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More "Excruciating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... coming often. The men of the Sand farm had always been plagued by witchcraft. They might be working in the fields, and bending down to pick up a stone or a weed, when all of a sudden some unseen deviltry would strike them with such excruciating pains in the back, that they could not straighten themselves, and had to crawl home on all fours. There they would lie groaning for weeks, suffering greatly from doing nothing, and treated by cupping, leeches and good advice, ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... is not an improbable supposition that this would have happened. The risk was removed by his complete failure of health. "A strange nervous affection, which alternately contracted his legs and produced, without any visible symptom, the most excruciating pain," was his chief affliction, followed by intervals of languor and debility. The saving of his life during these dangerous years Gibbon unhesitatingly ascribes to the more than maternal care of his aunt, Catherine Porten, on writing whose name for the first time ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... warrior scooped up coals on a piece of bark and with a fiendish grin leaped through the smoke. Two rifle shots, so close together as to be almost one, shattered the tense silence as the savages held their breath to enjoy every symptom of the excruciating agony. Dale went down on his knees, a small blue hole showing where the bullet mercifully had struck his heart. Big Turtle leaped backward and fell into the burning brush. A warrior, acting mechanically, dragged the Turtle clear of the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... visitation, and necessity and danger again obliged me to attempt forcing my hand in, which at length, after excruciating torture, I effected. My visitors came, and everything had the appearance of order. I found it, however, impossible to force out my right hand ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... for the lowest barbarism: and the Spanish conquerors of the New World themselves often exhibited cruelty such as even Indians seldom surpass. See below, vol. ii. p. 444. In spite of such cases, however, it must be held that for artistic skill in inflicting the greatest possible intensity of excruciating pain upon every nerve in the body, the Spaniard was a bungler and a novice as compared with the Indian. See Dodge's Our Wild Indians, pp. 536-538. Colonel Dodge was in familiar contact with Indians for more than thirty years, and writes with ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... pay her a visit on my return from London in June; but, after the day was fixed, a letter came from Mr. Bronte, saying that she was suffering from so severe an attack of influenza, accompanied with such excruciating pain in the head, that he must request me to defer my visit until she was better. While sorry for the cause, I did not regret that my going was delayed till the season when the moors would be all glorious with ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy. He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful deference, as a person visited by God and afflicted with ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... females and the children lay rolling in its bottom, drinking the waters of bitterness; and their cries, mixed with the roaring of the waves and the furious north wind, increased the horrors of the scene. My unfortunate father then experienced the most excruciating agony of mind. The idea of the loss which the shipwreck had occasioned to him, and the danger which still menaced all he held dearest in the world, plunged him into a swoon. The tenderness of his wife and ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... presence of the woman. Only upon Cummins had there settled a deep grief. The changes of spring and summer, bringing with them all that this desolate world held of warmth and beauty, filled him with the excruciating pain of his great grief, as if the woman had died ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... clear but we could not sleep at all from the pains of having eaten. We suffered the most excruciating torments though I in particular did not eat a quarter of what would have satisfied me; it might have been from using a quantity of raw or frozen sinews of the legs of deer, which neither of us could avoid doing, so great ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... capitalists, and (2) how to save it from its perpetual and greater hell of suffering by the bloodless wars between the machine owning masters and the machine operating slaves, which wars, if less excruciating, are yet more destructive ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... others during this journey, and always near the evening fire. The Bedouins entertain the greatest dread of them; they say that their bite, if not always mortal, produces a great swelling, almost instant vomiting, and the most excruciating pains. I believe this ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... fanatic who broke a window on Ludgate Hill was alone enough to set them up in good copy for the night. But when the same man was brought before a magistrate and defied his enemy to mortal combat in the open court, then the columns would hardly hold the excruciating information, and the headlines were so large that there was hardly room for any of the text. The Daily Telegraph headed a column, "A Duel on Divinity," and there was a correspondence afterwards which lasted ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... evident some accident had happened, and servants were sent out in all directions. The first conscious perception Charles had was of waking to excruciating agony, and finding himself supported on men's shoulders along the road. No doubt every one believed him still insensible, or, much as he was disliked, they would not have been so cruel as to reproach ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... with lightning. Nor do I overmuch commiserate him to whose lot the fifth may fall, for slumber descends upon him forthwith, and he passes away in painless oblivion. But wretched he who chooses the sixth, whose hair falls from his head, whose skin peels from his body, and who lingers long in excruciating agonies, a living death. The seventh phial contains the object of your desire. Stretch forth your hands, therefore, simultaneously to this table; let each unhesitatingly grasp and intrepidly drain the potion which fate may allot him, and be the quality ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... was very good to me on the occasion of a bad attack of my old disorder, cramps. I suffered such excruciating pain that time that they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled empty blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them to my side, half the day. I got better, and quite easy toward ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... the sand dance to it.' And he expounded the sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long, 'Hush!' with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes, 'he's going to play "Auld Robin Gray" on one string!' And throughout this excruciating movement,—'On one string, that's on one string!' he kept crying. I would have given something myself that it had been on none; but the hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced myself to the notice of the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me, tried to put me in his place, while my companion took to his heels. As they were six to one, they succeeded, and I had the very unpleasant experience of being bastinadoed. The first dozen or two strokes I didn't mind much, but at about the ninetieth the pain was too excruciating for description. When they had finished with me I naturally enquired what it was all for. It seems that my companion when firing at a duck had accidentally shot an Egyptian woman, the wife of one of the soldiers. Upon my appearance he had called out in Turkish ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... a moment's freedom from pain of a most excruciating character during the ten minutes that elapsed before her husband's return. The quantity of opium administered was large, and its effects soon apparent in a gradual breaking down of the pains, which had been almost ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... cans, and many bottles, and metal galleys, and nameless fragments of metal. Everything contributed to the impression of immense ponderosity exceeding the imagination. The fancy of being pinned down by even the lightest of these constructions was excruciating. You moved about in narrow alleys among upstanding, unyielding metallic enormities, and you felt fragile and ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... oracle of awful phrase, The approving "Good!" (by no means good in law) Humming like flies around the newest blaze, The bluest of bluebottles you e'er saw, Teasing with blame, excruciating with praise, Gorging the little fame he gets all raw,[bp] Translating tongues he knows not even by letter, And sweating plays ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... although we derive great consolation from the promise of Jesus Christ, that the gates of hell shall never prevail against the Church, our soul cannot but feel excruciating pain, upon considering how daring outrages against divine and sacred things daily flow from the unbridled licentiousness, the perverse effrontery and impiety of the press. Now in this pestilence of corrupt books which ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... was at first intense, the tendons of the legs and arms being dreadfully strained, and the spinal column bent so as to be nearly broken in two. The shoulder-blades, forced into close contact, pressed the vertebrae inward, and caused excruciating pains along the lumbar vertebrae, where the strain ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... which I have to add, that I have seen some, and heard of others, who have moderated their paroxysms of gout, by diminishing the quantity of fermented liquors, which they had been accustomed to; and others who, by a total abstinence from fermented liquors, have entirely freed themselves from this excruciating malady; which otherwise grows with our years, and curtails or renders miserable the latter half, or third, of the lives of those, who are subject to it. The remote cause is whatever induces temporary torpor or weakness of the system; and the proximate cause is the inirritability, or defective ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of that, and then, with a terrific roar, all our field guns opened, and we knew that our comrades in front, the 4th N.F. on the right and the 7th N.F. on the left, had 'gone over the top.' The noise in front of the field batteries was pandemonium, excruciating to the nerves. The air shook and quivered with the sound, the quarry seemed to shake. You could only hear when the speaker shouted in your ear. And so it went on hour by hour all day. The rate of fire subsided, but the guns went on all ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... reduced to such mere skeletons that their skins seemed to cleave to their bones, and these had this consolation, that they gradually consumed away without pain. Others were swelled out to monstrous sizes, and were so tormented with excruciating pain, as to drive them to furious madness. Some were worn away by the dysentery, and others were racked with excruciating rheumatism, while others again dragged their dead limbs after them, having lost feeling through the palsy. To these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... of his maturer stage productions. On the contrary, his conception of music and his own musical execution had no admirers beyond himself. For hours he would scrape the chords of a small, red violin, drawing from them most excruciating sounds, himself lost in ecstasy, and most amazed when he was begged to cease his concert, which was somewhat calculated to give his friend ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... horrid talebearers. You have plenty of time to dress, my dear; I have an immense deal to talk about. There are half-a-dozen scandals in London already, and you ought to know them, or you will be behind the tittle-tattle when you go to town; and I remember, as a girl, I knew nothing so excruciating as to hear blanks, dashes, initials, and half words, without the key. Nothing makes a girl look so silly and unpalatable. Naturally, the reason why Captain Beauchamp is more talked about than the rest is the politics. Your grand reformer should ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... snake has made a finish of me, I believe," he gasped, placing one hand upon his side, as though the effort to speak had caused excruciating pain in that region of his body. "Blast his ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... cold and clear, but we could not sleep at all, from the pains of having eaten. We suffered the most excruciating torments, though I in particular did not eat a quarter of what would have satisfied me; it might have been from using a quantity of raw or frozen sinews of the legs of deer, which neither of us could avoid doing, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... Israel undertook to pilot me across the cotton fields into the pine land; and a more excruciating process than being dragged over that very uneven surface in that wood wagon without springs I did never endure, mitigated and soothed though it was by the literally fascinating account my charioteer gave me of the rattlesnakes with which the place we drove through becomes ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... his eyes and looked around he became conscious of excruciating pains and he closed them again to rest. His outflung hand struck something that made him look around again, and he saw Tex Ewalt, face down at his side. He released his grasp on the other's collar and slowly the whole thing ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... apiece—engaged in languid conflict. They whacked each other with blows which would have destroyed elephants. But they weren't really interested. One of them sat down and looked bored. The other sat down. Presently, reflectively, he gnawed at a piece of whitish rock. The gnawing made an excruciating sound. It made one's flesh crawl. The diny dozed off. His teeth had cut distinct, curved grooves in the stone. The manufacturer of precision machinery—back on ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... doubt he was growing weaker. Once or twice he stumbled, and the last time he lay a few moments before rising. He wanted to rest badly. The cold was keener than ever; it was merciless; it was excruciating. He no longer had the vitality to withstand it. It stabbed and stung him whenever he exposed bare flesh. He pulled the parka hood very close, so that only his eyes peered out. So he moved through the desolation ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... down again with the scurvy. The effect of these nuts alone, in checking this disease, is astonishing: Many whose limbs were become as black as ink, who could not move without the assistance of two men, and who, besides total debility, suffered excruciating pain, were in a few days, by eating these nuts, although at sea, so far recovered as to do their duty, and could even go aloft as well as they did before the distemper seized them. For several days about this time, we had only faint breezes, with smooth water, so that we made but little way, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... ever be lost. She is there, dear lady, lock, stock, and barrel, right there all the time. So her raiment of violet amounts to a purely gratuitous advertisement of a permanently self-evident fact.—And such a shade too, such a positively excruciating shade!" ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... waves of deadly nausea and with the surging of deep waters in her ears, Diana struggled back to consciousness. The agony in her head was excruciating, and her limbs felt cramped and bruised. Recollection was dulled in bodily pain, and, at first, thought was merged in physical suffering. But gradually the fog cleared from her brain and memory supervened hesitatingly. She remembered fragmentary ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... not to wish to disappoint his foes—he resolved to allow himself to be burnt, and thus frustrate the anticipated pleasure of his cruel persecutors. To die game to the last is an Indian's glory, and under the most excruciating tortures, few savages will ever give way to ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... fire. Every fibre of his strong nature was strained and tortured by the iron grip of his suffering. Every pulse of his body beat with a frantic rage for which no outlet was possible. His eyeballs burned with excruciating pain as he attempted to read again the letter he still held in his hands. He was one of those habitually calm men who become almost insane when they are angry, and in whose placid strength passion of any sort, when roused, finds its most dangerous material. ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... You look out of window and amuse yourself; we shall not be long, I guess," and in went Thorny, silently hoping that the dentist had been suddenly called away, or some person with an excruciating toothache would be waiting to take ether, and so give our young man an excuse for ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... table-girl who ringed his plate with the semicircle of ironstone portion dishes, stood between him and the men who were still regarding him as a joke. And since Maggie's displeasure manifested itself in cold coffee and tough cuts of the beef, the long table made its most excruciating jests ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... as one of the greatest grand seigneurs among violinists. His rendering of romantic works, Saint-Saens, Lalo, Bruch, was exquisite—I have never, never heard them played as beautifully. On the other hand, his Bach playing was excruciating—he played Bach sonatas as though they were virtuoso pieces. It made one think of Hans von Buelow's mot when, in speaking of a certain famous pianist, he said: 'He plays Beethoven with velocity and Czerny with expression.' But to hear ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... he fully clothed. His leather shoes drove into me viciously, even as his face turned purple. The pain was excruciating, but I dared not cry out. His left thumb found my ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... life, the bloody combats of the gladiators, the captives, and malefactors stretched on crosses, expiring in excruciating agonies or mangled by wild beasts, were the tragedies which most deeply interested a ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... of God pray release us from these cruel bonds as quickly as possible; they are bound so tightly that the circulation of the blood is stopped, and we have been suffering the most excruciating agony ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... himself so solicitous about a worldly existence. I asked him: "How do you now find yourself?" He replied: "What shall I say?—Hast thou never witnessed what torture that man suffers from whose jaw they are extracting a tooth? Fancy to thyself how excruciating is his pain from whose precious body ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... grasp. How painful was the distance at which they now appeared! My present debility was felt with intolerable impatience. To love and to be unable to heap happiness on the object beloved, was a thought that assailed me with excruciating sensations! ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... sinking; the room was blurred; the excruciating agony of tortured nerves melted into a lethargy that swept through him. Dimly he sensed that the monstrous, quivering, bell-topped thing was still launching its devastating rain of vibrations; they were above the range of hearing; ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... no response. They did not hear any further firing behind them. On and on they trudged. Night turned to day. Day rolled slowly on into night once more. And still they staggered on, footsore and weary. Mallory suffered excruciating agony from his wound. There were times when it seemed that it would be impossible for him to continue another yard; but then the thought that Barbara Harding was somewhere ahead of them, and that in a short time now they must ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... became anxious for a confirmation of the intelligence, and commenced a loud call for Mr. Kemble. He had not then returned from the Crown and Anchor; but of this the pitites were not aware, and for nearly half an hour they kept up a most excruciating din. At length the great actor made his appearance, in his walking dress, with his cane in hand, as he had left the tavern. It was a long time before he could obtain silence. He. apologized in the most respectful ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... asked him whether it was pleasant to a writer of plays to see them performed; and he said it was intolerable, the presentation of the author's idea being so imperfect; and Dr. ——— observed that it was excruciating to hear one of his own songs sung. Jerrold spoke of the Duke of Devonshire with great warmth, as a true, honest, simple, most kind-hearted man, from whom he himself had received great courtesies and kindnesses (not, as I ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... earth. Here their torments are in proportion to their crimes, and although not eternal, their duration extends almost to the infinitude of eternity; those who have been guilty of the deadly sins of parricide, sacrilege, and defiance of the faith being doomed to the endurance of excruciating deaths, followed by instant revival and a repetition of their tortures without mitigation and apparently ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... and deep hatred mounted to his face, as the blood would to the face of any other. "If a man had by unheard-of and excruciating tortures destroyed your father, your mother, your betrothed,—a being who, when torn from you, left a desolation, a wound that never closes, in your breast,—do you think the reparation that society gives you is sufficient when it interposes the knife of the guillotine between ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... come to hand from Bishop Puginier regarding the martyrdom of the Chinese priest Cap. For three days he suffered excruciating torments. On the fourth day the mandarin asked him to translate the Lord's Prayer. When he came to the third petition, "Thy kingdom come," he was asked of what kingdom he spoke. He replied, "Of God's kingdom." The mandarin immediately ordered him to ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... point was most excruciating. Over and over I studied the hard names and measures, conned again and again the polysyllables; hoping to be able to arrive some time at an intelligible definition of the terms. I revolved in my mind the words Mukunguru, Ghulabio, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... approach of death, an almost insane brilliancy; as, for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who occupied the last minutes of his ebbing life with a very subtile mathematical discourse concerning the exceeding, the excruciating smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts. And strange as it may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a triumphant vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian faith. Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... more serious than a flesh-wound on the hip. But alas! the wild months of dissipation before he had met Mathilde were before long to be paid for by that long, excruciating suffering which is one of the most heroic spectacles in the history of literature. It is the paradox of the mocker that he often displays the virtues and sentiments which he mocks, much more manfully than the professional ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... iron hissing in his brain: Murder, with the blood-hound ghost, over land, over sea, through crowds, deserts, woods, and happy fields, ever tracking silently in horrid calmness; the oppression of indefinite Guilt, with that Holy Eye still watching; the consciousness of instant danger, the sense of excruciating pain, the intolerable tyranny of vague wild fear, without will or power to escape: spurring for very life on a horse of marble: flying upward to meet the quick-falling skies—O, that universal crash!—greeted in a new-entered world with the execrations ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... with you. I've got one bit here that's been bothering me for an hour." He turned back to his music, waved his bow in the air, laid it across the strings and drew forth sounds that made the visitors squirm in the chairs they had taken. One excruciating wail after another came from the tortured instrument, the lank youth bending absorbedly over the notes in the failing light and apparently quite oblivious to the presence of the others. Finally, with a sigh of satisfaction, he laid his bow on the ledge of the stand, stood his violin in ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... that his imagination had been haunted by the ideas of Emilia and her officer, which tormented him to an unspeakable degree of anguish and distraction; and that he would rather suffer death than a repetition of such excruciating reflections. He was, however, comforted by his friend, who assured him, that his sister's inclinations would in time prevail over all the endeavours of resentment and pride, illustrating this asseveration by an account ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... what he called "a good drink," and later in the day his strength returned. He felt strange prickings in the skin of his hands and feet. But lately his limbs had grown heavy. This pricking sensation gave place to the most excruciating cramps, which he did not find very amusing. He rarely laughed now but often stopped short and stood still on the sidewalk, troubled by a strange buzzing in his ears and by flashes of light before his eyes. Everything looked yellow to him; the houses seemed to be moving away from him. At other ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... attentive in his demeanour. He put the rope round my neck with an air of cutting civility, and apologized for the whole proceeding. I experienced vividly the moment of being turned off. I suffered the horrors of strangulation. The noose slipped, and I was dangling in the air in excruciating agony, half-dead and half-alive. Buster rushed to the foot of the scaffold, and with Christian charity fastened himself to my legs, and hung there till I had breathed my last. Whilst he was thus suspended, he sang one of his favourite hymns with his own rich and effective ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... good health, the pneumonia now seized me violently; and after a week of "heroic treatment," I was put into a box-car and started for the hospital at Nashville. This was the dreariest ride of my life thus far. Alone, in darkness, suffering excruciating pain, going perhaps to die and be buried in an unhonored grave, my "Christmas" was any thing but "merry." And yet the month following my arrival in Nashville was the most pleasant, on many accounts, that I had yet spent in Dixie. I was carefully and tenderly nursed by Drs. Stout and Gambling ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... addressing his army before the battle, and telling them that they were about to enter, not upon a single action, but upon a long war,—that from success, then, would follow a series of victories,—and that therein lay their only salvation from a death at once excruciating and infamous. They must, he said, live upon victory after victory,—an expression that showed he had a clear comprehension of the nature of his situation. In the battle that followed, Varinius was beaten, unhorsed, and compelled to fly for his life. All his personal goods fell ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... boiler-iron. It is a lingering note, and comes in triplets, on the one unchanging key: hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o; then a silence of fifteen seconds, then the triplet again; and so on, all night. At first it is divine; then less so; then trying; then distressing; then excruciating; then agonizing, and at the end of two hours the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the man who made, the man who sold, and the woman who supplied me with my present excruciating gilt nib to that place ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me. From morning to night, as he paced his cell, he groaned dismally: not fitfully but continually. It was like the wail of a dog suffering excruciating agony, only a thousand times more irritating and nerve-racking. Even during the night he groaned, apparently in his sleep. Another day, when similarly paraded beside him, I asked if he would like a piece of black bread. He made no reply, but turned such a wolfish look upon ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... came. Sickness and pain entered our dwelling, and seized upon one of my family. My youngest son was taken ill. He was racked with excruciating pain. It seemed as if the agony would drive him to distraction, or cut short his days. And there I stood, watching his agony, and distracted with his cries, unable to utter a whisper about a gracious Providence, or to offer up a prayer ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... of our two men and the Prince as room-mates was so excruciating that I suddenly felt equal to bearing any hardship; but Mamma hasn't the same sense of humour I have, and she said that she knew she was sickening ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... He strove to bring resolution to his aid, and to fix his thoughts on a happier state of existence beyond this earth, the contemplation of which might aid him to bear without flinching, a short period of excruciating pain. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... only one very torn alpaca-coat and a pair of trousers made out of gunny-bags. He took the pipe out of his mouth, and went on judicially, "All things considered, I doubt whether you are the luckier. I do not refer to your extremely limited classical attainments, or your excruciating quantities, but to your gross ignorance of matters more immediately under your notice. That, for instance," he pointed to a woman cleaning a samovar near the well in the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the water out of the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... earnestness to trace the mazes of misery, through which so many wretches must have passed to this gloomy receptacle of disjointed souls, to the grand source of human corruption. Often at midnight was she waked by the dismal shrieks of demoniac rage, or of excruciating despair, uttered in such wild tones of indescribable anguish as proved the total absence of reason, and roused phantoms of horror in her mind, far more terrific than all that dreaming superstition ever drew. Besides, there was frequently something so inconceivably ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... instant a horrible shriek rent the air. Jimmie had quickly grasped both of the Professor's arms at the wrists and was slowly twisting them in a grip of iron. Kell's face went white, the lips writhed back over toothless gums, the eyes closed in the supreme effort to withstand the excruciating pain. Then— ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... late in the afternoon and Pee-wee and Pepsy were feeling the tedium of waiting when suddenly the sound of merry laughter burst upon, their ears and somebody said, "Oh, I think it's perfectly adorable to be on the wrong road! I just adore being lost! And I never saw anything so perfectly excruciating in my life!" ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... out along the pathway of the Francis Cadman, Done had reviewed his life almost daily, sometimes broadly and briefly, as given here—sometimes going into excruciating details of suffering, shame, terror, and hate; but his eyes were ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... exchange but for a very real enjoyment, obtained in relieving our object. Even extremes in this class of our dispositions, as they are the reverse of hatred, envy, and malice, so they are never attended with those excruciating anxieties, jealousies, and fears, which tear the interested mind; or if, in reality, any ill passion arise from a pretended attachment to, our fellow creatures, that attachment may, be safely condemned, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... victims had lain, with here and there deep notches where the steel had bitten through the guard of flesh and shored into the wood. Round the chamber, placed in all sorts of irregular ways, were many implements of torture which made one's heart ache to see—chairs full of spikes which gave instant and excruciating pain; chairs and couches with dull knobs whose torture was seemingly less, but which, though slower, were equally efficacious; racks, belts, boots, gloves, collars, all made for compressing at will; steel baskets in which ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... salvation set to what may be described as lightly spinning dicky-bird music. Anybody could sing them, and everybody did, and the more they sang the more cheerful they looked, but not repentant. The service was composed mostly of these songs interspersed now and then with wildly excruciating exhortations from Brother Dunn to repent and believe. He explained, with an occasional "ha! ha!" how easy it was to do, and there is no denying that the altar was filled with confused young people who knelt and ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... war; after which, there are no excesses to which their rage and ferocity do not incite them. Even their feasting upon the dead bodies of their enemies, after putting them to death with the most excruciating tortures they can devise, is rather a point of revenge, than of relish for ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... torn from their luxurious home and confined in this dreary prison. All that could revolt, disgust, and utterly depress human nature seemed gathered within its walls. Here were drunkenness, deadly sickness, and reckless and shameless profanity, all of the most loathsome character. And all this was excruciating torture to a man like Lord Vincent, who, if he was not refined, was at least excessively fastidious. There was no rest; every few minutes the door was opened to receive some new prisoner, some inebriate, or some night-brawler picked up by the watch, and brought in, and then would ensue ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... of age, had a severe attack of scrofula on the right thigh; he was brought over from Ipswich to Stanton, when J. Kent found the thigh swollen to an enormous size, attended with considerable inflammation, and with a large quantity of matter formed between the muscles and integuments. The pain was excruciating, and his health had declined extremely; and it was with the greatest difficulty that he was moved about. He had had the very best medical attention, without producing any good effect; but by taking the medicines, and using ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... first intense, the tendons of the legs and arms being dreadfully strained, and the spinal column bent so as nearly to be broken in two. The shoulder-blades forced into close contact, pressed the vertebrae inwards, and caused excruciating pains along the lumbar vertebrae, where the strain ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... and Fanchon, two quivering Italian greyhounds, jump into their lady's arms, and kiss her hands, but respect her cheeks, which are covered with rouge. "No, my dear! For nothing do I bless Heaven so much (though it puts me to excruciating torture very often) as for having endowed me with sensibility and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... exquisite pleasures they enjoy, are all so many proofs that, while on earth, they loved God with their whole heart, and their neighbor as themselves; that they were poor in spirit, humble, pure, patient in adversity, and that perhaps some of them laid down their lives for God, amidst the most excruciating torments. Here is a correct judgment. For it is precisely their heroic virtue, and not the mere accident of birth or the smile of fortune, which gives them the superior beauty, glory, and happiness ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... professing her own religious views, she was just as firm in refusing to implicate any of her former associates. Threatenings and promises were alike found useless. Then she was subjected to the most excruciating torture; but, though every limb was dislocated, the noble girl remained true to her friends and to her God. So enraged was the chancellor at her fortitude, that when the lieutenant of the tower refused to obey his order ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... beginning to get lonesome and in a few more months I would get hungry. At the thought of enduring two such excruciating pains at a single time, I decided to risk my life. I would travel through space to the earth and try to find ...
— Lonesome Hearts • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... false story, and clung to it with a bitter effrontery that we may well call diabolic, remembering how the nervous terror of punishment and exposure sinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, really denotes in the young an excruciating physical struggle, often so keen that the victim clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity and cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined sensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and at this epoch, owing either to the brutalities which ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... took account, had ended all for the unhappy wife, had been the beginning of a joy beyond words for the other two. She had kept her bed for two days, suffering from a nervous attack, accompanied by excruciating neuralgia, and had died quite suddenly from the bursting of a ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... Mora begged so persistently, the lethargy, to speak more accurately, lasted a whole night and morning, with partial awakenings caused by excruciating pain which yielded each time to soporifics. They did nothing for him except to try to make his last moments comfortable, to help him over that last step which it requires such a painful effort to pass. His eyes had opened during that time, but they were ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... outlaws of the jungle, and it proved their enmity to the Golden City. The Ragged Men greeted them joyously and fed them, and enlisted their aid in a savage attack on a land-convoy on the way to the city. Their weapons carried the convoy, and they watched wounded prisoners killed with excruciating tortures.... ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... a favourable subject for the virus of diabolism, which was got by Good Intentions out of Expediency. The latter must have been carrying on with Cowardice, though, to account for Respectability's choice, for her convicts, of an excruciating life rather than a painless death. Possibly the Cowardice of the whole Christian world, which accounts Death the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... him: "Jenyns was possessed of lively talents, and a style eminently pure and 'easy', and could very happily play with a light subject, either in prose or verse; but when he speculated on that most difficult and excruciating question, 'The Origin of Evil,' he ventured far beyond his depth, and, accordingly, was exPosed by Johnson [in the 'Literary Magazine'), both with ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... never before, the truth that lay behind one of Stanley's convictions. He once said, "No luxury of civilization can be equal to the relief from the tyranny of custom. The wilds of a great city are greater than the excruciating tyranny of a small village. The heart of Africa is infinitely preferable to the heart of the world's largest city. If the way were easier, millions ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... pinched him; and after the first few words of recognition were over, he told me that the changes of the season affected him severely. A bullet was lodged somewhere in his shoulder, and the easterly winds always inflicted excruciating agonies upon him in consequence. This led to an inquiry as to how it happened, which brought out ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the sufferer's agony should increase, but it was apparent that it did remorselessly. All humanity was obliterated in an excruciating spasm over which streamed some meagre tears. Mr. Winscombe's arms raised and dropped; and, suddenly relaxed, he slipped down upon the pillows. Immediately the torment vanished from his countenance; it became peaceful, released. The familiar mockery of the mouth came back. The ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... endured the most excruciating agonies with the utmost fortitude, when faint and almost exhausted, he commended his soul to God, and laid down on his face. He was then scalped, and burning coals being laid on his head and back, by one ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... of the weariness, Parkinson became aware of a sharp throbbing in his arm. Rapidly this increased in violence, until suddenly an unbearable, excruciating agony seized him. Far greater was this than any pain he had suffered before. For a moment he struggled to scream, to move, to do anything to relieve his agony. There seemed to be a sudden snap—a cry of anguish burst from his lips—and his senses left him. Just ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... expected and deliberately induced by her efforts quickly came to pass. Just as the year before she had suffered excruciating pain from aching muscles, and saddle blisters, and walking blisters, and a very rending of her bones, so now she fell victim to them again. In sunshine and rain she faced the desert. Sunburn and sting of sleet were equally ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... agonising wrenches were given of the most fearful character, as the screws and ropes of the horrid instrument were set in motion. Not a word did he utter; scarcely a groan escaped from his bosom, though every limb was suffering the most excruciating torture; the blood gushed from his nostrils and mouth, his eyes well nigh started from their sockets. His physical nature at length gave way, though his courage did not fail him. He fainted. Death would have been a happy release, but his torturers took pains not ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the hideousness of life, of the excruciating lower middle-class arrangement of this room. I don't know how I've stood it all these years. My soul must have been starved—stifled. I want to live in another atmosphere, to be surrounded by beautiful things. Don't laugh like that,—I know I'm not an ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... his eyes, lifted his head, and, with a voice strangely resonant of agony, but which had still an indescribable calm mingled with its hoarseness, pronounced in excruciating accents, from under the mass of stones, words to pronounce each of which he had to lift that which was like the slab of a tomb placed upon him. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... grew intense. He was trying to cry out, and a giant hand was over his mouth. And when the pain became so excruciating that it did not seem as if nature could longer endure it, he opened ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... to the front door. A man was seated at the wheel of the motor car, and turned his head quickly as they approached. Mr. Fielding nodded pleasantly, though his face was white with excruciating pain. ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hope to be valued as scholars, yet stickle for an odd phrase, which critics have denounced as follows: "But the history of the language scarcely affords a parallel to the innovation, at once unphilosophical and hypercritical, pedantic and illiterate, which has lately appeared in the excruciating refinement 'is being' and its unmerciful variations. We hope, and indeed believe, that it has not received the sanction of any grammar adopted in our popular education, as it certainly never will of any writer of just pretensions to scholarship."—The True Sun. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... live out this deep-down, deliberate—But it will kill her, Moya. Her life is ended from this on. How could I have driven her to that excruciating choice! I ought to have listened to him altogether or not at all. There is a hell for meddlers, and the ones who meddle for conscience' sake are the deepest damned, ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... thrown over the upper cross-pole, and the culprit is drawn up till his toes barely touch the ground. In this position the whole weight of the body rests on the thumb and fore-finger. The torture is excruciating, and strong, able-bodied men can endure it but a few moments. The Colonel naively told me that he had discontinued its practice, as several of his women had nearly lost the use of their hands, and been incapacited for field labor, by its too frequent repetition. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to know as much as poor Charlotte did. She was a jewel, and I don't see anything what she wanted to die for, just as I had got her well trained; but that's all the thanks I ever get for my goodness. Now go quick, and tell her I've got an excruciating headache." ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... to play Doctor Robin, Janina stood behind the scenes to see what would be done with her role. It is impossible to describe that subtle, excruciating pain that rent her soul when she saw Majkowska as "Mary" on the stage. She felt that that other woman was tearing out piecemeal from her brain and heart every word, every gesture, every ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... light when he awoke, but a strange brightness seen through what seemed blurred eyes. A moment passed before his mind worked clearly, and then he had to make an effort to think. He was dizzy. When he essayed to lift his right arm, an excruciating pain made him desist. Then he discovered that his arm was badly swollen, and the hand had burst its bandages. The injured member was red, angry, inflamed, and twice its normal size. He felt hot all over, and ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... how frank I am and that I cannot be silent when I meet with perverse opinions. While you have been away I have had much to hear and to say; it would have exhausted the strength of the strongest. I only wonder you don't find me more worn out, for what can be more excruciating for a woman, that to be obliged to enter the lists for manly decisiveness against a man who is defending a perfectly antagonistic ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and down hill, down hill and up, through fir-groves and oak-clumps, and along the edge of dark ravines, until I thought that I should go mad, for all this time the sun was pouring down its hottest rays most pitilessly, and I had an excruciating pain in my head ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... His patter is excruciating and, to hide his want of skill in sleight-of-hand, he moves his hands and arms in grotesque curves, with his body so bent that it is almost impossible to see what he is trying to do. I have never yet seen any Indian ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... horror of earwigs; I firmly believe that they do get into the ear. That is a subject on which it is useless to argue with me upon philosophical grounds. I have a vivid recollection of a story told me by Mrs. Primmins,—how a lady for many years suffered under the most excruciating headaches; how, as the tombstones say, "physicians were in vain;" how she died; and how her head was opened, and how such a nest of earwigs, ma'am, such a nest! Earwigs are the prolifickest things, and so fond of their ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... did. Before he could answer the question a shell burst at our gun, from which an iron ball an inch in diameter struck me on the right thigh-joint, tearing and carrying the clothes in to the bone. I fell, paralyzed with excruciating pain. Graham rode off, thinking I was killed, as he afterward told me. The pain soon subsided, and I was at first content to lie still; but, seeing the grass and earth around constantly torn up, ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... consideration. Dismal reflection! Mr Methusaleh looked up to one of the hotel windows to get rid of it. The boy was inexperienced, and might be in the hands of sharpers, who would rub their hands and chuckle again at having done the "knowing Jew." Excruciating thought! Mr Methusaleh visibly perspired as it came and went. The boy himself was hardly to be trusted. He had been the plague of Mr Methusaleh's life since the hour of his birth—was full of tricks, and might have schemes to defraud his natural parent ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... perceiving, he said to the attendants, "What mean you by remarking that lying is the distinction of traitors? Is it possible that ye have not put them to death? Declare the truth instantly, or by the God who hath appointed me guardian of his people, I will have you executed with the most excruciating torments." ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... the saint thrust his spear fiercely through him, and he fell from his war horse. They bore him to a bed, whereon he suffered excruciating agonies till twilight, when he died the third of the nones of February. From such a death, good Lord, deliver us! The bloodthirsty and deceitful man shall not live out half his days; nevertheless, my trust shall be in thee, ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... and he had a blissful thought of sleeping those six miles. But the man did not know how to row, and Churchill took the oars and toiled for a few more centuries. He never knew six longer and more excruciating miles. A snappy little breeze blew up the inlet and held him back. He had a gone feeling at the pit of the stomach, and suffered from faintness and numbness. At his command, the man took the baler and threw salt water into ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... long, live nerve were drawn out from his body, a long live thread of electric fire, a long, living nerve finely extracted from him, from the very roots of his soul. A long fine discharge of pure, bluish fire, from the core of his soul. It was an excruciating, but also an intensely ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... whom the last two paragraphs are taken, says be has seen needles substituted for pins; and relates a long story of a child whose life was well nigh destroyed in this manner. It underwent months of ill health, and many moments of excruciating agony, before the cause of its trouble was suspected. Sometimes its distress was so great that nothing but large doses of laudanum, sufficient to stupify it, could afford the least relief. At last a tumor was discovered by the attending ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... creed that William II. has occasional fits of insanity. This is by no means the case, but it must be admitted that the peculiar malady to which I referred above, and which is as yet not eradicated from his system, causes him, at times, days of the most excruciating pains all over the back and side of his head, and it is scarcely surprising that at such moments the emperor should act in a way which astonishes the uninitiated. Indeed, William II. displays extraordinary force ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... night, that indomitable spirit which had refused to recognize his ebbing strength, showed signs of giving way. He had been trying to raise a log into place and its pressure on his bruised shoulder caused him excruciating pain. He got his sleeping blanket out of the cabin which he occupied and laid it, folded, on his shoulder, but his weary frame gave way under the burden and he staggered ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... rebuke as long as Islamism as a system and a faith prevails in the world. Happily for the poor women, the husbands do not generally beat them so as to imperil their lives, in case their own relatives reside in the vicinity, lest the excruciating screams of the suffering should reach the ears of her parents and bring the husband into disgrace. But where there is no fear of interference or of discovery, the blows and kicks are applied in the most merciless and barbarous manner. Women are killed in this way, and no outsider knows ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... atrocious intimacy. Never, since their marriage, had they lived so tightly tied together, and never had they experienced such suffering. But, notwithstanding the anguish they imposed on themselves, they never took their eyes off one another. They preferred to endure the most excruciating pain, rather than ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... stiff collars no pen can fitly tell. But only to one another did they confide these sufferings and the rare moments of repose when they could stand on one aching foot with heads comfortably sunken inside the excruciating collars, which rasped their ears and made the lobes thereof a pleasing scarlet. Brief were these moments, however, and the Spartan boys danced on with smiling faces, undaunted by the hidden anguish which preyed upon them "fore and ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... I., forsaking his previous tolerance, ordered six fires to be lighted simultaneously in Paris. The Convention, as we know, limited itself to a single guillotine in the same city. It is probable that the sufferings of the victims were not very excruciating; the insensibility of the Christian martyrs had already been remarked. Believers are hypnotised by their faith, and we know to-day that certain forms of ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... saints rejoiced in tribulation, and, like Stephen, when put to death with excruciating torments, have prayed for their enemies. Bunyan's fear was, when threatened to be hung for preaching Christ, that he should make but 'a scrabbling shift to clamber up the ladder.' He was, however, comforted with the hope that his dying speech might be blessed to some ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... virtue is the deep affection of his young wife Paulina. Refusing all entreaty, she resolutely determined to die with her husband. They opened their veins together; she fainted away, and was removed by her friends and with difficulty restored to life; he, after suffering excruciating agony, which he endured with cheerfulness, discoursing to his friends on the glorious realities to which he was about to pass, was at length suffocated by the vapour of a stove. Thus perished one of the weakest and one ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the punishment of a parricide or of a betrayer of his country. Vexation is a pressing grief. Mourning is a grief at the bitter death of one who was dear to you. Sadness is a grief attended with tears. Tribulation is a painful grief. Sorrow, an excruciating grief. Lamentation, a grief where we loudly bewail ourselves. Solicitude, a pensive grief. Trouble, a continued grief. Affliction, a grief that harasses the body. Despair, a grief that excludes all hope of better things to come. But those feelings ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... minute, in the eye, is very painful; but a piece of burning lime is excruciating. Shakspeare gives a graphic description of the pain from the presence of any foreign substance, however small, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... to the top of the wall. This was a score of feet away, and at the end of an hour he had managed to get the boat that far. He was sick with nausea from his exertions, and at times it seemed that blindness smote him, for he could not see, his eyes vexed with spots and points of light that were as excruciating as diamond-dust, his heart pounding up in his throat and suffocating him. Elijah betrayed no interest, did not move nor open his eyes; and Daylight fought out his battle alone. At last, falling on his knees from the shock of exertion, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... no more that protests are first heard; then armed resistance; then anarchy. Thus it was with the French of the eighteenth century. Thus it is with the Russian, the German, the English, the Irish peoples of to-day. The heel of the tyrant is studded with too many steel nails to be borne without excruciating ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... twelfth year of his age, a stubborn, painful, and malignant ulcer, broke out upon his left thigh; which, for near five years, defeated all the art of the surgeons and physicians, and not only afflicted him with most excruciating pains, but exposed him to such sharp and tormenting applications, that the disease and remedies were equally insufferable. Then it was, that his own pain taught him to compassionate others, and his experience of the inefficacy of the methods then ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... ever been? Probably some one knew the truth about her, in all that great society. Such things might be known. Francesca Campodonico's delicate noble face rose faintly between her and the sky, and she realized with excruciating suddenness the distance that separated her from the woman she hated, the woman who perhaps knew that Gloria Dalrymple was the daughter of a peasant and a fit wife by her birth for Angelo ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... the recital of the defendant, Sara almost seemed to bleed her tears, so poignantly terrible they came, scorching her eyes of a pain too exquisite to be analyzed, yet too excruciating to be endured. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... often. The men of the Sand farm had always been plagued by witchcraft. They might be working in the fields, and bending down to pick up a stone or a weed, when all of a sudden some unseen deviltry would strike them with such excruciating pains in the back, that they could not straighten themselves, and had to crawl home on all fours. There they would lie groaning for weeks, suffering greatly from doing nothing, and treated by cupping, leeches and good advice, till one day the pain would disappear as ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... indignant roar, and the rats leaped among the pots and pans with a horrified squeak, while Ebony and the others looked on with excruciating enjoyment. ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... I now found severe shooting pains, more racking than the sharpest rheumatism I had ever suffered, pervading my whole body. They increased until I suffered the most excruciating agony, as if my bones had been converted into red—hot tubes of iron, and the marrow in them had been dried up with fervent heat, and I was obliged to beg that a hammock might be spread on deck, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... The excruciating agonies which Nature inflicts on men (who break her laws) to be represented as the work of human tormentors; as the gout, by screwing the toes. Thus we might find that worse than the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition are daily suffered ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... refugees. There was a mark of a fearful gash which had almost severed the heel from the foot and left a troublesome deformity. One could easily realize how slow and tedious its healing must have been, and Keseberg assured us that walking caused excruciating pain even at the time the ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... only wisely, but well, that a certain proportion of these questions were pretty safe to be again propounded in subsequent contests, just as one sees antique Joe Millers appear again and again, at regular recurring intervals, in the excruciating "Facetiae" columns of those penny serials, of limited merit and "unlimited circulation," that delight the eyes and ears of below-stairs readers, the staple of whose mental pabulum they ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... face was hideously distorted and his stony eyes seemed changed into coals of fire. Every fibre of his strong nature was strained and tortured by the iron grip of his suffering. Every pulse of his body beat with a frantic rage for which no outlet was possible. His eyeballs burned with excruciating pain as he attempted to read again the letter he still held in his hands. He was one of those habitually calm men who become almost insane when they are angry, and in whose placid strength passion of any sort, when roused, finds its most dangerous material. For a full minute he stood speechless, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... know how frank I am and that I cannot be silent when I meet with perverse opinions. While you have been away I have had much to hear and to say; it would have exhausted the strength of the strongest. I only wonder you don't find me more worn out, for what can be more excruciating for a woman, that to be obliged to enter the lists for manly decisiveness against a man who is defending a perfectly antagonistic ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... retribution. They who cry "Wolf!" whenever they see a leveret are not believed when Lupus comes. They who suffer "excruciating agony" whenever a thorn pricks, can say no more under exquisite pain, and their familiar words are powerless to evoke the sympathy which they have repelled so long. They are more likely to receive ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... how I would shut my eyes and vision my mother looking at me from her grave, her heart contracted with anguish and pity for her famished orphan. It was an excruciating vision, yet I found comfort in it. I would mutely complain of the world to her. It would give me satisfaction to denounce the whole town to her. "Ah, I have got you!" I seemed to say to the people of Antomir. "The ghost of my mother and ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... die, your poor mistress would die too!" Mimi and Fanchon, two quivering Italian greyhounds, jump into their lady's arms, and kiss her hands, but respect her cheeks, which are covered with rouge. "No, my dear! For nothing do I bless Heaven so much (though it puts me to excruciating torture very often) as for having endowed me with sensibility ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the posts of his house shall remain, only the walls of his house shall remain, only the small posts and the stones of the fireplace shall remain; he shall be afflicted with colic, he shall be racked with excruciating pains, he shall fall on the piercing arrow, he shall fall on the lacerating arrow, his dead body shall be carried off by kites, it shall be carried off by the crows, his family and his clan shall not find it; he shall become a dog, he shall become a cat, he shall creep in dung, he shall ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... descendants, will have ceased to be a memory! And yet - and yet - one would like to leave an image for a few years upon men's minds - for fun. This is a very dark frame of mind, consequent on overwork and the conclusion of the excruciating EBB ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... left, that the sufferings of the doomed might be prolonged, a species of cruelty common in Indian tortures. As it would be some time before the flames would touch Hamilton, though his sufferings from heat would be excruciating in a little while, murdering him by slow inches, Durant hoped that the sufferings and reflections of this interval would bring repentance at the eleventh hour, and cause his victim to plead for mercy on ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... beyond him to get in by himself. It was six miles to Skaguay, and he had a blissful thought of sleeping those six miles. But the man did not know how to row, and Churchill took the oars and toiled for a few more centuries. He never knew six longer and more excruciating miles. A snappy little breeze blew up the inlet and held him back. He had a gone feeling at the pit of the stomach, and suffered from faintness and numbness. At his command, the man took the baler and threw ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... affection, friendships, and the memory of good offices rendered to one another,—all were effaced from their minds: nothing remained there but an inexpressible regret at having been exiled from the world of light, and an excruciating desire to reach it once more. The threshold of Allat's palace stood upon a spring which had the property of restoring to life all who bathed in it or drank of its waters: they gushed forth as soon as the stone was raised, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... made no response. They did not hear any further firing behind them. On and on they trudged. Night turned to day. Day rolled slowly on into night once more. And still they staggered on, footsore and weary. Mallory suffered excruciating agony from his wound. There were times when it seemed that it would be impossible for him to continue another yard; but then the thought that Barbara Harding was somewhere ahead of them, and that in a short time now they must be with her once more kept him doggedly ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... articles, as well as in contempt of common humanity, delivered up above twenty men of the garrison to the Indians, in lieu of the same number they had lost during the siege; and in all probability these miserable captives were put to death by those barbarians, with the most excruciating tortures, according to the execrable custom of the country. Those who countenance the perpetration of cruelties, at which human nature shudders with horror, ought to be branded as infamous to all ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... confined in this dreary prison. All that could revolt, disgust, and utterly depress human nature seemed gathered within its walls. Here were drunkenness, deadly sickness, and reckless and shameless profanity, all of the most loathsome character. And all this was excruciating torture to a man like Lord Vincent, who, if he was not refined, was at least excessively fastidious. There was no rest; every few minutes the door was opened to receive some new prisoner, some inebriate, or some night-brawler picked up by the watch, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... The younger, Mary by name, nine years of age, attracted very great attention, by the deep interest she manifested in a poor fugitive (whom she had never seen before), at the Philadelphia station, confined to the bed and suffering excruciating pain from wounds he had received whilst escaping. Hours and hours together, during the two or three days of their sojourn, she spent of her own accord, by his bed-side, manifesting almost womanly sympathy in the most devoted and tender manner. She thus, doubtless, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... oration in which he unfolded these sentiments, which were delivered with great emotion, touched the heart of Frederic Prince of Wales; who arose, quitted his seat, and, taking Lord Orford by the hand, expressed his acknowledgments.[22] That warning was the last effort of one sinking under an excruciating disease, and to whose memory the tragedy of 1715 must ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... proudly, like a banner. The deliciousness of being loved; the intoxication of it, after the last spark of hope had been quenched by that excruciating engagement! Her volcanic heart held a capacity for happiness as tremendous as her capacity for daring and suffering. But the first had so long eluded her, that now she dared scarcely let ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... gesticulations. The last hour of the brave soldier seemed at hand. He strove to bring resolution to his aid, and to fix his thoughts on a happier state of existence beyond this earth, the contemplation of which might aid him to bear without flinching, a short period of excruciating pain. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... straddling as a young Colossus on the hearth-rug, and with an admonitory forefinger, I proclaimed to the universe at large that Mrs. Risby had blighted my existence and beseeched for Warwick some immediate and fatal and particularly excruciating malady. In fine, I was abjectly miserable the while that I disarmed all comment by being quite delightfully boyish ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... pleasures, are at least pains of a peculiar nature, which we do not even wish to exchange but for a very real enjoyment, obtained in relieving our object. Even extremes in this class of our dispositions, as they are the reverse of hatred, envy, and malice, so they are never attended with those excruciating anxieties, jealousies, and fears, which tear the interested mind; or if, in reality, any ill passion arise from a pretended attachment to, our fellow creatures, that attachment may, be safely condemned, as not genuine. If we be distrustful or jealous, our pretended affection ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... interiorly excited, is again placed in a state analogous to that in which it was when he really experienced this pain: but if he had never felt it, he would never have been in a capacity to form to himself any just idea of its excruciating torments. ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... dropping of his hand was considered as the signal for my death. The string was tightened, and buried itself, cutting deeply into the flesh of a neck once as fair and smooth as the polished marble of Patras. For the first moments my torture was excruciating—my eyes were forcing out of their sockets—my tongue protruded from my mouth—my brain appeared to be on fire—but all ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... just God avenging Robert Fitzhildebrand's perfidity, a worm grew in his vitals which, gradually gnawing its way through his intestines, fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with excruciating sufferings and venting himself in bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to begin the rehearsal at four o'clock. I counted the minutes as they passed; their flight was at once too rapid and too slow: my sensations were of an excruciating kind; I could taste no food, nor apply to any task, nor enjoy a moment's repose; when the hour arrived I hastened ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... festivity among the Japanese, the guechas at Chemulpo were hard at work, and from morning till night and vice versa they were summoned from one house to the other to entertain with their—to European, ears excruciating—music on the Shamesens and Gokkins, while sake and foreign ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... there by the rocks, I limped a short distance, though every step wrung from me a cry of agony. Several times I stopped to rest, and to wipe the sweat from my brow; twice in less than five minutes I was obliged to sit down, and at last the pain in my foot became so excruciating that ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... suggest rheumatism. Nervous disturbances of the most varied character may appear. Painful points on the bones or skull may develop, and there may be serious disturbances of eye-sight and hearing. A few are severely ill, lose a great deal of weight, endure excruciating pains, pass sleepless nights, and suffer with symptoms suggesting that their nervous systems have been profoundly affected. As a general thing, however, the constitutional symptoms are mild compared ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... made me shudder to think of the agony the poor fellow must have endured, with cold and hunger to add to his misery. But although the sufferer was a young man, now maimed for life, he never complained save when pain in the festering limbs became excruciating. Under such conditions a European would probably have succumbed in a few weeks, but Arctic Siberia must be visited to thoroughly realise the meaning of ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... reared and struck again—this time only empty air. Yet, as he returned to earth, almost before he touched ground, the hand was around his ear, another was around his other ear, he was feeling the dread twist again, twofold. Every twitch of muscle, every least gasp for air, sent excruciating pain throughout the ends of him. Fearing to move, yet clamoring for breath, ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... on his bed, face down, his grasping fingers clutching spasmodically at the covering as his nerves twitched with remembered pain. Thirteen jolts. Thirteen searing jolts of excruciating torture. It was over now, but his synapses were still crackling with the memories of those ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... reflect on the wondrous happiness we might enjoy, while mutually exerting ourselves in the general cause of virtue, I confess the thought of renouncing so much bliss, or rather such a duty to myself and the world, is excruciating torture. ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... from Shippensburg: "My journey here from Carlisle raised my disorder and pains to so intolerable a degree that I was obliged to stop, and may not get away for a day or two." Again, on the eighteenth: "I am better, and partly free from the excruciating pain I suffered; but still so weak that I can scarce bear motion." He lay helpless at Shippensburg till September was well advanced. On the second he says: "I really cannot describe how I have suffered both in body and mind of late, and the relapses have been worse as the disappointment was ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Heaven, neither can we imagine the misery of Hell. Sometimes you will find frightful descriptions of Hell in religious books that tell of the horrible sights, awful sounds, disgusting stenches, and excruciating pains the lost souls endure. Now, all these descriptions are given rather to make people think of the torments of Hell than as an accurate account of them. No matter how terrible the description may be, it is never as bad as the reality. We know that the damned are continually ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (of 4) - An Explanation Of The Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine • Thomas L. Kinkead
... all; but their boast did not last long, for a few moments later, while I was watching poor Filippe, Antonio and the man X threw themselves down on the rocks, rolling over and contorting themselves, evidently in most excruciating pain. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... have denounced as follows: "But the history of the language scarcely affords a parallel to the innovation, at once unphilosophical and hypercritical, pedantic and illiterate, which has lately appeared in the excruciating refinement 'is being' and its unmerciful variations. We hope, and indeed believe, that it has not received the sanction of any grammar adopted in our popular education, as it certainly never will of any writer of just pretensions to scholarship."—The True Sun. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... unabated enjoyment.. they were evidently accustomed to such scenes. The attendant slaves stood all mute and motionless, with the exception of Gazra, who surveyed the torments of Nir-jalis with an air of professional interest, and appeared to be waiting till they should have reached that pitch of excruciating agony when Nature, exhausted, gives up the conflict and welcomes death as ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... whether I like it,' she mused languidly; 'beautiful as it is, it is only a reproduction of bygone splendour, and it is painfully excruciating now. For my own part I would much rather have the shabbiest old house which had belonged to one's ancestors, which had come to one as a heritage, by divine right as it were, instead of being bought with ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... night was cold and clear, but we could not sleep at all, from the pains of having eaten. We suffered the most excruciating torments, though I in particular did not eat a quarter of what would have satisfied me; it might have been from using a quantity of raw or frozen sinews of the legs of deer, which neither of us could avoid doing, so great was our hunger. In the morning, being much agitated for the safety of Beauparlant, ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... ghost, over land, over sea, through crowds, deserts, woods, and happy fields, ever tracking silently in horrid calmness; the oppression of indefinite Guilt, with that Holy Eye still watching; the consciousness of instant danger, the sense of excruciating pain, the intolerable tyranny of vague wild fear, without will or power to escape: spurring for very life on a horse of marble: flying upward to meet the quick-falling skies—O, that universal crash!—greeted in a new-entered world with ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... myself I have become a subject of excruciating interest. To myself I am a vastly more picturesque personage than any debonair hooligan of quattro-cento Verona. He has faded into the dullest (and most offensive) dog of a ghost. I only exist. This sounds like the colossal vanity of Bedlam. Heaven knows it is not. If you are racked ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... next morning, when the incident was imperfectly remembered, they had shaken hands with a hearty laugh. Yet, again, while Memory was reading, Conscience unveiled her face, struck a dagger to the heart of Mr. Smith, and quelled his remonstrance with her iron frown. The pain was quite excruciating. ...
— Fancy's Show-Box (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a brilliant career to a principle, he sent in his resignation and returned to Holland in 1856 a poor man. He began to put his experiences on paper, and in 1860 published the book that made him famous. 'Max Havelaar' is a bitter arraignment of the Dutch colonial system, and gives a more excruciating picture of the slavery of the natives of fair "Insulind" than ever existed in the South. For nearly three hundred years Dutch burghers on the Scheldt, the Maas, and the Amstel, have waxed fat on the labors of the Malays of the far East. In these islands of the East-Indian Archipelago ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... became impoverished, and I suffered from incapacity with an appalling sense of misery and general apprehension of coming evil. I passed sleepless nights and was troubled with irregular action of the heart, a constantly feverish condition, and the most excruciating tortures in my stomach, living for days on rice water and gruel, and, indeed, the digestive functions seemed ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... we believe, generally known, even in England, that Pushkin was mortally wounded in a duel, on Wednesday 27th January, and that he died, after lingering in excruciating[2] torment during two days and nights, at half-past two in the afternoon of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... not a war genius, he was the personification of dogged, obstinate persistency, never allowing a word of discouragement or doubt to escape during the entire day, not even to his personal staff, though suffering excruciating pain from the recent injury from the fall of his horse. To him and to the valor of his officers and soldiers the country owes much for a timely victory, though won at great cost of life and limb. To him and them ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... understand. Yarry positively began to fail under the restraint he imposed upon himself. His wound caused him agony, and profanity would have been his natural expression of even slight annoyance. All day long grisly oaths rose to his lips. Now and then an excruciating twinge would cause a half-uttered expletive to burst forth like a projectile. A deep groan would follow, as the man became rigid in ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... to get Russell into all these things that were too tight or too loose for him. The socks were the worst. The right-hand one had to be put on very carefully, by quarter inches at a time; the least tug on the sock would give Russell an excruciating pain in his wounded knee; and Russell was all for violence and haste; he was so afraid of ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... be described as lightly spinning dicky-bird music. Anybody could sing them, and everybody did, and the more they sang the more cheerful they looked, but not repentant. The service was composed mostly of these songs interspersed now and then with wildly excruciating exhortations from Brother Dunn to repent and believe. He explained, with an occasional "ha! ha!" how easy it was to do, and there is no denying that the altar was filled with confused young people who knelt and ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... I replied unsteadily; the unexpected accents of pity in her voice, or the excruciating pain I had been suffering for the previous four hours, suddenly ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... excruciating pain as he wrenched the knife from right to left, twisting it wildly as he went, blindly slashing at his vital organs with the hope that once and for all he could stop the ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... above the level of the eyes of the seated pupils; but the picture of the musician was plain to Penrod, painted for him by a quality in the runs and trills, partaking of the oboe, of the calliope, and of cats in anguish; an excruciating sweetness obtained only by the wallowing, walloping yellow-pink palm of a hand whose back was Congo black and shiny. The music came down the street and passed beneath the window, accompanied by the care-free ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... impossible for any person of eminence in the whole Empire to feel sure that he might not any day be seized and accused of a crime, or even without the form of an accusation be taken and put to death, after suffering the most excruciating tortures. To produce this result, it was enough to have failed through any cause whatever in the performance of a set task, or to have offended, even by doing him too great a service, the monarch or one of his favorites. Nay, it was enough ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... entertain the other more natural desire of a spiritual substance to join the other spiritual beings in the other world. This feeling too it will not be able to satisfy because of its want of perfection. This division of desires unsatisfied will cause the soul excruciating torture, and ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... fact that in two months of the year 1096 twelve thousand Jews, whose names have been preserved, were massacred in the towns of the Rhine alone, because they refused to accept a Christian baptism. The Spanish Jews who perished by one of the most excruciating deaths rather than forswear their faith may be numbered by thousands, and those who preferred exile and spoliation to apostasy, by hundreds of thousands. Even in our own sceptical and materialising age the conduct of the Russian Jews under the recent savage ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... sharp, acute, trenchant; penetrating, shrewd, astute, discerning; piercing, poignant, excruciating, a crimonious, mordacious, bitter, intense, severe; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... seemed to tighten like a metal band, though his lungs stabbed within him as he breathed, though the pain in his feet was unendurable, Eric wrenched again and again at the handle, but the door would not budge. He called, but there was no answer. Almost delirious with baffled rage and excruciating suffering, the boy hurled himself against the door, throwing his shoulder out of joint with the power of the blow. The door fell inwards and he ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... spaces of oblivion, intersected with terrible streaks of excruciating pain. During the intervals of this fearful suffering he was acutely conscious, but he invariably forgot everything again when the merciful unconsciousness came back. He knew in a vague way that he lay in a hospital-tent with other dying men, knew when they moved him at last because ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... witch-wife and her daughter to flight. The Welshman administered some oil, which, after two hours of suspense, and with the help of an opiate, saved the life of Lavengro. During this companionship Borrow found that Williams suffered excruciating spiritual terrors from the conviction that he had committed the sin against ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... again as before, I knew the battle which was joined between us would be fought to a dreadful end. She touched my chest lightly, but the touch jolted excruciating pain ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... often excruciating in adults. It may be felt over the temple, side and back of the head and neck, and even in the lower teeth, as well as in the ear itself. The pain is increased by blowing the nose, sneezing, coughing, and stooping. There is considerable tenderness usually on pressing on the ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... of Jellico, Tenn., who was so seriously injured by an unprovoked and cowardly attack, is, we are happy to learn, slowly improving. Suffering, both from excruciating pain and from great nervous prostration, all that a human being can endure and live, yet he has borne it uncomplainingly. Large expenses have been necessarily incurred for surgeon's, doctor's and nurse's bills, and Mr. Lawrence ...
— American Missionary, August, 1888, (Vol. XLII, No. 8) • Various
... and the boy commenced to mend. No word of complaint passed his tight set lips, though the pain of his wounds was excruciating. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... little outing, This excruciating cove, And his instrument is flouting Bath, or Scarborough, or Hove. For the moment I can get a Peaceful interim, and free— But he cherishes vendetta, This Italian count, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... with my collar and cravat in the morning, and how he stuck pins into my neck, and wrestled mightily with his own elaborate toilet. I remember, and this very distinctly, how awfully tight were my new patent-leather boots, which caused me for the time being the most excruciating anguish. Beyond these, and similar minor things which have a way of sticking in the memory, all the rest is very much like a vivid dream. The close carriage whirling through the streets; a great crush of people, with here and there ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... amorous kind, characterized, it is said, by great simplicity, natural and pleasing metaphor, and extremely soft and melodious rhyme. They sing their poems to certain popular airs, which are committed to memory. Malay music, though plaintive and less excruciating than Chinese and Japanese, is very monotonous and dirge-like, and not pleasing to a European ear. The pentatonic scale is employed. The violin stands first among musical instruments in their estimation. They have ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... these words, when the excruciating torment which I suffered caused me to faint away. When I recovered, I found myself in a prison-cell, with a bandage over my damaged optic, and a physician ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... dully which would win—the wind that sought to whirl him up into the sky, or the rain that was for beating him to earth, or the lightning that would burn him to cinders. Then thought left him, and his last impression was of being torn limb from limb, and atom from atom, in excruciating pain. ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... time he came back and lit a fire in the sheet-iron stove. As the circulation that meant life flooded back into her chilled veins Sheba endured a half-hour of excruciating pain. She had to clench her teeth to keep back the groans that came from her throat, to walk the floor and nurse her tortured hands with ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... neighbour, some sallow-faced workingman's wife, who sat mending linen, from time to time producing handkerchiefs and stockings riddled with holes from a little basket patched up with string. Moreover, Mademoiselle Saget had plenty of acquaintances here. Amidst the excruciating squalling of the children, and the ceaseless rumble of the traffic in the Rue Saint Denis, she took part in no end of gossip, everlasting tales about the tradesmen of the neighbourhood, the grocers, the butchers, and the bakers, enough, indeed, to fill the columns of a local paper, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... cruelly polite and attentive in his demeanour. He put the rope round my neck with an air of cutting civility, and apologized for the whole proceeding. I experienced vividly the moment of being turned off. I suffered the horrors of strangulation. The noose slipped, and I was dangling in the air in excruciating agony, half-dead and half-alive. Buster rushed to the foot of the scaffold, and with Christian charity fastened himself to my legs, and hung there till I had breathed my last. Whilst he was thus suspended, he sang one of his favourite hymns with his own rich and effective nasal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... started as though he had been struck, and turned his eyes upon the chairman. He drew a deep inspiration, which wheezed and rattled as it passed into his chest. An expression of excruciating pain swept over his face. He dropped the ball, which struck the floor with a loud sound, and his long, bony fingers tore at the striped shirt over his breast. A groan escaped him, and he would have sunk to the floor had not the guard caught him and held him upright. ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... because under no conceivable circumstances could she ever be lost. She is there, dear lady, lock, stock, and barrel, right there all the time. So her raiment of violet amounts to a purely gratuitous advertisement of a permanently self-evident fact.—And such a shade too, such a positively excruciating shade!" ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... looked down into a narrow strip of plain on the other side. Just as Nada had given up in weakness and despair, so now he was almost ready to quit. He had traveled miles since the owl fight, and his wounds had stiffened, and with every step gave him excruciating pain. His injured eye was entirely closed, and there was a strange, dull ache in the back of his head, where Gargantua had pounded him with his beak. The strip of valley, half hidden in its silvery mist of dawn, seemed a long distance away to Peter, and he ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... was five "times made a bankrupt and reduced from a state of "affluence, by a train of unavoidable misfortunes! then "Sir, though a very industrious tradesman, I was twice "burnt out, and lost my little all both times! I lived "upon those fires a month. I soon after was confined by a "most excruciating disorder, and lost the use of my limbs! "That told very well; for I had the case strongly attested, "and went about col—called on you, a close prisoner "in the Marshalsea, for a debt benevolently contracted "to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... bad way, both mentally and bodily. The pain in his gouty foot had extended to his knee, and was excruciating in the extreme; but he almost forgot it in the greater trouble in his mind. In the same mail which had brought Eloise's letter from California there had been one for him, which in the morning Peter had taken from the postman and examined ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... for Miss Darcey because she sang off pitch and didn't mind it in the least. It was excruciating to sit there day after day and hear her; there was something shameless and indecent about ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... criminal proceedings were instituted against them, after they had long before been accused by the people of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and in Freiburg, in 1349. Under the influence of excruciating suffering, the tortured Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crime imputed to them; and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been found in a well at Zofingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convince the world; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the happiness yesterday of a letter from Charles, but I shall say as little about it as possible, because I know that excruciating Henry will have had a letter likewise, to make all my intelligence valueless. It was written at Bermuda on the 7th and 10th of December. All well, and Fanny[199] still only in expectation of being otherwise. He had taken a small prize in his late cruise—a ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... his standing as a physician, pronounces good champagne to be "a true stimulant to body and mind alike, rapid, volatile, transitory, and harmless. Amongst the maladies which are benefited by it," remarks he, "is the true neuralgia, intermitting fits of excruciating pain running along certain nerves, without inflammation of the affected part, often a consequence of malaria, or of some other low and exhausting causes. To enumerate the cases in which champagne is of service would be to give a whole nosology. ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... often exhibited cruelty such as even Indians seldom surpass. See below, vol. ii. p. 444. In spite of such cases, however, it must be held that for artistic skill in inflicting the greatest possible intensity of excruciating pain upon every nerve in the body, the Spaniard was a bungler and a novice as compared with the Indian. See Dodge's Our Wild Indians, pp. 536-538. Colonel Dodge was in familiar contact with Indians for more than thirty years, and writes ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... must take me away from here, so that I can see your little girl. I want so much to see her." Madame Braux, her features illuminated, exclaimed: "Yes, mother, that I will," while Mdme. Caravan, the younger, became pale, and seemed to be enduring the most excruciating agony. The two men, however, gradually drifted into conversation, and soon became embroiled in a political discussion. Braux maintained the most revolutionary and communistic doctrines, gesticulating and throwing about his arms, his eyes darting like ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... would be excruciating! And I certainly am going to have a stab at it. Let's see who will go into it. Steve Edwards—no, Steve wouldn't, of course. Tom Hall will, I'll bet. And Roy Draper and Harry Wescott, probably. We ought to get as many of the fellows as we ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... heels. As they were six to one, they succeeded, and I had the very unpleasant experience of being bastinadoed. The first dozen or two strokes I didn't mind much, but at about the ninetieth the pain was too excruciating for description. When they had finished with me I naturally enquired what it was all for. It seems that my companion when firing at a duck had accidentally shot an Egyptian woman, the wife of one of the soldiers. Upon my appearance he had called ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Philip, his mother appeared to be transfixed, and motionless as a statue; gradually her lips separated, and her eyes glared; she seemed to have lost the power of reply; she put her hand to her right side, as if to compress it, then both her hands, as if to relieve herself from excruciating torture: at last she sank, with her head forward, and the blood poured out of ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... passed around the negro's thumb and fore-finger, while the cord is thrown over the upper cross-pole, and the culprit is drawn up till his toes barely touch the ground. In this position the whole weight of the body rests on the thumb and fore-finger. The torture is excruciating, and strong, able-bodied men can endure it but a few moments. The Colonel naively told me that he had discontinued its practice, as several of his women had nearly lost the use of their hands, and been incapacited for field labor, by its too frequent repetition. 'My —— ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that he should acquire the summit of merit, which is only attained by great patience, He tried him by many sorts of maladies, so grievous, that there was scarcely any part of his body in which he did not suffer excruciating pains. These reduced him to such a state, that he was scarcely more than skin and bone, almost all his flesh was wasted away; but these sufferings he did not consider as such, he denominated them his sisters, to show how much he ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... of the martyrs were obliged to pass, with their already wounded feet, over thorns, nails, sharp shells, &c. upon their points, others were scourged till their sinews and veins lay bare, and after suffering the most excruciating tortures that could be devised, they were destroyed by the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... all my faculties to her service. This was the recompense which it was in my power to make for the benefits that I had received. Would not this procedure bear the appearance of the basest ingratitude? The shadow of an imputation like this was more excruciating ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... remain on into his waking time. They were not necessarily horrible things at all, but their clearness in the dream, and their total, if slow, disappearance as the actual world came back, became sometimes an excruciating torment. Who could say that they, or some equivalents, might not reach him out of the past to-day ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... his worth; but I tell thee, Ludwig, that yonder Gottfried is a good fellow, and my fast friend. Why should he not be! He is my near relation, heir to my property: should I" (here the Margrave's countenance assumed its former expression of excruciating agony),—"SHOULD I ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unavoidable but vicious measure of his own. He'd had to resort to it, for the temptation to drive to a terminal, to an airport, or rocket field, or railroad station—anywhere—had become excruciating. ...
— Citadel • Algirdas Jonas Budrys
... priori intuition that the note of the domestic cat is repulsive to the ear of the human adult. Consequently, what does your baby do but betake itself to a practical study of the caterwaul! After a few conscientious rehearsals a creditable degree of perfection is usually reached, and a series of excruciating performances are forthwith commenced, which last with unbroken success until the stage arrives when correction becomes possible. This process may check the child's taste for imitating the lower animals in some of their less engaging peculiarities, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... strange violent pains shot through my hand. In another two minutes they had so increased in their intensity that I became alarmed and shouted to Viri to come back. Certainly not more than five or ten minutes elapsed before he was with me; to me it seemed ages, for by this time the pain was excruciating. A look at the fish told him nothing; he had never seen one like it before. How I managed to get back to the schooner and live through the next five or six hours of agony I cannot tell. Twice I fainted, ...
— John Corwell, Sailor And Miner; and, Poisonous Fish - 1901 • Louis Becke
... of a man's dissolution that he is the least capable of judging of his true interest? His bodily frame racked, it may be, with pain, his mind is necessarily weakened or chafed; or if he should be free from excruciating pain, the lassitude and yielding of nature to the irrevocable decrees of fate at death, unfit a man for reasoning and judging of the sophisms that are proposed as panaceas for all his errors. There are, without doubt, as strange notions as those of religion; but who ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... down its burning cage the many-facultied and mightily intelligenced spirit wastes its excruciating immortality in varying and ever varying still, always beginning and monotonously completing, like a caged beast upon its iron tether, a threefold movement, which is not three movements successively, but one triple movement all at once. In rage it would fain get at God ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... and pinched him; and after the first few words of recognition were over, he told me that the changes of the season affected him severely. A bullet was lodged somewhere in his shoulder, and the easterly winds always inflicted excruciating agonies upon him in consequence. This led to an inquiry as to how it happened, which brought out ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... painful muscular spasms occurring in the muscles of the calf of the leg, the toes, etc. The expectant mother in the later months of pregnancy awkwardly turns in bed, is suddenly awakened and without a moment's warning, is seized with a most excruciating pain in her leg or toe. The most effectual treatment for these cramps is quickly to apply a very cold object to the cramping muscle. Extremes of either heat or cold usually relieve as well as the vigorous grasping or kneading of the muscle. A hot foot bath on ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... one would naturally suppose. How calmly the brave boys endure the wounds they have received in defence of their beloved country! Only now and then can be heard a subdued sob, or a dying groan; while those who are fully conscious, though suffering excruciating pain, are either engaged in silent prayer or meditation, or reading a Testament or a last letter from loved ones, and patiently awaiting their turn with ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... enemy lay in that direction. He turned his horse towards Thame, where he arrived almost fainting with agony. The surgeons dressed his wounds. But there was no hope. The pain which he suffered was most excruciating. But he endured it with admirable firmness and resignation. His first care was for his country. He wrote from his bed several letters to London concerning public affairs, and sent a last pressing message to the head-quarters, recommending ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... as it was sterilized, further followed his instructions and sewed up the wound and dressed it. During this process the stranger showed neither by exclamation nor facial expression that he felt in the slightest what must have been excruciating pain. At the conclusion of the operation the man sprinkled a few pellets into the palm of his hand and swallowed them. For a few minutes after ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... him to distant worlds, though the family only thought the chatterbox was tired. In all ways, however, he was in these days a very ordinary child, devoted to fairy stories, fond of the popular nursery amusement of making up plays, and charmed with the excruciating noise he brought out of a little red violin. This he would sometimes play on for hours, till even the faithful Laure would remonstrate, and he would be astonished that she did not realise ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of the discovery taught me something further, namely, that my head was liable to excruciating little throbs of pain. I raised a hand to it. My forehead was swathed in bandages, like a turbaned Turk's. Oh, to be sure, in the castle at Prezelay, as we were retreating up the staircase, Schwartzmann had fired at me; but, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... innumerable difficulties in the way of ascent, with an enemy lining the banks of the river. And that which was more annoying forced itself strongly upon his mind—the Canadians were both loyal and brave. His agony was most excruciating when he received a letter from Hampton to the effect that the Plattsburgh-Grand-Junction-Invading-Army was marching as expeditiously as circumstances would allow out of Canada; that, in a word it had been defeated and ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... you," said Doggie; and when the door was shut he went and threw himself, shaken, on the couch, hating Oliver and all his works more than ever. Go about barefoot and swab decks! It was Bedlam madness. Besides being dangerous to health, it would be excruciating discomfort. And to be insulted for not grasping at such martyrdom. It ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... pleased to bestow on their conscious frauds. The vindictiveness of a purposeless hell has, of course, failed ignominiously as a deterrent from crime. We cannot conceive infinite Intelligence inflicting an excruciating and endless punishment simply for punishment's sake. We are superior to such methods ourselves; we refuse to associate them with God. What we do believe in, what we are sure of, is that a man's sin must find him out, that he must reap as he sows, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... most perfect players I have ever known, as well as one of the greatest grand seigneurs among violinists. His rendering of romantic works, Saint-Saens, Lalo, Bruch, was exquisite—I have never, never heard them played as beautifully. On the other hand, his Bach playing was excruciating—he played Bach sonatas as though they were virtuoso pieces. It made one think of Hans von Buelow's mot when, in speaking of a certain famous pianist, he said: 'He plays Beethoven with velocity and Czerny with expression.' But to hear Sarasate play romantic music, his own 'Spanish Dances' ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... separating them seemed to be growing wider all the while. Each had said exasperating and belittling things of the other, and a wall of hate had been built up where once there had been a bond of strong friendship. The pain in Badger's eye was excruciating, and it rendered him for a little while absolutely reckless. Fortunately, it also rendered him incapable of inflicting on his former friend the punishment which ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... after the family, with the most excruciating anxiety, and Miss Brook Dingwall was formally introduced to her future companions. The Miss Crumptons conversed with the young ladies in the most mellifluous tones, in order that Miss Brook Dingwall might be properly impressed ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the most excruciating pain. Medical aid was called in by the magistrate, and every attention extended to the little sufferer, who seemed to forget her pain in the consciousness of her mother's presence. The inhuman wretch who had thus brutally maltreated a mere child, enraged to a state of insanity ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... inexperienced man, had started out with a family of six on his hands, some idea of the situation may be had. I can recall having been without food many a day, and the pangs of hunger drove me almost to desperation. But mother and father would come late at night from a day of depressing toil and excruciating inward pain, the result of their inability to relieve our suffering, and pacify us for the night with such things as they had been able to get. When I awoke the next morning they were gone again ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... Phaeton saw, saw in impotent agony of soul. His boyish folly and pride had been great, but the excruciating anguish that made him shed tears of blood, was indeed a punishment even too heavy for ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the second, the third, and another, and another, and after each went a moan from Anastasio. He leaned through the window to see one tossing in the waves, then suffered a next pang to see the next follow after. It was an excruciating cumulus of grief. The trooper regarded him quizzically. Destruction of merely worldly goods had become routine for him. He returned to his ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... in solitary confinement in a cell at the depot for sixteen days now—or was it fifteen?—he was not sure. The hours dragged by with an excruciating monotony ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... ringed his plate with the semicircle of ironstone portion dishes, stood between him and the men who were still regarding him as a joke. And since Maggie's displeasure manifested itself in cold coffee and tough cuts of the beef, the long table made its most excruciating jests elaborately impersonal. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... seen courage, but never like this, and deep down in his soul he prayed—prayed that death might come to him first, so that he might not have to look upon the agonies of this other, whose end would be ghastly in its fearless resignation. His own suffering had become excruciating. Sharp pains darted like red-hot needles through his limbs, his back tortured him, and his head ached as though a knife had cloven the base of his skull. Still—he could breathe. By pressing his head against the post it was not difficult for him to fill his lungs with air. But the strength ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... glasses—greeted us with formality. The "doctor" drew a black case from his pocket, went through some hocuspocus with a small mirror, and within two minutes, though his Spanish was little less excruciating than his English, had proved to the startled curate that the glasses he was wearing would have turned him stone-blind within a month but for the rare fortune of this great Berlin specialist's desire to visit the famous historical capital of the Tarascans. The priest smoked cigarette ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... That is a subject on which it is useless to argue with me upon philosophical grounds. I have a vivid recollection of a story told me by Mrs. Primmins,—how a lady for many years suffered under the most excruciating headaches; how, as the tombstones say, "physicians were in vain;" how she died; and how her head was opened, and how such a nest of earwigs, ma'am, such a nest! Earwigs are the prolifickest things, and so fond of their offspring! They sit ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... content; his craving for her fretted the flesh from his bones and gnawed his heart like some voracious, sharp-fanged, predatory animal. Happy—was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of living water and yet must perish of drought. He could only imagine one greater misery, one more excruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than this happiness she had conferred upon him—and that ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The Duke killed Marie because doing so gave him the most damnable pleasure,—her the most excruciating pain. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... which no one took account, had ended all for the unhappy wife, had been the beginning of a joy beyond words for the other two. She had kept her bed for two days, suffering from a nervous attack, accompanied by excruciating neuralgia, and had died quite suddenly from the bursting of a ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... till the end of two months did she receive a letter. Fear for his health, apprehension of his death during this cruel interim, caused an agony of suspense, which, by representing him to her distracted fancy in a state of suffering, made him, if possible, still dearer to her. In the excruciating anguish of uncertainty, she walked with trembling steps through all weathers (when she could steal half a day while her parents were employed in labour abroad) to the post town, at six miles' distance, to inquire ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... the last post. I cannot tell you how much I regret it. When I was complaining and accusing you of neglect, you were suffering the most excruciating pain; but I could not have imagined this unfortunate reverse. Impute my impatience to my anxiety to hear from you. I am pleased at the gayety of your letter. Do not think a moment of the consequences which you apprehend from the wound. Let me only hear that you are relieved ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... for many days, When duty led him to distrain, And serving writs, although it pays, Gave him excruciating pain. ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... overboard, till there remain only dynamite and scientific breeding. My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism: I believe in the future; but this only makes the present—which I foresee as going strong for a couple of million of years or so—all the more excruciating by contrast. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... of Gethsemane. There behold, what even the pencil of the angel Gabriel cannot fully portray. There, in the stillness of the night, the Saviour retires to give vent to the bursting emotions of his soul. Deep sorrow, keen anguish, and excruciating agony roll in, like continuous surges, upon his tender spirit. His strength fails. Low he lies on the cold earth, and the drops from his pale and agonized features, like the clammy sweat of death—no, "like drops of ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... would say, 'it's a great favourite with performers; they dance the sand dance to it.' And he expounded the sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long, 'Hush!' with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes, 'he's going to play "Auld Robin Gray" on one string!' And throughout this excruciating movement,—'On one string, that's on one string!' he kept crying. I would have given something myself that it had been on none; but the hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced myself ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as Brant traversed the blood-stained field he bent over the wounded form of Gabriel Wisner, who was a magistrate of Orange county. The fallen man, though suffering excruciating pain, was still able to speak, but the chieftain saw that he was dying. There were wolves in the forest, and these would soon visit the scene of carnage. To bear Wisner from the field would avail nothing. For a moment the War ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... wresting from him every faculty save that of suffering. He went down into a darkness that swallowed him, soul and body, blotting out all finite things, loosening his frantic clutch on life, sucking him down as it were into a frightful emptiness, where his only certainty of existence lay in the excruciating agonies that tore and convulsed him like devils in some inferno ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... his sweet, unlucky hands together rather eagerly, my little dog Muff happen'd to be in the way, by which means my pet was squeez'd rather more than it lik'd, and my Adonis's finger bit by it so feelingly, that it would have delighted you to see how he twisted his soft features about, with the excruciating anguish. Ha, ha, ha. ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... of Holland and Denmark is one of excruciating anxiety to the citizens of those countries. They know that the Allies are fighting the battle of their own political existence, but they are so hypnotized with well-founded terror of the implacable tyrant on their flank that they are not only bound to neutrality, ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... account of the melancholy catastrophe of three men being poisoned, after excruciating sufferings, in consequence of eating food cooked in an unclean copper vessel, on board the Cyclops frigate; and, besides these, thirty-three men became ill ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... He bled profusely, but the haemorrhage was finally arrested by some rude bandaging, and at night he was helped astride a donkey, and conveyed across the frontier into France. He told me he had suffered excruciating torments at every jolt of the jog-trotting animal on that mountain journey. Had the bullet struck him an inch higher he would have had to suffer amputation; but his luck stood to him, and at the time we met he was getting ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... last months of her life—months of excruciating physical sufferings, vividly described for us by her contemporaries—the woman's rectitude and wisdom, her swift tender sympathies, were still, as ever, at the disposal of all who sought them. With unswerving energy she still laboured for the cause of truth. When we consider ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... physicians of the time. Their various prescriptions were followed to the letter, but in vain. One ordered a very plentiful meat diet; another exercise; a third constructed a little rack, modelled on those employed by the Holy Inquisition, on which young Hercules was stretched, with excruciating torments, for half an hour every morning and evening. In the course of the next three years Hercules gained perhaps two inches. After that his growth stopped completely, and he remained for the rest of his life a pigmy of three feet and four inches. His father, who had built the most extravagant ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... the light of dawn. Jaime experienced a sensation of chill. The covers were being withdrawn from his body; agile hands were touching the bandages of his wounds. The flesh, numb a few hours before, now flinched at the lightest touch with the excruciating vibration of the pain, arousing an irresistible ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... walk home," said Mr. Alwynn, slowly. It gave him excruciating pain to say anything so severe as this; but he got ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... "but the Russian soldier is so badly fed." The little man seems rather disappointed at my diagnosis of my case—the effect due to a new and tight boot which I had not been able to change since leaving Ispahan. Notwithstanding, I cannot put foot to ground without excruciating pain. Spreading the rugs out on the dirty earthen floor, I make up my mind to twenty-four hours here at least. It is, perhaps, the dirtiest post-house we have seen since leaving Teheran; but moving under the present circumstances is out of ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... Namorik in the Marshall group, and stands alone in my experience. To give the opposite extreme, which is yet far more near the average, I will describe the soil and productions of Fakarava. The surface of that narrow strip is for the more part of broken coral lime-stone, like volcanic clinkers, and excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I believe, not in Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck. Here and there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white, and these parts are the least productive. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... favourite with performers; they dance the sand dance to it." And he expounded the sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long "Hush!" with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes; "he's going to play 'Auld Robin Gray' on one string!" And throughout this excruciating movement,—"On one string, that's on one string!" he kept crying. I would have given something myself that it had been on none; but the hearers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced myself ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this poor blundering player, who stopped convulsively if he heard steps in the passage, and actually closed the lid of his instrument when the maid came in with the tea-things, was united more closely with the divine ones of music during his excruciating performance, than many a listener at a splendid concert. Mozart, for whom he had a special cultus, would surely have felt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with my friend's marvellous bungling over that first ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... had scarcely a moment's freedom from pain of a most excruciating character during the ten minutes that elapsed before her husband's return. The quantity of opium administered was large, and its effects soon apparent in a gradual breaking down of the pains, which had been almost spasmodic ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... century. The Countess Elizabeth enticed young girls into her palace on divers pretexts, and then coolly murdered them, for the purpose of bathing in their blood. The spectacle of human suffering became at last such a delight to her, that she would apply with her own hands the most excruciating tortures, relishing the shrieks of her victims as the epicure relishes each sip of his old Chateau Margaux. In this way she is said to have murdered six hundred and fifty persons before her evil career was brought to an end; though, when ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... vanished—it was gone! I will not attempt to describe the torturing feelings which possessed me, at seeing the chance of relief which had offered itself destroyed. I was stupified with grief and disappointment. My stock of provisions was now entirely exhausted, and I looked forward with horror to an excruciating death. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 275, September 29, 1827 • Various
... them in courage and resolution. His heroism in endurance of pain was put to a severe test when he broke his leg at the age of seventeen. It was twice badly set. He was threatened first by the entire loss of it, next with the prospect of a crooked leg, but he bore cheerfully the most excruciating torture in having it straightened by a series of painful experiments, and in no long time he recovered his activity. In the army he showed his strength of will by rigid abstinence from drinking and gambling, no easy feat in those days; and he learned by his father's example to control all ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the next morning, and went outside the tent and feebly attempted to walk; but it was a most excruciating effort. My hip-joints, that ached like a toothache the night before, now seemed to be made of old rusty iron, and grated and shrieked when I tried to move, as if they rebelled against it. I felt as if there was nothing left for me to do but to walk the soreness off; therefore ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... melodies despite their evidently FORCED unlikeness to familiar phrases, an utter ignorance of design everywhere apparent in his lengthened works...The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony. When he is not THUS singular, he is no better than Strauss or any other waltz compounder... such as admire Chopin, and they are legion, will admire these Mazurkas, which are supereminently ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... motives—again as it is everywhere. Comedy in letters is good: but it should be fairly "genteel" comedy, such as this age excelled in—not roaring Farce. An "excruciatingly funny" letter runs the risk of being excruciating in a sadly literal sense. Now the men of good Queen Anne and the first three Georges were not given to excess, in these ways at any rate; and there are few better examples of the happy mean than the best of their letters. The person who is bored by any one of those sets which have ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... should have presented had I been subject to the Hellish Tortures which this poor crazy Wretch Damiens underwent, I justly conceived an extreme Horror for this Fiendish yet frivolous People, who could mingle the twirling of Fans and the sucking of Sugarplums, with the most excruciating Torments ever inflicted upon a Human Being. At least, so I reasoned to myself; if we English hang and disembowel a Traitor, at least we strangle him first; and though the sentence is Bloodthirsty, the mob would rend 'Squire ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... will be indulged in without rebuke as long as Islamism as a system and a faith prevails in the world. Happily for the poor women, the husbands do not generally beat them so as to imperil their lives, in case their own relatives reside in the vicinity, lest the excruciating screams of the suffering should reach the ears of her parents and bring the husband into disgrace. But where there is no fear of interference or of discovery, the blows and kicks are applied in the most merciless and barbarous manner. Women are killed in this way, and no outsider ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... been the principal witness against you, has been suddenly seized, during the night, with an excruciating and evidently fatal disease; in the agonies of death she has confessed to me, and in the presence of Lady D—— too, that she had sworn to a lie; that she herself with her own hand, and by means of a false key, placed the articles—which she had originally stolen with the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
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