"Stiffening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but choked it off when he noted the angry stiffening of mademoiselle's figure. Somehow, her veiled countenance was impressive of lingering, bitter emotions. She was a Basque, and that was a primitive race. She was probably bold enough and hardy enough to fulfill ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... the hills before the predicted stiffening came to such an extent that they decided it was wise to return ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... filling 1/16's cotton; 12 picks to the inch. Weight per yard, 1.8 ounces. These fabrics depend a great deal on the finishing. The men's wear requires less sizing on account of the hair it contains. The goods are piece dyed. Buckram is used principally for stiffening garments, and to give them shape or form. It is placed between the lining and the surface cloth of the garment in particular parts, such as the lapels, etc. It is used in the millinery trade, and is made into hats. Millinery buckram is ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... Joanna was stiffening with grief. She had not expected to have this battle with Ellen; she had been prepared for abuse and upbraiding, but not for argument—it had not struck her that her sister would demand ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Funk ever mixed his favorite drink for R.L.S., but his own fame has spread, not as a healer, but as a dram-decocter, from Samoa to Tahiti. "Dr. Funk!" one hears in every club and bar. Its particular merits are claimed by experts to be a stiffening of the spine when one is all in; an imparting of courage to live to men ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... me. "Kiss me, she's gone," I said. "Oh! what a boy," and she kissed me, saying, "let me go now—your mamma is coming." It came into my mind that I had had my hand up her clothes, and had felt hair between her legs. My prick stiffening in thinking of a women. I clutched her hard, put one hand on to her and did something I know not what. She said: "You are rude, Wattie." Then I pinched her and said: "Oh! what a big bosom you have." "Hish! hish!" said she. She was a tallish woman with brown ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... a whole lot of stiffening, too. You go through the Southwest and see the country they trailed over—the hot, dry places and the quicksands and canyons and all that. They sure made them Injuns ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... starting back on feeling pain. Contact with the hot embers rather increases the energy with which they strive to gain the hottest parts, and they never cease their struggles for the centre even when their juices are coagulating and their limbs stiffening in the roasting heat. Various insects, also, are thus fascinated; but the scorpions may be seen coming away from the fire in fierce disgust, and they are so irritated as to inflict at that time their most ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... must have to endure such friendship! I have often seen the temperature in the Siberian steppes fall to more than forty degrees below freezing point! I have felt, notwithstanding my reindeer coat, my heart growing chill, my limbs stiffening, my feet freezing in triple woolen socks; I have seen my sleigh horses covered with a coating of ice, their breath congealed at their nostrils. I have seen the brandy in my flask change into hard stone, on which not even my knife could ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... that they did. The fear of such a position is the after-recollection of it. We were in a sense numbed to mental apprehension by the vigour of the physical suffering we endured, by that overwhelming thirst, by the devouring heat, by the cutting spray which drove upon our faces, by the stiffening of our clothes when the sun scorched them. Seethed in the brine one hour, we were nigh burnt up the next; and yet we knew that water would soon fail us—that we could not hope for life for many days unless we should sight some ship, and she in turn ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... are more or less frequent. They are always serious, and often result in anchylosis (stiffening) of the joint or the death of the animal. The joints mostly punctured are the hock, fetlock, or knee, though other joints may, of course, suffer this injury. As the symptoms and treatment are much the same for all, only the accident as it occurs in the hock joint will be described. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... already so near it that he could not stop. The boat was carried out, the poor Tin Soldier stiffening himself as much as he could, and no one could say that he moved an eyelid. The boat whirled round three or four times, and was full of water to the very edge—it must sink. The Tin Soldier stood up to his neck in water, and the boat sank deeper ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... sea and shore, In my wild dreams I see him lie, With face upturned toward the sky, Murdered, and stiffening in his gore;— ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... finds out a narrow passage between the implement-house and the wall; and he says, 'There, you can work all night at digging a passage out; and who in the morning will suspect?' Is not that a fine discovery, when one must keep moving in the dark to prevent one's self stiffening into a corpse? Oh yes; then you find the poor devils, in their madness, begin to tear the ground up; what tools have they but their fingers, when the implement-house is locked? The poor devils!—old men, too, and women; and ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... wire ropes of still greater tenacity, permitted the construction of road bridges of this type with spans at that time impossible with any other system of construction. The suspension bridge dispenses with the compression member required in girders and with a good deal of the stiffening required in metal arches. On the other hand, suspension bridges require lofty towers and massive anchorages. The defect of the suspension bridge is its flexibility. It can be stiffened by girders and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... queries and doubts however were soon put an end to when it became known that the Colonel had decided to land and practice an attack. He knew that at any moment his Regiment might be thrown into action, and as the long journey was found to have a stiffening effect on one's limbs he decided on some small practice manoeuvres before the actual ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... point them to "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world," and if I can be instrumental in this mission I will not only open the eyes of the followers of Catholicism, but I will put stiffening into the backbone of Protestantism and help them to brand this idolatrous doctrine of Catholicism wherever she may dare to rear her ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... chivalry. Then came the ages which, when they have taken their due place in the depths of the past, will be, by a wise and clear-sighted futurity, perhaps well comprehended under a common name, as the ages of Starch; periods of general stiffening and bluish-whitening, with a prevailing washerwoman's taste in everything; involving a change of steel armour into cambric; of natural hair into peruke; of natural walking into that which will disarrange no wristbands; of plain language into quips and embroideries; and of human life in general, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... stream into him, to hold him fast to this earth with the force of her will-power. When his breast fought for air, her breast fought too, when his heart-beat flagged, hers flagged too. She felt that his coldness was making her cold, that her arms were stiffening. But she did not let him go. She fought with Death standing at the head of the bed—who was stronger, Death or her love, the ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... finished there was a significant silence. They were waiting for Ambrose to speak. Stiffening himself he told his story as manfully as he could. Conscious of its weakness he wore a hang-dog air which contrasted unfavorably ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... in the sacred ruins of Kelpie! The consul saw the ladies stiffening with indignation at this trespass upon their possible rights and probable privileges, and glanced at ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and as the ocean mists cleared and rolled away, and the grey morning light fell upon the chilled and stiffening form of his enemy, Challoner came up and looked into his face, and spoke ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... summoned from the cabin in which he slept, and he was now plying Father Orin with questions. There was a cry of alarmed amazement when the priest told of finding Ruth at Anvil Rock. Only William Pressley said nothing, and sat perfectly still, with a sudden stiffening of his bearing. It was not easy for the priest to make the whole story clear, for he did not understand it quite clearly himself. But he told as much as he knew of the night's events. And when he was done, the judge's voice stilled the clamor of the ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... rapidly away. The water was icy cold, but it was a case of life or death. Without the boats they were lost men. "All we possessed was on board," says Nansen, "so I exerted myself to the utmost. I redoubled my exertions though I felt my limbs gradually stiffening; at last I was able to stretch out my hand to the edge of the kayak. I tried to pull myself up, but the whole of my body was stiff with cold. After a time I managed to swing one leg up on to the edge ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... sale," said Bobby, stiffening; "but I might consider a proposition to buy your eight acres." He offered this suggestion with reluctance, for he had no mind to enter transactions of any sort with Silas Trimmer. Still, he recalled to himself with a sudden yielding to duty, business is business, and his father ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... of June he showed a symptom of it. He rode along the line and cheered men by his look and his face, and they too cheered him. But, when the danger was over—when the 21,000 brave men of his own and the Prussian army lay stiffening in death—the duke, who was so cheerful in the midst of his danger, covered his face with his hands and wept. He asked for that friend, and he was slain; for this, and a bullet had pierced his heart. The men who had devoted themselves to death for their leader and their country had been blown to ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the violence of her grief could not mar her beauty, was filled with anguish over the impending doom of her brother. That the boy had all he could do to maintain his composure was manifest to every one. For a time it seemed that affection would submerge all other emotions; then came a quick stiffening of his body as though he were preparing himself to resist any further appeal to his tenderness. When he spoke it ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... some rapidly succumb, others linger for a few hours. They are all dead by tomorrow. I leave the corpses on the table, exposed to the air. Instead of drying and stiffening, like the asphyxiated insects intended for our collections, my patients, on the contrary, turn soft and slacken in the joints, notwithstanding the dryness of the surrounding air; they become disjointed and separate into loose pieces, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... been borne down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong instincts are apt to make men strange, and rude; self-confidence, however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the crucifix of silver-gilt to his lips, that he might kiss the Christ, he made a frightful gesture, as if to seize it; and that last effort cost him his life. He called Eugenie, whom he did not see, though she was kneeling beside him bathing with tears his stiffening ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the point of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was stiffening the bottom of the skirt after the fashion ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... twenty years of age, who had died in the night. He had been wounded in the head and at some time during the long hours of darkness between sunset and dawn the bandage had partly slipped off, and hemorrhage had begun. The blood had run down on his neck and shoulders, coagulating and stiffening as it flowed, until it had formed a large, red, spongy mass around his neck and on his naked back between the shoulder-blades. This, with the coal-black hair, the chalky face partly buried in mud, and the distorted, agonized attitude of the half-nude body, made one of the most ghastly pictures ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... delivered almost at the rifles' muzzles, and the long sword-bayonets clashed together. Without yielding ground, for a few terrible seconds they thrust and parried with the clanging steel, while on either side the dead were stiffening beneath their feet, and the wounded, with shrieks of agony, were clutching at their limbs. Harold and the young Southron met; their swords clashed together once in the smoke and dust, and but once, when each ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... whispered Ellen, slowly stiffening. "Yes. He's mine," replied Isbel. With that he turned to whistle. Spades threw up his head, snorted, and started forward at a trot. He came faster the closer he got, and if ever Ellen saw the joy of a horse at sight of a beloved master she saw it then. Isbel ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... contemptible means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd Girl's suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and glaring among us like ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... STIFFENING ORDER. A custom-house warrant for making a provision in the shipping of goods, before the whole inward cargo is discharged, to prevent ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... figures in the foreground was a dead Confederate boy, lying in the angle of a worm fence. His uniform was worn and ragged, mud-stained as well as blood-stained; the cap which had fallen from his head was a tatter, and the torn shoes were ready to drop from his stiffening feet; but in a buttonhole of his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, which continued even to the end of the war to be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture,—the souvenir that the Confederate ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... got my note?" he inquired, stiffening up, yet determined to ignore her touch of sarcasm, and so preserve ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... corners for the sale of city and country property. Hotels were crowded, bar-rooms were jammed. The preponderance of the male population had never been so pronounced, and every incoming train added to it. Money moved easily; wages were stiffening; tradesmen were in demand. There was material for many good stories in his investigations. He began writing features on the city's prosperity and prospects. The rival paper did the same, and there was soon started between them a ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... likelihood of anybody troubling the young people, for they had Reno along. This faithful creature watched over the trio most jealously and, as they were eating on the grass, he found some sudden reason to become excited. He rose up, stiffening his back, the hair rising on his neck, and a low growl issuing from his throat. The girls were a little startled, but Tom sprang up, motioned to Helen and Ruth to keep still, and ran to the ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... pretty well known in Brown's Tract as the "Nessmuk canoe." She weighed just 17 pounds 13 3/4 ounces and was thought to be the lightest working canoe in existence. Her builder gave me some advice about stiffening her with braces, etc., if I found her too frail, "and he never ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... to return. A sure sign, Mrs. Hungerford thought, that she was feeling better; and she watched in secret amusement the sudden stiffening of the angular figure and the compression of the thin lips as the "instructress" looked fixedly out of the carriage window and vouchsafed ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... this quantity is doubtless consumed in the arts—as starch for stiffening linens, &c., and for other purposes not coming under the term of food, but I have purposely left out in the calculation about 30,000 to 40,000 quarters of rice ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... have been soon after this that your brother died: truly, dearest, from now, and strangely, this Johnnie Kigarrow will seem more to me than him; touching a more heroic strain of idea, and stiffening fibers in your nature that brotherhood, as a rule, has ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... to what becomes of their written and printed paper, the matter contained in foreign documents and books must obviously be of no great value. It is even considered criminal to use printed matter for stiffening the covers or strengthening the folded leaves of books; still more so, to employ it in the manufacture of soles for boots and shoes, though in such cases as these the weakness of human nature usually carries the day. Still, ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... across ruts and sank into drifts, and the wind rose before him like a granite cliff. Now and then he stopped, gasping, as if an invisible hand had tightened an iron band about his body; then he started again, stiffening himself against the stealthy penetration of the cold. The snow continued to descend out of a pall of inscrutable darkness, and once or twice he paused, fearing he had missed the road to Northridge; but, seeing no sign of a turn, he ploughed ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... hold this in place and there should be a few inches surplus at each end. Mix the plaster and cover the entire top and sides of the head with it. Just as the plaster begins to harden draw the thread upward through the stiffening plaster cutting it in two parts which are easily removed when hard. When dry coat with shellac, tie together and they ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... stiffening a little. 'I can't see that they were even playing at killing. I suppose one boy said to the other, "You look down the barrel while I pull the trigger, and see what happens." It seems to me ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... his frightful head, and thus he says: "Receive, Nonacrian Nymph, the spoil that is my right; and let my glory be shared by thee." Immediately he gives her the skin as the spoil, thick with the stiffening bristles, and the head remarkable for the huge tusks. The giver of the present, as well as the present, is a {source} of pleasure to her. The others envy her, and there is a murmuring throughout the whole company. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... arm, run the needle through the middle of the top body raisin, where the shoulders should be, then string on the three raisins for the other arm and tie a knot at the end. Jocko is all right now, except that he is very limp. Put stiffening into his joints by running broom straws through his legs, body, and arms. Use a raisin stem for the tail, and fasten it on by pushing the largest end into the lowest body raisin. Make the eyes by running a short piece of broom straw through the ...
— Little Folks' Handy Book • Lina Beard
... madly forward, he appeared blind as well as fear-stricken, and Helen, suddenly seeing a barb-wire fence ahead, felt herself go faint, for she had never taken a fence, and she knew that Pat never had. She must get control of herself again. And this she did. Stiffening in the stirrups, she gripped a single rein in both hands and pulled with all her strength. But she could not swerve the horse. On he plunged for the obstruction, evidently not ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... cordite rang out. The brute seemed to trip, just as the other had done, over some invisible taut-stretched wire, and skidding with its own impetus, squealing, striking out and tearing up the grass, it came right up to Berselius's feet before stiffening in death. Like the great automaton it was, it had scented the human beings just as the bull had scented them, "fussed" just as he had fussed, charged as he had charged, and died as he ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... and swamping and crashing them into bottomless pits of destruction,—storms where waves toss and breakers gore, where, hanging on crests that slip from under, reefs impale the hull, and drowning wretches cling to the crags with stiffening hands, and the sleet ices them, and the spray, and the sea lashes and beats them with great strokes and sucks them down to death: and right in the midst of it all there burst a gun,—one, another, and no more. "Oh, Faith! Faith!" I cried again, and I ran ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... know,' says Ellabelle through her teeth and stiffening in her chair. Young Angus just set there ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... side of the shed. As for rigidity, if Manderson died in a struggle, or laboring under sudden emotion, his corpse might stiffen practically instantaneously: there are dozens of cases noted, particularly in cases of injury to the skull, like this one. On the other hand, the stiffening might not have begun until eight or ten hours after death. You can't hang anybody on rigor mortis nowadays, inspector, much as you may resent the limitation. No; what we can say is this. If he had been shot after the hour at which the world begins to get ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... telephones, and while the roundhouse, the superintendent, and the master-mechanic were getting the news the Special engine steamed slowly into sight through the whirling snow and stopped at the semaphore. So a liner shaken in the teeth of a winter storm, battered by heading seas, and swept by stiffening spray, rides at last, ice-bound, staggering, majestic, ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... terror in the night, her danger of the early morning, the men fighting and the man dead; in spite of the excitement and risks of the afternoon, shaking the heart in relief only less than in encounter, and in spite of aching head and limbs, stiffening to cramp while she still sat and the man still slept, Amaryllis knew herself happier than ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... the war canoe should be named Nyoda, and Mr. Evans promised to take it to St. Pierre the next day to have the name painted on her bow. As soon as dinner was over they were out in her again with the sails up, until the ever-stiffening wind made the lake too rough for pleasure. They could hardly land when at last they reached the shore, the canoe plunged so, and Uncle Teddy jumped out and stood in the water up to ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... was gained. The evil results of the movement were checked by the introduction of a supporting ship, midway between frigates and true ships-of-the-line. Sometimes classed as a battleship, and taking her place in the line, the 50-gun ship came to be essentially a type for stiffening cruiser squadrons. They most commonly appear as the flagships of cruiser commodores, or stationed in terminal waters or at focal points where sporadic raids were likely to fall and be most destructive. The strategical effect of the presence of such a vessel in a cruiser line ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... in the aged; the mortality seems to bear a direct ratio to the respiratory capacity; in young subjects the breathing powers have not been fully developed like the other physical capacities, while in the old the respiratory volume has been diminished by the stiffening of the chest walls and of the lungs by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... death; the sword-fish stabs us with his sword; and the thrasher whips us to death with his own slender, but strong and heavy body. Then, men harpoon us, shoot or entrap us; and make us into oil and candles and seats, and stiffening for gowns and umbrellas," said the bone, in a tone ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... Rowan took the letter and did not ask, "Where is he at?" By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing—"Carry a message ...
— A Message to Garcia - Being a Preachment • Elbert Hubbard
... very simple matter to do this, and presently they had deposited the already stiffening body of the sheep-destroying dog in the bed of the wagon, where it certainly presented a very gruesome appearance, with its four feet sticking up ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... of dressing the hair are fixed. They vary with the ages of female children, and there is a slight difference between the coiffure of the married and unmarried. The two partings on the top of the head and the chignon never vary. The amount of stiffening used is necessary, as the head is never covered out of doors. This arrangement will last in good order for a week or ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... at Pochette's, just unharnessing his team, limped my friend of White Divide, old King. Funny how a man's view-point will change when there's a girl cached somewhere in the background. Not even the memory of Shylock's stiffening limbs could bring me to a mood for war. On the contrary, I felt more like rushing up and asking him how were all the folks, and when did Beryl expect to come home. But not Frosty; he drove phlegmatically up so that ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... truth. I could see the shadow of the gallows fall across the man's face. What stiffening there was in him oozed out, and he stood there wriggling in an agony of apprehension, like a worm in a chicken's beak. Master Freake knew him to the bottom of his muddy soul. My Lord Tiverton was a man of another mould, but he too ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Thebes, and wherever columns were reared and lintels laid throughout the length and breadth of the "Land of Bondage." It is the key-note of all that architecture; and a brief examination into the principles of this, new birth of the Lotus, of the monumental straightening and stiffening of its graceful and easy lines, will afford some insight into the strange processes of the human mind, when it follows the grandest impulse of Love, and out of the material beauties of Nature creates a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... him!" snarled Cullin, wrath and temper stiffening his back, "but the law shall, quick as I can fix it. Back to your cab, both of you!" he waved, for Ben, too, was bulkily climbing the platform steps. "Pull out at once and don't you ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... sturdily—straight-backed, eyes straight in front of him—to where an age-old baobab loomed like a phantom in the night. He marched like a man in armor. Not even the terrific heat of a Central-Indian night could take the stiffening out of him. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... in your body that gives it stiffening to stand upright, and makes levers in your legs and arms to move it about? When you feel your body and arms and head with your fingers, what are they like? Isn't there something hard and then a soft kind of pad over it? We call the hard things bones. Your ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... a heightened color, when the sound of light, hurried footsteps, and the rustle of a woman's dress was heard in the hall. A swift recollection of her companion's infelicitous reputation now returned to her, and Grace Nevil, with a slight stiffening of her whole frame, became coldly herself again. Mr. Rushbrook betrayed neither surprise nor agitation. Begging her to wait a moment until he could arrange for her to pass to her carriage unnoticed, he left ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... second man, now wearing the Barrent-1 face, take careful aim. Barrent-2 felt pain flash through his arm, already torn by the trichomotred's teeth. He managed to shoot this Barrent-1, and through a haze of pain faced the third man, now also Barrent-1. His arm was stiffening rapidly, but he forced himself to ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... and with thy stiffening breath Clog their strain'd helms, distend their limbs indeath. Tho ancient enmity our realms divide, And oft thy chains arrest my laboring tide, Let strong necessity our cause combine, Thy own disgrace anticipate in mine; Even now their oars thy sleet in vain congeals, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... portion of Confucius' career without feeling that a great change had come over his conduct. There was no longer that lofty love of truth and of virtue which had distinguished the commencement of his official life. Adversity, instead of stiffening his back, had made him pliable. He who had formerly refused to receive money he had not earned, was now willing to take pay in return for no other services than the presentation of courtier-like advice on occasions when Duke Ling desired to have his opinion in support of his own; and in defiance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... fight. Her domestic situation was deplorable; parliamentary government had been suspended; and nearly half the population of the Empire was in veiled or open revolt. Hundreds of thousands of Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs had joined the enemy, and some were stiffening the Piave front. But German demands were inexorable, and it was hoped that German tactics would supply the place of German troops. There were two battles in the offensive which began on 15 June, one in the mountains, the object of which was to ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... talesmen grew into the hundreds and the same extraordinary antipathy to hanging continued to manifest itself, it occasioned remark, then ridicule. It would have been laughable had it not been so significant. The papers took it up, urging, exhorting, demanding that there be a stiffening of backbone; but to no effect. More than this, the Mafia had reigned so long and so autocratically, it had so shamefully abused the courts in the past, that a large proportion of honest men declared themselves unwilling ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... a sudden stiffening on the part of Olive, as though she heard someone about to enter the room. Sir Francis came in, shook hands cordially with Larssen, and all three ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... the light gone from his brave young face, stands mutely looking down, upon the stiffening frame of his father's old friend, and his, who lies shot ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... start you so? Her stiffening grief, Who saw her children slaughtered all at once, Was dull to mine: Methinks, I should have made My bosom bare against the armed god, To ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... sudden and terrible tragedy, gazed after him, and saw from out the placid water, sparkling in the bright beams of morning, a pair of arms, with outstretched hands, emerge; a black spot, that was a head, uprose between these stiffening arms, and then, with a horrible cry, the whole disappeared, and the bright water sparkled as placidly as before. The eyes of the terrified Frere, travelling back to the wounded man, saw, midway between this sparkling ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... at me. I thought that he was going to speak. But his eyes became suddenly hard. Under the lustrous veil I saw his features stiffening. ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... Madame," replied the captain, kneeling. He gently loosed the sword from the stiffening fingers. The master ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... Sir Norman, turning away, with a sigh, from the beautiful form already stiffening ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... her strangely and very sadly, after his first start and stiffening of the muscles. "Would that have been better than caring for me?" he asked in a voice so low that she ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... through the child's frame, and an expression of such misery crept into her face that Helene forbore to print a second kiss upon her brow. She still kept hold of her, but neither of them uttered a word. Jeanne's sobbing fell to a whisper, a nervous revolt stiffening her limbs the while. Helene's first thought was that much notice ought not to be paid to a child's whims; but to her heart there stole a feeling of secret shame, and the weight of her daughter's body on her shoulder brought a blush to her cheeks. She hastened to put Jeanne ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... will ever know just what took place in that darkened sitting-room, for the story as afterwards related was significantly lacking in details. The light had been extinguished and the doors silently closed by the slayer. The stiffening body of Edward Crown out in the snow was not more silent than the interior of the old farmhouse, apart from the room in which David Windom pleaded with ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... contempt for the body as the body, is therefore a manifestation not of love but of the opposite of love. Such a loathing of the physiological is a sign of a weakening of the creative energy. It is also a sign of the stiffening of the resistant "malice," or "motiveless malignity," which opposes creation. What the energy of love directs its desire and its will towards, is first the "eternal idea of the soul," the idea of the rhythmic harmony of "mind" and "matter" fused and lost in one another, and then "the eternal idea ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... themselves to take joint action, diplomatic, economic, or forcible, against any of their members who, in defiance of the treaty obligations, makes or proposes an armed attack upon another member. This is the measure of stiffening added by Mr. Lowes Dickinson in his constructive pamphlet After the War: 'The Powers entering into the arrangement' are to 'pledge themselves to assist, if necessary, by their national forces, any member of the League who should be attacked before the ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... said, "I can't allow you to tire yourself tonight, and run the risk of stiffening in the wrist tomorrow. In strength you are superior to de Mezy, and in wind far better. You should have no trouble with him. Watch his eye and stand for a while on the defensive. One of his habits, will soon wear himself down, and then he will be ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... was nothing to show. He was dead; and yet I could hardly believe that it was so. He had been so much alive; so full of schemes and enterprises. Nothing now was left but that crushed and haggard figure, stiffening on the bed; nothing, at least, that mortal senses could take cognizance of. It ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... A stiffening of Miss Hassiebrock took place, as if mere verbiage had suddenly flung a fang. From beneath the sternly and too starched white shirtwaist and the unwilted linen cravat wound high about her throat and sustained ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... pangs of prickly heat, Wrote variations of the seaside joke We all do know and always loved so well, And of cool breezes and sweet girls that lay In shady nooks, and pleasant windy coves Anon Will in that self-same room, with tattered quilt Wrapped round him, and blue stiffening hands, All shivering, fireless, pinched by winter's blasts, Will hale us forth upon the rounds once more, So that we may expect it not in vain, The joke of how with curses deep and coarse Papa puts up the pipe of parlor stove. So ye Who greet with tears this olden favorite, Drop one for him ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... reddening of the skin lasted longer, little by little the bluish tints began to go, little by little the stiffening which had ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... path. He watched them bolt down the slope from the right and cross in front of him, wishing he had the rifle, and when the last white tail vanished in the gray-brown woods he drove the spike of the ice-staff into the stiffening ground and took both hands to shift the weight of the pack. If he'd had the rifle, he could have shot only one of them. As it was, they were unfrightened, and he knew where to ...
— The Keeper • Henry Beam Piper
... for the use of Anne Boleyn in the time of her prosperity, bokeram frequently appears for "lyning and taynting" (?) gowns, lining sleeves, cloaks, a bed, etc., but it can scarcely have been for mere stiffening, as the colour of the buckram is generally specified as the same as that ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... mind, but it mustn't be just on impulse. We're going to leave you now for thirty minutes. When the time is up I'll be back and if you want to begin dressing—all right." She paused a moment and then with a defiant stiffening of her slender figure she announced crisply. "And if you don't want to, I'll go downstairs and tell them that you've decided not ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... remained. The stiffening forms, grim in death, returned not even a groan to the wild shout of triumph that rung so mockingly though the deserted chambers of the slaughter-house. Victory declared for the wily tyrant—the black-hearted ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... resolution in his eye, and a resonance in his voice that thrilled me. After all he had done, after the victories we had won under his leadership, the admiration and love I felt for him rose to the idolatry of a soldier for his general, as I saw him stiffening his limbs, knotting his muscles, and, with teeth set and nostrils dilated, rising to the load which ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... The mail-cart does not pause. Its springs were made, apparently, to spring. It descends. For one instant you are left in the air, the next you resume your seat—with violence. This sort of thing does not last long, however, for you quickly become wise. You acquire the habit of voluntarily stiffening your backbone at the ditches, of yielding to the ruts, and of holding on at the precipices. Still, with all your precautions, you suffer severely. I have been seriously informed that, during some of their plunges on what may be called ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... no more attention than if he had not heard, but the slight stiffening of his face and raising of his eyebrows as he turned to Sir Samuel, made him look supremely proud and distinguished, incomparably more a gentleman in his dusty leather livery, than Bertie in ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... brought his sextant, and took the altitude of a star convenient for his purpose. He then went below to the cabin to perform his calculations. The lookout man, a ready sleeper, was in a heavy slumber, upon which the stiffening breeze made no effect. The rest of the watch had disappeared in the customary fashion. Captain Anderson was practically ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... 'gathering' in the leaf edge. It would be more accurate to say it was gathered at the central rib; but there is nothing in needlework that will represent the actual excess by lateral growth at the edge, giving three or four inches of edge for one of centre. But the stiffening of the fold by the thorn which holds it out is very like the action of a ship's spars on its sails; and absolutely in many cases like that of the spines in a fish's fin, passing into the various conditions of serpentine and dracontic crest, connected with all the terrors ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... strength failed me at the same time. What clothing I had on me, notwithstanding the extreme coldness of the weather, was drenched with sweat. It was not long after I turned toward home that I felt it stiffening about me. My leggings were of cloth, and were torn in pieces in running through the bush. I was conscious I was somewhat frozen before I arrived at the place where I had left our lodge standing in the morning, and it was now midnight. I knew it had been the old ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... like the shadow of a cloud; then leaving it clear, though sad with the habitual sadness which had scored its many lines. "You have surprised me, indeed. But——" He stopped abruptly, and apparently for the first time noticed the young man standing near. Stiffening slightly, Colonel DeLisle looked keenly at Max, his eyes trying to solve the new puzzle. "But—my daughter, you have ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... stickiness of blood on his face, and the sting of a deep cut somewhere upon it. He saw that Cain was straightening over a mangled form; that Kriijorl had overcome odds of two to one. The breeder at his own feet had died swiftly of a deftly broken neck, a reddened dirk still clutched in his stiffening fingers. ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... slowly got to his feet, his face paling, his body stiffening. From Virginia! Who should be come from Virginia, save she to whom he had just ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and all but unashamed, they were tragic to the Princess in spite of the dissimulation that, with the return of comparative confidence, was so promptly to operate. How tragic, in essence, the very change made vivid, the instant stiffening of the spring of pride—this for possible defence if not for possible aggression. Pride indeed, the next moment, had become the mantle caught up for protection and perversity; she flung it round her as a denial of any loss of her freedom. To be doomed was, in her situation, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... come back to wide full skirts," said Miss Cynthia. "We're putting stiffening in to hold them out. And ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... quite useless, for it only results in stiffening your friend's belief in his (presumably ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... had crossed into Poland this sober, steel-gray stream had been mingling with and stiffening our lighter-hearted, more boyish, blue-gray stream of Austrians and Hungarians. Here were men who knew what they were doing, believed in it, and had the will to put it through. One thought of Emerson's "Earnest of the North Wind" ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... Friendship—gratitude—esteem—I have; but each moment he came near me, and that I could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far more gently towards him, it is only close by that I grow rigid, stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger, which nothing softens but his retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner. I did not want to be proud, nor intend to be proud, but I was forced to be so. Most true ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the gray dawn of the 12th of October, 1492 (Copernicus, at the age of eighteen, was then a student at Cracow), beheld the shores of San Salvador; like that when the law of gravitation first revealed itself to the intellect of Newton; like that when Franklin saw by the stiffening fibers of the hempen cord of his kite, that he held the lightning in his grasp; like that when Leverrier received back from Berlin the tidings that ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... Under the lid the keys were stiffening with the damp. The hammers were swelling, sticking together. She tried not to think ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... am accordingly in this phlegmatic place of punishment, far from the divine fire which animates the Friedrichs, the Maupertuis, the Algarottis. For God's love, do me the charity of some sparks in these stagnant waters where I am,"—stiffening, cooling,—"stupefying to death. Instruct me of your pleasures, of your designs. You will doubtless see M. de Valori,"—readers know de Valori; his Book has been published; edited, as too usual, by a Human Nightmare, ignorant of his subject and indeed of almost all other things, and liable to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... have taken the chance with Bruno alone. I should have had Jack along, too. With more than one dog, a man won't stand against 'em. He'll take to a tree." He shook off the depression that descended as he glanced down at the stiffening body of the beast. There was a forced cheerfulness in his tones when he continued: "But how did you get into the swamp? I take you to ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like—you must bless the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... be sitting here in solitude listening to the music of one of Nature's mighty harp-strings. Her grand symphonies peal forth through the endless ages of the universe, now in the tumultuous whirl of busy life, now in the stiffening coldness of death, as in Chopin's Funeral March; and we—we are the minute, invisible vibrations of the strings in this mighty music of the universe, ever changing, yet ever the same. Its notes are worlds; one vibrates for a longer, another for a shorter ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... light breeze comes over, the wheat rustles the more because the stalks are stiffening and swing from side to side from the root instead of yielding up the stem. Stay now at every gateway and lean over while the midsummer hum sounds above. It is a peculiar sound, not like the querulous buzz of the honey, nor the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... in a flushed, bewildered sort of way, not resisting; but his eyes were so gay and mischievous, and his quick smile so engaging that a breathless, uncertain smile began to edge her lips; and it remained stamped there, stiffening even after he had jumped into his cutter and had driven away, jingling joyously out ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... might wake. But if they meet love, even on an Easter morning, and when they are looking for him, they mistake him for the gardener. They can only be loved and served. They cannot love—as yet. They exact love and miss it. They feel their urgent need of its warmth in their stiffening, frigid lives. Sometimes they gain it, lay their cold hand on it, analyse it, foresee that it may become an incubus, and decide that there is nothing to be got out of it ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... the place. The advantage of this caustic over all others is that less pain and inflammation is induced. The sores may be cured by the following or Sloan's ointment: ceder oil is to be applied to the tendons, to prevent them stiffening, in ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... Brown's raid. In particular the rise of the Garrisonian agitation and the quickly ensuing Nat Turner's revolt occasioned together a wave of reactionary legislation the whole South over, prohibiting the literary instruction of negroes, stiffening the patrol system, restricting manumissions, and diminishing the already limited liberties of free negroes. The temper of administration, however, was not appreciably affected, for this clearly appears to have grown milder as ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... group. There was a concerted stiffening of bodies, a general sigh from lungs in process of deflation. And then the group stood silent, every man watching Harlan with that intent curiosity that comes with one's first glimpse of a noted character, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... blows the surly North and chills throughout The stiffening regions, while by stronger charms Than Circe e'er or fell Medea brewed, Each brook that wont to prattle to its banks Lies all bestilled and wedged betwixt its banks, Nor moves the withered reeds ... The surges baited by the fierce North-east, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... betrayed no emotion save amusement. Miss Guile was watching through half-closed eyes. There was a noticeable stiffening of the prim ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Her body was already stiffening in death; the breath from her lips would scarcely have dimmed a mirror; the eyes only, wide-open, were fixed and brilliant, as though the whole remaining life of the body, dead before its time, were centred, there. Roland had heard of this strange state called ecstasy, which is nothing else ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... own sake; and that it may yet be greatly prolonged is my wish for my own sake, and for the sake of the rest of your friends! What a transient business is life! Very lately I was a boy; but t'other day I was a young man; and I already begin to feel the rigid fibre and stiffening joints of old age coming fast o'er my frame. With all my follies of youth, and, I fear, a few vices of manhood, still I congratulate myself on having had in early days religion strongly impressed on my mind. I have nothing to say ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... her with her eyes. "I like mamma's company best," she said in the stony way which she had when stiffening herself against outside influence. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... lightly on her feet. Then she fell to her labor of collecting what I suppose was nesting material, and in a few minutes started up again by the roundabout road to the top. Two hours or more, with gradually stiffening neck, I spent with the wren, while she worked constantly and silently, and not once during all that time did ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... can be beautiful. You can envelop yourselves in an atmosphere of moral and intellectual beauty, through which your otherwise plain faces will look forth like those of angels. Beautiful to Ledyard, stiffening in the cold of a northern winter, seemed the diminutive, smokestained women of Lapland, who wrapped him in their furs and ministered to his necessities with kindness and gentle words of compassion. Lovely to the homesick heart of Park seemed the dark maids of Sego, as they sung their low and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... risen since this fashion came up." At this, all the company who were present lifted up their eyes into the vault; and I must confess, we did discover many traces of cordage, which were interwoven in the stiffening of the drapery. ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... Killen walked to the office of the latter, which was on the next floor of the Century Building, the legislator stiffening his will to resist the assaults he felt would be made upon it. But as soon as the door was shut Jeff surprised him by laying ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... kingdom silently awaited his coming so he struck out at a sharp pace. The run of the day before, in place of stiffening him, had put him in racing trim and he went like the wind. He was in playful mood. He danced and shied as each cloud-shadow struck him, a dim figure in the shade but shining red-chestnut in the sun patches. On every hand he saw dozens of places where he would have stopped willingly had not more ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... in the action of his muscles. His legs trembled, as he braced himself to the effort; the veins of his neck throbbed hard; but the muscles of his arms and chest held firm as the crowbar they guided, and slowly, reluctantly, sullenly, the rock went over on its side. He dropped the crowbar from his stiffening grasp and drew himself up, flinging his shoulders back ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... courage for Joseph to go to Pilate and avow his sympathy with a condemned criminal. The love must have been very true which was forced to speak by disaster and death. And to us the strongest motive for stiffening our vacillating timidity into an iron fortitude, and fortifying us strongly against the fear of what man can do to us, is to be found in gazing upon His dying love who met and conquered all evils ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... beautiful, used for church vestments, veils for covering lecterns, cathedral flags, and in the 16th century for the lining of velvet gowns. The coarse, heavy, plain-woven linen or cotton material known as buckram today is used for stiffening, etc. ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... whole bowl. Henry, sharp as his eyes were, could not see twenty feet in front of him, and, just like the bear that had once occupied it, he lay very close in his lair. The confinement was growing irksome to one of his youth and strength, as he felt his muscles stiffening, but it was necessary, because he heard the signals of the Indians to one another through the fog, sometimes not more than two or three hundred yards away. Their proximity, he knew, was due to chance, ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... A stiffening raced over Mrs. Kantor, so that she sat rigid on her chair-edge, lips compressed, eye darkly upon the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... hitherto thought of trust as a gritting of the teeth and a stiffening of the nerves to believe and endure, no matter what compulsion one put upon oneself. Gradually, in the light of the experience sketched above, I came to see it as simply the knowledge that the supreme command rules everything to everyone's advantage. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... improvement have died by stiffening at last into some routine. Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth century stiffening into the mere Gothic ugliness of the fifteenth. Thus the mighty wave of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to heaven, was touched by a wintry witchery of classicism ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and Versatilia set off, the others followed as best they might, the beauty "going to pieces" in a minute or two, according to the master, the society young lady stiffening visibly, losing the cadence of the trot very soon, but making no outcry as she was tossed about uncomfortably, and not bending her head to look at her ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... the Ottawa, where Ontario marches with Quebec. The Voltigeurs were French Canadians under a French-Canadian officer in the Imperial Army. In the other corps there were many United Empire Loyalists from the different provinces, including a good stiffening of ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... this young man, as brave at least as the average of his kind, contemplated seizing a pistol and firing into his own head. But a deadly, chilly, langour was spreading over his limbs. It was as if his flesh had been wet plaster stiffening slowly about his ribs. Presently, he thought, the two witches will be coming in, with crutch and stick—horrible, grotesque, monstrous—affiliated to the devil—to put a mark on his forehead, the tiny ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... the details of Vaillant's execution left me in a thoughtful mood. I imagined him expanding his chest under the ropes, marching with firm step, stiffening his will, concentrating all his energy, and, with eyes fixed upon the knife, hurling finally at society his cry of malediction. And, in spite of me, another spectacle rose suddenly before my mind. I saw a group of men and women pressing ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... absolution of the Church, as to one who had newly confessed herself of deadly sin. I pushed on with passionate force, till I stood close to the dying woman, as she received extreme unction amid the breathless and awed hush of the multitude around. Her eyes were glazing, her limbs were stiffening; but when the rite was over and finished, she raised her gaunt figure slowly up, and her eyes brightened to a strange intensity of joy, as, with the gesture of her finger and the trance-like gleam of her eye, she seemed ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Philip had ever read worked together in his mind to produce these melancholy suggestions. Helen laughed, and instantly felt a stiffening withdrawal of her brother from ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... to be allowed to watch me that one night only, with such affliction and meek earnestness, that she gained her point, and sat silent and motionless, except when, stung by intolerable remembrance, she kissed my closed eyes and pallid lips, and pressed my stiffening hands ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... of rank, whose shoulder-emblem I could not distinguish, riding upon a limping field-horse. Four men held him to his seat, and a fifth led the animal. The officer was evidently wounded, though he did not seem to be bleeding, and the dust of battle had settled upon his blanched, stiffening face, like grave-mould upon a corpse. He was swaying in the saddle, and his hair—for he was bare-headed—shook across his white eyeballs. He reminded me of the famous Cid, whose body was sent ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... that much that he says is true." Keith looked at him quickly, his form stiffening. "And I believe that all that he says is true," continued Norman; "and I am unwilling to stand by longer and see this ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... thou.," they wrote, "To ease the joints and stiffening sockets." The public acted like a goat, They kept the cash ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... put to await her. Then Michael arose, almost from the same spot where she had addressed him nearly four years before, the halo of the morning shining through the high window on his hair, and with a start and stiffening of her whole form she ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... upon her couch stiffening, there unheeded, the God of heaven only knowing at what moment the breath ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Marie—more light!' He said it scarce above his breath, but she heard it, and looked at me. I shook my head. She saw how it was, and caught the stiffening hand of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... spaces horses lift their metallic eyes to the sky's emptiness, with their feet on barren earth. Four poilus are setting up a table. The open-air smithy is smoking. This heterogeneous and swarming city, planted in ruined fields whose straight or winding ruts are stiffening in the heat, is already broadly valanced ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... his arm from Jukes' shoulders, and thereby ceased to exist for his mate, so dark it was; Jukes, after a tense stiffening of every muscle, would let himself go limp all over. The gnawing of profound discomfort existed side by side with an incredible disposition to somnolence, as though he had been buffeted and worried into ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... right-end man of the front four recognized him. Not a word was said that the German could hear, but he could see the recognition run from rank to rank and troop to troop, until the squadron knew to a man; he saw them glance at Ranjoor Singh, and from him to one another, and ride on with a new stiffening and a new air of "now we'll see ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... examine the nature of this outlet; but, to his further alarm, he found it guarded outside with iron bars. This was a direct confirmation of his surmises. A cold shudder crept over him. He felt almost stiffening with horror as he looked down upon his thoughtful companion, doomed, he doubted not, as well as himself, to fall a prey to the assassin. He gazed wildly round the apartment, as if with some desperate hope of deliverance. His head grew ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... up. Well, he would do all the damage he could before the stiffening limb permitted Garman to catch him in that horrible gorilla ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... last words. She felt herself stiffening slowly, while the living room almost faded from her sight. Perhaps, in that instant, some additional new circuit had closed in her mind, or some additional new channel had opened, for TT's purpose in tricking her into contact with the reckless, mocking beings outside was suddenly ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... daughter's shoulder Adelaide noted her father's expression, a stiffening of the mouth and a brightening of ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... complicated even for him to solve in a second, for the worst was yet to come. Thinking to compliment Di, and honour the man who had brought their nephew out of captivity, they had arranged that Captain March should take Lady Diana Vandyke in to dinner. The expression on her face and the stiffening of his muscles had shown this plan to be impossible, to say nothing of Major Vandyke's mad-bull glare. Now, at an instant's warning, there would have to be a general post, and changing of partners; and the most desperate difficulty of all must have lain ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... children, for I was no longer in doubt but that the murderer, Pedro Ortez, was the sinning ancestor of my old-time friend. Even in his presence my thoughts flew to Agnes; had she not spoken of her grandsire as being such a man? The stiffening body at my side was speedily forgotten in the ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... hour passed under this straining vigil. He had stirred slightly to ease his lean, stiffening muscles. The rough buildings of the camp slowly faded under the growing darkness. The activity of the camp became swallowed up, and only his keen ears told him of it. The pack ponies at their picketings, under the sheer walls beyond the cook-house, abandoned their ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the Monroe doctrine, the tariff and bank issues, and the spread of internal improvements,—political events which commonly eclipse the intellectual aspects of nationality; but also in the Unitarian revolt of 1815, led by Channing, which loosed New England from the stiffening bonds of Calvinism, the Quaker schism in the Middle States, and the birth of the Campbellites in the West. The goodness of man was beginning to attract more attention than the total depravity of man. The North American Review was founded in 1815. Four years later, Irving ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... the onward movement of the country and the times. The whole system was, however, pervaded by the monastic spirit, which had originally preserved all learning from annihilation, but which now kept it wrapped in the ancient cerecloths, and stiffening in the stony sarcophagus of a bygone age. The university of Louvain was the chief literary institution in the provinces. It had been established in 1423 by Duke John IV. of Brabant. Its government consisted of a President and Senate, forming a close ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... neckties, cauliflower frills, and top-boots of the period, false calves and stays, a pair of which the Frenchman hairdresser is lacing for one of his customers. Another of the party, who has completed the upper part of his toilet, is so hampered with the voluminous folds and stiffening of his cravat that he cannot wriggle into his unmentionables. The caricaturists take us into the garrets of these fellows, abodes of squalor and wretchedness, and show us that beneath their exterior magnificence ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... rather than yield. Thomas, cool, and showing no trace of excitement also directed the troops. Both by their courage and resolution inspired the men. The beaten became the unbeaten. Dick felt rather than saw the stiffening of the lines, and the return of ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler |
