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More "Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... water-lilies rocked on the water and dragon-flies hummed on their great stiff wings. Up on the surface the lake was clear as a mirror. But whether we wished it or not, we had to run right down by the bottom, where it was dark and gruesome. And this I could not endure. I longed for the sunbeams. I knew them so well from the time I used to run in the brook. There they used to peep down through the leaves and pass over me in fleeting gleams. I longed so much to see them again that I stole up to the surface, and lay down in ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... went, their spirits at the very highest pitch of exhilaration, and their nerves by so much the steadier, and such rapid progress did they make that ten minutes later saw them clustered together clinging to the rocky pinnacle before mentioned. And a gruesome-enough looking spot it was—a sharp projecting point of rock overhanging a sheer precipice some two hundred feet deep, with a narrow snow-bank immediately beneath, and then another frightful abyss of ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... what meanest thou?" "Ah!" she said, "fear not! as I am now, so shall I be for thee many a year. Was not thy fear that I should vanish away or change into something unsightly and gruesome? Fear not, I say; am I not a woman, and thine own?" And again she flushed bright red, and her grey eyes lightened, and she looked at him all confused ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... blow which had struck him down had not crushed the life from him. He was awakened. But when, after four weeks of gruesome fever and delirium, his mind had somewhat regained its equilibrium, his hair had turned white as snow, and his children beheld an ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... city, and gradually the mandarins gained small successes. Prisoners—miserable specimens of men fighting for they hardly knew what—were captured and brought to the city, and, on March 16th, sixteen human heads, thrown in one gruesome mass into a common basket, with upturned eyes gaping into the great unknown, hideous-looking and bearing still the brutish stare of hysterical craving and morbid rage, were carried by an armed squad of ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... from the railway station. As I went toward the next house, which was a short distance away, I was hailed by a tall, broad-shouldered man with long hair, who commanded me to halt. I kept right on, however, meaning to tell him about my gruesome discovery. As I advanced toward him he retreated, and I called to him to have no fear, as I did not intend to shoot. The big man shook with laughter and cried, "Hold, boy, stop there a minute until I tell you something. They say that 'Wild Bill' ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... and here I should like to build myself a home," he said, little deeming in what gruesome manner his words were to ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the floor, as Shirley caught her limp girlish form in his arms. He placed her on the couch again, and she regained her composure under his calm urging. Little by little she visualized the details of the gruesome evening and narrated them under the magnetic cross-questions of ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... theory, how to make The matutinal tea and coffee, And, when at school, I used to bake A gruesome mess described as toffee; But these, which form my whole cuisine, Are scarce the kind of thing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... stories that I have noted down on the gruesome subject of heart-eating have been given above. Such ideas were abhorrent to the Jewish conscience, and the use of the heart torn from a living animal was regarded as characteristic of idolatry (Jerusalem Talmud, Aboda Zara, ii, 41b). In ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... wriggling his toes with delight, the tale being of that gruesome nature which appeals to him. It must have been tried on countless other children, for, despite Whinnie's autobiographical interjections, the yarn is an old and venerable one, a primitive Russian folk-tale which even Browning worked over in his ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... was a mining fellow who used to come over and clean out my whiskey, and sing gruesome songs for hours together to a banjo that had, I think, two strings. I stayed out all night quite frequently when I had reason to believe that he was coming. Then, we killed a good many tarantulas—and a few equally venomous pests—but ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... A gruesome sight met them as Eli brought the dogs to a stop. Huddled close and lying by the side of the toboggan, partially covered by drift, were the stiff-frozen bodies ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... this gruesome scene only for a moment. They wished only to make sure that the two Spaniards were really out of the fight, and when they saw the Iowa was going to stand by both, away they went to join the race between the Brooklyn and the Oregon on our side, and the ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... owner to pleasure or business lay moored on the river ready to carry him that last sad journey to the Tower; and sadder still, to bring back the devoted daughter when the execution was accomplished, and later also when she bore her gruesome burden of a father's head, said to have been buried ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... comment from such British visitors as came across them; and they therefore attempted to block up the path of travellers, refusing them a passage through the Republic, and in some instances ordering the expulsion of visitors across the Vaal. About this time one of the most gruesome of all the many massacres in which the Boers were concerned took place. One Potgieter (not the Potgieter who was the rival of Pretorius), in charge of a small party of thirty men, women, and children, went forth to barter ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... enough to enforce abandoning library copies of Keats and buying an edition of my own. And this, too, may have been not unconnected with the gracious influence of the other sex as exhibited in a neighbouring athenaeum; and was accompanied by a gruesome spate of florid lyrics: some (happily) secret, and some exposed with needless hardihood in a college magazine. The world, which has looked leniently upon many poetical minorities, regards such frenzies with tolerant charity and forgetfulness. But the wretch concerned may be pardoned for ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... and Perkins (the butler) had seen one or other of the ghosts, and the cellar apparition was quite familiar to them all. They also declared that there were other parts of the house quite as badly haunted as the cellar, and it might have been partly owing to these gruesome stories that poor Letty always felt scared, when crossing the passages leading to the attics. As she was hastening down one of them, early one morning, she heard some one running after her. Thinking ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... thrill. There is nothing to fear. Penarvon here has all the pluck in the world. Hinckley is a V.C. Captain Vandermere is a soldier, and I will answer for it that he has no nerves. Guerdon and I, I am sure, are safe. Let us hear your gruesome prophecy, my dear Saton, and if it comes true, we will form a little society, and you shall be our apostle. We will study occultism in place of bridge. We will be the founders ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... make another attempt to settle the Irish Question, promised that he would not "explore the noxious vapours of the past," I feared the worst. But he was as good as his word, and spared us any gruesome excavations in ancient Irish history. Major HILLS did even better by implying that it was only during the last ten years that the question had warped and diverted our domestic politics. If all Irishmen were as reasonable and moderate as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... about two minutes, because his spirit came upon him, and he fell down upon one knee, unable to rise. I never saw a more gruesome spectacle. A bright unnatural light gleamed in his eyes, his countenance became livid, the eyeballs protruded, a copious perspiration streamed from his body, the muscles of his face twitched, and his whole frame shook more and more vehemently as the intensity of the paroxysm increased. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... as roundabout a route as he could contrive so as to spare the young officers the gruesome sights that he and the other men had encountered; but enough was left to make ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... doctors have received their gruesome reward at the hands of the ladies. But Cliges is terror-stricken and filled with grief upon hearing of the pain and martyrdom which his sweetheart has endured for him. He is almost beside himself, fearing greatly, and with good reason, that she may be dead ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... naked corpses are laid, and no sooner are they there than the awaiting vultures descend and consume the flesh. I saw these grisly birds sitting expectantly in rows on the coping of the towers, and the sight was almost too gruesome. Such is their voracity that the body is a skeleton in an hour or so. The Parsees choose this method of dissolution because since they worship fire they must not ask it to demean itself with the dead; ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the boats, for, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... shutting me off from the rest of the world, and had my purpose been less serious, my will less nerved, I might have succumbed to the dreariness of the outlook and taken myself away while yet the gruesome influences that lay crouched in the darkness at my back remained in abeyance, and neither ghost's step nor man's step had come to shake the foundations of my courage and make of my silent watch ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour. Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness. She paid no heed. There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenceless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... Strozzi was gay with pinks and carnations and early roses. They drove out of the city, passed innumerable villas, out into the open country where the only blot upon the fair landscape was a funeral train, the coffin borne by those gruesome beings, the Brothers of the Misericordia, with their black robes and black face cloths pierced only with holes ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... originally escaped from Zoological Gardens and travelling beast shows. "Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools, Trafalgar Square," was one of the most notable and characteristic of his studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of "Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street." There were also photographs of the large canvas on which he had been engaged for some months, and which he was now endeavouring to sell to some enterprising dealer or ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... as Hop Bitters is said to owe many of its supposed virtues to the bryony root, substituted for the mandrake which it is alleged to contain. The true mandrake is a gruesome herb, which was held in superstitious awe by the Greeks and the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... spirits," and Fred replied, by gosh, he didn't blame her one mite; whereat they wandered off and spent the evening at a very comfortable distance from the house, but fairly close together, revelling in a wealth of gruesome facts and suppositions. Katherine said she certainly never would marry at all, men were such dreadful creatures, and Molly said, yes, indeed, but what else could a girl marry?—while Edith determined to ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... words of hers increased his suspicion. Was it any wonder that she was horrified when she recalled that gruesome episode of the death of a brave and honest man? Her personal fascination had overwhelmed Harry Bellairs, just as it had overwhelmed himself. The devil sends some women into the hearts of upright men to rend and ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... confirmed our leader's statement by gathering around threateningly and making gruesome and suggestive motions with our spades. There were two hundred of us and only forty guards. We meant business and they knew it. They took us back to the laager and locked ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... back over the multiple clock faces, and turned away. Three more years on the Ecological Base was a gruesome stretch of time when you thought of ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... blamed him for leaving at Iquique. They now said he had been guided by a strange but merciful Providence to his old home. He told the eager listeners of the family circle many tales of daring adventure as they sat in the cosy room by the fire, but whenever the gruesome figure of the dead man in the wardrobe crossed his mind he became reticent and pensive. These lapses did not go unnoticed, and he was often pressed for the cause of so sudden a change from ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... Miss Oliver? I don't know why Jem tells such gruesome things at a time like this when we're all ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in from the door, and asked what news?—I was ower big, and ower vexed to hear her; so, never letting on, I went to the little looking-glass on the drawers' head, and set it down on the table. Then I looked myself in it for a moment, and made a gruesome face. Syne I pulled out the little drawer, and got the sharping strap, the which I fastened to my button. Syne I took my razor from the box, and gave it five or six turns along first one side and then the other, with great ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... his pajamas and the morning was cold, but he suddenly felt a great drop of perspiration on his forehead. It was the sort of thing, this, which he had expected—had been prepared for, in fact—but it was none the less, in its way, gruesome. There was a further knock at the door, and the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... went on merrily enough. About three feet down a skull was found; then another; then various human bones. These gruesome discoveries checked the singing and laughter, and for a while the men worked in silence. But there was nothing to dull the spirits of the water-carriers, and they romped and skylarked like a party of schoolboys. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... woodcock was not adapted by nature for being cooked after this fashion. None of us—not even Master E. Smith, in whom I had previously remarked an unfailing appetite—cared to indulge in the dish. Indeed, it was not until I had removed the unsightly and gruesome object—these are the only adjectives that properly describe it—to a point considerably remote from our camping place that I deemed myself to be sufficiently revived to join the others in a frugal supper consisting of the remaining sandwiches and a ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Having selected the house you pay a call and lay ground-bait, so to speak. You tell the tenant you are interested in the place because you happen to know that at one time it was haunted. You relate a gruesome tale of some mysterious tragedy that you say has occurred there, and generally ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had lived through in ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... we attended our master on one of his official visits to Bantama, the fetish priest's village where we so narrowly escaped execution, and were able to thoroughly inspect the gruesome place. The most horrible blood-orgies known to superstition and fetish-worship were almost daily practised there, and in nearly every abode there were stools and chairs smeared with human blood, drinking bowls ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... place was of small extent—little more than a pit—and it seemed to be a natural cavity, with nothing remarkable about it. But I turned my attention to the floor, which felt curiously soft and greasy to the touch. It was strewn with pieces of human bones and skulls! The gruesome place weighed rather upon me, I confess, silent and stifling as it was, but having come to explore I proceeded to excavate lightly in the yielding material of the floor with a light pick. The singular nature of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... fastened by stout ropes to rings fixed in the rafters of the barn. Their heads dangled from the slip-knots. The one against which Perenna had struck was still moving slightly and the bones clicked together with a gruesome sound. ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... Horoeka into the kainga at nightfall, and was now shut up in one of the whares. But a fierce speech of Horoeka's presently told the painfully interested eavesdropper that nothing less than death, attended by heathenish and gruesome ceremonies, would expiate the boy's outrage on the tapu-tree, in ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... rich piece of open or pierced work, in the pattern of which may be seen three crosses. Upon the slab rests a representation of the corpse of a monk undergoing the process of decay, and being devoured by various lizards, snails, &c. It is rather a gruesome subject for contemplation, reminding one of some of the drawings in the Dance of Death at Basle. Immediately over the body, in the centre of the tomb, is a massive ogee arch, richly foliated, from which ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... transform myself again, and you can give them to her." No sooner had she finished speaking than she mounted a cloud and disappeared in space. The two ministers reached the palace and presented to the Queen the gruesome remedy which they had brought from the temple. She, overcome with gratitude and emotion, wept copiously. "What Immortal," she asked, "can have been so charitable as to sacrifice a hand and eye for the King's benefit?" Then suddenly her ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... pushed the narrow trap-door in the ceiling upward, and had thrust candle and head through the opening, and the faint yellow light, seeping back and downward in flickering, uncertain rays, suggested the impression of a gruesome, headless figure standing there hazily outlined in the surrounding murk. It chilled her; she clutched at her shawl, drew it more closely about her, and edged ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... India, assassins' weapons from Italy and Spain, even the knife which was formerly carried by the slave-drivers of the Mississippi region. Death and pain of every kind were fully represented in that gruesome collection. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... which the Freshmen have their home with Dr. Mary Samuel, the Indian member of the staff, as their house mother. Just behind it is the thatched shed, carefully walled in, which serves as the dissecting room. To the uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, for cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables. The casual visitor sympathizes with the Hindu student who confides to you that during her first days of work in the dissecting room she could only sleep when firmly flanked by a friend on each ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... enthusiasm the Brethren depicted every detail of the Passion History; and thus they reminded their hearers of events which ordinary Christians had almost forgotten. At times the language they used was gruesome; and, lost in mystic adoration, the Brethren, in imagination, trod the Via Dolorosa. They nestled in the nail-prints; they kissed the spear; they gazed with rapt and holy awe on the golden head, the raven locks, the pallid cheeks, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... connected with this, "death-warrants." I begged and implored my father to let me see a "death-warrant." He told me that there was nothing to see, but I went on insisting, until one day he told me that I might see one of these gruesome documents. To avoid any misplaced sympathy with the condemned man, I may say that it was a peculiarly brutal murder. A man at Cork had kicked his wife to death, and had then battered her into a shapeless mass with the poker. I went into my father's study on ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... be in the story of the pawnbroker and his daughters, M. Zola much preferred the popular and gruesome legend of the little girl murdered in the scullery; and, some time later, when he consented to write a short story for 'The Star,' it was this legend which he took as his basis, building thereon the pathetic ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... of gruesome fable," she said when he was done, and she shuddered slightly. "The other brother was Death, wasn't he? When you told it to me last I did ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... gruesome. I sneaked away, and had already reached the foot of the hill, when, to my horror, I noticed the grey man approaching. He took off his hat, bowed ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... remarkable stories in English literature, and is worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... and staves, and valiant shakings of partially unwound turbans, against the unwelcome intruder—a mangy-coated pariah, with lolling tongue and foam-flecked lips, whose bones showed through hairless patches of skin; and whose bared fangs snapped incessantly at everything and nothing, in a manner gruesome to behold. A second crowd of outsiders, huddled close to the gates, was also very zealous in the matter of shouting, and of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... piled up to the windows with the corpses of those that had fled there for sanctuary. Skulls with gray hairs still attached to them, tresses which had once adorned the heads of young girls, and the rotting limbs of small children were mingled in one gruesome heap. It is said that the Ottoman High Commissioner, who was sent by the Turkish Government with the British commission to investigate, on beholding this sight, turned to one of the perpetrators who was present and asked ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... to the plough and supported himself and the community, as they were all supposed to do, by his labour; but he contributed little to the hum of voices. Some of his companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely psychological purposes. He sat in a corner, they declared, and watched the inmates when they were off their guard, analysing their characters, and dissecting ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... He described in his own fashion the finding of Archibald McBride's body. Then a few skilful questions by Moxlow brought out the fact of his having met John North on the Square immediately before his own gruesome discovery. The little lamplighter was excused, and Colonel Harbison took his: place. He, in his turn, quickly made way for Andy Gilmore. Moxlow next interrogated Atkinson, Langham's client, who explained the nature of his business ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... were at work. The head of another gruesome tragedy loomed vaguely through the shadows of this ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... shadows under his eyes were deeper, his cheeks more sunken. He had lost something of the sprightliness of his bearing. His attitude, indeed, was almost dejected. He was like a man who sees into the future and finds there strange and gruesome things. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to the dais, and now Long Sin faced her and sternly ordered her to kowtow to the gruesome ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... ou sont vos prisonnieres?—Je crois, mon commandant, qu'elles sont allees quelque part faire une visite." And the ladies would be welcome. This is to take the most savage of Polynesians; take some of the most civilised. In Honolulu, convicts labour on the highways in piebald clothing, gruesome and ridiculous; and it is a common sight to see the family of such an one troop out, about the dinner hour, wreathed with flowers and in their holiday best, to picnic with their kinsman on the public wayside. The application of these ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his shoulder, and seizing his gun, G. W. tore on down the hill straight toward the gruesome place below, and right into it. No one noticed him. The surgeons were too busy to look up as he ran around the table scanning the faces upon the boards. The men carrying the helpless burdens, or ministering to their wants, had no time to question why a little black boy should suddenly ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... |the man. | | | |The story of the terrible tragedy enacted in the | |Lewis "love bungalow," where for some years the | |celebrated sculptor and the former Mrs. Cross had | |been living in open defiance of the | |conventionalities, was a gruesome one as it came to | |light to-day. | | | |Carlton is twenty-eight years old. He is married. | |His wife lived with him at the Lewis home. He had | |been employed by Lewis for six months. He was | |formerly employed by John Z. Hobart, proprietor of | |Hobart's restaurant. He is ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... these things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once. But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when Thompson ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Some were evidently bales of tapa-cloth. The burden of one set of poles, heavier than the rest, however, was not so easily made out. My curiosity was whetted to know whether it was a roast pig or something of a gruesome nature, and I inquired about it. "I don't know," said Mrs. Stevenson, "whether this is a wedding or a funeral. Whatever it is, though, captain, our place seems to be at the head ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... I told him the whole gruesome story. He saw, he could not help but see what a deep impress the events of the night had made on me. He heard me to the end with every appearance of sympathy,—and then all at once I discovered that all the time papa had been concealed behind a large screen which was in ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... good boys to be, And sailed away across the sea, At London Bridge that Bishop he Arrived one Tuesday night; And as that night he homeward strode To his Pan-Anglican abode, He passed along the Borough Road, And saw a gruesome sight. ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... impatient for its meal. The grim king of terrors is very close to thee, poor honest soldier of the Fatherland; but thou canst face him as boldly as thou hast faced the foe, with the help of the little book of which thy frost-chilled fingers have never lost the grip. The gruesome bird falls back as thou ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... by a very glum, grim, gruesome, gory, but connubially-minded gentleman, whose ugly blue beard was ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Boers' wagons, surmounted by a white flag, were seen coming across the plain, their attendants being engaged for a long time in the gruesome task of ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... had remained perfectly quiet in the room crouching at Jacqueline's feet and beside the bed. It had not attempted to molest me, as I had feared might be the case during the course of my gruesome work. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... lying where the wolves and coyotes had left them, with scraps of clothing caught here and there upon the vines and bushes. Dr. Charles Brewer, the assistant army surgeon who was sent with a detail to bury the remains in May, 1859, says in his gruesome report:— ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... yellow sand, upon which the feathery tops of the cocoa-palms look like pins planted in the ground. To the travelled man the view suggests many a nook in the Pacific islands. The bathing is here excellent: natural breakwaters of black rock exclude the shark. The place derives its gruesome name from olden days, when the smooth waters and the abundant fish and fruit tempted the fiery filibusters to a relache. It was given in 1726 by Mr. Smith, surveyor to the Royal African Company, after Roberts the pirate, who ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... that I would complete my high school studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous bones. My midnight vigils were ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Beyond, but we prefer the little tracks worn by the feet of the natives, which criss-cross everywhere. Jean won't stir a step without a horrid, dilapidated rag doll called Topsy. I do dislike the faces of rag dolls, their lack of profile is so gruesome, and Topsy is a most depressing specimen of her kind; but Jean lavishes affection on her. A woman-child is an odd thing. I remember being taken into a shop to choose a doll, and I chose a most hideous thing with curly white hair. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... general flutter, the sight was strangely suggestive of the pestilential death ever lurking below, ready to feed upon the foreign visitor. One could scarcely help thinking of the dead and the dying, and wondering, with a shudder, what might not be the ignoble cravings of the gruesome flock. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... events, we may congratulate ourselves that the details of these disgusting cess-pools of medical art have disappeared entirely from the pages of our modern text-books. Even Gilbert considers it advisable to preface this gruesome chapter with a sort of "Caveat emptor" apology to ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... man desperately wounded in some fight, and far away from physicians or nurses, and then the metaphor is interpreted by the plain facts of hostile invasion, flaming cities, devastated fields. It destroys the coherence of the verses to take the gruesome picture of the wounded man as a description of men's sins; it is plainly a description of the consequences of their sins. In accordance with the Old Testament point of view, Isaiah deals with national calamities as the punishment of national sins. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... impulse to leap full into the mass of repulsive, crawling bodies and die fighting as his fists battered at the gruesome faces. But a second impulse, and a stronger one, was the blind instinct to preserve his life as long ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... servant will have to rub up her own silver backed brushes and sweetmeat dishes if she wants them to look nice. Of course it may be said that extra silver can be put by till circumstances improve, or that it might be useful in a financial emergency. This last idea is rather a gruesome one to take to a wedding, and it is in the early days of her housekeeping that the young wife likes to have her pretty things about her. Why an artistic chair or table should not be as suitable as an entree dish I do ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... and an almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... one of the trips their flagpole and staff, which was put up on a high point, called Observation Hill, was missing. Later on a gruesome skeleton was found on the seashore not far from Observation Hill, and the wrecked portions of a boat, and to this may be added the discovery of a lifeboat, similar to their own, among debris on South river, fully ten miles inland, which must have ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... to retailer, and from retailer to customer, and was amazed at the character and standing of the latter. He had a number of those buyers who lived in adjacent cities, privately approached and interviewed, and ascertained that, save in two instances, they were all his readers, had seen the gruesome pictures he had presented, and then had ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... won distinction in the campaigns of '64 and '66, came strains of 'The Watch on the Rhine.' Every now and then my mother would lean back in her chair and close her eyes, and I knew intuitively she was thinking of me. Mein Gott! If she had only known the truth. These tableaux faded away, and the gruesome awfulness of my surroundings thrust themselves upon me. A damp, foetid smell, suggestive of the rottenness of decay, assailed my nostrils and made me sneeze. I choked; the saliva streamed in torrents down my chin and throat! My recumbent ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... her to share his discoveries, and learn the true story (if it were not rather the malicious counterfeit) of the new divine mother to whom he has thus absolutely entrusted himself. Was not this absolute chastity itself a kind of death? She, too, in secret makes her gruesome midnight offering with averted eyes. She dreams one night he is in danger; creeps to his cubicle [172] to see; the face is covered, as he lies, against the cold. She traces the motionless outline, raises the coverlet; with the nice black head deep ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... was still grey, with sweepy rain-clouds on the sea—gruesome, objectionable. It was a prolongation of yesterday. Well, despair was no good, and being miserable was no good either. She got no satisfaction out of either mood. The only thing to do was to act: seize hold of ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... morals, with greater boldness, he rebelled against a minute and cramping interpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine did not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson's thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from old history. The black and devious ways through which the race ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... assumed any definite shape! It was there—in the background—a dim, floating purpose, never once oppressing me, never forcing its way forward in my mind for more definite consideration, and only showing itself at all in a vague, lurid glow which seemed to change even the shapes of all the gruesome surroundings of my dismal walk. Towards the end of my expedition this became even more marked. My thoughts had recoiled from the present to the past. Vague pictures of the days that had gone by seemed floating before my eyes. I saw myself in the convent garden, ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... leaned over the desk, and spoke in a gruesome whisper which made the cold run down our backs, 'that yon paper was your finger, one finger only of your hand, and it burned like that for ever and ever, and think of your hand and your arm and your whole body all on fire, never to go out.' We shuddered that you might have heard the form ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... "Sabbath," as it was called—and here were recounted all the evil deeds of the past year, and here the witches saw and conversed with the devil himself, and received their instructions from him. It would be almost impossible to conceive a more grotesque and gruesome picture than some of these Sabbaths were supposed to be: every impossible and inconceivable thing that man's mind could invent was apparently attributed to these meetings. In order to form some faint idea of men's beliefs in those days, I quote the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... blush and an invitation in her eyes, and he kissed her on the lips. "See here, dearest," he said, "your first dance! And as many as you will give me afterward. Did I ever mention that I was jealous? Nell, I inform you of the gruesome fact now; and that I shall endure agonies every time I see you dancing with ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... to be rowed ashore, he had to be one of the crew of four, he pulling the bow oar, and, as soon as the rest landed, he was left in charge of the boat. The sequel to an incident of this kind is one of the most gruesome in the annals of maritime life. The captain of a vessel, anchored in Elsinore Roads, was rowed into the harbour. The crew of the boat were told that he would require them at 10.30 that night. The cabin-boy was left in charge, and the two A.B.'s and the oldest apprentice proceeded to a ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... points. There is an interior quadrangular court with arcades, and there Lucretia was shown the place where Niccolo II had caused his son Ugo and his stepmother, the beautiful Parisina, to be beheaded. This gruesome deed was a warning to Alexander's daughter to be true to ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... discuss these gruesome possibilities, although this was not Drew's fault. I would not listen to him; and so he would be silent about them until convinced that the furtherance of our careers as airmen demanded additional unpleasant imaginings. There was something of the Hindoo ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... interruption. A clanking of arms sounded somewhere nearby. Men with long, gruesome, glittering spears came through a doorway. They stood aside. A girl entered the great hall. More spearmen followed her. They stopped by the door. The girl came across ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... Point, Louth Isle, Sibsey Isle, Stickney Isle, Spilsby Isle, Partney Isle, Revesby Isle, Point Boston, and Winceby Isle. Banks' name was given to a group of islands, and Coffin's Bay must not be allowed to suggest any gruesome association, for it was named after Sir Isaac Coffin, resident naval commissioner at Sheerness, who had given assistance in the equipment of the Investigator. A few names, like Streaky Bay, Lucky Bay, and Cape Catastrophe, were applied from circumstances ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... the fraction of a second, had she stopped to read the placard setting forth this odious law, had she only reflected, then she would even now have turned back, and fled from that gruesome box of infamies, as she would from a dangerous and noisome reptile or ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... answered his wife. "It was gruesome to hear her. She made me look up to see if there was really any one there; and she wasn't speaking to our Lady either. Art sure she is a child ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... so much," I said nastily. (When people presage a remark by saying that they only say it because they love you, you may lay long odds that it's going to be disagreeable!) "It certainly sounds a gruesome prospect. Not even a choice between bankruptcy and mania, but a certainty of both! And within a year, too! Such a short run for one's money! Aunt Eliza had some suggestion to make, then? And you evidently approved. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a murmur went round among the eager watchers. It was her most famous dance—the dance of Death, the most gruesome spectacle, so it was said, that any dancer had ever conceived. She came on to the stage like the flash of an arrow, dressed in black that glittered and scintillated with every amazing movement. And then ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... prophecy Mookoomahn ceased speaking, and leaned back exhausted. As they looked at him they could appreciate the sufferings of Shad and Manikawan, and no great stretch of the imagination was necessary to picture the gruesome spectacle that they had no doubt awaited them in the lodge on ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... who had suffered martyrdom for his conversion to Christianity was smiling very sweetly and looking upwards, and in that part of his work the sculptor had been very happy. But the rest of the carving was gruesome and the anatomy was gross and bad, the figure being so disproportionately broad as to convey the impression of a ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... only to the space on the side of the bed next the fire. The bed itself—not to mention the shadowy region beyond it—on which the body of the pirate had lain, he could not regard without a sense of the awfully gruesome: itself looked scared at its own consciousness of the fact, and of the feeling it caused ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... were green; they were wriggly and lean; they writhed with so hateful a sound. My blood seemed to freeze; I fell on my knees; my face was a white splash of dread. Oh, the Green and the Blue, they were gruesome to view; but the worst of them all were the Red. They came through the door, they came through the floor, they came through the moss-creviced logs. They were savage and dire; they were whiskered with fire; they bickered like malamute dogs. They ravined in rings like iniquitous ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... flat country of the Middle West there is less likelihood of swift, complete destruction than in narrow valleys, like those of Johnstown and Austin in Pennsylvania. But the effect is, if anything, more gruesome. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... A most fearful and gruesome play, based on Jacobs's story, in the vein of the Three Wishes, and the Foot of Pharaoh, ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... plain some disaster had taken place, but what had happened on those gruesome sands I could only conjecture until I reached the Boatmen's Rooms. Outside the building I found in groups and knots a crowd of boatmen and pilots, and also Richard Roberts, the coxswain of ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... Old Bergamo had to stay where they were, and day by day it grew hotter; and day by day the gruesome disease became more voracious and more grasping. Terror grew to madness. What there had been of order and good government was as if the earth had swallowed it, and what was worst in human ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... others the solution of the problem, although the task was a gruesome one and they would have gladly evaded it if they could. It made chills run down the spine to trudge along leading the horse with that huge figure towering behind them in the darkness, mocking at them ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... and beg to gaze On all once ours—are shown a seat, O irony! In sad amaze We marvel that it looks so neat, Recalling how we used to meet At gruesome hours in days of yore,— Hours that fate can ne'er repeat: Another's name ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... again. I disposed of the remains decent as I could, for Doc Carey was leisurely coming down National pike from Jane Aydelot's, an' it was gettin' late, an' no cheerful plate nor job in a crowd in sunshiny weather, let alone there in the dusk of the evening. Wow! I dreamt of that there gruesome thing two weeks. I throwed the shovel in the crick. Would you like me to show you where to go to dig, so's you can be sure your plan with Tank Shirley worked and you didn't drown, after all? And are you sure you ain't been ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... what it was like! This thing she had read of in newspapers! Now she was going down in mid-ocean, she, Betty Vanderpoel! And, as she sprang to clutch her fur coat, there flashed before her mental vision a gruesome picture of the headlines in the newspapers and the inevitable reference to the millions ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Hideous, gruesome carvings they were, resembling some futuristic sculpture of to-day, for the artist who had fashioned them had given hardly more than a hint of the finished representation. It was rather as if the masses ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... the incident I have now related took place, and again, in response to orders given by the enterprising landlord of the property, long-closed doors and windows have been thrown open, and painters and paperhangers have brought their skill to bear upon gruesome rooms and halls; the house is once more inhabited, this time by a widow lady and some grown-up sons. These tenants come from a distance, and are entirely strangers both to the neighbourhood and the former history of the house, but, to use ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... breath. Then he went to his brother's side. Here he paused, and, after a moment of mental struggle, stooped and lifted the corpse upon his unwounded shoulder. Then with his gruesome freight he plunged ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... earlier poet, and he even developed a fondness for the morbid and the abnormal. This is revealed in 'Le Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger will than his own and that he was being hypnotized ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... her reply had meanings which would escape the understanding of the Mayor, and her apprehensive glance had told him of the gruesome jealousy of this old man at her side. The Mayor's polite words had caused the long, clean-shaven upper lip of the old man with the look of a debauched prophet, to lengthen surlily; and he noticed that a wide, flat foot in a big ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... into glass boxes to watch them, they manage to corrode the glass so it ceases to be transparent. And they can bore their way out of any wood, or even metal, containers you try to keep them in. The termite seems destined to remain a gruesome, marvelous, possibly deadly mystery." ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... with loathly icicles, lashed by rains, battered by hail, dangled that pitiful, shrunken figure, creaking dolefully, as it swung to and fro in the bitter blasts that come howling in from a storm-tossed North Sea. And far from acting as the warning intended to others, so little was this gruesome thing a "terror to evil-doers," that the vicinity of the gibbet actually became a place noted for the frequency ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... already built on the edge of the camp at Bazoilles. I saw it on my afternoon trip and knew that the report was true. Being interested in the psychology of such a scene on the men present, I put aside my inward rebellion at so gruesome a sight and arranged my trip so as to be present. I reached the camp at nine forty-five and was the last man admitted. The gallows was built in the center of the semicircle facing two hills which came abruptly together, leaving a large grass plot at their base. This formed a natural ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... all heard certain absurd stories told in connection with the old quarry that had not been worked for so many years that the road leading to it across country had grown up in grass and weeds. Some adventurous boys who went out there once declared it was a most gruesome place, with pools of water covered with green scum lying around, and all sorts of holes looking like the cave Robinson Crusoe found on his island home to be seen where granite building rocks had been ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... causeway, and where Dickens placed that amphibious creature, "as slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as he collected the materials for Great Expectations, was afterwards elaborated in the Rogue ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... Hospital, in all weathers and in every kind of cheap conveyance, was prominent. I have to confess that I preferred that a visit to her should not be immediately prefaced by one of these adventures among the "pore dear things" at the hospital, because that was sure to mean the recital of some gruesome operation she had heard of, or the details of some almost equally gruesome cure. She enjoyed the whole experience in a way which is blank to the professional humanitarian, but I suspect the "pore dear things" appreciated ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... pile; to be able to wander about it as he liked, free to speculate on its pictures and engravings; to rummage the immense collection of china in the basement rooms which no one but himself ever looked at; to examine some new corner of the muniment-room, and to ponder the strange and gruesome collection of death-masks, made by Coryston's grandfather, and now ranged in one of the annexes of the library—gave him endless entertainment. He was a born student, in whom the antiquarian instincts ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... after all the chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather Italian ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of the night Gard lay awake, living over the gruesome moments spent in the ill-omened house on Washington Square. The ghastly face of the dead man seemed to stare at him from every corner of ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... the papers to-morrow, I expect," he said in a confidential tone, "so there is no harm in telling you there has been a most gruesome discovery in that locked room. A man who was here at the Hunt Ball, has been found dead; suicide no doubt. The ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... had looked upon many a gruesome sight during my somewhat chequered career, though scarcely one more hideous than this which I had ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... in Robespierre's berline and in that four years much of the things that were prophesied have come to pass —aye, and much more besides that was undreamt of at the outset by the revolutionaries. A gruesome engine that they facetiously called the National Razor—invented and designed some years ago by one Dr. Guillotin—is but an item in the changes that have been, yet an item that in its way has become a ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... in the scene. Under the tower a band of soldiers made a passage through the crowd of people. Pope John XVI came riding backwards on an ass. His ears and nose had been cut off, and his eyes had been dug out. It was a gruesome sight. A wine-bladder, waving over his head in the wind, made it worse. The people were silent, and shuddered simultaneously, for he was, after all, Christ's representative and St. Peter's successor, although ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... golden yellow sand, upon which the feathery tops of the cocoa-palms look like pins planted in the ground. To the travelled man the view suggests many a nook in the Pacific islands. The bathing is here excellent: natural breakwaters of black rock exclude the shark. The place derives its gruesome name from olden days, when the smooth waters and the abundant fish and fruit tempted the fiery filibusters to a relache. It was given in 1726 by Mr. Smith, surveyor to the Royal African Company, after Roberts the pirate, who buried ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... in the Rue Oberskampf—another forgotten story—he had taken to one of the editors of the "Epoque,"—a paper then rivalling the "Matin" for information,—the left foot, which was missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains were discovered. For this left foot the police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it. To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one of ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... New York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee. One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in its arms the gory body of a woman. It was that impression which now revived in my mind. But by a process ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the apartment. Through the darkness only a few feet away from Jimmie Dale, the two men sat there silently, waiting, as he had waited, in the darkness, and the silence—for the Magpie. There seemed an abhorrent, gruesome analogy in the situation—this waiting for a murdered man ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... exclaimed his listener, unconsciously pushing back his chair, shocked at the gruesome humour. Besides, the man was looking at him with something like a professional eye, as if making an estimate of ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... bitterness against him and Sally Salisbury revived. Then came a revulsion of feeling. Why should he not be ill? Nay, he might even be dead. Perhaps worse. If he had carried out his despairing threat? She pictured him floating on the surface of a Hampstead pond and a shudder went over her at the gruesome thought. Finally she subsided into dull resignation and strove to think no ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... the seat, in a white evening frock, looking—for an aunt—really quite nice. On the lawn stood an incensed curate, grasping our small brother by a large ear, which—judging from the row he was making—seemed on the point of parting company with the head it adorned. The gruesome noise he was emitting did not really affect us otherwise than aesthetically. To one who has tried both, the wail of genuine physical anguish is easy distinguishable from the pumped-up ad misericordiam ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... place was gruesome in the extreme. On three sides was solid rock, forming a semicircular back to the room. The partition, closed the entire front. Near its top in several places were cut out apertures, admitting air and a ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... impossible to identify the victim, and Harley had his own reasons for concealing the truth. The house on the wharf with its choice Oriental furniture was seized by the police; but, strange to relate, no arrest was made in connection with this most gruesome outrage. The man who dropped through the trap had been wounded by one of Harley's shots, and he sank for the last time under the very eyes of the ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... death's gloomy gate Shall fade away the mists that hide The gruesome and the nobly great, Borne ever on by time and tide. This from thy book of fate alone A liberated soul may tell thee: Perish thou shalt by deed thine own, And yet a ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... the solution of the problem, although the task was a gruesome one and they would have gladly evaded it if they could. It made chills run down the spine to trudge along leading the horse with that huge figure towering behind them in the darkness, mocking at them because he had escaped to the silent ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... he spent in trying to lower the army's confidence by telling all the gruesome stories of Indian warfare he could think of; but he frightened himself a great deal more than them, and at last had to abandon the attempt ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... their white fingers and struck the kale and the pebbles and the soft moss upon the beach, for they sought to make music for the seal-folk to dance thereby; but the music that was made was not merry nor gleeful, but was passing gruesome and mournful. And presently the seal-folk came where lay the wife of Harold wrapped in the fair velvet skin, and they knew her of old, and they called her by what name she was known to them, "Persis! Persis!" over and ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... the skulls and bones of Incas that were strewn about and amused themselves by playing ten pins on the hard sand, sticking the bones up and rolling the skulls at them. Don Nicholas paid no attention to the gruesome sport; but stood calmly conversing with the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... Somehow, since learning Tony's opinion, the sound, as it came welling out of the swamp far away, seemed more gruesome than ever. Phil could easily in imagination picture the scene, with a posse of determined keepers from the convict camp following the lead of dogs held in leash, and chasing after a wretched fugitive, who ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... little at the gruesome company as they slowly paced about her in a narrowing circle, and when the leader took her hand and led her to the model stand, motioning to her to mount it, ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... which was greatly venerated in early days, and many stories are told of the miraculous power of its waters. Inside the churchyard a grave is pointed out as the burial place of the robber whose tragic end was told by James Hogg in his gruesome story ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... manner in which the tornado had whirled him round and round. Caught in a different set of gyrations and then borne out from the center—flung out would come nearer it—the burros and William might have been carried in any direction save his own. Into that gruesome Crevice, for instance. They had not been more than a mile from the Crevice when the ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... behind him, and saw an animal whose gruesome oddity even he, who knew so many of the strange creatures, two of which were never the same, that used to live inside the mountain with their masters the goblins, had never seen equalled. Its eyes were flaming with anger, but it seemed to be at the housekeeper, ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... If this is gruesome why should one be asked to present a subject which cannot be adequately presented without showing what pygmies we are and how helpless in the grasp of an ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... cheer. You'd think I had said something. At least they were reminded of the summary powers granted the F.B.I. to deal with telepaths, because of the gruesome danger they ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... of the most charming spots that Nature gave to this scenic Ohio region dwelt a being—a wretch—by the name of McKinney, the tales of whose terrible deeds recall the gruesome acts of the days of the Inquisition or the horrible tortures of the fierce Iroquois. In one of the caves embowered in this leafy wilderness, where the rays of the noonday sun scarce ever fall and there reigns perpetually a cavernous gloom, dwelt this bold ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... one step, it made her feel "that low in her spirits," and Fred replied, by gosh, he didn't blame her one mite; whereat they wandered off and spent the evening at a very comfortable distance from the house, but fairly close together, revelling in a wealth of gruesome facts and suppositions. Katherine said she certainly never would marry at all, men were such dreadful creatures, and Molly said, yes, indeed, but what else could a girl marry?—while Edith determined to devote the rest of her life to attending ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... as Andy reached the door amid the gruesome silence and awe of his sympathetic comrades, Mr. Darrow added the final ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... they invariably are disappointed. One lady I met even thought "how delightful" it would be "if the Apaches would only hold up the train!" It failed altogether to occur to her that, in the days when wagon-trains were held up by Apaches, few of those in them escaped to tell the gruesome tale. And yet this estimable lady, fresh from the drawing-rooms of Upper-Radcliffe-on-the-Hudson and the ballroom of Rector's, thought how "delightful" this would be! Ah, fortunate indeed is it that the pluck and ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... a while we were sure of it. The other could not be revived, so we weighted his feet, and let him slide the plank to his watery grave. But that wasn't all—however I guess I won't tell any more. It's downright gruesome, and I've got to go up and take a lookout, for we're likely to have ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... happen in my house, for I think, of all "shop," ours is the most unsuitable for general conversation because of the morbid fascination it has for most people. Ladies especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... account of how the body was found and how further investigation led the constable to the kitchen to make his second gruesome discovery. ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... home to his blood-stained halls a young bride of purest Rajput descent from beyond Nanakpur, who had borne him a son, commonly reported to be the apple of his eye. There had been an elder son, but no one knew whether he was alive or dead, though a gruesome tale was whispered of his father's having ordered his eyes to be torn out. A faithful foster-brother was said to have sacrificed himself to save him, and to have died in the prison after his eyes had been duly exhibited to the Rajah as those of his son, while the prince made his ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... from the door, and asked what news?—I was ower big, and ower vexed to hear her; so, never letting on, I went to the little looking-glass on the drawers' head, and set it down on the table. Then I looked myself in it for a moment, and made a gruesome face. Syne I pulled out the little drawer, and got the sharping strap, the which I fastened to my button. Syne I took my razor from the box, and gave it five or six turns along first one side and then the other, with great precision. Syne I tried the edge of ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... my child! unsay these words that be freighted with death for thee, and ruin for all that be near to thee. Shake of this gruesome dream. Call back thy poor wandering memory. Look upon me. Am not I thy mother that bore ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... than to get possession of that ghastly relic. Since losing his own scalp the subject of crownlocks had grown upon his mind until its fascination was irresistible. He studied the hair of every person he saw, as a physiognomist studies faces. He held the gruesome thing up before him, scrutinizing it with the expression of a connoisseur who has discovered, on a grimy canvas, the signature of an ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... with the head bowed to the knees and the hands clasped in front of them had been absolutely necessary; and the miserable creatures had died and stiffened in this cramped and painful posture; it was gruesome enough, therefore, to see the bodies passed up and thrown overboard in so woeful an attitude; but the worst sight of all was in those cases where, in the dying agony, some unfortunate wretch had writhed his head back until it looked as though the neck ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as he collected the materials for Great Expectations, was afterwards elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... some water, Cricket. Oh, baby, speak to me," poor frightened Eunice cried, half beside herself at the gruesome sight of the baby's white, still face, and that dreadful blood welling up so fast, and staining everything with its vivid red. Cricket flew to the edge of the beach, dipping water up in the crown of her sailor hat. She tore off her soft ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... of that gruesome weapon, more frightful than the unsheathed claws of the royalest Bengal tiger, hanging over the head of his chosen among women, stung Dick Bellamy to very unceremonious removal of the body, which, after rifling it ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... however, the play was growing scene by scene. In the lone hours of the night he spun upon the loom of his fancy a brilliant weft of swift desire—heavy, perfumed, Oriental—interwoven with bits of gruesome tenderness. The thread of his own life intertwined with the thread of the story. All genuine art is autobiography. It is not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but of a myriad of ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... near-by slopes of gray rocks scantily covered with yellow-green grass. All was bare, wild, desolate, and drear. The wind continued to whirl down over the divide, carrying torn gray masses of vapor which cast a gloomy half light across the gruesome little meadow covered with rotting carcasses and crates of bones which filled the air with odor of disease ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... burying the dead. But from the looks of the field the task seemed difficult. In the little clusters of bushes, behind trees, in gullies, and in every conceivable place that seemed to offer shelter, lay the dead. What a shudder thrills the whole frame when you stand and contemplate the gruesome faces of the battle's dead. In every posture and all positions, with every conceivable shade of countenance, the glaring, glassy eyes meet you. Some lay as they fell, stretched full length on the ground; others show a desperate struggle for the last few remaining breaths. There ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... series of blood-curdling yells broke from the direction of the corral, and they stopped. But Clarence at once recognized the well-known war-whoop imitation of Jim Hooker,—infinitely more gruesome and appalling than the genuine aboriginal challenge. A half dozen shots fired in quick succession had ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... know, in theory, how to make The matutinal tea and coffee, And, when at school, I used to bake A gruesome mess described as toffee; But these, which form my whole cuisine, Are scarce the kind of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... reached the bottom of the valley, the moon peered up over its edge. He had never seen the moon before—except in the daytime, when he had taken her for a thin bright cloud. She was a fresh terror to him—so ghostly! so ghastly! so gruesome!—so knowing as she looked over the top of her garden-wall upon the world outside! That was the night itself! the darkness alive—and after him! the horror of horrors coming down the sky to curdle his blood, and turn his brain to a cinder! He gave a sob, and made straight for the river, ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... Telly buff endorsed the more sadistic of the fictional and nonfictional programs presented him. Even in the earliest years of the industry, producers had found that murder and mayhem, war and frontier gunfights, took precedence over less gruesome subjects. Music was drowned out by gunfire, the dance replaced by the shuffle of cowboy and rustler advancing down a dusty street toward each other, their fingertips brushing the grips of their six-shooters, the comedian's ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... and lay a short distance away from the other remains, the eyes staring wide open with a startled, horrified look in them. The place was considerably cut up, and on closer examination we found that two lions had been there and had probably struggled for possession of the body. It was the most gruesome sight I had ever seen. We collected the remains as well as we could and heaped stones on them, the head with its fixed, terrified stare seeming to watch us all the time, for it we did not bury, but took back to camp for identification before ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... was embarrassed again—"it is considerable. I have barbed wire fencing, and—other arrangements. You see, it is a lonely spot," he added apologetically. "And now, if you will excuse me, we will resume these gruesome inquiries after the more pleasant ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... residence from without, looked at some of the famous paintings in the art gallery, then shuddered over the instruments of torture on exhibition in the "Torture Chamber" found in the old prison. There were some gruesome articles here. ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... four and a half centuries later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing typical. There may never have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the particularly gruesome way described—probably there never was; but, in listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt her word—the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian regarded the Jew ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... interpretation of Duty. We are not sure that his own optimistic doctrine did not play him the same tyrannical trick, by sealing his eyes to at least one half of the actualities of nature and the gruesome possibilities of things. It had no unimportant effect on Emerson's thought that he was born in a new world that had cut itself loose from old history. The black and devious ways through which the race has marched are not real in North America, as they are to us in old Europe, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... moment in the successful effort to maintain a poetic equilibrium. Then he began pouring forth volumes of shattered French, English and Arabic sentiment, accompanied by facial contortions so intense that they were little less than gruesome. ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had lived through in ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... when he came forth to start for the Platte was a gruesome sight. "He looked," said the unfeeling linesman, after he'd gone, "as though he'd seen ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... his wings and flew away, but soon returned to his gruesome feast. His followers, made bold by their leader, floated down into the glade. Their black feathers shone in the sun. They hopped over the moss; they stretched their grizzled necks, and ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... in question have been laid out in a small artificial lake fed by a tiny streamlet which forms one of the numerous tributaries of the River Cray. Its depth is greater than is usual in watercress-beds, otherwise the gruesome relics could never have been concealed beneath its surface, and the flow of water through it, though continuous, is slow. The tributary streamlet meanders through a succession of pasture meadows, in one of which the beds themselves are ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... tends to rob the glory from anything to analyze it into its parts and study the natural causes that produced it. The loveliest painting is but a mess of pigments to the microscope, the loveliest face but a mess of cells and hairs and blood vessels. There is something gruesome and inhuman about embryology and all other ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... not have been paid to this gruesome tale had it not been repeated to various people during the course of several months. The boy wrote letters reiterating these incidents. His stories always went on to include the most surprising amount of abuse. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... than Olga Loschek had been in comprehending his surroundings. His old eyes at first saw little but the table and its candles in their gruesome holders. But when he saw the Committee his heart failed. Here, embodied before him, was everything he had loathed during all his upright and loyal years anarchy, murder, treason. His face worked. The cords in his neck stood out like strings drawn ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... children can read for themselves, they will take from their stories what suits their stage of development, their standard of judgement, and we need not interfere, even though they regard with perfect calm what seems gruesome to the adult. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... are right," answered the young man. "Things are not often so serious as they are supposed to be. It's like being in a house that's supposed to be haunted—on All Hallow E'en, for instance—it's awfully gruesome and creepy at night when the wind moans and the owls screech. And then, the next morning, one wonders how one could have been such an idiot. Other things are often like that. You think the world's coming to an end—and then it doesn't, you know. ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... which the naked corpses are laid, and no sooner are they there than the awaiting vultures descend and consume the flesh. I saw these grisly birds sitting expectantly in rows on the coping of the towers, and the sight was almost too gruesome. Such is their voracity that the body is a skeleton in an hour or so. The Parsees choose this method of dissolution because since they worship fire they must not ask it to demean itself with the dead; and ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... that once had received me as a guest and that sheltered the fairest eyes that had ever gazed in mine. And now I was to appear before that house as the bearer of ill-tidings. Ah, duty often wears a gruesome countenance; yet it is a sign of courage to face this duty down, and I sat more firmly in my saddle and rode nearer to the High Sheriff. He was a stern and determined man; he was short of stature, stout of frame, and sat his powerful horse like the fox-hunter that he was. ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... the trips their flagpole and staff, which was put up on a high point, called Observation Hill, was missing. Later on a gruesome skeleton was found on the seashore not far from Observation Hill, and the wrecked portions of a boat, and to this may be added the discovery of a lifeboat, similar to their own, among debris on South ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... large relief on the L. wall from the old church of St. Jacques de la Boucherie, 199, is an excellent example of transitional Franco-Italian sculpture; and the half-reclining bronze effigy of Prince Carpi from the great Franciscan church (the Cordeliers) of Paris, is wholly Italian in style. The gruesome figure, La Mort, in the embrasure of a window, from the old cemetery of Les Innocents, and a fine bust, 173, of John of Alesso, will also be noted. We pass to Room IV., dominated by the most eminent sculptor of the French renaissance, Jean Goujon (? 1520-1567), whose famous Diana and the Stag, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the saints, and no larger than they. Next to the silk-enveloped head of St. John the Great Sufferer, which still projects as in life, when he buried himself to the neck in the earth,—as though he were not sufficiently underground already,—in order to preserve his purity, the most gruesome sight which we beheld in those dim catacombs was a group of chrism-exuding skulls of unknown saints, under ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... theatrical—unjustly; for even though we regard the play as but the scenic representation of the incidents of a night, the representation is of absorbing interest and is entirely free from the crudities which make Muellner's dramas more gruesome than dramatic. But Grillparzer nevertheless resolved that his next play should dispense with all adventitious aids and should take as simple a form and style as he could give it. A friend chanced to suggest ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Ainsworth, I insisted on calling the documents connected with this, "death-warrants." I begged and implored my father to let me see a "death-warrant." He told me that there was nothing to see, but I went on insisting, until one day he told me that I might see one of these gruesome documents. To avoid any misplaced sympathy with the condemned man, I may say that it was a peculiarly brutal murder. A man at Cork had kicked his wife to death, and had then battered her into a shapeless mass with the poker. I went into my father's study on the tip-toe of expectation. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... sage-brush on the hearth laid ready for lighting. I touched a match to it, and Kitty dropped on her knees in front of its riotous warmth and glow. Suddenly she sprang up and stared about her, sniffing and catching her breath. I had noticed it too; it fairly took one by the throat, the gruesome odor. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Opium dens flourish as a matter of course, for opium and Chinese are synonymous words. You can tell an opium fiend as far as you can see him; his face looks like wet parchment stretched over a skull and dried, making a truly gruesome sight. Every ship that comes into the bay from the Orient is searched for opium, and quantities of it are found hidden away under the planking, or in other places less likely to be detected by the sharp-eyed officials. When found it is ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... formed a weird contrast to the other two. This one was lean, bent, and twisted like a gnarled tree that had been starved and warped in the forest. His dress was alike native, but the grotesque ornaments of animals' skulls, tails, dried monkeys' hands, and other gruesome relics gave the wearer an appearance that was repulsive to Saxon eyes. This freak of figure and dress was Thunder-maker, the great Medicine Man of the tribe. Without his presence no state conclave was complete; without his opinion no tribal law or ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... out of his pocket, and, a propos to one of his own remarks, began to read a highly decorated account of the fearful injuries under which the last victim of the last diabolical explosion had been in danger of succumbing. Sir Roger read his gruesome narrative with much emphasis, and as he laid ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... school studies. I cannot pretend to diligence. The passing months found me less frequently in the classroom than in secluded spots along the Calcutta bathing GHATS. The adjoining crematory grounds, especially gruesome at night, are considered highly attractive by the yogi. He who would find the Deathless Essence must not be dismayed by a few unadorned skulls. Human inadequacy becomes clear in the gloomy abode of miscellaneous bones. My midnight vigils were thus of a different ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... little Abe Lincoln had no idea of the White House then. He may never have heard of "the President's Palace," as it used to be called—for the White House was then a gruesome, blackened ruin, burned by the British in the War of 1812. President Madison was living in a rented house nearby, while the Executive Mansion was being restored. The blackened stone walls, left standing after the fire, were painted white, and on that account the President's mansion came ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... built on the edge of the camp at Bazoilles. I saw it on my afternoon trip and knew that the report was true. Being interested in the psychology of such a scene on the men present, I put aside my inward rebellion at so gruesome a sight and arranged my trip so as to be present. I reached the camp at nine forty-five and was the last man admitted. The gallows was built in the center of the semicircle facing two hills which came abruptly together, leaving a large grass plot at their base. This formed ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... come through the door after bearing out one of their gruesome loads, and the young Indian hurried to his side. He weighed one of the pieces in ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the book, we come to another story by a novelist, this time a man of genius, Charles Dickens. The agreeably gruesome trifle occurs in the essay in The Uncommercial Traveller on 'Nurses' Stories,' and it was told to the little Dickens by a dreadful girl named Sarah, who chilled him also with the dark history of Chips, the ship's carpenter, and the ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... loving daughter Meg when she heard this! What could she do? She could not suffer it to stay there, so she bribed two men and took a boat, and, going down the river, stole her own father's head, and, wrapping it in a cloth, returned with her gruesome burden to Chelsea, where she is said to have buried it in the church. Can you picture anything more awful than the task ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... deviltry began. Mr. Mostyn found himself wholly unable to sleep. Many relics have curious histories, and the experienced archaeologist becomes callous to that uncanniness which seems to attach to some gruesome curios. But the slipper of the Prophet was different. No mere ghostly menace threatened its holders; an avenging scimitar followed those who came in contact with it; gruesome tragedies, mutilations, murders, had marked its ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... general opinion of the Boche among the British troops is that he is only good at one thing, and that is destroying other people's property. One of Mr. Punch's correspondents writes to say that while the flattened villages and severed fruit trees are a gruesome spectacle, for him "all else was forgotten in speechless admiration of the ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... burning. Lady Caroom leaned back in her chair with an indrawn sobbing breath. The action at such a moment seemed grotesque. His own coolness, whilst with steady fingers he probed away amongst the wounded places of his life, was in itself gruesome. ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... brave jackals! Come to the feast prepared for thee." She lowered her hand and with a contemptuous smile indicated the gruesome results of the ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... out of your chosen home by suggestion. No real ghost is required. Having selected the house you pay a call and lay ground-bait, so to speak. You tell the tenant you are interested in the place because you happen to know that at one time it was haunted. You relate a gruesome tale of some mysterious tragedy that you say has occurred there, and generally make your ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... beneath. He counted fifty Arabs and estimated that there were five times as many Manyuema. The latter were gorging themselves upon food and, under the very noses of their white masters, preparing the gruesome feast which is the PIECE DE RESISTANCE that follows a victory in which the bodies of their slain enemies ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be two weeks to-morrow since I dined with Judge Howe, the postmaster-general, going out to the table with him, and here he is dead! Poor Arthur, he will find the Presidency more gruesome with a favourite cabinet minister gone! If it were Folger now, I suppose he would not care, for they really do not know what to do with him."—Mrs. James G. Blaine, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... agonies. Many victims are credibly reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the nameless cruelties in which these human fiends reveled. One gruesome picture of the less loathsome scenes enacted will live in history on a level with the noyades of Nantes. I have seen several moving descriptions of it in Russian journals. The following account is from the pen ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... say, was his bride to see, And wilful she must have been, That she could bide at his gruesome side When the first red ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... only about two minutes, because his spirit came upon him, and he fell down upon one knee, unable to rise. I never saw a more gruesome spectacle. A bright unnatural light gleamed in his eyes, his countenance became livid, the eyeballs protruded, a copious perspiration streamed from his body, the muscles of his face twitched, and his whole frame shook ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... he liked, free to speculate on its pictures and engravings; to rummage the immense collection of china in the basement rooms which no one but himself ever looked at; to examine some new corner of the muniment-room, and to ponder the strange and gruesome collection of death-masks, made by Coryston's grandfather, and now ranged in one of the annexes of the library—gave him endless entertainment. He was a born student, in whom the antiquarian instincts would perhaps ultimately overpower ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... currents in those seas are strange and gruesome. Even as they lay, apparently motionless, with the sea as smooth as oil all round them, there came a sudden turmoil, and they were in a wild race of waters, with bubbling coils and swirls and frothing gouts of foam from rocks that lay ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... species, must have originally escaped from Zoological Gardens and travelling beast shows. "Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools, Trafalgar Square," was one of the most notable and characteristic of his studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of "Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street." There were also photographs of the large canvas on which he had been engaged for some months, and which he was now endeavouring to sell to some enterprising dealer or adventurous amateur. The subject was "Hyaenas asleep ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... strain for longer hours than that. The night operators will have a cot for the one off duty, so that if anything unusual happens the waking one can call the other. I think it must be doleful to stay alone in such a place during those gruesome night hours. I couldn't have ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... them, and beside was an ink-bottle of the commonest type, the ink in powder and flakes. He took up one of the sheets. It had a great stain on it. The bottle must have been overturned! But was it ink? No; it stood too thick on the paper. With a gruesome shiver Donal wetted his finger and tried the surface of it: a little came off, a tinge of suspicious brown. There was writing on the paper! What was it? He held the faded lines close to the candle. They were not difficult to decipher. He sat down on the stool, and read thus—his reading ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... home with all of Gordon's weight behind it. The stranger's jaw buckled and gave beneath that shattering impact. Then abruptly his entire face crumpled into distorted ruin. Gordon staggered back a step in sheer horror at the gruesome result of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... because he happened to have had the experience himself. He dreamt of a wax-work show. The classical writers stood there, elegantly represented in wax and beads. Their arms and eyes moved, and a screw inside them creaked an accompaniment to their movements. He saw something gruesome among them—a misshapen figure, decked with tapes and jaundiced paper, out of whose mouth a ticket hung, on which "Lessing" was written. My friend went close up to it and learned the worst: it was the Homeric Chimera; in front it was Strauss, behind it was Gervinus, and in the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the water ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the door and picked up the gander and, whirling it around his head, dashed it violently at the one candle which was thus knocked over and extinguished, leaving the room in darkness but for a few smouldering embers on the hearth, and with the gruesome addition to the company of what two of those present believed to be the severed head of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... his wife. "It was gruesome to hear her. She made me look up to see if there was really any one there; and she wasn't speaking to our Lady either. Art sure she is a child ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... in normal size, with the wrecked dome-laboratory around us. The dome had a great jagged hole halfway up one of its sides, through which the snow was falling. The broken bodies strewn around were gruesome. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... meant he was badly frozen and probably out of his mind before he got back to the shack. He wasn't able to keep up a fire, of course, or do anything for himself—and I suppose the poor boy simply froze to death. He was alone there, and it was weeks and weeks before his body was found. But the most gruesome part of it all is that his horses had been stabled, tied up in their stalls without feed. They were all found dead, poor brutes. They'd even eaten the wooden boards the mangers were built of. Hugh Cochrane couldn't get over it, and was going to sell the ranch for fourteen ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... instruction because it is gruesome, or because it may seem like intimidation, is sentimentalism: in this matter, as elsewhere in the realm of knowledge, the truth should scare no one who does not need to be scared. It is better to be safe than sorry; and ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... football days, if he had ever had any, were long past, had gone down with a crash, and remained on the pavement, motionless. Fenn was conscious of an ignoble impulse to fly without stopping to chat about the matter. Then he was seized with a gruesome fear that he had injured the man seriously, which vanished when the stranger sat up. His first words were hardly of the sort that one would listen to from choice. His first printable expression, which did not escape him until he ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... my eyes—been snow-blind twice; look where my foot's half gone; And that gruesome scar on my left cheek where the frost-fiend bit to the bone. Each one a brand of this devil's land, where I've played and I've lost the game, A broken wreck with a craze for 'hooch,' and never ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... passion, he certainly was, but his position in the world was a counselling spouse, jealous of his good name. He did not regret his proposal to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if taken. On the safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... old, abandoned cemetery. It was nearly in the heart of the town, yet by night it was as gruesome a place as the most dismal of human moods could crave. The railings about the plats were prostrate, decayed, or altogether gone. Many of the graves were sunken, from others grew sturdy pines, whose roots had committed unspeakable sin. The headstones ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... trumpets recalling us," said St. Clair. "The men have finished the gruesome task. I want you to know, Mr. Mason, that we bear you no animosity, and we're quite sure that you ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... next morning was a gruesome one, and it was a most pathetic sight to watch the drivers, with tears running down their cheeks, bidding a last farewell to their lost charges before burial, for the men become exceedingly attached to their four-legged comrades, especially when they have had charge of them for a ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... eyes well open, having been admitted to the temple by a young priest, who, carrying a taper, led him through several winding passages. A man could get into this gruesome building and never find his way out, thought Alyrus, and though a brave chieftain in his own country, he shivered here in the black corridors, echoing ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... while Pan was away for a few hours deer hunting, Wiggate's men, accompanied by Blinky, attended to the gruesome detail of burying ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that I'm too ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... contradiction in terms involved in speaking of "Christian warfare." Few theologians or churchmen have dared to swim against the stream. In his admirable book La Guerre infernale,[58] Gustave Dupin has pilloried gruesome specimens of militarist Christianity. Nicolai gives other samples, which it would be a pity to leave unrecorded. In 1915, Professor Baumgarten, a Kiel theologian, placidly pointed out that there is opposition between the morality of bellicose nationalism and the morality of the Sermon ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... part faire une visite." And the ladies would be welcome. This is to take the most savage of Polynesians; take some of the most civilised. In Honolulu, convicts labour on the highways in piebald clothing, gruesome and ridiculous; and it is a common sight to see the family of such an one troop out, about the dinner hour, wreathed with flowers and in their holiday best, to picnic with their kinsman on the public ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me of you in the night, howadji," pursued Najib, taking from the soiled folds of his abieh a large old volume, bound in stout leather, after the manner of religious or scientific books of a half-century ago. On the brown back a scratched gold lettering proclaimed the gruesome title: ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... said—"Here at last is our opportunity for gratifying our natural taste in colours. It will probably be of but short duration. Therefore let us select a combination of all the most brilliant tints and wear them, for who knows how soon that gruesome pall of woe may again ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... the sinister and repulsive figure of Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that she saw the monster who sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who reveled like some arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected another tune ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... business lay moored on the river ready to carry him that last sad journey to the Tower; and sadder still, to bring back the devoted daughter when the execution was accomplished, and later also when she bore her gruesome burden of a father's head, said to have been buried with her ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... almost close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal of the Bazaar—since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after making ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... apart, and each side had developed a strong and elaborate system of defense. One flank was protected by an impassable marsh and the other by the river. When we passed, the field presented an unusually gruesome appearance even for a battle-field, for the wandering desert Arabs had been at work, and they do not clean up as thoroughly as the African hyena. A number had paid the penalty through tampering ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... he had roused in Alison, Mr. Hadley found that suspicion of his own folly develop into a gruesome conviction. It compelled him to labour with Sir John vehemently until that blundering knight consented to wait before exploding his alarms upon Lady Waverton. Even as the first blundering remonstrances had irritated Alison's wanton will into passionate resolution, so this ensuing vacillation ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism, which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect shall be paid to our ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... stout ropes to rings fixed in the rafters of the barn. Their heads dangled from the slip-knots. The one against which Perenna had struck was still moving slightly and the bones clicked together with a gruesome sound. ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... alone. I had reasons to believe I had solved it. I found the Rhamda and the Nervina. I had iron will and courage—also strength. The Rhamda was never able to control me. My life is gone but not my will. Now I have left him another. Do not surrender, Harry. It is a gruesome task; but hold on to the end. Help me up the steps. There now. Just wait a minute till I fetch ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... abruptly turned up. The head is large, the eyes deeply embedded in their sockets, and the animal has the power of protruding and withdrawing the head much more extensively developed than usual. The "death's head" staring from beneath the dome-shaped back gives to the animal a most gruesome aspect. These details are supplied by the master of a beche-de-mer schooner, to whom all the nooks and corners of the Great Barrier Reef and of the other Coral Sea beyond, from New Guinea to New Caledonia, are familiar. He says that the species, as ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... possess this gruesome accomplishment; he could somehow make a blood-curdling click with his jawbone. When he did it in "prep." his neighbours smote him on the head with dictionaries, and when he repeated the performance in the dormitory, fellows rose in their beds and ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... the original version of a book by Paracelsus. I have not read it yet, for the writing is most difficult to decipher, but one point caught my eye on turning over the pages. That is the gruesome fact that Paracelsus fed the homunculi he manufactured on human blood. One wonders how he ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... he had subjects and treasures and a borough. The son of Beanstan performed faithfully all that he had pledged himself to. So I expect for thee a worse fatality,—though thou hast everywhere prevailed in rush of battle,—gruesome war,—if thou darest await Grendel at close quarters for ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... artist's eye the gem of the building is undoubtedly the fine grouping and ensemble of the flying buttresses at the rear of the choir. Most persons, so gifted, have tried their prentice, or their master, hands at depicting this grand marshalled array of "folded wings," and, but for the gruesome morgue at its foot, which ever intrudes into the view, one might almost say it is the most idyllic and most specious view of a great cathedral that it were possible to have. Were it not for this charming view of these ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... where the Peace Congresses are held, observed Queen Wilhelmina's residence from without, looked at some of the famous paintings in the art gallery, then shuddered over the instruments of torture on exhibition in the "Torture Chamber" found in the old prison. There were some gruesome articles here. ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... the morose but rather dressy foreigner who resides in a cage on the verandah. Miss Ropes, who owns him and ought to know, says he is a Grey Cardinal, but neither his voracious appetite for caterpillars nor his gruesome manner of assimilating them are in the least dignified or ecclesiastical. It takes the unremitting efforts of Miss Ropes and the entire available strength of convalescent officers (after deducting the players of bridge, the stalkers of rabbits ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... old Greeks, there lay far to the west, in the ocean, a wonderful island where were kept, under the guard of a gruesome dragon, the beautiful golden apples which Gaea gave as a wedding present to Zeus. The Hesperides were the three daughters of Night, who ruled the guardian dragon. These golden apples, then, came to be known as the apples of Hesperides. When Hercules ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... deposited a white crust on the margins. Nielsen, kicking around in the sand, unearthed a skull, bleached and yellow, yet evidently not so very old. Some thirsty wanderer had taken his last drink at that deceiving spring. The gruesome and the beautiful, the tragic and the sublime, go hand in hand down the naked shingle ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... know was that I had been much troubled about her and was anxious to help her. I went into a very heavy, deep sleep; but until next morning, when I heard of it from Mrs. C. I had no idea that my double had left my room." I said, "This power is rather gruesome, for you might take to haunting me." "I do not think so, unless there was something to be gained which could not be otherwise secured, some benefit to be conferred upon you." "That is to say, if I were in trouble ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... stake sent physical pains tingling down the nerves of my body; and yet, turn as I would, my eyes would keep coming back t it, such fascination has the gruesome and the terrible ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... tarried at this gruesome scene only for a moment. They wished only to make sure that the two Spaniards were really out of the fight, and when they saw the Iowa was going to stand by both, away they went to join the race between the Brooklyn and the Oregon on our side, and ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... and such like matters, and gave me cake and cocoa; a delicious repast I thought it. And so, while crushed and beaten London lay sleeping off its exhaustion, I slept under Constance Grey's roof, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... thousands go annually upon pilgrimages. One of the most gruesome spectacles to be found anywhere is in a side room near the altar. From the ceiling are suspended wax and plaster of paris reproductions called ex-votos of literally every portion of the body—feet, hands, limbs, heads, all portions—the ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... the dead. He did so, and found the money; but in nailing on the coffin lid again, a part of his soutane was fastened down with it. The priest turned to go, advanced a step, and, being suddenly held, dropped dead with fright. These gruesome stories were happily followed by an hour or two of song and pleasantry in Mr. McKenna's tent, ending in "Auld Lang Syne" and "God Save the Queen." It was a unique occasion in which to wind up so laborious a day; and our camp itself was unique—on a lofty bluff ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... floor of the office lay a charred, shapeless, unrecognisable mass. What was that gruesome odour in the room? Burned human flesh? I recoiled from what had once been the ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... distended limbs, the bleeding wound in His side, the face smeared with bloody sweat and dust, the torn brow and hair, and the swollen features, must have combined with all the horrible surroundings to make one of the most gruesome sights that ever man saw. And it was at this moment, in His extremity, that He says: "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." "Father, I have done all that I can do; now I leave Myself and ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... would be hard to say how deeply this ballad, wedded to its wailing music, touches and moves a Manxman. Even to my ear as I have heard it in Manx, it has seemed to be one of the weirdest things in old ballad literature, only to be matched by some of the old Irish songs, and by the gruesome ditty which tells how "the sun ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... for which Loomis has struck out a superb frenzy, and a group of songs by John Vance Cheney, Loomis has found some of his most powerful inspirations in the work of our lyrist, Aldrich,—such as the rich carillon of "Wedded," and his "Discipline," one of the best of all humorous songs, a gruesome scherzo all about dead monks, in which the music furnishes out the grim irreverence of the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... dead Marine, and beside him stood a French surgeon, who greeted them warmly. The wounded were in a cellar, and if they were not got out soon, it was obvious that they would be burned alive. Inside the hall were piles of bicycles, loaves of bread, and dead soldiers, all in gruesome confusion. In the cellar dead and wounded were lying together. The wounded had all to be carried on stretchers, for everyone who could crawl had fled from that ghastly inferno, and only those who have shifted wounded on stretchers can appreciate the courage it requires to do it under shell fire. ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... themselves the result of a knowledge of Greek art and myth.[849] Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the Roman religion ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... demons and witches—a "Sabbath," as it was called—and here were recounted all the evil deeds of the past year, and here the witches saw and conversed with the devil himself, and received their instructions from him. It would be almost impossible to conceive a more grotesque and gruesome picture than some of these Sabbaths were supposed to be: every impossible and inconceivable thing that man's mind could invent was apparently attributed to these meetings. In order to form some faint idea of men's ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... their spirits at the very highest pitch of exhilaration, and their nerves by so much the steadier, and such rapid progress did they make that ten minutes later saw them clustered together clinging to the rocky pinnacle before mentioned. And a gruesome-enough looking spot it was—a sharp projecting point of rock overhanging a sheer precipice some two hundred feet deep, with a narrow snow-bank immediately beneath, and then another frightful abyss of unknown depth beyond. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... "What a perfectly gruesome subject for tea-table talk," he said lightly, and beckoned the head-waiter. "You are keeping ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... a pit—and it seemed to be a natural cavity, with nothing remarkable about it. But I turned my attention to the floor, which felt curiously soft and greasy to the touch. It was strewn with pieces of human bones and skulls! The gruesome place weighed rather upon me, I confess, silent and stifling as it was, but having come to explore I proceeded to excavate lightly in the yielding material of the floor with a light pick. The singular nature of this material aroused ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... SPATULATE-LEAVED SUNDEW (D. intermedia) and the THREAD-LEAVED SUNDEW (D. filiformis) whose purplish-pink flowers are reared above wet sand along the coast, possess contrivances similar to the round-leaved plant's to pursue their gruesome business. Why should these vegetables turn carnivorous? Doubtless because the soil in which they grow can supply little or no nitrogen. Very small roots testify to the small use they serve. The water sucked up through them from the bog ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... upon his chum, for Hugh laughed merrily at the gruesome picture Thad drew of his complete subjugation to the wiles of ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... thought that could not but be fraught with some terror to the boy, who knew that he had been instrumental in hiding the threatened monk, and that if by some gruesome chance the secret were to be discovered, their bitter enemy would make it an excuse for prosecuting his malicious and covetous purpose towards Chad with redoubled ardour, and with every prospect of ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... water and dragon-flies hummed on their great stiff wings. Up on the surface the lake was clear as a mirror. But whether we wished it or not, we had to run right down by the bottom, where it was dark and gruesome. And this I could not endure. I longed for the sunbeams. I knew them so well from the time I used to run in the brook. There they used to peep down through the leaves and pass over me in fleeting gleams. I longed so much to see them again that I stole up to ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... heads into our Throne Room, making all that horrible mess! It's a piece of bad taste which, perhaps—in an under gardener—please have them removed directly. Well, young man," she continued to the indignant Mirliflor, who, it need not be said, had nothing to do with the gruesome introduction of the heads, "I'm sure we are all very much obliged to you—very much obliged indeed. If you hadn't come forward as you did, it's dreadful to think what might have happened. And, though it seems you did take the liberty of borrowing the Crown Prince's sword without permission, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... mouth had been open, the nostrils of her fine little nose had quivered. Hans Fuellenberg was correct in his observation that her eyes, as she held her head back, had been closed. The second time, she seemed to be drawn against her will by a gruesome something, which alternately aroused fear, horror, and curiosity. She held her eyes wide open, and now and then covered them with both hands, as if in ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... was able to reassure them with the statement that Captain Vavassour would undoubtedly take immediate steps to have it found and restored to them. Having done which, and excused myself upon the plea of urgent business— coupled with a suggestion that the ladies should remain below until the more gruesome evidences of the recent conflict could be effaced—I hurried away to the other end of the ship and effected the release of her officers and crew, who at once ascended to the deck and assisted our own lads to put matters to rights. Fortunately, there ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... nothing especially gruesome or repellent about the corpse. It was the body of a man of about fifty years of age, with a pronounced brick-red complexion, and a lofty brow, the height of which was increased by premature baldness. Long, fair moustaches drooped from the upper lip almost ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... burdening themselves with queer weights on their backs, now invaded the wilderness which they and their fathers had roamed untrammeled for centuries. The invaders in turn studied the faces of the Mayorunas, of whom so many gruesome tales were told. For long silent minutes primitive and civilized man probed each other for signs of ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... a collection of spear-heads, gruesome execution knives, elephant swords, and wonder-working ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... carriers were coming along. The little group passed up the road, Tom pushing his wheel and answering their questions briefly and soberly as he always did. Planks had been laid across the German trenches where they intersected the road and as they passed over them Tom looked down upon many a gruesome sight which evidenced the surprise by the Americans and their undoubted victory. Not a live German was to be seen, nor a dead American either, but here and there a fallen gray-coat lay sprawled in the crooked topsy-turvy ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... One speak to-day?" Bassett asked, by this time so accustomed to the old man's gruesome occupation as to take even an interest in ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... as he did so she raised her head with a blush and an invitation in her eyes, and he kissed her on the lips. "See here, dearest," he said, "your first dance! And as many as you will give me afterward. Did I ever mention that I was jealous? Nell, I inform you of the gruesome fact now; and that I shall endure agonies every time I see you dancing ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... a gruesome sight. At the head of the column of doolies and stretchers were the bodies of the killed, each tied with cords upon a mule. Their heads dangled on one side and their legs on the other. The long black hair of the Sikhs, which streamed down to the ground, and was draggled with ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... rude, unskilled, and illiterate, shunning as profane the Christian churches of the land, and bowing in unknown rites as devotees of a system known, and by no means favorably known, only through polemic literature and history, and through the gruesome traditions of Puritan and Presbyterian and Huguenot, was an impression not far removed from horror; and this impression was deepened as the enormous proportions of this invasion disclosed themselves from year to year. The ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... afternoon he spent in trying to lower the army's confidence by telling all the gruesome stories of Indian warfare he could think of; but he frightened himself a great deal more than them, and at last had to abandon the ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... mechanics had felt sure some disaster would overtake me. But, as it happened, their anticipations were not fulfilled. The journalists and photographers did not, however, have a fruitless journey. Though there was nothing gruesome to chronicle, they found ample material, when they learned of them, in the early morning adventures of myself and my friend with this 60 h.p. monoplane. Next day, in fact, our exploits were given prominence in the newspapers, and I received a number of congratulatory telegrams; not forgetting one ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... Yggdrasil when, growing suddenly faint, she loosed her hold and dropped to the ground beneath, and down to the lowest depths of Nifl-heim. There she lay, pale and motionless, gazing with fixed and horror-struck eyes upon the gruesome sights of Hel's realm, trembling violently the while, like one overcome by ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... terrible crime he was led to commit at the instigation of that human viper, Queen Caroline, and the licentious Emma Hamilton. He, to some extent, whittles down Nelson's share of the responsibility by putting the whole blame on them. But who can read the gruesome story of the trial and hanging of the aged Prince Carraciolli without feeling ashamed that a fellow-countryman in Nelson's position should have stamped his career with so dark a crime? At the capitulation of St. Elmo, Carraciolli made his escape. He commanded a Neapolitan warship called the Tancredi, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... overhead had shut them from his ears, he stood there, with puckered brows and pursed-up lips, drumming with his finger-tips a faint tattoo upon the framework of the shattered lid; then he walked over to the skeleton case, and silently regarded the gruesome thing within. ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... the Samurai,—the Art of Death which makes our soldiers exult in self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism, which represents so much of our Art of Life. Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilisation were to be based on the gruesome glory of war. Fain would we await the time when due respect shall be paid to our ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... that were drawn from the very earth increased in the gun and spumed out like lightning bolts. The Things squeaked excitedly and surged forward. Asher's finger pulled the ratchet trigger full force, and like dew before a strong shaft of sunlight, the gruesome Things were ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Zyobite and an almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the water ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... and answered: "Two days ago we did a portage on the Albany, and came, at camping time, upon the gruesome spectacle of two skeletons lying side by side under a little shelter formed of snowshoes and spruce boughs. We supposed that they must have been the Indians dispatched from Maxohama months ago with mails, only there were no mail bags, ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... upon them, but their bodies were saved from harm. For their beauty was no wise injured, nor was any harm come upon their garments, nor their hair singed by the fire, but in God's protection they came forth gladly from that gruesome horror, wise of heart and favoured by ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... dead, and one could have walked all over it on their bodies. Gen. Grant, in substance, makes the same statement in his Memoirs. It was a fearful sight. But not far from the Peach Orchard field, in a westerly direction, was a still more gruesome spectacle. Some of our forces were in line on an old, grass-grown country road that ran through thick woods. The wheels of wagons, running for many years right in the same ruts, had cut through the turf, so that the surface of the road was somewhat lower than the adjacent ground. To men ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... the lower jaw series at Teddington, which is also, in all probability, the only instance of a man's nightcap figuring in such gruesome circumstances. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... der tip-toes, en dey'll set dar en run over de ole times wid one er n'er, en crack der jokes same ez dey useter. En den ag'in," continued the old man, shutting his eyes and giving to his voice a gruesome intonation quite impossible to describe,—"en den ag'in hit look lak dat Brer Rabbit'll gin de wink all 'roun', en den dey'll tu'n in en git up a reg'lar juberlee. Brer Rabbit, he'll retch up en take down de trivet, en Brer Fox, he'll snatch up de griddle, en Brer B'ar, he'll ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... even printed verses upon her genius. In a letter to Wieck, in 1833, he says, "It is easy to write to you, but I do not feel equal to write to Clara." She was still, however, the child to him; the child whom he used to frighten with his gruesome ghost-stories, especially of his "Doppelgaenger," a name, Clara afterwards took to herself. Child as she was, he watched her with something of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... to fear. Penarvon here has all the pluck in the world. Hinckley is a V.C. Captain Vandermere is a soldier, and I will answer for it that he has no nerves. Guerdon and I, I am sure, are safe. Let us hear your gruesome prophecy, my dear Saton, and if it comes true, we will form a little society, and you shall be our apostle. We will study occultism in place of bridge. We will be the founders ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was leisurely coming down National pike from Jane Aydelot's, an' it was gettin' late, an' no cheerful plate nor job in a crowd in sunshiny weather, let alone there in the dusk of the evening. Wow! I dreamt of that there gruesome thing two weeks. I throwed the shovel in the crick. Would you like me to show you where to go to dig, so's you can be sure your plan with Tank Shirley worked and you didn't drown, after all? And are you sure you ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... beyond death's gloomy gate Shall fade away the mists that hide The gruesome and the nobly great, Borne ever on by time and tide. This from thy book of fate alone A liberated soul may tell thee: Perish thou shalt by deed thine own, And yet a ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... taken. The front-line trenches were but a short distance apart, and each side had developed a strong and elaborate system of defense. One flank was protected by an impassable marsh and the other by the river. When we passed, the field presented an unusually gruesome appearance even for a battle-field, for the wandering desert Arabs had been at work, and they do not clean up as thoroughly as the African hyena. A number had paid the penalty through tampering with unexploded grenades and "dud" shells, and left their own bones to be ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... way, like an elephant over egg-shells. Her household did her one service, at least, in return for their maintenance, and that was to provide the old lady with an audience. It was in no sense an unwilling service, for her imagination ran to the gruesome, and she never planted a precept but she drove it home with a case in point. As a result night was often shattered by a yell from some sleeper whose dreams had trespassed on devilish domains. The Vrouw Grobelaar believed most entirely in Kafir magic, ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... had resulted in a carnival of blood. Now the colonials, owing to their numbers, were able to get together and to place themselves on the defensive. The fight soon became hand to hand and there ensued one of the most gruesome melees of the whole War of the Revolution. The men were able to look into one another's faces; they fought at quarters too close for bullets, and relied upon gun-stock, knife-blade, and bayonet. There was slashing and cutting, clubbing and throttling, ...
— 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
... things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once. But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war, without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... alive." (Honoria deprecates gratitude.) "No, I don't want money—yet. You made me take and bank L700 last January over that Rio de Palmas coup—heaps more than my share. Altogether I've got about L1,000 on deposit at the C. and C. bank, the Temple Bar branch. I've many gruesome faults, but I am thrifty. I think I can win through to the Bar on that. Of course, if ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the Moon lay buried. And all at once they stopped, quaking and mazed and skeery, for there was the great stone, half in, half out of the water, for all the world like a strange big coffin; and at the head was the black snag, stretching out its two arms in a dark gruesome cross, and on it a tiddy light flickered, like a dying candle. And they all knelt down in the mud, and said, "Our Lord, first forward, because of the cross, and then backward, to keep off the Bogles; but without speaking out, for ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... the gruesome situation dimly. There seemed no longer any good reason for silence, and startled exclamations dropped from the lips ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... sorrows through which they have passed. Such individuals find their chief delight in portraying, in vivid details, the terrific sufferings which they have had to endure. No one has suffered quite so much as they have. They harrow their friends by going over frequently and persistently the long, gruesome details of their "awful" past. This habit is destructive to an extreme degree. Why harbor past experiences that only bring sorrows to mind? Why add to the bitterness of your daily life by dragging up the lamentable past? Why pass ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... arrangement of the room. Why should the horsehair sofa be placed straight against the wall, and those ghastly wax flowers under glass covers adorn the stiff chimneypiece, which might be made so pretty? The memorial cards, that are framed and hung on the wall—how gruesome they appear in the spring sunshine! She longs to pull them down, and burn them, but to do so would be to violate poor Mrs. ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... began a wary journey through the corn. One by one the long aisles between the rows appeared. As they glanced along each of them it seemed as if some gruesome thing had just previously vacated it. Old Peter halted once and whispered: ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... gamester. He did not seem to be enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the gruesome burden. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations. ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Blackbird whistled: "I say, you know, What is the trouble down there below? Are you in sorrow, or pain, or what?" The Frog said: "Mine is a gruesome lot! Nothing but mud, and dirt, and slime, For me to look at the livelong time. 'Tis a dismal world!" so he sadly spoke, And voiced his ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the late lamented Mr. Job," said Bob Dashwood, with a wry face. "But never mind, keep on rubbing. I'm feeling more life in it already. But, I say, Den, this is a weird place we're in. These German fellows don't seem to take their gruel like our chaps. It's a gruesome thing ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... scenes of exquisite tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had a creative imagination ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... It was a grim, gruesome task. Another nameless grave! Neale had already seen nine graves. This one was up the slope not a hundred feet from the ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... It happened that my aunt was on a visit to the Byrons when the poet's body, which was consigned to the Admiral, was brought to London. The Admiral, who lived near Windsor, posted up to receive the barrel of spirits in which the remains were preserved. When he returned from his gruesome visit the ladies of his family, and none more so than my aunt, then a girl of fifteen or sixteen, were very anxious to know what he had seen and what the remains of the most-talked-of man in the Europe of his day looked like. "What did he look like, my dear? ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... in the kitchen when the fray began. She was nearly incoherent with fright; but Felix managed to reassure her, and piloted her skilfully out of the hotel by an exit that concealed the gruesome staircase. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... exhume the skeletons, disarticulate them, and seal the bones in the huge jars of Chinese porcelain which are a Dyak's most prized possession. Sometimes these burial-jars are kept in the family dwelling—a rather gruesome article of furniture to the European mind—but more often they are deposited in a grave-house, a small, fantastically decorated hut or shed which serves as a family vault. But I doubt if any people on the face of the globe have so weird a custom of disposing of their dead as the Kapuas ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Many victims are credibly reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the nameless cruelties in which these human fiends reveled. One gruesome picture of the less loathsome scenes enacted will live in history on a level with the noyades of Nantes. I have seen several moving descriptions of it in Russian journals. The following account is from the pen of a French ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... indiscriminately together like that! . . . Lack of space was no excuse. Millet's "Angelus," "Ally Sloper at the Derby," a splendid lithograph of "The Angel of Pity at the Well of Cawnpore," Lottie Collins, scantily attired, in her song and dance "Tara-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," Sir Frederick Leighton's "Wedded," a gruesome depiction of a Chinese execution at Canton, an old-fashioned engraving of that dashing, debonair cavalry officer, "Major Hodson," of Indian Mutiny fame, George Robey, as a nurse-maid, wheeling Little Tich in a perambulator, the grim, torture-lined face of Slatin Pasha, a ridiculously ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... "Now surely 'tis gruesome To gaze all around. When bloodred through heaven Drives cloudrack o'er head; Air soon shall be deep hued With dying men's blood When this our spaedom ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... Jackal shivered and shook with fear, and when the Crocodile, in a gruesome growl, remarked that he was hungry and wanted a good meal, the wretched creature hadn't ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... without fear of comment from such British visitors as came across them; and they therefore attempted to block up the path of travellers, refusing them a passage through the Republic, and in some instances ordering the expulsion of visitors across the Vaal. About this time one of the most gruesome of all the many massacres in which the Boers were concerned took place. One Potgieter (not the Potgieter who was the rival of Pretorius), in charge of a small party of thirty men, women, and children, went forth to barter ivory unlawfully ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... of vantage looked down upon the savage horde beneath. He counted fifty Arabs and estimated that there were five times as many Manyuema. The latter were gorging themselves upon food and, under the very noses of their white masters, preparing the gruesome feast which is the PIECE DE RESISTANCE that follows a victory in which the bodies of their slain enemies fall into their ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... taste, old Time, it is more agreeable to make this evening a season of gruesome brooding. Morosely I survey the faults and follies of my last year. I am grown too canny to pour the new wine of good resolution into the old bottles of my imperfect humors. But I get a certain grim satisfaction ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... panorama Passing slowly, dully by, With the sun's brass disc high gleaming From a white and cloudless sky, Sometimes drew fantastic pictures. Many a strange and gruesome sign— Phantom trees and fairy castles— Blurred the far horizon line. Then they'd vanish like the fancies Of a fever-smitten brain, And returning, changed in outline, Elsewhere on the mighty plain Would allure the eyesore trav'ler Till the very sky above Seemed to mock with ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... carefully balancing myself with a khudstick. The men came prancing over as if they were on a good high-road, the careless ease with which they made the passage bordering on impertinence! I reflected, however, that sheep, and such like beasts of humble brain, can stroll upon the brink of gruesome precipices without any fear of falling, and my ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... have been laid out in a small artificial lake fed by a tiny streamlet which forms one of the numerous tributaries of the River Cray. Its depth is greater than is usual in watercress-beds, otherwise the gruesome relics could never have been concealed beneath its surface, and the flow of water through it, though continuous, is slow. The tributary streamlet meanders through a succession of pasture meadows, in one ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... steering-rocket fuel, and he was uncomfortable about the business of releasing the spaceship from the launching cage. There was, too, cause for worry in the take-off rockets—if the tube linings had shrunk there would be some rather gruesome consequences—and there could always be last-minute orders from Washington to ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... Zoological Gardens, almost close at hand and with which we took in that age of lingering forms no liberty of abbreviation; to say nothing either of Madame Tussaud's, then in our interminable but so amiable Baker Street, the only shade on the amiability of which was just that gruesome association with the portal of the Bazaar—since Madame Tussaud had, of all her treasures, most vividly revealed to me the Mrs. Manning and the Burke and Hare of the Chamber of Horrors which lurked just within it; whom, for days after ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... the manner in which the bone had been cracked open with a stone to let the marrow be sucked out. The sight of this gruesome relic revived all his fears, tenfold more acutely than ever, and filled him with a sense of vague, impending evil, of peril deadly to ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ferocious, which the imagination of poets and painters had not yet ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... field. Mrs. Patterson became hysterical, and was taken into the spare room with such remedies as could be suggested. Everybody blamed poor Dan. Cecily asked him what he would feel like if Jimmy was never, never found. The Story Girl had a gruesome recollection of some baby at Markdale who ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of how the body was found and how further investigation led the constable to the kitchen to make his second gruesome discovery. ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... of Gimp's quarters, the bundles were opened; the contents, some of them dried and gruesome, all of them rather wonderful, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... spiked helmets, the gruesome figures in the foreground of this cartoon might have belonged in life to any one of the warring nationalities. It is a noteworthy fact, however, that not one of the nations at war has shown so little care ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... and, moreover, to St. James of Compostella, and St. Martha of Provence, not to speak of lesser chantries and Saints. Aye, and I crossed the sea to see the holy coat of Treves, and St. Ursula's eleven thousand skulls—and a gruesome sight they were. Nay, if the Lady Countess be not in London it would cost me little to go on to the north with her. There's St. Andrew of Ely, Hugh, great St. Hugh and little St. Hugh, both of them at Lincoln, and there's St. Wilfred ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tell me when this butchery will cease! For seventy-two hours I have been plying my knife, and look at those who have yet to come"—he swept the circle of wounded with an outstretched bloody hand. "O God! If you know how to write, write to your papers and tell Europe she must stop this gruesome war." Then, tired out and enervated, he swooned into the arms of the medical orderly. As he came to to be apologized. "That," he said, "is the third time I have fainted; I suppose I must waste precious time in eating something to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... and we had to shut the door to exclude the slant sheets of rain. All gathered in the upper end of the room where my chair stood, the only seat there except the floor. To the accompaniment of hissing rain and angry winds, the gruesome particulars of the triple funeral were narrated. Mariposa—with the baby on her lap—was chief spokeswoman, but nearly every one present had some item of his own, authentic or imaginary, to add. All were sure that the three whose fate had aroused the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... there was logic in his contention and so I gave in and made the Children's Hell. It is a gruesome doctrine, that a child who kills himself does not really die. It is the one thing in the whole book that makes me feel most intellectually unclean for writing it. But I wrote it and when the book was finished and His Majesty had signed the manuscript, ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... school; the year following she had taken a place as nursery-governess; then she had been reading-companion to an unpleasant old woman in Northumberland. The old woman had lived in the country, and her relatives had hovered over her like vultures awaiting her decease. The household had been gloomy and gruesome enough to have driven into melancholy madness any girl not of the sanest and most matter-of-fact temperament. Emily Fox-Seton had endured it with an unfailing good nature, which at last had actually awakened in the breast of her mistress a ray of human feeling. When the old ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... now thrust out from the verge into the abyss, to go hurtling into the mist-wreathed depths.... No, Zeke must not come back. The hardness crept again into her face, as she went forward. She held her eyes averted from that gruesome cavern ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... paused but for the fraction of a second, had she stopped to read the placard setting forth this odious law, had she only reflected, then she would even now have turned back, and fled from that gruesome box of infamies, as she would from a dangerous and noisome reptile or ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... that uncanny apparition that had come and gone so suddenly—that weird strange thing that was so soft-spoken and so gentle of manner and yet had shaken them up like an earthquake with the shock of its gruesome aspect. At last a cold little shudder quivered along down the widow's meager frame and she said in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... comfortable, I thought, for the shadow of doom, which, in my eyes, overlay its cheerful front, wide-open doors and windows. How should I tell my story here! What credence could I expect for a tale so gruesome, within walls warmed by so much sunshine and joy. None, possibly; but my story must be told ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... disaster had taken place, but what had happened on those gruesome sands I could only conjecture until I reached the Boatmen's Rooms. Outside the building I found in groups and knots a crowd of boatmen and pilots, and also Richard Roberts, the coxswain of the ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... beast, but it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we went ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... dark when I had finished the manuscript. The far corners of the attic were peopled with fantastic shadows, and the spiders in the window were swaying, lazy and full-stomached, in the midst of the day's spoils of gruesome wings and legs. I got up slowly, stiffly, shivering a little. I felt suddenly old and worn and ineffably weary. It is a long, long journey back to our childhood—sometimes, even though one may be ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... a while. He could let it appear that he had not been at the house at all and so had not discovered the crime when he did. That would give Aleck Douglas more time to get away. But there was Jean, due at any moment now. He could not go away and let Jean discover that gruesome thing on the kitchen floor. He could not take it up and hide it away somewhere; he could not do anything, it seemed to ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... fire by flashing sparks with flint and steel, and ate their supper consisting only of pounded parched corn and dried meat. This they shared with Ree, and though he ate heartily he was thinking of other things. Every time he looked across the fire he could see the gruesome scalp at the belt of the chief of the party. Little wonder that he became apprehensive for his safety. It would not do, however, he thought, to let the Indians see that he was worried, and he began to whistle. The savages ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... buzzard flapped his wings and flew away, but soon returned to his gruesome feast. His followers, made bold by their leader, floated down into the glade. Their black feathers shone in the sun. They hopped over the moss; they stretched their grizzled necks, and turned their ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... nothing but a dream,—a gruesome, haunting dream. With an instinct of wiping out the dreadful memory, I raised my hand wearily to my forehead. As I did so, I became conscious again of how it hurt me. I looked at it. It was covered with half-dried blood, and two straight clean cuts appeared, one across the palm and one across ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Pare describes and pictures a monster, at Rome, on November 3, 1520, with the upper portion of a child apparently about five or six years old, and the lower part and ears of a fish-like animal. He also pictures a sea-devil in the same chapter, together with other gruesome examples of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... lights and those that illumine the King's Highway! They shine from above, with increasing splendor, while these cast forth, from below, their uncertain lights. It seems to me that the farther we go the darker becomes the way, and its lights the more inconstant,—so fitful is their gruesome glare." ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... chair and watched his tea getting cold. The suggestion of something having happened to Bobby had changed his anger to sharp solicitude. Gruesome tales of brutality toward foreigners in Eastern ports ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... read in some old bound volume at home a very gruesome account of the "Life and Misdeeds of Mr. Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner." The impression that still remained with her was of a man standing in the shadowy hall of just such an hotel as this, and pouring poison into ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... my life has thus far brought me; but I scarce know which to admire most—the patient endurance of the sufferers or the skilled devotion of the army doctors, whose outspoken hatred of war was still more intensified by the gruesome ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... "foursome" some would fain Find nepenthe for their woe; Following through shine or rain Where the "greens" like satin show; But I vote such sport as "slow"— Find it rather glum and gruesome; With a little maid I know I would play ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... far such gruesome topics should be introduced into a book for children, but as a matter of fact the katharsis of pity and terror among the little ones is as effective as among the spectators of a drama, and they ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... to the feast prepared for thee." She lowered her hand and with a contemptuous smile indicated the gruesome results of the ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... absolutely to the nursery; and the collection of these even, though fairly ample, is not so full as it might be. We will conclude with a few, each of which forms a puzzle or conundrum—some of them, in all conscience, gruesome enough, and full of terrible mystery—but, individually, well calculated to awaken thought and stir ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... said I had chosen a gruesome house, but not if I had described the forest from which I came, and I was in need of any spot wherein I could rest my mind from ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... creature was to be seen as she made her way eastward, shaping her course for Princes street, and peering, with a gruesome fear of the school-board officer, round every corner. That early bird, however, was not so keenly on the alert as she gave him the credit of being, and she reached her goal unchallenged after coasting along in parallel lines ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... listening open-mouthed. Mrs. Halsey laid down her knitting, and stared at the speaker over the top of her spectacles; while across Betts's gnome-like countenance smiles went out and in, especially at the more gruesome points of the tale. The light sparkled on the young Canadian's belt, the Maple Leaf in the khaki hat which lay across his knees, on the badge of the Forestry Corps on his shoulder. The old English cottage, with its Tudor brick-work, and its overhanging beams, the old English labourers with ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has the true knack of the story-teller, and lovers of the gruesome will find all they want in this collection of ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... first, out. The thousands massed near the entrance and along Taylor's Creek, watched with fevered excitement the return of the brave men who had thus placed their lives in such jeopardy for a cause they, perhaps, felt no interest. Quickly they placed new fuse, lit them, and quickly left the gruesome pit. Scarcely had they reached a place of safety than an explosion like a volcano shook the earth, while the country round about was lit up with a great flash. The earth trembled and swayed—great heaps of earth ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... of the Old.—In the annals of savage life we find many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food saved for them by some pitiful ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... he, and he leaned over the desk, and spoke in a gruesome whisper which made the cold run down our backs, 'that yon paper was your finger, one finger only of your hand, and it burned like that for ever and ever, and think of your hand and your arm and ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... drawback lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die every time the spasm shook ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
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