"Suffocation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that night of nights; and the bed and dressing rooms of the Princess Sophia were lighted to suffocation with smoking candles. Two maids and old Masha, general factotum of her mistress, were bustling importantly from one room to the other, bearing to her, piece by piece, their mistress's burden of jewels. At her dressing-table, pale, still wearing, as always in public, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... he must have been obtuse indeed who would not wince under this rough and bizarre, but terribly earnest and fervid preacher. For a long period he gave a series of evening lectures which were crowded to suffocation, and as the fame of him went abroad throughout all the city, he was often the cynosure of eyes that were neither friendly nor devout. But, if he sometimes failed to make a deep impression, he always succeeded in persuading his hearers of the seriousness and importance ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... the helmets instead of air, we all may be able to stand it. These special cushions keep the body from flattening out, as it normally would under such a pressure. The unconsciousness is simply a suffocation caused by the lateral muscles being unable to lift the ribs—in other words, the air-pumps aren't strong enough for the added work put upon them. At least we stand a chance this way. We may live through the pressure while we are pulling ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... down close together. Noel's face still had on it that strange look of waiting; and Morland sat obedient, with his hand on her heart, and his own heart beating almost to suffocation. They sat, still as mice, and the moon crept up. It laid a first vague greyness on the high wall, which spread slowly down, and brightened till the lichen and the grasses up there were visible; then crept on, silvering the dark above their heads. Noel pulled his sleeve, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... decided to make the attempt, and was accordingly rowed to the right bank of the river, when I took to the swamp, hungry and savage enough to have eaten any alligator fool-hardy enough to assail me. After a hard scramble, together with two or three plunges waist deep, I escaped suffocation, and gained one of the banks dividing and draining these vast fields: following this, unimpeded by other difficulty, I reached, after half an hour's march, the high land; and, attracted by the sounds of merriment, mounted the first bluff, where I found a large barn occupied ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... lighted with tufts of grass for their relief. The trial of this ever busy and tormenting insect is inconceivable, but to those who have endured it. We retire to rest, enveloped in clothes almost to suffocation, but the musquitoe finds its way under the blankets, piercing with its envenomed trunk, till we often rise in a fever. Nor are we relieved from this painful scourge until the return of a slight frost, in ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... directed to be hanged, and two who were to have been transported for ten years, to transportation for life. In comparison with death, the condition of the prisoners, with whom the jails and fortresses were crowded to suffocation, was scarcely to be envied. Though all were uncondemned, and most of them innocent, the whole were delivered over to the merciless authority of apostolic miscreants, who seemed to find no gratification but in the invention of new ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... expressed their reliance upon his sufferings as their only refuge; but from total debility and oppression they could speak very little: they complained of great weakness, lameness, blindness, and a feeling of suffocation. At four in the afternoon little Abel, and in the same tent, the widow Salome, and at six o'clock old Thomas, (Kapik,) died. 27th, There was little improvement; besides those who remained ill many ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... permanently open instead of closing when the animal for a moment discontinues his efforts. If after a while he loses his balance and tumbles over, there can be no longer any mistake. It is the saliva becoming more and more glutinous, irritating the fauces and threatening suffocation. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... of this way of desolation contract still more. They impel a feeling of suffocation, of a nightmare of falling which oppresses and strangles: and in these depths where the walls seem to be coming nearer and closing in, you are forced to halt, to wriggle a path for yourself, to vex and disturb the dead, to be pushed about by the endless ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... normal, serene and even familiar in effect was the room into which I came. Yet, as I closed the door behind me and stood in that softly brilliant radiance, a shudder shook me from head to foot with the violence of an electric shock. A sense of suffocation caught at my throat ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... half-awakened man struggled as if in delirium, scarcely realizing the danger. He was aware of suffering, of horror, of suffocation. Then the brain flashed into life, and he grappled fiercely with his dread antagonist. Murphy snapped like a mad dog, his lips snarling curses; but Hampton fought silently, desperately, his brain clearing as he succeeded in wrenching those claws from his lacerated ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... bone, or plucked out an eye, and been silent; but they never grappled iron and whalebone into the very nerves and life-blood of their system. They might possibly have passed a dagger too deeply info the heart, and died; but they never drew a ligature of suffocation around it, and expected to live! They never tied up the mouths of the millions of air-vessels in the lungs, and then taxed them to the full measure of action and respiration. Even Pharaoh only demanded bricks without straw for a short time; but the fashionable lady asks ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... within me like a suffocation. But the past day of my torture was not easily forgotten; ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... rout. For Adrian was much too small. He was spare, he was meagre; he was sapless, like his books; and the part in his smoothly plastered black hair scarcely reached to her eyebrows. She felt herself swelling, distending, filling her place to repletion, to suffocation, and rose to flee. She was for seeking refuge in the brown beard of Stephen Giles, which was at least on a level with her own chin, when suddenly she perceived, in a dark corner of the place, a tower of strength more promising still—a man even taller, broader, ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... and threw up her hands with a curious quick motion, like one in suffocation, who was trying to find a voice; but she ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... administered. The disease runs a regular course and its most dangerous complication is the membrane which forms in the larynx and threatens to suffocate the child unless prompt intubation is performed—the slipping of a silver tube in the larynx to prevent suffocation and death. The early use of antitoxin greatly lessens all these ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... do!" exclaimed the old gentleman, aghast, as well he might be, at the proposal, since none of the furniture in question had been subjected to such a process for years, and immediate suffocation, with intolerable confusion of papers, must have been the result. "If you want to go and see your aunt, my girl, go, in heaven's name. I can spare you as long as you like. But you mustn't tidy up here. No; that would never do. And, Dorothea, if you should hear anything, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... pen suddenly stuck in the paper, and scattered a little shower of ink-drops all round it. "The library," repeated her ladyship, in a voice suggestive of approaching suffocation. "I undertake to control myself, Sir Patrick! Any thing ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... fire under her soap-pot, if I had to live as the rest of the drove did. Can you form an idea, Waldo, of what it must be to be shut up with cackling old women, who are without knowledge of life, without love of the beautiful, without strength, to have your soul cultured by them? It is suffocation only to breathe the air they breathe; but I made them give me room. I told them I should leave, and they knew I came there on my own account; so they gave me a bedroom without the companionship of one of those things that were having their brains slowly diluted and squeezed out of them. I ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... at the mantel door, at everything. I did not fear suffocation; before the thought had come to me I had already seen a gleam of light from the two small ventilating pipes in the roof. They supplied air, but nothing else. The room ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a climate, in the fierce heat of midsummer, that dungeon would have been too close for a single European captive; to crowd it with more than sevenscore persons for a night meant death by all the agonies of heat, thirst, and suffocation. In vain they endeavored to bribe the guard to transfer part of them to another room, in vain they begged for mercy, in vain they tried to burst the door. Their jailers only mocked ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... visits of that special insect to which each is adapted, and, having secured him, to compel him unwittingly to do their bidding. In the steaming tropical jungles, where vegetation is luxuriant to the point of suffocation, and where insect life swarms in mvriads undreamed of here, we can see the best of reasons for orchids mounting into trees and living on air to escape strangulation on the ground, and for donning larger and more gorgeous ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... was stricken into ruin. On the same day the electric lighting apparatus of Fort Boncelles having been destroyed, the few living men of its garrison fought through the following night in darkness, and in momentary danger of suffocation from gases emitted by the exploding ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... like a man who has narrowly escaped suffocation. "Young man, I b'lieve you're a square dealer, and that yuh savvy the cow business. I've thought it ever since yuh started t' work." His keen old eyes twinkled at the memory of Rowdy's arrival, and Rowdy ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... are speedy and comparatively economical. They are slightly dangerous, however; not that they are likely to explode, but from the fact that the gas, particularly if of a poor quality—which is usually the case—rapidly vitiates the air of the room, and may cause fainting or even suffocation. If the apparatus is properly adjusted, and one makes sure of the ventilation, heating the water and admitting fresh air before entering the tub, no distress need be anticipated. There are also gasolene and kerosene heaters, and an electric coil placed in the water is the safest and cleanest but ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... been given, before the hammocks were all got on deck, and the ports opened, to give light and room below, until the place of fire could be discovered, and better means obtained for drawing water. Mr. Tailour did not recover from the suffocation so fast as he expected, and was obliged to go upon deck for air. There he found Captain Le Gros in consultation with the master, who, being of opinion that the fire was on the larboard side, gave orders to wear the ship, so as to allow the water which had been hove ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... of dawn, he awoke, a strange sensation, almost of strangling and suffocation, upon him. There, bending over, framed in a mist of blue-black waves, he saw his lady's face. Its milky whiteness lit by her strange eyes—green as cats' they seemed, and blazing with the fiercest passion of love—while ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... and animation in this quarter of the Fort to engage the attention, but it seems silent and deserted when compared with the crowd of the more exclusively native portions. Here the streets literally swarm with life—men, women, children, and bullocks, filling them almost to suffocation. Ranges of open shops appear on each side, raised a foot or two from the ground, the occupant being seated upon a ledge in front, in the midst of his wares. Here, too, immense quantities of English glass and crockery-ware are exhibited, ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... migrated one by one. The curate coughed till he was black in the face—it was in vain. He respired with difficulty—it was equally ineffectual in awakening sympathy. Seats are once again to be had in any part of our parish church, and the chapel-of-ease is going to be enlarged, as it is crowded to suffocation ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... called the Estancia de los Ingleses. Here our travellers passed the night, not perhaps quite so comfortably as they would have done in their berths, but without suffering too much from the feeling of suffocation experienced by other explorers. The fleas, however, were very troublesome, and their unremitting attacks kept the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... on the body of the unfortunate woman, and the jury returned the following astounding verdict:—"That the deceased died from the effusion of blood into the chest, which occasioned suffocation, but from what cause is ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... (suffocation) by Gas. Asphyxiation by gas is treated the same as in the case of drowning, omitting, of course, the operation of getting the ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... with an adventure which well-nigh proved serious. I was awakened at night by the flash from a bull's eye lantern, a sense of suffocation and a scream from my wife. A masked burglar was before me, pressing to my face a handkerchief saturated with chloroform, and endeavoring to take from under the mattress a large sum of money which I had collected ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... him? And again came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old saturated leather. Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put the whole thing down in black and white! And suddenly he breathed with difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were swollen. He got up and went out into the air. The stars were very bright. He passed along the terrace round the corner of the house, till, through the window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the piano, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sometimes even chickens, tied together by the legs, and piles of mattresses and pillows and shapeless bundles of clothes. All were white with dust. Under the lurid glare I saw one old woman lying on her back across a cart, ghastly white and, if not dead already of fear and heat and suffocation, certainly almost gone. We ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... light dies away all becomes still again, unless any marshy ground shelters frogs. But to hear all this you must go to the old jungle, where the tall trees stand near together and shut out the light of day, and almost the air, for there is a painful sense of suffocation in the dense wood. ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... day when the unhappy Porteous was expected to suffer the sentence of the law, the place of execution, extensive as it is, was crowded almost to suffocation. There was not a window in all the lofty tenements around it, or in the steep and crooked street called the Bow, by which the fatal procession was to descend from the High Street, that was not absolutely filled with spectators. The uncommon height and antique ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... stairfoot, Uncle Mo, silent, looking inquiry, mistrusting speech. Aunt M'riar used a touch on his arm, and a nod towards the door of the little parlour, to get safe out of the children's hearing before risking speech, with that suffocation in her throat. Then when the door ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... fireworks. As evening closed in, the fatigue of the people rendered rest, as well as refreshment, necessary, and every booth was, in a short time, crowded with eager inquiries for eatables and drinkables. The dancing booths were crowded to suffocation, and the viands of the purveyors of grog ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... say they did. There ain't any way they didn't turn and twist the teepee for comfort. That's what makes it so good. Ye kin live in it forty below zero an' fifty 'bove suffocation an' still be happy. It's the changeablest kind of a layout for livin' in. Real hot weather the thing looks like a spider with skirts on and held high, an' I tell you ye got to know the weather for a teepee. Many a hot night on the plains I've been woke up by hearing 'Tap-tap-tap' all around me in ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... were loud and incessant, even before she had concluded the words; their eyes were fixed upon each other with a hopeless and agonizing expression: but no sooner were they uttered, than a strong hysteric sense of suffocation rose to her throat; she panted rapidly for breath; Denis opened his arms, and she fell, or rather threw herself, over in a swoon upon his bosom. To press his lips to hers, and carry her to the brink of the well, was but the work of a moment. There he laid her, and after having sprinkled her face ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... slowly got better (and, after all, I was not much damaged, as soon as I had got over the effects of the suffocation and terror of that awful night) I heard more about the fire. Permission was given me to see one friend a day for ten minutes at a time, and the reader may imagine the wild excitement ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... breathing world," and is usually strangled by the hands of its unnatural mother immediately upon its birth. The manner in which this act is said to be performed, is by filling up the mouth of the babe with rice, and holding its nostrils closed with the hand until suffocation is produced. ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... all was suffocation and horror. Unwounded, but buried and battered, with his musket torn from his grasp, Fritz struggled out through the writhing heap of humanity, and saw that the head of the column had fallen back for a breathing space, though with the evident intention of ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... from the great field pieces of the enemy falling upon the forts had shattered the cupolas and had caused them to fall in upon the Belgians who were thus imprisoned and barely escaped suffocation from the poisonous gases of the exploding shells. The electric wires were cut immediately so that the poor things who were entrapped three stories underground groped about in the dark some time before they at last found the stairs which led them up through shot and ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now, scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy wave. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging; the laboring ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... king of a certain country which is called Kurga, to be disposed of there. The King of Kurga put him into a sack, sewed up the mouth of it, and then laid him across the wooden image of an ass, and left him there to die of hunger and suffocation. ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... scorching up, burning alive internally, in an agony of fire and suffocation, and I wanted air. I madly wanted air. My efforts to raise a window were vain, for all the windows in the car were screwed down. Nelson had seen drink-crazed men, and thought I wanted to throw myself out. He tried to restrain me, but I fought ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... that it would be his last, as his body was worn out. At first he prescribed for himself, and nearly to the period of his death delivered his opinion of the remedies offered him by his wife and Dr. Chartran.... When his wife, on account of a fit of suffocation, said to him, 'Providence ought to exempt you from these sufferings, as you have relieved so many, and endured such numerous persecutions,' he replied, 'Me: why me? Every one works according to the abilities and powers which Providence has bestowed upon him. Superiority or inferiority exists ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... carrying drawn swords. The sharp, naked weapons alarmed the crowds in the streets, and without distinction of sect or class men rushed for the church, everybody trying to outstrip his neighbour in the race to get there first. Soon all the approaches to the building were packed to suffocation; no one stirred backwards or forwards, and the prefect's chariot was unable to advance. What seemed a hostile barricade of human beings welded together obstructed his path. In vain did the soldiers brandish ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... did not prevent the crowding of the barn "almost to suffocation," and deep attention on the ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... him the probable mode of termination of his disease: 'that he might die from suffocation or more probably the aneurism would burst and cause death by hemorrhage.' He expressed a decided preference for the latter mode. His attacks of dyspnoea were horrible, threatening immediate dissolution. I was compelled to give chloroform to relieve ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... to which this dance is performed, I know not well how to describe it. By inflating and depressing the lungs so as to create a convulsive heaving of the breast, a sound is produced, somewhat similar to the groans of a person suffering from suffocation; and it is to this sound they grin, and jerk their shoulders. The whole performance is quite in keeping; the music worthy of the dancing, the dancing worthy of the music. They have boxing too, but do not practise the art after the fashion of the Cribs and ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... strange sense of heat and suffocation, and with difficulty shook off his covering. Rubbing his eyes, he discovered that an extra blanket had in some mysterious way been added in the night; and beneath his head was a pillow he had no recollection of placing there when he went to sleep. By degrees the events of ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... from there they would be snatched afar, to the top of one of the mountains of eternal frost and snow, where they would be allowed to shiver for a time; thence they would be precipitated into a loathsome pool of boiling brimstone, to wallow there in conflagration, smoke, and the suffocation of horrible stench; from the pool they would be driven to the marsh of Hell that they might embrace and be embraced by its reptiles many times worse than serpents and vipers; after allowing them half an hour's dalliance with these creatures, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... lay motionless, then the intolerable agony clutched her throat with an aching sense of suffocation, and she sat up, with nerveless hands lying on the package in her lap. She was prepared for, expectant of the worst, but the details added keener stings to suffering that had benumbed her. At last, with a shuddering ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a sweet voice, 'O blessed youth, who brought me hither! See, I am now come to myself.' 'O my lady,' replied he, 'three black eunuchs came hither, bearing this chest;' and told her all that had happened and how his being belated had proved the means of her preservation from death by suffocation. Then he asked her who she was and what was her story. 'O youth,' said she, 'praised be God who hath thrown me into the hands of the like of thee! But now put me back into the chest and go out into the road and hire the first muleteer or horse-letter thou meetest, to carry it to thy house. When ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... from the house to the edge of the wood, sitting down for five minutes at either end. The walking was resumed in the afternoon. A physician, consulted ten years before, had spoken of hypertrophy because she had suffered from suffocation. Ever since, this word had been used to describe the ailment of the baroness. The baron would say "my wife's hypertrophy" and Jeanne "mamma's hypertrophy" as they would have spoken of her hat, her dress, or her umbrella. She had been very pretty in her youth ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... felt it as it passed my lips, for a black frown gathered on Robert's face, and his strong hands closed with an ugly sort of grip. But he did not touch the poor soul gasping there before him, and seemed content to let the slow suffocation of that stifling room end his ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... alleged experience in the cabin of a sunken ship. It is narrated that there was revealed to his appalled sight the spectacle of the drowned passengers in various attitudes of alarm or devotion when the dreadful suffocation came. The story is told with great effect and power, but unless a voltaic lantern is included in the stage furniture, the ghastly tableaux must sink into the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... came a brighter flash, a deeper crash, and it seemed for the moment that the house was immersed in a lurid glare of light. Annie, screaming, started to her feet, then fell back, fainting, and black in the face with suffocation. ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... wood and the danger of suffocation precluded the building of an adequate fire, and the miserable night wore interminably upon the nerves ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... constitution. Through carelessness Michel had left the tap full on. Nicholl made haste to turn off this flow of oxygen with which the atmosphere was saturated, and which would have caused the death of the travellers, not by suffocation, but ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... troubled dreams it was with a sense of suffocation. She had stirred in her sleep and the thongs had cut more deeply into the flesh at her knees, causing her pain. Below the knees she was numb from the constant pressure, but she moved her toes up and down and her limbs tingled painfully as the ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... night. The evening before she had been sent for in haste to a woman in desperate illness. She came, and found a young Jewess, with a ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women friends in a state of raging delirium. The room, was full to suffocation of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns. It had been Marcella's first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an instant. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the self-abasement of her mother. She could not weep, but she was white as clay, and her heart was swollen with a sense of wrong and injustice, until breathing was almost suffocation. She looked with a piteous entreaty at Isabel. Her little sister had taken a seat at the extremity of the room away from her. She watched Antonia with eyes full of terror. But there was no sympathy in her face, only an uncertainty which seemed ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... them. She assented, having, justly enough, all confidence in my sagacity; and I put them into a warm old worsted hood, and brought them into the house. But the hood was not a hen, though it was tucked around them almost to the point of suffocation; and they filled the house with dolorous cries,—"yapping" it is called in the rural districts. Nothing would soothe them but to be cuddled together in somebody's lap, and brooded with somebody's hand. Then their shrill, piercing shrieks would die ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... breathing of suffocation and of lung diseases is due to the excessive stimulation of this center, caused by the excess of carbon dioxid in the blood. Various mental influences from the brain itself, as the emotions of alarm or joy or distress, modify the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... the solitude through the long autumn evening. As may be supposed, no air came to the sleeping rooms save through the mouth of the cavern; and as the aperture above our hero's door had been likewise closed, the air was oppressive almost to suffocation. ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... sufficiently to combine with the oxygen. This product of the combustion of gas (free carbon) might be regarded as rather wholesome than otherwise (as its nature is that of an absorbent) were it not the worst kind of dust to breathe—in fact, clogging the lungs to suffocation. In vapor gas—made at low heat—the carbon is in a large degree only mechanically mixed with the hydrogen, and is liable, especially in cold weather, to be deposited in the pipes. This leaves only a very poor, thin gas, mainly hydrogen, which burns with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... rage against the King for not noticing her dancing or applauding it, had been the trifling cause of the sudden volcanic eruption of the public mind, became more than ever the idol of the hour. The night after the riot, the Opera-house was crowded to suffocation,—and the stage was covered with flowers. Among the countless bouquets offered to the triumphant little dancer, came one which was not thrown from the audience, but was brought to her by a messenger; it was a great cluster of scarlet carnations, and attached to it was a tiny velvet ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... as he spoke, and then, with the swiftness and the strength that had marked them in health, the outlaw's fingers fastened upon his hairy throat. The long, thin hands clamped themselves upon his neck, and for a moment Monkey Mack was helpless in the agonies of suffocation. Then his left hand pointed the revolver at Ryder's ear; there was a sharp report, and the outlaw fell limply, and rolled back upon the flat water-worn rock, his shattered head to the stone, his arms out thrown, his lifeless face turned up to ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... princes," took a most determined step toward reform. As it is the only case of the kind on record, a description of the wedding may not be uninteresting. Several hundred invitations were given, and at the appointed hour the parlors were crowded almost to suffocation. The bride was attired in a white marceline silk of most scant proportions; her veil consisted of one breadth of tulle caught in her comb, at the back of her hair; no flowers were worn except a very minute bunch in front of her dress. The groom ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... it seemed that we were. What with actual suffocation, and what with the poisonous fumes of the chloroform, the Lady Frances seemed to have passed the last point of recall. And then, at last, with artificial respiration, with injected ether, and with ...
— The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax • Arthur Conan Doyle
... soon became packed to suffocation, while the temporary seats which had been erected overflowed before either team appeared on the field. Frank had taken the precaution to have ropes stretched for the purpose of holding the crowd back. It was well that ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... ten hours, with the cold at 27 and even at 28 degrees, thousands of soldiers who fancied themselves in safety, died either from cold or suffocation, just as had happened at the gates of Smolensk, and at the bridges across the Berezina. Sixty thousand men had crossed that river, and twenty thousand recruits had since joined them; of these eighty thousand, half had already perished, the greater part within the ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... abodes standing without any order and enclosed by a stockade, was, at times, the scene of almost {40} endless merry-making. Now it was a big feast; now a game of chance played by two large parties matched against each other, while the lodge was crowded almost to suffocation by eager spectators; now a dance, of the peculiar Indian kind; now some solemn ceremony to propitiate the spirits who were supposed to rule the weather, the crops, the hunting, and all ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... their partisans, fell on Pope John X., who was staying in the Lateran Palace, murdered his brother Pietro before his eyes, and dragged him through the streets of Rome to the castle. The unfortunate Pope lingered awhile in a dark dungeon, and was ultimately killed by suffocation. Marozia, perhaps to dispel the suspicions of a violent death, allowed him to be buried with due honors near the middle door of the Lateran, at the foot of the nave. His gravestone was seen and described by Johannes Diaconus, but has long since disappeared. In 974 Crescenzio, son of Theodora, committed ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... to a ring in the wall he lay, having a cork gag strapped so tightly between his teeth that I wondered how he had escaped suffocation. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... establishment where one hundred and fifty girls, in a single room, were engaged in needle-work. Pale-faced, and with low vitality and feeble circulation, they were unconscious that they were breathing air that at once produced in me dizziness and a sense of suffocation. If I had remained a week with, them, I should, by reduced vitality, have become unconscious of ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... refusal to go back to New York. "I know I am silly," she told her son, "but I have a feeling that I shouldn't be able to breathe, and should die of suffocation." ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... used to be wasted, by being thrown against windows, walls, and roofs, the firemen now seek out the spot where the danger lies, and creeping on hands and feet into a chamber full of flame, or smoke, often at the hazard of suffocation, discover the exact seat of danger; and, by bringing the water in contact with it, obtain immediate mastery over the powerful element with which they have to contend. In this daring and dangerous work men have occasionally fainted from heat, or dropped down from want of respiration, in which ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... reinforcements up to the front. Vast numbers of large shells containing poisonous "mustard" gas were collected. These were to be fired from heavy guns and made to explode far behind the Allied lines. By this means suffocation might be spread among the reserves, among motor drivers, and even among the army mules, and by deranging the transport service make it impossible to concentrate troops to withstand ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... my head from its bent position over the book, and drew a long breath—something oppressed me with a sense of suffocation, and looking up I saw that I was being steadily closed in, as by a contracting cage. The little room, draped with its soft purple hangings, was now too small for me to move about, I was pinned to my chair, and the ceiling was apparently descending ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... illusory biographies which always accompany young vocalists. There was, however, intense curiosity to hear and see this redoubtable singer who had held the citadel of the Royal Italian Opera against the attraction of Jenny Lind, and the theatre was crowded to suffocation by rank, fashion, beauty, and notabilities on the night of her first concert, October 9th. When she stepped quietly on the stage, dressed in black velvet, a brooch of brilliants on her bosom, and her hair cut a la Titus, with a music-paper in her hand, there ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... good," he said, laughing; though his heart beat to suffocation. "Just give me a word of hope, Helena! Don't turn me down, ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... troops immediately on our left, jumped out of their trenches, falling as they ran. The whole thing seemed absolutely incomprehensible—until I got a whiff of the gas. They ran like men possessed, gasping, choking, blinded and dropping with suffocation. They could hardly be blamed. It was a new device in warfare and thoroughly illustrative of the Prussian idea ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... it is a vital necessity when distressed for wind. And the impossibility to draw breath when off the ground is the reason of the death of horses in steeple-chasing and hurdle-racing; they die of suffocation. The reason is a sufficient one for the discontinuance of such racing ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... sleep by the fact that if the heart does not markedly slow, there is cardiac weakness or some general disturbance. There is also cardiac weakness if there is a tendency to yawn or to take long breaths after slight exertions or during exertion, or if there is a feeling of suffocation and the person suddenly wants the windows open, or cannot work, even for a few minutes, in a closed room. If these disturbances are purely functional, exercise not only may be endured, but will relieve some nervous heart disturbances, while it will aggravate a real heart disability. If the heart ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... scene into a Court, Near to suffocation full; Counsel unto lies resort, And the jury loud exhort ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... knew the doughty heroes, with whom I had entered the lists. The chiefs of Homer, with their chines and goblets and canisters of bread, would have been unequal to the contest. I had time enough to contemplate the bishop; I thought I beheld him quaffing suffocation and stowing in apoplexy; and Homer's simile of the ox and Agamemnon forced ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... is used to cover a variety of sensations from the internal organs, such as hunger, thirst, nausea, suffocation and less definite bodily sensations that color the emotional tone of any moment, contributing to "euphoria" and also to disagreeable states of mind. Hunger is a sensation aroused by the rubbing together of ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... of smoke suddenly closed, the flame sank down, and again all was gloom and darkness in the cavern. The thick stifling vapour of the damp wood, augmenting as the flame diminished, was now so overpowering that the Turks were in imminent danger of suffocation. In their extremity, making a violent effort, their pent up voices found vent in a cry of such startling wildness, that the Uzcoques, struck with terror, sprang back from the mouth of the cave, hurrying the maiden with them. The cry was not repeated, for the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... causes of the discharge of energy is that due to an attempt to obstruct forcibly the mouth and the nose so that asphyxia is threatened. Under such conditions neither friend nor foe is trusted, and a desperate struggle for air ensues. It will be readily granted that the reactions to prevent suffocation were established for the purpose of self-preservation, but the discharge of nerve-muscular energy to this particular end is no more specific and no more shows adaptive qualities than do the preceding examples. Even the proposal ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... itself the condemnation of the civilized world. The earnest antislavery convictions which had characterized it only twenty-five years before, violently suppressed from utterance, seem to have perished by suffocation. The common sentiment of southern Christianity was expressed in that serious declaration of the Southern Presbyterian Church, during the war, of its "deep conviction of the divine appointment of domestic servitude," and of the "peculiar mission of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... astonished and uneasy, when she saw him lying, half-dressed, across his bed, haggard, biting the pillow to stifle his sobs. He got out of bed and tried to finish dressing himself, but a fresh attack seized him, and, his head giddy and his heart palpitating to suffocation, recovering from a momentary faintness, he ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... breathe quite easily; there was no resistance—that was a comfort; there would be no suffocation about it.... She put out her left hand and touched the handle, conscious less of its sudden coolness than of the unbearable heat in which the room seemed almost suddenly plunged. She could hear the drumming pulses in her temples and the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... fatigue; but the guide cried "Forward," and we soon came to the most disagreeable part of the business. The smoke was forced by the wind in a kind of cascade some fifty yards down the declivity, and as soon as we got into it an awful sense of suffocation came on. The guide swore, and some of us talked of retreating. But the majority were for persevering; and, panting and coughing, we dashed upward, reached the summit, got into the midst of a fearful torrent of black smoke, like that which is vomited by a steamer's funnel, and staggered giddily about ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the lower rooms or underground cellars of their houses, but there the steaming mud pursued and overtook them. Had it been otherwise, they must have died of hunger or suffocation, as all avenues of egress were ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the natural intelligence of a child. But ours is just the opposite of leading forth. It is a ramming in of brain facts through the head, and a consequent distortion, suffocation, and starvation of the primary centers of consciousness. A nice day of reckoning we've got in front ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... Ephialtes, or nightmare, or indeed any other external impression upon our organs in sleep, which the patient's morbid imagination may introduce into the dream preceding the swoon. In the nightmare an oppression and suffocation is felt, and our fancy instantly conjures up a spectre to lie on our bosom. In like manner it may be remarked, that any sudden noise which the slumberer hears, without being actually awakened by it—any casual touch of his person occurring in the same manner—becomes instantly adopted in his ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... quantities was fatal to life. He showed, for instance, that in the proposed Box tunnel, on the Great Western Railway, the passage of 100 tons would deposit about 3090 lbs. of noxious gases, incapable of supporting life! Here was an uncomfortable prospect of suffocation for passengers between London and Bristol. But steps were adopted to allay these formidable sources of terror. Solemn documents, in the form of certificates, were got up and published, signed by several of the most distinguished physicians of the day, attesting the perfect wholesomeness of ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... make up an opinion. At every grand outcry a simultaneous rush would, however, take place from all parts of the camp, proper and improper, towards the pulpit, altar, and pen; till the crowding, by increasing the suffocation and the fainting, would increase the tumult and the uproar; but this, in the estimation of many devotees, only rendered the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... A sudden sense of suffocation dispelled the dream. He found himself breathless, in a bath of perspiration. The punkah had stopped dead. And one must have endured this trifling inconvenience to gauge the significance of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... evening came for the great debate on the Eight flours Bill between Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Hyndman. St. James's Hall was packed to suffocation. I sat on the platform near my old leader, and I saw how the effort was telling on him. His opponents in the meeting behaved with incredible brutality. Some of them laughed aloud when he said, "Believe me, this has tried me more than I had thought." But now the hero they laughed at is dead, ...
— Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh • George W. Foote
... or wholly through the mouth. They are apt to breathe noisily, especially when they eat and drink. They sleep with their mouth open, breathe hard and snore. They have attacks of slight suffocation sometimes, especially seen in young children. There may be difficulty in nursing in infants; they sleep poorly, toss about in bed, moan, talk, and night terrors are common. They may also sweat very much during sleep. A constant hacking or barking cough is a common ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... thought of that,' he said, 'and I believe that I can manage to let him down gently, so that he shall die of suffocation, instead of having his neck put out of joint. I ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest |
