"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most ghastly deformities I have ever seen was a tumour under a Mullah's foot. It was an almost spherical tumour, some three inches in diameter, with skin drawn tight and shining over its surface. It had patches of red on the otherwise whitish-yellow skin, and gave the impression ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... end in any other way. A masculine hand had opened the orifice through which was escaping the last bubble of her existence.... And the horrified captain, poring over her sad profile with its purpling temple, thought that he never would be able to blot that ghastly vision from his memory. The phantasm would diminish, becoming invisible in order to deceive him, but would surely come forth again in all his hours of pensive solitude; it was going to embitter his nights on watch, to follow him through the years ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... him stood a moment or so motionless, and seemed to listen, for it turned to the right, to the left, its visage covered with the black, hideous mask which is worn in carnivals. Slowly the mask was removed. Could that be his son's face,—the son of a brave man? It was pale and ghastly with scoundrel fears; the base drops stood on the brow; the eye was haggard and bloodshot. He looked as a coward looks when death ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... army do much the same. What matter to Burgunds and Herules who was who, provided they had any thing to be plundered of? Totila has allowed many Roman senators to live in Campania. They hear that Narses has taken Rome, they begin to flock to the ghastly ruin. Perhaps there will be once again a phantom senate, phantom consuls, under the Romani nominis umbram. The Goths catch them, and kill them to a man. And there is an end ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the world-mart be wider opened to the product mulct from toil; That the labor and land of our neighbors should become your war-won spoil; That the eyes of an outraged people might be turned from your graft and greed In the misruled, plundered home-land by lure of war's ghastly deed; And that priests of the warring nations could pray to the selfsame God For His blessing on battle and murder and corpse-strewn, blood-soaked sod. Oh, fools! if God were a woman, think you She would let ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... it,' and he drew his dagger. The poor fellow stretched out his throat, and awaited the stroke with a ghastly smile. Raphael caught his eye; his heart ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... met his wife on the stairs. She had somewhat recovered her calmness on the road, and as he interrogated her with a searching glance, she made a ghastly effort ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... now's de time! Git up quick, deary, but fer de Lawd's sake doan' make no noise! Follow de ole woman—dis way.' I got up at once and obeyed her. It was a ghastly sort of thing, this Marse Edwin business, but I saw a chance of escape at the bottom of it. We went to the lower part of the house on tip-toe, and the negress, opening the street door, pushed me ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... drew off his mailed gauntlet, and gave Gascoyne's hand one last final clasp, strong, earnest, and intense with the close friendship of young manhood, and poor Gascoyne looked up at him with a face ghastly white. ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... man got up. He spread out his arms; and he shouted, with a great voice, like the heroes of the Iliad. The two wounds were mortal; they were hideous, ghastly wounds, ripping up the vital organs in the man's body and severing the great arteries. The splendid pagan knew he had received his death wounds; and, true to his atavistic ideal, the ideal of the Greek, the Hebrew and the Roman, ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... the light where all of us could see—the thing Rolldown had discarded from his treasures, that I had picked up and been robbed of in the kindly dark—the old brown casket-thing with the polished surfaces and the bits of intricate and ghastly carvings that had once let in the light of day and the sound of words—the old, brown, sea-bitten, sand-scoured skull of Andrew Blake, with the two gold teeth in the upper jaw dulled by the tarnishing tides that had brought it up slowly from its bed in the bottom of the sea. And to think ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... chest—Life and Death on the Ocean—quarto-sized and printed in agate. It was filled with mutiny, murder, storm, open-boat cannibalism and agonies of thirst, handspike and cutlass inhumanities. No shark, pirate nor man-killing whale had been missed; no ghastly wreck, derelict nor horrifying phantom of the sea had escaped the nameless, furious compiler. For four days and nights, Andrew glared consumingly into this terrible book, and when he came to the writhing "Finis," involved in a sort of typhoon tailpiece—he was whipped, and never could bring ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... excused this seeming weakness to a companion thus: "Tim, I haven't cried this twenty year; but they were all good boys, and my countrymen." The next day when the roll was called, and they answered not, we thought of their ghastly faces as we laid them in the trench, and hearts beat quick. When we sat down to eat and missed a messmate, the query went round, "Will it be my turn next?" A comrade's faults were now forgotten, his good qualities magnified, and all ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... and I suppose I'll be as lonely with my success as you with your adversity. Think of it—that people feel hurt by your fortune! Oh, it's ghastly ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... couldn't bear the thought of your moping here by yourself, and it was a ghastly shame of Weevil ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... Tree of the Triple Bough And the ghastly Dreams that tend you, Your growth began with the life of Man And only his death can end you: They may tug in line at your hempen twine, They may flourish with axe and saw, But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs In the ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... in the apartment, and he felt the hair rising upon his head, and cold drops of sweat trickling down his brow. His ghastly and bewildered look was hardly noticed by his parents and sister during the first moments of salutation; and, when it was, the excuse was illness and fatigue. He could neither eat nor drink, (it seemed as if he had lost altogether the faculty of swallowing,) but sat silent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... temple and an obsequious "Yes, Ma'am," any romance that had gathered round him fled away, leaving the saddest of all sad facts in living guise before me. Not only did the manhood seem to die out of him, but the comeliness that first attracted me; for, as he turned, I saw the ghastly wound that had laid open cheek and forehead. Being partly healed, it was no longer bandaged, but held together with strips of that transparent plaster which I never see without a shiver and swift recollections of scenes with which it is associated ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... back, with her face turned toward Angelica. There were deep lines of suffering marked upon it, and her eyes glittered feverishly, but otherwise she was gray and ghastly, and old. It was the horrible look of age that impressed Angelica. There were three gentlemen present, the bishop, Dr. Galbraith, and Sir ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... Society, that he promoted their efforts within his own dominions to the utmost of his ability." He pointed to the condition of Spain, which was "overspread with the thickest gloom of heathenish ignorance, beneath which the fiends and demons of the abyss seem to be holding their ghastly revels." He described it as "a country in which all sense of right and wrong is forgotten . . . where the name of Jesus is scarcely ever mentioned but in blasphemy, and His precepts [are] almost utterly unknown . . . [where] the few who are enlightened ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... people drawn from widely separated parts of Saladin's dominions. Here were Nubians from the Nile, tall and powerful men, jet black in skin, with lines of red and white paint on their faces, giving a ghastly and wild appearance to them. On their shoulders were skins of lions and other wild animals. They carried short bows, and heavy clubs studded with iron. By them were the Bedouin cavalry, light, sinewy men, brown as berries, with white turbans and garments. Near these were the cavalry ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... And Hecuba's ghastly low-voiced 'In a crowd we are terrible!'—[Greek: deinon to plethos]—as she and her women turn upon the Thracian, put out his eyes, and tear his children ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Cumberland River. That's where she's bound for, if she don't stop before she gets there Guess there ain't many of 'em inquired where she was goin', or cared much," he added, with a ghastly effort ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... rioted down the thoroughfare. Men rushed forth from every quarter, and the ghastly object in the dirt was hidden by a seething mass ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... of adverse circumstances as the combined result of parental egotism and pedantic, pedagogical ignorance, is it wonderful, I would ask, that the ghastly record of the hideous sacrifice of child-life is what it is, and that the young lives which do by chance escape the horrible holocaust, still reap the prevailing harvest of prolific ills of which the coming explanation will ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... at last experienced all that he had dreaded. He was utterly overcome. White, ghastly, trembling from head to foot, he stared at Talbot with something like horror in his face, yet he could not move. He stood shuddering, ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... Captain?" cried Doe, struggling again to rise, while Bruce drew the girl gently from his arms. "Is it the captain?" he repeated, bending his eager looks and countenance ghastly with wounds upon the Virginian. "They han't murdered you then? I'm glad on it, captain;—I'll die the easier, captain! And the gal, too?" he exclaimed, as his eyes fell upon Edith, who, scarce knowing in her horror what she did, but instinctively ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... flower from the bouquets on the table, or when the handmaiden came round to him with a dish of leguminous vegetables, could readily have been traced by a clairvoyant to associations connected with the ghastly belladonna and with the deadly bean of St. Ignatius the Martyr. For Mr. Arcubus had now arrived at the investigation of the positive poisons,—a fact which might have revealed itself to the man of science by the general narcotico-acrid expression ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... horrid burdens into the great pit at Aldgate; the bells of London tolled all day and all night for the passing of human souls. Hundreds of homes, isolated because of a victim of the plague found therein, became ghastly breeding-places of the disease, and then silent, disgusting graves. If a man shivered in fear, or staggered from weakness, or for very hunger turned sick, he was marked as a victim, and despite his protests was huddled away with the real victims to die the awful death. From every church, where ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... amusement. He considered Viola in corals as too rude a jest to share with her. Had poor Viola once grasped Harold Lind's estimation of her she would have as soon gazed upon herself in her coffin. Harold's comprehension of the essentials was beyond Jane Carew's. It was fairly ghastly, partaking of the nature of X-rays, but it never disturbed Harold Lind. He went along his dance-track undisturbed, his blue eyes never losing their high lights of glee, his lips never losing their inscrutable smile at some happy understanding ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... started, gazed wildly on the face of the dead, turned ghastly pale and, with a low moan and suffocating sob, fell fainting into the ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... is at his work, cutting of him down, hewing both bark and heart, both body and soul asunder. The man groans, but death hears him not; he looks ghastly, carefully, dejectedly; he sighs, he sweats, he trembles, but death ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... there scarcely a mile to the east lay the camp of the traders. In the morning they would ride into the Indian camp saddled with bright beads and colored calicoes. In the morning—Carl shuddered and lay very quiet, fighting again the ghastly torment that had racked and driven him into the melancholy solitude of the Everglades. Now the firelit palmetto roof of the wigwam he knew to be Diane's seemed somehow, to his distorted fancy, redder than the others—the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... Frayne start and shiver as a little scream escaped her. I didn't wonder. Even I, knowing that it was an illusion and a snare, felt my flesh creeping as I looked at the ghastly thing in the window. ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Fanny; "but one must always think of one's self—at least, I am afraid I must. Not that I mean to be selfish," she added, seeing a look of consternation spread over Miss Symes's face. "The fact is this, St. Cecilia, I have had the most horrible fright. Those ghastly little creatures the twins—the Vivian twins—brought a most enormous spider into your room, hid it in the center of my bed, and then ran away again. I never saw such a monster! I was afraid to go near the creature at ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... be said of Ernest Renan that he was toniours seminariste, and there is a flavour of the pulpit in these beautiful sentences. Beautiful indeed they are, and not more beautiful than true. The implacable Mary, whose ghastly epithet clings to her for all time, like the shirt of Nessus, found in Pole an apt and zealous pupil in persecution. Both are excellent specimens of their Church, because according to that Church they are absolutely blameless. Punctilious in the discharge ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... retire, or I shall not be able to sleep": upon which, whilst he held up the lamp she opened the bundle. Guess, guess at the astonishment of the tailor and his wife, when, instead of seeing a suit of clothes, they discovered, wrapped in a napkin, in its most horrid and ghastly ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... motion from 'Tana. She had not uttered a word yet. All she could do was to stare in wonder at the wreck of a woman before her—a painted wreck; for, even on her deathbed, the ghastly face ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... a ghastly stare and wheeled away to stride down the path. Once he turned to flash his convulsed face at Lucy. Then he passed out of sight among the trees ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... came a period of unusual irritation, to which we owe, in part at least, Carlyle's railings against progress and his deplorable criticism of England's great men and women,—poor little Browning, animalcular De Quincey, rabbit-brained Newman, sawdustish Mill, chattering George Eliot, ghastly-shrieky Shelley, once-enough Lamb, stinted-scanty Wordsworth, poor thin fool Darwin and his book (The Origin of Species, of which Carlyle confessed he never read a page) which was wonderful as an example of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of her injured husband, together with his ghastly paleness disturbed her, and her inquietude grew to painful anxiety as he maintained silence. At length he said "I have learned to love you truly and passionately, my wife, and now you show me how you have returned the affection which my heart bestowed upon you. You are right when you accuse me of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... thing, if you want to make a ghost," said Tod Yorke, "is to get a tin plate full of salt and gin, and set it alight, and wrap yourself round with a sheet, and hold the plate so that the flame lights up your face. You never saw anything so ghastly. Scooped-out turnips ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... every sadness he had his own achievements to set. There was Rome in its marble visibly about him, that he had found in brick and in ruins; Rome now capable of centuries of life, that had been, when he came to it, a ghastly putridity. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... aside their veils, and the flickering light of the dim lamp gave a ghastly and unearthly appearance to their pale and severe countenances. They were all three elderly persons: and their aspect was of that cold, forbidding nature, which precludes hope on the part of any one who might have to ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... his head and held the cup to his lips. Chance stood in the middle of the room strangely subdued, yet he watched each movement of his master with alert eyes. The moonlight faded from the window and the fire died down. The air became chill as the faint light of dawn crept in to emphasize the ghastly picture—the barren, rough-boarded room, the rusted stove, the towering figure of Sundown, impassively waiting; and the shattered, shrunken figure of the Mexican, hopeless and helpless, as the morning mesas welcomed the golden glow of dawn ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... slightly with horror. The whole face of things was to her livid and ghastly. Being a moralist rather than an artist, coming of fervent Wesleyan stock, she began to scourge herself. She had done wrong again. Looking back, no one had she touched without hurting. She had a destructive force; anyone she embraced she injured. Faint voices echoed back from her conscience. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... Artie lying in a sheltered spot, on a hastily constructed couch of pine boughs. Over the wounded young man stood Surgeon Farnwright, binding up a ghastly wound ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a pantomime of thrusting. He was clearly reproducing the action which had won for him his military medal. Then suddenly he fell down in the dust and writhed. He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of his four victims. His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of the bayonet-fight and of killing four men. Tump himself got up out of the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... he did not see a strange, level mass of gray that advanced slowly toward him. From a distance to the lay observer this mass would have looked like an ordinary cloud-bank, but the experienced eyes of a fisherman would have discerned its ghastly gray hue and its ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... being visible, she yet shed a little glimmer of light over the plain, revealing a world as wild as ever the frozen north outspread—as wild as ever poet's despairing vision of desolation. I see it! I see it! but how shall I make my reader see it with me? It was ghastly. The only similitude of life was the perplexed and multitudinous motion of the drifting, falling flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of a delirious ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... now ghastly, and was listening with breathless earnestness to his visitor. Merriman realized what he had always suspected, that the man was weak and a bit of a coward, and he began to believe his bluff would ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... very wide, and I had the headlight taken off of our engine and placed on the bank; and presently a wrecker came up from the south, and her headlight was similarly placed, casting a ghastly weird, white light over the scene of suffering and desolation. I cut in a wrecking office, Truxton took off his ground, I put on mine, and Mr. Antwerp was soon in possession of all the facts. A little later ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... my ghastly countenance, Peggy commanded the nurse to take the child from the room. Theresa followed with lingering steps, casting back upon me a glance of pity and remorse. I never saw ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... prostitution or mortality. Those that die are, like factory children that die, instantly succeeded by new competitors for misery and death." There is no hour of a summer's or a winter's night, in which there may not be found in the streets a ghastly wretch, expiring under the double tortures of disease and famine. Though less aggravated in its features, the picture of prostitution in New York or Philadelphia would ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... never can I forget her countenance—pale, ghastly pale she looked; she was seated to be undressed, and attended by Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave and Miss Goldsworthy ; her whole frame was disordered, yet she was still and quiet. These two ladies assisted me to undress her, or rather ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... from a gangway near; then one of my own boys came, exclaiming, 'Oh, Miss! I prayed to Jesus, and He saved me.' Then the deck became a fearful scene of confusion, poor foreigners weeping, and oh! the mutilated men and women, ghastly with fright, some of their faces ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... after a prolonged resistance, when all the other cities of Asia Minor had surrendered. Twelve years later it was captured by Timur, who built a wall with the corpses of his prisoners. A fragment of the ghastly structure is in the library of Lincoln cathedral. The town is connected by railway with Afium-Kara-Hissar and Smyrna. It is dirty and ill-built; but, standing on elevated ground and commanding the extensive and fertile plain of the Hermus, presents at ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... scourged the slave's bare back, The red blood running down at every stroke, The dark skin clinging ghastly to the lash. No moan escaped him at the stinging pain. Tremblingly he stood, and patiently bore all; His heart indignant, shaking his broad breast, Strong as the heart that Hippodamia wept, Which with the cold, intrusive ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... the body of her dead husband cutting out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eaten. The daughter was seen eating the father; and the mother, that [viz. body] of her children; children, that of father and mother. The emaciated, wild, and ghastly appearance of the survivors added to the horror of it. Language can not describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire suffering had wrought in the minds of the wretched and pitiable beings. Those who one month before would have shuddered and sickened at the thought ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... closed, and her breathing laboured under her failing strength. She had put forth a tremendous effort, and the reaction was terrible. The ghastly hue of her cheeks and lips terrified Steve. He dreaded lest at that moment the final struggle was actually ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... the inert figures and sleepily regarded us before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead—it was like a phantom world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly and incredible reality. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Of ghosts, And that without reflectors; And creepy things With wings, And gaunt and grisly spectres! He can fill you crowds Of shrouds, And horrify you vastly; He can rack your brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, Spirit philology, High class astrology, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... Melville, to whom she was telling it, saw nothing but perhaps a lesson on the duty of having chimneys regularly swept, because of the danger to neighboring thatch. But had not Annie been seated in the shadow, her ghastly countenance would, even to the most casual glance, have betrayed a certain guilty horror, for now she knew that she had found and given away what she ought at once to have handed back to its rightful owner. It was true he did not even know that he had lost it, and could have ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... thing he saw was his grandfather propped up in bed, with a ghastly pallor on his face. When he beheld his truant grandson, the scowl upon his brow deepened, and he ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... on which he founded the story. In his water-side wanderings during his last book, the many handbills he saw posted up, with dreary description of persons drowned in the river, suggested the 'long shore men and their ghastly calling whom he sketched in Hexam and Riderhood, "I think," he had written, "a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and being dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for years retaining ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... The officers were elegantly dressed and were in great spirits, thinking it was only a pleasant little enterprise to go over to Charlestown and drive those Yankees out of their fort; but when they returned it was a sad sight. The dead and dying were carried through the streets pale and ghastly and covered with blood. She said the people witnessed the battle from the houses in Boston, and as regiment after regiment was swept down by the terrible fire of the Americans, they said that the British were feigning to be frightened and falling ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... All sorts of tales were told of great blazing skeletons that dashed out from the gate with dart in hand, and of a skull that breathed out red fire from a blazing mouth, and grinned and gibbered at them. As to the noises and the ghastly green fire, none could account for them, and I do believe that there is not a villager who would approach within a quarter of a mile of the house after dark, ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... house, where he was concealed by one of the women, and though the savages made vigorous search for him, he remained undiscovered. You can imagine the horrible sight the fort presented when the sun went down, the soldiers in their red uniforms lying there scalped and mangled, a ghastly heap under the summer sky. And to just think it was only a short time ago, a little more than ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... make it quite likely that there were really two apparitions of the Tree is this fact: From the most ancient times if one saw a villager of ours with his face ash-white and rigid with a ghastly fright, it was common for every one to whisper to his neighbor, "Ah, he is in sin, and has got his warning." And the neighbor would shudder at the thought and whisper back, "Yes, poor soul, he ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... meantime, the caitiff minister had reached his manse, and found a ghastly loneliness awaiting him—oh, how much deeper than that of the woman he had forsaken! She had lost her repute and her baby; he had lost his God! He had never seen his shape, and had not his word abiding in him; and now the vision of him was closed in an unfathomable abyss of darkness, far, ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... than an hour they returned, bringing with them a keen-eyed, tall young man, who had a number of tools wrapped in an apron. Evidently he was unused to such scenes, for he became deathly pale upon seeing the ghastly spectacle on my bed. With staring eyes and open mouth he began to ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... terrors. Her breath came quick and short, a film came over her eyes, and cold drops of sweat stood upon her forehead, yet she would not now have left the room without penetrating into the mystery of death. Miss Thusa laid her hand upon the sheet and turned it back from the pale and ghastly face, on whose brow the mysterious signet of everlasting rest was set. Still, immovable, solemn, placid—it lay beneath the gaze, with shrouded eye, and cheek like concave marble, and hueless, waxen lips. What depth, what grandeur, what duration in that repose! ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... on or below the level of the ground, and the floor, as well as the lower end of the planks which formed the walls, was black with moisture. The cell was littered with straw and every kind of indescribable filth, while the walls and ceiling were mildewed and spotted with ghastly growths of mould, feeding on the moist and filthy vapors, which were even more ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... them, the Indians perceaved that those were no men descended from heaven. Some of them, therefore, hidd their victualls, others hidd their wives and their children. Some other fledd into the mountaines to seperate themselves afarr of from a nation of so harde natured and ghastly conversation. The Spaniardes buffeted them with their fistes and bastianadoes, pressinge also to lay their handes on the lordes of the townes. And these cases ended in so greate an hazarde and desperatnes, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... though it seemed ages to us, a whole posse came flying down the hill. The incessant lightning made all things appear as in the glare of day. Mata's curly hair fairly stood on end, and his eyes rolled with ghastly ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... Noland's appearance to terrify the girl as he lay before her, wasted and woebegone, his low forehead blue-veined and colourless, his hands blue-veined and transparent, and all his shrunken figure sharply outlined under the thin summer covering of the bed with ghastly and suggestive significance. Instantly she wanted to go down by his side and with her arms about him give him the sympathy and comfort his lonely heart craved, but because it was so deliciously tempting she ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... me," she continued. "Do not be sad," she added, observing her mother's pale and ghastly countenance. "I am going to a world where no one is sick, and no one ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... of the Slave Trade tried to enlist this winning voice in the service of their cause. Cowper disliked the task, but he wrote two or three anti-Slave-Trade ballads. The Slave Trader in the Dumps, with its ghastly array of horrors dancing a jig to a ballad metre, justifies the shrinking of an artist from a subject hardly fit ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... from their seats and hauled from side to side, their liveries were in ribbands, their terrified faces, ghastly with terror and streaming with blood, might be seen one moment in one place, the next in another, sometimes they seemed down on the ground. The crowd roared with rage and laughter at their cries. One lady swooned with terror, one or two crouched on ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ways of telling ghastly stories on Hallowe'en. Have a large ball of different colored yarn handy and before the midnight hour, turn out the lights, and ask all the players to sit in a circle. The hostess, holding the ball of yarn, begins by telling some weird story, unwinding the yarn as she proceeds, until ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... passage; With his mittens and his snow-shoes Vainly walked he through the forest, Sought for bird or beast and found none, Saw no track of deer or rabbit, In the snow beheld no footprints, In the ghastly, gleaming forest Fell, and could not rise from weakness, Perished there from cold and hunger. Oh the famine and the fever! Oh the wasting of the famine! Oh the blasting of the fever! Oh the wailing of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... own clothing, and, with a shudder, put on the leggings and breechcloth of the dead Indian. Then Shif'less Sol and Tom Ross painted him from the waist up in a ghastly manner, and, with their heartfelt wishes for his safety and success, he departed for the camp, the others following in silence not far behind. He soon heard the sound of the chant and he knew that the orgie was proceeding. An Indian dance could ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... shuddered to conjecture. That he, Scout Harris, whose reputation for being wide awake had gone far and wide in the world of scouting, should be carried away unwittingly by a pair of thieves and find himself in imminent peril of being added to that ghastly galaxy of "dead ones." It ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... remember," I said, "that I should like very much to see you again before you go." "I don't know what's to prevent you. The damned thing won't make me invisible," he said with intense bitterness,—"no such luck." And then at the moment of taking leave he treated me to a ghastly muddle of dubious stammers and movements, to an awful display of hesitations. God forgive him—me! He had taken it into his fanciful head that I was likely to make some difficulty as to shaking hands. It was too awful for words. I believe I shouted suddenly at him as you would bellow to a ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... to the Treasury came the exhibition of the Ochavo, the octagonal chapel of dark marbles, that pantheon of relics where the most repulsive human remains—skulls with their ghastly grin, mummified arms and worn-eaten vertebras—were shown in gold or silver shrines. The gross and credulous piety of former days displayed itself in the full tide of unbelief, so that even Don Antolin, ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the perfume of the roses into the open window came the stench of this hideous parody, as if in mockery. I removed it, and another appeared in the same place shortly afterward. The earthman was rampant and insulting. Pan is not dead yet. At least he still makes a ghastly sign ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... and rustled mournfully. With the exception of the riders and an occasional Gila monster, no life was discernible. Cacti of all shapes and sizes reared aloft their forbidding spines or spread out along the sand. All was dead, ghastly; all was oppressive, startlingly repellent in its sinister promise; all was ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... bridegroom whom the lady had captured. There he was before my panic-stricken eyes! The wedding was exactly as I had already described it. It took place in London, just as I had said. The remembrance that the book had passed beyond my own control, the irrevocability of certain ghastly sentences, came over me in a flash, together with the certainty that, however earnestly I might deny, swear, take solemn oaths on family Bibles, nothing, nothing, not even a voice from heaven, much less that of a rural dean still on earth, could ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... surrender; others fled to Spain, in the hope of stirring up some movement there against England, or at least of finding a place of shelter. Ireland was suffering almost everywhere from famine, and in many districts famine of the most ghastly order. Tyrone found it impossible to carry on the struggle for independence under such terrible conditions. There was nothing for it but to surrender and come to terms as best he could ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... hospital, or at Mr. Ramsden's," said Ethel, with a ghastly suspicion that he thought Margaret in a state to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... gleamed in a swarthy fist. Undaunted the braves of Wakawa's band Leaped into the thicket with lance and knife, And grappled the Chippeways hand to hand; And foe with foe, in the deadly strife, Lay clutching the scalp of his foe and dead, With a tomahawk sunk in his ghastly head, Or his still heart sheathing a bloody blade. Like a bear in the battle Wakawa raves, And cheers the hearts of his falling braves. But a panther crouches along his track— He springs with a yell on Wakawa's back! The tall chief, stabbed to the heart, ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... is all reminiscence and anticipation—if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of it, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... cloudy day; and heavy volumes of vapor are wreathing and unwreathing themselves around the gaunt forms of the everlasting rocks, like human reasonings, desires, and hopes around the ghastly realities of life and death; graceful, undulating, and sometimes gleaming out in silver or rosy wreaths. Still, they are nothing but mist; the dread realities are just where they were before. It is odd, though, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... armor. So for five long minutes the gallant horsemen of Spain and of France strove ever and again to force a passage, until the wailing note of a bugle called them back, and they rode slowly out of bow-shot, leaving their best and their bravest in the ghastly, blood-mottled ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pretence of the girl was stripped from her. She was a ghastly, pitiable sight, as she stood there, her big eyes fixed on Dicky, her breath coming unevenly in ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... sister. Annette, driven to desperation, came to me with her story the night of the Match. She was awfully cut up, poor girl. I had to leave the dance and go right off to Toronto. Too late for the train, I drove straight through,—ghastly roads,—found Tony, fetched him back, and up till yesterday he has been hiding in his own home. Meantime, I managed to get things fixed up—paid his debts, the prosecution is withdrawn and now he wants,—or, rather, he doesn't want ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... swept the landscape, with a voice of dirge, while the rain poured down in torrents. For long hours Zulma knelt beside the inanimate form. M. Belmont sat at the head of the bed with the rigidity of a corpse. But for the ever Watchful Eye over that stricken house, who knows what ghastly scene the morning ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... the sons of Mohammed Bahadur were once dragged forth to die by daring Hodson's smoking pistols, their slaughtered shades grinned over the ghastly vengeance ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... remark might have been meant for a covert reference to his own thievish tendencies, Wapoota restrained his somewhat ghastly humour, while the chief continued his arrangements ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... have lived in such a country," he told himself, with perhaps a tinge of regret. "Poor little thing, I wonder what's to become of her? The whole thing's a shame—a ghastly shame. Wait till Stefan and I find out all about it. Somebody's got to ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... cheerful in these ancient rooms. Modern paper-hangings are too superficial and wishy-washy for the purpose. Tapestry, it is true, there is now, completely covering the walls of several of the rooms, but all faded into ghastliness; nor could some of it have been otherwise than ghastly, even in its newness, for it represented persons suffering various kinds of torture, with crowds of monks and nuns looking on. In another room there was the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and other subjects not to be readily distinguished in the twilight ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thee, caitiff, far beyond the seas, To the grim tyrant Echetus, who mars All he encounters; bane of human kind. Thine ears he'll lop, and pare the nose away From thy pale ghastly visage: dire to tell! The very parts, which modesty conceals, He'll tear relentless from the seat of life, To feed his ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... heavily to the window, and raised the shade. "There's a ring around the moon as plain as my wedding ring!" And then as she looked there clung to the window-pane a single flake of snow, showing ghastly white in the instant before ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... enters the shadow; but, as one looking into a tunnel from without can see nothing therein, though the open country beyond is plainly visible, so, standing in that submarine shadow, all around is dark, though beyond the sable curtain of the shadow the view is clear. Apply this optical fact to the ghastly story of a diver's 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... was with her now—ill and exhausted from the combined effects of excitement, horror, and the unaccustomed ride across the desert—most anxious for his daughter—worried, to the verge of desperation, by the ghastly ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Meldon, "that you've improved your appearance much by that last performance. You were better before. But never mind. Miss King has seen you at your best, the Sunday afternoon I brought you up to call, and she'll recollect what you looked like then. In any case, nothing you can do will make you as ghastly as you were that day on the yacht. If she put up with you then, she won't ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... of their looks directed the eyes of Tom Brown and his comrades towards a neighbouring thicket, where they beheld an object that was well calculated to inspire dread. It appeared to be a living skeleton covered with a black skin of the most ghastly appearance, and came staggering towards them like a drunken man. As it drew nearer Jumbo's limbs trembled more and more violently and his face became of a leaden blue colour. At last he became desperate, ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... OFTENER THEY OCCUR.—As O. S. Fowler says: "'The poison of asps is under their lips.' The first spat is like a deep gash cut into a beautiful face, rendering it ghastly, and leaving a fearful scar, which neither time nor cosmetics can ever efface; including that pain so fatal to love, and blotting that sacred love-page with memory's most hideous and imperishable visages. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... eternal, not temporary. In no department of life, has the scientific principle of self-interest and the rule of reason had a more confusing, corrupting, and destructive influence. To attempt to translate the meaning of a marriage into terms of a business partnership is a ghastly mockery. ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... and that must be given in the home, in the schools and from the pulpit and from the public press. I have become convinced from long labor in this reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram seller's conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly failure. Institutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly enforces it. Otherwise ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... English literature, and is worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... is with me, Avery," he said. "The fates have played a ghastly joke on me, but you are mine in spite of it. You came to ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... do not for a moment question." He looked about upon his companions. Three of them shook their heads gravely; but the fourth, in his over-zeal, attempted to, say "No," and burst into a laugh; whereupon they all broadly smiled, while Camille looked ghastly. ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... mouth and chin, bristly with the stubble of a coarse hard beard; and his complexion was one of that kind which never looks clean or wholesome. But what added most to the grotesque expression of his face was a ghastly smile, which, appearing to be the mere result of habit and to have no connection with any mirthful or complacent feeling, constantly revealed the few discoloured fangs that were yet scattered in his mouth, and gave him the aspect of a panting dog. His dress ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... could not believe the dreadful news, and took it for one of those ghastly rumours which circulate with such rapidity during periods of civil strife; but we were not left long in uncertainty, for the details of the catastrophe ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... its attitude towards, would nearly convey it. Everything is anti-human. How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design. There is no ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... and see what he ought to do? The thought hurt him, then lost edge, as if it had come in contact with a breastplate. Out of oneself! Impossible! Out into soundless, scentless, touchless, sightless space! The very idea was ghastly, futile! And touching there the bedrock of reality, the bottom of his Forsyte spirit, Soames rested for a moment. When one ceased, all ceased; it might go on, but ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... truth—fair Hope or ghastly Fear? God knoweth, and not I. Only, o'er both, Love holds her torch aloft, And ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... I watched Van Roon curiously as he sat propped up among his cushions, his smooth face ghastly in the green light from the lamp-shade. He held the stump of a cigar between his teeth, but, apparently unnoticed by him, it had long since gone out. Smith, out of the shadows, was watching ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... a quarter-past eleven, the outside door was suddenly thrown open, and in there staggered Jim, a haggard, wild-eyed being, ghastly white, utterly exhausted, and holding in his hand a wretched, scrawny branch of the mountain shrub he had gone ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... black crucifix. The candles stood, one at the head and one at the foot, on little tables. I entered the room and looked long at the dead old man. I thought it strange that there should be no one to watch him, but I am not afraid of dead men after the first shudder is past. It was a ghastly sight enough, however, and the candles shed a glaring yellowish ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... truly to shine.' It needed something more than this world could supply to make a man's face to shine under the sentence that he be hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh, his body dismembered, and his head fixed on an iron spike in the West Port of the same city. The disgraceful and ghastly story of his execution, and the hacking up of his body, may all be read in Howie, beside a picture of the Nether Bow as it still stands in our Free Church and Free State Day. 'Art not Thou from everlasting, O Lord my God?' were James Guthrie's last words as he stood on the ladder. 'O ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... standing high aloft, low lay thine ear, And there such ghastly noise of iron chains And brazen cauldrons thou shalt rumbling hear, Which thousand sprites with long enduring pains Do toss, that it will stun thy feeble brains; And oftentimes great groans, and grievous stounds, When ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... messenger was the neatest practical joke that had occurred in the county for some time. The always serious and anxious sheriff told the driver the accusation, and it was a genuine cry of horror that the young lover gave at hearing the truth at last, and at feeling the ghastly chain of probability that had wound ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... of her ladyship's room were down, and the chamber dark, and she was in bed with a nightcap on her head, and propped up by her pillows, looking none the less ghastly because of the red which was still on her cheeks, and which she could not afford ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... the two candles rose about their unsnuffed wicks and flickered in the draught, casting a fitful, ghastly light on Goliah's distorted features. The fierce efforts he made to scream for mercy, to vociferate the words that were strangling him, were such that the handkerchief knotted across his mouth was drenched with spume, and it was a sight most horrible to ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of the valley, the moon peered up over its edge. He had never seen the moon before—except in the daytime, when he had taken her for a thin bright cloud. She was a fresh terror to him—so ghostly! so ghastly! so gruesome!—so knowing as she looked over the top of her garden-wall upon the world outside! That was the night itself! the darkness alive—and after him! the horror of horrors coming down the sky to curdle his blood, and turn his brain to a cinder! He gave a sob, and made straight ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... Chester, saddened and awed, came to show its sympathy for the stricken parents, and its pity, if nothing more, for the dead boy. But Helena, ghastly pale, had no room in her mind for either pity or sympathy. She heard Mr. Dilworth's subdued voice directing her to a pew, and a few minutes afterwards found herself sitting between Dr. and Mrs. King. Martha greeted her with an appropriate ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... Sam?" said Frank, after they had progressed about a mile, during which the outskirts of the city had given place to garden, cultivated field, trees dotted here and there, and then hedges which looked weird, ghastly, and strange in the moonlight, being composed of those fleshy, nightmare-looking plants of cactus growth, the prickly pears, with their horrible thorns, while more and more the way in front began to spread out wild, desolate ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... certainly force a crisis. The sooner the crisis came the better, and amongst those for whom that was better Philip de Commines was not the least. With all his heart he loathed the part he was compelled to play, even while determined to play it to its ghastly end. But to some men, Commines amongst them, the irrevocable brings a drugging of the sensibilities. When that which must be done could not be undone he would ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the three besieged Earthlings, half in blackness, the light from the front making ghastly shadows on their faces. Acolites at some sorcerer's rite they looked, with the long inky patches that left them to dissolve formlessly against the far walls ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... than to live under the rule of people whose hearts are so utterly black and whose process of reasoning is so oxlike—they are so stupidly brutal. I knew then that no man could die better than in defending civilization from this ghastly thing which threatened her! ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... together so great a family as his predecessor did. Now when the stomachs of those that are thus turned out of doors, grow keen, they rob no less keenly; and what else can they do? for when, by wandering about, they have worn out both their health and their clothes, and are tattered, and look ghastly, men of quality will not entertain them, and poor men dare not do it; knowing that one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the neighbourhood with an insolent scorn, as far ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... bright, bitter clearness. He could feel,—ah, that was the hell of it. That quivering response to the subtle nuances of thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the man, was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as he ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... told her that he was alive. His color had changed but little; hovering death showed mainly by a sharpening of all the lines of his face. Yet it did not seem to be Bertram, but rather some statue, some ghastly ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... wife showed the rich man's daughter the A B C of woman's work among the sick and suffering. At first Rita could do little more than control her own nerves, and fight down the faintness that came creeping over her at sight of the bandaged faces, ghastly under the brown, of the torn flesh and nerveless limbs. Gradually, however, she began to gain strength. The rough brown hand moved so easily, so lightly; it laid hold of those terrible bandages as if they were mere ordinary ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... her eyeballs rattled in her head. The doll fell to the floor and lay there with closed eyes. Her face was pallid and ghastly. Her bonnet had fallen off, and her hair stuck out wildly in every direction. Her legs were doubled under her in the most helpless fashion. She was the forlornest figure of a doll imaginable. Presently Mary drew her hands away from her eyes and looked down at Miranda. ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... his feet and, crossing to the window, fumbled the shutter into place, his ghastly face turning and turning toward the revolver that glittered in such deadly fashion in Mr. Ravenslee's steady hand. At length, the shutters barred, the boy turned, and moistening dry lips, spoke ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... tidings could not now be suppressed, and the ball-room was filled with screams and faintings. The corpse was brought in, borne on the arms of the yeomanry, most of them wounded, and looking ghastly from loss of blood and the agitation of the encounter. The guests crowded round the sofa on which the body was laid, with all the varieties of sorrow and strong emotion conceivable, under the loss of a common and honoured friend. Tears fell down many a manly cheek; sobs were heard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... impressive in this ghastly spectacle was the fact that each of the skeletons, though deprived of every rag of clothing, still wore a gold ring, too wide now that the flesh had disappeared, but held, as in hooks, by the bent ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... long hours of the night the scenes of the last few hours, of the last few days, came back to him and burnt into his soul. The gulf yawned before him now plain enough, open at his feet—black, ghastly. He shuddered at it, wondering if he should even yet fall in, felt wildly about for strength to stand firm, to retrace his steps; but found it not. He found not yet the strength he was in search of, but in the grey morning he wrote ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... voice would still have struck them with terror. She brought her deepest tones to those simple words, "What does this mean?" All at once it seemed to them that something had been meant, something absurd, monstrous, lawless, deserving a ghastly punishment. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... which, as Procopius had been told, the ground was covered with serpents, and the air was such that no man could inhale it and live. To this desolate region the spirits of the departed were ferried over from the land of the Franks at midnight. A strange race of fishermen performed the ghastly office. The speech of the dead was distinctly heard by the boatmen, their weight made the keel sink deep in the water; but their forms were invisible to mortal eye. Such were the marvels which an able historian, the contemporary of Belisarius, of Simplicius, and of Tribonian, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... traps. But it did look almost as though they were encouraging their two unheard-of visitors from another world to go on deeper and deeper into the heart of the eerie city (all the tunnels sloped down now), there perhaps to meet with some ghastly imprisonment. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... its high promontory the Northern Lights scintillate and blaze, and out of its moving brightness the terrified fishermen behold the war-canoes of dead Indians freighted with their redskin braves; the forms of c[oe]ur de bois and desperate Frenchmen swinging down the sky-line in a ghastly snake-dance; the shapes and spars of ships long since forgotten from the "Missing List"; and always, most dread-inspiring of them all, the distress signals from the sinking ship of Mogul ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... for the complexion, Cho[u]bei took them, smelled and carefully tasted, and finally put some of the paste on the end of the hashi or sticks to arrange the charcoal in the hibachi. A smell of garlic pervaded the room. He noted the puffy face of O'Iwa, the unnatural, almost ghastly, white of the skin where the wide pockmarks permitted it to be seen. Within the circles of these scars there was a curious striated effect, only seen at times in the efforts of artists to depict the ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Mr. Hanlon's body continued to kneel headless beside the log. Then the head on the ground popped like a flash to the neck it belonged to, and fastened itself accurately there in place. Ketch turned ghastly pale. ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... hours of that day were spent in ministering to the living and burying the dead. Along that battle swept front the Chaplain was always gladly welcomed and his divine Message reverently received. Death in its thousand ghastly forms, ever impending, ever threatening, impressed with serious religious thought the consciousness of even the most careless. In direct proportion to the coming and going of danger was the ebb and flow of the tide spiritual. ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... cab and crawled into the enclosure. Two carried a sack between them. Other men, some in cassocks, awaited them. They proceeded towards a hole dug in the middle of the field. At the bottom of the hole was quicklime. These men said nothing, they had no lanterns. The wan daybreak gave a ghastly light; the sack was opened. It was full of bones. These were the bones of Jean Jacques and of Voltaire, which had ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... Cabrieres being fortified was prepared to stand a siege; but on a promise of their lives and property the inhabitants opened the gates. Without a moment's hesitation the Baron gave orders to put them all to death. The soldiers refused to break plighted faith; but the mob had no scruples and the ghastly work began. 'A multitude of women and children had fled to the church: the furious horde rushed headlong among them and committed all the crimes of which hell could dream. Other women had hidden themselves in a barn. The Baron ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen |
