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More "Torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the gate to disappear into the leafy woods. But they have lost one man, whom Robertson has shot, and have killed or wounded three or four of the settlers. Robertson, by keen watchfulness, has saved the fort from capture and his comrades from probable torture or death. ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... a sudden confusion she exclaimed: "Great Heavens! what differences there are in men! Those who would torture and kill these inoffensive people ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... emphasized his commands by pulling his six-shooter from under his leg and raising and lowering the hammer with one hand, keeping the muzzle pointed toward the steward's head all the while, the latter grew as white as a sheet and trembled in every limb. After he thought he had inflicted sufficient torture upon the timid fellow, the Confederate put ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... ADOLPHE. After endless self-torture he reached a certain degree of composure, but life had never any real pleasures to offer him. He never dared to accept any kind of distinction; he never dared to feel himself entitled to a kind word ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... ahead, and he saw himself in the dock, faced by the stony-faced judge, and put through the torture of cross-examination which laid bare the innermost recesses of his black ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... is he could sing at all in such a hell's cacophony. A man with obvious weaknesses, perhaps; but fighting hard to be brave and hopeful where there was nothing in sight to encourage bravery or foster hope; when every moment was pregnant with ghastly possibilities; when death and abominable torture hobnobbed in the Roman streets with riots of disgusting indulgence, abnormal lusts, filthiness parading unabashed. He speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings; deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... at Paris. The former, who was quite used to adorning Miss Ethel against her will, looked as amused as her mistresses; and, before Ethel knew what was going on, her muslin was stripped off her back, and that instrument of torture, a half made body, was being tried upon her. She made one of her most wonderful grimaces of despair, and stood still. The dresses were not so bad after all; they were more tasteful than costly, and neither in material nor ornament were otherwise ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... his soul he had doubtless persuaded himself that it was necessary for the redemption of the human species that the empire of the world should be vested in his hands, that Protestantism in all its forms should be extirpated as a malignant disease, and that to behead, torture, burn alive, and bury alive all heretics who opposed the decree of himself and the Holy Church was the highest virtue by which he ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... chattering of high-pitched squeals. Again he was lifted in air, held there in the grip of a score of lean, long-fingered hands. He was nerving himself to undergo without flinching whatever new torture might be in store. Yet he thrilled inexplicably as through the sounds of these things about him, he heard a muffled: ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... whose gentle current, two hundred and sixty-six years before, Champlain had ascended to the noble lake which bears his name, and up which the missionary Jogues had been carried an unwilling captive to bondage and to torture. ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... who filled his place, having refused to remove the interdict which had been pronounced against certain confraternities which admitted members of the secret societies, was condemned on 25th April, 1875, to six years of forced penal labor. Four years of the like torture were decreed against the administrator of Olinda for a similar offence. So much for the humanitarian Emperor of ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... he must go presently without all delay: and he that hath suffered the iniury, carieth him, as it were captiue. They punish no man with sentence of death, vnles hee bee taken in the deede doing, or confesseth the same. But being accused by the multitude, they put him vnto extreame torture to make him confesse the trueth. They punish murther with death, and carnall copulation also with any other besides his owne. By his own, I meane his wife or his maid seruant, for he may vse his slaue as he listeth himself. Heinous theft ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... Germain des Pres—the abbot of this, and the abbot of that—but various communities and Signories, having right of life and death over their vassals, kept an executioner for purposes of domestic torture, as they kept a seneschal to carve their meats; or as people now keep a chef or a maitre d'hotel. In those excellent olden times of Europe, hangmen, doubtless, carried about written characters from lord to lord, certifying ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... and some observances of the ascetics (such as pulling out the hair instead of shaving the head) are severe, but as a community the Jains lead sane and serious lives, hardly practising and certainly not parading the extravagances of self-torture which they theoretically commend. Mahavira is said to have taught that place, time and occasion should be taken into consideration and his successors adapted their precepts to the age in which they lived. Such monks as I have met[285] maintained that extreme forms ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the troops were in motion. The staff should see that he was still the same self-contained commander whose every faculty was the trained servant of his will. His efforts at sleep resulted in a numbing brain torture, which so desensitized it to outward impressions that his faithful personal aide entering the room at dawn had to touch him on ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... letter with the picture he had made of her. It belonged more to him than to her because he had created it—the man's part—while she had merely offered the accidental cause,—the woman's share. And further she wished to torture him always with this evidence of what once had been in him; not with her face,—that doubtless had already faded from his mind. But no other one had he fixed eternally by his art as he had hers. Of that she ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... grew taller beyond the big tribal camp. The constant crooning wail of the women in the tents produced a minor murmur of sound, enough to drive a man to the edge of madness. Ross had been left under guard where he could watch it all, a refinement of torture which he would earlier have believed too subtle for Ennar. Though the older men carried minor commands among the horsemen, because Ennar was the closest of blood kin among the adult males, he was in ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... "'What torture on both sides! Octave would be always doubting me, I doubting him. I, quite involuntarily, should give him a rival wholly unworthy of him, a man whom I despise, but with whom I have known raptures branded on ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... captured he would probably be tortured by one of the fiendish methods made use of by these Indians. If he had a woman with him it was an act of kindness to shoot her, too, for to her, also, even if the element of torture were absent, captivity with the Indians would invariably be an even ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... suffered such torture as in the long hours till the evening of the next day. He followed Athalie's advice, and remained at home till noon. After dinner he said he must go to the Platten See and look after the fishery ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... Variations, "The Quangle Wangle," conducted by Carl himself. If the honest truth be told, we sat down to the Variations with no more pleasurable anticipation than one sits down with in the dentist's chair, preparatory to the application of gags, electric drills and other instruments of odontological torture. (Strange, by the way, that no modernist has translated the horrors of the modern Tusculum into terms of sound and fury!) But we were most agreeably surprised to find ourselves following every one of the forty-nine Variations with breathless interest. Mr. Walbrook is indeed a case ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... would not hear of my crossing the mountains without an escort, for he assured me that El Cuchillo, the Spanish guerilla chief, was out that way with his band, and that it meant a death by torture to fall into his hands. The old priest observed, however, that he did not think a French hussar would be deterred by that, and if I had had any doubts, they would of course have been decided ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you understand!" Darrell exclaimed; then continued, passionately: "The last three weeks have been torture to me if I but allowed myself one moment's thought. Wherever I look I see life—life, perfect and complete in all its myriad forms—the life that is denied to me! This is not living,—this existence of mine,—with ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... his best; but, in his state of mind, the very radiance of her face was only an added torture, and his tongue stumbled over the words of praise and appreciation that he tried to say. He saw, then, the happy light in Billy's eyes change to troubled questioning and grieved disappointment; and he hated himself for a jealous brute. More earnestly than ever, now, he tried to force ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... intendant of a military station, and have soldiers under me, and he who is our general is hardly a man. He has no fear, and death is to him as life"? So this young Herr, whom I love the same as my own brother, met Fritz when there was not the thickness of a Wurst-skin between him and the torture that makes men blanch for thinking on, and I will now tell you the story of how he saved ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... 'but the edge is there. We shall polish it ourselves today—not on the wheel. Curdie, my son, I wake from a troubled dream. A glorious torture has ended it, and I live. I know now well how things are, but you shall explain them to me as I get on my armour. No, I need no bath. I am clean. Call ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... interview! Did ever woman so consider the anxiety of a lover to seek explanation and forgiveness! Helen, Helen, you torture me; is this generous?—is it like yourself? ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... with their dilated eyes staring at the sky—and among them, the happy, the enviable! how many living, groaning, bleeding men, writhing with pain, unable to raise their mutilated bodies from the gory bed of torture and death! ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... proved himself a real friend and an unselfish one. He felt as if getting up out of bed was the final, supreme torture under which a man may live; but he got up, for there was something in Luck's voice that thrilled him even through the clogging sleep-hunger. Presently he was sitting in his trousers and socks ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... said the Shade. "I quite see. Satan finds some mischief still—eh? as I used to say when I was a Dean. Since you really insist on it, I suppose there had better be some trifling torture by way of occupation. Only look here—it mustn't be any of the things I used to do up above. Quite absurd, you know, to go on reading the same books you did at school—no, I mean, to be made to continue on the same old lines I followed before I came ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... Shakespeare's 'poor players' you are severe—and yet I was glad to hear you severe—it is a happy excess, I think. When men of intense reality, as all great poets must be, give their hearts to be trodden on and tied up with ribbons in turn, by men of masks, there will be torture if there is not desecration. Not that I know much of such things—but I have heard. Heard from Mr. Kenyon; heard from Miss Mitford; who however is passionately fond of the theatre as a writer's medium—not at all, from Mr. Horne himself, ... except ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... take the news to those who have fled to the mountains. 8. They generally killed the lords and nobles in the following way. They made wooden gridirons of stakes, bound them upon them, and made a slow fire beneath: thus the victims gave up the spirit by degrees, emitting cries of despair in their torture. 9. I once saw that they had four or five of the chief lords stretched on the gridirons to burn them, and I think also there were two or three pairs of gridirons, where they were burning others; and because they cried aloud and annoyed the captain or prevented him sleeping, he commanded that they ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... conditions. There are no fangs proper. The poison gland is in the lower jaw, instead of in the upper, as in snakes, and its product is projected through small ducts which open in the gums outside the teeth. The Gila monster has the grip of a bulldog. Torture will not loosen its hold, once fastened on. It is through this intimate contact that the venom works ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... Such a man is purged of all his sins. Fasts and other penances cannot destroy sins, however much they may weaken and dry up the body that is made of flesh and blood. The man whose heart is without holiness, suffers torture only by undergoing penances in ignorance of their meaning. He is never freed from sins of such acts. The fire he worshippeth doth not consume his sins. It is in consequence of holiness and virtue alone that men attain to regions of blessedness, and fasts and vows become efficacious. Subsistence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... time I joined my wife in holy wedlock, I was ignorant of these ungodly laws; I knew not that I was propogating victims for this kind of torture and cruelty. Malinda's mother was free, and lived in Bedford, about a quarter of a mile from her daughter; and we often met and passed off the time pleasantly. Agreeable to promise, on one Saturday evening, I called to see Malinda, at her mother's residence, with an intention of ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... examined before the council, under pretence of his being concerned in the insurrection at Pentland; and though no proof appeared against him, he was put to the question, and, contrary to the most obvious principles of equity, was urged to accuse himself. He endured the torture with singular resolution, and continued obstinate in the denial of a crime, of which, it is believed, he really was not guilty. Instead of obtaining his liberty, he was sent to the Bass, a very high rock surrounded by the sea; at this time converted into a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... how I torture you," he said. "And yet, now we've once broken the ice and begun talking of all this, we're bound to talk on to the finish—if finish there is. You see these few weeks in London—I've enjoyed them—but still they've ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... most delicate point of your noble and trusting heart!—that I have sacrificed your tenderness to my distracted passions; but you shall no more be subject to the caprices of a man who cannot repay your innocent love with his own. You have no guilt to torture you; and you possess virtues which will render you tranquil under every calamity. I leave you to your own purity, and, therefore, peace of mind. Forget the ceremony which has passed between us; my wretched heart disclaims it forever. Your father is happily ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... was bad in the old system (one country even going so far as to re-establish torture), the steady attack on liberty and on all liberal ideas, Wurtemberg being practically the only State which grumbled at the tightening of the reins so dear to Metternich,—all formed a fitting commentary on the proclamations by which the Sovereigns ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the dogs, but five or six days usually marks the limit of human life under such conditions. In early English history condemned criminals were put to death by being deprived of sleep, and the same method has been employed in China. Enforced sleeplessness, in fact, has been used as a form of torture by the Chinese, being more feared than any other. The men subjected to this frightful ordeal always die ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... have his society when I was not able to be with her, and I should insist on his accepting my invitation. This was after I saw how rebellious, as I termed it, Eudora was becoming; and I was determined to torture her all I could. Alphonse was now an inmate of our house, which greatly increased the opportunities for his being with Eudora. She appeared to enjoy intercourse with him just as usual; I think, in fact, she did enjoy it more than usual; and it made me hate her to see that she was not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the prolonging of which was like torture to the wounded knight, the Earl of Crawford at length took horse, to go to his distant quarters in the Castle of Dupplin, where he resided as a guest, the Knight of Ramorny retired into his sleeping apartment, agonized by pains of body and anxiety of mind. Here he found Henbane Dwining, on ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... the Indian's code of honor to ask for mercy. An Indian brave must never complain, no matter how hard his fate. If he were put to torture, if he were even burned at the stake, he must let no sound of pain escape him. He might boast of his own exploits and tell how many of his enemies he had killed, but he must never admit defeat. Courage and endurance were the great Indian virtues. Therefore Miantonomo made no reply ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... landlady could not enlighten me on the subject. I have noticed two inns in London of the same name, and have seen it mounted on several other public houses in England. Why that ancient saint and the machinery of her torture should be alone selected from the history and host of Christian martyrs, and thus associated with houses of entertainment for man and beast, is a mystery which I will not undertake to explore. To ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... withdrew. Left to himself, the Admiral tossed, and turned, and fumed, and swore, lay still for a while, and then repeated the process backwards. After a time the bed-clothes began to prick him, and the heat to become a positive torture. He leapt out, and tore at the bell-rope, until it came away in his hand—just ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... torture of suspense so worked upon her that she began to grow feverish. The afternoon was waning and still no word ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... was he to get bread, to get work, if the bailiff was his enemy? How could he face his wife, and tell her all the foolish past and dreadful future? How could he bear to look on Grace, too beautiful Grace, and torture his heart by fancying her fate? Thomas, too, his own brave boy, whom utter poverty might drive to desperation? And the poor babes, his little playful pets, what on earth would become of them? There was the Union workhouse to be sure, but Acton ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... for action—since to remain passive at such a time was torture—I called at once at Coverly's chambers. He was out. But I left an urgent written message for him, and in the hope of finding him with Isobel, hurried to her flat. He had not been there that day, however; and now I could only hope that ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Johanna's toleration of it was, for the most part, to be explained by the literary interests before mentioned. For Johanna was always in a tremble lest Ephie should become spoiled; and thoughtless Ephie could, at times, cause her a most subtle torture, by being prettily insincere, by assuming false coquettish airs, or by seeming to have private thoughts which she did not confide to her sister. This, and the knowledge that Ephie was now of an age when every day ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... in the same desire for conquest. After years of secret attempts, it was at last open war; the savant saw his household turn against his opinions, and menace them with destruction. There is no worse torture than to have treason in one's own home, around one; to be trapped, dispossessed, crushed, by those whom you ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... she said gravely and quietly. "Do you think I could face my father and mother, knowing I was about to wound them to the heart? Each day of delay would be torture to me. Oh, why is religion such a curse?" She paused, overwhelmed for a moment by the emotion she had been suppressing. She resumed in the same quiet manner. "Yes, we must break away at once. We have kept our last Passover. We shall have to eat leavened food—it will ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the devils of hell to take me with them. I have call on God to give me death. I have prayed, and I have cursed. Twice I have travelled to the grave where he lies. I have knelt there and have beg him to tell the truth to God, and say that he torture me till I kill him. I have beg him to forgive me and to haunt me no more with his bad face. But never—never—never—have I one quiet hour until you come, M'sieu'; nor any joy in my heart till I tell you the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is to cut him off from all communication with society, and surround him with the shades of mystery, till, having accustomed the world to hear nothing said of him, and to forget him, they can easily torture ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... widely-opened jaws from the cruel hooks. One had two hooks in his mouth. He was the quietest of the lot, as he had less purchase than the other two upon the ground, and with one hook in his lower and one in his upper jaw, glared upwards at us in his torture and smote his sides with his long, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... or Masked Delight in the Torture of Others Indifference to Suffering Exposing the Sick and Aged Birth of Sympathy Women Crueler than Men Plato Denounces Sympathy Sham Altruism in India Evolution of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... natives suggested that it was their wish to take both the men prisoners instead of killing them. They had done too much to be let off with such an easy death: they were wanted for torture. ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... but to have the regularity of her household disturbed by the presence of a child every week—the bustle of arrival and departure, the risk of broken china, the possible upsetting of Betty's temper; all this was torture to look forward to, and when she went to bed she felt that she was paying ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... where no wrong is; the wrong lies in the thoughts, and not in the objects. There is something of over-sensitiveness and over-delicacy which shows not innocence, but an inflammable imagination. And men of the world cannot understand that those subjects and thoughts which to them are full of torture, can be harmless, suggesting nothing evil to the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... In spite of an obstinate and heroic resistance, blows triumphed over his ill-will. Every morning for three hours, and for three hours every evening, Jean-Christophe was set before the instrument of torture. All on edge with attention and weariness, with large tears rolling down his cheeks and nose, he moved his little red hands over the black and white keys—his hands were often stiff with cold—under the threatening ruler, which descended ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... house, and while she gave us some bread and wine she told us about the wrecking of the village and the factory. It was one of the most damnable stories I've heard yet. Put together the worst of the typical horrors and you'll have a fair idea of it. Murder, outrage, torture: Scharlach's programme seemed to be fairly comprehensive. She ended off by saying: "His orderly showed me a silver-mounted flute he always travelled with, and a beautiful paint-box mounted in silver too. Before he left he sat ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... agony, in eternal progress, to gratify the infinite tyrant, and, at the same time, please a few humble vassals whom terror alone had driven into his service. You have taught mankind, all too successfully, to imitate this superhuman monster, by the banishment, imprisonment, murder, or torture, of all who did not accept your insane and heartless teachings; and the bloody drama, which has been in full progress for at least fifteen centuries without one interval of pity or remorse, is coming to its end ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... by the nuns to the immediate vicinity of the chair, which her excited imagination instantly converted into an engine of torture, that part of the floor on which the chair stood seemed to tremble and oscillate beneath her feet, as if it ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... men, was sent to the Kremlin to arrest the officers implicated in the conspiracy. They were loaded with chains, conducted to the Trinity, and in accordance with the barbaric custom of the times were put to the torture. In agony too dreadful to be borne, they of course made ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... would readily have taken in a sea-trout or a loch-trout. They of Kennet and Test know a good deal better than to approach your wet flies. A few minutes of this failure reduce the novice to the despair of Tantalus. He never was set to such a torture as casting over big feeding trout and never getting a rise. You feel inclined to throw your fly-book bodily at the heads of the trout and bid them take their choice of its contents. That method of angling would be quite ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! 95 I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream Of agony by torture lengthened out That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav'st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, 100 Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, Or lonely house, long held the witches' ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... door to be thrown open than has been yet." We are about to point you to that more effectual door. Look around you, and behold the bosoms of your loving wives, heaving with untold agonies! Hear the cries of your poor children! Remember the stripes your fathers bore. Think of the torture and disgrace of your noble mothers. Think of your wretched sisters, loving virtue and purity, as they are driven into concubinage, and are exposed to the unbridled lusts of incarnate devils. Think of the undying glory that ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... They are indeed not that blood-thirsty, war-loving race which some have imagined them to be. We make bold to say that there is nothing which they so much dislike and abhor as shedding blood and inflicting torture and misery on humanity. They are essentially a peace-loving race, and will never indulge in war unless compelled by circumstances over which they ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... vengeance of an enemy, there is no cruelty which can be exercised, no species of torture, which their ingenuity can devise, too severe to be inflicted. To those who have excited a spirit of resentment in the bosom of an Indian, the tomahawk and scalping knife are instruments of mercy. Death by the faggot—by splinters ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... A. D. . Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters. Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea. A field strewn with thorns. All these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists. Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are .. a plenty; and so in some small degree, with ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... extraordinarily complex, and we cannot expect to find a simple solution for it as we can for the questions of alcoholism, slavery, torture, etc. The latter are solved in one word—suppression. Suppression of slavery and torture; suppression of the usage of alcoholic drinks. We are concerned here with ulcers artificially produced and ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... a chill pass over him. Could it be possible these rascals meant to torture Ted until he told; or were they just trying to frighten him? If it came to the worst they just could not stand by and see ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... y aller trop lentes, & y estant, trop courtes pour vn si agreable seiour & delicieux amusement.—En fin il a le faux martyre: & se trouue des Sorciers si acharnez a son seruice endiable, qu'il n'y a torture ny supplice qui les estonne, & diriez qu'ils vont au vray martyre & a la mort pour l'amour de luy, aussi gayement que s'ils alloient a vn festin de plaisir & reioueyssance publique.—Quand elles sont preuenues de la Iustice, elles ne pleurent & ne iettent vne seule larme, voire ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... hostility. Unfortunately some busybody in America made it his concern to forward to Irving all the ill-natured flings which could be gleaned from American notices of the new book. The incident—with all its unpleasantness—was trifling enough, but to Irving's raw sensitiveness it was torture. He was overwhelmed with an almost ludicrous melancholy, could not write, could not sleep, could not bear to be alone. This petty outburst of critical spleen, backed as it evidently was by personal antagonism on the part of a ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... living the same life and sharing the same perils. When he emerged into the moonlight, his shaggy countenance looked excited and haggard. Notwithstanding all his experiences, he was not of a constitution which could deny nature. He had inflicted every kind of torture upon his father while living; but, notwithstanding, the fact of the death affected him. His eyes looked wilder than usual, and his face older and more worn, and he looked round him with a kind of clandestine skulking instinct as he came out of ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... house more anxious and more upset than before. She feared that the servants might be suspected of having killed Tahoser in order to seize on her riches, and that the judges would seek to make them confess under torture what ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... customs of their countries, different persons bear the transition from life to death, from existence to annihilation? As for myself, I can assure you of one thing,—the more men you see die, the easier it becomes to die yourself; and in my opinion, death may be a torture, but it ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... scene in this delightful comedy, in which Jerningham, "with the true feeling of a zealous friend," touches the griefs of Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader happy. Few of our dramatists or novelists have attended enough to this. They torture and wound us abundantly. They are economists only in delight. Nothing can be finer, more gentlemanlike, and nobler, than the conversation and compliments of these young men. How delicious is Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his fears, that Jerningham has a "Saint in Essex;" ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... hanged on the Col di Meano; Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails torn from his living body at Turin; Peter Geymarali of Bobbio in like manner had his entrails taken out in Lucerna, and a fierce cat thrust in their place to torture him further; Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia; Magdalena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni; Susanna Michelini was bound hand and foot, and left to perish of cold and hunger on the snow at Sarcena; Bartolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres, had the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... minutes, perhaps of seconds, and yet it seemed as if he could do nothing. Never had he gazed upon a peaceful village street with feelings of such tumultuous woe. Helplessness and impotence are intolerable at any time, but they are the cruellest torture when a dear human life ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... youngster up to look at his face in the light. "Ah, heart of me, will you grow up too to live in a lightship and leave a poor woman at home to weary for you in her trouble? Rogue, rogue, what poor woman have I done this to, bringing you into the world to be her torture and her joy?" ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... key. A God! that haunting legend of a God of vengeance, in which priests and others affected to believe? Now that he came to think of it, what rubbish was here, for as any agent of the Inquisition knew well, the vengeance always fell upon those who trusted in this same God; a hundred torture dens, a thousand smoking fires bore witness to the fact. And if there was a God, why, recognising his personal merits, only this morning He had selected him out of many to live on and be the inheritor of the wealth of Hendrik Brant. Yes, he would go to Leyden and fight ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... should sometimes notice them before we do. They are often, too, looked upon as trivial, as of small importance. The mother of pirate Gibbs might have thought it very trivial that her little son should kill flies, and catch and torture domestic animals. But it had its influence in forming the character of the pirate. The man who finishes his days in state-prison as a notorious thief began his career in the nursery by stealing pins, or in the pantry by stealing sugar and cake, and as soon as ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... whose nails have grown to claws, and from whose ears have started horns. They sail upon bats' wings; and only by their livid hue, which changes from yellow to the ghastliest green, and by the cruelty of their remorseless eyes, can you know them from the souls they torture. In Hell ugliness and power of mischief come with length of years. Continual growth in crime distorts the form which once was human; and the interchange of everlasting hatred degrades the tormentor and his victim to the same demoniac ferocity. To this design ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Dios, and that these vessels had been fitted out to pursue them, which might, undoubtedly, have overpowered the pinnaces and their feeble crew. Nor did their suspicion stop here; but immediately it occurred to them, that their men had been compelled, by torture, to discover where their frigate and ship were stationed, which, being weakly manned, and without the presence of the chief commander, would fall into their hands, almost without resistance, and all possibility of escaping ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... called kanakajiki. We were shown some of them which had been left by the woodcutters against their return. They were skeleton sandals, iron bands shod with three spikes. They looked like instruments of torture from the Middle Ages, and indeed were said to be indispensable ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... passing from the torture of uncertainty to the calm of settled grief, had still a sacred duty to live for. She had not forgotten her husband's dream. She went to the cardinal-archbishop to beg the consecration of a little burial-plot at the foot of the greatest ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... sometimes hoped that he would miss her and come and fetch her back, she stifled it instantly. The very fact that he had made no attempt to come after her, showed plainly enough that he had never really cared for her. She thanked God that they had had no children. At least she was spared the torture of having brought unhappiness on innocent heads. At times she saw his name mentioned in the newspapers, and she smiled bitterly when she read accounts of sensational supper parties, scandalous proceedings which ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... the old man banned the suffering, Far away he drove the anguish, To the central Hill of Tortures, To the topmost Mount of Suffering, There to fill the stones with anguish, And the slabs of rock to torture. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... hands, and looked wildly round for something to destroy. I was in training to become a little tiger. From what I then experienced, I can easily conceive the feelings that actuate, and can half forgive the crowned monsters who have revelled in blood, and relished the inflicting of torture; as pandering to their worst passions in infancy resolves them into a terrible instrument of cruelty, the control of which rests not with themselves. But this lesson in tiger ferocity had its emollient, though not its antidote, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the planing of his tusks, "while a saw lies upon the ground, suggestive of the actual de-horning of the beast. The work itself and later apologies for the institution mention among the instruments of torture a comb and scissors for cutting the victim's hair, an auriscalpium for his ears, a knife for cutting his nails; while the ceremony further appears to include the adornment of the youth's chin with a beard by means of burned cork or other pigment, and ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... human race, of which he is the head. Be sure that, come what may of the rest, let the flames of hell ebb or flow, that man is safe, for he is delivered already from the only devil that can make hell itself a torture, the devil of selfishness — the only one that can possess a man and make himself his own living hell. He is out of all that region of things, and already dwelling in the secret place ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... then—why shouldn't I accept it? [She opens the letter.] It is—it is from the Prince. [She reads, aside.] "Adored one! Is there to be no end to these cruelties? Have they begun to torture you with England yet? They will come to you and will try to force you into this marriage. But Baronet Hotham, the English Envoy, is my friend and your friend, and will work for you while he seems to be working against you. It is a dangerous ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... into "confessions." With his "third degree" seances he arrived at results better and more quickly than in any other way. All his convictions had been secured by them. The press and meddling busy-bodies called his system barbarous, a revival of the old-time torture chamber. What did he care what the people said as long as he convicted his man? Wasn't that what he was paid for? He was there to find the murderer, and he was going to ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... drove to the station, where we found all our own party assembled, and many more people, who had come to see us off. I was given the Chilian bit used for the horse I rode to-day, as a remembrance of my visit. It is a most formidable-looking instrument of torture, and one which I am sure my dear little steed did not in the least require; but I suppose the fact of having once felt it, when being broken in, is sufficient for a lifetime, for the horses here have certainly the very lightest mouths I ever met with. A gift of a young puma, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... sun, Jack. For men adrift the blaze of it fries them like fish on a grid. A pint of water a day, no more, is the allowance. 'Twill torture you, but castaways can live on it. They have done it for weeks on end. Here's two musket balls in my pocket. I can whittle a balance from a bit of pine and we must weigh the bread ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... I come up, it de Lord's truth, I ain' know nothin but a decent livin all de time. My old Missus was a dear old soul en I been raise dat way. I hear talk bout how some of de white folks would bout torture dey niggers to death sometimes, but never didn' see my white folks allow nothin like dat. Dey would whip dey niggers dat runaway en stay in de woods, but not so worser. No, mam, my Missus wouldn' allow no slashin round bout whe' she was. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... able to appreciate the reason. But the bitterness with which he delivered his harangue certainly proved that he believed the stories which had evidently been sedulously circulated throughout Germany relative to the alleged mal-treatment and torture of German military prisoners by the British. Unfortunately, no steps apparently were taken to disprove these deliberate lying statements for which we ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... to entertain exaggerated expectations from it. Their morbid feelings are little able to support the disappointment certain to ensue, and they either rush into a reprisal of imaginary wrongs, by satire on others, or inflict torture on themselves by the belief, often erroneous, of the injuries they ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... for the spectators, he leaps behind the scenes, and they are none the wiser. And next; people have no more right even for dramatic purposes, to put such language into print for any purpose whatsoever, than they have to print the grossest indecencies, or the most disgusting details of torture and cruelty. No one can accuse this magazine of any fondness for sanctimonious cant or lip-reverence; but if there be a "Father in Heaven," as Mr. Smith confesses that there is, or even merely a personal Deity at all, some ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... first duty is to them." With this Mrs. Dodd rose, and, endeavouring not to look at her daughter at all, went round and drew each of her guests out in turn. It was the very heroism of courtesy; for their presence was torture to her. At last, to her infinite relief, they went, and she was left alone with her children. She sent the servants to bed, saying she would undress Miss Dodd, and accompanied her to her room. There the first thing she did was to lock the door; and the next was to turn round ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... took observations for latitude and longitude, in order to ascertain my exact position; an 8-in. sextant, mercurial artificial horizon and chronometers being used for the purpose. It is not easy to describe the torture I had to go through when taking those tedious astronomical observations. The glass roof of the artificial horizon had unfortunately got broken. I had to use a great deal of ingenuity in order to screen the mercury from the wind so as to obtain a well-defined reflection. No sooner was I getting ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Adlumia which came up year by year in flower boxes in the Down verandah grew from seed supplied by Asa Gray.) I have just got a plant with sensitive axis, quite a new case; and tell Oliver I now do not care at all how many tendrils he makes axial, which at one time was a cruel torture to me. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... and suggested to him that he should incite the people not to suffer a villain who had intended to murder the Prince to go unpunished. True to his instructions, the miscreant spread among the crowd collected before the prison doors the report, that the torture inflicted on Cornelius de Witt was a mere pretence, and that he had only escaped the death he deserved because the judges favoured his crime. Then, entering the gaol, he presented himself at the window, and exclaimed to the crowd below, 'The dog and ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... religion for his own satisfaction, he could not impose upon the slave. Never yet did I see a negro slave who thought it a duty to obey his master; and therefore there was always some dream of release. But who has not heard of some delicate and refined woman, one day of whose torture was equivalent to years of that possible to an obtuse frame,—who had the door of escape ready at hand for years, and yet died a lingering death rather than pass through it; and this because she had promised ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Prince Maurice had not however prevented Verdugo from doing his best to assassinate Count Lewis William. Two Spaniards had been arrested in the States camp this summer, who came in as deserters, but who confessed "with little, or mostly without torture," that they had been sent by their governor and colonel with instructions to seize a favourable opportunity to shoot Lewis William and set fire to his camp. But such practices were so common on the part of the Spanish commanders as to occasion no ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Niagara region made Mosely's case their own and determined to prevent his delivery up to the American authorities to be taken to the land of the free and the home of the brave, knowing that there for him to be brave meant torture and death, and that death alone could set him free. Under the leadership of Herbert Holmes, a yellow man,[31] a teacher and preacher, they lay around the jail night and day to the number of from two to four hundred to prevent the prisoner's delivery ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... "I am out of doors all day. Excitement of any sort has not touched my life for many years. Sometimes I feel that this perfect health is a torture. Sometimes I am ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fears and scruples. She was sometimes a lofty patroness, sometimes she was tender and flattered him. At first, while he was overawed by her rank, Lucien experienced the extremes of dread, hope, and despair, the torture of a first love, that is beaten deep into the heart with the hammer strokes of alternate bliss and anguish. For two months Mme. de Bargeton was for him a benefactress who would take a mother's interest in him; but confidences came next. Mme. de Bargeton began to address her poet as "dear Lucien," ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... half of Europe, are only the purgatory, not yet the real Siberian hell. You still find woods there, poor, thin, dwarfed woods, it is true, but where there is wood there is fire and vitality. The true hell of human torture begins beyond the line of the woods; then there is nothing but ice and snow; ice that does not even melt in the plains in summer—and in the midst of that icy desert, miserable human beings thrown upon this shore by ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Gertrude, and I believed you. You lured me on deliberately, with a cold cruelty for which there is no name. I shall never hate you as well as I have loved you, for I have a rather poor capacity in that way. You found a man with a bruised heart, and for your own wicked pleasure you set to work to torture him. There is no use in words, and I have said ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... behold! the creation did struggle up somehow, and began what is called 'life.' Then the fun began. Fate, which had so ruthlessly tormented Nedopyuskin the father, took to the son too; she had a taste for them, one must suppose. But she treated Tihon on a different plan: she did not torture him; she played with him. She did not once drive him to desperation, she did not set him to suffer the degrading agonies of hunger, but she led him a dance through the whole of Russia from one end to ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... dinner; in the street, at the theatre; I sit or walk with him, saying never a word, silent as a shadow. He desires nothing so little, I need not tell you. In the infernal din of this town he looks at me and would sell his soul for the sound of an English voice—even his worst enemy's. It is torture, and he will break down if I don't give him a holiday. The curious part of it is that, under this twist of the screw, he has apparently found some resource of pluck. He doesn't entreat, though it is killing him with quite curious rapidity. I must give ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... than potted anchovies on their way from Nantes to Southampton. There we were, and there perforce we must remain till we reached our destination. To move a finger, to stir an inch, was out of the question. Nothing short of physical torture for the space of six hours seemed in store for us—for the three occupants of that narrow coupe, like ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... gloomily along throughout the winter, although the White Beaver did every thing in his power to render us comfortable. Having been accustomed throughout a long life, to roam through the forests—to come and go at liberty—confinement under any such circumstances, could not be less than torture. ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... earlier times in Italy, for the inventory was taken every time the property changed hands by inheritance or sale. Everyone of these inventories begins at the main gate of the stronghold, and the first item is 'Rope for giving the cord.' Now 'to give the cord' was a torture, and all feudal lords had the right to inflict it. The victim's hands were tied behind his back, the rope was made fast to his bound wrists, and he was hoisted some twenty feet or so to the heavy iron ring which is fixed in the middle of the arch of every ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... old button-maker sleeps with his father (to pluralize his ancestors would be a grave historical error), and Joseph II. reigns in his stead, exercising, I doubt not, over his factory-people the same ingenuity of torture which in old times nearly drove the fags to rebellion. He is a Demosthenes, they say, at vestries, and a Draco at the Board of Guardians; but in the centre of his broad face, marring the platitude of its smooth-shaven ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... had long ceased to burn farms, sack convents, torture monks for gold, and slay every human being they met, in mere Berserker lust of blood. No Barnakill could now earn his nickname by entreating his comrades, as they tossed the children on their spear-points, to "Na kill the barns." Gradually they had settled down on the ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... that I could prove myself truer than the truest, if I ever loved. Yet now I had betrayed my lover and sold his country; and, realising what I had done, as I hardly had realised it till this moment, I suffered torture in his arms. ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... butchered and cooked, for we are told in the legend according to Voragine that his body was torn with sharp combs of brass till his bowels fell out, and that after this foretaste, this hors d'oeuvre of torture, he was broiled on a gridiron, larded with nails, and basted with the sauce of his own blood. He lay calm, praying while he was being toasted. He remained unmoved, grilling and praying. When he was dead, Dacian, his persecutor, ordered that his body should ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology. Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement, of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its cruelties, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... easy to recognize some of the important gains and to foretell the path if not the field of full accomplishment of the conquest. A century ago a man, so far as the law was concerned, owned his living chattels as he did the inanimate things of his property. He could torture or slay them as whim or malice might dictate; there were no limitations by statute, and public opinion, where it might reprobate, was too weak to influence his conduct. Now the statute books of all countries which are moving in the path of moral advance ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... small-pox, which was raging in different parts of Guernsey. Finally Jean unburdened his mind to his friend and talked with him of Ellenor's infatuation for Dominic. Would it be that she had drowned herself to be rid of the torture of ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... narrated how he had been captured just as he was quitting the village. His great fear had been lest he should be compelled to betray them; and he declared to Rayner, who believed him, that he would have undergone any torture rather than ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... Moulton had bought during the Revolution of 1848, they emptied the casks containing the Petit Bleu, made on the estate! The result was disastrous, and could Mr. Moulton have only seen the poor creatures doubled up with torture he would have felt ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... connection with this controversy, represents that two United States citizens attached to the legation were arbitrarily seized at his side, when leaving the capital of Paraguay, committed to prison, and there subjected to torture for the purpose of procuring confessions of their own criminality and testimony to support the President's allegation against the United States minister. Mr. McMahon, the newly appointed minister to Paraguay, having reached the La Plata, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... a torture to men and a relief to women, so in a few minutes she lifted her head again, the storm was over and she began to look the situation over calmly. The more she thought of it the more certain it seemed that she could do nothing but irretrievable ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... mother's side, to say nothing of the fact that my father was a clergyman of the English Church. I was therefore sufficiently qualified for the task, and was the more inclined to it, over and above my real desire to save the unhappy creature from an eternity of torture, by recollecting the promise of St. James, that if any one converted a sinner (which Chowbok surely was) he should hide a multitude of sins. I reflected, therefore, that the conversion of Chowbok might in some degree compensate ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... immediate suspicion who was in the coach with her, and turning his head quickly, he met the stern eye of Dorriforth; upon which, without the smallest salutation, he turned from him again abruptly and rudely. Miss Milner was confused, and Miss Woodley in torture, at this palpable affront, to which Dorriforth alone ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... companion. "Any thing is better than passive submission in such circumstances. I see but little, indeed no hope of escape; but idleness is torture. If I endeavour to raise this boat, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... and harassment at Louisville were exhausting his strength and health, and that he would soon leave. On a telegraphic summons from him, about the 5th of October, I went down to Louisville, when General Anderson said he could not stand the mental torture of his command any longer, and that he must go away, or it would kill him. On the 8th of October he actually published an order relinquishing the command, and, by reason of my seniority, I had no alternative but to assume command, though ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... on whom academic art had acted as a soporific, Sylvain Kohn proposed to take him to certain eclectic theaters,—the very latest thing. There they saw murder, rape, madness, torture, eyes plucked out, bellies gutted—anything to thrill the nerves, and satisfy the barbarism lurking beneath a too civilized section of the people. It had a great attraction for pretty women and men of the ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... our midst knows the tale of my past better than I do myself. I no longer dare attend our meetings, for all around me I hear whisperings and insinuations, and my name being passed from one mouth to another along with references to my past actions. The torture is becoming unendurable. Some of these cowards even descend to taunting me with their knowledge; and when I, in any way, cross their purposes in our discussions, they threaten me covertly with exposure. That disgusting young fool, Mori, only to-day, being jealous of me in some ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... the red-men, but no red-men, cruel and blood-thirsty as they are, ever do that," he observed. "When they take prisoners they torture them, it is true, for a short time, but they then put them to death; they would not subject them to a long life of torture of soul ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... would have spoiled all the fun; I was so afraid daddy would tell you that I made him promise not to say a word; and nobody else had seen it except Mr. Morris, and he said torture couldn't drag it out of him. That old Major that Uncle Peter thinks so much of came near spoiling the surprise, but Aunt Felicia said she would take care of him in the back of the house—and she did; and I mounted guard at the top of the stairs before anybody could get hold of ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... as wanting one main element of misery to the sufferer, and an indispensable condiment to the jaded palate of the connoisseur, viz., a lingering duration. As a pleasant variety, therefore, the tormentors were introduced with their various instruments of torture; and many a dismal tragedy in that mode of human suffering was conducted in the sacred presence during the ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... an enemy, there is no cruelty which can be exercised, no species of torture, which their ingenuity can devise, too severe to be inflicted. To those who have excited a spirit of resentment in the bosom of an Indian, the tomahawk and scalping knife are instruments of mercy. Death by the faggot—by splinters of the most combustible ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... difficulties or hurt. Do they only recollect circumstances which are deeply impressed by some shock of fear or sudden pain, and does the remembrance of prolonged strain pass away? Who can tell? But it would seem strangely merciful if nature should blot out these weeks of slow but inevitable torture. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... the thirteenth century, after the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan had overrun southern Russia, he turned northward and captured the cities of Moscow, Vladimir, and Ryazan, putting to death many of the inhabitants by the most fiendish methods of torture. Thousands were slaughtered merely to wreak vengeance for the strong resistance offered by the besieged before surrendering. Hundreds of thousands of the Russians both high and low were made slaves. Wives of the nobles who had been richly ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... three hundred yards behind him, still buried in the timber, Otto was having trouble with Dishpan, a contumacious pack-mare. Langdon grinned happily as he listened to the other's vociferations, which threatened Dishpan with every known form of torture and punishment, from instant disembowelment to the more merciful end of losing her brain through the medium of a club. He grinned because Otto's vocabulary descriptive of terrible things always impending over the heads of his sleek and utterly heedless pack-horses was one ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... of misfortunes for Alexander Gordon. He was five times tried, twice threatened with torture—which he escaped, in the judgment hall itself, by such an exhibition of his great strength as terrified his judges.[40] He simulated madness, foamed at the mouth, and finally tore up the benches in order to attack the judges with the fragments. He was sent first ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... along, and the sun blazed, and a torture of thirst came and went as it had come and gone before; and sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly, the veering winds and the pendulous tides carried the wreck and its burden along. Flor had planned, before she started, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... general it may be said that they escaped death and they gained life. Life is probably sweet to them as it is to everyone, but what physical and mental torture has been the price of life to those who were brought back to land on the Carpathia—the hours in life-boats, amid the crashing of ice, the days of anguish that have succeeded, the horrors of body and mind still experienced and never to be entirely absent until ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... plans—had relieved my heart of every burden, when, a second time, he throws a mountain upon it. Stop, friend conscience, why do you take his part?—For twenty years thus you have used me, and been my torture. ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... so, Ralph; do not torture me by such fears. You have never wounded me by word or look—you have always been kind ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... cruel and what is unusual? * * * Each officer may define cruelty according to his own temper, and if it is not usual, he will make it usual. Corporal punishment, imprisonment, the gag, the ball and chain, and the almost insupportable forms of torture invented for military punishment lie within the range of choice. The sentence of a commission is not to be executed without being approved by the commander, if it affects life or liberty, and a sentence of death must be approved by the President. This applies to cases in which there ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... faction. The Attorney General caused, on the 16th of August, 1672, Cornelius de Witt to be arrested; and the noble brother of John de Witt had, like the vilest criminal, to undergo, in one of the apartments of the town prison, the preparatory degrees of torture, by means of which his judges expected to force from him the confession of his alleged plot against ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... was, that if the party giving them failed in fulfilling his obligations, the innocent and helpless hostages were to be entirely at the mercy of the other party into whose custody they had been given. The latter would, in such cases, imprison them, torture them, or put them to death, with a greater or less degree of severity in respect to the infliction of pain, according to the degree of exasperation which the real or fancied injury which he had received awakened ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... knew it to be his own, and assured the judge he had put twenty sequins into it. Upon which the judge called me before him; "Come, young man," said he, "confess the truth. Was it you that took the gentleman's purse from him? Do not wait for the torture to extort confession." Then with downcast eyes, thinking that if I denied the fact, they, having found the purse upon me, would convict me of a lie, to avoid a double punishment I looked up and confessed my guilt. I had no sooner made the confession, than the judge called people to ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... boy is malicious to an extreme. His purpose is "to destroy" him. Yet there is a limit to his power, for what he would do he has not yet been able to do. He shows extreme tenacity. He fought bitterly against being disembodied again. (Can it be that embodiment eases in some way the torture of existence for these prodigal spirits!) And so far he fought well, and with success. The disciples had tried to cast him out. They were expected to. They expected to. They had before. They failed!—dismally—amid the sneering and jeering of the crowd and the increasing ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... and sit contented in the shadow of the world's mourning? He spoke with passion of the millions disinherited before their birth, with infinite tenderness of those weak ones whom our social system condemns to a life of torture, just because they are weak. One loved the man for his great heart and for his gift of ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... home, and Guster will fetch him. Guster disappears, glad to get out of the shop, which she regards with mingled dread and veneration as a storehouse of awful implements of the great torture of the law—a place not to be entered after the gas is ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... is true, the strength of Spain is shattered, her ships are sunk or fled, the sea has swallowed her soldiers and her sailors by hundreds and by thousands, and England breathes again. They came to conquer, to bring us to the torture and the stake—to do to us free Englishmen as Cortes did by the Indians of Anahuac. Our manhood to the slave bench, our daughters to dishonour, our souls to the loving-kindness of the priest, our wealth to ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... the hands of bishops and priests, has allowed a trail of blood to be drawn across the path of the ages. I say nothing of religious persecution and the millions who have gone to torture and to doom for erroneous beliefs. I confine myself entirely, to field warfare. During a period of 674 years, from 1141-1815, it is an historical fact that this country and France were at war for ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the wife of Don Pedro went back to bed and put out the light. The rays of the morning sun, as they penetrated the room, fell upon the two sleepless beings. With God's daylight commenced the barbarous torture of an innocent creature. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... of thought. Such stricter hours he is far from lacking. They address themselves especially to the task of showing why and how corruption works in politics and of tracing those effects of private greed which ruin souls and torture societies. The hero-villains of A Certain Rich Man and of In the Heart of a Fool tread all the paths of selfishness and come to hard ends in punishment for the offense of counting the ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... brats are dangerous," interrupted Emlyn, looking Maldon full in the eyes; "my father told me of a young monk in Spain—I forget his name—who brought certain ladies to the torture in some such matter. But who talks of bastards in the case of Dame Cicely Harflete, widow of Sir Christopher Harflete, slain by the Abbot ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... of madness for rejecting her. Why had he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely inspired. She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his armoury, went his way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese going under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a minute in the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cannot help myself. I am drawn to you by some force stronger than my own will; but you need not be afraid of me—not yet! As I said, I can wait. I can endure the mingled torture and rapture of this sudden passion and make no sign, till my patience tires, and then—then I will win you ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... put to death. But he must go presently without all delay: and he that hath suffered the iniury, carieth him, as it were captiue. They punish no man with sentence of death, vnles hee bee taken in the deede doing, or confesseth the same. But being accused by the multitude, they put him vnto extreame torture to make him confesse the trueth. They punish murther with death, and carnall copulation also with any other besides his owne. By his own, I meane his wife or his maid seruant, for he may vse his slaue as he listeth himself. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... assemble together to take food harmlessly and in common. That after my proclamation, in which, in obedience to your command, I had forbidden associations, they had desisted from this practice. For these reasons, I the more thought it necessary to investigate the real truth, by putting to the torture two maidens who were called deaconesses; but I discovered nothing, but a perverse and excessive superstition. I have, therefore, deferred taking cognizance of the matter until I had consulted you; for it seemed to me a case requiring advice, especially on account of the number ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... was almost unbearably hot. It seems, looking back, as though the big baking city in those days was meant to serve as an anteroom of torture—an inadequate bit of preparation for the hell that was soon to break in the guise of the Great War. About the soda-water bar in the drug store near the Hotel Cecil many American tourists found solace in the sirups and creams of home. Through the open windows of the ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... arrived at results better and more quickly than in any other way. All his convictions had been secured by them. The press and meddling busy-bodies called his system barbarous, a revival of the old-time torture chamber. What did he care what the people said as long as he convicted his man? Wasn't that what he was paid for? He was there to find the murderer, and he ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... "This world is the real hell, ending in the eternal naught. The dreams of a life beyond and of re-union there are but a demon's mocking breathed into the mortal heart, lest by its universal suicide mankind should rob him of his torture-pit. There is no truth in all your father taught you" (he was a clergyman and rather eminent in his profession), "there is no hope for man, there is nothing he can win except the deep happiness of sleep. Come ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... on the chance of a legacy, begged and prayed of the doctors to prolong Blaesus's life by hook or by crook. But when the will was signed he took quite a different line. He changed his tone and said to the same doctors: "How long do you intend to torture the poor man? Why do you grudge him an easy death when you cannot give him life?" Blaesus dies, and, as though he had heard every word, he leaves Regulus not a brass farthing. Two stories are quite enough. Or do you ask for a third, on the rhetoricians' ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... a worthy Frenchman in a seal-skin cap with a braided hood over it, once our travelling companion in the coupe aforesaid, who, waking up with a pale and crumpled visage, and looking ruefully out at the grim row of breakers enjoying themselves fanatically on an instrument of torture called 'the Bar,' inquired of us whether we were ever sick at sea? Both to prepare his mind for the abject creature we were presently to become, and also to afford him consolation, we replied, 'Sir, your servant is always sick when it ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... of this my torture, quickly, there; My madam, with the everlasting voice: The bells, in time of pestilence, ne'er made Like noise, or were in that perpetual motion! The Cock-pit comes not near it. All my house, But now, steam'd like a bath with her thick breath. A lawyer could not have been heard; nor ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... up all in two words. The end is abdication—the means, vexation, incessant torture. The Rennepont inheritance wilt pay for the election. The price agreed, the merchandise ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... last only from sunrise till sunset. Then direct, as during the divine dynasties, that people rest every seventh day; not every tenth, but every seventh day. Then command that landowners shall not have the right to mortgage earth-tillers, or scribes the right to beat and torture ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... Upham has not sent me Mr. Scott's poem yet. However, I am not sorry. I feel a sort of satisfaction that mine is going to the press first, though there is little danger that we should think on any subject alike, or stumble on any one character in the same track." De Quincey spoke of the hidden torture shown in Landor's play to be ever present in the mind of Count Julian, the betrayer of his country, as greater than the tortures inflicted in old Rome on generals who had committed treason. De Quincey's admiration of this play was more than once expressed. "Mr. Landor," he said, "who always rises ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... miserable life, crying from hunger, shivering with cold, harassed by cruel dogs, and tortured to make sport for brutal boys. How much kinder and more really humane to take upon ourselves the momentary suffering of causing the death of an animal than to turn our backs and leave it to drag out a life of torture and misery! HARRIET ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... deer is lodged, I've track'd her to her covert. How will the young Numidian rave to see His mistress lost! If aught could glad my soul, Beyond the enjoyment of so bright a prize, 'Twould be to torture that young, gay barbarian. —But, hark! what noise! Death to my hopes! 'tis he, 'Tis Juba's self! there ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... state of ideal bliss, into the world of shadows which again closed around and infolded me, my first dread was, not unnaturally, that my own shadow had found me again, and that my torture had commenced anew. It was a sad revulsion of feeling. This, indeed, seemed to correspond to what we think death is, before we die. Yet I felt within me a power of calm endurance to which I had hitherto been a stranger. For, in truth, that I should be able if only to think ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... was not there," returned Gartok. "I could not have saved him from so many, and it would not have been pleasant to go into slavery—if not to torture and death. Poor Cheenbuk! he was ever against war—yet war has been forced on him. I fear we shall never see him again. Hoi! my leg is bad. I can't understand how the Fire-spouters could hit it without the little thing going ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... vestige of clothing was torn from him, and the merciless blows fell upon his bare and quivering flesh. But not once did the Frenchman cry out in pain. He breathed a silent prayer that he be quickly delivered from his torture. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... love of us he bled, And all in torture died; 'T was love that bowed his fainting head, And ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... a horrid practice he had admitted having recourse to. 'Torture, or torture-witchcraft possibly! It seems a hopeful way of eliciting true intelligence, not to speak of playing the game in any sort of British sense.' He hung his head penitently. He pleaded that this expedient ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... No torture that I ever heard of or could ever have conceived—no punishment, no agony, no Calvary ever has matched the hellish hideousness of the endless execution of this young man.... He was only twenty-two years old; only a lieutenant among the thousands ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... sea beyond the hole in which their oar worked. The sweat poured off their chests and backs in streams, until their waist-bands clung to the flesh like soaked sponges. Some began to moan and sob; others to entreat Heaven for a respite, as if God were directing their torture and taking delight in it; others again broke out into frightful imprecations, cursing their Maker and the hour of their birth. And while the oars swung and the chains clashed and the cries redoubled their volume, the three keepers moved imperturbably ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... faces—they were as helpless as newly born babes in that respect; and it may seem like a small matter, but when the sweat began to run down their necks and tickle them, or a fly to bother them, it was a torture like being burned alive. Whether it was the slaughterhouses or the dumps that were responsible, one could not say, but with the hot weather there descended upon Packingtown a veritable Egyptian plague of flies; there could be no describing this—the ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... last moment, refuses to go through the ceremony, the trolls dash at him. One bites himself fast to his ear. Others strike him. He falls. They throw themselves upon him in a heap. At this critical moment, when he is writhing beneath them in torture, the sound of distant church bells is heard, the trolls take to flight, the palace of the Mountain King collapses and Peer is standing alone on a mountain. The scene may be construed as one of his supernatural experiences, as a nightmare, or as the allegory of a stricken ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... which in A King and No King is only apparent, becomes real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the Broken Heart, is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... cell. This done, with a sardonic laugh, the two men stood upright and looked at the recumbent form of their prisoner. Then Carlos stepped across the dungeon and, chuckling all the while, thrust several of the steel instruments of torture in among the ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... not recount the many painful reflections that passed through my mind during the period that followed. Suffice it to say, that for many long hours I endured the terrible pain of thirst, without any hope of being relieved from its torture. I felt certain it was going to kill me. I knew not how soon, but I was sure that sooner or later it would cause my death. I had read of men living for days under the agony of thirst, before life became extinct. I tried to remember how many days they had lived, but my memory was at fault. ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... when our loneliness becomes intolerable, it is when the poisonous teeth of the eternal malice in Nature have us by the throat, it is when our malice rises up, in the miserable torture of hatred, to answer the malice of the system of things, that, out of the depths, we cry to the darkness which surrounds us for some voice or some signal that shall give us an intimation of help. Merely to know that ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of children, all talking at the same time, I entered the torture chamber. My first impression was one of astonished disgust because of the hideousness of the ink-stained walls, and of the old benches of shiny wood defaced by the penknife carvings of countless school-boys who had been so inexpressibly miserable in this place. Although I was a stranger to ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... neglected me I was sometimes the object of her solicitude; she occasionally spoke of my education and seemed desirous of attending to it herself. Cold chills ran through me at such times when I thought of the torture a daily intercourse with her would inflict upon me. I blessed the neglect in which I lived, and rejoiced that I could stay alone in the garden and play with the pebbles and watch the insects and gaze into the blueness of the sky. ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... especially my regard for my wife, who would have heard of this sudden resignation and of all that would have been written about it with great grief, determined me to hold out till the last concert. The infernal torture this is to me I cannot express. All my pleasure in my work is disappearing more and more. I had made up my mind to finish the score of the "Valkyrie" during the four months here, but that is out of the question. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... exaggerated. The young are so trained that when old they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting pain in its most appalling form. Among the most brutal white borderers a man would be instantly lynched if he practised on any creature the fiendish torture which in an Indian camp either attracts no notice at all, or else excites ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... white with rage, exclaiming, 'Yea, 'tis she! a serpent in the slough! and Ukleet in the torture hath told of thee what is known to him. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the service is poor and apt to be forward; and (last, but not least) the manners of the other guests are apt to include a most superfluous proportion of tobacco-chewing, expectorating, an open and unashamed use of the toothpick, and other little amenities that probably inflict more torture on those who are not used to them than would decorous breaches ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... woke. Some sound was threatening him. It was London, coming to get him and torture him. The light in his room was dusty, mottled, gray, lifeless. He saw his door, half ajar, and for some moments lay motionless, watching stark and bodiless heads thrust themselves through the opening and withdraw with sinister alertness ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... a termagant, imperious, prodigal, lewd, profligate wench, as ever breathed; she used to rantipole about the house, pinch the children, kick the servants, and torture the cats and the dogs; she would rob her father's strong box, for money to give the young fellows that she was fond of. She had a noble air, and something great in her mien, but such a noisome infectious breath, as threw all ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... haunted him. At first Christ's words and look of earnest affection filled his heart with a tumult of joy: but having fallen back into the old sordid self, the very memory of his master's face became a curse and torture. And so the vision blighted that ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... pre-historic cypresses in Monterey. These differ from the straight, symmetrical classic redwoods as Rodin's "Thinker" differs from the Apollo. Monstrous, contorted shapes—those Monterey cypresses look like creatures born underground, who, at the price of almost unbearable torture, have torn through the earth's crust, thrusting and twisting themselves airward. I refer even to that astonishing detail in the general Californian sulphitism, the seals which frequent beach rocks close ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... loneliness. And because he had known that inevitably a day would come when she would need assistance and support he had sunk his own feelings and retained his post. Her brief happiness had been hard to watch—the subsequent long years of her desertion a protracted torture. He had raged at his own helplessness. And ignorant of his love and the motive that kept him at Craven Towers she had come to lean on him and refer all to him. But for his care the Craven properties would have been ruined, and the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... return; and that if Neri were detached from Rinaldo, the party of the latter would be so weakened, as to be unable to defend themselves. This letter coming to the hands of the magistrates, Agnolo was taken, put to the torture, and sent into exile. This example, however, did not ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... story as he had heard it from a bibulous member of the Barred Horseshoe, and then added a little of torture as a sauce to ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... massacre was completed by the butchery and torture of wounded remnants of these brave Union defenders—some being buried alive, and others nailed to boards, ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... infamous treason ever attempted, and for which the conspirators had already been executed: so "heinous, horrible and damnable"[32] was it considered, that the authorities had even proposed to devise some specially severe form of torture for the perpetrators to undergo, in addition to the usual terrible ...
— The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605 • William Parker
... Pouncebox for the jewels, almost till they were cut to pieces. The preservation of these treasures on behalf of those who paid them their wages and fed them, who occasionally scolded them, but always succoured them, would be their point of honour. No torture would get the key of the cellar from Binns; no threats extract from Pouncebox a secret of the toilet. But poor Lizzie Eustace had no Binns and no Pouncebox. They are plants that grow slowly. There was still too much of the mushroom about Lady Eustace to permit of her possessing ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... until now; never until now had it so much as hinted that Violet had any soul at all. The comparative fineness and sharpness of outline might have reminded him of his wife as she had looked when she came out of her torture after the birth of her first child, but that no implacable resentment and no revolt was there. It was plainly to be seen (nor did Ransome altogether miss it) that here were a body and a soul that had suffered to extremity, and were ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... was to give me some small coins, when she bent swiftly down to my hand, and tried to kiss it, evidently imaging that I had given her the ruble. I muttered something, and quitted the kitchen. I was ashamed, ashamed to the verge of torture, as I had not been for a long time. I shrank together; I was conscious that I was making grimaces, and I groaned with shame as I fled from the kitchen. This utterly unexpected, and, as it seemed to me, utterly ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... arms across her breast and held herself in a fury of self-possession. Marriage suddenly appeared to her as an ugly thing even if it attained to the ideal. No, no! Men were good to play with, to tease and torture, but she had fixed her limits, and she fixed them with some astonishment for her own reserve. The discovery of this inherent coldness had its effect: it bounded her future in a manner which was too disturbing for much contemplation, but it also gave her a new freedom ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... shirts and smocks and tow "tongs" or "skilts," which were loose flapping summer trousers which ended almost half-way from the knee to the ankle. This tow stuff was never free from prickling spines, and it proved, so tradition states, an absolute instrument of torture to the wearer, until frequent washings had worn it out and thus subdued ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... the orders of the Afridi who is now dead. They made ready to torture me, showing me the knives they would use. But she came, and they obeyed her, binding the Afridi fast to me. After that I heard the sahib's voice, and then this happened. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... end of the fifteenth century the Muscovite ideas of right were subjected to the strong mind of Ivan the Great and compressed into a code. Therein were embodied the best processes known to his land and time: for discovering crime, torture and trial by battle; for punishing crime, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... the missionary to say, after this perfect proof that you have mistaken the great law of right? Verily, he finds that the rule, with your explanation, tells the Indian to torture his prisoner. Verily, he finds that the wild man has the best of the argument. He finds he had left out the word OUGHT; and that he can't put it in, until he teaches the Indian things which as yet he don't know. Yea, he finds he gave the commandment too soon; for that he ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... to his body, his once curly hair disheveled, he tossed about in the cell convulsively and hopelessly, like a man suffering from an unbearable physical torture. He would sit down for awhile, then start to run again, he would press his forehead against the wall, stop and seek something with his eyes—as if looking for some medicine. His expression changed as though he had two different faces. ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... passed in England. In France all are dull, drowsy. In Germany all are hungry for the food that satisfies unbelievers. The "Critique of Pure Reason" was followed by the labors of Fitche. He was succeeded by Schelling, and he by Hegel. All forms of torture must be added to this account of the conflict if we would get a glimpse of the strength of the Christian religion and of the religious element in man's nature, from the amount of resistance which they ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... up in violent emotion). God of revenge! inspire me to invent Some new, unheard-of torture! Is their crime So clear, so plain, so public to the world, That without e'en the trouble of inquiry The veriest hint suffices to reveal it? This is too much! I did not dream of this! I am the last of all, then, to discern it— The last in all ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of this bird of solitary tastes is not attractive. He is quarrelsome and unfriendly with his kind, and aggressive and malicious toward others, says the Oracle. His pleasure is to torture and destroy; no sweet or tender sentiment may cling about his life; in fact, he is altogether unlovely. So declare the books, and so, with additions and exaggerations, says nearly every one who takes birds for his theme. He is branded everywhere as the "butcher-bird," and it seems to be the aim ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... had robbed and murdered her. Marian usually wore a very valuable watch; probably, also, she had money about her person—enough to have tempted the cupidity of some lawless wretch. He shrank in horror from pursuing conjecture—it was worse than torture, worse than madness to him. Oh, blindness and frenzy; why had he not thought of these dangers so likely to beset her solitary path? Why had he so recklessly exposed her to them? Vain questions, alas! vain as was his ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... said Garvey. "Maybe we'd be doin' Mr. Wolf from Texas a favor by puttin' lead through him. Bear Claw was Yellow Skull's favorite. The old chief is an expert at torture. I'd like to be on hand to see it. But I've got an idea. Shank, have Jose dig a grave on Boot Hill—make it two of 'em. We've got to ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... in, and bare him away from what she would have had him suffer. When they put him on the hurdle, he lay as though he wist not; when they twined a crown of nettles and pressed it on his brow, he was as though he felt not; when, the torture over, they made ready to drag him to the gallows, they saw that he was dead. God cried ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... open warfare and actual bodily torture between various sects all calling themselves Christian, thus extended over three centuries. These may be divided into four periods. The first is one of fierce dispute but little actual warfare, during which the revolt spread over Europe with Germany as its centre. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... and from God's device Unfashion'd, crazed in dismay; yea, God's skill Fails in them, as the skill a founder put In brass fails when the coals seize on his work. For this fierce Holofernes and his power, This torture poured on the city, is no more Than a wild gust of wicked heat breathed out Against our God-wrought souls by the world's furnace. No new thing, this camp about the city: Nebuchadnezzar and his hosted men But fearfully image, like a madman's dream, The fierce infection of the world, that waits ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... subjected to fiendish tortures, and so be discouraged from attempting to secure a share of the immeasurable wealth which you enjoy. Now the time has come when your minds must be disabused of this notion. No amount of torture which you can possibly inflict upon solitary, helpless Englishmen will deter their fellow countrymen from striving, by fair means or foul, to secure a share of what they are as much entitled to as yourselves; ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... a gallows in our sense of the word, but usually a stake on a scaffold, to which the condemned to a death of torture was bound ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... without pleasure. The last may, perhaps, appear strange to men unacquainted with the masquerade of life: I deceived others, and I endeavoured to deceive myself; and have worn the face of pleasantry and gaiety, while my heart suffered the most exquisite torture. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the papers in a tiroir against the wall he took a French journal, and read, translating fluently. The article was a bald account of the torture, outrage and massacre of Armenian women and girls, at Adana, by the Turks. The most hideous portion of it was briefly descriptive of the atrocities perpetrated by order of a high Turkish official ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... equal in extent to the half of Europe, are only the purgatory, not yet the real Siberian hell. You still find woods there, poor, thin, dwarfed woods, it is true, but where there is wood there is fire and vitality. The true hell of human torture begins beyond the line of the woods; then there is nothing but ice and snow; ice that does not even melt in the plains in summer—and in the midst of that icy desert, miserable human beings thrown upon this shore ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Hebrews stepping with quiet, full, heel-to-toe tread into the hotly flaming furnace, not sure but it meant torture and death, only sure that it was the only right thing to do. It is the old Babylonian premier actually lowering nearer and nearer to those green eyes, and yawning jaws, and ivories polished on many a bone, clear of duty though not ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... agin to Pittsburg, I never could rightly h'ar, but what I know is, that thar war dozens of prisoners beaten to death by the squaws and children, and that old Cunnel Crawford himself war put to the double torture and roasted alive; and, I reckon, if he war'nt eaten, it war only because he war too old ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... at Newgate began on May 8th, when Gow was sullen and reserved and refused to plead. He was ordered to be pressed to death, which was the only form of torture still allowed by the law. At the last moment Gow yielded, and pleaded "not guilty." Gow was found guilty, and hanged on June 11th, 1725, but "as he was turned off, he fell down from the Gibbit, the rope breaking by the weight of some ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... position of the lovers was uncomfortable, Jaspar's was painful. They had the consolation of loving and being loved; but he was now writhing under the weight of an additional torture. The appearance of Hatchie was the knell of all his hopes, the precursor of ruin. To him it was a mystery, and all his endeavors ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... affair of this sort—of its past, its present, or its future—had never struck him. What it meant, what torture and raptures had gone to its construction, what slow, overmastering fate had lurked within the facts, very naked, sometimes sordid, but generally spicy, presented to his gaze. He was not in the habit of blaming, praising, drawing deductions, or generalizing at all about such things; he simply ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... worship anywhere (their churches had of course all been pulled down) was a crime punishable with death; and any Huguenot caught whilst attempting to escape from the country was sent to the galleys—a fate worse than mere death, for it meant death by slow torture. And every child was forcibly taken from its heretic parents at the age of five, ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... to himself a continuation of present pleasures. His Heaven is a delightful country, far away beyond the unknown Western seas, where the skies are ever bright and serene, the air genial, the spring eternal, and the forests abounding in game; no war, disease, or torture are known in that happy land; the sufferings of life are endured no more, and its sweetest pleasures are perpetuated and increased; his wife is tender and obedient, his children dutiful and affectionate. ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... for it with might and main, wildly, aimlessly, his ears ringing with detonations that sounded to him like thunder-claps. His eyes burned like coals of fire; it seemed to him that he was wrapt in flame. It was an eternity of torture. Then he suddenly caught sight of a little house to his left, and he rushed for the friendly refuge, gained it, with a sensation as if an immense load had been lifted from his breast. The place was tenanted, there were men and horses ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... were allowed an equal share with men in shaping the laws of that great empire, would they subject their female children to torture with bandaged feet, through the whole period of childhood and growth, in order that they might be cripples for the residue ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... every tree and gate and house, there came a gathering and swelling of his emotions and he began to weaken and shake. He was afraid he could not make it half way up the street. But he kept on. The torture now was more a mingled rapture and grief than the physical protest of his racked body. At last he saw the modest little house—and then he stood at the gate, quivering. Home! A light in the window of his old room! A terrible and tremendous storm of feeling forced him to lean ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... unsteadily. Obviously he was incapable of lucid thought, and the mere effort at sustained conversation was a torture. He turned through a yew arch into the Italian garden, and threw himself wearily into ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... the thought that his baseness would be atoned for in his own blood. Even when, unnerved and faint from the hideous ordeal, he flung himself upon his knees in the cell, he regretted only the impotent ravings that the torture had forced from him. He could have bitten out his tongue for his blasphemous utterings—not because they were blasphemous, but because their utterance, by revealing his agony, gave their triumph to his tormentors. When North found ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... covering the hand from the wrist to finger tip, and sending a thrill of agony through every nerve in the body. Ten, twenty, thirty, or in extreme cases, even forty such stripes would be administered, some boys taking them as fast as the doctor could strike, so that the torture might soon be over, and others pausing between each blow, to rub their stinging palms together, and ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... work his revenge. He had it given to his wife so that she might hold a terrible arm against Tremorel, all ready to crush him. If he revolted, she always had this instrument of torture at hand. Ah, the man was a miserable wretch, and she must have made ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... barbarity of the Mexican sacrifices, the numbers of the victims, and the refinements of torture to which they were subjected. Prisoners, who had often been fattened for months previously, perished by thousands on the altars. The palpitating flesh was distributed amongst the assistants, and a horrible custom compelled the priests to clothe themselves in the still bleeding skins of the unfortunate ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... appreciable to themselves as well as to their tutor. This of course made them more happy and more diligent. There were no attempts now to work upon their parents for a holiday; no real or pretended head or tooth-aches, whose disability was urged against the greater torture of ill-conceded mental labour. They began in fact to understand; and, in proportion to the beauty and value of the thing understood, to understand is to enjoy. Therefore the laird and his lady could not help seeing that the boys were doing well, far better in fact than ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... and had been incarcerated in the prison at La Guayra. They had nearly all been subjected to the tortures of the Holy Office, and bore the most dreadful scars as mementoes of its attentions. Many, under the influence of the torture, had recanted and abjured their own faith in order to save themselves from ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... nooks, to the wind on the heights, to the silence and loneliness and beauty. And here the dreams come back and SHE is WITH me always. Her spirit is all that keeps me kind and good, as you say I am. But I suffer, I long for her alive. If I love her dead, how could I love her living! Always I torture myself with the vain dream that—that she MIGHT not be dead. I have never been anything but a dreamer. And here I go about my work by day and lie awake at night with that lost girl in my mind.... I love her. Does that seem ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... rested upon the close-cropped lawn where the grackles and robins were industriously picking up their evening meal. "You love the country out there—you must love it, to remember only the sunrises, and the sunsets, and the stars; and forget the torture of long hours in the saddle and that terrific downpour of rain that burst the reservoir and so nearly cost us our lives, and the dust storm in the bad lands, and that night of horrible thirst. Why those ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... the cavern. Cervantes, with his natural chivalry, at once came to the front and took the whole blame upon himself. Surprised at this magnanimity, the Viceroy—who is described in Don Quixote as "the homicide of all human kind"[74]—sent for him, and found him as good as his word. No threats of torture or death could extort from him a syllable which could implicate any one of his fellow-captives. His undaunted manner evidently overawed the Viceroy, for instead of chastizing he purchased Cervantes from his master for ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... the two men who had been prepared by Vittigis for this service (for it was not fated that Rome should be captured by this army of the Goths) came of his own accord to Belisarius and revealed everything, and told who the other man was. So this man under torture brought to light all that he was about to do and displayed the drug which Vittigis had given him. And Belisarius first mutilated his nose and ears and then sent him riding on an ass into the enemy's camp. And when the barbarians saw him, they realised ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... love-letter. And for Wade, with his keen eyes that seemed to see the senses and the soul, there shone something infinite through her rapture. Never until that unguarded moment had he divined her innocence, nor had any conception been given him of the exquisite torture of her maiden fears or the havoc of love fighting for itself. He learned then much of the mystery and meaning ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... succeed. But if, after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our country's freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment, and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death, we ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... said gravely and quietly. "Do you think I could face my father and mother, knowing I was about to wound them to the heart? Each day of delay would be torture to me. Oh, why is religion such a curse?" She paused, overwhelmed for a moment by the emotion she had been suppressing. She resumed in the same quiet manner. "Yes, we must break away at once. We have kept our last Passover. We shall have to eat leavened food—it will be a ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... indignity, and even every torture, were thrown into dungeons, and menaced with the most cruel death, in order to make them reveal their secret treasures, or purchase liberty by exorbitant ransoms. Clement himself, who had trusted for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... terrific cries, louder even than the most obstinate of its race when the butcher is making preparations for manufacturing it into corned pork. The sow, attributing the cries of her darling to some torture inflicted by us, rushed to the drawers, making several savage attempts to rear up against them so that she could seize us by the legs. Every moment we expected to be caught hold of by the hook in her nose, when we should have inevitably been brought down. In vain we kicked ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... when a traitor like Ravaillac or a Lombard untore was being put to death in agony. His firm mental grip on cruelty, and the somber gloom with which he invested these ghastly transcripts from the torture-chamber, prove Ribera true to his Spanish origin. Caravaggio delighted in color, and was indeed a colorist of high rank, considering the times in which he lived. Spagnoletto rejoiced in somber shadows, as though to illustrate ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... fierce the anguish now, Which tore the very soul, and clothed the brow Of the Enthusiast; while gaunt despair Its heavy, cold, and iron hand laid bare, And in its grasp of torture clenched his heart, Till, one by one, the life-drops seemed to start In agony unspeakable: within His breast its freezing shadow—dark as sin, Gloomy as death, and desolate as hell— Like starless midnight on his spirit fell, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... reconcile you to such a contemplation. There was a Jesus Christ crucified, by the same, very fine. One gets tired, indeed, whatever may be the conception and execution of it, of seeing that monotonous and agonised form for ever exhibited in one prescriptive attitude of torture. But the Magdalen, clinging to the cross with the look of passive and gentle despair beaming from beneath her bright flaxen hair, and the figure of St. John, with his looks uplifted in passionate compassion; his hands clasped, and his fingers twisting themselves together, as it were, with involuntary ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... from the cruel hooks. One had two hooks in his mouth. He was the quietest of the lot, as he had less purchase than the other two upon the ground, and with one hook in his lower and one in his upper jaw, glared upwards at us in his torture and smote his sides with his long, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... pony), as, except in Reykjavik, horse furniture is of the most miserable description, and the constant breakages cause many delays, while there are actually no side-saddles, except in the capital, and a chair is an instrument of torture only to be recommended to your ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... have tried to rise out of his wreck. His actions all through spell weakness. I could bear your not marrying me, Mary. But I can't bear to see you marry a man who isn't worthy of you. To see you unhappy would be torture for me." ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... then proposed to establish me in some such undertaking as my late employer's. When he said that, I knew all was over; that nothing I could do or say would avail; that I had been but a toy; that he could not conceive what my nature was, nor the agony of shame, the torture of rejected love, he was inflicting. I contrived to keep silent and composed. I knew I had no right to complain: I had risked all and lost. I managed to say we might arrange things later, and he praised me for being a sensible, capital ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... have to read so many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, for she knew that love from the worst man on earth would be more nourishing for the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... one of the gravest of my life, I had happily no leisure to think of myself. My whole soul sickened with anxiety for the girl. I knew enough of Indian ways to guess her fate. For Shalah and myself there might be torture, and at the best an arrow in our hearts, but for her there would be things unspeakable. I remembered the little meadow on the Rapidan, and the tale told by the grey ashes. There was only one shot in ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... Mr. Sayer enters the room, exclaiming—"Mr. Manhug, Mr. Jones, Mr. Saxby, and Mr. Collins." The four depart to the chamber of examination, where the medical inquisition awaits them, with every species of mental torture to screw their brains instead of their thumbs, and rack their intellects instead of their limbs,—the chair on which the unfortunate student is placed being far more uneasy than the tightest fitting "Scavenger's daughter" in the Tower of London. After an anxious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... briefly of the coming of the Thing during this time, I do so because the mind shrinks from past pain. It came again, and again. It craftily used the torture of irregularity in Its coming. For days there might be a respite, then It would haunt me nights in succession until my physical ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... to the captain; and as for his Uncle Jack, he would have thought it dishonourable to breathe a word to him. He would rather have suffered the crudest torture the bully could ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... not take her life!" she cried; "but if I could mar her beauty—the pink-and-white beauty of Daisy Brooks, which has won Rex from me—I would do it. I shall torture her for this," she cried. "I will win him from her though I wade through seas of blood. Hear me, Heaven," she cried, ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... upon men, from thinking about their opinion. You will be set at liberty from your dependence upon externals, from feeling as if you could not live unless you had this, that, or the other person or thing. You will be emancipated from fears and hopes which torture the men who strike their roots no deeper than this visible film of time which floats upon the surface of the great, invisible abyss of Eternity. If you have Christ for your Master you will be the masters of the world, and of time ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... watched and enquired with the most intense interest for the arrival or for news of this vessel, and are only now slowly and reluctantly abandoning all hope, while the wretched parents have been for weeks past agitated with all the alternations of hope and despair, and suffering a protracted torture worse than any certainty. So ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... ashamed, and I felt sorry for him, though my remark was quite in place, for it is really cruel in this manner to torture patients and convalescents. I can, indeed, endure much, but when, after coming from the opera, I sit down to supper, and am annoyed instantly by the strains of a harp or a singer, jarring with ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... came to him. They would carry him off in the ship and settle with him at their leisure. No swift merciful death for him. He had read dreadful tales of the Bolsheviks' skill in torture, and now they all came back to him—stories of Chinese mercenaries, and men buried alive, and death by agonizing inches. He felt suddenly very cold and sick, and hung in his bonds, for he had no strength in his limbs. Then the pressure on this throat braced him, and also quickened ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... stood up for peace in Bosnia. Remember the skeletal prisoners, the mass graves, the campaign to rape and torture, the endless lines of refugees, the threat of a spreading war. All these threats, all these horrors have now begun to give way to the promise of peace. Now, our troops and a strong NATO, together with our new partners from Central Europe and elsewhere, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... strangely haunting to the imagination. It represents the youthful, slender figure, nude, save for slight drapery, laid on the gridiron while the fire is being kindled under it and the fagots shovelled in. The physical shrinking of the flesh—of every nerve—from the torture, the spiritual strength and invincible energy of the countenance, are wonderfully depicted. The great aisle was painted by order of Pius IX by Cesare Fracassini; in it are two pulpits of marble. A double staircase of marble conducts to that part of the Basilica of Constantine which by Honorius ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Robust and frail. Beneath That breast indeed might throb the Sacred Heart. And from the lips, so holily dispart, The dying murmur breathes "Forgive! Forgive!" O wide-stretched arms! "I perish, let them live." Under the torture of the thorny crown, The loving pallor of the brow looks down On human blindness, on the toiler's woes; The while, to overturn Despair's repose, And urge to Hope and Love, as Faith demands, Bleed, bleed the feet, the broken side, the hands. A poet, painter, Christian,—it ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... word not to worry her before I return. Look, she is half dead. And you, too, must rest. Rely upon me; I answer for everything; in any case, wait till I return. I tell you again, don't torture her, or ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... crisped his flesh as his feet touched the torture. He could feel the skin curl and harden. Gritting his teeth, he sped at topmost speed of the house ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... too long thou keepst on torture's rack One who obeys thy laws, yet whisp'ring chides In that thou bidst me boast a joy I lack, And hush the ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the inquisition of reason, and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions—yet still they would not have been talked of or described, as instances of LUCK, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... establishments of like nature, so as to reconcile the rights of humanity with those of justice. Corporal punishment shall not be administered, even in the prisons, except in conformity with the disciplinary regulations established by my Sublime Porte; and everything that resembles torture ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... bold to say, we were the most miserable creatures that ever existed on the face of the earth. The thought of passing all the bad season in this state of torture, made us regret a hundred times we had not perished in the shipwreck. How, thought I, how is it possible to endure the want of sleep, the stings of myriads of insects, the putrid exhalations of marshes, ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... swept as through funnels and burned the victims where they lay or stood, leaving a circular imprint of scorched and burned flesh. I brought ten on deck who were thus burned; two of them were dead, the others survived, although in a dreadful state of torture from their burns. Their screams of agony were heartrending. Out of a total of twenty-three on board the Roddam, which includes the captain and the crew, ten are dead and several are in the hospital. My first and second mates, my chief engineer and my supercargo, ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... skeletons by hunger, the capture of Guatimozin while attempting to escape in a canoe, made an end of the fighting in August, 1521. Cortes promised honorable treatment to the fallen king, but before long he put him and some of his companions to the torture in order to force the discovery of hidden treasure. This brutality proved ineffectual, but taken together with the subsequent hanging of Guatimozin upon an unproved charge of conspiracy against the Spaniards, it constitutes the blackest blot upon the fame of Cortes. It is ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... He could neither eat nor sleep. He shambled through the obscure streets of Warchester, or lingered wistfully in the beech woods behind his own palatial home in Acredale, staring at the window of his daughter's chamber. The week passed in such mental torture as tries the strong when confronted by the major force of conscience. Then the doctor told him that he had balked the plague; that Kate was recovering from varioloid; that beyond a transparency of skin, which would add to her beauty ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... self-torture he reached a certain degree of composure, but life had never any real pleasures to offer him. He never dared to accept any kind of distinction; he never dared to feel himself entitled to a kind word or even ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... me by talking," said Erica. "And now I want you, if you don't mind, to tell me all from the very first. I can't torture my father by asking him, and I couldn't hear it from the landlady. But you were here, you can tell me all. Don't be afraid of hurting me; can't you understand, if the past were the only thing left to you, you would want to know every ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... assassination or to despatch his prey, is poisoned. It is a lingering poison, and takes several hours to produce its effect; but no remedy is known, and many who have escaped from the cowardly blow have crawled to the path only to expire in torture. There was no denying that what the retainer proposed was the only thing that could be done. The warder had meantime brought a bucket of water, of which the poor creature drank eagerly. Felix could not do it; he could not slay the creature which had carried him so ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... be made to keep his place." They are the gentlemen who have their grip upon the throat of Southern labor; who hold vast areas of land, the product of robbery, for a rise in values; who run the stores and torture the small farmer to death by usurious charges for necessaries; these are the gentlemen who are opposed to the new conditions resultant from the war which their Hotspur impetuosity and Shylock greed made possible. In short, these ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... of a passion infinitely more terrible than his earlier one for her. It wiped out the memory, even the thought, of Elizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. Bitter jealousy racked him, remorse and profound grief. The ten miles of road to the railroad became ten miles of torture, of increasing domination of the impulse to go to her, and of ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... preference, hunger or domestic affliction: but the fact of extortion remains precisely the same. Whether we force the man's property from him by pinching his stomach, or pinching his fingers, makes some difference anatomically;— morally, none whatsoever: we use a form of torture of some sort in order to make him give up his property; we use, indeed, the man's own anxieties, instead of the rack; and his immediate peril of starvation, instead of the pistol at the head; but otherwise we differ from Front de Boeuf, or ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... is prepared for those who neglect prayer. The sixth is called Hatamah and is appointed for Jews and Christians. The seventh is named Hwiyah and is prepared for hypocrites. Such be the seven stages.' Quoth Bulukiya, 'Haply Jahannam hath least of torture for that it is the uppermost.' 'Yes,' quoth King Sakhr, 'the most endurable of them all is Jahannam; natheless in it are a thousand mountains of fire, in each mountain seventy thousand cities of fire, in each city seventy thousand ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... it should believe that equality is so contrary to nature that we have no right to torture nature in order to establish real equality among men, and that the people which has established such a state of things, which is quite possible, must succumb to the fate of those who try to live exactly in opposition to the laws of nature. Instead, ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... between Melchior and the Signor Grimaldi having terminated, the bailiff hastened to join his more important guests, and Sigismund was released from an examination that had harrowed every feeling of his soul, while he even despised the besotted loquacity of the man who had been the instrument of his torture. ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... fell in love with a woman in the valley of Sorek, named Delilah. Then the rulers of the Philistines came to her and said, "Find out by teasing him how it is that his strength is so great and how we may overpower and bind him that we may torture him. Then we will each one of us give you eleven hundred pieces of silver." So Delilah said to Samson, "Tell me how it is that your strength is so great and how you might be bound to torture you?" Samson said to her, "If they should bind me with ...
— The Children's Bible • Henry A. Sherman
... Ridicules,' when he first discovered "what a labour it is to publish a book, and how GREEN (NEUF) an author is the first time they print him." Or it may be that Campanella turned over, with hands unstrung, and still broken by the torture, these leaves that contain his passionate sonnets. Here again is the copy of Theocritus from which some pretty page may have read aloud to charm the pagan and pontifical leisure of Leo X. This Gargantua is the counterpart of that which the martyred ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... combating love, happiness and inclination,—each conquering alternately, and alternately each vanquished,—I could endure it no longer, I resolved by one effort to finish the strife, and to undergo an instant of even exquisite torture, in preference to a ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... doubtful that the prohibition of the sale of white captives by the Indians would be productive of good. The natural result would rather be that the Indians would kill their white captives at once or torture them to death. At the best the prisoners would in most cases, if adults become slaves and if young be adopted into the tribe. There are numerous instances of white captives being slain because unsaleable while the Negroes escaped death because they found a ready ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... ceremonies of the Mysteries, these material horrors were explained to the Initiates as mere symbols of the unimaginable torture, remorse, and agony that would rend the immaterial soul and rack the immortal spirit, they were feeble and insufficient in the same mode and measure only, as all material images and symbols fall short of that which is beyond the cognizance of our senses: and the grave Hierophant, the imagery, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... her duty—despised her, and could never forgive her for having cheated him into taking her for his wife. She died the victim of his contempt and hatred. Not suddenly, not as with a lightning-stroke, did his contempt kill, but slowly and steadily did it pierce her heart. She bore the torture for one desolate, disconsolate year, and then she died solitary and forsaken. No loving hand dried the death-sweat on her cold forehead; no pitying lips whispered words of love and hope to her; yet on her death-bed, her heart was still warm toward her husband, and even then ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... this manoeuvre the mule's body is kept at full stretch, and the rider is obliged to lean forward over the animal's neck to avoid being thrown head-foremost by the violent jerks when the mule springs from step to step. It is absolute torture to ride down a descent of five or six leagues, along a road such as I have just described: willingly would the harassed rider dismount and pursue his course on foot; but were he to attempt to do so, the mule would stand stock still. I have already remarked the singular ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... from the death of the one some means for preserving the life of the other. The councillor was in a violent fever, agitated unceasingly both in body and mind: he could not bear any position of any kind for more than a few minutes at a time. Bed was a place of torture; but if he got up, he cried for it again, at least for a change of suffering. At the end of three months he died. His stomach, duodenum, and liver were all in the same corrupt state as his brother's, and more than that, the surface of his body ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... entering into unnecessary details—the sufferings of one or two of the unfortunate men must have been prolonged to the extent of quite three hours. The ringleader, Tonkin, had been, singularly enough, the man who had been subjected to certain peculiar refinements of torture which, while inflicting what one could readily conceive would be the most excruciating agony, were not of a nature to produce death save by the long-drawn-out process of physical exhaustion. We spoke such comforting words to the poor creatures ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... sooth, I would you were a little sick, That I might, sit all night, and watch with you. I warrant, I love you more than you do me. Hub. His words do take possession of my bosom.— Read here, young Arthur. [Showing a paper.] How now, foolish rheum. [Aside.] Turning dispiteous torture out of door! I must be brief, lest resolution drop Out at mine eyes, in tender womanish tears.— Can you not read it? Is it not fair writ? Arth. Too fairly, Hubert, for so foul effect. Must you with ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... to its close like so much slow torture. Others might resign, but he had to stand at his post until the end, and it was a happy day for him when he got his discharge. His elation was so manifest that it was noticed by John Adams. Writing to his wife about the ceremony the day after ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... whether you were going to make Julian drink that poisonous stuff or not, you were inflicting a horrible torture upon him," said Janetta, as hotly as Wyvis himself could have spoken. "And I cannot understand how you could allow your own child to be treated in that cruel way. I call it wicked to make a ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... seemed to say. "This world is the real hell, ending in the eternal naught. The dreams of a life beyond and of re-union there are but a demon's mocking breathed into the mortal heart, lest by its universal suicide mankind should rob him of his torture-pit. There is no truth in all your father taught you" (he was a clergyman and rather eminent in his profession), "there is no hope for man, there is nothing he can win except the deep happiness of sleep. Come ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... an attendant, "This is just the director I have long sought!" The friar became archbishop of Granada. Her only defect—yet it is surely great enough—is her approval of the infernal tribunal which consigned to torture, imprisonment, or death, so many thousands of her subjects. Strange that this very lady, whom sufferings so exquisite could not move, should have been the constant and successful advocate of the Moors, whenever any town or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... the hunger of his brain. His eyes grew old with wincing, and his hand Reckless with ague. Courage leaked, as sand From the best sandbags after years of rain. But never leave, wound, fever, trench-foot, shock, Untrapped the wretch. And death seemed still withheld For torture of lying machinally shelled, At the pleasure of this ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... the pain That man inflicts on all inferior kinds, Regardless of their plaints. To make him sport, To gratify the frenzy of his wrath, Or his base gluttony, are causes good And just in his account, why bird and beast Should suffer torture, and the streams be dyed With blood of their inhabitants impaled. Earth groans beneath the burden of a war Waged with defenceless innocence, while he, Not satisfied to prey on all around, Adds tenfold bitterness to ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... breeze, whistling against our bodies, made itself felt in spite of all the precautions we had taken. The vehicle now brought was broader and more commodious than the previous one, which, somewhat in the shape of a coffin, seemed especially designed so as to torture the occupants, particularly if, like my companion and self, they should happen to be endowed by nature with that curse during a sleigh journey—however desirable appendages they may be when in a crowd—long legs. Three horses ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... witch, who had come to the hall, to try her skill in finding them. She told him that they were in the hall. Then Signy threw her a gold ring, and the witch said that what she had just stated was false. Frothi threatened to torture her if she did not tell the truth; and she said that unless he soon prevented it, which he would not do, the boys would be his death. But the boys, terrified, fled to the wood. The king ordered his men to seize them; but Regin put out ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... tracks and burned to ashes by this time, and, best of all, "that pig of a sergeant," as Moreno called him, that hound and murderer, Feeny,—he who had slain Ramon,—bound, gagged, and left to miserable death by torture. Indeed, as he was jolted along in the ambulance, groaning and cursing by turns, Pasqual wondered why he had not insisted that Harvey, too, should be given the coup de grace before their start. It was an unpardonable omission. Never mind! There in the brand-new Concord that came clattering ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... throbbed and screamed its notes of passion in the desert, seemed to be beating in Max's brain. A horrible irritation possessed him like a devil. He could have yelled as a man might yell in the extremity of physical torture. If ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... of her judgment told her it was better for them to remain apart, but her longing to see Brandon grew stronger as the prospect of it grew less, and she became angry that it could not be gratified. Jane was right; an unsatisfied desire with Mary was torture. Even her sense of the great distance between them had begun to fade, and when she so wished for him and he did not come, their positions seemed to be reversed. At the end of the third day she sent for him to come to her rooms, but ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... A paper of interrogatories was laid before him by order of the Privy Council. He replied to those questions to which he could reply without danger to any of his friends, and refused to say more. He was told that unless he returned fuller answers he should be put to the torture. James, who was doubtless sorry that he could not feast his own eyes with the sight of Argyle in the boots, sent down to Edinburgh positive orders that nothing should be omitted which could wring out of the traitor information against all who had been concerned in the treason. But menaces ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sensation as if his whole body—flesh, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, every lobe of his brain, every cell within each lobe, had been, as the saying is of an arm or leg, "asleep" and was now "coming to." The tingling sensation increased almost to torture; but he could not ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... and in his rayless wanderings he had made his way into the dungeons, sepulchres, and vaults, which were lying far below the foundations of the castle, and which had for centuries served as places of torture, punishment, and death to the enemies of his long and noble line. In these secret charnel houses were buried the bodies of the oppressed, while in the haughty tombs around and above them lay the bones of their oppressors. The ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... built to protect the city from free-booters, as Manila, like old Panama, offered a tempting prize to pirates. Into the wall was built old Fort Santiago, which still stands. The wall varies in thickness from three to forty feet, and in it were built many chambers used as places of confinement and torture. Until six years ago a wide moat surrounded the wall, but the stagnant water bred disease and the moat was filled with the silt dredged up from the bay. Fort Santiago forms the northwest corner of the wall. Its predecessor was a palisade of bags, built in 1571, behind which the Spaniards ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... it from your lips, curse you!" cried Wilde, furiously. "I will torture you here, starve you here, until you go mad and ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... an old fighting bull walrus; enormously swollen, corrugated with bloats and wrinkles, blotched, bumpy, and bloody, as disgusting as it was painful. All too closely it simulated the ravages of some frightful disease, and for a night or two the torture of this itching fire kept me from sleeping. Three days, fortunately, ended the black fly reign, and left us with a deeper sympathy for the poor Egyptians who on account of their own or some other bodies' sins were the victims ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... satisfaction that mine is going to the press first, though there is little danger that we should think on any subject alike, or stumble on any one character in the same track." De Quincey spoke of the hidden torture shown in Landor's play to be ever present in the mind of Count Julian, the betrayer of his country, as greater than the tortures inflicted in old Rome on generals who had committed treason. De Quincey's admiration of this play was more than once expressed. "Mr. Landor," he said, "who always ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... by the actual fist, though she staggers and sinks under blows quite as cruel and effectual; where, with old wounds yet unhealed, which she strives to hide under a smiling face from the world, she has to bear up and to be stricken down and to rise to her feet again, under fresh daily strokes of torture; where the husband, fond and faithful, has to suffer slights, coldness, insult, desertion, his children sneered away from their love for him, his friends driven from his door by jealousy, his happiness strangled, his whole life embittered, poisoned, destroyed! If ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Yellow Peril; and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it. Many might say, and have said, that the Heathen Chinee is very heathen indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor's sincerity when he sought to point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be, supposing that it could ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... a struggle of fifteen days, fifteen days of torture, of anguish! Ah! what I suffered in that time! I neglected my business, being totally unfit for work. During the day, I tried by incessant action to fatigue my body, that at night I might find forgetfulness in ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... if the heavens give no rain, if there be an earthquake, if a famine or pestilence, straightway they cry, Away with the Christians to the lions.... But go zealously on, ye good governors, you will stand higher with the people if you kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to the dust; your injustice is the proof that we are innocent. God permits us to suffer. Your cruelty avails you nothing.... The oftener you mow us down, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed. What you call our obstinacy is an instructor. ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... a wild creature in her cage. She would not speak when Louis entered the room. She had a horrible fear of his blandishments. There were days and nights,—how many she did not know for there was the torture of hundreds comprised in them. Then she wept and prayed. There was the great Manitou Touchas and many of the Indian women believed in; there was the good God the schoolmaster had talked about, and the minister at the chapel, who had sent his Son to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... thirteen hundred and nine laws and decrees relative to the general administration of the state. It is impossible, even now, to settle the question whether it did good or ill, on the whole; but it certainly removed many great and glaring evils, and enacted many wise laws. It abolished torture, the lettres de cachet, the most oppressive duties, the privileges of the nobility, and feudal burdens. It established a uniform system of jurisprudence, the National Guards, and an equal system of finance. "It opened the army to men of merit, and divided the landed ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... contemporaries. They were great sentimental comedians, these Peters, Elizabeths, and Catherines who played their Tsarships as eccentric character parts, and produced scene after scene of furious harlequinade with the monarch as clown, and of tragic relief in the torture chamber with the monarch as pantomime demon committing real atrocities, not forgetting the indispensable love interest on an enormous and utterly indecorous scale. Catherine kept this vast Guignol Theatre open for nearly half a century, not as a Russian, but as a highly domesticated ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... Galatea? Why will you not change this marble statue into a woman of flesh and blood, with heart and soul? These lips are ready to smile, to utter a cry of rapture and delight, and behind the veil of my eyes lies a soul, which one touch of thine will arouse! O Frederick! Frederick! why do you torture me? Do you not know that your wife worships, loves, adores you; that you are her salvation, her god? Oh, I know these are unholy, sinful words! what then? I am a sinner! I am ready to give my soul in exchange for thee, Frederick. Why do you not hear me?—why have not my sighs, my tears ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... different kinds of these tormenting insects, viz. the mosquito, the black-fly, and the gnat—the latter the same as the midge in N. Britain—who relieve each other regularly in the work of torture. The mosquitoes continue at their post from dawn to eight or nine o'clock, A.M.; the black-flies succeed, and remain in the field till near sunset; the mosquitoes again mount guard till dark, and are finally succeeded by the gnats, who continue their watch ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... her of it. She hastily looked at the others. She liked the one with sheep in it best, only the artist had made them like bolsters, and given the shepherd saucer eyes. Then she came to one of the Crucifixion, a subject on which the artist had lavished all the slumbering instincts of torture that are in so ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... and prophets; by the prelates and confessors; by the doctors of the church; by the holy abbots, monks, and eremites, who dwelt in solitudes, in mountains, and in caverns; by the holy saints and martyrs, who suffered torture and death for their faith, I curse thee, witch!" cried Paslew. "May the malediction of Heaven and all its hosts alight on the head ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... himself, he sank down, and fell into a haunted sleep; and then he wakened again, to a reality worse than any nightmare. That awful man was coming after him again! He was going to torture him, to make him tell what he did not know! All the ogres and all the demons that had ever been invented to frighten the imagination of children were as nothing compared to the image of the man called Guffey, ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... God of War—yea, God of Battle am I, And the evil men speak about me has moved me to fierce reply. Does not the surgeon's knife Torture—to save a life? So, for the life of nations, men learn to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... chances are," Geoffrey said quietly, "I shall share them with you. Your kindness has saved me from what at best might have been imprisonment for life, and not improbably would have been torture and death at the hands of the Inquisition, and I am certainly not going to withdraw myself from you now when you are entering upon what is undoubtedly a very dangerous adventure. If we escape from Spain we escape together; ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... and sisters, oh, what a hell of torture they suffered in those few tense moments whilst waiting for the news, which, though to a great extent it may relieve many, must break at least one heart. No man, having once seen this, ever wants to witness it again. ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... after this saw an event in the Palatine which was matter of talk for some two days more, and then passed into oblivion. Rumour said that Muscula had been detected plotting against the life of Bessas, that she had been examined under torture, found guilty, and executed. Certain gossips pretended that there was no plot at all, but that Bessas, weary of his mistress, had chosen this way of getting rid of her. Be that as ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... saying called to mind, "The devil through his paw behind Alone shall penal torture find From iron, lead, or steel." Achilles thus had been eternal, Thanks to his baptism infernal, But for his ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... enemy of Bonaparte; but the priest, in hope of reward, disclosed the conspiracy to the master of ceremonies, Salmatoris. The three surviving conspirators are said to have been literally torn to pieces by the engines of torture, and the priest was shot for having given absolution to an assassin, and for having concealed his knowledge of the plot an hour after he was acquainted with it. Even Salmatoris had some difficulty to avoid being ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... could not make the runners stay in the middle of my soles where they belonged, hence my ankles not only tipped in awkwardly but the stiff outer edges of my boot counters dug holes in my skin so that my outing was a kind of torture after all. Nevertheless, I persisted and, while Burton circled and swooped like a hawk, I sprawled with flapping arms in a mist of ignoble rage. That I learned to skate fairly well even under these disadvantages argues a high degree ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Master, I am not able to stand alone: You goe about to torture me in vaine. Enter a ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... is as indifferent, as careless, as vagrant as she. He browses, he digs, he hunts, he climbs, he halloes, he feeds on roots and greens and mast. He uses things roughly and without sentiment. The coolness with which boys will drown dogs or cats, or hang them to trees, or murder young birds, or torture frogs or squirrels, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... cruelties. As assignees of Spain, we seem to have succeeded not only to her properties but to her policies in the treatment of subject races. We do not know that in the greatest excesses of the bad colonial government of Spaniards they ever inflicted a torture more exquisite than that of the "water cure." How many of the perpetrators of these atrocities have been adequately punished, or how many have been ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... clergyman of the English Church. I was therefore sufficiently qualified for the task, and was the more inclined to it, over and above my real desire to save the unhappy creature from an eternity of torture, by recollecting the promise of St. James, that if any one converted a sinner (which Chowbok surely was) he should hide a multitude of sins. I reflected, therefore, that the conversion of Chowbok ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... in his hand, he commenced to pound upon that instrument of torture, talking gaily the while. Presently he asked, "Do you care about music?" and on our eagerly agreeing that we did, "All right," he said, "we'll close the shop for a ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... your own making,' said Lord Cadurcis. 'What occasion is there for any of these extraordinary proceedings? I have told you a thousand times that I cannot endure scenes. Female society is a relaxation to me; you convert it into torture. I like to sail upon a summer sea; and you always will ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Sydney, down to the attractions of an Italian restaurant he had discovered near the jail, the flavor of the Chianti and so forth. On the contrary, it was most interesting to note the play of features in the tortured man, who after all brought his torture on himself by asking so many questions. Soon, when his visitor left him, the bondman could follow the free in all but the flesh, through every corridor of the prison and every street outside, to the hotel where you read the English papers on the veranda, or to the little restaurant where ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... torturers will have a regular festival at our expense every day. Libanus, now we need grit and guile. I've just now come upon such a deed for us to do, that we two will be called the worthiest men alive—to be where the torture's thickest. ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... along the Northern Railway is the tsetse fly: especially was he to be found at a place called Same, and during the long trek from German Bridge on the Northern Railway to Morogoro in the south. At one place there is a belt thirty miles wide, and our progress was perpetual torture, unless we passed that way at night. For the Glossina morsitans sleeps by night beneath leaves in the bush, and only wakes when disturbed. For this reason we drive our horses, mules, and cattle by night through these fly-belts. Savage and pertinacious ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... no spark of pugnacity, and his surrender caused the loss of the entire north-west. Tecumseh and his warriors now advanced against the Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio frontiers; and the nameless horrors of Indian massacre and torture surged along the line of settlements. The frontiersmen flew to arms. General Harrison, with a commission from Kentucky, headed a large expedition to regain lost ground; but he only succeeded in building forts in ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... the sleeve of his surplice in water, from which to squeeze out a few drops and baptize the dying. Hoping all things, and fearing nothing, this valiant soldier of the truth was borne onward throughout by faith and energy. "Whatever form of death or torture," said he, "awaits me, I am ready to suffer it ten thousand times for the salvation of a single soul." He battled with hunger, thirst, privations and dangers of all kinds, still pursuing his mission of love, unresting and unwearying. At length, after eleven years' ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... On this occasion, and on at least one other, when engaged in building in a wet season in the Western Highlands, I had all my fingers oozing blood at once; and those who think that in such circumstances labour protracted throughout a long day can be other than torture, would do well to try. How these poor hands of mine burnt and beat at night at this time, as if an unhappy heart had been stationed in every finger! and what cold chills used to run, sudden as electric ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... all there is to be seen, and we must take this breeze while we've got it.' It was always torture to Davies to feel a good breeze running to waste while he was inactive at anchor or on shore. The 'shore' to him was an inferior element, merely serving as a useful annexe to the water—a ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... been the hope of a passionate embrace. To live with her, sit opposite to her while she ate and drank, see her, perhaps, with her hair in curl-papers, know possibly that she had a corn upon her foot, hear her speak maybe of a decayed tooth, or of a chilblain, would have been torture to me. Into such abyss of the commonplace there was no fear of my dragging her, and for this I was glad. In the future she would be yet more removed from me. She was older than I was; she must be now a woman. Instinctively I felt that in spite of years I was not yet a man. She would marry. The thought ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... understand by the police force—waited subserviently on his nod. It rested with him, says Lydus, to establish the authority of the Court of Justice by means of the wholesome fear inspired by iron chains and scourges and the whole apparatus of torture[147]. Nay, not only did the subordinate magistrates execute their sentences by his agency, he had even the honour of being chosen by the Emperor himself to be the minister of vengeance against the persons who had incurred his anger or his suspicion. 'I myself remember,' says Lydus, ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... where he was gone she knew nothing; then, with great and dignified firmness, she added, even if she had known any thing of his route, Colonel Desbrow must be aware, that as she had the courage and goodness to plan and effect his escape, no threats, not even the torture, should induce her to do any thing that might place him in their power again. Elizabeth was instantly taken into custody and examined also, but she knew nothing more than her sister. They were both consigned to the dungeon that he had quitted, and the scaffold, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... New Testament than happiness and misery. The Supreme Being would appear to us in a very different view if we were to consider him as pursuing the creatures that had offended him with eternal hate and torture, instead of merely condemning to their original insensibility those beings that, by the operation of general laws, had not been formed with qualities suited to a purer state ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... Germany, men very skilled in the use of questions, who profess that the tongue of man, if adequately skilful, may always prevail on guilt to disclose itself; who believe in the power of their own craft to produce truth, as our forefathers believed in torture; and sometimes with the same result. And of course all that was great on the British bench, and all that was famous at the British bar was there,—men very unlike their German brethren, men who thought that guilt ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... her missal. She read the "Candide" of Voltaire, Fenelon on the education of girls, and Locke on that of children. During all this time her mind was troubled by those unanswerable and saddening reflections upon those recondite theological subjects which often torture such children, and which grown up people are too often so forgetful of their own childhood that they fail to sympathize with them. She regarded with disapproval the transformation of the Devil into a serpent, and thought it cruel in God to permit it. Referring to the time when her first communion ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... himself a real friend and an unselfish one. He felt as if getting up out of bed was the final, supreme torture under which a man may live; but he got up, for there was something in Luck's voice that thrilled him even through the clogging sleep-hunger. Presently he was sitting in his trousers and socks and shirt, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... assembled to pay their tribute of respect to the memory of a revered friend, and to solace the hearts of the disconsolate survivors. They needed all the sympathy they received. It was now the dull dead calm after the torture of the storm, the leaden sea strewn with wrecks, enabling them to realise more fully the extent of their loss. Amid the lulls of the tempest, while Lazarus yet lived, hope shrunk from entertaining gloomy apprehensions. ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... this torture for nothing, in the end! What looked at last like a possible prize (oh, without illusions! but still a prize) broken in her hands, fallen in the dust, the bitter dust, of disappointment, she revelled in the miserable revenge—pretty safe too—only regretting the unworthiness of the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... unto my trial when you will. Died he not in his bed? where should he die? Can I make men live, whe'r they will or no? O, torture me no more, I will confess. Alive again? then show me where he is: I'll give a thousand pound to look upon him. He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them. Comb down his hair: Look! look! it stands upright. Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul. ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... alluded to, law being suspended, and the courts of justice closed, the "question" by torture was revived and largely practised. The commercial exchange of Dublin formed a place of execution; even suspected rebels were every day immolated as if convicted on the clearest evidence; and Lieutenant H——'s pastime of hanging on his own ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... had been sold by Arnold. The noble ideal it had cherished, the blood it had given, the bitter hardships it had suffered—torture in the wilderness, famine in the Highlands, long marches of half naked men in mid-winter, massacres at Wyoming and Cherry Valley—all this had been bartered away, like a shipload of turnips, to satisfy the greed of one man. Again thirty pieces ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... see the detestable and extreme pleasure that arch-heretics, and false prophets, and impostors are transported with, when they once find in themselves that they have a superiority in the faith and conscience of men; so great as if they have once tasted of it, it is seldom seen that any torture or persecution can make them relinquish or abandon it. But as this is that which the author of the Revelation calleth the depth or profoundness of Satan, so by argument of contraries, the just and lawful sovereignty ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... loneliness and beauty. And here the dreams come back and SHE is WITH me always. Her spirit is all that keeps me kind and good, as you say I am. But I suffer, I long for her alive. If I love her dead, how could I love her living! Always I torture myself with the vain dream that—that she MIGHT not be dead. I have never been anything but a dreamer. And here I go about my work by day and lie awake at night with that lost girl in my mind.... ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... steer's progress, no matter where it went, until the rope went true. He discovered that it was imperative for him to stand without moving when his master trailed the reins over his head; he early learned that the bit was a terrible instrument of torture, and that it were better to answer to the pressure of Calumet's knee than to be subjected to the ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... weakness. What was the matter? Why did he feel so ill? His eyes burned, his legs seemed weighted, his throat was so dry that there was no comfort when he swallowed. All this he could have stood if it had not been for the fiendish noise which, he began to feel, was being played merely for his torture. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... as you think," said Harold, pointing to Chimbolo, whose sad story he had heard; "they will try every kind of torture before ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... Tarling had made a careful examination of the cuts on his chest, and was relieved to discover that Ling Chu—he did not doubt that the Chinaman was responsible for Milburgh's plight—had not yet employed that terrible torture which had so often brought Chinese criminals ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... offering, consisted of a boat filled with fruit, flowers and any precious gift, which was to be paddled over the foaming cataract by one either drawn by lot or selected by the chiefs; or, as often happened, a voluntary offering of life, as it manifested heroism beyond their usual test of torture. Martyrs thus sacrificed had this consolation: that their spirits were sure to rise in the mist and follow the bright path above, while bad Indians' spirits passed down in the boiling, crashing current, to be torn and tossed in the whirlpool, there ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... treacherous—how much she dared not think—but she would not believe that his threat to take her boy from her was genuine. All she could think of, as she sat huddled up on the ground, was to cling to the belief that her boy would not be taken away, and that somehow the mental torture the man's existence caused her, and the physical pain he never hesitated to inflict, might ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... calm waters of Sandusky Bay, they saw the blockhouse burst into flames. Paully and his men were landed at the Ottawa camp, where a horde of howling Indians, including women and children, beat them and compelled them to dance and sing for the entertainment of the rabble. Preparations were made to torture Paully to death at the stake; but an old squaw, who had recently lost her husband, was attracted by the handsome, dark-skinned young ensign, and adopted him in place of her deceased warrior. Paully's hair was cut close; he was dipped ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... Farewell, ye honour'd rags, ye glorious bubbles; Fame's but a hollow echo, Gold, pure clay; Honour the darling but of one short day; Beauty, th' eye's idol, but a damask'd skin; State, but a golden prison, to live in And torture free-born minds; embroider'd Trains, Merely but pageants for proud swelling veins; And Blood allied to greatness is alone Inherited, not purchas'd, nor our own. Fame, Honour, Beauty, State, Train, Blood and Birth, Are but the fading blossoms of ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... This was so common that one is tempted to hope, and almost to suppose that the "question" was not ordinarily administered with circumstances of extreme cruelty. We hear, indeed, of slaves having their liberty given them in order that, being free, they may not be forced by torture to tell the truth;[67] but had the cruelty been of the nature described by Scott in "Old Mortality," when the poor preacher's limbs were mangled, I think we should have heard more of it. Nor was the torture always applied, but only when the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... moment," she said. "It's very simple, after all, what I have to tell you. I don't love my husband, and he doesn't love me, and it has become torture to live together. I have left him with his knowledge and consent, and he understands that I ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... them together, bone to his bone, till Leviathan and Behemoth stand before us in bodily presence and in their full proportions, and we almost tremble lest these dry bones should live again! Let them put nature to the rack, and torture her, in all her forms, to the betrayal of her inmost secrets and confidences. They need not forbear. The foundations of the round world have been laid so strong that they can ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of Psalms condemned me. I said, I never felt like David. I cannot rejoice. Still I felt that I ought to, but instead, a constant feeling of condemnation and conviction. This was torture to me. I would often have been willing to have died, if I thought it would have been an eternal sleep. My childhood and girlhood were not happy; had so many disappointments. I was called "hard headed" by my parents. ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... amend, and every day I've done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! But the thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen? But listen, for the last time, I am not guilty of my father's blood. I accept my punishment, not because I killed him, but because I meant to kill ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... self-preservation asserted itself, he put up a more and more creditable fight, until those who watched thought that he might indeed have a chance to vanquish the Outlaw of Torn. But they did not know that Norman of Torn was but playing with his victim, that he might make the torture long, drawn out, and wreak as terrible a punishment upon Peter of Colfax, before he killed him, as the Baron had visited upon Bertrade de Montfort because she would not ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the door at eleven. Why do you torture me? There's no time to lose now. You will be claimed. Come, and let us two cut the knot. It is the best thing in the world for me—the only thing. Be brave! I have your hand. Give it for good, and for heaven's sake don't play the sex. Be yourself. Dear soul of a woman! I never saw the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... him journey through his earthly day: 'Mid hustling spirits go his self-found way; Find torture, bliss, in every forward stride— He, every moment, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... my brother, what can these foul tyrants know of either! Already he has perhaps doomed you to some refined and procrastinated torture, already—— Ah! what unutterable woe is mine! fly, my ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... like the kitchen cat when she smelt cream, fawning upon her in a way which soon became repulsive to Hollyhock, refusing to have any other friend, and over and over again in the day kissing Hollyhock's hands, her brow, her cheeks, her lips. All this sort of thing was pure torture to Hollyhock. But although she was terribly tried, she determined to go through with her mission, and hoped ere long to train Leucha into finer and grander ways. By their father's permission, Leucha was invited to accompany the Flower Girls to The Garden on a ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... them on tenterhooks of suspense for days and weeks, until he was tired of the amusement—for this practising on the fears of weaker natures is a horribly keen delight to some—or until some desperate little dog, unable to bear his torture any longer, would threaten to give himself up and make an end ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... satisfied me that the worry and harassment at Louisville were exhausting his strength and health, and that he would soon leave. On a telegraphic summons from him, about the 5th of October, I went down to Louisville, when General Anderson said he could not stand the mental torture of his command any longer, and that he must go away, or it would kill him. On the 8th of October he actually published an order relinquishing the command, and, by reason of my seniority, I had no alternative but to assume command, though much ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... investigation, I would find waiting for me from twenty to thirty people whose friends and relatives were in the suspected institution, all in such acute distress of mind that to see them was to look upon the victims of deliberate torture. In most cases my visitor would state that it seemed impossible to put their invalids in any other place, but if these stories were true, something must be done. Many of the patients were taken out only to be returned after a ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Odyssey being the work of "a milder age," consider the hanging of Penelope's maids and the abominable torture of Melanthius. There is no torturing in the [blank space] for the Iliad happens not to deal ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... surely they would cry aloud for some better provision against their extremity after battle,—for some regulated and certain assistance to the wounded and agonized,—so that we might hear no longer of men left in cold and misery all night, writhing with torture,—of bodies stripped by prowlers, perhaps murderers,—and of frenzied men, the other day the darlings of their friends, dying, two and even several days after the battle, of famine! The field of Waterloo was not completely cleared ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... office, a servant at your will, But an instrument of torture if 'tis not used with skill. Beauty before her mirror studies its use with care, And deigns, perchance, to choose ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... day they came again to the palace, and they said, "Shoot not at us any more, unless thou desirest such hurt, and harm, and torture as thou now hast, and even more." "Give me thy daughter, and if thou wilt not give her, thou shalt receive thy death because of her." "Where is he that seeks my daughter? Come hither where I may see thee." And they placed him a chair face ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... which seemed ready to burst at any moment. Their hands were just as bad, covered with chilblains and sores. Many were tortured with wounds which had at first seemed slight, but by neglect and exposure had become sources of exquisite torture. The gleaming eyes, matted hair and beard hanging about their cadaverous faces, gave to these men a wild, ghastly look utterly indescribable. As they came in, many sunk exhausted upon the pallets, some falling at once into a deep sleep, from which it was impossible ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... person, in order to get the better price for them." "That's right," says the Jew; "and I'll engage she shall never be mistress of them again; they shall either be seized by us," says he, "in the king's name, or she shall be glad to give them up to us to prevent her being put to the torture." ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... father was closely interrogated respecting his money which they knew he must have. But as he gave them no account of it, he was instantly cut and pounded on his body with great inhumanity, that he might be induced by the torture he suffered to make the discovery. All this availed not the least to make him give up his money, but he despised all the tortures which they inflicted, until the continued exercise and increase of torment, obliged ...
— A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of • Venture Smith
... waking hours. When morning dawned, he was found lying on his couch but with every trace of life extinct. The family inquisition on the slaves of the household was held as a matter of course. Their statements were never published to the world, but it was believed that under torture they had confessed to seeing certain men introduced stealthily during the night through the back part of the house; these, they thought, had strangled their master.[460] The reason which they assigned for their ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Landers stood before him, and immediately held forth their hands; all of them trembling like aspen leaves; the chief looked up full in their faces, kneeling on the ground; light seemed to flash from his dark rolling eyes; his body was convulsed all over, as though he was enduring the utmost torture, and with a timorous, yet indefinable expression of countenance, in which all the passions of human nature were strangely blended, he drooped his head, eagerly grasped their proffered hands, and burst into tears. This was ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... looked pinched and pathetic as she spoke, and for the first time her father had a suspicion of what punishment was to this child—a thing as inevitable as disease, a continually recurring torture, but quite without effect upon her conduct—and his heart contracted with a ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... on him with eyes ablaze. "Torture and slay me if you will, but my wealth you shall not thieve. I know not where these jewels are, but wherever they may be, there let them lie till my heirs find them, ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... tens of thousands of us are lying? Do not think it, gentlemen. The thought that it is inevitable is the last infidelity; infidelity not to God only, but to every creature and every law that He has made. Are we to think that the earth was only shaped to be a globe of torture; and that there cannot be one spot of it where peace can rest, or justice reign? Where are men ever to be happy, if not in England? by whom shall they ever be taught to do right, if not by you? Are we ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... silent pain too, a silent scornful one: the lip is curled in a kind of god-like disdain of the thing that is eating-out his heart,—as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and lifelong unsurrendering battle, against the world. Affection all converted into indignation: an implacable indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god! The eye too, it looks ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Kuriat, and Zoar[165], all in one night by previous concert, by a private order from the king of Ormuz. This attack was so sudden and well concerted, that above 120 of the Portuguese were slain on that night, and one Ruy Boto was put to the torture by the Moors in defence of the faith. The Portuguese at Ormuz, where Don Garcia Coutino then commanded, exerted themselves as well as they could to defend themselves, and secured the ships which happened to be at that place ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... dimly hinted by those familiar with the technicalities of the Holy Office, that the terms, "Il rigoroso esame," during which Galileo is reported to have answered like a good Christian, officially announce the application of the torture. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.—I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!—No, a second time I know I should go mad.—Have you enjoyed yourself so much?—And ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... First Thorpe's feet became numb, then his hands, then his nose was nipped, and finally his warm clothes were lifted from him by invisible hands, and he was left naked to shivers and tremblings. He found it torture to sit still on the top of the bale of hay; and yet he could not bear to contemplate the cold shock of jumping from the sleigh to the ground,—of touching foot to the chilling snow. The driver pulled up to breathe his horses at the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... cast into this den of roaring waters!—at last, suddenly, over a large fall, and here smooth waters again, smooth and untroubled, and strong and deep. Then, and only then, did a word escape either; but the man had passed through torture and unavailing regret, for he realised that he had had no right to bring this girl into such a fight. It was not her friend who was in danger at Bindon. Her life had been risked without due warrant. "I didn't know, or I wouldn't have asked it," he said in a low ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... possessed a more efficient weapon than my clumsy pistol, I should have tried to shoot one of the latter, in the hope of being able to manufacture shoes or sandals out of the hide to protect my lacerated feet, which were so swollen that I felt it would be almost torture to proceed further without some protection for them. As soon as there was sufficient light, however, I employed myself in picking out the thorns, with which they were full; after which operation I felt some slight relief. I then looked around for water in which I might cool them, but no stream or ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the bed and poor Daddy allowed me to stroke his hand, a thing he usually resents. I know that he was in great pain and feared other unknown tortures. The poor man looked at the tall doctor's big hands as if he deemed them instruments of potential torture. One really couldn't blame him for having scant confidence in a man whose business appears to be the ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... in France, where alone, of all the Catholic states, there were any great numbers of Protestants. In 1762 a Huguenot of Toulouse, unjustly charged with crime, was put to torture and to death, under the pressure of the old persecuting spirit. Many Huguenots thought the persecutions of former times were reviving, and prepared to flee to Switzerland. But Voltaire took up ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... the feeling that ice had formed about her heart, trying to bear unflinchingly the curious or sneering looks of those she had known well enough to call by their first names. It was torture for the sensitive girl who saw in each cold eye the thought that she had killed a man—killed a human ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... when shall the grave hide for ever my sorrow? Oh! when shall my soul wing her flight from this clay? The present is hell! and the coming to-morrow But brings, with new torture, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... instinct reveals to him its extent. It signifies not that strangers or foes be the sufferers; imagination puts him in their place; something like a personal feeling is mingled with his pity, and makes himself suffer whilst the body of his fellow-creature is in torture. In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for one another; but they display general compassion for the members of the human race. They inflict no useless ills; and they are happy to relieve the griefs of others, when they can do so without much hurting themselves; ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Decreed, that the Louvre and the Tuilleries united shall be the habitation of the King, and that all monuments of science and art shall be collected and kept there. 31. Decreed, that the punishment of death shall be inflicted without torture. From thence came the use of the guillotine;-an instrument of death so called from its author, a member of the national assembly. June. Letter of the Abbe Raynal to the assembly. Persecutions against ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... went up to Hallam's lips. "Hush! Do you suppose God blunders? I don't. If He had meant her to stay with us, He would have found a way to cure her. To think otherwise is torture. No. No, no, indeed no! Father is left and so are we. We have got to live and take care of ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... him; he on his side had given himself to the Crucified without reserve or return. To uncertainty, disquietude of soul, anguish, longing for an unknown good, bitter regrets, had succeeded a delicious calm, the ecstasy of the lost child who finds his mother, and forgets in a moment the torture ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... What is there in her mind? What meaning lurks In speech begun but to be broken short? Would both deceive me with a vain pretence? Have they conspired to put me to the torture? And yet, despite my stern severity, What plaintive voice cries deep within my heart? A secret pity troubles and alarms me. Oenone shall be questioned once again, I must have clearer light upon this crime. Guards, bid Oenone come, and ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... the mother, as she lies in the very article of death, could still find in his heart to paint on it the dark patches of foul disease. He would have fled with shrieks from those appalling scenes of murder, torture, madness, bestial drunkenness, rapacity, fury—from that delirium of scrofula, palsy, entrails, the winding-sheet, and the grave-worm. Diderot's method was to improve men, not by making their blood curdle, but by warming and softening the ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... story of Pocahontas, she did something more than interfere to save from barbarous torture and death a stranger and a captive, who had forfeited his life by shooting those who opposed his invasion. In all times, among the most savage tribes and in civilized society, women have been moved to heavenly pity by the sight of a prisoner, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a new peril threatened. A chill ran through me of cold and nervousness, and I slid an inch. I suppressed the growing shivers with all my will. I would keep perfectly quiet till Muir came back. The sickening pain in my shoulders increased till it was torture, and ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... on, Wulf," Beorn said as they threw themselves down on the ground late that night, when the carousal was ended, "I shall snatch the count's dagger from his belt and bury it in his heart, though they put me to death by torture afterwards." ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... I am not ashamed. But that outbreak cost me bodily agony, and I wept and sobbed whilst I cursed myself for weeping. Sacred Heaven! how I wrestled with this devil of weakness, which held me so strongly. When I had fought him down, he leapt upon me afresh, and subdued me by sheer torture until I let nature take her way, and cried like a woman! Then, when it was all over, I stood up and ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... this people tongues to speak with; you would cut them out that they may be dumb in their agony, silent in their torture! But God hath given them hands to smite with, and they shall smite! Ay! from the sick and labouring womb of this unhappy land some revolution, like a bloody child, shall[21] rise ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... written about the value of a cold bath, particularly in the morning, and many people, from a sense of duty, suffer what is almost torture taking a shower bath or a cold plunge bath on rising. When a cold bath (which should not last more than a few seconds) is followed by a good reaction, that is, when after drying, a distinct glow is felt, there ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... had expected something of the sort. But none the less, I will not make a point of it," said Jurgen, handsomely. "No, I shall be quite satisfied even though you do not torture me at all." ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... might be thirty miles on his way. The trouble with that was that he would then have to spend two nights out, and the long hours of darkness with their flickering shadows cast by the camp-fires would be full of torture for him. On the other hand, if he should stay till morning, word might leak out from the officers' quarters that he was carrying ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... see no reason why you should brood on such things. What's the use? Your health is excellent for your time of life. Your end is not imminent. You are voluntarily undergoing a system of self-torture which is quite unnecessary. We've known each other for years, yet I hardly recognise you in your present humour. I thought you were perfectly happy. Surely you ought to be,—you, David Helmsley,—'King' David, as you are sometimes called—one of the ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... was the Baron de Fontenelles,[203] a man of high family, who had for several years rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious to the King and his ministers, and whose atrocious barbarities caused him to fall unpitied. This wretched man, after having been put to the torture, was, by the sentence pronounced against him by the council, broken alive upon the wheel, where he suffered the greatest agony during an hour and a half. His lieutenant was condemned to the gallows for having been the medium of his communication with the Spanish Government; although, even as ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... marveling at the domestic economies of an English barber shop. I use the word economies in this connection advisedly; for, compared with the average high-polished, sterilized and antiseptic barber shop of an American city, this shop seemed a torture cave. In London, pubs are like that, and some dentists' establishments and law offices—musty, fusty dens very unlike their Yankee counterparts. In this particular shop now the chairs were hard, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... as anything poetic can be. It is true that ultimately the drama ends in a vindication of what are called the ways of God to man, if indeed people are willing to put themselves off with a form of omnipotent justice which is simply a partial retribution inflicted on the monster, while torture and butchery fall upon victims more or less absolutely blameless. As if the fact of punishment at length overtaking the guilty Franceschini were any vindication of the justice of that assumed Providence, which had for so long a time awarded punishment far more harsh to the innocent ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... snarling for vengeance. Then, perceiving the woman's plight, he flung himself upon her, trying to envelop her in one sweeping embrace that should crush all the virulent pests at once. In this he failed signally; and in an instant the liquid fire was running over his own body. The torture of it, however, was a small thing to him compared with the torture of seeing them sting the woman, and feeling himself impotent to effect her instant succor. He slapped and beat at her with his great ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... so small it had not occurred to them that a man could get into it. Lysander had got into it, however, and there he lay, so cramped, and stifled, and compressed, that he could not endure the torture without an effort to ease it by moving a little. He had stirred; then all was ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... Build me a nation true and strong, Bar out the old world's hate and wrong; For men had traced with blood and tears The trail of weary wasting years, And torn and bleeding martyrs trod Through fire and torture up ...
— Poems • Frances E. W. Harper
... worse!" Eldris flashed back. "I would rather face my lord in the torture-chamber; I would rather be broken on the wheel and die the death—" She shuddered, and again hid her face. "And there is no way out of it but death. What can I ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... was pitiable. While all this was torture to her inexperience and timidity, her fear of her mother rendered her wholly submissive. Each day brought with it some new trial. She was admired for many reasons,—by some for her wealth, of which all had heard rumors; by others ...
— Esmeralda • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the cab freed him from this torture. The hotel porter opened the door. Pierre stepped out mechanically. Without speaking a word he followed a waiter, who showed him to a room on the second floor. Left alone, he sat down. This room, with its commonplace furniture, ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... The boys learned lessons or played games. The Pastor liked to hear his daughter sing; but it would be doing that worthy man strong injustice to say he liked the piano, which was very old and worse than worthless. It was to Hardy's ear torture to hear it in contrast with Froken Helga's clear voice. At last he could stand it no longer, and the ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... that is near the door, after his custom, the farmer thinks it an evil omen. For a robin to sing persistently near the house winter or summer is a sign that something is about to go wrong. Yet the farmer will not shoot him. The roughest poaching fellows who would torture a dog will not kill a robin; it is bad luck to have anything to do with it. Most people like to see fir boughs and holly brought into the house to brighten the dark days with their green, but the cottage children tell you that they must not bring a green fir branch ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... He stood before a shrine, writhing, wringing his hands, contorting his whole frame in an agony of remorseful recollection, but finally knelt down to weep and pray. If this youth had been a Protestant, he would have kept all that torture pent up in his heart, and let it burn there till it seared him ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... religion. Here it is sufficient to observe that the old law which had been hitherto altogether arbitrary—either the will of the Emperor or of the Shogun—was revised on the model of the Napoleonic code and soon published throughout the land. The use of torture to obtain testimony was wholly ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... lepers; returned to old ways, And strove to keep occupied, filling her days With devotional duties. But when the night came She heard through her slumber that song like a flame, And her dreams were sweet torture. She sought all too soon To chill the warm sun of her youth's ardent noon With the shadows of premature evening. Her mind Lacked direction and purpose. She tried in a blind, Groping fashion to follow an early ideal Of love and of constancy, starving ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... thousand deaths from this hair-shirt of a secret, which cut him, skinned him, turned him pale and red in the same minute and caused him to squint continually. Remember that he belonged to Tarascon, unfortunate man, and say if, in all martyrology, you can find so terrible a torture as this—the torture of Saint Bezuquet, who knew a secret ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... the victim, I bore the insensible lady to the hospital of Dalem; and the utmost skill of our surgeons was employed upon her wounds. Better had it been spared!—The dying girl was roused only to the endurance of more exquisite torture; and while murmuring a petition for 'mercy—mercy to her father!' that proved her still unconscious of her family misfortunes, she attempted in vain to take from her finger the ring I have had the honour to deliver to your highness:—faltering with her last breath, 'for his sake, Don ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... to be the same instrument of torture to me that you remember it always was in my youth, when I used to read your letters with such wonder and delight. This spell is still upon me, for I appreciate the magic of your mind now as much as I did then, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... thought, nor publicly to worship as he believed was right. Many of the Christians were not ashamed to conceal their real belief from the heathen Romans, who were everywhere seeking with hatred for the followers of Christ, to torture and slay them. ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... field we came to a deep gully through which ran a swift stream almost knee-deep. Our way led across this stream, and there was only one means of getting over. That was to plunge in and splash through. Tired as we all were, after getting thoroughly wet our feet felt like lead, and marching was perfect torture. Still there was ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... with accelerated force, for the devil 569:24 knoweth his time is short. Here the Scriptures declare that evil is temporal, not eternal. The dragon is at last stung to death by his own malice; but how many periods 569:27 of torture it may take to remove all sin, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... motionless, poised, breathing hard—the silence oppressed the girl—each moment her terror increased—expectant attention became suffering that demanded his voice—and still was silence—save for the dull roar of Niagara that more and more pervaded the air. The torture of waiting for the words—a curse against her, she feared—overwore Ruth's endurance. She looked up suddenly, and John Bedell saw in hers the beloved eyes of his dead wife, shrinking with intolerable fear. He groaned heavily, flung up his hands despairingly, and strode ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... be difficult to see, perhaps, that a necessary holiness, or a necessary sin, is a contradiction in terms, if we would only allow reason to speak for itself, instead of extorting testimony from it by subjecting it to the torture of a false logic. For what proposition can more clearly carry its own evidence along with it, than that whatever is necessary to us, that whatever we cannot possibly avoid, is neither our virtue nor our fault? What can be more unquestionable, than ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... ourselves. John of Gaunt or Harry Hotspur might find fault with us for the same reason, giving up the 'good old customs' of rushes on the floor, for instance, and flagons of ale for breakfast. There were the stocks and the pillory too, and hanging for theft, and the torture of prisoners. Those were all in use more or less when the Pilgrims went to America, and I'm sure we're all glad that they were given up. The world must move, and I suppose it's but natural that the new nations should give it ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... The next night it is crimped until each individual hair has acute curvature of the spine; then it is burned off in chunks and triangles and squares; it is yanked out by the handfuls, it is wadded and twisted and tugged at and built up into an Eiffel tower, and—after a few hours of such torture—the little woman takes out the sixty odd hairpins, shakes it loose, gets every hair into a three-ply tangle of its own, and then hops into bed! When she gets up in the morning she pulls out and combs out more ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... alternative of the three. It feared to be harsh, and was cruel; for by retaining the supreme rank for the king, it condemned him to the torture of the hatred and contempt of the people; it crowned him with suspicions and outrages; and nailed him to the throne, in order that the throne might prove the instrument of his ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... asserted in England, and by those who really think they know whereof they speak, that although such torture-houses as Dotheboys Hall certainly did exist, even so lately as Dickens wrote, the publication of "Nicholas Nickleby," by turning attention upon the abuse, effectually swept it out of English civilization. We "smile bitterly," as romance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... peace was signed (1848) the Mormons, a religious sect, finding themselves unwelcome and out of place in Illinois, moved westward in a body. Enduring every hardship, every privation, perishing by hundreds in the trackless deserts, captured and put to torture by the Indians, they still persevered in their migration, and, halting at last in the valleys of Utah, began the settlement of the Central West. [Footnote: See Migrations ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... woods. These savages are making signs, Deerslayer, for me to encourage you to come ashore with the canoe; but that I'll never do, as it's ag'in reason and natur'. As for old Tom and myself, whether they'll scalp us tonight, keep us for the torture by fire, or carry us to Canada, is more than any one knows but the devil that advises them how to act. I've such a big and bushy head that it's quite likely they'll indivor to get two scalps off it, for ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... with his club had he not been shot dead at the moment of striking. On the 23rd they cruised about in search of the Pandora until the afternoon when, having drunk their last drop of water, they gave her up, and made sail for Namuka, the appointed rendezvous. The torture they suffered from thirst on the passage was such that poor Renouard, the midshipman, became delirious, and continued so for many weeks. Their leeway and the easterly current combined to set them to the westward of Namuka, and the first land they made was Tofoa, which they mistook ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... A twinge of frightful torture swept the Flopper's face—and with that same slow, awful deliberation the misshapen arm straightened out. Men cried aloud again and again—a woman fainted, another here, another there—children wailed and ran, some shrieking, some ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... with thine own hand killed my father and my two brothers. Torture me as thou wilt; I shall rejoice in having freed the world ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and drowned, or were mangled by sea-monsters. The only ones to obtain an endurable death, considering the sufferings round about, were such as killed one another or themselves before any calamity befell them. These did not have to submit to torture, and as corpses had the burning ships for their funeral pyre. The Caesarians, who saw this, at first so long as any of the foe were still able to defend themselves would not come near; but when the fire began to consume the ships and the men so far ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... was to pay for Hugh's death and her favor, made a mockery of all the beauties of giving—a mockery, too, of her acceptance of them, whether tacitly or otherwise. A man who could kill without scruple, a woman-baiter, courteous that he might be cruel, tolerant that he might torment! By torture of her spirit and of her body he had brought her near death that he might gain the flavor of ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... frenzy for work, I will compare it to an attack of herpes. I scratch myself while I cry. It is both a pleasure and a torture at the same time. And I am doing nothing that I want to! For one does not choose one's subjects, they force themselves on one. Shall I ever find mine? Will an idea fall from Heaven suitable to my temperament? Can I write a book to which I shall give myself heart ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Visconti, for the hand of his beautiful cousin Lucia as the bride of Kent. When all was arranged, but not sooner, in November he presented himself at Kenilworth. (Rot. Pat, 7 H. IV, Part i.) What means were taken to torture his unhappy cousin into compliance with his iron will can only be conjectured. She did at last consent to disown her marriage, unless the facts alleged in the petition of Kent's sisters are fictions. On January 19th, 1406, "all the goods ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... hearsay; I myself have beheld all these horrors in the Holy Land of Palestine. Through the ancient streets of Jerusalem the accursed infidels stalk in the evil pride of conquest. They insult and oppress, they torture and murder the followers of Christ. They rob and maltreat the pious pilgrims from all lands who toil through desert and over mountain to worship at the tomb of their Lord. Scarcely will these heathen ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... slow torture. Like mad things we ran about where there was room, unable to stand still as long as we were on the ship and he on shore. To have crossed the ocean only to come within a few yards of him, unable to get nearer till all the fuss was over, was dreadful enough. But to hear other passengers called ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin
... worshipped a god who devoured the souls of the dead, inflicting torture in the eating, but mercifully releasing souls from pain ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... replied, "They know that do accuse me; I know of none:" then turning to Leonato, she said, "O my father, if you can prove that any man has ever conversed with me at hours unmeet, or that I yesternight changed words with any creature, refuse me, hate me, torture me to death." ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... remarked Hiramani; "but has he not been too cruelly used by his uncle? You must have noticed the welts on his naked back. I counted five as broad as my forefinger. How could a grown-up man torture a child like that?"—and she looked meaningly ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... to peace, Prophaners of this Neighbor-stained Steele, Will they not heare? What hoe, you Men, you Beasts, That quench the fire of your pernitious Rage, With purple Fountaines issuing from your Veines: On paine of Torture, from those bloody hands Throw your mistemper'd Weapons to the ground, And heare the Sentence of your mooued Prince. Three ciuill Broyles, bred of an Ayery word, By thee old Capulet and Mountague, Haue thrice disturb'd the quiet of our streets, And made ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... on edge] Everything we can say is useless, and it'll only torture and humiliate us. We must ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... are covered with brush and leaves under the last birch in the bush, where I finished that meddlesome fool of a lawyer. You know why you ought to give a lot to Regy's boy. It's all over. Curse the lot of you. Here goes, but mind you kill that damnable Squire, or I'll come when I'm dead and torture the life out ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... hand grievously, broke my knuckles, and cut and bruised the flesh, so that it awaked me out of my sleep. Another apprehension I had was, the cruel usage we might meet with from them if we fell into their hands; then the story of Amboyna came into my head, and how the Dutch might perhaps torture us, as they did our countrymen there, and make some of our men, by extremity of torture, confess to crimes they never were guilty of, or own themselves and all of us to be pirates, and so they would put us to death with a formal appearance of justice; and that they might ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... by definition, is a place where all is perfect. Therefore, in Heaven everybody is exactly like everybody else, and therefore, everybody is thoroughly and completely bored! There is no torture like boredom, Dixon, and—Well, have ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... he means not to give characters entire, but such parts of each man's particular passions, acquirements, and habits, as he was most likely to transfer into his political schemes. What writing, what sentence, what character, can stand this torture?—What extreme perversion may not, let me say, does not, this produce? Yet thus does he choose to treat all men, that were not favourers of the latest measures of the Queen, when the best that has been said for her, shows ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... stole upon Marm Lisa, the torture and the anguish, the long hours of bewilderment, faded little by little, little by little, till at length a blessed sleep crept over her eyelids, blotting into a merciful nothingness the terror and the ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... general was to attend with twenty thousand men, armed with poisoned arrows, to shoot you on the face and hands. Some of your servants were to have private orders to strew a poisonous juice on your shirts and sheets, which would soon make you tear your own flesh, and die in the utmost torture. The general came into the same opinion; so that for a long time there was a majority against you; but his majesty resolving, if possible, to spare your life, at last brought ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... several have been tortured till they died, and others have been sentenced to death, and, it is believed, executed, although the only evidence of their guilt was the pretended confessions wrung by torture from their ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... furnace flamed; yet from those flames No light; but rather darkness visible Serv'd only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end. 895 MILTON: Par. ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... shouted Leblanc. "Sapristi! that black devil wanted to torture me, Leblanc, the friend of the great Napoleon. Well, at least I have tortured him ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... the least degree to their profession? If not, then each officer may define cruelty according to his own temper, and if it is not usual he will make it usual. Corporal punishment, imprisonment, the gag, the ball and chain, and all the almost insupportable forms of torture invented for military punishment lie within the range of choice. Third. The sentence of a commission is not to be executed without being approved by the commander, if it affects life or liberty, and a sentence of death must be approved by the President. This applies to cases in which there ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... easily credit the painful anxiety which is raised in my mind when I read such a statement as this. I think I see my poor Elizabeth, the wife or slave to some wild savage; her children, merciful Heaven! my grandchildren, growing up as the brutes of the field, in ignorance and idolatry. It is torture, my dear Alexander—absolute torture, and requires long prayer and meditation to restore my mind to its usual tone, and to enable me to bow to the dispensations of ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... body and soul. This source is the blessed Trinity. As often as we make the sign of the Cross we invoke the blessings of God upon us, for we owe all blessings to the infinite merits of our divine Saviour, who died upon the Cross for us. The ignominious instrument of torture and death, the Cross, has now become the instrument of life and the source of salvation. Hence the Church never dispenses blessing except in the sign of the Cross. St. Chrysostom says therefore: Every ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... minister, his voice faltering and his hands trembling as they rested on Cecil's bowed head, "so we give him into Thine own hand and send him forth into the wilderness. Thou only knowest what is before him, whether it be a harvest of souls, or torture and death. But we know that, for the Christian, persecutions and trials are but stepping-stones leading to God; yea, and that death itself is victory. And if he is faithful, we know that whatever his lot may be it will be glorious; that whatever the ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... pillow, which they might easily have done by the simple expedient of throwing it over the ship's side into the sea. He himself had done this twice, but the keeper had immediately brought a fresh pillow already heated for the torture and forced it under ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... determination of his future path. Nothing is more painful to a man of any energy than the inability to put things in order in himself— to place before himself what he has to do, and arrange the means for doing it. To be the passive victim of a rushing stream of disconnected impressions is torture, especially if the emergency be urgent. So when the sun came up Zachariah began to be ashamed of himself that the night had passed in these idiotic moonings, which had left him just where he was, and he tried to settle what he was to do when he reached Manchester. He did not know a soul; but ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... paled slightly, but she kept her eyes steadily fixed on her companion's face. She began to understand where the point of the torture was coming in. ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... Important Factor in Health. Few more ingenious instruments of crippling and torture have ever been invented than fashionable tight ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... her horse's neck; she did not see him smile. He had felt quite sure that she sought relief for the silences of her life in literary composition. When an unattractive woman has not talent she finds a double revenge in the torture of words, he thought. What shall I say to her? That she is whittling thorns for her own soul? Bah! Did I not find enjoyment once in the very imaginings of all that has scourged me since? Would I have thanked anyone for opening my eyes? And the positive is ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... leg over a horse. This mood fastened on him without warning in a Surbiton hospital after a calm night without a sleeping draught, when through his open window he could see green branches waving in sunlight, and hear the cries of men playing cricket and the smack of the driven ball: and it was torture. Tears forced their way suddenly into Bernard's eyes. His nurse, who had watched not a few reluctant recoveries, went out of the room. Then his great chest heaved, and he sobbed aloud, lying on his back with face unhidden, his ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... tell the mother falsehood after falsehood to keep her content. The children had suddenly become infected with a contagious disease, and the doctor had said that the new baby must not be exposed in any circumstances. After three long weeks of torture it devolved upon him to tell his wife ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... way through the cave was a maddening torture. They had no light, nor would they dare use one if they had. There were no wheel marks to follow on the stone floor. Without Ulv's sensitive nose they would have been completely lost. The cave branched and rejoined and they soon ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... fetters, and were often branded to prevent escape. If slaves ran away, and were caught, they might be crucified. If a householder were killed by a slave, all the slaves in his house might be put to death. As at Athens, the testimony of slaves was given under torture. Hatred to the master on the part of the slave was a thing of course. "As many enemies as slaves," was a ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... given any indication of his desertion being the result of insanity, something might be done, but there was nothing to suggest such was the case. To delay the execution for twenty-four hours and then to have to carry it out would mean subjecting a human being to unspeakable torture. He felt he could not take it upon himself to run the chance of inflicting such misery upon the man. The Colonel and I saw at once that the case was utterly hopeless and that we could do no more. The question then was to ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... the highest philosophy. It is the divine voice which speaks in our hearts, though it has caught some accretion of human passion and superstition. The popular versions are false and debased; the old versions of the Atonement, for example, monstrous; and the belief in the everlasting torture of sinners, a hideous and groundless caricature. With much that such men have said I could, of course, agree heartily; for, indeed, it expresses the strongest feelings which have caused religious revolt. But would it not be simpler to say, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Master Hopkins!" interposed the governor sternly. "It is never well to threaten what we cannot perform. We break not bones nor put to the torture in our new community; but, John Billington, I shall counsel thy father to take thee ashore and whip thee so soundly as shall make thee long remember that gunpowder is for thee forbidden fruit. Go, now, to thy cabin, and remain there till he comes, while I go to see ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... alcalde-mayor or his deputy divides among the chiefs two, three, four, or more taes of gold (which is a certain weight worth five pesos), and orders that so many gantas of rice be collected for one toston. Afterward they send, to collect this rice, men without piety; who, with blows, torture, and imprisonment enforce compliance with the rate of three hundred and fifty gantas for a toston; and, in other years, one hundred of wine, and this year, sixty. It is a fact well established, for I have learned from the very persons who collect ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... the Bishop and Synod. From that time onwards he became a political agent, and was mixed up in the plots which filled the closing years of the reign of Charles II. In 1684 he was arrested and questioned. Though made to undergo the torture of the boot, he refused to disclose anything. He was then handed over to the tender mercies of General Dalziel, the "Muscovy beast who would roast men," and was kept from sleeping for eight or nine days till his enemies themselves were weary. He had ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... he examined the broken foreleg more carefully. Gentle as was his touch, yet Link knew it must cause infinite torture. But the dog did not flinch. He seemed to understand that Ferris meant kindly, for he moved his magnificent head far enough to lick the man's hand ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... not an outline betrayed itself through the heavy folds of drapery in which it was wrapped. His thoughts recurred to his unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which he could find a silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was torture to keep imprisoned in his soul. The cold stone would tell them, but without passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered from a presence which, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... midway between the seat and the floor, was the weapon chosen by Satan for my destruction. In German churches you do not kneel, and seldom stand, but sit nearly the whole time, praying and singing in great comfort. If you are four years old, however, this unchanged position soon becomes one of torture. Unknown and dreadful things go on in your legs, strange prickings and tinglings and dartings up and down, a sudden terrifying numbness, when you think they must have dropped off but are afraid to look, then renewed and fiercer prickings, shootings, and ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... of the cruelty of the Iroquois has arisen mainly from the custom which they occasionally practiced, like some other Indians, of burning prisoners at the stake. Out of the multitude of their captives, the number subjected to this torture was really very small,—probably not nearly as large in proportion as the number of criminals and political prisoners who, in some countries of Europe, at about the same time, were subjected to the equally cruel torments of the ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... Barker seems to have been an idle person—he says that after travels "my former fancye of professenge nothinge partycularly was verye muche encreased"[129]—and a papistical one, for on the accession of Mary he came home to serve the Duke of Norfolk, whose Catholic plots he betrayed, under torture, in 1571. It was then that the Duke bitterly dubbed him an "Italianfyd Inglyschemane," equal in faithlessness to "a schamlesse Scote";[130] i.e. the Bishop of ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... in a flood of new emotion; she tried once or twice to be discreetly angry with herself for admitting so unreservedly the pleasure she felt in Pierre's admiration; she placed her soul on a rack of self-questioning torture, and every inquisition she made of her heart returned the self-same answer: ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of your own existence, and to know that there could be no possibility of my revealing any thing about you; no," he added, as his clenched fist fell upon the table, and his face flushed up deeply at his rising feeling—"no, not even if it were still the fashion to employ torture; not even the rack could extort from me one syllable that could implicate you. After all that I have said, I swear that by all that ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... torments—for those men that grace And holiness of life slight and disdain, There to bemoan themselves with hellish pain. This place, also, the pains so dismal be, Both as to name and nature, that in me It is not to express the damning wights, The hellish torture, and the fearful plights Thereof; for as intolerable they Must needs be found, by those that disobey The Lord, so can no word or thought express Unto the full the height of that distress; Such miserable caitiffs, that shall there Rebukes of vengeance, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... possess psychic properties, they were thought to derive them from evil sources, and so strong was the prejudice against these unfortunate animals on this account, that all through the Middle Ages we find them suffering such barbaric torture as only the perverted minds of a fanatical, priest-ridden people could devise (which treatment, no doubt, partly, at all events, accounts for the many palaces, houses, etc., in those particular countries, stated to have been haunted by the spirits ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... de Witt was thrown into prison and put to the torture on a false charge of planning the assassination of the Prince of Orange. Jan de Witt visited his brother in his agony, and a mob, bursting into the jail, seized upon both brothers as traitors and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... trust, gave an asylum to refugees, and treated them with respect and kindness, were scrupulous observers of their pledged word, and eminently faithful to their treaty obligations. On the other hand, it must be admitted that they had some customs which indicate a tinge of barbarism. They used torture for the extraction of answers from reluctant persons, employed the scourge to punish trifling offences, and, in certain cases, condescended to mutilate the bodies of their dead enemies. Their addiction to intemperance is also a barbaric trait. They were, no doubt, on the whole, less civilized ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... friends, and without pleasure. The last may, perhaps, appear strange to men unacquainted with the masquerade of life: I deceived others, and I endeavoured to deceive myself; and have worn the face of pleasantry and gaiety, while my heart suffered the most exquisite torture. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the ground of that cave, in every conceivable position of misery and torture, were the bodies of half a dozen ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... the gig stopped at the avenue gate. Feemy was all but fainting; what with the cold and her former fear, and the dreadful position in which she found herself, she could not have moved if she had tried; she just preserved her senses sufficiently to torture her, and that was all. Plainly she heard her lover whistle; and plainly Thady heard it too, for he kept his stick completely still, and took the pipe from his mouth: then the second whistle—then she heard Ussher's foot on the ground—heard him approaching, ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... was curious to see how he put down and pushed away all he had once begun to touch and torture. Mrs. Edmonstone said it was self command in no common degree; and Philip allowed that to cure so inveterate a habit ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... done? Life is beginning to be a torture. If I send her away, I shall eat my heart out. If she stays, fuel is but added to the fire. Her caressing ways will drive me mad. To repulse her were brutal—she loves to be fondled; she can scarcely speak to me without ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... trapper rose hastily. The expression of his brow was still the same, but his mouth was altered. The lips were pressed tightly like those of a brave when led to torture, and there was a fierce activity in his motions as he sprang down the bank and proceeded to dig a hole in the soft earth. For half an hour he laboured, shovelling away the earth with a large, flat stone; and carrying down the body, he buried it there, under the shadow of a willow. The trapper ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... guides. Nor did it matter that ignorance rather than evil intent had been the cause of their failure. It was enough for Hauptmann Fritz Schneider to know that he was lost in the African wilderness and that he had at hand human beings less powerful than he who could be made to suffer by torture. That he did not kill them outright was partially due to a faint hope that they might eventually prove the means of extricating him from his difficulties and partially that so long as they lived they might ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... He got well of this, but only to fall into a dropsy, which despatched him in a week. Shortly before his death, at the seventh hour, he cried out to two Spaniards who were standing by the bed that he had suffered such great torture from the working of Troilus, and that he was dying therefrom. "Therefore," he cried, "in your presence I summon him with my dying words to appear before God's tribunal, that he may give an account of all the evil he has wrought against me." On the following day there came a messenger ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... kill one another on Saturdays and Sundays, the murderers are seldom brought to justice because of Omerta; a word which is said to be derived from uomo and to signify manliness in the sense of power of endurance, the power, for example, of keeping silence even under torture; hence it comes to be used for an exaggeration of that natural sense of honour, that Noblesse Oblige or Decency Forbids, which makes an English schoolboy scorn to become a sneak. It may be false and foolish, it may be noble and chivalrous, whatever it ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... down, you—beggar!" and followed at its close by the last and crowning outrage, consequent on a violent outbreak of wrath on the part of Squeers, who spat at him and struck him a blow across the face with his instrument of torture: when Nicholas, springing upon him, wrested the weapon from his hand, and pinning him by the throat—don't we all exult in the remembrance of it?—"beat the ruffian till ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... nevertheless true, that a good man, a kind man, a generous man, may sometimes quite unconsciously drive a woman nearly mad; make her feel as though a legion of fiends were struggling for possession of her soul, goad her weakness into acts which torture alone causes, and the after-blackness of which, presented to her real self, creates a humiliation which only drives her madder still. Men, that is, good men, who are stronger and better able to do and to bear—ought to be very gentle, very wise, in the manner they ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Marianne; "leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! but do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those, who have no sorrow of their own to talk of exertion! Happy, happy Elinor, you cannot have an idea of what ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... a movie-man whipped out a handkerchief and tied it over my eyes. The director then took the firing squad in hand. He had but recently witnessed the execution of a spy where he had almost burst with a desire to photograph the scene. It had been excruciating torture to restrain himself. But the experience had made him feel conversant with the etiquette of shooting a spy, as it was being done amongst the very best firing-squads. He made it now stand him in ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... of fulfilment, and as he came up the steps, I looked into the face of Ex-Secretary Pollifex, and saw there an expression which is beyond description. Say that of the ghost of a man who has been hanged, attending an execution. Or say the expression of a Catholic, converted by torture, watching the action of the thumb-screws upon another heretic. The air, in short, of a man who had been through it all before. And as the then Secretary came madly rushing up the steps, Pollifex confronted ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... glimpses of a tomorrow, and struggles against the inevitable future. He must have legal purgation, discharge, release from custody, quittance. He exacts it from the vanquished, and at need puts them to the torture, to obtain it. Louis Bonaparte knows that there exists, in the conscience of every prisoner, of every exile, of every man proscribed, a tribunal, and that that tribunal is beginning his prosecution; he trembles, the executioner feels a secret dread of his ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... thing is responsible for making woman the victim of more woes and diseases than all other causes put together. About one-half the children born in this country die before they are five years of age, and no doubt this terrible mortality is largely due to this instrument of torture known as the modern corset. Tight lacing is the cause of infantile mortality. It slowly but surely takes the lives of tens of thousands, and so effectually weakens and diseases, so as to cause the untimely ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... come out here and reduce the price of their tickets to their value,—say about sixty-two and a half cents a dozen,—it is possible that we sha'n't hear them any more. When we ride forty miles, at an expense of at least ten dollars, extras not included, to hear a couple of itinerant Dutchmen torture a brace of unoffending instruments into fits, until the very spirit of music howls in sympathy, if some one will cave in our head with a brickbat, we will feel ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... faith in her. Suddenly, she does a thing, shocking, incomprehensible, and, in doing it, asks you not to question, for she can not explain; asks you to think of her kindly; to trust her still. Here is a test for your friendship. Others may pry, drag her name about, torture her with their curiosity; she has appealed to you. Respect her secret. Let her bury it if she will, and can; you can not help her. If she has become that bad man's wife, she is past human help. Undoubtedly there is a mystery here; undoubtedly she has acted ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... observed, that she did not, like ordinary persons under extreme anguish of mind, suffer her understanding, in the mean time, to sink into listlessness and debility. The most inapprehensive reader may conceive what was the mental torture she endured, when he considers, that she was twice, with an interval of four months, from the end of May to the beginning of October, prompted by it to purposes of suicide. Yet in this period she wrote her Letters from ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... Hebrew and Greek original, they secreted the knowledge from the people. They fear that this would forever discredit them with their hearers. Hence, they still outwardly lend their influence to the doctrine of eternal torture, which they do not believe, and feel angry with us because we teach the people the Truth upon the subject, which they know will bring to them hundreds of questions difficult ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... the poison," moaned Little, squirming out of his bed and trying to lift his friend up. Then his own world spun around him, and he fell beside Barry, every inch of ant-bitten skin a blazing patch of torture. ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... Believe me, gentlemen, what has tortured me most during this night has not been the thought that I'd killed the old servant, and that I was in danger of Siberia just when my love was being rewarded, and Heaven was open to me again. Oh, that did torture me, but not in the same way: not so much as the damned consciousness that I had torn that damned money off my breast at last and spent it, and had become a downright thief! Oh, gentlemen, I tell you again, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... possible absurdity in the way of preparation for this blessed event. I turn hot when I remember the cravat I bought. My boots might be placed in any collection of instruments of torture. I provided, and sent down by the Norwood coach the night before, a delicate little hamper, amounting in itself, I thought, almost to a declaration. There were crackers in it with the tenderest mottoes that could be got for money. At six in the morning, I was in Covent Garden Market, buying ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... confirmed by other early writers, are so express with reference to these points, that they seem to require something more than a mere reference in this place. "When his father was suffering under the torture of a grievous sickness, the Prince endeavoured with filial devotedness to meet his wishes in every possible way; and notwithstanding the biting detraction and manifold accusations of some, which (according to the prevalence of common opinion) made efforts to diminish the kind feeling of the ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... been fighting and fighting and fighting until their nerves were nothing but a jangling torture. And a counter-attack on Neuve Chapelle was being organised. Huggie told me afterwards that when the car had come along the road, all the men had jumped like startled animals and a few had turned to take cover. Why, ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... freed from her bonds she sighed deeply, uttered a little sob as though her soul had fluttered to her lips, and sank into Royson's arms. In the ever-growing darkness he had not realized earlier how acute was the torture she was enduring. She must have experienced some difficulty in breathing, owing to the outrageous manner in which her mouth and nostrils were covered. Yet, to render her quite helpless, her wrists were tied with such cruel force that they became swollen and stiff, and her delicate skin ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... ascent no more!'—Immediately I heard arise towards me, from the depth of invisible abysses, a myriad of formidable voices united in a strange chant—'Let us destroy him! Let him be destroyed! What does he here among the dead? Let him be delivered back to torture! Let him ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... necessity of making a living for himself and family to remain away from church, meditated sorrowfully as he followed his plow, and often at the end of his furrow fell upon his knees and besought the Creator to save his undying soul and spare him the everlasting torture of the damned. A popular little gift book, published by the American Tract Society of New York, was entitled Passing Over Jordan, and on an early page we find ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... bigotry, tyranny, and cruel religious intolerance were such as flourished in the seventh century, and in spite of systematic slave raids the population decreased by nearly two-thirds, and practically all the children died. Peace came, well-being came, freedom from rape and murder and torture and highway robbery, and every brutal gratification of lust and greed came, only when the Sudan lost its independence and passed under English rule. Yet this well-meaning little sonneteer sincerely felt that his verses were issued in the cause of humanity. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the Constitution was carried in procession through the city with the honours paid to the Holy Sacrament, and all political prisoners were set at liberty. The prison of the Inquisition was sacked, the instruments of torture broken in pieces. On the 9th the leaders of the agitation took steps to make the King fulfil his promise. A mob invaded the court and threshold of the palace. At their demand the municipal council of 1814 was ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... till I came to him. Sometimes after the old man had repeated his composition to me I would begin to dispute with him, asking whether the thing would not be better another way, and he could hardly keep from flying into a passion with me for putting his work to the torture." ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... we forget. And yet, when we were new-born we did remember other times and places. We, helpless infants in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and monstrous things. We new-born infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... friends and comrades may fire the blood. It may lead men to risk their own lives in a desperate charge to get even. But it is a pain that does not rankle and that does not fester like a sore that will not heal. It is the tales the Canadians have to tell of sheer, depraved torture and brutality that has inflamed them to the pitch of hatred that they cherish. It has seemed as if the Germans had a particular grudge against the Canadians. And that, indeed, is known to be the ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... agreed on, remarks, 'qu'elle a quelque nouvelle offence contre la dite reyne d'Ecosse,' which could have been nothing else but the first news of the seizure of one of Ridolfi's servants at Dover on the 10th April, who then under torture ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... without compliance to ordained conditions. But, we ask, have those conditions named in Genesis been perpetuated in [10] the multiplication of mankind? And, are the conditions of salvation mental, or physical; are they bodily penance and torture, or repentance and reform, which are ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... that what I say is true," he continued in quieter but no less intensely passionate accents—"You know that every day sees our Master crowned with new thorns and exposed to fresh torture! You know that we do nothing!—We stand beside Him in His second agony as dumb as though we were unconscious of it! You know that we MIGHT speak and will not! You know that we fear the ephemera of temporary governments, policies, and social conventionalities, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... still resting in her own, and drawing the long veil back over face, she walked silently with the puzzled spinster, unable to broach the theme she had at heart. Merry spared her the torture ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... strangely grouped towers and palaces, and its huge squares, made me feel an insignificant insect with no right to opinions of any kind; and as I gazed up at the dark, medieval buildings, vague visions of Cornelis and John de Witt in their torture, of van Oldenbarneveld, and fair Adelaide de Poelgust stabbed and bleeding, flitted fearfully through my brain. I wanted to get out and look for the stone where Adelaide had fallen to die (how well I remembered that story, told in twilight and firelight ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... be devoured, &c., was mentioned. A rev gentleman could not understand the conduct of Government; could not see that there was any impropriety in torturing men's souls; seemed to think that a good deal might be said in favour of bodily torture as well! These are your teachers, O Israel! Imagine what the ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... carried in their hands either a cross, or an inverted torch, which was a sign that their own life would shortly be extinguished. Few of these showed weakness, since they had already triumphed over long-protracted torture. They walked with head erect to the quemada ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... main subject in this story and its companion—the trial, to a point of utter torture, of knightly faith, and several passages in the conduct of both, more especially the exaggerated scenes in the House of Baldringham, and hermitage of Engedi, are signs of the gradual decline in force of intellect and soul which those who love Scott best have ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... other ravenous beasts in the world; but this one is peculiar in that he laughs over his work, which is also his pastime. Now, if you wish to hear a Boy laugh—a horse-laugh, a giant-laugh—just put some other animal, human or otherwise, through a course of torture. Twist a pig's tail until it comes out; or, if you don't like the occupation, the Boy will cheerfully do it—and will drown the squeal of the porker in his own uproarious merriment. What do you suppose were the age and sex of the inventor ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... in the broader sense," said mother, "and if you'll forgive me, your face bears marks of suffering almost amounting to torture." ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... the verge From side to side, beneath the glittering morn, An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge, Like Hope upon a death-bed, and, unworn Its steady dyes, while all around is torn By the distracted waters, bears serene Its brilliant hues with all their beams unshorn: Resembling, 'mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... in those days was pretty severe. For slight offences the boys were deprived of their recess or compelled to study for an hour after the school was dismissed. The chief weapon of torture was the ferule, to the efficacy of which I can testify from much personal knowledge. The master had in his desk, however, a cowhide for gross cases. I do not remember knowing how that felt from personal experience, but I remember very well seeing it applied occasionally ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... fever. It was for you I did it—for your sake I sold my honor, the love of my country, the freedom of my brothers. For your sake I risked an awful death. For your sake I have lived like a hunted man, with the cry of the wolves always in my ears, and the fear of death and of eternal torture with me day by day. No other man since the world was made has done more. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... only one faint chance of recovery, that good news might arrive. The chief cause of physical collapse was the torture of the brain; and it was possible that the whole system might even now rally under the vitalizing thrills of hope. But as day by day passed by and brought nearer that dreaded occasion, the opening of Parliament on ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... rather to be buried under the solid squares of hay than to be discovered in such a position. Sir Thomas' words inspired him with a ray of hope, but his expectations were dashed as suddenly as they had arisen by the words of the baron and the action of the busy landlord, who, all unconscious of the torture he was inflicting, struggled ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... homage to their self-sacrifice and zeal, and never has work of human hand or spirit been more worthy of tribute. The Jesuit went, often alone, where no others dared to go, and he faced unknown dangers which had all the possibilities of torture and martyrdom. Nor did this energy waste itself in flashes of isolated triumph. The Jesuit was a member of an efficient organization, skillfully guided by inspired leaders and carrying its extensive work of Christianization with machine-like thoroughness through the vastness of five continents. ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... do it; not ambitious of more, not fancying himself capable of more.'[19] Of all men living or dead, this is the one whom it is most impossible to think of as acquiescing in such an easy relation to those around him, or even as attempting so to acquiesce—at least without inward self-question and torture. We must remember that Knox had undoubtedly before this time embraced the doctrinal system of the Reformation, no doubt in the form taught by Wishart. And a catechism of that doctrine, perhaps founded upon or identical with that which Wishart brought from Basel, he gave to his East Lothian pupils. ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... view, completely ruined two lives. I did not know then what an awful struggle was going on in her own breast between her pride and her remorse for having driven Winnie away, to be lost in Wales. Afterwards her sad case taught me that among all the agents of soul-torture that have ever stung mankind to madness the scorpion Remorse is by far the most appalling. But other events had to take place before she reached the state when the scorpion stings to death all other passions, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the doctor hoped to find from the death of the one some means for preserving the life of the other. The councillor was in a violent fever, agitated unceasingly both in body and mind: he could not bear any position of any kind for more than a few minutes at a time. Bed was a place of torture; but if he got up, he cried for it again, at least for a change of suffering. At the end of three months he died. His stomach, duodenum, and liver were all in the same corrupt state as his brother's, and more than that, the surface of his body was burnt ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... going up and down these narrow streets? At every turn is this little cock of a king's man who, though he croweth not with his mouth, doeth so with his looks. I know not for whom he is seeking. Not for me, or he would assail me and capture me and put me to the torture to tell him where Hugo is, for he thinketh Hugo is Josceline, which he is not, but a stranger, and a headstrong one. There is nothing in dreaming of going up a ladder or climbing a tree, if I get not the better of him." And so he betook him ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... was so rarely that a white man fell into the hands of the negro savages that when one had the misfortune to do so they generally made the utmost of him. And that "utmost" was usually something in which prolonged and agonising torture figured largely. But it would obviously be worse than useless to attempt to escape until an opportunity occurred of at least a fair prospect of success; for to attempt and fail meant the extinguishment at once of all further hope. And, up to the present, I had not had a ghost of ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longed more and more to cross forever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. So when I learned of the drug which would unlock the gate and drive me through, I resolved to take it when ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... children was the pillar which always raised the queen up again, when the torture of her daily life cast her to the ground. She would, she must live for her children. She must, so long as a breath remained in her, devote all her powers to retain for her son the dauphin at least the crown beneath whose burden his father sank. She wanted nothing more for herself, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... the natives suggested that it was their wish to take both the men prisoners instead of killing them. They had done too much to be let off with such an easy death: they were wanted for torture. ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... suffered torture and abuse for two hours he was obliged to start at once on a journey to Auitan. The suffering priest, after being compelled to march through the street shouting "Vivas!" for the Republic and Aguinaldo, spent the night without a mouthful of food ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... the point of view at which YOU take life," said Angela quietly, "but I was just then thinking of a cousin of mine,—a very beautiful woman; her husband treated her with every possible sort of what I should term civil cruelty,—polite torture—refined agony. If he had struck her or shot her dead it would have been far kinder. But his conduct was worse than murder. He finally deserted her, and left her penniless to fight her own way through the world. Then he died suddenly, and she forgot ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the extension of the citizenship carried the principles and practice of Roman law to every quarter of the empire, the spirit of that law underwent an entire change. It became exact, impartial, liberal, humane. It limited the use of torture to force confession from persons accused of crime. It protected the child against a father's tyranny. It provided that a master who killed a slave should be punished as a murderer, and even taught that all men are originally free by the law of nature ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the hands of vandals, who were ruthlessly destroying the loved and cherished objects that had surrounded him from infancy, Antoinette, crushed by the disasters of this most wretched night, this was the terrible picture that rose before him. To this torture was added the despair caused by a sense of his utter powerlessness. Gladly would he have rushed back to the chateau to die there, struggling with his enemies, but he was prevented by the thought of Antoinette, ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... only concession which can be made in consideration of the kindness which had been extended to them is, not to burn the chateau of the ladies of Vanes, who had been so charitable; but they burn all their title-deeds, and torture the business agent at three different times by fire, to force him to deliver a document which he does not possess; they then only withdraw him from the fire half-broiled, because the ladies, on their knees, implore mercy for ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
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