"Suffocating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over with the foul deposits of damp vapors that forever hung around; the atmosphere was thick with impure exhalations and poisonous miasma; the dense smoke from the ever-burning torches might have mitigated the noxious gases, but it oppressed the dwellers here with its blinding and suffocating influence. Yet amid all these accumulated horrors the soul of the martyr stood up unconquered. The Roman spirit that endured all this rises up to grander proportions than were ever attained in the proudest days of the old republic. The fortitude ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... into canoes and paddled swiftly to the head of the long basin which runs inland for miles from the head of the harbor. At the beginning of the portage their feet were unbound, and their mouths set free from the suffocating gags. ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... our friends at our parting was so suffocating that I clung to the shelter of my new friend, the stranger of that ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... and powerless. This act revealed to him that the scepter had fallen from his hands. In a paroxysm of excitement, to prevent himself from speaking he thrust the bed-clothes into his mouth, nearly suffocating himself. Resistance was in vain. He feared that should he manifest any, he also might be torn from his palace, a captive, to share the prison of the cardinal. In sullen indignation he submitted to ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... concluded, and no one uttering a word of sociable conversation, I approached a window to examine the weather. A sorrowful sight I saw: dark night coming down prematurely, and sky and hills mingled in one bitter whirl of wind and suffocating snow. ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... unquickened flesh, that reminded her of the great prehistoric lizards. One day her Uncle Tom came in out of the broiling sunshine heated from walking. Then the perspiration stood out upon his head and brow, his hand was wet and hot and suffocating in its clasp. He too had something marshy about him—the succulent moistness and turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh, where life and decaying ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Had a note or a messenger announced her serious illness, or her elopement or sudden death, the first pang would have terminated in some sort of relief, or at least a breathing place; but this letter was suffocating, and the dense fog seemed to grow darker as it stretched into the future. "A religious fanatic!" "A Methodist lunatic!" "Has our darling set out upon such ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise: What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense: The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... something within him, which, thus awakened, becomes to him a living voice ever after; and the good and the true must thenceforth answer its call, even though succeeding years would fain overlay them with the suffocating crowds ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... rapid progress; the main-mast which had long been burning, fell over the side with the lurching of the vessel, and the flames out of the main-deck ports soon showed their points above the bulwarks, while volumes of smoke were poured in upon the upper-deck almost suffocating the numbers which were crowded there; for all communication with the fore-part of the ship had been for some time cut off by the flames, and every one had retreated aft. The women and children were now carried on to the poop; not only to remove them farther from the suffocating ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... passengers it appears that when the torpedoes burst they sent forth suffocating fumes, which had their effect on the passengers, causing some of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "till the proof reach thee—But, no!" she said, interrupting herself, "thou shalt know, even now, the doom, which all thy power, strength, and courage, is unable to avoid, though it is prepared for thee by this feeble band. Markest thou the smouldering and suffocating vapour which already eddies in sable folds through the chamber?—Didst thou think it was but the darkening of thy bursting eyes—the difficulty of thy cumbered breathing?—No! Front-de-Boeuf, there is another cause—Rememberest thou the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... there could be no hope of substantial prosperity for the Jamestown emigrants. He was a selfish and conceited satrap, incapable of enlightened thought or beneficent action, who knew no other way to magnify his own importance than by suffocating the rights and insulting the self-respect of others. He had a protege in Argall, a disorderly ruffian who was made deputy-governor of the colony in 1617. His administration was that of a freebooter; but the feeble and dwindling colony had neither power nor spirit ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the hissing serpent and the preserver of his life were one and the same. With horrible hisses the monster encircled him. Its fetid breath was in his face, its deadly fangs ready to strike his death-blow, and, with a suffocating cry, Sir Everard a-woke from his nightmare ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... by cries of terror and the loud commands of dwars and padwars who were evidently attempting to direct their men away from some grave danger. At last the report came back to us. "They have fired the pits ahead." "We are hemmed in by flames in front and flood behind." "Help, John Carter; we are suffocating," and then there swept back upon us at the rear a wave of dense smoke that sent us, stumbling and blinded, into a ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be such a thing when there is a single sick baby dying for lack of nutrition—a single convalescent suffocating for want of country air—a single family without fire or blankets? Suggest to your wife that she give up a dinner gown and use the money to send a tubercular office boy to the Adirondacks—and listen to her excuses! Is there not some charitable ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... struggling, he continued in this state of awful alarm, vainly endeavouring to extricate himself from the toils of an imaginary monster, that was suffocating him, until he sank exhausted to ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... the accumulation of tobacco-smoke with fire-smoke produced a suffocating effect, but no one was capable of suffocation apparently, for they all smoked on—except Archie, who, as we have said, had not acquired the habit. Even the four-year-old girl, like Baby La Certe, had a pull now ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... night. A bed was made up for me in the room next to my brother's bedroom, and I could hear that he was awake, and that he kept getting up and going to the plate of gooseberries and taking one. I reflected how many satisfied, happy people there really are! 'What a suffocating force it is! You look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, incredible poverty all about us, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying.... Yet all is calm and stillness in the houses and in the streets; of the fifty ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to his. My heart beat with suffocating quickness, and thoughts were in my brain that threatened to overwhelm my small remaining stock of self-control and make of me nothing but a creature of tears and passion. I moved my lips in an effort to speak, but no sound came ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... like the rest. Indeed for the most of the time I feel as they do, I suppose, but sometimes that sort of ribaldry and feelings of the ludicrous that made us joke, and prank, and cut up in genial companionships come over me, and I am suffocating with a glee out of place to this exalted society. Ah! it's good to feel you, my friend, so fresh and new from earth. It's promised here in the learned talk I have heard, that those who disappear from Mars become reincorporated ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... take fire, they were all too damp and soaked to burn. Oonamoo had hardly spoken when the blaze went out of itself. A perfect storm of arrows, tipped with burning tow, now came sailing in upon them, but the only inconvenience they occasioned was a blinding, suffocating smoke, which lasted, however, but ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... was she by the angelic visions of bliss. Sometimes, in the middle of her great bed, she would rouse herself suddenly, her two hands joined and pressed against her breast as if a heavy burden were weighing her down and almost suffocating her. She would then jump up, rush across the room in her bare feet, and, opening the window wide, would stand there, trembling slightly, until at last the pure fresh air calmed her. She was continually surprised ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... left the road and plunged into the trackless veldt, it being estimated that a compass bearing due east would bring it by daybreak within easy reach of the parallelogram of hills in which Fauresmith and Jagersfontein lie. But the favour of Providence was withdrawn: the night, which had been born in suffocating heat, suddenly changed to piercing cold, and great zigzags of white lightning, clutching at the heavens like the claws of some gigantic dragon, heralded a tempest of unwonted fury. And presently it came preceded by a blinding sandstorm, which told how much the burnt surface of the ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... longer stood between her and happiness; was a menace that with the sun's rays would disappear out of her life like so much mist. But the effort was useless. The aura of shadow that hung always over that place wrapped her in its suffocating miasma, became part of the ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... hurled herself into a cab, and observed, half-way to the station, that the horse was on the point of collapse; had changed cabs and had arrived at the station to see her train just going out. 'So there I paced up and down like a caged, suffocating lioness for over an hour, had a loathsome lunch, and read half a dozen papers before my train started, I came third class with a weary mother and two babies, the sun beat in all the way, and I had three changes. I'm hardly fit to be seen, and not fit to speak. But, yes, I'll ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and on, asking herself these questions and finding no answer in the whirl and eddy of dust blown at her by the wind, in the limitless stretch of prairie, in the suffocating thickness of heat which enveloped the way ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... Thus, as Humphrey described the events of the past forty-eight hours, and forgot pain and weariness in the enthusiasm for the courage and heroism of Sir Philip Sidney, his listener was picturing the blazing house, the flames, the suffocating smoke, and the boy whose face had been revealed to Humphrey as the ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... Marius fell on their knees, in despair, suffocating with tears, each beneath one of Jean Valjean's hands. Those august ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... crackling beams and falling timbers. She wrapped her dressing-gown around her, and rushed to the door. Unclasping the bolts, she threw it open, but hastily closed it again, for smoke and flame rushed in, almost suffocating her. ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... the decision of the tribunal upon a contending party who has an organized army of millions of men? To disarm? No one desires it or will begin it. To invent yet more dreadful means of destruction—balloons with bombs filled with suffocating gases, shells, which men will shower upon each other from above? Whatever may be invented, all States will furnish themselves with similar weapons of destruction. And cannon's flesh, as after cold weapons it submitted to bullets, and meekly exposed itself to shells, bombs, ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... and the lighting bad, the air suffocating, whilst a few particles of sand blown in by the hot ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... of her lungs. And then Slade savagely brought a big hand over her mouth and held it there. She fought to escape the clutch, kicking, squirming—trying to bite the hand. But to no avail. The terrible pressure on her mouth was suffocating her, and the room went dark as she continued to fight. She thought Slade had extinguished the light, and she was conscious of a dull curiosity over how he had done it. And then sound seem to cease. She felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. She was conscious only of that ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... as though transfixed. For an instant the whole world seemed to rock, and a black mist rose up in front of her, blotting out that solitary figure at the gateway. Her heart beat in great, suffocating throbs, and her throat ached unbearably, as if a hand had closed upon it and were gripping it so tightly that she could not breathe. Then her senses steadied, and her gaze leapt to the face outlined in profile against the cold ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... so-called Dauphin were brought together. 'Dinner to-night,' he nodded, as he limped away on his blissful visit of ceremony to sprightly Chassediane (a bouquet had gone in advance): he left me stupefied. The sense of ridicule enveloped me in suffocating folds, howling sentences of the squire's Boeotian burlesque by fits. I felt that I could not but take the world's part against the man who allowed himself to be made preposterous externally, when I knew him to be staking his frail chances and my fortune with such rashness. It was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... meantime, the fire was making rapid progress; the mainmast, which had long been burning, fell over the side with the lurching of the vessel, and the flames out of the main-deck ports soon showed their points above the bulwarks, while volumes of smoke were poured in upon the upper deck, almost suffocating the numbers which were crowded there; for all communication with the fore-part of the ship had been, for some time, cut off by the flames, and everyone had retreated aft. The women and children were now carried on to the poop; not only to remove them farther from the suffocating smoke, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... were thrown open, and then horses, mules, and carts, men, women, and children, pressed into Paris, at the risk of suffocating each other, and in a quarter of an hour all ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... all the meteorological instruments and changed the daily charts; at times having to feel his way from one place to the other. Attending to the exposed instruments in a high wind with low temperature was bad enough, but with suffocating drift difficulties ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... and wondered at the people. Hot? and suffocating? she had no recollection of any such thing all day. How delicious it had been in that green dell under the walnut tree, with ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the Englishman: Captain the Hon. Richard Mildare, late of the Grey Hussars—was dead. No hand made murderous by the lust of gold had helped him to his death. Sudden failure of the heart is common in aggravated cases of rheumatic fever, and with one suffocating struggle, one brief final pang, he had gone to join her he loved. But his dead face did not look at rest. There was some reflection in it of the terror that had come upon him in the watches ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Teniers in their power of painting vacant space. Claude makes his whole landscape a plenum: the air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as Teniers. That picture of the Archers[2] exemplifies this excellence. See the distances between those ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the year round will be 66 deg.; and this perhaps by night as well as by day, with no great variation. Now, those who have attended to thermometrical observation will readily allow, that a continuance of this degree of heat for a length of time, would be found violent and suffocating by the generality of mankind. But at Petersburg, though the heat, as measured by the thermometer, may happen to be a few times in the year considerably higher than at St Catharines, yet, at other times, the cold is intensely sharper, and the medium for a year, or even for one season only, would ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... had seemed suddenly to come to work upon him. Even in the brief moment of his entrance into the magnificence of Anthony Harding's home he had felt a strange little stricture of the throat—a choking, half-suffocating sensation. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... men worked with a will at this cheerless task, and in spite of darkness, heat, thirst, and the suffocating atmosphere, never was a well sunk more quickly. At the same time it was not half completed when so serious a fire broke out on the roof that the entire remaining stock of water was exhausted ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... the causes of the fire, but the occurrence about the same time of several highly suspicious fires in Canadian munition factories and the unexplained rapidity with which the Parliament Building fire spread with mysterious volumes of suffocating smoke, caused widespread suspicion that the disaster was of incendiary and enemy origin. A tidal wave of resentment flooded the Dominion and deep feeling was aroused against men of German birth or extraction remaining in Canada, ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... predecessors, had still enough of weight and spite in it to sweep one of the poor fellows from his precarious foothold into the seething, hissing swirl to leeward. The man tossed his arms over his head, with a wild shriek for help, as the smother carried him along in its suffocating embrace, and Joe promptly made a spring for a spare life-buoy that we had provided for such an emergency; but before it could be thrown the unfortunate wretch was hurled over the brig's mainyard as it lifted out of the water, and the next instant he disappeared beneath the foot of the main-topsail, ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... a mountain side. They run along the ground licking up the leaves and dead branches. They leap from tree to tree, and then with a roar the sheet of flame goes to the top of a tall pine. The air is like the breath from an oven and is filled with sparks and with suffocating smoke. The birds and animals flee away in ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... cook. What would he reply under such circumstances, if some one were to accuse him, saying, 'O my boys, many evil things has this man done to you: he is the death of you, especially of the younger ones among you, cutting and burning and starving and suffocating you, until you know not what to do; he gives you the bitterest potions, and compels you to hunger and thirst. How unlike the variety of meats and sweets on which I feasted you!' What do you suppose that the physician would be able to reply when he found himself in such a predicament? ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... Captain Malan, returning suddenly. We passed the sentry between white enamelled walls of speckless small arms, and since that Royal Marine Light infantryman was visibly suffocating from curiosity, I winked at him. We entered the chintz-adorned, photo-speckled, brass- fendered, tile-stoved main cabin. Moorshed, with a ruler, was demonstrating before the frame-plan of ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... be frank, there are moments when you don't exist for me. But in others I feel your hatred like suffocating smoke. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... situated, with the great ozonic brine on both sides, it comprises the most favorable health-chances in the world. (If only the suffocating crowding of some of its tenement houses could be broken up.) I find I never sufficiently realized how beautiful are the upper two-thirds of Manhattan island. I am stopping at Mott Haven, and have been familiar now for ten days with the region ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Suffocating, he fled up the aisle and out into the lobby. There he addressed himself distractedly ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... night an infant had disappeared from its hammock under the mango-tree and no trace of it had ever been found. The mother, who had been sleeping on the ground near her babe, told a strange story of being awakened by a suffocating pressure on her chest; as she stretched out her hand in the dark, she encountered a cold, clammy mass that moved under her touch. She must have fainted, for when she was able to scream for assistance, her baby was gone, and there were no tracks in the sand. The river was searched, but the crocodile ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... besides. It comes not without warning, but the warning and the wind are not far apart. The approach of the simoom is a dense black cloud of whirling and seething fine dust. As it strikes one, the choking, suffocating blast of hot air and dust overcomes everything that has life. The caravan men and the animals as well turn their backs to the wind and lie down with faces close to the ground. In a minute or two the full strength of the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... refused my request, and ordered me to continue in the place allotted for the surgeon's mates, or else be contented to be in the hospital, which, by the by, was three degrees more offensive and more suffocating than our own berth below. Another, in my condition, perhaps, would have submitted to his fate, and died in a pet; but I could not brook the thought of perishing so pitifully, after I had weathered so many gales of hard fortune: I therefore, without minding Oakum's injunction, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... clambered upon the house, and were soon heard descending through the capacious flue of the chimney. The wife still stood with the axe to guard the door. The father, bleeding and fainting, called upon one of the little children to roll the feather bed upon the fire. The burning feathers emitted such a suffocating smoke and smell that the Indians were almost smothered, and they tumbled down upon the embers. At the same moment, another one attempted to enter the door. The wounded husband and father had sufficient ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... a column in the Telegraph," mused Robertson as the story neared its end. But he was already listening with one ear to what was going on in the big room, whence the sharp, clear tones of a speaker could be heard through the suffocating tobacco fumes. Over the heads of the attentive crowd hung a few gas-lamps, the globes of which looked like large oranges. Robertson gave his Mott Street hero the promised two dollar bill and then made his way to the rear room. Standing in the doorway, he could ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... speaks wisely. 'Tis not often that men who live in books, and spend their time in pouring over mouldy parchments, and in well-nigh suffocating themselves with stinking fumes have common sense in worldly matters. But when I have conversed with your father, I have always found that, although he takes not much interest in public affairs at present, he is marvellously well ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... answered not a word, and had vanished before anybody could arrest her. The smoke was worse, and almost suffocating, but she wrapped her face and nose in her woollen gown, and reached Tom's door. He never slept with it fastened, and the amazed youth was awakened by a voice which he knew to be that of Miss Furze. Escape by the way she had come was ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... new thrill of hope, she was hardly conscious of the suffocating smoke which now filled the cabin, stinging her eyes so that she could hardly see, or of the heat which with her exertions had sent the perspiration streaming down her face. For now, balancing herself with great care, she moved ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... and become knotted; the voice in speaking acquires a sharp, crowing, or croupy sound, while the inspirations have a harsh, metallic intonation. After a few hours, a quantity of thick, ropy mucus is thrown out, hanging about the mouth, and causing suffocating fits of coughing ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... sleeping-car blankets were unlike other blankets; why they were like squares cut out of cold buckwheat cakes, and why they clung to you when you turned over, and lay heavy on you without warmth; why the curtains before you could not have been made opaque, without being so thick and suffocating; why it would not be as well to sit up all night half asleep in an ordinary passenger-car as to lie awake all night in a Pullman. But the snoring of my fellow-passengers answered ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... oxygen was low, to lie down and breath as slowly as possible. And, if possible, to go to sleep. Sleep, under such conditions, served two purposes. While relaxed in sleep, the body used less oxygen and should help fail to arrive, the victim would slip into a suffocating unconsciousness, not knowing if and when death took ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... and landing under cover of their shields, crept under the long house where many families lived together. These houses stand on high poles. The pirates then set fire to dry wood and a quantity of chillies which they carried with them for the purpose. This made a suffocating smoke, which hindered the inmates from coming out to defend themselves. Then they cut down the posts of the house, which fell, with all it ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... woman was hurrying back, her hand still grasping the wrist of the girl, when she was suddenly seized so violently by the throat as to cause her to release her captive, and to prevent her making any other sound than a sort of gurgling, suffocating noise. The Serpent passed his arm round the waist of his mistress and dashed through the bushes with her, on the north side of the point. Here he immediately turned along the beach and ran towards the canoe. A more direct course could have been taken, but it ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... we are to the unlimited atmosphere of a boundless continent, always feel depressed in a country like England. There is in your country, Sir, a physical and also a moral constraint which, to a free, republican, continental American, is suffocating. And hence my ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... with the superb confidence of youth, and a slight ray of hope pierced the suffocating fog of fear, and brought Cookie from the head of the bed where she had been standing in the shade of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... body) had been used hundreds and hundreds of times to save the lives of diphtheria-stricken guinea-pigs, and had been shown over and over again to be not merely magically curative but absolutely harmless, it was tried with fear and trembling upon a gasping, struggling, suffocating child, as a last possible resort to save a life otherwise hopelessly doomed. Who could tell whether the "heal-serum," as the Germans call it, would act in a human being as it had upon all the other animals? In agonies ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... secrets, which her fair visitors had confided to her, and I learned that some of the most fashionable people in the city had invoked her aid. She was rather fatigued by her labors, however, as the weather was warm, and the atmosphere of her room, at times, became almost suffocating. She said that she had made an engagement to admit Mrs. Thayer the first ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... more calculated to quickly shatter the nerves and break the health of a human being than one of those foul, suffocating tunnels under the hills. ...
— Through Canal-Land in a Canadian Canoe • Vincent Hughes
... pressing Stella's hand very tightly to her little quivering bosom, and there followed a pause, a deep silence that seemed to have in it something of an almost suffocating quality. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... they subsist upon the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapor of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... banquet smiles, A common cheer for all;... e'en humble Giles, Who joys his trivial services to yield Amidst the fragrance of the open field; Oft doom'd in suffocating heat to bear The cobweb'd barn's impure and dusty air; To ride in murky state the panting steed, Destin'd aloft th' unloaded grain to tread, Where, in his path as heaps on heaps are thrown, He rears, and plunges ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... quantity of provisions, in the quality of which they are not particularly chary. Nor are these roosting-places attractive to the Indians only, for the settlers near them also pay them nocturnal visits. They come with guns, clubs, pots of suffocating materials, and every other means of destruction that can well be imagined to be within their command, and procure immense quantities of the birds in a very short time. These they stuff into sacks and carry ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... lamplight against the cold walls, as though some shuddering consciousness of happier woodland scenes had suddenly moved them to a vain regret. The haze of heat lay very thickly here, creeping along with slow stealth like a sluggish stream, and a suffocating odour suggestive of some subtle anaesthetic weighed the air with a sense of nausea and depression. It was difficult to realise that this condition of climate was actually summer in its prime—summer with all its glowing abundance of flower and foliage as seen in fresh green ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... cease, long after it seems as if every particle in that rainless land must have been driven by. It is in the "Great Basin," and the south wind is the broom that sweeps it clean. Not only dust does the south wind bring, but heat, terrible and suffocating, like that of a fiery furnace. Before it the human and the vegetable worlds shrink and wither, and birds and ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... Herman a vision of his boy clasped in Helen's arms which made him feel as if suffocating with the excess of his emotion. He rose blindly, only half conscious of what he was doing; and without giving time for objections Helen hastened to dress herself for the street, and in a few moments they were walking together toward ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... than she. And both had tears in their eyes as they saw each other thus ill and troubled, unable to think of a remedy for the evil which had fallen upon them. Were they going to die here of that mysterious, suffocating faintness? ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... into his neck to save his jaw, but his right cheek was pounded, one eye closing. It was only a matter of moments before he must relax and then Russell would pin him down with one arm and send in the final smashing blow. He felt himself suffocating, sinking—the noise of roaring waters dinned ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... to weary the reader by detailing at length the progress of Madame's Saturday campaign. Her methods of offence will, by now, have become clear. To the "suffocating gas" of her smiles, and the "liquid fire" of her eyes she had added the devastating "Tank"—her despatch-case. She worked its mysteries unceasingly. When it was not under her own hand it reposed—during meal times, for example—in the steel ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... wrist, and drew him to the bar. There they stood in the water to their necks, and watched the great fire as it divided at the little prairie, and swept around them, passing to left and right. It was a grim sight. All the heavens seemed ablaze, and the clouds of smoke were suffocating. Even there in the river the heat was most oppressive, and at times the faces of the boys were almost scorched. Then they would thrust their heads under the water, and keep them there as long as they could hold their breath, coming up again greatly refreshed. The wild game clustered ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... made an attempt to examine their wounds; but before we could strip off one of their shirts, we heard a crashing and roaring beneath our feet, and up through the floor streamed clouds of smoke, black and suffocating, as though produced by ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... crackling as if they contained some fatty, resinous substance, purposely placed there with incendiary intent, and the smoke was blinding and suffocating. The door of the side entrance was locked and I could not force it, so I called for a few volunteers to try to break it down by ramming it with some planks that were lying about, and though we did not succeed ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... and seemed to be suffocating; he tried to raise himself on his pillow and to sit up in bed, but found ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... as the sweet but painful sounds rushed to the senses of the youth he darted through the crowd, closely followed by his friend. The music seemed to pursue him with mockery. He rushed headlong from the temple, as if seeking escape from some suffocating atmosphere in the pure breezes of heaven, and hurried forward with confused and purposeless footsteps. The moment of his disappearance was marked by the partial recovery of Francesca. She unclosed her eyes, raised her ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... Assisi, the courage and determination of a St. Joan of Arc, the intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain, the "brute male" who is wholly male, the "eternal feminine" with her suffocating sexuality seem on the one hand inhuman, on the other subhuman. It is not the absence of the masculine qualities in a man, or of the feminine qualities in a woman which raises them above the mass; it is the presence in power ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... resolved to bear myself as like a man as I could. I drew myself up, touched my cap in soldier-like fashion, and cried out. "Adieu;" and then, descending into the street, hurried away to hide the tears that were almost suffocating me. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... leaves and branches while the fruit is ripening. Or take a chafing-dish of burning charcoal, place it under the branches of the bush or tree, and throw on it a little brimstone. The vapour of the sulphur, and the suffocating fume arising from the charcoal, will not only destroy all the insects, but prevent the plants from being infested with them any more that season. Black cankers, which commit great devastation among turnips, are best destroyed by ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... well-provided tea-tables and entertained a regularly flowing throng of tea-drinking, scandal-mongering women, accompanied by a circle of men of some interest and distinction. In the evening, Florence did still more. By this time, the salons were suffocating and airless. Yet there were few nights in the week when, somewhere, the sober reception was not heightened to a ball, sometimes impromptu, more often formally prearranged. Morning found the indefatigable leisure world scattered through one or another of the great ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... hurried talk about carrying him back to the town, calls for a gate or a shutter, and the little crowd constantly on the increase, till the pressure grew suffocating. ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... the throat!" General Grant wrote in October, 1864. In February, 1868, when these lines are written, black hands have got Virginia by the throat, and she is suffocating; Cuffee grins, Cuffee gabbles—the groans of the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... frantic hands, as if to push away some suffocating pressure. Both of these women—Lily, with her car fare and her handkerchief; Edith, with her impudent "advice" to Maurice not to have secrets from his wife—pitied her! She would not be ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... fallen, two hundred and fifty in the burial trenches at Oriskany—thirty-five wagon-loads in all. Scarcely an officer of rank remained to lead the funeral march when the muffled drums of the Palatines rolled at midnight, and the smoky torches moved, and the dead-wagons rumbled on through the suffocating darkness of a starless night. We had few wounded; we took no prisoners; Oriskany meant death. We counted only thirty men ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... their posts. The moment the sun appeared above the horizon the explosion took place. First the earth trembled and rose and fell for many miles as if shaken by an earthquake. A smothered roar, swelling into pealing thunder ensued, which appalled every mind. Immense volumes of smoke, thick and suffocating, instantaneously rolled over the city and the beleaguering camp, converting day into night. A horrible melange of timbers, rocks, guns and mutilated bodies of men, women and children were hurled into the air through this storm cloud of war, and fell in hideous ruin alike upon the besiegers ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... the delicious, secret game of hide-and- go-seek made everything else in the world insignificant. Harriet opened the boxes of flowers he sent her with a heart suffocating with joy. Richard consented to be absent from the dinner table over which she presided with an agony of renunciation that almost made him feel ill. When he chanced one day to meet her with Nina, in a breezy, awninged summer restaurant, the sight of the slender ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... throne of God has not lost itself in the sands, nor is it shrunken in its volume. The fire that was kindled on Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes. The rushing of the mighty wind that woke on that morning has not calmed and stilled itself into the stagnancy and suffocating breathlessness of midday heat. The same fulness of the Spirit which filled the believers on that day is available for us all. If, like that waiting Church of old, we abide in prayer and supplication, the gift will be given to us too, and we may ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... variable period, from a few days to two weeks from the beginning of the cough, the peculiar feature of the disease appears. The child gives fifteen or twenty short coughs without drawing breath, the face swells and grows blue, the eyeballs protrude, the veins stand out, and the patient appears to be suffocating, when at last he draws in a long breath with a crowing or whooping sound, which gives rise to the name of the disease. Several such fits of coughing may follow one another and are often succeeded by vomiting and the expulsion of a large amount of phlegm or mucus, which is ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... already ended their time, and that this which gave them light was the fifth. The first perished, with all other creatures, by an universal inundation of water; the second by the heavens falling upon us and suffocating every living thing to which age they assigned the giants, and showed bones to the Spaniards, according to the proportion of which the stature of men amounted to twenty feet; the third by fire, which burned and consumed all; the fourth by an emotion of the air and wind, which came with such ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... by the flames of a few poor slender tapers which flicker against the walls in stone arches, a dense crowd of human figures veiled in black, in a place overpowering and suffocating—underground, no doubt—which is filled with the perfume of the incense of Arabia; and a noise of almost wicked movement, which sirs us to alarm and even horror: bleatings of new-born babies, cries of distress of tiny mites whose voices are drowned, as if on purpose, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... blare of trumpets, and the clapping of hands. It seemed that somewhere, immensely far away, at some fathomless depth, a multitude innumerable was suddenly astir, and was rising up, rising up in agitation, calling to one another, faintly, as if muffled in sleep, the suffocating sleep of ages. Then the air began moving in dark currents over the ruin.... Shades began flitting before me, myriads of shades, millions of outlines, the rounded curves of helmets, the long straight lines of lances; the moonbeams were broken into momentary gleams of blue upon ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... sharp, rapid knock of the postman sounded in his ears. His heart leaped up, and then suddenly sank with suffocating fear, for the dark mood of despair was on him—could it be another returned manuscript? He had only one now in the hands of a publisher; the one on which he had expended all his powers—the one to which he had trusted ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... her into the attic, but the staircase, he found, was full of suffocating smoke, and he dared not venture below the next floor. He took her into a long dormitory, shut the door on those pungent and pervasive fumes, and opened the window to discover the fire escape was now against the house, and all Fishbourne boiling with excitement as an immensely helmeted ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... doomed, we fear, to poverty and suffering, which we find marked in the rain-map of Europe with a double shade of blackness. We had hard work, and often soaking rain, during the day; and at night our damp fuel filled the turf hut in which we sheltered with suffocating smoke, and afforded no light by which to read. Nor—even ere the year got into its wane, and when in the long evenings we had light—had we any books to read by it, or a single literary or scientific friend with whom to exchange an idea. We remember at another time living in an agricultural district ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... old lamp shed its yellow rays around, but by no means lighted the dormitory. The plumbing was open, and the odours coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and from the hot air of the stove—windows and doors being tightly closed—made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating. ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... melancholy apparent to vulgar eyes, but the forecast of genius, to be revealed sooner or later, and with a further promise, in the antipathy shown for the routine of schools, and especially of the University of Cambridge,—a suffocating atmosphere for genius, equally uncongenial to Milton, Dryden, Gray, and Locke, who all, like Lord Byron, and more bitterly than he, exercised their satiric vein on it. As for the slight attraction he sometimes showed for the world in his youth—in his seventeenth year—and which the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... lurcher that followed at his heels was perfect too, in his way—man and dog appeared made for one another. When this man spoke of his life, spent in roaming about the country, of his very perfect health, and of his hatred of houses, the very atmosphere of any indoor place producing a suffocating and sickening effect on him, I envied him as I envy birds their wings and as I can never envy men who live in mansions. His was the wild, the real life, and it seemed to me that there was no other ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... sight of some disgustful deformity or disease. Going to the mirror he studied his face for some reflection of the soul; but unable to master his feelings, in which there was at once loathing and despair, he threw open the window and walked out of the suffocating ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... and the early hour, the heat was suffocating. The wind whispered coolness, but did not deliver coolness. It might have blown off the Sahara, save for the extreme humidity with which it was laden. There was no fog nor mist, nor hint of fog or mist, yet the dimness of distance produced the impression. ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... with renewed vigor, and worked away at every moment when he thought he could do so unseen. One day, however, when he had reached some distance, he dislodged a large stone which blocked up the opening toward his cell. His terror was frightful. Not only was the air suffocating, and the darkness dreadful, but he knew that if any of the guards were unexpectedly to come into his cell, the opening must be discovered, and all his toil again lost. For eight hours he stayed in the tunnel paralyzed by fear. Then he roused himself, and by dint of superhuman ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... in some degree from the shock of finding herself actually on trial, she endeavored to collect her faculties; but the violent palpitation of her heart was almost suffocating, and in her ears the surging as of an ocean tide, drowned the accents of the magistrate. At first the words were as meaningless as some Sanskrit formula, but gradually her attention grasped and comprehended. In a strident incisive voice he read from a paper ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... hot and suffocating staircase to the first floor, where the fire raged with the utmost fury. Here the flames were bursting from the burning wing through every crevice into the passage. Ishmael, in his wet woollen clothes, and the boys in their blankets, dashed for the last flight of stairs—keeping their eyes shut ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... from my grave across my brow Plays no wind of healing now, And fire and ice within me fight Beneath the suffocating night. ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... "Sir Guy Carleton is using every art to soothe and lull our people into a state of security. Admiral Digby is capturing all our vessels, and suffocating as fast as possible in prison-ships all our seamen who will not enlist into the service of his Britannic Majesty; and Haldimand, with his savage allies, is scalping and burning on the frontiers." Facts always were the ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... head in a slow acquiescence. He released her, and she ran; but he easily overtook her, and she was once again held, still with her back to a pillar. Both were now breathing hard. Sally's head was lowered. She was suffocating. She seemed to be in complete darkness. And she had no sense of what was happening. The mere technique of the row absorbed her. They were almost like two quarrelling cats, both sullen, both glowering and full of resentment ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... are wont to do. Then dark rumors were afloat of foes making a desperate advance, and of bloody battle pending. One night a horror fell upon my troubled sleep—an appalling gloom, a shuddering, suffocating sense of some impending doom. Battling fiercely and blindly with this dread, invisible something, I awoke in deadly fright, to find the terror no less clear to my perceptions, no less palpable and real, and to wrestle with it still. Some blind instinct in me called aloud for air; with difficulty ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lament, who would accuse, when we had nothing to accuse, none to lament against but fortune, who is less than a vapour? But when ourselves are the well that breathes out this exhalation, the oven that spits out this fiery smoke, the mine that spews out this suffocating and strangling damp, who can ever, after this, aggravate his sorrow by this circumstance, that it was his neighbour, his familiar friend, his brother, that destroyed him, and destroyed him with a whispering and a calumniating breath, when we ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... the Hirpini, IO m. S.E. of Aeclanum, close to the Via Appia. There are now two small pools which exhale carbonic acid gas and sulphuretted hydrogen. Close by was a temple of the goddess Mephitis, with a cave from which suffocating vapours rose, and for this reason the place was brought into connexion with the legends of the infernal regions. Virgil's description (Aeneid, vii. 563) is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... fir-wooded mountains on either hand, the lower slopes spotted with farms. The houses showed some slight improvement as we advanced. The people were all at work in the fields, cutting the year's satisfactory harvest. A scorching sun blazed in a cloudless sky; the earth was baked and dry, and suffocating clouds of dust rose from under our horses' hoofs. Most of the women in the fields, on account of the heat, had pulled off their body-sacks, and were working in shifts made on the same principle, which reached to the knees. Other garments they had none. A few, recognising us as ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... he could not tell us how he came there, but confided that Tim and Mr. Crudup came daily to attend to him, we learned that they knew of his whereabouts. Rebecca snapped her teeth close and her eyes blazed at the thought of her father keeping this man a prisoner in such a suffocating place. ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... suffocating breath Loads the dank pinion of the gale with death.— 195 With fear and hate they blast the affrighted groves, Yet own with tender care their kindred Loves!— So, where PALMIRA 'mid her wasted plains, Her shatter'd aqueducts, and ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... more delicious than the water of this stream, nor downy pillow more welcome than the sod on its banks. Without blankets or covering we sank in each other's arms for mutual warmth on the dew-drenched grass; and blistered feet and aching limbs and hunger and thirst and suffocating ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... every one was still about when the signal was given, and this cellar where the electric lamps burned brightly soon took on the aspect of a drawing-room, in spite of all. One lone man, however, stood disconsolate, literally suffocating beneath a huge cavalry cape, hooked tight up to his throat. As the perspiration soon began rolling from his forehead, a friend seeking to put him at his ease, suggested he open ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... the damned at the hands of our fellow prisoners, who, to a man, made it their daily business and pleasure to render our lives miserable. Gottlieb wasted away to a mere shadow and I became seriously ill from the suffocating heat and loathsome food, for it was now midsummer and the Tombs was crowded with prisoners waiting until the courts should open in ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... It tended to produce it and to cause relapses, and it was good practice to use direct counter-suggestion whenever the patient was conscious, as well as brandy and morphia. The worst of it was that many of those patients who recovered over night died next afternoon as they lay in the suffocating ward. What was possible with wet sheets and small pieces of ice was done, but it was a wretched business, and those who were in Basra at that time and saw those spectacles will never forget them; nor will they forget ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... knapsack to my stomach in order to protect myself as best I could. The shrieks of the wounded rang out on all sides. Tears came to my eyes when I heard the poor devils moaning with pain. The dust, the smoke, and the stench of the powder were suffocating. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... surface as well as for the lungs. The mind, for it is housed in the body and its tenant, must depend for its vigour or tone upon the fresh air in school or college study. Even a very good head cannot work well set upon an anaemic body which is suffocating for want of good clean air. If you wish to do your best work and keep well, the first thing to do is not to open your books but to open your windows. After that the books and a reasonable number of hours ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... who have gallantly rescued a couple of children that have been burning and suffocating under roof). Yes, take 'em off to the hospital! Poor little creatures—not much hope for them, I'm afraid! (To Colonel.) ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 29, 1890 • Various
... or the soreness of my bones. A new misery was fast growing upon me. My head swam with dizziness, the sweat started from my brow, and I felt sick both at the heart and in the stomach. I experienced a suffocating sensation in my breast and throat, as if my ribs were being compressed inwardly, and my lungs had not room enough to expand and let me breathe. My nostrils were filled with a nauseating smell—the smell of "bilge-water"—for ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... strident droning of the Thunder Bird. He watched, pressing his forehead against the bars. The sound increased steadily, and Johnny, gripping the bars until his fingers cramped afterwards, felt a suffocating beat in his throat. A great revulsion seized him, an overwhelming desire to master a situation that had so far mastered him. What were six days—five days now? Why, already one day had gone, and the Thunder Bird was still ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... fretting; By day, 'twas gadding or coquetting. Fond to be seen, she kept a bevy Of powder'd coxcombs at her levy; The 'squire and captain took their stations, 55 And twenty other near relations; Jack suck'd his pipe, and often broke A sigh in suffocating smoke; While all their hours were pass'd between Insulting ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... his Physico-Theology, says, "July 8th, 1707, (called for some time after the hot Tuesday,) was so excessively hot and suffocating, by reason there was no wind stirring, that divers persons died, or were in great danger of death, in their harvest work. Particularly one who had formerly been my servant, a healthy, lusty young man, was killed by the heat; and several horses on the road dropped ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... she spreading her dainty skirts and saying "Thank you, Mr. Rutter—" and Ben with his face in so broad a grin that it got set that way—Aunt Dinah, the cook, having to ask him three times "Was he gwineter hab a fit" before he could answer by reason of the chuckle which was suffocating him. ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... served as an illustration of an air-tight bowl, flung down relentlessly upon this part of the world. Inside this figurative bowl it was chill, yet the air was stirless. It was without refreshment; it became a labor and not an exhilaration to breath it. A pall of suffocating dust rolled above and about the Irrawaddy flotilla boat which, buffeted by the strong irregular current, strained at its cables, now at the bow, now at the stern, not dissimilar to the last rocking ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... Hand and a Face behind a grating; They will dream of cotton petals, endless, crimson, suffocating, Never of a wild rose thicket, nor the singing of a cricket; But the ambulance will bellow through the wanness of their dreams, And their tired lids will flutter with the street's ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... awful than anything he had ever imagined. Jose would have met a bullet, a knife, a lash, without flinching; flames would not have served to weaken his resolve; but this slow drowning was infinitely worse than the worst he had thought possible; he was suffocating by long, black, agonizing minutes. Every nerve and muscle of his body, every cell in his bursting lungs, fought against the outrage in a purely physical frenzy over which his will power had no control. Nor would insensibility come to his relief—Law ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... on the terrace where she had left them that perfect May night. They had gone out there immediately dinner ended, for study hour had lately been held from five to seven on account of the warm evenings, Mrs. Vincent objecting to the lights which made the house almost suffocating. ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... more carefully. He swung his sight to the foremost, and drove a bullet straight through his chest. The next moment something seemed to have fallen upon him with crushing weight. A red sea rose before his eyes. In it he was submerged; the roar of it filled his ears; it blinded him; and in the suffocating embrace of it he tried to cry out. He fought himself out of it, his eyes cleared, and he could see again. His rifle was no longer in his hands, and he was standing. Twenty feet away men were rushing upon ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... the lungs is so totally different from that of swallowing a fluid in which we are immersed, that it cannot be acquired before our nativity. But at this time, when the circulation of the blood is no longer continued through the placenta, that suffocating sensation, which we feel about the precordia, when we are in want of fresh air, disagreeably affects the infant: and all the muscles of the body are excited into action to relieve this oppression; those of the breast, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... at Beynac left some pleasant memories. The days were fiery, and, when the south wind blew, almost suffocating; but when the sun went down into the west there usually came a beneficent change. During the few minutes that the golden circle lay seemingly upon the edge of the world, a boat crossing the river appeared to glide over unfathomable depths of splendour; then gradually over the fields of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... seeing-sense that was left, mourned always for the hearing and speaking senses that were gone—he marked all these things in an instant, and felt that his heart was sinking as he looked. A dimness stole over his sight; a suffocating sensation oppressed his breathing; the lights in the circus danced and mingled together; he bent down over the child's hand, and took it in his own; twice kissed it fervently; then, to the utter amazement of the laughing crowd about him, rose up suddenly, and forced his way out ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... not of a rank to make suggestions, or I would have suggested that if we went faster we should get by sooner. It seemed to me that it was an ill-judged time to be taking a walk. Just as we were drifting in that suffocating stillness past a great cannon that stood just within a raised portcullis, with nothing between me and it but the moat, a most uncommon jackass in there split the world with his bray, and I fell out of the saddle. Sir Bertrand ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... reached the hills and were making for Larissa. Leaving part of his legions in the camp to rest, Caesar took the freshest the same evening, and by a rapid march cut off their line of retreat. The hills were waterless, the weather suffocating. A few of the guiltiest of the Pompeian leaders, Labienus, Lentulus, Afranius, Petreius, and Metellus Scipio (Cicero and Cato had been left at Durazzo), contrived to escape in the night. The rest, twenty-four thousand of them, surrendered at ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... this celebrated conjunction Tycho ascribed the great plague which in subsequent years desolated Europe, because it took place in the beginning of Leo, and not far from the nebulous stars of Cancer, two of the zodiacal signs which are reckoned by Ptolemy "suffocating ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... right time; After firing, I see him lean aside, and look eagerly off to note the effect; —Elsewhere I hear the cry of a regiment charging—the young colonel leads himself this time, with brandished sword; I see the gaps cut by the enemy's volleys, quickly filled up—no delay; I breathe the suffocating smoke—then the flat clouds hover low, concealing all; Now a strange lull comes for a few seconds, not a shot fired on either side; Then resumed, the chaos louder than ever, with eager calls, and orders of officers; While from some distant part of the field the wind wafts to my ears a shout ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... of sand passed over us, overthrowing and suffocating man and beast; the camels thrust their muzzles into the ground, and, profiting by their instinct, we did the same, awaiting our fate in silence and trepidation. But the simoom had not yet poured upon us all its horrors: in a few minutes nothing was to be distinguished—all was darkness, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... in suffocating sobs, but they reached the ear of Cadet, who, foreboding some terrible catastrophe, rushed into the room where the secret door stood open. The light glared up the stair. He ran down and saw the Intendant on his knees, holding in his arms the half raised form of a woman which he ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... locked up at the fixed hour for locking up, and found dead at the fixed hour for opening. How they had died—no one knew. At what hour they had died—no one knew. Whether in some choking struggle a human hand might have saved them by changing a suffocating position or the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade |
