"Fetid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sleep. He awoke in a high fever and delirious. Some days later he came to himself, rose and went out. It was eight o'clock, and the sun had disappeared. The heat was as intolerable as before, but he inhaled the dusty, fetid, infected town air with greediness. And now his head began to spin round, and a wild expression of energy crept into his inflamed eyes and pale, meager, wan face. He did not know, did not even think, what he was going to do; he only knew that all was to be finished "to-day," ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... he was about. In the past he had had experience with the rodents and vermin that infest every native village, and, while he was not overscrupulous about such matters, he much preferred the fresh air of the swaying trees to the fetid atmosphere ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... removed, he realized the atmosphere was fetid and stifling. A great pressure bore on his lungs, making breathing labored and difficult. And then they were in a lift that dropped into the depths of its shaft with dizzying speed. Antazzo's grin; Tom's eyes, dull and lifeless, floating ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... wash-hand stand; drank some of the water in my jug; poured the rest out, and plunged my face into it; then sat down in a chair and tried to compose myself. I soon felt better. The change for my lungs, from the fetid atmosphere of the gambling-room to the cool air of the apartment I now occupied, the almost equally refreshing change for my eyes, from the glaring gaslights of the "salon" to the dim, quiet flicker of one bedroom candle, aided wonderfully the restorative effects of cold water. The giddiness ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... schools, and his friendship for Robert and Willet was strong and enduring, but his heart was in the forest. Enlightened and humane, he had nevertheless asked seriously the night before the question: "Will Lennox kill him?" He had discovered something fetid in Quebec and to him de Mezy was a noxious animal that should be destroyed. He wished, for an instant, that he knew the sword and that he was going ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... The man pushing against Mr. Neal was heavy-jowled as a prize-fighter, but if ever he had followed the ring his fighting days were over now. Good feeding had done for him; he breathed heavily in the fetid atmosphere of the car. He was almost squeezing the breath out of the little man with a heavy red mustache who stood just behind him. The red mustache made the little man's face seem out of proportion; there was not enough of chin to make a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... spotted with white. Its head bears a tuft in shape like a crown; it has a strident voice, and its eye is murderous, "A look," says the "Romance of Alexander," "so piercing, that it is pestilential and deadly to all beasts, whether venomous or no." Its breath is no less fetid, nor less dangerous, for, "by its breath are all things infected, and when it is dying it is fain to disgorge it; it stinks so that all other beasts ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Attica, celebrated for the quantity and excellence of its honey. The rock on which the aromatic flowers grew in such profusion for the bees, did not, however, partake of the same delightful quality. In working it a peculiar fetid odour of sulphuretted hydrogen, somewhat like that of a stale onion, was emitted, which gave rise to its modern Italian name—Marmo Cipolla. This repulsive quality, however, disappeared quickly on exposure. The finest specimens of this marble in Rome ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... smiles On his byles; Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow Come and go; Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea, Hides and ghi; Where the Babu drops inflammatory hints In his prints; Stands a City—Charnock chose it—packed away Near a Bay— By the Sewage rendered fetid, by the sewer Made impure, By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by the swamp Moist and damp; And the City and the Viceroy, as we see, ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... devoid of interest; we traversed long stretches of sandy plain, with scarcely any signs of vegetation, save here and there a clump of sage brush, or the wild pita plant, whose stalk towered into the air like a sign-post to guide the wanderer over these sandy wastes. The cactus and fetid creosote plant lined our path, the latter giving forth a most disagreeable odor as it was crushed beneath the horses' hoofs. Towards night we approached the base of a mountain, and entering a grove of willows and cottonwoods, halted, and dismounting, made preparations ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... hill that dominates the landscape—on the summit sits the inevitable castle, blue sky peering through its battered windows. But the interior is not at all in keeping with this imposing aspect. Morano, so far as I was able to explore it, is a labyrinth of sombre, tortuous and fetid alleys, whexe black pigs wallow amid heaps 'of miscellaneous and malodorous filth—in short, the town exemplifies that particular idea of civic liberty which consists in everybody being free to throw their own private refuse into the public ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of the lepers' ward and the opium refuge, the place, with its trim lawns, its roses, its clematis, its azaleas, its wistaria, had the sweetness of an English rectory garden. He liked to think that Corinna Meecham had been able to escape from her duties in the crowded, fetid, multi-colored city right outside the gates to something like peace and ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... hanging. The women who sat in their doorways were pale and their matted fair hair hung loose over their shoulders. The children were almost naked and the few clothes that they did wear were but rags. In the alley were some pigs wallowing in the stagnant water from which a fetid odor arose. Our guide stopped. Evidently he had lost his way. But at this moment a policeman appeared. The clerk spoke to him and the officer told him he would show him the way.... We followed the policeman down more narrow streets. At last ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... and tearing pains and tortures of the gout, stone, colic, cancer, rheumatism, convulsions, and such like insufferably painful distempers; when I see the crises of almost all acute distempers happen either by rank and fetid sweats, thick lateritious and lixivious sediments in the urine, black, putrid, and fetid dejections, attended with livid and purple spots, corrosive ulcers, impostumes in the joints or muscles, or a gangrene and mortification in this or that part of the body; when I see ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... there, either upon his bed of spikes or in an attitude which suggested torture, and ready to receive the homage, and the money as well, of his benighted admirers. Mothers were present, immersing not only themselves but also their children. All the bathers must drink of the muddy and fetid water, for purification internal is as needful as purification external. And so, hundreds of worshipers every day, and on special feast-days thousands, drink this water of the "sacred Ganges," foul with the stains of disease and reeking ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... forty years ago, or in 1828, a paving-stone above Canal Street, nor could any necessity induce the government of the city to pave a single street. Where now stands the great St. Charles Hotel, there was an unsightly and disgusting pond of fetid water, and the locations now occupied by the City Hotel and the St. James were cattle-pens. There was not a wharf in the entire length of the city, and the consequence was an enormous tax levied upon produce, in the shape of drayage and repairs of injuries to packages, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Deity, is nevertheless represented in the most popular books of Hinduism to-day—the Puranas, which are known in their legends to all Hindus and which wield a supreme influence over them in their life—as a very different being. In these books the story of Krishna is one of fetid, unblushing immorality and voluptuousness. The publishing of these narratives in the English language in a western land at the present time would be considered a crime punishable with imprisonment. And thus this Hindu god, who is the most popular ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... banks were fragrant, mauve-coloured pinks, with ragged petals; but at the foot of the Orgues was a rocky waste, where little grew besides the sombre holly and fetid hellebore. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... people of the Amonian worship: and we may always, upon inquiry, perceive something very peculiar in their history and situation. They were particularly devoted to the worship of the Sun; and they were generally situated near hot springs, or else upon foul and fetid lakes, and pools of bitumen. It is, also, not uncommon to find near them mines of salt and nitre; and caverns sending forth pestilential exhalations. The Elysian plain, near the Catacombs in Egypt, stood upon the foul Charonian canal; which was so noisome, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... room, and Cyril at once proceeded to unroll the blankets. As he came to the last he was conscious of a strong fetid odour, similar to that he had more than once perceived in ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... Inquiry was made into the origin of the scourge, and by degrees various facts came out which excited public indignation in a high degree. The unhealthy nature of the site; the quantity and quality of the children's food; the brackish, fetid water used in its preparation; the pupils' wretched clothing and accommodations—all these things were discovered, and the discovery produced a result mortifying to Mr. Brocklehurst, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the church, they pass through it in solemn march, they find themselves in a vaulted passage. The Swiss looks around. "Dig here," said he suddenly. "Yes, dig here," said the meiga. The masons labour, the floor is broken up,—a horrible and fetid odour ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... every one: one day in my house he called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful. His expression was that of a depressed, almost despondent yet benevolent ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... voices were a misery to the shrinking, aching, choking Finn, who stood shuddering in his fetid den, his sensitive nose wrinkling with horror and disgust. His need of water was the thing which hurt him the most cruelly; but the nature of his prison was a good deal of a torture, too. Remember that his life so far had been as cleanly ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... seven days. He pictured her huddled there in the swamp in the cheerless leaky cabin with worse than no companions. Ah! the swamp, the cruel swamp! It was a fearful place in the rain. Its oozing mud and fetid vapors, its clinging slimy draperies,—how they twined about the bones of its victims and chilled their hearts. Yet here his ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... fetid species of West Indian cockroach, so called on account of the knocking noise they make ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... hand or got upon the whale and knocked the birds over with a club. Blood as well as oil ran from the great carcass and the sea was soon streaked all around with foulness. A dreadful stench began to be apparent, too. The fetid gasses from the abdominal cavity of the dead ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... her womanhood has its best chances. However, she is there, living the life of all such hired "helps," drudging from morning till night in one long round of sordid labor, in an atmosphere stinking with the fetid breath ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... blows, when his strength failed; and Brend, his flesh black and beaten to jelly, and his bruised skin hanging in bags full of clotted blood, was thrust into his cell. There, upon the floor of that dark and fetid den, the victim fainted. But help was at hand; an outcry was raised, the people could bear no more, the doors were opened, and he was rescued. [Footnote: New England Judged, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... his chamber was poverty-stricken, but as his poverty was noble, his garret was neat. The den upon which his eye now rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid. The only furniture consisted of a straw chair, an infirm table, some old bits of crockery, and in two of the corners, two indescribable pallets; all the light was furnished by a dormer window of four panes, draped with spiders' ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... theme I have been wont to brag on; I've told how you, my now innocuous moke, Would chew the tail-board off a G.S. wagon By way of mere plaisanterie (or joke); Dubbed you most diabolical of ragers, A rampant hooligan, a fetid tough, A thing without respect for sergeant-majors— That is to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... brave," she told him; "only obedient." Her veil fluttered in the hot November breeze that bore with it the heavy fetid taint from the overcrowded trenches that ringed Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the cordite; though the air up here on the veld was sweet compared with the befouled atmosphere of the Women's Laager and the crowded ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Egypt shrieking for a drink of clean water, and saying that the desire to drink clean water out of a glass represented everything he had to say for the moment about the desert; all the same, he continued to tell of fetid, stale, putrid wells, and of the haunting terror with which the Saharian starts in the morning lest he should find no water at the nearest watering-place, only a green scum fouled by the staling of horses and mules ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... constructed of fine phrases, great thoughts and of jokes not common on the streets. Moreover 'tis not obscure private persons or women that he stages in his comedies; but, bold as Heracles, 'tis the very greatest whom he attacks, undeterred by the fetid stink of leather or the threats of hearts of mud. He has the right to say, "I am the first ever dared to go straight for that beast with the sharp teeth and the terrible eyes that flashed lambent fire like those of Cynna,[330] surrounded by a hundred lewd flatterers, who spittle-licked ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... scurvy, which, in the succeeding few weeks, carried off so many. All of us who had read sea-stories had read much of this disease and its horrors, but we had little conception of the dreadful reality. It usually manifested itself first in the mouth. The breath became unbearably fetid; the gums swelled until they protruded, livid and disgusting, beyond the lips. The teeth became so loose that they frequently fell out, and the sufferer would pick them up and set them back in their sockets. In attempting to ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... which they are fashioned seem to have been hewn by Titans. The names are full of romance and mystery. The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, for instance, how it brings back a certain red and gold book of one's youth, full of innocent prisoners in clanking chains confined in fetid underground dungeons. It seemed incredible to really behold its slender, golden minarets on the other side of the Neva. But this was no time for sight-seeing, we were all very anxious to get to work at once. So my first excursion in Petrograd was to ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... down on the desert and the rattlesnakes and Gila monsters holed up. As in the frozen East they hibernated in winter to escape the grip of the cold, so in sun-cursed Papagueria, where the Tecolotes lie, they crawled as deep to get away from the heat. But in the Geronimo jail with its dead, fetid air, Rimrock Jones learned to envy the snakes. Out on the stark desert, where the men laid the track, the hot steel burned everything it touched; but the air was clean and in the nights, when he suffocated, they lay cool ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... deliver thee, and to give up thy enemies to thee, and let thy camp be holy (i.e. clean), and let no uncleanness appear therein." The figurative reason for this precept, according to Gregory (Moral. xxxi), is that sins which are the fetid excretions of the mind should be covered over by repentance, that we may become acceptable to God, according to Ps. 31:1: "Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered." Or else according to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... at life. A "bloody spittle," as is known from Arthur Rimbaud's sonnets on consonants, stands before the eyes of everyone who pronounces the vowel i, just as the vowel a brings up the picture of "black, shaggy flies, which buzz around terribly fetid objects." ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... were much cleaner than those below, yet there was a fetid smell escaping from them. This we found arose from the tubs being allowed to stand in the rooms, where the criminals were closely confined, for twenty-four hours, which, with the action of the damp, heated atmosphere of that ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... for pickpockets,' shouted a Metropolitan. Every body then tried to button his coat over his breast, and every body gave it up as a bad job. In at last, but with the heat of that exertion—the smell of the hot gas—the fetid breath of two thousand souls, not particular, many, as to the quality of their gin—what a sweltering bath follows! The usher sees a ticket clutched before him, and a breathless individual saying wildly, 'Where?' He points to a distant part of the house, and the way to it is through a sea of humanity. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... minister's wife opened the door, a hot, close, foul smell rushed forth to meet her. Upon the kitchen stove a large pot of pig's food was boiling, and the steam and smell from the pot made the atmosphere of the room overpoweringly fetid. Off the kitchen or living-room were two small bedrooms, in one of ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... suffering and horror of those months of waiting, while the unfortunate victims lived in crowded, dirty cells, subjected to every conceivable indignity and insult from brutal guards, half starved, and breathing foul, fetid air—the breath of sickness, the stench of unclean wounds. Dragged forth at last, one by one, into a court organized for condemnation, presided over by a foul-mouthed brute, whose every word was ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... classicists, and from whose simple, austere atelier issued works instinct with a new life, such as the dramatic group, The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, on the E. base of the Triumphal Arch of the Etoile. Rude, who rescued the art from the fetid atmosphere of a corrupt society and emancipated it from a hide-bound pedagogy, is here represented by his Jeanne d'Arc, 813; Maurice de Saxe, 811; and 815, Napoleon awakening to Immortality, a model for a monument to the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... all-absorbing "prison-discipline," and general morbid sympathy, instead of hearty hatred, for scoundrels; which is threatening to drown human society as in deluges, and leave, instead of an "edifice of society" fit for the habitation of men, a continent of fetid ooze inhabitable only by mud-gods and creatures that walk upon their belly. Few things more distress a thinking ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... we are introduced to a lover watching the beautiful and virtuous object of his adoration as she descends an infamous street late in the evening, and enters one of the houses through a damp, moist, and fetid passage, feebly lighted by a trembling lamp, beneath which are seen the hideous face and skinny fingers of an old woman, as fitly placed as the witches in the blasted heath in 'Macbeth.' In this case, however, Balzac is in one of his wildest moods, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the intention of improving the condition of the blood in cases of anaemia. Manganic acid and permanganate of potash are of great use when applied in lotions (as in Condy's Fluid diluted) to foul and fetid ulcers. In connection with the medicinal applications of manganese it may be mentioned that manganic acid is the agent employed in Dr. Angus Smith's celebrated test for the impurity of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... back against the wall; but presently he sank to the ground in his extremity of famine and fatigue. There he lay till dawn, his heart fluttering for want of food; and, owing to his sweating, the lice[FN126] coursed over his skin; his breath waxed fetid and his whole condition was changed. When the villagers came to pray the dawn prayer, they found him prostrate, ailing, hunger lean, yet showing evident signs of former affluence. As soon as prayers were ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... applications as are most approved in such desperate circumstances, joined with proper internal medicines. The next day he seemed much the same; but on March the 1st he was worse, the incisions discharged a sharp fetid odor (which is generally of the worst consequence). On the next day, which was Sunday, the symptoms seemed to be a little more favourable; but, to my great surprise, the very next day I found his leg not only mortified up to the knee, but the same began anew in four different parts, viz., ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... mark the spot near which a huge impulse died; but we need not linger in the fetid swamps—or only long enough to say a word of justice. Do not rail too bitterly against official painters, living or dead. They cannot harm art, because they have nothing to do with it: they are not artists. If rail you must, rail at that public ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway track-walker, purblind from gloom; the coal-stoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler-room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a flight below the sidewalk level, ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... extremely dangerous operation was long and painful; and M. Cadet de Gassicourt deserves much commendation for the courage he displayed under these circumstances; for notwithstanding every precaution, and in spite of the strong disinfectants burned in the room, the odor of this corpse was so fetid, and the vapor from the sublimate so strong, that the distinguished ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... of the sebaceous gland and duct, produced by retained secretion. The contents may be hard and friable, soft and cheesy, or even fluid, of a grayish, whitish or yellowish color, and with or without a fetid odor; the mass consisting of fat-drops, epidermic cells, ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... putrefaction. Here in the tropics, under a brazen sun, all unclean things turn to putrid filthy life within the hour; and in a native gaol the atmosphere is heavy with the fumes and rottenness of the offal of years, and the reeking pungency of offal that is new. No ventilation can penetrate into the fetid airless cells, nor could the veriest hurricane purge the odours bred ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... double doors, and shutting himself into the tiny box where the fetid air seemed to take him by the throat and the space was so narrow he could hardly crowd his long legs into it, rushed into another delay. Wrong number! ... When at last he got the right number and the hospital, there were the usual deliberate ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... near him, he bent low and walked rapidly. Right and left of him sounded two or three low, horrible crunching noises, and right and left of him two or three blue shapes sank limply down on their faces. A sudden sickness seized him, nauseating him like a fetid odour—the crunching noise was the sound of a bullet crashing into a living human skull as the men bent forward. One man, he remembered afterward, dropped with the quick grunt of an animal—he was killed outright; another gave a gasping cry, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... corner of this soul-destroying Christendom vitality suddenly begins to germinate again. Joyousness, a sacred gift long dethroned by the hellish laughter of derision and obscenity, rises like a flood miraculously out of the fetid dust and mud of the slums; rousing marches and impetuous dithyrambs rise to the heavens from people among whom the depressing noise called "sacred music" is a standing joke; a flag with Blood and Fire on it is unfurled, not in murderous rancor, but because fire is beautiful and blood a ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... blind struggle, the sense of unleashed passions different from those of any single blackguard. It was a dark world to me, and I don't like darkness. But in my nightmares I had never imagined anything just like this. The narrow, fetid street, with the icy winds fanning the filth, the unknown tongue, the hoarse savage murmur, and my utter ignorance as to what it might all be about, made me cold in ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... the prisoner, intimating that on the first sign of treachery I should blow his brains out. However, in spite of this precaution, I felt uncomfortable to the last degree. I blamed myself for allowing the King to expose himself to this unnecessary danger; while the meanness of the quarter, the fetid air, the darkness of the night which was cold and stormy, and the uncertainty of the event lowered my spirits, and made every splash in the kennel, or stumble on the reeking slippery pavements—matters over which the King grew merry—seem no light troubles to me. ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... life, an influence serene, natural, healthy, and sweet breathed over him from the mind of a woman,—an influence so heavenly and peaceful that he did not challenge or suspect it, but rather opened his worn heart insensibly to it, as one in a fetid chamber naturally breathes freer when the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Thou Spain, hast thou not fruitful Afric nigh? And has she not in sooth offended more Than Italy? yet her to scathe, that high, And noble, enterprize wilt thou give o'er. Alas! thou sleepest, drunken Italy, Of every vice and crime the fetid sewer! Nor grievest, as a hand-maid, to obey, In turn, the nations that ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... bundle of dried grass, and Jack took up several sticks, dry and tindery, ready to burst into flame as soon as a light was set to them. All three now crawled through the low, half-blocked doorway. As soon as they crept into the darkness, a strong, fetid, musty smell, mingled with a horrible scent of decay, made the air ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... organic matter, mineral salts, nitrogenous substances, potash, and phosphoric acid. Fresh-mixed excrementitious matter has an acid reaction, but within twelve to twenty hours it becomes alkaline, because of the free ammonia formed in it. Sewage rapidly decomposes, evolving organic and fetid matters, ammonium sulphide, sulphureted and carbureted hydrogen, etc., besides teeming with animal and bacterial life. A great many of the substances contained in sewage are valuable ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... masons brought up the rear. The procession enters the church, they pass through it in solemn march, they find themselves in a vaulted passage. The Swiss looks around. "Dig here!" said he. The masons labour, the floor is broken up—a horrible fetid odour arises.... ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... must necessarily go. What wonder, if here and there one should be found whose principles were weaker than his appetites? Consider also the temptations. These men are hard-worked, often scantily fed. Every nerve is tried by the constant presence of suffering, and every sense by fetid odors. Would it be surprising, if they sometimes craved the luxuries which were so close at hand? Moreover, the Commission mission employs hundreds of men, the very best it can get, but it would be too much to ask that all should be models of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the little house was hot and fetid; so she threw open the doors and windows. Dust had accumulated everywhere and, with a certain detachment, she noted, even in her distress, that she had gone away without closing the great square piano. She ran her fingers over the dusty keys and brought forth a few, sonorous chords; ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... hill and down, in the depths of the valley and over the soft fetid swamp. That valley of Oaxaca has just as much right to be called a valley as our Alleghanies would have to be called bottoms. In the States we should call it a chain of mountains. Out of it rise at every step hills a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... round ventilators. For a broad, roomy nose endowed with a keen pituitary membrane, it would have been a curious sport to discover and investigate the provenience and the species of all the vile odours comprising that fetid stench, which was an inalienable characteristic ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... as it had done for six thousand years; it shone on open problems in the lives of these men and women who walked the streets, problems whose end and beginning no eye could read. There were places where it did not shine: down in the fetid cellars, in the slimy cells of the prison yonder: what riddles of human life lay there he dared not think of. God knows how the man groped for the light,—for any voice to make earth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... that evening by his window in the Rue des Saladiers, trying to disintegrate some fresh air from the fetid odours that rose from the narrow street below, "you have won Madame de Verneuil's heart. You are a lucky little Asticot. And I am proud of you because I made you. You are a proof to her that I haven't spent all my life in absorbing absinthe and omitting to decorate Europe ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... was told. He had no particular affection for his partner and the prospect of his death scarcely troubled him. Yet for twenty miles and more, through fetid swamps and poisoned jungles, he had carried him over his shoulder, fighting fiercely for the lives of both of them, while there remained any chance whatever of escape. Now he knew that it was in vain, he regretted only his wasted efforts—he ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... come to Cowan's Bridge, and with swift strides cleared away the old order of things. The site was declared unhealthy; the clothing insufficient; the water fetid and brackish. When the doctor who inspected the school was asked to taste the daily food of the scholars he spat it out of his mouth. Everything, everything must be altered. It was a time of sore and grievous humiliation to Mr. Wilson. He had felt no ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... fall heavily, and the night, which had come on, was impenetrably black. This lasted till near midnight. Rowland thought of Mary Garland's challenge in the porch, but he thought even more that, although the fetid interior of a high-nestling chalet may offer a convenient refuge from an Alpine tempest, there was no possible music in the universe so sweet as the sound of Roderick's voice. At midnight, through his dripping window-pane, he saw a star, and ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... who has just been crowned at Moscow at an expense of some millions, and whose emblem of authority is ornamented with rubies as large as eggs and ablaze with 2,564 costly diamonds—while half his people are feeding on fetid offal—is a weak-faced pigmy who would probably be peddling Russia's favorite drunk promoter over a pine bar had he not chanced to be born in the purple. Having been spawned in a royal bed—perchance the same in which his great gran'dame Catherine was ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... least sixty years old. His hands were white and clean. His boots were trodden down at the heels, and full of holes. A pair of blue trousers, mended in various places, were covered with a species of fluff which made them offensive to the eye. Whether it was that his damp clothes exhaled a fetid odor, or that he had in his normal condition the "poor smell" which belongs to Parisian tenements, just as offices, sacristies, and hospitals have their own peculiar and rancid fetidness, of which no words can give the least ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... trembled through the cracks above died away, and the darkness became gross. The air in the hold was stifling; our souls panted for the wind and the stars outside. At the worst, when the fetid blackness lay upon our chests like a nightmare, the hatch was suddenly lifted, a rush of pure air came to us, and with it the sound of men's voices speaking on the deck above. Said one, "True the doctor pronounces him out of all danger, yet he is a ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... you, Durtal, it's superficial quackery, and that isn't all. This fetid naturalism eulogizes the atrocities of modern life and flatters our positively American ways. It ecstasizes over brute force and apotheosizes the cash register. With amazing humility it defers to the nauseating taste of the mob. It repudiates style, it rejects ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... Dank and fetid boxes and barrows, to say naught of the more ambitious shops, fill the Whitechapel Road and Petticoat Lane (now changed to Middlesex Street, but some measure of the old activities may still be seen of a ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... many diseases of the head, and more of the heart; with strong convulsions, with grievous contractions of the nerves and sinews in both hands, but especially the right; with spleen, flatus, vertigos, and deliriums; with scrofulous tumours, full of fetid purulent matter; with sour frothy ructations: with canine appetites, and crudeness of digestion, besides many others, needless to mention. This doctor therefore proposed, "that upon the meeting of the senate, certain physicians should attend it the three first days of their sitting, and ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... faculty technically call lancinating; and the patient's health, which had hitherto continued tolerably well, now begins to suffer from the irritation of the disease. In process of time the part ulcerates, a discharge of fetid ichorous matter issues from it; sometimes it bleeds freely, and there is a burning pain in the part. The ulcer becomes of considerable size, and assumes a frightful aspect. The patient becomes dejected in his spirits, his countenance is sallow and woe worn, his appetite fails, his days and nights ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... also are visible only to those who are about to enter, to whom they are then opened. When these are opened gloomy and seemingly sooty caverns are seen tending obliquely downwards to the abyss, where again there are many doors. Through these caverns nauseous and fetid stenches exhale, which good spirits flee from because they abominate them, but evil spirits seek for them because they delight in them. For as everyone in the world has been delighted with his own evil, so after death he is delighted with the stench to which his evil corresponds. In ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... things the scum and rotten Sewer, where ordures best forgotten And unmentioned still descend! Filth and garbage, stench and poison. Thou dost bear in fetid foison! Here ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... of fetid air on a hot day will bring the smell of that Sac camp to me even now. The Sacs were a migratory, brutish people, who snatched at life red-handed and growling, and as I squatted in their dirty hovels, I lost, ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Cursed be the crazy creature who torments me so much! Were it not for him, I could talk to you of more agreeable things: he is not greatly changed; and yet he has taken a great deal o f %t. But he has nearly killed me with the fetid smell of his breath; for now his is still worse than your cousin's: you guess that this is a fresh reason for my not approaching him; on the contrary, I go away as far as I can, and sit on a chair at the foot ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... day alike, squatting or lying on the cushions in these apartments. They were divided into two categories. The negresses, who formed the great majority, occupied two court-yards, and these courts exhaled a fetid odour which poisoned the whole of the Bey's palace, whenever the wind blew from that quarter. The white and sallow- complexioned women all lived together, they all wore Arab dress, with more or fewer trinkets, and there were some pretty women among them. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... Such a feat of seamanship was almost beyond belief; but we were shut up to believing, since in no other way could the vessel's miraculous escape be accounted for. The little, dumpy, red-faced figure, rigged like any scarecrow, that now stood on his cutting-stage, punching away vigorously at the fetid mass of blubber beneath him, bore no outward visible sign of a hero about him; but in our eyes he was transfigured—a being to be thought of reverently, as one who in all those dualities that go to the making of a man had proved himself of the seed ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... purify them? Is there no radical method, no force yet untried, a power not only of skillful checks, which I do not undervalue, but of controlling character? Mr. Chairman, if we sat in this chamber with closed windows until the air became thick and fetid, should we not be fools if we brought in deodorizers—if we sprinkled chloride of lime and burned assafoetida, while we disdained the great purifier? If we would cleanse the foul chamber, let us throw the windows wide open, and the sweet summer air would sweep all impurity away and fill our lungs ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... discharge black blood, and the trodden flowers lie prone upon the footways. . . . I noticed just in front of me one large bunch which had slipped off a neighbouring mound and was almost bathing in the gutter. I picked it up. Underneath, it was soiled with mud; the greasy, fetid sewer water had left black stains upon the flowers. And then, gazing at these exquisite daughters of our gardens and our woods, astray amidst all the filth of the city, I began to ponder. On what woman's bosom ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... works. In their early stage they are enclosed in an egg-shaped veil (volva), having a gelatinous inner layer. Some are bright-colored, others are pure white, and the stems of one species look as if covered with lace work. The most familiar one, Phallus impudicus, "the fetid wood witch," we have placed in the list of fungi at the end of ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... struck me in the stomach and for an instant I sickened. Now I tripped him; we toppled together, came to the ground with a thump. Here we churned, while he flung me and still I stuck. The acrid dust of the alkali enveloped us. Again he spat, fetid—I sprawled upon him, smothering his flailing arms; gave him all my weight and strength; smelled the sweat of him, snarled into his ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... was let down into the well; the crowd pressing around us, and breathlessly bending over the dark and fetid hole, the secrets of which seemed hidden in impenetrable obscurity. This was repeated several times without any result. At length, penetrating below the mud, the hooks caught an old chest, upon the top of which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the shores were completely covered with a stratum of dead salmon, exhausted in ascending the river, or destroyed at the falls; the fetid odor of which ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the appetite returns, and the symptoms above detailed rapidly subside; if, on the other hand, resolution is not progressing, the lung substance degenerates, becomes clogged up, and ceases to function. In fatal cases the breath has a peculiar, fetid, cadaverous odor, and is taken in short gasps; the horns, ears, and extremities become cold and clammy, and the pulse is imperceptible. On auscultation, when suppuration is taking place and the lung structure is breaking down, a bubbling or gurgling crepitation, caused by the passage ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... poisonous water-fungus in the form of a turnip-radish, blue and round, and swelled like a puff ball—deadly poison to every living thing. When Timar's oar struck one of these polyp-like fungi, the venomous dust shot out like a blue flame. The roots of this plant live in a fetid slime which would suffocate man or beast who should fall into it; nature has given this vegetable murderer a habitat where it is least accessible. But where the cardinal-flower spreads its clubbed suckers, and where the beautiful bells of the water-violet sway among ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... his throat long fingers clutched. A fetid, stinking breath gushed hot upon his face. He heard the raving chatter of ivories, snapping ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Their mixed forms were painfully revealed. Frame hutches, split log cabins rubbed shoulders with buildings of steel frame and stone fronts. Thousand dollar apartments gazed disdainfully down upon hovels scarcely fit to shelter swine. Their noses were proudly lifted high above the fetid atmosphere which rose from the offal-laden causeway below. They had no heed for that breeding ground of the germs of every disease known to the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... London, Edinburgh, or Glasgow Cockney's hand, immediately after it has been washed and scented, and put it to your nose—and you will begin to be apprehensive that some practical wit has substituted in lieu of the sonnet-scribbling bunch of little fetid fives, the body of some chicken-butcher of a weasel, that died of the plague. We have seen as much of what is most ignorantly and malignantly denominated dirt—one week's earth—washed off the feet of a pretty young girl on a Saturday ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... in Europe has been largely driven into Whitechapel sweaters' shops. They call the sweater in this business a "chamber master," and in these foul chambers, in the midst of "bad smells, great heat, no ventilation, and fetid refuse," men and women swelter and die, the men getting ten shillings, and the women ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... night was abominable, some unpleasant kind of meat cooked with cabbage, and though they tried to eat it, many of them could not keep it down. The ship rolled and the men grew sick. The atmosphere became fetid. Each moment seemed more impossible than the last. There was no room to move, neither could one get out and away. After supper the men lay down in the only place there was to lie, two men on the tables, two men on the benches each side, two men on the floor between, and so on all over the cabin, ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... but the sun was still above the edge of the horizon, and its beams had that soft, whitish, unnatural light of the northern summer night. A faint breeze came down from the waters of the gulf, lifting away the fetid odors of the huge camp, and bringing relief to the thousands of wet and dirty men who were half prostrated by heat and unwonted exercise. Ivan, who had lain gazing moodily through the lifted flap of the tent, had ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... but did not yield. Once more they bent their backs to the work, and this time they won. Slowly and creakingly the door rose, showing a yawning chasm beneath, while a rush of fetid air assailed ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... consuming as much oxygen as six people; air filled with shreds of tissue expelled from diseased lungs; poisonous effluvia exhaled from the bodies of people who rarely bathe, from clothing seldom washed, fetid breaths, and skin disease in different stages of development. For hours we sit in this bath of poison, and wonder at our headache and lassitude ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of the dead chivalry, of succour to the weak, life-long self-denial,—did it need the sand waste of Palestine or a tournament to call it into life? Down in that trading town, in the thick of its mills and drays, it could live, she thought. That very night, perhaps, in some of those fetid cellars or sunken shanties, there were vigils kept of purpose as unselfish, prayer as heaven-commanding, as that of the old aspirants for knighthood. She, too,—her quiet face stirred with a simple, childish ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... one of those red star-spangled passions of rebellion against his fetid days, he blindly cut Hanscha with the edge of a book which struck against her brow as he hurled it. She had been drunk and had asked of him, at sixteen, because of the handsomeness that women would easily love in him, to cadet the neighborhood of Grand Street, using her tenement as ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... Nay, if the fetid gutter had a voice And cried I was not clean, what should I care? Or you, for heretic cries? And I believe, Spite of your melancholy Sir Nicholas, Your England is as ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Caesar; and their happiness seems to me, not perhaps the same as that of the few whose sources of enjoyment are numerous, refined, and, save by their own passions, unalloyed; but equal to that of the mass of men in States the most civilized and advanced. The artisans, crowded together in the fetid air of factories, with physical ills gnawing at the core of the constitution, from the cradle to the grave; drudging on from dawn to sunset and flying for recreation to the dread excitement of the dram-shop, or the wild and vain hopes of political fanaticism,—are not in ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the eighties. The wail of a newly born baby came from the room under mine. The heat was stifling. Outdoors in the false, flickering day of the arc lights the crowd swarmed, on the curb, on the sidewalk, on the house steps. The breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards. Shouts, calls, cries, moans, the sounds of old age and of infancy, of despair and of joy, mingled and became the anonymous murmur of a hot, ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... "Close fetid cell, Where the hot vapour of an agony, Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down Horrible worms made out ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... moated gloomily by a bitter drain of blood, From whose fetid wave contumely Of all truth was reeking fumily And infectiously, I stood; Waiting for her sign— A shriek ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... and bitter fool whose timeless disappearance from the stage of King Lear seems for once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites. I must have leave to say that the coincidence of these two in the scheme of a single play is a thing hardly bearable by men who object to too strong a savour of those too truly "Eternal Cesspools" over which the first of living humourists ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... used to the fetid atmosphere of bar-rooms and to the soft living of the great city, found his nerve beginning to crack under the strain. Cold drops stood out on his forehead and his hands shook from excitement and anxiety. What kind of a man was ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... senior partner; that, after this, they had a good long period of comparative quiet, during which they held a riotous game of hide-and-seek across the lane and down among sewers and dust holes, and delightfully noisome and fetid places of a similar character; interrupted at irregular intervals by a vagrant street boy, or a daring cat, or an inquisitive cur; that this game was stopped at about ten o'clock by the advent of Mr Denham, who generally gave them, the rats, a smile of recognition as he passed to his ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... islands of Mindanao and Sulu. In Mindanao Island, on the neck of land forming the western extremity, the Durien thrives. It is about as large as a pineapple, white inside, and when ripe it opens out in three or four places. It is very delicious eating, but has a fetid smell. The seeds, as large as beans, are good to eat when roasted. The tree bears fruit about ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... was the sublimated dust of deadly nightshade, which kindles the red fires of fever and rots the roots of the tongue. There was the fetid powder of stramonium, that grips the lungs like an asthma; and quinia, that shakes its victims like the cold hand of the miasma of the Pontine marshes. The essence of poppies, ten times sublimated, a few grains of which bring on the stupor of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... answered, "that salt has a vile odor to the Indians. They do not use it with their food, preferring to season that instead with the sugar they make from the maple tree. Therefore, the bay into which we are soon to venture they call the Bay of the Fetid, or ill-smelling salty country, on account of ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 10th, innumerable fire spouts were seen leaping and flaring amid the icy hollows of the mountain, while the river Skapta, one of the largest in the island, having first rolled down to the plain a vast volume of fetid waters mixed ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... the prisoners were packed in like herrings in a barrel. Abyssinians themselves, hard-hearted as they are, described the scene at night as something fearful. The huts, crowded to excess, were close, the atmosphere fetid, the stench unbearable. There lay, side by side, the poor, starved vagabond, chained hands and feet, and often with a large forked piece of wood several yards long fixed round his neck, and the warrior who had bled ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... ASSAFOETIDA. Gum. L. E. D.—This drug has a strong fetid smell, somewhat like that of garlick; and a bitter, acrid, biting taste. It looses with age of its smell and strength, a circumstance to be particularly regarded in its exhibition. It consists of about one-third part pure resin, and two-thirds of gummy matter; ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... bending worn-out rails. But on this day, by happy chance, he had fled from the high road by the first opening that offered, and he no longer groped his way amongst obscene refuse, sickened by the bloated bodies of dead dogs, and fetid odors from unclean decay, but the malpassage had become a peaceful winding lane, with warm shelter beneath its banks from the dismal wind. For a mile he had walked quietly, and then a turn in the road showed ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the fruit of a tree of that name. It has an extremely fetid and disagreeable smell, which will effectually prevent the contact of flies or any other insect. On this account it is a valuable preventive to the attacks of flies upon open wounds, in addition to which ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... formed something like a half-decayed turnip stuck upon a mop-stick. Let the reader only imagine to himself a figure of this sort, constantly opening the slit that I have above described, and vomiting forth at once, from a fetid carcase, the most disgusting sound and stench, and then he will have some faint idea of the scene exhibited by this animal of a Customhouse officer. After being admonished twice to be peaceable, and not attending to it, he and his satellites were handed out of the crowd, and banished ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... while the emperors who wielded the sceptre of the Roman empire were hastening the ruin of the existing civilization. It was in such an age and amid such surroundings that the Gospels and the Epistles came forth as the lotus springs, pure and radiant from the foul and fetid quagmire. What could have produced them? The widely accepted rule that religions are the products of their environments is surely at fault here. Neither in the natural impulses of a dozen Judean fishermen ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... and without any apparent reason, were seized with violent heats in the head and with redness and inflammation of the eyes. Internally the throat and the tongue were quickly suffused with blood, and the breath became unnatural and fetid. There followed sneezing and hoarseness; in a short time the disorder, accompanied by a violent cough, reached the chest; then fastening lower down, it would move the stomach and bring on all the vomits of bile to which physicians have ever given names; and they were very distressing. An ineffectual ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... that we all regretted the Maharajah's keenness about water-buffalo and rhinos, for this entailed long days of plodding on elephants through steamy, fetid swamps, where the grass was twenty feet high and met over one's head, where the heat was intolerable, without one breath of air, and the mosquitoes maddening. A day in the swamps entailed, too, a big dose of quinine ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... recoil from what had seemed a curious deadness of his whole nature, and the awakening of the senses preceded by many months the final resurrection of the more spiritual emotions. The sources of health were still abundant in him, he admitted, if the vile air, the fetid smells, the closeness as of huddled animals, the filth, the obscenity, the insufferable bestial humanity could arouse in him a bodily nausea so nearly resembling disease. There were moments when he felt capable of any crime from sheer frenzied loathing of his surroundings—when for the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... had been watered at some fetid alkali holes that had scarce given enough to slake their thirst. The effect of the water had weakened them, and the steers that had been without water for thirty-six hours were being pushed on a ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... through the door and clattering down the stair, so we followed in the stream. A fine rain was falling, and the yellow lights from the windows glistened upon the wet cobblestones of the yard. How welcome was that breath of sweet, damp air after the fetid atmosphere of the supper-room. At the other end of the yard was an open door sharply outlined by the gleam of lanterns within, and through this they poured, amateurs and fighting-men jostling each other in their eagerness to get to the front. For my own part, being ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the brain, repose utterly forsook the patient's couch. The progress of the heat within was marked by yellowish spots, which spread over the surface of the body. If, then, a happy crisis came not, all hope was gone. Soon the breath infected the air with a fetid odour, the lips were glazed, despair painted itself in the eyes, and sobs, with long intervals of silence, formed the only language. From each side of the mouth spread foam, tinged with black and burnt blood. Blue streaks mingled with ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... had died; there appeared to be no hope. It was in vain that I endeavoured to cheer both officers and men with tales and assurances of the promised land before them, should they only reach the Nile. They had worked like slaves in these fetid marshes until their spirits were entirely broken,—the Egyptians had ceased to care whether ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... Italian soldiers and civilians. Even a few carriages appeared, conveying ladies to the shops or public gardens, now that the intense heat of the sun had subsided. Therefore he found it scarcely credible that in the fetid slums there should be such covert hatred of the white race which held undisputed sway in thoroughfares distant not a stone's throw. And, in puzzling contrast to the evidences of eye and ear, he was conscious of an uncanny sense of familiarity with his surroundings. Before the Aphrodite brought ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... fetid alleys where the sun never shone, my guide led the way, bringing me at last to the familiar Rue de Roi. My distrust had vanished by now, and I followed him unhesitatingly. Crossing the road and walking rapidly through a private passage, we reached the back ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... the forty-mile square that makes the Dismal Swamp. Thither, aforetime, even as to-day, men fled into the labyrinthine recesses to escape the justice—or the injustice—of their fellows. Runaway slaves sought asylum within its impenetrable and uncharted mazes of thicket and quaking earth, of fetid pool and slithering quicksands. Such fugitives came no more after the emancipation. Instead of slaves, there were black men who had outraged the law, who fled into the steaming, noxious waste in order to evade the penalty for crime. For a time, these evil-doers were hunted through the ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily |
