"Noisome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pipes to the poor people who can buy no other," he raged. "This is not your blame—you did not know." He pointed his finger, quivering, dripping with the slime, at the child on the bed. "They have murder her! With this!" He slatted his finger with the gesture of one who throws off a noisome serpent. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... Titmouse, for some little time I have done with you. Away!—give room to your betters. But don't think that I have yet "rifled all your sweetness," or am yet about to "fling you like a noisome weed away." ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... his girths well up, to turn away and flee at speed, if anything should happen. And now he proved how well it is to be wary and wide-awake, even in lonesome places. For at the other side of the Slough, and a few land-yards beyond it, where the ground was less noisome, he had observed a felled tree lying over a great hole in the earth, with staves of wood, and slabs of stone, and some yellow gravel around it. But the flags of reeds around the morass partly screened it from ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refinement of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible; even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... jealousy for good, A loving-kindness for the great man's fame, Dwells here and there with people of no name, In noisome alley, and in pathless wood: And where we think the truth least understood, Oft may be found a "singleness of aim," That ought to frighten into hooded shame A money mong'ring, pitiable brood. How glorious this affection for the ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... life, more loathsome to my vexed thoughts [278] Than noisome parbreak [279] of the Stygian snakes, Which fills the nooks of hell with standing air, Infecting all the ghosts with cureless griefs! O dreary engines of my loathed sight, That see my crown, my honour, ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.... Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shall thou trust.... Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.... For He shall give His angels charge over thee to keep thee in ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... strong tower, but you did not love him. He was not of your race, or breed. His hands were hard with toil, his hair was rough, and his voice was harsh with the night air. The breath of the labouring poor is noisome in the nostrils of the rich. His garments smelt of industry, and his awkward gait told tales of his humble trade. You did not love him: such as you could not have loved a man like him. You have come ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... famous persons who were at one time or another confined in this "noisome place with a pestilential atmosphere" are recalled by such names as Bishop Hooper, the martyr; Nash, the poet and satirist; Doctor Donne, Killigrew, the Countess of Dorset, Viscount Falkland, William Prynne, Richard Savage, and—of the ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... were dug up and passed along, growing as they went. Little eyes and mouths grew permanently rounded with horrors, and the ground was thoroughly well spaded and planted with sturdy shoots warranted to yield a noisome harvest of ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... sea-captain to lodge. This Carew—this "Wild Bob" Carew, as the boatswain had termed him—must be a man very indifferent to his surroundings, or else mightily anxious to remain under cover. The captains Martin had met were particular men; one would not find them in such a noisome hole. This Carew must be some rough renegade. Perhaps he was not even white; perhaps he was a half-caste. That would explain his choice of lodgings. One would think from all the secret mummery with which he surrounded himself that he was the Mikado, himself. He certainly ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... bury them; so that the bodies of the dead lay strewed about, exposed to the view of those who were awaiting a similar fate; and thus the dead were the means of destroying the sick, and the sick those who were in health, both by fear and by the filthy state and the noisome stench of their bodies. Some preferring to die by the sword, even rushed alone upon the outposts of the enemy. The violence of the plague, however, was much greater in the Carthaginian than the Roman army; ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... fell into their hands. Of these the chief one was a dismasted hulk known as the "Old Jersey" prison-ship, and moored in Wallabout Bay near New York City. No pen can adequately describe the horrors of this prison; but some extracts from the published recollections of men once imprisoned in her noisome hold will give some idea of the miserable fate of those condemned ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... den for foul night birds, reptiles, and beasts of prey," of precipice after precipice, abyss after abyss, in apparently endless succession, and of an explorer who perished there and lay "even now rotting in the bowels of the mountain, preyed upon by its blind and noisome worms." ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... as soon as we have been paid off; they depart, inebriated and uxorious, to their homes. They enjoy what the political economists call "the rewards of abstinence"; we put on our boiler suits and crawl about in noisome bilges, soot-choked ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... McMaster he was making the usual round previous to the opening of the school, beating up unreliable scholars, and had entered a damp, noisome alley, lined on either side with tumble-down apologies for houses. Mr. McMaster took one side and Bert the other, and they proceeded to visit the different dwellers in this horrible place. Bert had knocked at several doors without getting any response, for the people were apt to lie in bed late on ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... name, to cherish their homes and rear the castle buildings. And even now the ships were drawn up on the dry beach; the people were busy in marriages and among their new fields; I was giving statutes and homesteads; when suddenly from a tainted space of sky came, noisome on men's bodies and pitiable on trees and crops, pestilence and a year of death. They left their sweet lives or dragged themselves on in misery; Sirius scorched the fields into barrenness; the herbage grew dry, and the sickly harvest ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... German silver shovels, into tins or American flour barrels, lined with paper, attached with arrowroot paste. The packages are never sent to this country in the hold of the ship, as their contents are easily tainted by noisome effluvia, of ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... people of these regions clothed in the skins of beasts, yet not without the use of reason. He says also that there are great numbers of bears in those countries, which feed on fish, and catch them by diving into the water; and being thus satisfied with abundance of fish, are not noisome to man. He says likewise that he saw large quantities of copper among the inhabitants of these regions. Cabot is my dear and familiar friend, whom I delight to have sometimes in my house. Being called out of England by the Catholic king of Castille, on the death of Henry VII. of England, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... out for all you've done,' he muttered to himself, as he lay curled up in the black shadow like a noisome reptile. 'Tit for tat, ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... question of scent! There were some that had no appreciable scent beyond a vague fungoid flavour, more or less common to all. Others smelt of turnips, of sour cabbage; some were fetid, sufficiently so to make the house of the collector noisome. Only the true truffle possessed the aroma dear to epicures. If odour, as we understand it, is the dog's only guide, how does he manage to follow that guide amidst all these totally different odours? Is he warned of the contents of the subsoil by a general emanation, by that fungoid ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... across the corridor, and suddenly opened a small barred door. Whatever preconceived idea Miss Keene may have had of her unfortunate country-woman immured in a noisome cell, and guarded by a stern jailer, was quite dissipated by the soft misty sunshine that flowed in through the open door. The prison of Mrs. Markham was a part of the old glacis which had been allowed to lapse into a ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... gathers head to run, no longer is it called Benaco, but Mincio, far as Governo, where it falls into the Po. No long course it hath before it finds a plain, on which it spreads, and makes a marsh, and is wont in summer sometimes to be noisome. Passing that way, the cruel virgin saw a land in the middle of the fen without culture and bare of inhabitants. There, to avoid all human fellowship, she stayed with her servants to practice her arts, and lived, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... and indefatigable Chinese traveller, gives to Tient-sin the glory of being the filthiest and most noisome of Chinese cities, although he mentions Shanghai with high honor. Canton, from which Europeans have mainly derived their ideas of China, is comparatively a clean and neat place, far superior to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... stairs was growing more and more noisome, as if the monks were being pressed back in the direction of the secret passage. 'Twas evident the Abbes intended this move; for unless there was egress 'twould be a veritable slaughter hole and from the first they had kept together, ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... for the world; sure to come. But on Fact alone, not on Semblance and Simulacrum, will it be able either to come, or to stand when come. With union grounded on falsehood, and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable, the noisome grave is peaceable. We hope for a living ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... that infest those regions were drawn upward, giving out as the air grew warm a sickening and malarious influence. Vast and gloomy cypress, bay, swamp palm, ironwood, and other tropical woods reared their columnar trunks, from out a dark and noisome undergrowth, to an immense height. In those leafy depths no sun ever shone, and the absence of bird life was ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... facing the door of which there was a green pool of stagnant water; and before the window, of one pane, a dunghill that, reaching to the thatch of the roof, shut out the light, and filled the house with the most noisome smell. The ground sloped towards the house door; so that in rainy weather, when the pond was full, the kitchen was overflowed; and at all times the floor was so damp and soft, that the print of the nails of brogues ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the detail of the noisome contents of the fardel will but make it stick the closer, first to my imagination and then ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... she, 'I had forgotten that danger. I have grown familiar with perilous intrigues, as the nurses in a pest-house are said to become accustomed to the air around them, till they forget even that it is noisome.' ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still. He who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing, private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... Carrbroke, to raise his eyelids one by one. "Pah!" he ejaculated. "The odour is quite strong. The poor lad has been drugged by some pungent medicament." And then as he drew back his hand he took a kerchief from his pouch to wipe his hands. "The noisome poison is still ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... we had exchanged the holiday gaiety and the sunshine of Bleecker Street for a dark, noisome side-street, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... of St. Mary and the crowd of teachers and students had left its aisles, the boy stood before an image of the Virgin, and placing a ring of gold upon its finger took Mary for his bride. Years of study, broken by a fever that raged among the crowded, noisome streets, brought the time for completing his education at Paris; and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother Robert of his, begged his way as poor scholars were wont to the great school of Western Christendom. Here a damsel, heedless of his tonsure, wooed him so pertinaciously that Edmund ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... worth and virtue, in the mild And genial soil of cultivated life Thrive most, and may perhaps thrive only there, Yet not in cities oft. In proud and gay And gain-devoted cities, thither flow, As to a common and most noisome sewer, The dregs and feculence of every land. In cities, foul example on most minds Begets its likeness. Rank abundance breeds In gross and pampered cities sloth and lust, And wantonness and gluttonous excess. In cities, vice is hidden ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... They showed us the noisome cell where the celebrated "Iron Mask"—that ill-starred brother of a hardhearted king of France—was confined for a season before he was sent to hide the strange mystery of his life from the curious in the dungeons of Ste. Marguerite. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... closet stairs. He had sat for more than an hour before his bedroom fire, after bidding Ah Ben good-night, to make sure that the inmates of Guir House had retired; and as not a sound had been heard since locking his door, he sincerely hoped they were asleep. Before descending into the noisome depths, however, he concluded to climb up into his window, and have another look at the beautiful panorama of mountain and woodland shimmering in the meagre light of a hazy sky and a moon past full. ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... had burned very low, the cheerless room was dense with smoke and noisome with the smell of dead tobacco. Drayton buttoned up to the throat the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... with hair and moss forming its grassy vesture. Polluted with the stench of sinners, and miry with flesh and blood, it abounded with gadflies and stinging bees and gnats and was endangered by the inroads of grisly bears. Rotting corpses lay here and there. Overspread with bones and hair, it was noisome with worms and insects. It was skirted all along with a blazing fire. It was infested by crows and other birds and vultures, all having beaks of iron, as also by evil spirits with long mouths pointed like ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... he declared that the conditions were unequal, and the challenge was abandoned. When at last he was granted a safe conduct by the Emperor Sigismund, and trusted himself to the Council of Constance, his fate was sealed. Even in his noisome prison his pen (when he could procure one) was not idle, and Huss composed during his confinement several tracts on religious subjects. At length his degradation was completed; a tall paper cap painted with hideous figures of devils was placed ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... thine own purity Thy loftier aims and holier hopes aspire? Harshly thy fleshly fetters bear on thee, In dark and dreary prison-house confined, Cramped and diseased with long captivity, And hath divine Intelligence designed That noisome dungeon for her own restraint— By her own act to galling bonds consigned,— Self-doomed, with wilful purpose, to acquaint Herself with sin and sorrow, and pollute Aethereal essence with corporeal taint? How doth thy helpless misery confute That frantic boast of vain ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... the convent of St. Claire to the church of the Cordeliers, where Laura is reputed to have reposed in peace. Her tomb is in a small chapel, dark, damp, and even noisome: it is indicated only by a flat unadorned stone. The inscription, which is in Gothic letters, is rendered illegible by time. The congenial nature of Francis the First of France caused the tomb to be opened, and a leaden box was found, containing some bones, and a copy ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... fourteenth century a colony of Waldensians had settled in some villages upon the coast. They preserved their peculiar beliefs and ritual, and after three centuries numbered about 4000 souls. Nearly the whole of these, it seems, were exterminated by sword, fire, famine, torture, noisome imprisonment, and hurling from the summits of high cliffs. A few of the survivors were sent to work upon the Spanish galleys. Some women and children were sold into slavery. At Locarno, on the Lago Maggiore, a Protestant community of nearly 300 persons was driven into ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... but reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him as he was uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted the cloak with which he was covered and, making wry faces at the noisome smell of mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began examining that dreadful place. The doctor was very much displeased about something and made a change in the dressings, turning the wounded man over so that he groaned again and grew unconscious and delirious from the agony. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... you are unhappy. You have come to grief in some of your doings or belongings, and therefore find that all things are bitter to the taste. I have had my palate out of order too; but the proper appreciation of flavours has come back to me. Bah,—how noisome was ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... had not a day's work to be counted against him. It was rumoured among his associates that he had saved a considerable amount of money. The four other men were fair specimens of the slinking, ill-clad, noisome genus who carried their labels ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... many death-beds. And then into noisome dungeons; places where the darkness was appalling, and the stench loathsome, pestilential; and men looking like wild beasts lay coiled in rags and filth and despair. It tried his body hard; but the soul collected all its powers to comfort such poor wretches there as were ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound,' and I may add," the unreal editor broke off, "that he did not hurry the unripe grain to the hopper. He would not have sent all the horses at once to the abattoir because they made the city noisy and noisome, but would first have waited till there were automobiles ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of that land there dwelt a monster—fierce, noisome, and cruel, a thing that loved evil and hated all that was joyous and good. To its ears came the ring of the laughter and the shouts of King Hrothgar's revellers, and the sweet song of the gleemen and the melody of harps filled it with fierce hatred. From its wallow in the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... there can be nothing for it save to cut out the noisome weed, even as drones are ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... looking from behind the grating disappeared, and Maslova took to the middle of the corridor, and with short, but rapid strides, followed the warden. They descended the stone stairway, and as they passed the men's ward, noisy and more noisome even than the woman's ward, scores of eyes followed them from behind the gratings. They entered the office, where an armed escort of two soldiers stood. The clerk handed one of the soldiers a document, reeking of tobacco smoke, and, pointing to the ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... phantom-multitude remained; the towering city, the gleaming corridors, the fire-bright radiance had vanished. We stood on a wilderness—a still, black lake of dead waters was before us; a white, faint, misty light shone on us. Outspread over the noisome ground lay the ruins of a house, rooted up and overthrown to its foundations. The demon figures, still watching on either side of me, drew me slowly forward to the fallen stones, and pointed to two ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... for Jem had chosen a delicately green mossy and ferny patch, and plumped himself down, to utter a cry of horror, and snatch at the extended hands. For the green ferny patch was a thin covering over a noisome hole full of black boiling mud, into which the poor fellow was settling as ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... 30 For scarce nine suns have waked the hours, To swell the fruit, and paint the flowers, Since I thy humbler life surveyed, In base, in sordid guise arrayed; A hideous insect, vile, unclean, You dragged a slow and noisome train; And from your spider-bowels drew Foul film, and spun the dirty clew. I own my humble life, good friend; Snail was I born, and snail shall end. 40 And what's a butterfly? At best, He's but a caterpillar, dress'd; And all thy race ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... reduced him to beggary and dependence. The Five Mile Act had banished him from his dwelling, from his relations, from his friends, from almost all places of public resort. Under the Conventicle Act his goods had been distrained; and he had been flung into one noisome gaol after another among highwaymen and housebreakers. Out of prison he had constantly had the officers of justice on his track; he had been forced to pay hushmoney to informers; he had stolen, in ignominious disguises, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... longer to hear the precepts which he disdained to practice, sternly commanded OMAR to depart: 'Be gone,' said he, 'lest I crush thee like a noisome reptile, which men cannot but abhor, though it is too contemptible to be feared.' 'I go,' said OMAR, 'that my warning voice may yet again recall thee to the path of wisdom and of peace, if yet again I shall behold thee while it is ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... place, Safe doth his beloved lie, Shaded by his sovereign grace From the tempests fierce and high. Love Divine will hear his prayer, Be his refuge and defense; Save him from the fowler's snare, And the noisome pestilence. Sheltered 'neath the Father's wings, Covered with his pinions wide, Truth the ransomed homeward brings, ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... and smiling fields; it brought abundance and a new life to me and my children and I love it, I love it! If I were a multi-millionaire I would charter freight cars and carry away from the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern cities and the Old World the toiling masses, and let them loose in our vast forests and ore-laden mountains to learn what life really is!" And my heart was stirred by his words and by the whirling spaces of woods and peaks ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... at length reached Charleston. The journey from Greensborough had been a tedious one; besides the annoyance of slow travelling, through the inefficient state of the line, which was so defective that the carriages frequently left the rails, the noisome effluvia arising from the swamps we had to pass through, which harbour innumerable alligators and other reptiles, had the most debilitating effect on the frame, which was increased by the extreme sultriness of the weather After leaving my ticket at the terminus, I disposed of my baggage ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... sequence, that the truly wise man, who seeks to comply with the laws of Nature, and to fulfil the great ends of his existence, will choose for his sleeping-apartment the closest quarters possible, and will welcome the fumes which would be noisome by day. For my part, therefore, I feel profoundly grateful even for one night of this little crib. It has already done much for me. I feel confident that it has contributed greatly to my span of life. I am deeply beholden to the owners, to the captain, yea, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... was so carried away by the glamor of the white hind's magical beauty that he went home at once, had the eyes of his seven Queens taken out, and, after throwing the poor blind creatures into a noisome dungeon whence they could not escape, set off once more for the hovel in the ravine, bearing with him his horrible offering. But the white hind only laughed cruelly when she saw the fourteen eyes, and threading them as a necklace, flung ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... us, sir, for love of Heaven, forego Of anger and of death the noisome lore; And be it deemed that I have said enow, For this while, of that Saracen, not more Cruel than strong; 'tis time in trace to go Of Gryphon, left with Origille, before Damascus' gate, and him who with her came, The adulterer, not the brother of ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... were the night revels said to have been held in the old hut, which had at last fallen into bad repute and been for years deserted. To one like Hagar, however, there was nothing intimidating in its creaking old floors, its rattling windows and noisome chimney, where the bats and the swallows built their nests; and when one day Madam Conway proposed giving little Maggie into the charge of a younger and less nervous person than herself she made no objection, but surprised her mistress by asking ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... of speaking, and her ear caught the words of an oath. Her situation now was far from pleasant; but it was still a relief that no one was by to witness what she saw and was doing. She conveyed pailful after pailful of the noisome shavings to the dunghill at the back of the cottage, wondering the while that the inhabitants of the dwelling were not all dead of the fever long ago. She almost gave over her task when a huge toad crawled upon ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... scruples entered the mind of the captain of the slaver. "If they will sell you I certainly will buy you," he answered, and soon the kidnapped kidnapper was in irons and thrust below in the noisome hold with the unhappy being he had sent there. A multitude of cases of negro slave-dealers being seized in this way, after disposing of their human cattle, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Mr. Smellie. No one knows who led the charge down upon the boats, or gave the cry to stave in the barrels on board. But in a trice the preventive men were driven overboard and, as they leapt into the shallow water, were caught and held and drenched in the noisome mess; while the Riding Officer, plastered ere he could gain his saddle, ducked his head and galloped up the beach under a torrential shower of ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the darkness around him was impenetrable; he could feel toads and noisome animals crawling over his limbs. The damp atmosphere of the place began to thrill through him to his very bones; his whole frame trembled under the excess of his past exertions. Without light, he could neither attempt to proceed, nor hope to discover the size and extent of the chasm which he had ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Amerindian nor Eskimo was squeamish. They were almost omnivorous, and specially delighted in putrid or noisome substances from which a European would turn in loathing, and from the eating of ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... they are in a doubt whether they should cleave to our faith or to Mahomet's slavery." But they are a filthy race, continues the traveller, all of them mean and very abject, liars and traitorous knaves, squat of figure, noisome of breath, though of a truth they cover their mouths as of decency, saying that the mouth is a very cesspool and sewer of impurity. They oil their hair with a foul-smelling grease, which they think a great virtue ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... and fetid alley to open, bright Canadian fields is, in the very thought, refreshing. A child is snatched from pinching hunger, fluttering rags, and all the squalor of gutter life; from a creeping existence in the noisome pool of slum society is lifted up into some taste for decency and cleanliness; from being trained in the school whose first and last lesson is to fear neither God nor man, is taught the beginnings of Christian faith and duty, and by a strong effort of love and patience is borne away ...
— 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
... summer came, the huge profits of the manufacturers literally melted away, for the beautiful garments decomposed in the heat; and loads of them, melting and running together, were being returned to the factory. And they filled Roxbury with such noisome odors that they had to be taken out at dead of night and ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... to be alone. He strangled old men; insulted women; squeezed children to death; knocked out the brains of dogs against the ground; pulled up posts; turned milk into blood; nearly killed a worthy clergyman by breathing upon him the intolerable airs of the grave, cold and malignant and noisome; and, in short, filled the city with a perfect madness of fear, so that every report was believed without the ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... sheep, two goats, and the red, rough filaments of a buffalo. This display was but scant provision for a population of 7,000. The streets are narrow like those of Bagdad; a necessary evil in Eastern climates, to exclude the power of the sun; but they are even more noisome and filthy. In like manner also, they are crowded, but not with so many persons in gay attire. Here are to be seen groups of dark, grim-looking, half-naked Arabs, sitting idly on the sides of the streets, and so numerously, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... inflammatory suffragettes of the sex-hygiene and birth-control species. The rigid limitation of offspring, in fact, is chiefly advocated by women who run no more risk of having unwilling motherhood forced upon them than so many mummies of the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in such noisome matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attract the attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises that are difficult or forbidden. But certainly the enterprise of dissuading such ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... to this bill, that, by conferring the power of entering houses by force, it may give the harpies of the law an opportunity of entering, in the tumult of an impress, and of dragging a debtor to a noisome prison, under pretence of forcing sailors into the service ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... for any length of time. There was a rustling noise, and a rat scurried across the rickety floor, drawing a startled gasp from Audrey and a disgusted 'Oh, piffle!' from the Nugget. Whatever merits this final refuge might have as a stronghold, it was beyond question a noisome place. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... calling out; 'Here, waiter! bring me another pillow! I have got the ear-ache, and have put the first one into my ear!' Thus wore the hours away. Sleep, you cannot. Feeble moschetoes, residents in the boat, whose health suffers from the noisome airs they are nightly compelled to breathe, do their worst to annoy you; and then, Phoebus Apollo! how the sleepers snore! There is every variety of this music, from the low wheeze of the asthmatic, to the stentorian grunt of the corpulent and profound. Nose after nose ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... highways; and under two statutes of Queen Elizabeth [Footnote: 8 Eliz., chap, xv., and 14 Eliz., chap. xi.] every year appointed two men who should be named "the distributers of the provision for the destruction of noisome fowle and vermine." A tax was levied upon the parishioners to provide these officers with funds, and it then became their duty to pay bounties for the heads and eggs of crows, rooks, starlings, and many other birds. A long list of four- footed beasts is also included in the definition of ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... gloomy lane little frequented. The stranger paused, and, for a moment, seemed lost in thought; then, with every mark of agitation, pursued rapidly a route which brought us to the verge of the city, amid regions very different from those we had hitherto traversed. It was the most noisome quarter of London, where every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime. By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... poured out his cup into the earth[16:2]; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men who have the mark of the beast, and who worship ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... hurricane, with its thunder, and its lightning, and its tempest;—give me the hurricane, with its partial and temporary devastations, awful though they be;—give me the hurricane, with its purifying, healthful, salutary effects;—give me that hurricane, infinitely rather than the noisome pestilence, whose path is never crossed, whose silence is never disturbed, whose progress is never arrested, by one sweeping blast from the heavens; which walks peacefully and sullenly through the length and breadth of the land, breathing poison into every heart, and ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... payment made compulsory, so that the wealthy prisoner was soon reduced to beggary. Resistance to the will of the jailers, and refusal to submit to their exactions, were severely punished. Loaded with fetters, and almost deprived of food, the miserable captive was locked up in a noisome subterranean dungeon; and, if he continued obstinate, was left to rot there. When he expired, his death was laid to the jail-fever. Rarely were these dark prison secrets divulged, though frequently ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... the alleys and passage ways were foul with excrements; the court was imperfectly paved, wet, and covered with domestic refuse; the privies, located in a close court between the rear and front houses, were dilapidated, and gave out volumes of noisome odors, which filled the whole area, and were diffused through all the rooms opening upon it; and the halls and apartments of the wretched occupants were close, unventilated, and unclean. The complaint was ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... most of the town the Wheelers were objects of envy. They had an automobile. They could ride while others must plod along behind them on foot, blinded by their dust and sickened by their noisome odor of gasoline. ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... empty save for heavy lorries and tramcars. Presently, at twelve o'clock, the mills would belch forth thousands of pale-faced operatives, who for long hours had been standing at the looms, but who, at present, were immured in those great noisome, prison-like buildings which form the main ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... brigade led down into the noisome basin which holds Hopetown, and took up temporary quarters on the first patch against the water into which it could squeeze its long line of transport. It wedged in between two columns, and the bad condition of both gave evidence of the severity of the work ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... the rock. It was so low that we had to stoop all the way, and in some places almost to creep, and so narrow that a very stout person would have some difficulty in forcing himself through. The floor was here and there wet with the overflowing of neighbouring drains, which exhaled a noisome smell; and we had to pick our steps carefully through thick greasy mud, which on the slopes was very slippery and disagreeable. We followed each other in Indian file, stooping low, each with a wax taper burning dimly in the damp atmosphere, and presenting a most picturesque ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... for an hour the dismal receptacles to which the prostitute retires from her nocturnal excursions, and see the wretches that lie crowded together, mad with intemperance, ghastly with famine, nauseous with filth, and noisome with disease; it would not be easy for any degree of abhorrence to harden them against compassion, or to repress the desire which they must immediately feel to rescue such numbers of human beings ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark; A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased—all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... cesspools to let us know that they were there, and so enlist volunteers for their abatement. That riles the kept keepers of lesser fames because they have agreed that the fine art of letters should be to spray the attar of posies to counteract the noisome smells of that which is rotten in the state of the world, where the many reek and sweat in filth and poverty that the few may live ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... homes once distinguished for elegance and refinement. Nuns had instructions to convert the novices under their rule by any means they liked to employ. Some did not hesitate to obtain followers of the Catholic Church by the use of the scourge, and fasting and imprisonment in noisome dungeons. ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... weather and a strong east wind had revealed the reason for the bargain. Back of a wooded area to the rear of his holding, was a combination hog farm and refuse dump. The owner of it got little or no rental from the tenant farmer who carried on his noisome business but he was well aware of its nuisance value to his new neighbor. Here indeed was a situation requiring the services of that middle man, the real estate broker. The latter was a good business man and by using all his guile, he eventually acquired the hog farm for his client at a fair ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... had extracted from me, I laid off my workmen the next morning. They trooped in bright and early, considerably augmented by fresh recruits who came to share the benefits of my innocuous prodigality, and if I live to be a thousand I shall never again experience such a noisome half hour as the one I spent in listening to their indignant protests against my tyrannical oppression of the poor and needy. In the end, I agreed to pay them, one and all, for a full day's work, and they went away mollified, calling me a true ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... force instead of mechanical force? We are continually in search of means to pull, to hammer, to fetch, to carry. We waste our future resources to get this strength, while we leave all the living fuel to burn itself out in mere pestiferous breath, and production of its variously noisome forms of ashes! Clearly, if we want fire for force, we want men for force first. The industrious hands must already have so much to do that they can do no more, or else we need not use machines to help them. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... national and ecclesiastical. Such public personages, it is true, are often in the nature of giants which an ancient community may have felt pride and safety in possessing, though, regarded privately, these born eminences must often have been inconvenient and even noisome. But of the future husband personally Mr. Gascoigne was disposed to think the best. Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... market-place, had resembled some darkly-traced picture placed against the opening. In the middle of the square still smoked, in a heavy volume of cloud, the last gleaming ashes of a lately blazing pile, still filling the air with a noisome stench. The night was closing darkly in, and one human being alone seemed yet to linger in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... (driving the whole troupe to the gate). Back, curs, back to your holes! Crawl back into your noisome dens! ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... kind, as well as out of respect to the parish-poor, who have no choice but to live with them, every county ought to be provided with a special Asylum for idiots; whose purpose should be to smoothen their passage through life, and to render it as little noisome to others, and ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring "El" between the rows of reeking sweat-shops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... prenileto. Nitre salpetro. Nobility nobelaro. Noble nobla. Nobleman nobelo. Nobleness nobleco. Nobody neniu. Nocturnal nokta. Nocuous pereiga. Nod (beckon) signodoni. No ne. No one neniu. Noise bruo. Noisome nauxza, malbonodora. Noisy (of children) petola. Nomad migranto. Nomadic migranta. Nom-de-plume pseuxdonomo. Nomenclature nomaro. Nominal nominala. Nominative nominativo. Nonchalance apatio. Nonconformist nekonformisto. Nondescript nepriskriba. None neniom. Nonentity ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... furnishes large quantities of salts to be used, among other applications, as food for plants. We thus restore to-day to our vegetation the nitrogen which existed in plants of primeval times. The tar, black and noisome though it be, is a marvelous product, by the reason of scores of beautiful substances which are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... in this sultry weather, in order to let a free current of air pass through the house, and they inhaled more strongly still the aromatic perfumes, which were not yet strong enough entirely to overcome that other noisome odour which was one of the most fatal means of spreading ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... breast; then for many weeks poultices were applied to it, which in continuance of time broke the skin, and then abundance of watery thin stuff came from it, but nothing else; at length the matter came to suppuration, but never any great store issued forth; it was exceeding noisome and painful; from the beginning of it until she died, she would permit no surgeon to dress it but only myself; I applied every thing unto it, and her pains were so great the winter before she died, that I have been called out of my bed two or three ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... pocket-handkerchiefs? Do they not indulge in a vicious and wholly unpardonable wealth of muddy boots, wherewith to trample upon their unoffending neighbors? Are they not as prone to bad language as the Tribune, and as noisy and noisome as the Sun itself? In short, are they not always and altogether the most oppressive nuisance that can annoy the peaceful pleasure-seeker? Echo answers that there isn't the smallest possible doubt of it. Why, then, do we foolishly ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... wholesome compulsion, we must oblige the owners of property haunted by death and contagion, to yield to the demands of society. If a man may not harbour a ferocious bull-dog in his alley, is he to keep a noisome ditch running at large there?—and if he may not hold a main of fighting cocks, is he to keep cholera and typhus in his house? For my part, I cannot see, if a justice of the peace can stop a man from knocking me down with a bludgeon, why he should not be authorised to interfere ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... city I hid with my men, though it was no easy task to persuade them to take up their habitation among so many ghosts of the departed, not to speak of the noisome fevers and the wild beasts and snakes that haunted it, for I had information that the Spaniards would pass through the swamp that lies between the ruins and the river, and there I hoped to ambush them. But on the eighth day of my hiding I learned from spies that Cortes ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... lands and towers and towns, So firmly won that thirty years of strife Made of their followers dukes, their leaders kings! While you! like jackal and the bird of prey, Who lurk in copses or 'mid muddy beds— Crouching and hushed, with dagger ready drawn, Hide in the noisome marsh that skirts the way, Trembling lest passing hounds snuff out your lair! Listen at eventide on lonesome path For traveller's footfall, or the mule-bell's chime, Pouncing by hundreds on one helpless man, To cut him down, then back to your retreats— ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... to be devised. John suggested them. One was that we should slip into the fairs under various disguises, and exercise our skill in thieving. From brigands we became pick-pockets, and our detested name sank lower and lower in infamy. We formed a fellowship with the most noisome characters our province concealed, and, by an exchange of rascally services, once again managed to ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... friar, and after that did nothing but groan feebly, smoke cigarettes and now and then call for Martin in a voice full of pain. Then he who had become Ricardo in the book would go below into that beastly and noisome hole, remain there mysteriously, and coming up on deck again with a face on which nothing could be read, would as likely as not resume for my edification the exposition of his moral attitude toward life illustrated ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... that, of the four kinds of divine punishment mentioned, three accurately correspond in both compositions. Famine and pestilence occur in both, while the lions and leopards of the Epic find an equivalent in "noisome beasts". The sword is not referred to in the Epic, but as this had already threatened Jerusalem at the time of the prophecy's utterance its inclusion by Ezekiel was inevitable. Moreover, the fact that Noah should be named in the refrain, as the first of the three proverbial ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... sending his disciples to buy food, He wandered forth intent on doing good, As was his wont. And in the market-place He saw a crowd, close gathered in one space, Gazing with eager eyes upon the ground. Jesus drew nearer, and thereon he found A noisome creature, a bedraggled wreck,— A dead dog with a halter round his neck. And those who stood by mocked the object there, And one said scoffing, "It pollutes the air!" Another, jeering, asked, "How ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... say that him into a pit they threw, A loathsome pit, whence noisome scents exhale; O cursed folk! away, ye Herods new! What may your ill intentions you avail? Murder will out; certes it will not fail; 125 Know, that the honour of high God may spread, The blood cries ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... however, she had lowered the upper sashes of the windows about a foot, and the fresh air of morning was pouring in, curling the paper on the centre table and dispersing the noisome fragrance of the flowers, in which I detected the morbid supremacy of the ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... far outnumbered the believers. Sabbatai was scouted as a madman. The Jewry was torn by dissensions and disturbances. But Sabbatai took no part in them. He had no communion with the bulk of his brethren, save in religious ceremonies, and for these he would go to the poorest houses in the most noisome courts. It was in a house of one room, the raised part of which, covered with a strip of carpet, made the bed-and living-room, and the unraised part the kitchen, that his next manifestation of occult power was ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... remonstrates or complains. It is true that, if you pass the door of her little room late into the night, you will probably go to bed haunted by the sound of low, dreary weeping; but it would be worse than useless to argue with her about her folly; she cherishes her noisome and ill-favored weed as if it were the fairest of fragrant flowers, and will not be persuaded to throw it aside. Well, if you could listen to that same long-suffering and soft-hearted young female, in her place in the subterranean ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... There was a proclamation, so far back as Edward the First, forbidding the use of sea-coal in the suburbs, on a complaint of the nobility and gentry, that they could not go to London on account of the noisome smell and thick air. About 1550, Hollingshed foresaw the general use of sea-coal from the neglect of cultivating timber. Coal fires have now been in general use for three centuries. In the country they persevered in using wood and peat. ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... parts of the edifice. This particular one was contrived in the thickness of the ballium wall which led from Beauchamp Tower to Develin Tower. On either side of the corridor was a range of low, strong doors which gave entrance to dungeons, and horrible thoughts of what the inmates of these noisome cells must endure flashed across the girl's mind, rendering ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... three figures with a scowl. 'You'll hand me over to the police, George Pendle, will you?' he muttered, loud enough for Cargrim to overhear. 'Take care I don't do the same thing to your father,' and like a noisome and dangerous animal he crept back in the shadow of the hedge ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... he said, and led us through a long, noisome passage, which was pitch dark and very unevenly paved. Then he unlocked a door and with a swirl the wind caught it and blew ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... capes thereof, in all humility take leave to represent the same unto Your Excellency and withal to acquaint you that by the means thereof great quantities of fish are poisoned and destroyed and the rivers also made noisome and offensive. For prevention of which evils in regard the restraint of the killing of whales is a branch of His Majesty's ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... crowded city,—summer's heat Glares burning, blinding, in the narrow street, Still, noisome, deadly, sleeps the envenomed air, Unstirred the yellow flag that says "Beware!" Tempt not thy fate,—one little moment's breath Bears on its viewless wing the seeds of death; Thou at whose door the gilded chariots stand, Whose dear-bought skill unclasps the miser's hand, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... house in a country town, with perhaps a little land beside; but the city has a mysterious fascination for the poorer classes, and year after year many who might make the change herd together in contracted and noisome quarters, when they might have their share of light and space in ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... That fouls his hands with dirty foes: 850 For where no honour's to be gain'd, 'Tis thrown away in b'ing maintain'd. 'Twas ill for us we had to do With so dishonourable a foe: For though the law of arms doth bar 855 The use of venom'd shot in war, Yet, by the nauseous smell, and noisome, Their case-shot savours strong of poison; And doubtless have been chew'd with teeth Of some that had a stinking breath; 860 Else, when we put it to the push, They have not giv'n us such a brush. But ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... their hands. As soon as this necessary duty was performed, we scraped our decks, and gave our ship a thorough cleansing, then smoaked it between decks, and lastly washed every part with vinegar. These operations were extremely necessary for correcting the noisome stench on board, and destroying the vermin; for, from the number of our men and the heat of the climate, both these nuisances had increased upon us to a very loathsome degree, and, besides being most intolerably offensive, were doubtless in some sort productive of the sickness we had laboured under ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... what the place is like. It is a crypt of the cathedral church. You enter it by a little door in the choir, leading to a tortuous flight of steep steps going down. It is a chamber cut out of the rock of the little island, dark, damp, and noisome. A small aperture lets in the light, as well as the sound of the sea beating on the rocks below. The roof, if you could see it in the gloom, is groined and ribbed, and above it is the mould of many graves, for in the old days bodies were buried in the choir. ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... prune. He was in bed, on November 11, when they sighted Cape Orange, now the most northerly point belonging to the Empire of Brazil. On the 14th they anchored at the mouth of the Cayenne river, and Raleigh was carried from his noisome cabin into his barge; the 'Destiny' got across the bar, which was lower then than it now is, on the 17th. At Cayenne, after a day or two, Raleigh's old servant Harry turned up; he had almost forgotten his English in twenty-two years. Raleigh began to ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... formed to loathe and to be loathed by man, 320 Which owed their birth to nastiness and spite, Deadly to touch, and hateful to the sight; Creatures which, when admitted in the ark, Their saviour shunn'd, and rankled in the dark, Found place within: marking her noisome road With poison's trail, here crawl'd the bloated toad; There webs were spread of more than common size, And half-starved spiders prey'd on half-starved flies; In quest of food, efts strove in ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... all things else REBECCA STRYPE Could least endure a pipe. She rail'd upon the filthy herb tobacco, Protested that the noisome vapour Had spoilt the best chintz curtains and the paper And cost her many a pound in stucco: And then she quoted our King James, who saith "Tobacco is the Devil's breath." When wives will govern, husbands must obey; For many a day DICK mourn'd and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... banished, and their flocks forbidden to elect their successors: nay, sometimes, in the fierce quest after hidden treasure, eminent ecclesiastics were stretched on the rack, their mouths were filled with noisome dirt, or cords were twisted round their foreheads or their shins. In Gaul, under the Visigothic King Euric, the persecution was less savage, but it was stubborn and severe. Here, too, the congregations were forbidden to elect successors to their exiled bishops; the paths to ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... lurked in the undergrowth. In one the ugly snout of a small crocodile protruded from the muddy, noisome water, and the cold, unwinking eyes stared at elephant and man as they passed. The rank abundant foliage overhung the track and brushed or broke against Badshah's sides, as he shouldered his way ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... those which are hairy) need excite no alarm or disgust;—indeed they are suffered to live unmolested in many houses, partly owing to a belief that they bring good-luck, and partly because they destroy multitudes of those enormous and noisome roaches which spoil whatever they cannot eat. The scorpion is less common; but it has a detestable habit of lurking under beds; and its bite communicates a burning fever. With far less reason, the mabouya is almost equally feared. It is a little lizard about six inches long, and ashen-colored;—it ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... army, strewn with the relics of a rout. On the right, a sluggish river glided, like a serpent, stealthy, sinuous, and dark, into a seemingly impervious jungle; on the left, a Southern swamp filled the air with malarial damps, swarms of noisome life, and discordant sounds that robbed the hour of its repose. The men were friends as well as comrades, for though gathered from the four quarters of the Union, and dissimilar in education, character, and tastes, the same spirit animated all; the routine ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... I must find my way back to the brig against which the two ships were lying and start afresh from her; since it was pretty certain that it was there, by boarding the wrong ship, that I had got off my course. But because of my certain knowledge of what horridness the brig sheltered, and of the noisome stench that I must encounter there, it took a good deal of resolution to put this plan into practice; so much, indeed, that for a while I wavered about it, and succeeded at last in starting back again only by setting going the full force of ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... Edward Burrough was called to a more deadly wrestling match than any in the pleasant London fields. He was thrown into prison, and there he had to face a mortal foe in the gaol-fever that was then raging in that noisome den. This was to wrestle in grim earnest, with Death himself for an adversary; and in this wrestling match Death ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... before him without one word of remonstrance, much wondering what was likely to happen next, till he found himself suddenly driven into that noisome hut, where he was forced to enter ignominiously on all fours, like an eight months' ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... man-of-war:—'Here I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, so huddled one upon another, that not more than fourteen inches space was allotted for each with his bed and bedding; and deprived of the light of the day as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere ... devoured with vermin.' &c. The doctor, when visiting the sick, 'thrust his wig in his pocket, and stript himself to his waistcoat; then creeping on all fours under their hammocks, and forcing up his bare pate between two, kept ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... be remembered. The air was crisp and clear. Just snow enough had fallen in the night to cover every black and noisome thing, as though all nature's sins were washed away by her Sabbath repentance, and she had commenced her life afresh. There was luxury in every inhalation of the pure air. The horse, more impatient than ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... freely expresses himself. "The people, by their own efforts, will sweep away the gross inequalities now obstructing the church-path,—will sweep away from amidst the habitations of the industrious the moral cemeteries, the noisome markets around the house of God, whatever be the selfish interests that stubbornly resist the operation.... It would grieve me to foresee a day when our cathedrals and our churches shall be demolished or desecrated; when the tones ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... out of them. And when it regards us, it gives us the sensation of a happiness that is not of this earth. It informs us of that of which we have always been ignorant; it makes us comprehend that the realities of our dreams are but noisome ordures. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... it, but remitted him to the sentence of the warden; who, by virtue of his dictatorial power, ordered the rioter to be loaded with irons, and confined in the strong room, which is a dismal dungeon, situated upon the side of the ditch, infested with toads and vermin, surcharged with noisome damps, and impervious to the least ray ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... and stirred him with my sword point. He was a noisome heap, but I knew that I must overcome my repugnance and bury him, or I should have to explain the whole tale to the camp at dawn. And explanation would take time and was not necessary. The Huron was following me, and had no quarrel ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... and I dressed myself slowly, thinking over all that had happened in the night. It was a beautiful day and I went on deck, glad to get out in the early, pure sunshine, and to smell the breeze from the blue water, so different from the noisome, stagnant odour from my state-room. Instinctively I turned aft, towards the surgeon's cabin. There he stood, with a pipe in his mouth, taking his morning airing precisely as on the ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... no particular shape, and are clustered in groups against the steep face of the terrace; filthy lanes wind amongst them, so narrow, that if you are not too tall, you look into the slits of windows on either hand, by turning your head, and feel the noisome warm air in whiffs against your face. Glacial boulders lie scattered throughout the village, around and beneath the clusters of houses, from which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the native rock. I entered one ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the threshold, and seems to respire even the noisome air of the metropolis as if it were Eden. As he proceeds down Hill Street he stops, and gazes for a moment on the opposite house. What passes in his mind we know not. Perhaps he is reminded that in that mansion dwell beauty, wealth, and influence, and that all might ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... in thrall to ancient mystic faiths, A land of iron creeds and gruesome deeds, A land of superstitions vast and grim, And all the noisome growths that ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... rapine, terror and blood, are ever associated with the tiger, the hyena, and the wolf. Among the feathered tribes, the owl and the bat, also companions of darkness, are shunned by many, as horrible objects, and full of ill-omen. Haunted castles, ruined battlements, and noisome caverns, are the chosen abodes of these noctural maurauders, and it is to such associations that these animals are indebted for the unamiable character they have obtained. The prejudices conceived against that portion of these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... through her like a river and left her clean. In the eye of nature and before the presence of nature's innumerable creatures she stood as innocent as they. She had entered into noisome places, but so had the marsh-hawk poising grandly on motionless wing there above. She had scrambled in the mire, and she was ruffled and draggled and besmirched; so likewise had been the silent flame-bird in the thicket, but he had washed clean his plumes ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... began to call and ask for work, she found the arum stalks, left alone without leaves, surrounded with berries, some green, some ripening red. As the berries ripen, the stalk grows weak and frequently falls prone of its own weight among the grasses. This noisome fruit of clustering berries, like an ear of maize stained red, they told her was 'snake's victuals,' and to be avoided; for, bright as was its colour, it was only fit ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... half way down the mast in the morning. Alleyne, wretchedly ill and weak, with his head still ringing from the blow which he had received, crawled up upon deck. Water-swept and aslant, it was preferable to the noisome, rat-haunted dungeons which served as cabins. There, clinging to the stout halliards of the sheet, he gazed with amazement at the long lines of black waves, each with its curling ridge of foam, racing ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... felt I must question this man, though it raised my gorge even to speak of her in his presence. In that atmosphere of corruption the thought of the girl was intolerably sweet, as of a ray of sunshine penetrating a noisome dungeon. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... I so long have dwelt In noisome cities, whence Thy sacred works Are ever banished from my sight; where lurks Each baleful passion man has ever felt. Here human skill is shown in shutting out All sight and thought of things that God hath made; Lest He should share the constant homage paid ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... I have been abroad on the mountains has my heart risen in grateful praise to God that it was not my destiny to waste and pine among those noisome ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... hospital, and made his way toward the rooms he had engaged in a neighborhood farther south. The weather was unseasonably warm and enervating, and he walked slowly, taking the broad boulevard in preference to the more noisome avenues, which were thick with slush and mud. It was early in the afternoon, and the few carriages on the boulevard were standing in front of the fashionable garment shops that occupied the city end of the drive. He had an unusual, oppressive feeling of idleness; it ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... courage, in spite of all her pain, were wonderful to witness. But all this cheery hope and courage and patience snuffed out as a candle, leaving noisome darkness to settle down in that sick-room from the day ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... a fearful sight. How many lay dead and dying in the noisome darkness below, God only knew! How many lay mangled and crushed, waiting for their death, Heaven only ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... acquire that glossy, oleaginous appearance, as if he would take fire easily and burn well? I wish we could do without him! The centre of his influence, a small room in the suburbs of the dining-room, which he calls the dispence, or dispence-khana, is a place of unwholesome sights and noisome odours, which it is good not to visit unless as Hercules visited the stables of Augeas. The instruments of his profession are there, a large handie full of very greasy water, with bits of lemon peel and fragments of broken victuals swimming in it, and a short, stout stick, with a ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... your soul your own is only the first step on the road to excellence. We, in Europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the time to forget how little that freedom means. To Russia it must seem everything. A prisoner shut up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates. It appears to him pregnant with an immense and final importance; whereas what is important is the spirit in which he will draw the first breath of freedom, the counsels he will ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... continued among them. . . . If I should write unto your Majesty what spoil hath been, and is of the archbishoprics, of which there are four, and of the bishoprics, whereof there are above thirty, partly by the prelates themselves, partly by the potentates, their noisome neighbours, I should make too long a libel of this my letter. But your Majesty may believe it, upon the face of the earth where Christ is professed, there is not a Church in so miserable ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... blacker. The clouds gather overhead. Doleful voices, the clanking of chains, and the rushing of many feet to and fro, are heard through the darkness. The way, hardly discernible in gloom, runs close by the mouth of the burning pit, which sends forth its flames, its noisome smoke, and its hideous shapes, to terrify the adventurer. Thence he goes on, amidst the snares and pitfalls, with the mangled bodies of those who have perished lying in the ditch by his side. At the end of the long ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... tottering on the mound regardless of my safety. Within that noisome den from which I had emerged I had thought with a narrow intensity only of our immediate security. I had not realised what had been happening to the world, had not anticipated this startling vision of unfamiliar things. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... they do not exercise any influence or control in the government of the city, and they are suppressed in as far as it has been found practicable. Municipal graft is inconsiderable. There are interior courts in the city that are noisome and centers of disease and the refuge of criminals, but Congress has begun to clean these out, and progress has been made in the case of the most notorious of these, which is known as "Willow Tree ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... time will do," he said, bending over the papers spread out before him—the papers in the case of the General Traction Company resisting the payment of its taxes. A noisome odor seemed to be rising from the typewritten sheets. He made a wry face and flung the papers aside with a gesture of disgust. "They never do anything honest," he said to himself. "From the stock-jobbing owners down to the nickel-filching conductors they steal—steal—steal!" And then he wondered ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... rank and pernicious trail of noisome smoke that brought peace to his heart and drove the birds from the roadside into the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... and gone To the rice swamp dank and lone, Where the slave whip ceaseless swings, Where the noisome insect stings; Where the fever demon strews Poison with the falling dews; Where the sickly sunbeams glare Through the hot and misty air. Gone, gone—sold and gone To the rice swamp dank and lone, From Virginia's hills and waters— Woe is me my ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... roof-ridges they choose to sit on. The native Christians ought to put a row of spikes along the top of their cathedral to keep them off; the beauty of that edifice is very far from great, and it cannot carry off the effect produced by the row of these noisome birds as they sit along its summit, with their wings arranged at all manner of different angles in an "all gone" way. One bird perhaps will have one straight out in front, and the other casually disposed at ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... diligent rummaging among archives. When we next find him, in summer 1461, alas! he is once more in durance: this time at Meun-sur-Loire, in the prisons of Thibault d'Aussigny, Bishop of Orleans. He had been lowered in a basket into a noisome pit, where he lay all summer, gnawing hard crusts and railing upon fate. His teeth, he says, were like the teeth of a rake: a touch of haggard portraiture all the more real for being excessive and burlesque, and all the more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon Antwerp, and wherever we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that all mean things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through the winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant water, and through the noisome courts, his spirit abides with us, and the heroic beauty of his visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps and bore his shadow seem to arise and speak of him with living voices. For the city which is the tomb of Rubens still lives to us ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame) |
