"Poisonous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boundaries of Transvaal there lies a stretch of malarial country in which nothing can live unless born there. Men and beasts from other parts visit it only in winter and leave it again before the rains begin, when the atmosphere becomes almost too poisonous to inhale. Even the unfailing tax-gatherers of the Native Affairs Department go there only in the winter every year and hurry back again with the money bags before the malarial period sets in. A Boer general describes how when harassed by the Imperial forces during the South African war, he ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... little known Fish for table, seir fish Sardines, poisonous? Sharks Saw-fish Fish of brilliant colours Curious fish described by AElian (note) Fresh-water fish, little known,—not much eaten Fresh-water fish in Colombo Lake Immense profusion of fish in the rivers ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... become involved in the terrible entanglement of the long-established rum-power, until to-day you witness a condition of affairs which ought to stir the righteous indignation of every citizen and father. What is it you are enduring? An institution which blasts with its poisonous breath every soul that enters it, which ruins young manhood, which kills more citizens in times of peace than the most bloody war ever slew in times of revolution; an institution that has not one good thing to commend it; an institution that is established for the open and declared purpose ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... hunger in the presence of food which their appetites reject, or are they poisoned by the small amount of honey absorbed at the first bites? I cannot say; but, whether poisonous or merely repugnant, the bee smeared with honey is always fatal to them; a fact which explains more clearly than the unfavourable circumstances of the former experiment my lack of success with the freshly ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... ureters and kidneys. Independently of their situation, however, cancers frequently cause death by giving rise to a progressive impairment of health known as the cancerous cachexia, a condition which is due to the continued absorption of poisonous products from the tumour. The patient loses appetite, becomes emaciated, pale, and feverish, and gradually loses strength until he dies. In many cases, especially those in which ulceration has occurred, the addition of pyogenic ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... on the battlefield today is deadly. When a gas shell explodes there are two kinds of men: Quick men and Dead men. The quick men put on their gas masks, which contain chemicals that neutralize the poisonous air. ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... iron arrow-blades obtained from the Bantu are also found. The arrow is usually 2 to 3 ft. long. The distance at which the Bushman can be sure of hitting is not great, about twenty paces. The arrows are always coated with a gummy poisonous compound which kills even the largest animal in a few hours. The preparation is something of a mystery, but its main ingredients appear to be the milky juice of the Amaryllis toxicaria, which is abundant in South Africa, or of the Euphorbia arborescens, generally mixed with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Hercules with the lion's-skin, "will teach him how to overcome Vice and quell evil passions, those poisonous monsters which like Hydras[15] are ever reborn in the heart. A foe to effeminate pleasures, he shall learn from me those too seldom trodden paths that lead to honour along the ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... such as mice, canary birds, guinea pigs and rabbits are used in trench warfare, because they are more sensitive than man to poisonous gases. It sometimes happens that hundreds of men must be rescued from a trench by three or four men. Each rescuer carries with him a canary bird in a small cage attached to his shoulder. And as long as these birds show no signs of distress the men are safe ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... written by the talented Mrs. Henderson is an admirable work. I owe much to it. The facts and arguments adduced against tobacco smoking, strong drink and poisonous foods, are set forth in such a clear and convincing manner, that soon after reading it I became a teetotaler and "sanitarian"[1] and began at once to reap the benefits. I felt that I ought not to keep such a good thing to myself, but that I should preach the doctrine ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... saw clearly that this was but another of the base schemes of his treacherous uncle, who, not yet certain by what means he should compass the death of Earl Hamish, had taken this poisonous course to assure himself that the Lady Adela should be ill on that night, and powerless to interfere in the crime that was in ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... life of the Sahara is deadly, and the esparto grass picker is constantly facing danger. The clump of esparto, into the bottom of which he must reach to cut the mature stalks, is quite likely to be the lair of a poisonous viper; and if the reptile sinks its fangs into the flesh of the unfortunate picker, long weeks of suffering and disability—perhaps death—are in store for him. Between the bite of a rattler and that of an esparto viper there is ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... canvas, were marvellously realistic, and were so much admired by the great audience, which overflowed the large lecture hall, that the word demonstrative does not describe their enthusiasm. But the lecture! Description, experience, suffering, adventure, courage, torrid heat, wild beasts, poisonous insects, venomous serpents, half-civilized peoples, thirst,—almost enough of torture to justify the use of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner in illustration,—and yet a perpetual, quiet, rollicking, jubilant humor, all-pervading, and, at the close, on the lecturer's return once more to the beginning ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... in a small shed back of the factory," was the answer. "We just heard of it, and we're going in after them. Oh! Oh—my—my heart!" he gasped, and he sank to the sidewalk. Evidently he was either overcome by the smoke and poisonous ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... on the hills they are most likely to be live-oaks—they are semi-globular in shape like our apple trees, only huge, of a clamant, virile, poisonous green. They grow alone, and each one of them seems to be standing knee-deep in shadow so thick and moist that it is like a ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... draught. Turns so sharp we rocked in our own wake; once we passed acres upon acres of big, cod-like fish floating dead upon the water among the branches and the forest rubbish. It seems the lake in rising spread over some poisonous mineral in the soil. But life there was none, except the rampant green dying plant life in every direction to the horizon. There were not even birds, other than now and then a stray snow-white slender ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... young trees being used for first coats, and of old trees for the finishing coats. It must be dried in a damp, close atmosphere. For the best work ten or twelve coats are elaborately rubbed down and polished. Even the presence of it is very poisonous to some people and all workers in it ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... the experiments of Thiersch, Burdon-Sanderson, and Macnamara, are not virulent and poisonous for the first twenty-four hours; on the second day eleven per cent. of those who swallow them will suffer; on the third day, thirty-six per cent.; on the fourth day, ninety per cent.; on the fifth day, seventy-one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... keeping out every trace of free trade that would enable the poor fisherman to sell his fish in the highest market and buy his provisions in the lowest, so in China the British in 1838 insisted on forcing the Chinaman to buy the poisonous opium of India, although in 1834 the China government had warned the British of their intention to prohibit the infamous traffic. The war that England thereupon proclaimed against China was one of the most infamous and cowardly ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... a thicket of oleanders drenched the air with the perfume of their heavy poisonous flowering, and behind them a rough clearing of saw grass swept up to the debris of the fallen portico. To the left, beyond the black hole of a decaying well, rose the walls of a second brick building, smaller than the dwelling. A few shreds of rotten porch clung to its face; and ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is extensive, but cheerless past description. Swamp, swamp-reeking, festering, rotting, malaria-pregnant swamp, where poisonous vapours for several months in the year are ever bulging up and out into the air,—lies before you as far as the eye can reach, and farther. If you enter the river at the worst seasons of the year, ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... it that you scoff? Verily, you do an unconsidered deed. When one remembers all the liquids, medicinal, soporific, insipid, poisonous, which flood the throat of humanity, one may deem himself a favorite of Fortune to be placed so high in the catalogue. Though upon his lowliness gleam down the rosy and purple lights of rare old wines aloft, yet from his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Up the sides of this depression grew sheaves of the common rush, and here and there a peculiar species of flag, the blades of which glistened in the emerging sun, like scythes. But the general aspect of the swamp was malignant. From its moist and poisonous coat seemed to be exhaled the essences of evil things in the earth, and in the waters under the earth. The fungi grew in all manner of positions from rotting leaves and tree stumps, some exhibiting ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... was in the presence of the active operation of the subtle drug. He had read the dead chemist's papers. He knew the deadly exhalations of the weed when growing, or when in an undried state. He also knew that distillation robbed it of its poisonous effect, but for all that, the sickly atmosphere left him with ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... Kate," said the king, thoughtfully. "You have many enemies at our court; and we have to accuse ourselves that we have not always succeeded in stopping our ear to their malicious whisperings, and in keeping ourselves pure from the poisonous breath of their calumny. Our heart is still too artless, and we cannot even yet comprehend that men are a disgusting, corrupt race, which one should tread beneath his feet, but never take to his heart. Come, Earl Douglas, ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... by pouring some soft plaster-paris over a few lumps of potassium cyanide (three pieces, each of the size of a pea) in a wide-mouthed bottle. When the plaster has set, keep the bottle tightly corked to retain the poisonous gases. (3) Pins to mount the specimens. Entomological pins, Nos. 2, 3, and 4, are the best for general use. Beetles are usually pinned through the right wing-cover at about one fourth of its length from the front end of it. Moths and butterflies ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... charged against him. On the ship he recognized Garnier, and accepted from him a little tobacco. Tobacco is more coveted by these people than anything else in the world, and the stronger it is the better. The child almost as soon as he can walk will smoke in an old pipe the poisonous tobacco furnished specially for the natives, which is so strong that it makes the most inveterate European smoker ill. "Gin and brandy have been introduced successfully," but the natives as a rule make horrible grimaces ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... behind his comic mask from the infidelities of a wife he was not able to cease to love, through memoirs, novels, dramas, and the volleyed squibs of the press, one fact stares us in the face as one of so common occurrence, that men, if they have not ceased to suffer in heart and morals from its poisonous action, have yet learned to bear with a shrug and a careless laugh that marks its frequency. Understand, we do not say that the French are the most deeply stained with vice of all nations. We do not think them so. There are others where there is as much, but there ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... idiot's toy Did Fancy mock your vows. Nor let the gleam Of youthful hope that shines upon your hearts, Be chill'd or clouded at this awful task, To learn the lore of undeceitful Good, 390 And Truth eternal. Though the poisonous charms Of baleful Superstition guide the feet Of servile numbers, through a dreary way To their abode, through deserts, thorns, and mire; And leave the wretched pilgrim all forlorn To muse at last, amid the ghostly gloom Of graves, and hoary vaults, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... respect may be better understood when we say that on shore he has to pay 4 shillings per pound for tobacco. But his greatest advantage of all—that for which the plan has been adopted—is his being kept away from the vessel where, while purchasing tobacco, he is tempted to buy poisonous spirits. Of course the anti-smoker is entitled to say "it were better that the smacksman should be saved from tobacco as well as drink!" But of two evils it is wise to choose the less. Tobacco at 1 shilling 6 pence procured in the "coper," with, to some, its irresistible temptation to get drunk ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... seems to have gone through a bewildering change of employments. We hear of a clerkship in Liverpool, a searing experience in America (described with but little deviation in New Grub Street), a gas-fitting episode in Boston, private tutorships, and cramming engagements in 'the poisonous air of working London.' Internal evidence alone is quite sufficient to indicate that the man out of whose brain such bitter experiences of the educated poor were wrung had learnt in suffering what he taught—in his novels. His start in literature was made under conditions that might ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... much the 'don'ts' as the 'do's' that constitute his power. He can inspire with high resolve. He can narrate his own victories over sore trials and fiery tests of his integrity. He can draw the sting of poisonous suggestions, moral disheartenings and malice which his child has been cherishing in his young heart. But this means time, and time may be money. Yet no money can buy this sort of instruction, nor put a price on it. The coin is struck in the soul. It is the costliest barter, ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... instead of the cheaper kinds of teas, which are sold for foreign teas, but which are too often composed of some kind of leaf more or less resembling the real plant, without any of its genuine fragrance, and are, from their spurious and almost poisonous nature, calculated to produce evil to all who consume them, besides the drawback of their being ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... unsavoury, it is therefore good for nothing, but to be cast out, and trodden under foot of men. Such jesting which doth not season wholesome or harmless discourse, but giveth a haut gout to putrid and poisonous stuff, gratifying distempered palates and corrupt stomachs, is indeed odious and despicable folly, to be cast out with loathing, to be trodden under foot with contempt. If a man offends in this sort, to please himself, 'tis scurvy malignity; if to delight others, 'tis base servility ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... or Wolf's-Bane).—Very pretty and very hardy, and succeeds under the shade of trees; but being very poisonous should not be grown where there are children. Increased by division or by seeds. Flowers June to July. Height, 4 ft. (See also ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... that was a crime, an insult against human and divine justice. It would be nothing for the criminal to say he was sorry; he had to be punished. A man who did that was not fit to live; he was a man no longer, he was a biting, poisonous reptile, who for the sake of the community must be expunged. Yet human justice which hanged people for violent crimes committed under great provocation, dealt more lightly with this far more devilish thing, a crime committed coldly and calculatingly, that had planned ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... know the full offence of this born villain, This creeping, coward, rank, acquitted felon, Who threw his sting into a poisonous libel,[db] And on the honour of—Oh God! my wife, The nearest, dearest part of all men's honour, Left a base slur to pass from mouth to mouth 160 Of loose mechanics, with all coarse foul comments, And villainous jests, and blasphemies ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... chivalry, told us that in those times vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. Infatuated moralist! Your Lordship excites compassion as labouring under the same delusion. Slavery is a bitter and a poisonous draught. We have but one consolation under it, that a Nation may dash the cup to the ground when she pleases. Do not imagine that by taking from its bitterness you weaken its deadly quality; no, by rendering ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... made himself heir of his worth. And between the Po and the mountain,[2] and the sea[3] and the Reno,[4] not his blood alone has become stripped of the good required for truth and for delight; for within these limits the ground is so full of poisonous stocks, that slowly would they now die out through cultivation. Where is the good Lizio, and Arrigo Manardi, Pier Traversaro, and Guido di Carpigna? O men of Romagna turned to bastards! When in Bologna ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... 'un!" said Barkstow savagely. "If she's the one we think she is-a black, poisonous, sly one with a face that no ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... tropical fish (Sphyraena baracuda), considered in the West Indies to be dangerously poisonous at times, nevertheless eaten, and ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... least role there. Many beauties envied her, detested her, spoke evil of her, and yet sought her friendship, because she almost always queened it in society. Her friendship and sympathy always seemed so cordial, so sincere and tender, and her epigrams were so pointed and poisonous, that every hostile criticism seemed to shrivel up in that glittering fire, and there seemed to be nothing left but to seek her friendship and good will. For instance, if things went well in Baden, one could confidently foretell that at the end of the summer season ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... about those seven days was the intense stillness of the air. We were, although we did not know it, under an air-proof canopy, and were slowly but surely exhausting the life-giving oxygen around us, and replacing it by poisonous carbonic acid gas. Scientific men have since showed that a simple mathematical calculation might have told us exactly when the last atom of oxygen would have been consumed; but it is easy to be wise after the event. The body of the ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... very little for him to do. After he had brought in two buckets of water from the well and had cut, for the day's consumption, a piece of meat from his elk hanging outside against the wall, he had only to sit and smoke, to read old magazines and papers, and to watch Joan. Then the poisonous roots of his jealousy struck deep. Always his brain, unaccustomed to physical idleness, was at work, falsely interpreting her wistful silence—she was thinking of the parson, hungry to read his books, longing for the open season and his coming ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... that which is rustling in the pines close to the wall—what is that looking out with flashing eyes and a poisonous glance? Is it the serpent already come to expel these happy beings ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... course, all the fluid matter deposited upon the surface that does not exhale in the atmosphere percolates through this loose stratum until it reaches the rock, where it stagnates and corrupts, returning into the air in the form of poisonous gases, instead of undergoing the healthy transformation which is effected in all soils capable of sustaining vegetable life. If the fluid thus held in solution were only the rain from heaven, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... went deer hunting. They got into some poisonous wild thing, perhaps poison ivy. My uncle's face was awful and father nearly lost his sight. He was almost blind for seven years but finally Dr. Daniels ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... there, but they are for the most part of innocuous species: three poisonous varieties only are known, and their bite does not produce such terrible consequences as that of the horned viper or Egyptian uraeus. There are two kinds of lion—one without mane, and the other hooded, with a heavy mass of black and tangled hair: the proper ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... into dark forests and craggy mountains, as savage though not so lofty as the Alps and the Pyrenees. In this rigorous climate, [128] where the snows seldom melt, the fruits are tardy and tasteless, even honey is poisonous: the most industrious tillage would be confined to some pleasant valleys; and the pastoral tribes obtained a scanty sustenance from the flesh and milk of their cattle. The Chalybians [129] derived their name and temper from the iron quality of the soil; and, since ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... claim of those ultra-democrats who preach the poisonous doctrines of direct government and of unrestrained majority rule, that responsible leadership is incompatible with popular government. This claim, is of course, supported by the radical press in Australia. We have already quoted from Mr. Syme's work on "Representative Government ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... oxygen; it comes out as carbonic acid, an impure gas created by the impurities of the body. The process of breathing dispatches the blood on a cleansing process through the whole body, and, while traveling through this, it collects all the poisonous gases and carries them back to the lungs to be emitted with expiration. By holding the breath we prolong this process, make it more thorough, and correspondingly free the body of more impurities. From the classic ages down physicians have ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... that I felt a single throe of expiring love, the love that had filled my heart to the brim. An immeasurable nausea of disgust overcame me, to the exclusion of other ideas, a fixed sense that a thing so dangerous in its angelic disguise, so poisonous and loathsome, must not remain on earth; this jest of Satan must be removed lest it contaminate all with whom it came in contact. Yet did there live any being uncontaminated already? Were not all vile, even as she was ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... being nobles or gentlemen. But our way is far more injurious; if a man takes a personal liberty, the cry is, Put him in jail! Death is a penalty which only disposes of a man forever; but jail is poisonous; the man survives, but he becomes criminal, and an enemy of society. And this cry for jail does not appear to emanate from legal tribunals merely, but we the people ourselves have caught it up, and invoke cells and chains for the lightest infraction of public or personal convenience; nay, we clamor ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... more lives as you have ruined mine. You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine. I will free the world of a poisonous thing. Take that, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... forces, each paralyzing the other, and standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that broken chalice which held the poisonous ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... for 100 soldiers, but they put 400 of us in there. The people of the place sent us slices of bread and butter, but it was the Germans who ate them. The latter gave us crusts of bread to eat. We were abominably cramped; a few managed to stretch themselves out, but the air was so poisonous that they could not remain in that position. At Melreux station we changed guards. They drove us with the butt-ends of their rifles to a spot where a train of cattle trucks was standing in the yard, and we had to get ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... the Parliament is usually held, the seats and wainscot are made of wood, the growth of Ireland; said to have that occult quality, that all poisonous animals are driven away by it; and it is affirmed for certain, that in Ireland there are neither serpents, toads, nor any other venomous ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... revenge. They tied him to three stones, and over his head they fastened a venomous serpent, whose poison was always to drip upon his face. Loke's faithful wife, Sigyn, placed herself at his side and held a cup under the poisonous drip; but whenever the cup is full and she goes to empty it, the poison drips into Loke's face, and then he writhes in agony so that the whole world trembles. This is ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... the dark—deep down in the dark, With the terror of death in each sightless eye, Which tells how hard 'tis to burn and die Down—down in the poisonous dark. ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... outlawed thus by Fate's behest? Drives ye forth open hate, or secret grudge flee ye? Follows ye unappeased an evil-doer's curse? Are ye pursued by poisonous words of calumny? ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... has been radical and strange. Dumbness, and slowness or thickness of speech alternate with an unnatural sharpness. Sometimes the spittle has a peculiar oiliness that results in a certain slipperiness of statement. Sometimes it has a bitter, poisonous, acid quality that eats its way into the words. There is a queer backward movement in biting sometimes. Withal a strange looseness of speech regarding the holiest things, and the most awesome truths, and ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... therefore very useful as a disinfectant. It has been used as a specific against cholera with marvellous results, and is useful in all cases of intestinal derangement. But only the pale-roasted varieties should be taken, as the roasting develops the poisonous, irritating properties. There is always danger in the roasting of grains or berries on account of the new substances that may ...
— Food Remedies - Facts About Foods And Their Medicinal Uses • Florence Daniel
... not explicitly abolished in the Constitution. The people, engaged in their various pursuits, ambitious for office, eager for wealth, let this seed of wrong become a mighty upas tree that covered our republic all over, and scattered everywhere its poisonous fruits. Shall we dare to go on for another period of our national existence knowing that at the foundation of our government there is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... half-past eleven, after many delays on her journey. She was pierced with cold, choked with the poisonous air, and had derived very little satisfaction from her visit ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... and dead things; you would not care to bathe in it. Well, still and stuffy air in a house is very much worse, only, unluckily, its dangers cannot be seen, but they are there lying in ambush for the ignorant person. Disease germs, poisonous gases, mildew, insects, dust, and dirt have it all their own way in stale, ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... half God called him to Himself. He was removed from many misfortunes which could not be relieved; and before he had preached a single time, or given one call to his flock, the Lord took him. It was said, however, that he died of a poisonous herb which was given him; and they say that his symptoms proved it. Whether that is true or not, this land is such that it could be suspected and said that in so short a time they took the life of their prelate. In the temporal government, the death of the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that I was not wide-awake enough to play the like comedy with Madame d'Etampes. That evening, when she heard the whole course of events from the King's own lips, it bred such poisonous fury in her breast that she exclaimed with anger: "If Benvenuto had shown me those fine things of his, he would have given me some reason to be mindful of him at the proper moment." The King sought to excuse me, but ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... impossible to get reliable local information as to which of the snakes are poisonous or not. If you ask an Indian about the character of any snake he always answers, "Very bad." But it is the cobra which is really an unpleasant creature to have any dealings with. Most other snakes will try and slink into a corner, or hide up. But the cobra, if cornered, shows ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... even the clergyman—" she stopt a moment to consider what might do for the clergyman;—"and even the clergyman, you know is obliged to go into infected rooms, and expose his health and looks to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere. In fact, as I have long been convinced, though every profession is necessary and honourable in its turn, it is only the lot of those who are not obliged to follow any, who can live in a regular way, in the country, choosing their own hours, following their own pursuits, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... he, scowling, "who are like the poisonous weed in the field, at which beasts nibble themselves to death. With such people the ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... the broad river-estuary which washed the northern border of their domain. There they had found a breathing-space, but it had proved a perilous one. The whole region north of the estuary was little better than a steaming swamp, infested with poisonous snakes and insects, and with strange monsters, survivals from a still earlier age, whose ferocity drove the Cave Folk back to their ancestral life in the tree-tops. Under these conditions it was all but impossible to keep alight the sacred fires—as ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... before and after. It's the only fair way, and the only efficient way! But aside from what we should have done, today we're fighting neither Mexico nor Spain. We're fighting a blood-glutted monster whose breath is poisonous gas, whose touch is fever, whose thoughts are leprous. This is too serious an emergency to trust in the hands of a fallacious volunteer system! The Government, by which I mean ourselves, must look to its knitting with an alertness never before found necessary, or this ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... his preparation. Siegfried takes the splinters of the sword—the splinters no smith can weld together—files them to dust, melts the dust, re-casts the sword and finishes it. Meantime Mime, working on, brews his poisonous broth, muttering to himself about his purpose. At the end Siegfried tests the sword and proves it true by splitting the anvil. All sorts of allegorical meanings may be found in this gigantic scene; but the plain meaning is that to a hero, unique, unparalleled in the history ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... cruelly murdered his sire— A crime to be punished with death— Be condemned to eat garlic till he shall expire Of his own foul and venomous breath! What stomachs these rustics must have who can eat This dish that Canidia made, Which imparts to my colon a torturous heat, And a poisonous look, I'm afraid! ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... curative mission. So it is with the novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... and a scholar to hob-nob with a traitorous beast like that! I know that he writes for a filthy weekly paper. Somebody sent me a copy a few days ago. It's rot—but not actually poisonous like that he must hear from Gedge. That's the reason, I suppose, he's not in the King's uniform. I've had my eye on him for some time. That's why I've not asked him to ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... for the alleged purpose of helping him feed the chickens. There were, as he had suspected, chickens attached to the castle. They lived in a little world of noise and smells at the back of the stables. Bearing an iron pot full of a poisonous-looking mash, and accompanied by Molly, he had felt for perhaps a minute and a half like a successful general. It is difficult to be romantic when you are laden with chicken-feed in an unwieldy iron pot, but he had resolved that this portion of the proceedings should be brief. The birds ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... enter the house, after her anger with Loveday and the flash of fear that the strange half-foreign girl had filled her with, only to find that the great Miss Le Pettit had offered that very girl to dance with her ... this was poisonous fare indeed for one in the discontented mood of Primrose Lear. The heaviness of her mind matched with that of her body as she ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... South is the same inexpressible melancholy which is obvious in those of our own man of sorrows, the beloved Lincoln. Bolivar was insulted and slandered as was Lincoln, and if Lincoln was assassinated by a man, Bolivar escaped the weapon of the assassin only to sink under poisonous treachery and ingratitude. It is true that Bolivar was quick-tempered, at times sharp in his repartee; his intellectual aptness had no patience with stupidity, and occasionally his remarks hurt. But when the storm had passed, he was all benevolence, ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... people around you who are as a garden—or as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force! How PERSONAL does a long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies! These pariahs of society, these ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... with strangers, and as a rule the cure is more certain; but when men receive disabling wounds, or have sickness likely to become permanent, the sooner they go far to the rear the better for all. The tent or the shelter of a tree is a better hospital than a house, whose walls absorb fetid and poisonous emanations, and then give them back to the atmosphere. To men accustomed to the open air, who live on the plainest food, wounds seem to give less pain, and are attended with less danger to life than to ordinary ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... grateful to give praise where it is needed than where it is deserved, and friendship so often seduces the iron stylus of justice into a vague flourish, that she writes what seems rather like an epitaph than a criticism. Yet if praise be given as an alms, we could not drop so poisonous a one into any man's hat. The critic's ink may suffer equally from too large an infusion of nutgalls or of sugar. But it is easier to be generous than to be just, and we might readily put faith in that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it, or around it stood a chance, for in a fractional second of time the place where it had been was a crater of seething, boiling lava—a crater which filled the atmosphere to a height of miles with poisonous vapors; which flooded all ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... pines, as the proudest grandee in his palace at Seville or Madrid." If he condemned superstition, he yet thought it possibly "founded on a physical reality"; he regarded the moon as the true "evil eye," and bade men "not sleep uncovered beneath the smile of the moon, for her glance is poisonous, and produces insupportable itching in the eye, and not infrequently blindness." If he believed in the immortality of the soul, he did not disdain to know the vendor of poisons who was a Gypsy. If he ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... householders possessed as many as five hundred. Horace gives it as a sign of the simplicity of his life as a bachelor, that he is waited on at table by only three slaves. Slave-holding among the Romans brought in temptations to all sorts of brutality and vice. It brought a poisonous atmosphere into every household. Nothing more clearly illustrates the moral degradation of this period than the character of the sports in which people of all ranks delighted. The most attractive theatrical performances came to be comedies, from the Greek and Latin ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... which is called cassada or cassava in the British West Indies, is made from the roots of Manioca pounded or grated, and carefully pressed free from its juice, which is alleged to be poisonous. The process will be found minutely described in other parts ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... "With the sword I will lay open this poisonous face of mine;" and she touched her right cheek; "or with it I will cut off this my wicked breast;" and she put her hand upon her left breast, ...
— The Ruinous Face • Maurice Hewlett
... with pistols and swords, bound the wretched man, hand and foot, threw him into the boat and rowed into the inlet. Just at the mouth of it there was a morass filled with gad-flies and other poisonous insects. Into this dreadful ditch they threw their former comrade, and then withdrew to a short distance to jeer at and mock him. In about an hour they drew him out again; he was still living, but his body was so covered with blisters that he looked like nothing ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... them thus to use with advantage the education which is given them at every hand. To make boys learn to read, and then place no good books within their reach, is to give men an appetite, and leave nothing in the pantry save unwholesome and poisonous food, which, depend upon it, they will eat rather than starve. Sir William, it seems, has ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... around the seer in whose vision the central identity in nature flowed through man's reason, gently did away with discords through their promise of larger harmonies. That which the Brahmans found in the far East, our little company there in the West knew also—"From the poisonous tree of the world two species of fruit are produced, sweet as the waters of life: Love, or the society of beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is like the immortal juice Vishnu." When Emerson had finished there was a hush of silence, the usual ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Their horrid ingredients were toads, bats, and serpents, the eye of a newt, and the tongue of a dog, the leg of a lizard, and the wing of the night-owl, the scale of a dragon, the tooth of a wolf, the maw of the ravenous salt-sea shark, the mummy of a witch, the root of the poisonous hemlock (this to have effect must be digged in the dark), the gall of a goat, and the liver of a Jew, with slips of the yew tree that roots itself in graves, and the finger of a dead child: all these were set on to boil in a great kettle, or cauldron, which, as fast as ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... concluded a final treaty with the Pope on June 29, and on August 5 made peace with King Francis. By this treaty of Barcelona he pledged himself to provide a suitable antidote to the poisonous infection of the new opinions. By the peace of Cambray he renewed the promise, given in the treaty of Madrid, of a mutual cooperation of the two monarchs for the extirpation ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... go beyond the verandah—the mud precluding the possibility of a constitutional. The nearest approach to excitement was mushroom-gathering; and in this occupation my inability to distinguish the edible from the poisonous species made my efforts unacceptable. We lived so "far from the madding crowd" that its din scarcely reached our ears. A week or ten days might pass without our receiving any intelligence from the outer world. The nearest post-office was in the district town, and with that distant point ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... them. The setting sun flashed his ruddy beams caressingly over her brow, and whispering winds lifted tenderly the clustering folds of jetty hair; but nature's pure- hearted darling had stood over the noxious tarn, whence the poisonous breath of a corrupt humanity rolled upward, and the once sinless child inhaled the vapor until her soul was a great boiling Marah. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... it seemed that death itself shuddered in her soul. Too late! It was too late. She had killed his love. That Jorth blood in her—that poisonous hate—had chosen the only way to strike this noble Isbel to the heart. Basely, with an abandonment of womanhood, she had mockingly perjured her soul with a vile lie. She writhed, she shook under the whip of this inconceivable fact. Lost! Lost! ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... poisonous as one could wish; a fresh breeze and driving snow from the E. with an awful surface. The recently fallen snow thickly covered the ground with powdery stuff that the unfortunate ponies fairly wallowed in. If it was only ourselves ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... heard," remarked the Count, "that there was a brazen image set up in the wilderness, the sight of which healed the Israelites of their poisonous and rankling wounds. If it be the Blessed Virgin's pleasure, why should not this holy image before us do me equal good? A wound has long been rankling in my soul, and filling ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the way with us that you may express disapproval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid! A Liberal is like the poisonous dry fungus which covers you with a cloud of dust if you accidentally touch it with ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... harmless. The fat man is almost always more exposed to disease, and to severe epidemic disease in particular, than the lean man. Let us leave it to the swine and other kindred quadrupeds, to dispose of gross half poisonous matter, by converting it into, or burying it in fat; let us employ our vital forces and energies in something better. Above all, let us not descend to swallow, as many have been inclined to do, besides the ancient Israelites, this gross secretion, and reduce ourselves to the painful ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... first is General Jacob Quincy, commander of the forces which man our ten thousand air-ships, or Demons, as they are popularly called. I think it is understood by all of us that, in these men, and the deadly bombs of poisonous gas with which their vessels are equipped, we must find our chief dependence for safety and continued power. We must not forget that we are outnumbered a thousand to one, and the world grows very restive under our domination. If it were not for ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... poisonous beast in his den," exclaimed he; "you plotted and planned for the scrimmage; you foresaw what would happen. Well, you are a ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... there is, so far as I know, only one dangerous one—a little black spider with a red spot on its back. Large spiders, called (incorrectly) tarantulas, credited by some with being poisonous, come into the houses. But they are really not in any way dangerous. I knew a man who used to keep tarantulas under his mosquito-nets so that they might devour any stray mosquitoes that got in. The ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... mesquites. Mixed among them were prickly pears, standing as high as our heads on horseback, and Spanish bayonets, looking in the distance like small palms; and there were many other kinds of cactus, all with poisonous thorns. Two or three times the dogs got on an old trail and rushed off giving tongue, whereat we galloped madly after them, ducking and dodging through and among the clusters of spine-bearing tress and cactus, not without getting a considerable number of thorns in our ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... tarantula nor scorpion to be feared in the Blue Ridge; the harmless lizard is called scorpion by the mountaineer. Nor are there large poisonous reptiles. There are snakes of lesser caliber, but only rattlers and copperheads among them are venomous. The highlander is not bedeviled by biting ants but there are fleas and flies in abundance though no mosquitoes, thanks to the absence of stagnant pools and lakes. There are no large lakes as in ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... without reckoning those who escaped with mutilated or injured bodies. The most opposite kinds of death were combined in this frightful moment. Some were consumed by the flames of the explosion, others scalded to death by the boiling water of the river, others stifled by the poisonous vapor of the brimstone; some were drowned in the stream, some buried under the hail of falling masses of rock, many cut to pieces by the knives and hooks, or shattered by the balls which were poured from the bowels of the machine. Some were found lifeless without any visible injury, having ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... his best, but the serpents he made were all noisome and poisonous, and he saw that he ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... beginning, the same irresistible tendency to ichorous suppuration and disorganization of the constituent parts of the joint, the same tendency to destroy the organism by gradual exhausting fever. We have unmistakeable proofs of the presence of a poisonous process pervading the whole organism. He who has had frequent opportunities of observing this disease, knows perfectly in what mysterious obscurity it is still enveloped, and how specifically different this affection of the knee sometimes appears to us from the hip disease. The ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... off for the point. We went by the longest way we could think of, to make it seem like a real expedition,—'cross country and back again. Jerry led us through the scratchy, overgrown part of Wecanicut, and we pretended that it was a long, weary trek through the most poisonous jungles to the coast of Peru; and when Greg walked right into a spider's web with a huge yellow spider gloating in the middle of it, he said he'd been bitten by a tarantula. We told him that we should have to leave him there ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... seen murder in a man's eyes, I saw it then in the mate's. He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand not open but clenched. One stroke of that bear's paw and Mulligan Jacobs and all the poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in the everlasting darkness. But he was unafraid. Like a cornered rat, like a rattlesnake on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he faced the irate giant. More than that. He even thrust his face ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... other day improvised a list of edibles headed, "Poisonous Ps,"—pastry, pickles, pork, and preserves. She was pleased to leave out puddings, and hereto we shall say, Amen. Not that one is to indorse such odiously rich ones as cocoa-nut, suet, and English plum; but, bating these, there are enough both nice ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... of a number of canned fruits, made by various Boards of Health, show the presence of small amounts of arsenic, tin, lead, and other poisonous metals. The quantity dissolved depends upon the kind, age, and condition of the canned goods and the state of the fruit when canned. The longer a can of fruit or vegetable has been kept in stock, the larger is the amount of tin or metal that has been dissolved. When fresh canned, there is usually ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... unnaturally laid on the visible facts. It is evident to the physician that the girl has attended school. It is not so evident that, since her earliest childhood, she has been fed on improper food, at irregular hours, and that the processes by which the poisonous dead matter is removed from the system, have been irregularly carried on. His questions put on these topics are put in a general way, and answered in the same, with, perhaps, a worse than foolish mock-modesty to prompt the reply. He does the best that ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... as he drew back and arose. "Perhaps you'd better coax him out," he said, for he had no desire to be bitten even by a little dog, as sometimes their teeth inflict a poisonous wound. ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... the result—a second Babel. We, all of us, such as we are, have reason to know that crowned kings are less ungrateful than kings of our profession; that the most sordid man of business is not so mercenary nor so keen in speculation; that our brains are consumed to furnish their daily supply of poisonous trash. And yet we, all of us, shall continue to write, like men who work in quicksilver mines, knowing that they are doomed to die of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac |
