"Fleshless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was his eye, His carcase was fleshless, and shrill was his cry, His knees were all bent, as with weakness he shook, And death and starvation scowled in his look.— "You may talk of Parnassus and Poets," he cried, "Of their scorn, and ...
— The Council of Dogs • William Roscoe
... forward; she stretched out to him her fleshless arms, and straining him to her heart with the strength of a tiger, she burst into a violent laugh, broken by deep, tearless sobs, which caused her to fall back suffocating ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... a very happy humour to-day, the Sultan related many things of his youth; his exploits, of course, which all men relate, and which I shall likewise do, I imagine, if I live to be old. Showing us his withered fleshless arms, and taking hold of his armlets, he observed: "The time was when these armlets could not slip off. Now, see how easily they come away." He then abused me for my leanness, and admired the Taleb (Overweg), because he had more flesh ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under the bony hand—a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... he was in the flesh, was he more than a mere embryo growing towards birth into that life of the world to come in which he now shines so gloriously? What a small thing was that flesh and blood life, of which he was alone conscious, as compared with that fleshless life which he lives but knows not in the lives of millions, and which, had it ever been fully revealed even to his imagination, we may be sure that he could not ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... white, thin lips of John Lawson. He replied briefly to the welcomings he received. He threw aside his cloak, and exhibited the figure of an exceedingly emaciated and feeble old man, who had all the appearance of ninety years, though he was little more than sixty; his face was worn and fleshless to a painful degree; his hair was of the whitest shade of great age, but his eyes had grown much more serene in their expression than in his earlier days, notwithstanding a cast of suffering which his whole countenance exhibited. He was ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... movement, the spectators perceived another— equally indicative of a desire on the part of the birds to betake themselves to repose. This was the drawing up of one of their long fleshless legs, until it was entirely concealed under the loose feathers of the belly—a movement made by both so exactly at the same instant, as to lead to the belief that they were actuated by like impulses, by some spiritual union that ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... food She quits, advancing indolently forth: The maid, in warlike brightness clad, she saw, In form divine, and heavy sighs burst forth Deep from her bosom's black recess: pale gloom. Dwells on her forehead; lean her fleshless form; Askaunce her eyes; encrusted black her teeth; Green'd deep with gall her breasts; her hideous tongue With poisons lurid; laughter knows her not, Save woes and pangs unmerited she sees; Sleep flies her couch, by cares unceasing wrung; At men's success she sickens, pining sad; But stung ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... ill-kept stove, bowl in lap and paring potatoes with the long fleshless hands of a bird, raised a still more ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... their omen Harshly 'mid thy billows' roar; Fleshless bones of shipwreck'd seamen Dash against thy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... (for the scene grows larger and larger as we look) a bony hand snatches back a performer in the midst of his part, and him, whom yesterday two infinities (past and future) would not suffice, a handful of dust is enough to cover and silence for ever. Nay, we see the same fleshless fingers opening to clutch the showman himself, and guess, not without a shudder, that they are lying in wait for ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... the corner of his mouth to emit a word or two, and screwed it down immediately he had done. His poor deformed body was like that of Punchinello, a part for which he was famous in the theatres—protuberant before, hunched up between his shoulders behind, and set upon little writhen fleshless legs like wooden spigots. In manner he was excessively punctilious, grave, collected, oracularly sententious. I know that he was exquisitely sensitive to ridicule and remorseless in punishing it. It was not hard to understand— the moment I set eyes upon this poor monster—that, with the young ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... a platform, on which ten skeletons were disposed at full length, with the skulls still covered with long hair, and the fleshless limbs glimmering white and stretching back ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... his brushwork; in such a manner did Bull Hunter drink in the words and the acts of Pete Reeve. And, indeed, where guns were the subject of conversation it would have been hard to find a man more thoroughly equipped to pose as an expert than Pete Reeve. That fleshless hand, all speed of motion as it whipped out the gun from the nerve and sinew, became an incredible ghost with the holster and the long, heavy Colt danced and flashed at his fingertips as though it ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... fell from him, and there appeared a mouldering skeleton, its ghastly head crowned with serpents; that which he had kept hidden under his mantle was an hour-glass with the sand almost run out. Death held it towards the knight in his fleshless hand. The bell at the neck of the little horse gave forth a solemn sound. ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... generations. The giant bones of warriors rested beside the more delicate skeletons of their women, or the skeletons, slenderer still, of little children of the ancient race. The warrior's bow lay beside him with rotting string; the child's playthings were still clasped in fleshless fingers; beside the squaw's skull the ear-pendants of hiagua shells lay where they had fallen from the crumbling flesh ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... executed with great spirit, and elicited tumultuous applause from all the beholders. The earl now retired, and Chowles took his place. He was clothed in an elastic dress painted of a leaden and cadaverous colour, which fitted closely to his fleshless figure, and defined all his angularities. He carried an hour-glass in one hand and a dart in the other, and in the course of the dance kept continually pointing the latter at those who moved around ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... him and sent him into her chamber, and the jailers went to seek another, and led out Messire Thibault, who was the husband of the Lady; and in sorry raiment was he, for he was dight with long hair, and had a great beard; he was lean and fleshless, as one who had suffered pain and dolour enough. When the Lady saw him, she said unto the Soudan: "Sir, again with this one would I willingly speak, if it please thee." "Dame," said the Soudan, "it pleaseth me well." So ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... made all speed, regardless of the heat, in his journey from Bridgetown to Colonel Bishop's plantation, and if ever man was built for speed in a hot climate that man was Mr. James Nuttall, with his short, thin body, and his long, fleshless legs. So withered was he that it was hard to believe there were any juices left in him, yet juices there must have been, for he was sweating violently by the time ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... That very night, Francisco, I took the key of the cabinet from your garments, while you slept—I sped to the chamber of death—I visited the depository of horrible mysteries—and for the first time I became aware that two skeletons were contained in that closet! And whose fleshless relics those skeletons were, the dreadful manuscript speedily revealed to me. Then was it also for the first time that I learnt how Margaretha was the detestable spy whose agency had led to such a frightful catastrophe in respect to Eugenio and Vitangela; then I became aware ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... who had gripped death by the throat and had torn the feathers from his grisly, fleshless fingers,—her imagination was very vivid at night, especially after reading a thrilling chapter of Hebrew massacre,—that man had talked with her upon such trifles as books and plays, strange pageants enacted among paper and canvas unrealities of life. She ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... half-moon is dipping to the west, And the cold fog invades the sleeping land. Lo! how the grinning skulls in the level light Litter the place! Methinks that every skull Is a most lifelike portrait of my Sen, Drawn by the hand of Death; each fleshless pate, Cursed with a ghastly grin to eyes unrubbed With love's magnetic ointment, seems to mine To smile an amiable smile like his Whose amiable smile I—I alone Am able to distinguish from his leer! See how the gathering ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... Priest, the fading footprints of adventurous Castile. Thou hast seen the declining glory of old Spain,—declining as yonder brilliant sun. The sceptre she hath wrested from the heathen is fast dropping from her decrepit and fleshless grasp. The children she hath fostered shall know her no longer. The soil she hath acquired shall be lost to her as irrevocably as she herself hath thrust the Moor from ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... With one brown, fleshless hand, that lay outside the covers, he made a gesture of resignation, but the gray eyes, turning towards ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... often tempts the blanchisseuse to continue at her trade until it kills her. The "water- disease," as she calls it (maladie-dleau), makes its appearance after middle-life: the feet, lower limbs, and abdomen swell enormously, while the face becomes almost fleshless;—then, gradually tissues give way, muscles yield, and the whole physical structure crumbles. Nevertheless, the blanchisseuse is essentially a sober liver,—never a drunkard. In fact, she is sober from rigid necessity: she would not dare ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... all is the adventure which happened to Count Frederick in the oratory. Kneeling before the altar was a tall figure in a long cloak. As he approached it rose, and, turning round, disclosed to him the fleshless jaws and empty eye-sockets of a skeleton. The ghost disappeared, as ghosts generally do, after giving a perfectly unnecessary warning and the catastrophe is soon reached by the final appearance of the whole suit of armour ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... thou fearful guest! Who, with thy hollow breast Still in rude armor drest, Comest to daunt me! Wrapt not in Eastern balms, But with thy fleshless palms Stretched, as if asking alms, Why dost thou ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... monk, and clerk to a lord. Let us turn to the other side, the ploughman's son who didn't turn monk, whose head was 'shet' in the straw, who delved and ditched, and dunged the earth, eat bread of corn and bran, worts fleshless (vegetables, but no meat), drank water, and went miserably (Crede, l. 1565-71). What education did he get? To whom could he be apprenticed? What was his chance in life? ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... have required the eyes of maternal love of Rosa's to recognize our jaunty Dick in the emaciated, fleshless face that lay imbedded in the disarray of the cot. Dick's blue eyes were sunken and dim, his lips chalky and parched. He made no sign of recognition when Rosa drew back with her arm under his head to scrutinize ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... stand in the water. The active and air-cutting-swallows, now beginning to assemble for migration, seek their prey about the shady places; where the insects, though of differently compounded natures, "fleshless and bloodless," seem to get for coolness, as they do at other times for warmth. The sound of insects is also the only audible thing now, increasing rather than lessening the sense of quiet by its gentle contrast. The bee now and then sweeps ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... disagreeable surprise. Merely a faint pout appeared for a moment on her lips. Then, standing by, she began to smile at her husband's demonstrations of affection. Quenu, however, at last recovered his calmness, and noticing Florent's fleshless, poverty-stricken appearance, exclaimed: "Ah, my poor fellow, you haven't improved in your looks since you were over yonder. For my part, I've grown fat; but what ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... out upon the water like living things, seeming to grasp after us as the wind swept them, and we glided past in phantom silence. Beyond, like a great black wall, arose higher ground, occasionally jutting into bare bluffs outlined against the lighter sky; again diversified by gaunt dead trees, their fleshless limbs extended upward toward ghostly pillars of vapor ever floating from off the river's surface. Occasionally, jaggedly uneven, close-set trunks of forest growth would appear, spectral in solemn ugliness, a veritable hedge, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... many perils in the past, but he had never been nearer a fatal end than he was at that moment. But the thought of the undying Friend lifted him buoyantly above the dread of death, and he could look with an unwinking eye right into the fleshless eye-sockets of the skeleton, and say, 'I fear no evil, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... prayed. When the sun rose, she murmured, "To-morrow!" and through the day her fancy wandered to the verge of madness. Sometimes visions of beckoning angels swarmed around her; then they fled, and in their places stood a hideous skeleton, that, with ghastly smile, held out his fleshless hand, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the brink of the narrow cleft, I watched Harry and Trenfield descend, throw down the rotting leaves and timber which had accumulated in the centre; and then I saw a dreadful sight—a shrunken, awful face, with white, gleaming teeth, and two fleshless hands lying together upon an all but skeleton chest. The rest of the body, except one leg, which from the knee downwards was partly raised and showed a bone protruding from a rough raw-hide boot, was mercifully concealed from our sight by the coarse ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... which were furnished with sharp talons, he had four outspread wings, two of which fell behind him, while the other two rose up and surrounded his head; he had a scorpion's tail, a human face with large goggle-eyes, bushy eyebrows, fleshless cheeks, and retreating lips, showing a formidable row of threatening teeth, while from his flattened skull protruded the horns of a goat: the entire combination was so hideous, that it even alarmed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... lose in making his decision. Beside him stood Harry, silent, morose. Before him,—Fairchild closed his eyes in an attempt to shut out the sight of it. But still it was there, the crumpled heap of tattered clothing and human remains, the awry, heavy shoes still shielding the fleshless bones of the feet. He turned blindly, his hands ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to the world outside. Slowly my eyes to the darkness grew, And I saw in the gloom, or rather knew, That my feet had touched two skeleton forms, One closely clasped in the other's arms. Recoiling, I shuddered and turned my face From the fleshless mockery of embrace. Again o'er a heap of rubbish and rust, I stumbled and caught in the moth and dust What hardly a sense of my soul believes— A mold-stained package of parchment leaves! A hideous bat flapped into my face! O'ercome with horror, I fled the place, And stood again ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... thought you would forget me?" chuckled the fleshless lips by his ear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now, for ever and a day. 'Misery loves company,' and it wouldn't be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity, would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Donatello's Wooden Statue of the same penitent in the Baptistery, seems a female Robinson Crusoe,—hirsute, cadaverous, fleshless, uncombed and uncomely,—certainly a more edifying spectacle than the voluptuous, Titianesque exhibitions of fair frailty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... London Mews, His fleshless face was a stretcht skin sheath For the narrow pear of the skull beneath. He had cold blue eyes, and a mouth like a slit, With yellow teeth sticking out from it. There was no red blood in his lips or skin, He'd a sinister, hard, sharp soul ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... wrinkles being marked in scarlet lines that contrasted with the would-be white of the bed-gown which was tied round her neck by a narrow tape. The gaping of this garment revealed a breast to be likened only to that of an old peasant woman who cares nothing about her personal ugliness. The fleshless arm was like a stick on which a bit of stuff was hung. Seen at her window, this spinster seemed tall from the length and angularity of her face, which recalled the exaggerated proportions of certain Swiss heads. The character of their countenance—the features being marked ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... at last there was renewed vibration in the tree. Keeko raised her eyes again. Marcel was moving backwards, and there, right at the broken head of the tree, the fleshless skull with its magnificent antlers was set up ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... The sun shines there, but it warms them not; Their bodies are wintry cold: They are wrapp'd in ice that grows and grows, Solid, and white, and old! And there's many a haunted desert rock, Where seldom ship doth go— Where unburied men, with fleshless limbs, Are moving to and fro: They people the cliffs, they people the caves,— A ghastly company!— never sail'd there in a ship myself, But I know that such there be. And oh! the hot and horrid track Of the Ocean of the Line! There are millions of the negro men Under that ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... of misery, attempted to supply the Parisians with bread and amusements (panem et circenses); but their very diversions were ghastly and melancholy. In 1425, there was painted in the sepulchre of the Innocents a picture called the Dance of Death: Death, grinning with fleshless jaws, was represented taking by the hand all estates of the population in their turn, and making them dance. In the Hotel Armagnac, confiscated, as so many others were, from its owner, a show was exhibited to amuse the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... blood in the man's body faintly reddened his fleshless cheeks as Midwinter advanced to meet him, and asked the way to Thorpe Ambrose. His weak, watery eyes looked hither and thither in a bewilderment painful to see. If he had met with a lion instead of a man, and if the few words addressed ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... escutcheon itself, it was sable, that is to say, black, and in the middle of it appeared, with the vague whiteness of silver, a fleshless, deformed thing, which, like the rest, at length became distinct. It was a death's head. The nose was lacking, the orbits of the eyes were hollow and deep, the cavity of the ear could be seen on the right side, all the seams of the cranium could be traced, ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... but of that peculiar Jewish cast which age renders harsh and prominent. The high narrow wrinkled forehead, the small deep-set jet-black eyes, gleaming like living coals from beneath straight shaggy eyebrows, the thin aquiline nose, the long upper lip, the small fleshless mouth and projecting chin, the expression of habitual cunning and mental reservation, mingled with sullen pride and morose ill-humor, gave to his marked countenance a repulsive and sinister character. Those ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... ceiling, and one tiny grated window. Imbedded in the wall was a huge iron ring, and chained to it was a gaunt skeleton, that was stretched out at full length on the stone floor, and seemed to be trying to grasp with its long fleshless fingers an old-fashioned trencher and ewer, that were placed just out of its reach. The jug had evidently been once filled with water, as it was covered inside with green mould. There was nothing on the trencher but a pile of dust. Virginia knelt down beside the skeleton, and, folding her little ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... Subsequently I saw many wonderful sights, and had some terrible experiences in the Uninhabited House; but I can honestly say, no sight or experience so completely cowed me for the time being, as that dull blackness to which I could assign no shape, that spirit-like rapping of fleshless fingers, which seemed to increase in vehemence as I obeyed ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... hoarse, feeble voice; looked on that fleshless body, those faded eyes under the gray eyebrows, those sunken, shaved cheeks, supported by a military collar, that white cross, and understood that to argue and explain to him the meaning of those words were futile. But, making another effort, he asked him about ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... to be had. I shall never forget the scene which I that night witnessed: mothers striving, by the heat of their own persons, to preserve the lives of their little ones; women stretching out their fleshless arms, imploring for food and shelter; old men tottering to the destination where they were to receive shelter. The odour from the clothes and persons of those poor people was dreadfully offensive, and the absence ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... vigorous that it was some seconds after she had released him before he could make any reply; and while he was trying to get his breath the fleshless Mr. Treat took him solemnly by the hand, and cleared his throat as if he were determined to take advantage of the occasion to make ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... who flashes through the head and paints the shadows green and red— The Sun shall eat thy fleshless dead, O Caravan, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... often boast a guest In sparkling robes and blooming chaplets drest; But, oh! what loathsomeness is hid beneath— A fleshless, mould'ring effigy of death; A thing to check the smile and wake the sigh, With thoughts that living excellence can die. How many at the coming feast will see THE SKELETON ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 7, 1841 • Various
... that I had ever seen. Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... name in grateful remembrance. The telescope through which he was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the movements of which had been the source of such odd fancies on my part, is now the property of a Western College. You smile as you think of my taking it for a fleshless human figure, when I saw its tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was an arm, under the white drapery thrown over it for protection. So do I smile now; I belong to the numerous class who are prophets after the fact, and hold my nightmares very ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... soiled and torn; no dagger in his belt nor sword at his side; his lips are blue and shivering, his brow pallid; he looks as if Death were breathing on him as he passed, and he fled in terror from the fleshless phantom. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and incredibly worn; his skin clung in dry yellow patches to his skull, the temples were bony caverns, and the pits of his eyes blank shadows. He felt forward with a siccated hand, on which veins were twisted like blue worsted over fleshless tendons, gripped Harry Baggs' shoulder, and lowered himself to ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... so thin, or, rather, so fleshless, that it is no nickname; I tell you, he is frightful; and with all this, he is provost-marshal of his ward; he is by far the greatest villain of them all. He comes from the galleys, and he has again robbed and murdered; but his last murder is so horrible, that ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... basking in the sunshine of a court, Fatten on its corruption!—what are they? —The drones of the community; they feed On the mechanic's labour: the starved hind 110 For them compels the stubborn glebe to yield Its unshared harvests; and yon squalid form, Leaner than fleshless misery, that wastes A sunless life in the unwholesome mine, Drags out in labour a protracted death, 115 To glut their grandeur; many faint with toil, That few may know the cares ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... strayed; others were found under trees in snow pits, which they themselves had made by walking round and round the trunks to keep from being snowed under. These starvelings were shot to end their sufferings, and also with the hope that their hides and fleshless bones might save the lives of our snow-beleaguered party. Every part of the animals was saved for food. The locations of the carcasses were marked so that they could be brought piece by piece into camp; and even ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... past me—thud, thud, thud! A bend in the road, and he vanishes from sight. But I can still hear him, still hear the mad patter of his horse's hoofs as they bear him onward, lifeless, fleshless, weightless, to his ancient home. God pity the souls that know ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... began with soup, made from the left-over beans and the hog's jaw of dinner. There it swam, that fleshless, long-toothed, salt-reddened bone, the most hateful piece of animal anatomy that Joe ever fixed his hungry eyes upon. And supper ended as it began; with soup. There was nothing else behind it, save some hard bread to soak in it, and its ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... his friends the skeleton and the Fat Woman, and to that end started toward the place where their tent had been standing; but to his sorrow he found that it was already being taken down, and he had only time to thank Mrs. Treat and to press the fleshless hand of her shadowy husband as they entered ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... how great changes of kingdoms and diverse vicissitudes have succeeded one another, since the marvellous body of this fish, which perished in the caverns and intricate recesses [of the mountain]. Now undone by time, thou liest patient in this confined spot; with thy fleshless and bare bones thou hast built the framework and the support of the ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... sunk so deep in their sockets that the eyeballs appeared to have dwindled to the size of small marbles; while the lips had contracted to such an extent as to leave the tightly clenched teeth clearly visible, the general effect being that of a grinning, fleshless skull with a covering of shrivelled skin drawn tightly over it. The once immaculate suit of white clothing was now deeply soiled and stained by contact with the earth and grass, and was a mere wrapping of scarcely recognisable rags, the coat being missing altogether, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... I had a "mission to perform," and that my fleshless bones were not given me for useless pleasure, but as a "warnin' to ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... them. But when they came to Deoca and she had laid her hands upon the birds, behold, their covering of feathers fell off and in their places were three shrunken and feeble old men and one lean and withered old woman, fleshless and bloodless from extreme old age. And Lairgnen was struck with amazement and fear, and ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... attempt to obtain inhabits an undulated and wooded land wherein willows frame the fields. And it is not a rare thing to find in the hollow of one of these old willows the skeleton of a Chouan pressing his gun against his breast and holding his beads in his fleshless fingers. I shall have my programme posted on the bark of oaks. I shall say 'Peace to presbyteries! Let the day come when bishops, holding in their hands the wooden crook, shall make themselves similar to the poorest servant of the poorest parish! It was the ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... folds of canvas removed, there lay a strange sight before the Pilgrims' eyes. Inclosed in a great quantity of fine red powder, emitting a pungent but agreeable odor, lay the skeleton of a man, fleshless, except upon the skull, where clung the skin and a mass of beautiful hair, yellow as gold, and curling closely ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... face was almost as fleshless as the foot of a bird, sat meditating upon the rocky shore of the flat and hazel- covered isle which fills the widest part of the Lough Gill. A russet- faced boy of seventeen years sat by his side, watching the swallows dipping ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... the deep; Nor wind nor wave shall tire Those fleshless arms, whose pulses leap With floods of living fire; Sleep on, and, when the morning light Streams o'er the shining bay, Oh think of those for whom the night Shall never wake ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... yes,"—Karamaneh divining my question, nodded, and the shimmering cloud of her wonderful hair, hastily confined, burst free and rippled about her shoulders. "A gaunt, fleshless brown man, who bent, and ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... sounded lazily. The sergeant reappeared and behind him shuffled a native. Clad only in a dirty loin-cloth, his brown skin was wrinkled in scaly folds upon his chest and belly; his face was like an ancient tortoise; the small lack-lustre eyes were bloodshot and furtive; the limbs were almost fleshless. He squatted upon the ground and with lowered lids appeared to be absorbed in the contemplation of a white man's table leg. Zu Pfeiffer regarded the man as one would a stray dog and nodded to the sergeant, who ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... interrupting voice crying out: 'I forbid! She is mine! The wife of William Pfeiffer can not wed another!' No such words could be dreaded now. The lips which might have spoken them were dumb. I forgot that fleshless lips gibber loudest, and that a lifetime, long or short, lay before me, in which to hear them mumble and squeak their denunciation and threats. Oh, but I have been wretched! At ball and dinner and dance those lips have been ever at my ear, but most when we have sat alone together; most then; ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... them piled in sable state, By a pale light through a gloomy grate; But War had entered their dark caves, And stored along the vaulted graves Her sulphurous treasures, thickly spread In masses by the fleshless dead: Here, throughout the siege, had been The Christians' chiefest magazine; To these a late formed train now led, Minotti's last and stern resource Against the ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... published under the title History of the French Revolution. One notices especially an engraving bearing the legend, Poverty of Peasants under Louis XIV. In the foreground a man is fighting some dogs for some bones, which for that matter are already quite fleshless. Beside him a wretched fellow is twisting himself and compressing his stomach. Farther back a woman lying on the ground is eating grass. At the back of the landscape figures of which one cannot say whether they are corpses or persons starving are also stretched ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... patience and faith, being tested in like manner and in like manner standing the test, were deepened and confirmed. Depend upon it, he was a better man all his days, because he had been brought close up to Death and looked it in the fleshless eye-sockets, unwinking and unterrified. And I dare say if, long after, he had been asked, 'Would you not have liked to have escaped those two or three days of suspense, and to have been let go at ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... I took stock of the poor creature. He was painfully thin; his skeleton could be clearly seen under the unadorned skin; his sunken eyes gleamed with mistrust and inquietude from out of his fleshless face, and his long black hair lay in ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... exactly, for when she began her utterance she looked around as if to find sympathy in the assembled faces, and her deep-set piercing eyes seemed alight with intense feeling. At first she grasped the back of the settee in front with her long fleshless fingers, and then later clasped and finally raised them above her upturned face, while her body swayed with the vehemence of her feelings. Her garb, too, lent a pathos, for it was naught but a faded calico dress that ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... saw two black eyes in a white, almost fleshless face. The eyes alone seemed to live, and the shrunken figure, huddled in many shawls, gave an impression of patriarchal age. Evelyn saw by her veil that Sister Lawrence was a lay sister, and the old nun tried to draw herself ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... chairman knew that Haldane was dead! He had seen him torn and tossed and trampled under foot. Perhaps he expected the ghost of the M.P. to rise and conclude the debate with frightful jabberings of fleshless jaws and gestures of bony hands. Indeed I heard a rustling of papers as if one gathered his notes for a speech; but I felt unable to face the grisly horror of a phantom replying to ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... coloring of malarious fevers, was a fit setting for such optics. Although it was nearly oval in contour, and although the features were or had been fairly regular, yet it was so marked by hard, and one might almost say fleshless muscles, and so brutalized by long indulgence in savage passions, that it struck you as frightfully ugly. A large dull-red scar on the right jaw and another across the left cheek added the final touches to this countenance of ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... palm-trees—far below. She crossed herself, turning hurriedly away. Yet, for an instant, Death, triumphant, hideous, inevitable, and all the spiritual terror and physical disgust of it, grinned at her, its fleshless face, as it seemed, close against her own. And alongside Death—by some malign association of ideas and ugly antic of profanity—she saw the bel tete de Jesu of M. Paul Destournelle as she had seen it this morning, he looking back, hat in hand, as he plunged down ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Pluto's throne Hercules saw Death the Reaper. He was clothed in a black robe spotted with stars and his fleshless hand held the sharp sickle with which he is said to cut down mortals as the ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... clerk not professionally trained, competing in a government supervised walking race from Dresden to Berlin, 123 miles, against the picked pedestrians of the German army and several professionals, won easily on a fleshless diet consisting of nuts and fresh vegetables which he pulled out of the vegetable gardens as he hurried by. The only protein he ate was derived ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... victim to the same passions, a prey to the same undying remorse, as now. Misery was at that time inscribed in legible characters upon his countenance. But now he appeared like nothing that had ever been visible in human shape. His visage was haggard, emaciated, and fleshless. His complexion was a dun and tarnished red, the colour uniform through every region of the face, and suggested the idea of its being burnt and parched by the eternal fire that burned within him. His eyes ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... that a thousand times, Tom," she answered with passionate bitterness. "See that wasted arm," and suiting the action to her words she stripped up her sleeve; "look at my fleshless face—what has brought me to this but starvation and drudgery? Hear the moaning of that helpless babe in the cradle, crying for nurse that starvation has dried up. Oh, Tom! how can you spend your money in whiskey when you know we are starving at home? You knew when you left this morning there ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... insignificance when contrasted with the results of this heinous sin—a systematic course of starvation of brave men, made captive by the chances of war. * * * My note-book is filled with fearful records of suffering, and hardships unparalleled, written just as I took the statements from the fleshless lips of these living skeletons. In appearance they reminded me more of the bodies I had seen washed out upon Antietam, and other battle-fields, than of anything else—only they had ceased to suffer and were at rest,—these were ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... upon the pillow, so wasted by sickness, was marked by the death-gray. The eyes, deep in their hollows between the fleshless forehead and the prominent cheek-bones, were closed; the lips were livid; the nose was sharp and pinched; the colorless cheeks were sunken; but the outlines were still delicately drawn and the proportions nobly fashioned. It was, still, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... rude men of the sea might acknowledge themselves vanquished and seek safety in the harbors, the passage might be closed against every living thing, the islands shut off from the rest of the world, but this signified nothing to the invincible mariner with the hairless head, to him who walks with fleshless legs, who rushes with gigantic strides over mountain and sea. No storm could detain him; no joy could make him forget; he was everywhere; he remembered everyone. The sun might shine, the fields might be in the fullness of their glory, the crops bountiful—they were deceptions ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... kept them at bay. Of those who did "beard the lion in his den, the Douglas in his hall," many were immolated in his diary; and we see them, now that it has been published, like so many flies with pins stuck through them, fastened to the paper. Poor Charles Lamb stands there, bloodless, fleshless; but we think scarcely the less of gentle Elia as we look upon him, but far less of the cruel perpetrator of the atrocity. Leigh Hunt, too, has a pin quite through his warm heart; and Stuart Mill, and many others. One wonders sometimes if Froude himself escaped, or if he were there too, like a ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... knives and tomahawks. We journeyed on till sunset, when we came to a deep dry gully, on the very edge of the prickly pear barrier, and there we encamped for the night. To go farther without something to eat was impossible. The wild and haggard looks of my companions, their sunken eyes, and sallow, fleshless faces, too plainly showed that some subsistence must be speedily provided more nutritious than the unripe and strongly acidulated fruit presented to us. We drew lots, and the parson's horse was doomed; in a few minutes, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... drifted out to sea. He exclaims: "Can it be that her body has been found and identified? What could the spectral voice have meant by the prophecy about burial 'in a cave' and 'trodden down with stones'? What if the body of Oswald Langdon, too, has passed out to the boundless deep, and his fleshless skeleton now is awaiting identification in ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... just see the ghostly extremities of these spectral trees over the top of the main tent as he lay crouched in his corner, after devoting an hour to the licking of his sores. Presently, an almost full moon rose among the trees' fleshless limbs, and painted their nakedness in more than ever ghostly guise. It was then that Finn rose, painfully and slowly, to his feet, and moved, like an old, old man, across the floor of his cage to the bars, the bars that were of an inky blackness in that silvery ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... follow a scene which never varied, even if my indiscretion had been confined to raspberries at five cents a pound, or currants at a cent less. She would wring her hands, long and fleshless as fan handles, and, her great green eyes phosphorescent with distress above her hollow cheeks and ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... I wondered, at the time, why the Germans were almost without horses. Their dash across Belgium in the previous year explained the mobs of broken-backed, split-heeled and fleshless wrecks we met in the paddocks ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... of a lantern disclosed to their view the fleshless bones of a human skeleton with clothing still ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... where It lay—my dread companion through the watches of the night. I pictured It in every abhorrent form which an excited fancy could summon up: now as a skeleton; with hollow eye-holes and grinning, fleshless jaws; now as a vampire, with livid face and bloated form, and dripping mouth wet with blood. Would it never be light! And yet, when day should dawn I should be forced to see It face to face. I had heard that specter and fiend were compelled ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... was scented and mysterious. The wind was playing an eerie fleshless melody in the reeds of the brook hollow. The sky was dark and starry, and across it the Milky Way flung ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the skeleton of the Ferris Wheel stands out gaunt and fleshless. All around is full of ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... them cover their Eyeless Sockets with their Fleshless Hands and fade forever from ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... Yet none of them roared with quite such assurance when Sharkey's pale face and filmy blue eyes were tuned upon him. He was in his shirt-sleeves, with his cambric frills breaking through his open red satin long-flapped vest. The scorching sun seemed to have no power upon his fleshless frame, for he wore a low fur cap, as though it had been winter. A many-coloured band of silk passed across his body and supported a short, murderous sword, while his broad, brass-buckled belt was ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... every sound is produced harmoniously with the action on the screen. An iron ball is dropped and you hear its thud upon the floor, a plate is cracked and you can hear the cracking just the same as if the material plate were broken in your presence. An immaterial piano appears upon the screen and a fleshless performer discourses airs as real as those heard on Broadway. Melba and Tettrazini and Caruso and Bonci appear before you and warble their nightingale notes, as if behind the footlights with a galaxy of beauty, wealth and fashion before them for an audience. ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... black eye, keen and searching, had in it a lurking malignity, like that of a snake, which impressed the spectator with suspicion at the first casual glance. His nose, long and sharp, was almost totally fleshless; the skin being drawn so tightly over the bones, as to provoke the fear that any violent effort would cause them to force their way through the frail integument. An untrimmed beard, run wild; and a pair ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... him as he sat on Sirius, and said, "I give them to you, son of Arrius, to do with as you will until after the games. You have done with them in two hours what the Roman—may jackals gnaw his bones fleshless!—could not in as many weeks. We will win—by the splendor of God, we ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... Marquess, all in a sweat. The Arabian turned; but his face was hidden, with a horrible appearance, as if a hooded cloak stood up by itself and a voice proceeded from a fleshless garb. 'You, Marquess of Montferrat,' it said, 'what do you want with me by the ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... answer, but stretched out its long fleshless hand to show Teig the direction in which he was to go. Teig went on accordingly, but he was greatly terrified, for he remembered what had happened to him at the last place. He went on, "with his heart in his mouth," as he said himself afterwards; but when he came to within fifteen or twenty ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... bring him here before him. Brandon stood motionless, mute. The face was turned toward him—that face which is at once human and yet most frightful since it is the face of Death—the face of a skeleton. The jaws had fallen apart, and that fearful grin which is fixed on the fleshless face here seemed like an effort at a smile ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... this account were obliged to put up with old packs for their round game, that had been lying by in a drawer ever since the time that Giles's grandmother was alive. Each card had a great stain in the middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp and excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens wore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums than real regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively few remarks of the players at the round game were ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... him. There were elephants of every type, of all ages. Some were very old, as he could tell from their lean, fleshless skulls, their sunken temples and hollow eyes, emaciated bodies and straight, thin legs. And the clearest proof of their age was their ears, which lapped over very much at the top and were torn and ragged at the ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly |
