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Rasping   Listen
Rasping

adjective
1.
Unpleasantly harsh or grating in sound.  Synonyms: grating, gravelly, raspy, rough, scratchy.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Rasping" Quotes from Famous Books



... the double leather of his helmet a roar came to Allan. He felt his craft vibrate to the exultant cheers of the fleet. His own mouth was open, and his throat rasping.... ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat

... positions and joined the procession. This roaring avalanche swept out of Melbourne and left it desolate, Sunday-like, paralyzed, everything at a stand-still, the ships lying idle at anchor, all signs of life departed, all sounds stilled save the rasping of the cloud-shadows as they scraped across ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Patrasche in his heart was very grateful to his fate, and thought it the fairest and the kindliest the world could hold. Though he was often very hungry indeed when he lay down at night; though he had to work in the heats of summer noons and the rasping chills of winter dawns; though his feet were often tender with wounds from the sharp edges of the jagged pavement; though he had to perform tasks beyond his strength and against his nature—yet he was grateful and content: he did his duty with each day, and the ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)

... Had he seen the Rabbi, it would not have been possible for him to continue, but he only was conscious of Lachlan Campbell, with whom he had then a feud, and who, he imagined, had come to criticise him. So he went on his rasping way that Sacrament morning, as when one harrows the spring earth with iron teeth, exciting himself with every sentence to fresh crudities of thought and extravagances of opposition. But it only flashed on him that he had spoken foolishly when he came down from the ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... count, while in the methodic unvarying note of her voice there was a rasping reiteration that began to affect the company. A slight gasping breath, uncontrollable, almost on the verge of hysterics, was heard, and a man ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... minutes. When he returned, the room was in darkness. He moved suddenly towards the electric lights, but was pushed back by an unseen hand. A man's hot breath fell upon his cheek, a hoarse, rasping voice spoke to him out of ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... came quick rustling of moving bodies, the smooth rasping of wings on leathery wings, hands that fumbled for him, then closed about arms and legs and throat, while in his ears was a chattering of high-pitched squeals. Again he was lifted in air, held there in the grip of a score of lean, long-fingered hands. He was nerving himself to ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... harsh. The sound, so irregular, at such wide intervals, sounded through the house. Morel, in his room, slept on. Paul and Annie sat crouched, huddled, motionless. The great snoring sound began again—there was a painful pause while the breath was held—back came the rasping breath. Minute after minute passed. Paul looked at her again, bending ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... hoards Behind the miller's elmen floodgate boards, And there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed In the vole's empty house, still drove afield To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees And build their young ones their hutched nurseries; Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison Nor had the whisper through the tansies run Nor weather-wisest bird gone home. How then Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken Lightning coming? troubled up they stole To the deep-shadowed sullen water-hole, Among whose warty snags the quaint perch lair. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various

... question touched on an important theological point. Demons, whose voices are as rasping as a cart wheel or a winepress screw, cannot imitate ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... the nickeled straps about his head and pressed the rubber disks tight to his ears. He tilted his head slightly. A distant but harsh rasping, as of countless needle-points grating on glass, occurred in the head phones. This was caused by charges of electricity in the air, known to wireless men as "static." Percolating through the scratching was a clear, bell-like note. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... the footsteps sounded again; there came a noise of clattering chains and the rattle of the key in the lock, and the rasping of the bolts dragged back. Then the gate swung slowly open, and Baron Conrad rode into the shelter of the White Cross, and as the hoofs of his war-horse clashed upon the stones of the courtyard within, the wooden gate swung slowly ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle

... Each night the Katydids' rasping chant was repeated again and again: Katy did, Katy did; she did, she did! But since in any crowd there are always a few that want to be different from the rest, now and then some member of Kiddie's clan insisted that Katy didn't—somewhat in ...
— The Tale of Kiddie Katydid • Arthur Scott Bailey

... pray, I will pray for her," she thought, and folded her hands. Then a voice sounded behind her, hollow as the roll of falling earth; rasping as coffin cords: ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann

... instant's silence; and then, with a strange, slow, creeping motion, as a panther creeps when about to spring, Jimmie Dale projected his body across the desk—far across it toward the other. And the muscles of his jaw were quivering, his words rasping, choked with the sweep of fury that, held back so long, broke now in ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... known by various names: "Brant Bird," "Bead-bird," "Horse-foot-Snipe," "Sand-runner," "Calico-back," "Chicaric" and "Chickling." The two latter names have reference to its rasping notes, "Calico-back," to the variegated plumage ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various

... better than he had a right to expect, for the leaden pellet bored its way through the skull of the wolf, who, with a rasping yelp, made a sidelong plunge, as if diving off a bank into the water, and, striking on the side of his head, rolled over on his back, with his legs vaguely kicking at the moon, and as powerless to do harm as a log ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis

... exile mounted the fallen tree, dug his claws deep into the bark, stretched himself again and again, yawned prodigiously, and ended the exercise with a big, rasping miaow. At the sound there was a sudden rustling in the bushes behind the windfall. Instantly the catamount sprang, taking the risk of catching a porcupine or a skunk. But whatever it was that made the noise, it had vanished ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... heat was rising over the land and the rasping cries of the cicala fretted their talk; and Caterina bade him follow her down into the voto—the vast, cool, underground chambers which, for the patricians of Cyprus, made life possible during this ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... Although not by any means a rare bird, with us jays are shy and wary. In Florida their southern cousins are as familiar as robins, without a trace of fear of mankind. What curious notes our blue jays have—a creaking, wheedling, rasping medley of sounds coming through the leafless branches. At this time of year they love acorns and nuts, but in the spring "their fancy turns to thoughts of" eggs and young nestlings, and they are accordingly hated by the small birds. Nevertheless no bird is quicker to shout and scream ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... me, and meantime the kingfisher has taken wing and gone noisily up the creek. The marsh hawk appears once more. A killdeer's sharp, rasping note—a familiar sound in St. Augustine—comes from I know not where. A procession of more than twenty black vultures passes over my head. I can see their feet drawn up under them. My own I must use ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey

... of voice is not of so great moment as distinctness of utterance, yet its cultivation is by no means to be neglected. Harsh, rasping sounds and nasal twangs are disagreeable to hear, and no speaker can afford to offend his audience in this way. An unpleasant voice may be the result of some physical defect; more often it is caused by sheer carelessness. In most cases a little practice will produce a wonderful change. A very common ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee

... burden in one of the boats drawn up on the beach, and straightened their backs gratefully. They ran the boat rasping over the stones into the water, and two of them sprang in and rowed steadily out to sea. The others stood, hands on hips, watching them silently till the boat turned the corner of Les Laches and passed out of sight, and ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... her airs and repeated her verses, longing for the twilight hour which would bring the angel voice from out the vineyard. Eventually the girl began to sing of love, and Joseph echoed the songs in solitude, his voice as rasping and untrue as that of ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... puritanic quiet here reviles The almost whispered warble from the hedge, And takes a locust's rasping voice and files The silence to ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley

... others. He offended local magnates by preaching at them from the pulpit, giving them pretty freely a piece of his mind as to their conduct and ways of life, and, indeed, turning them to public ridicule with rough and rasping sarcasms. With the Indians he could not do much, if only for the fact that he had to speak to them through an interpreter. The tongue, says Jean Paul Richter, is eloquent only in its own language, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... say, right here," he began, with a rasping leisureliness, "that I hope no member of this honoured body will take my remarks as personal or unparliamentary—but"—he raised a big forefinger and shook it with menace at the presiding officer, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington

... a resounding report, a rasping shriek that resounded through the woods, and the Shawanoe sprawled forward on his face, with his hands clutching the leaves and dirt, and then ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis

... child, a daughter was surely the most fitting companion for a widowed mother. The house Mrs. Meadowsweet lived in fitted her requirements to perfection. In short, she was fat and comfortable, both in mind and body; she never fretted, she never worried; she was not rasping and disagreeable; she was not fault-finding. If her nature lacked depth, it certainly did not lack affection, generosity, and a true spirit of kindliness. If she were a little too well pleased with herself, she was also well pleased ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade

... with your customary care and patience, fully studied the object of my errand"—he replied in a clear thin, somewhat rasping voice, which he endeavoured to make smooth and conciliatory—"But it is impossible that your Majesty, immersed every day in the affairs of state, should have found time to personally go through the various papers formally submitted to your consideration. Therefore, the Vicar- General ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... of the age, or rather was it that girl herself; and it was she who, with her pale, halfmocking features and rasping voice, came and sat with me at the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... decision. Tang, tang, tang, tang, tang, spat the machine-gun in the black night, now rasping out bullets at the rate of three hundred a minute, as the gunner under the excitement of the hour and his surroundings forgot his instructions, now steadying to a slow second fire. This was something like ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... about; his face was ghastly with weariness and dirt and fury; and as he recognised the head of his family, he drew in a long rasping breath, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... cautiously, their blades rasping against each other, and neither man gaining any advantage, although once or twice Vane found his antagonist's weapon perilously near his body. Then all at once Dorrimore changed his methods. He began fencing ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce

... hand, I find a thin neck attached to a thin body, and I also find a whole pack of wolves, hollow, rasping tone, and difficult of production—in ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson

... great rasping laugh, and the boy Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the bun-experiment as a part of his past ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... easy for a looker-on To counsel peace between a man and wife, But were he in the broil himself involved, Philosophy were physic all too weak To cure the wounds made by a rasping tongue, Which time doth canker as the cancer grows Until at last the surgeon with his knife Alone ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)

... end of a moment, or of an aeon of time, that there fell athwart their beating hearts a dull, rasping sound, that of the two great inner bolts of the huge oak door being pushed ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... and my duty is my business,"—and here the male voice grew more rasping and raucous. "I have as much right to use this tavern as any one of the misled men who spend their hard earnings here and neglect their homes and families for the sake of drink. And as you do not close till half-past ten, it is not too late for ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... lashings, which were then cut adrift. The Webb passed up following the Queen. The latter, having gained sufficient distance, turned and charged down, but as the Indianola was turning up at the same moment the blow on the starboard bow glanced, the vessels rasping by each other; and as the Queen cleared the stern of her enemy, the latter planted two IX-inch shot successfully, killing 2 and wounding 4 of her crew and disabling two guns. During all this time the Indianola kept ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan

... Something resembling rotten wood formed a deposit at the bottom of his glass, while the servers were handing round dishes of prunes with their thumbs washing in the juice. Now and again, amid the rattle of plates, the rasping voice of the reader, a lad of seventeen, reached the usher's ears. He caught the name of Cleopatra and some scraps of sentences: "She was about to appear before Antony at an age when women unite with the flower of their beauty every charm of wit and intellect... her ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France

... Mallalieu knew then that they were in the kitchen garden at the rear of old Kitely's cottage. Quietly and stealthily, moving herself as if her feet were shod with velvet, Miss Pett made her way with her captive to the door; Mallalieu heard the rasping of a key in a lock, the lifting of a latch; then he was gently but firmly pushed into darkness. Behind him the door closed—a bolt was ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher

... children. Austin could not work in the woods because of the rain, and his presence irritated his father all the time. They were never in the house together but what something unpleasant was said between them, and Austin's spirit was becoming worn with the constant rasping. He thought he could not endure it much longer, and since his presence made the home so filled with contention he doubted whether he was ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale

... voice began an hysterical whimpering, interspersed with pleading in rapidly spoken French which Jeb partially understood. At least, he realized a girl was in this dark place with him, and that she was promising to make no further outcry. Weak and thin her voice seemed, though rasping in a kind of frenzy, as she attempted to excuse a former disobedience by trying to explain how someone had come and frightened her. Luckily for Jeb the man gruffly interrupted with another flow of German, or his fate might then and ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... that, to accommodate the processes of restoration, and every minute or two I heard a dull click inside and knew that the two ends of a fracture had been successfully joined. This muffled clicking and gritting and grinding and rasping continued during the next three hours, and then stopped—the connections had all been made. All except dislocations; there were only seven of these: hips, shoulders, knees, neck; so that was soon over; one after another they slipped into ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... has inspected the wreck. Surely, he should know if it is possible to salve her! He says no, and it is reported that the insurance companies are in agreement with him.' Lee Fu's voice dropped to a rasping tone. 'The lives, of course, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... into service, and was stoning raisins, or eating them, a close observer would have found it difficult to discover which. She was certainly rasping the nerves of her sister in a variety of those endless ways by which a thoughtless, restless, questioning child can almost distract a troubled brain. Ester endured with what patience she could the ceaseless drafts upon her, and worked at the interminable cookies ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)

... Ireton; sit down, I beg of you," he said, in his thin, rasping treble. And when I had obeyed: "I think you must know what I've come for, ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... tip of his head, so that the wide hat fell off, and with the strangest, rasping, strangling sound in his skinny throat (his great, hairy Adam's-apple leaping, now high, now low), One-Eye began to laugh, at the same time beginning a series of arm-wavings, slapping first one thigh and then the other. "Har! har! ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... boots instead of his eyes. It was good sagacity. The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... two hours I sat perfectly still, alert and waiting, behind the little blind of ferns and grass. There was nothing to break the silence other than the incessant bleating of the goats and the unpleasant rasping call of the mountain jay. I had about given up hope of a shot when suddenly the huge head of the man-eater emerged from the bush, exactly where I had expected he would appear and within fifteen feet of the kids. The back, neck, and head of the beast were in almost ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews

... of him is the tongue. It is not for tasting, but for rasping. It is like a long, narrow ribbon, on which are hundreds of tiny points, all sloping backwards. They are arranged three in a row. The Periwinkle rasps the seaweed with his tongue, and so scrapes off his dinner. Of course ...
— On the Seashore • R. Cadwallader Smith

... know. The other was here at Maubeuge. I helped hold his right arm steady while a surgeon took the bandages off his hand. When the wrapping came away a shattered finger came with it—it had rotted off, if you care to know that detail—and at the sight the victim uttered growling, rasping, animal-like sounds. Even so, I think it was the thing he saw more than the pain of it that overcame him; the pain he could have borne. He had been ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... Bruix,' cried the Emperor, in the same terrible rasping voice, 'that you did not obey ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle

... came a sharp rasping sound on the forward hull of the American vessel and then a mighty ripping sound aft followed by a grinding in the region of the propeller blades and an almost sudden stoppage of the Monitor. McClure and Jack looked at each other, dismay ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll

... had expected that realization of the facts would produce these symptoms in him, but now that they had presented themselves she was finding them rasping to the nerves. "I should have thought ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... liberty to say so, and act accordingly. Are the superficial amenities, the soothing fictions, the smotherings of the burning heart,... really paramount in this world, and never to give way? and when a soul of power, unable to refrain, rubs off, though it be with rasping words, all the varnish from rottenness and lies, is he to be tried in our courts of compliment for a misdemeanor? Is there never a higher duty than that of either pitying or converting guilty men,—the duty of publicly exposing them? of awakening the popular conscience, and sweeping ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... coming from Wild Burro Springs, so named because the burros common to this region come there to drink. Just as we drew rein to allow our horses to quench their thirst, the sultry silence was shattered beyond repair. Such a rasping, choking, jarring sound rolled and echoed back and forth from crag to crag! "What's that?" I gasped, after I had swallowed my heart two or three times. The Chief pointed to a rock lying a few feet away. Over the top of this an enormous pair of ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith

... like pandemonium let loose; all the pupils studying aloud together, making a deafening, rasping noise. Sessions from 7 to 10 A. M., 3 to ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... him doubtfully for a moment, then yielding to her impulse, came to his side. His first intimation of her presence was the scarcely heard tones of her voice mingling with the harsh rasping ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... rasping, arrogant "honk" of a motor horn came from the road outside. Heavy, important steps sounded upon the office platform. The door opened and in came ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln

... as hatefully incongruous; it may be that the gracious femininity of her, her desirability as a woman, thus revealed by the lissome lassitude of her body, emphasized the fact that she was a creature created for joy and dalliance, not for the rasping stratagems of the market-place. Whatever the cause, it is certain that the lazy abandon of her posture irritated him, and it was with an attempt to veil his chagrin ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... Tom and his own hair he hated the clock most. It was forever rousing him of a morning when he longed to sleep. Also, the clock acted as a sort of vicar to Barber. Its round, flat, bald face stared hard at Johnnie as its rasping staccato warned him boldly. More than once he had gone up to the noisy timepiece, taken it from its place on the cupboard shelf, and ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... was owing to his rasping tongue or their own growing resentment at the impudence of the minor leaguers, the All-Americans broke the ice ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick

... back. The opaque white mist was dense about him, and he could see nothing. As he stood still, he heard a muttered oath, and after a time the man cleared his throat in a rasping fashion, as if the oath ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... cried in a rasping voice as soon as my man had gone, "our luck's turned! That woman has tricked us. She and Bunce went down to Crookshank's office and, under the pretext of looking for some deed or release, went through his papers and turned up some letters ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train

... took hold upon the soil of the new land. His soul reached out and laid hold upon the sky, the harsh flowers, the rasping wind. He gave, and he drank in. Thus grew the people of ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... go up the chimney. It threw a pleasant light out into the room. Father was at work on an ox-bow. John had a rake into which he was setting some new teeth, and I sat on a stool with a wooden shovel between my legs, shelling corn; rasping the ears on the iron edge of the shovel, so that the kernels fell into a big basket ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan

... some like we-all might have rain," Fox said, rasping his unshaven chin with the palm of ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... atmosphere of awe and solemnity, and his tone in speaking of 'rape' and 'torture' gave them an ineffable loathsomeness. It seemed as if so much soul had never been put into a Saxon speech. Keen satire, rasping rebuke, an avalanche of indignation, rapier-like thrusts to the vital fibre of the situation, and withal the invincible cogency of argument against the Turkish Government, gave the oration a primary place amongst the master-pieces ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook

... amphora. It is the common drink of the carters at every wine-house on the country roads. I longed for a glass of my own rich Falernian or the mellow Coan that was bottled in the year that Titus took Jerusalem. Is it even now too late? Could we not wash this rasping ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... your carriage and pairs," shouted a rasping voice at last. It was Black Tom. "Who says the fortune is belonging to the lad at all? It's mine, and if there's law in ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... of Mexico, the Tarahumares are fond of music and have a good ear for it. When the Spaniards first came, they found no musical instruments among the Tarahumares except the short reed flute, so common to many Mexican tribes, the shaman's rattle, and the rasping stick. But they soon introduced the violin and even the guitar, and throughout Mexico the Indians now make these instruments themselves, using pine wood and other indigenous material in their construction, sometimes with remarkable skill and ingenuity, and for glue ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... of every ship that Dad then pointed out to me. I can picture, too, the whole scene, with the tide at the flood and the sunshine shimmering on the water and the old Victory belching out a salute in sharp, rasping reports from the guns of her main deck battery, that darted out their fiery tongues, each in the midst of a round puff ball of smoke in quick succession, first on the port and then on the starboard side, until the proper number ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... and twisted his fingers together and the palms of his hands gave out dry, rasping sounds. His attitude seemed inconsistent with the immobility of his face, but Dick surmised that he was trying to regain control of his emotions. He had a keen desire to know more of the particulars of the tragedy, but sensed from the storekeeper's ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... her cell there was a crack low down by the floor, through which she could see the light from Wolfe's. She had discovered it days before. She hurried in now, and, kneeling down by it, listened, hoping to hear some sound. Nothing but the rasping of the tin on the bars. He was at his old amusement again. Something in the noise jarred on her ear, for she shivered as she heard it. Hugh rasped away at the bars. A dull old bit of tin, not fit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... his sharp, rasping voice, didn't change Virginia's respectful attitude. She only bent her head ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White

... something about it." He looked at Foster's drawn face, and heard with surprise the rasping note in his voice. "Was ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... was eclipsed by the glowing vision of an Erich Weixler studded with decorations and promoted out of his turn. The captain kept looking about for him anxiously, and breathed with relief each time the urgent, rasping voice came to his ears from ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... half-hour, when suddenly sounded a rasping of doors that told them the rocket was ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... no detail was the place so marked as by an indefinable oppressive atmosphere. The strong musk and edged perfumes, the races, distinct and subtly antagonistic or mingled and spoiled, the rasping instruments, combined in an unnatural irritating pressure; they produced an actual sensation of cold and staleness like that from the air ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... Ombos gave a strange rasping sound. Then, in a tone of weird intensity: 'See! See!' and he laid his hand on mine ... the curtain was no longer there, and some vague thing gathered—the statue was dim behind ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... be so in Russia, the first Socialist State, as yet unindustrial, able to draw on the industrial experience of the whole world, were it not that one discovers with a certain misgiving in the Bolshevik leaders the rasping arid temperament of those to whom the industrial machine is an end in itself, and, in addition, reflects that these industrially minded men have as yet no practical experience, nor do there exist men of goodwill to help them. It does not seem reasonable ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... on a child deserves mention. A young child, confronted with a rabbit, showed no fear, but on the contrary reached out his hand to take the rabbit. At this instant a loud rasping noise was produced just behind the child, who quickly withdrew his hand with {304} signs of fear. After this had been repeated a few times, the child shrank from the rabbit and was evidently afraid of it. Probably ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... of the lanterns, the bows of a three-masted schooner, which had sheared through the port-side of The Bonita. The bowsprit hung far over the smaller ship, a wand of doom. The beating of the waves against the boat's side came gently under the rasping, crunching complaint of timber against timber in combat. The schooner's sails flapped softly in the light breeze. Zeke, watching and listening alertly, despite bewilderment, heard the roaring commands of a ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily

... problem of reconstruction be thus settled to the satisfaction of all. Example is more powerful than precept in all cases. Were our constitutions free from all class distinctions, with what power our representatives could now press their example on the Southern States. Is there anything more rasping to a proud spirit than to be rebuked for shortcomings by those who are themselves guilty of the grossest violations of law and justice? Does the North think it absurd for its women to vote and hold office, the South thinks the same of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... comfortabler then she had entered it, and finished buttoning that glove in the passage. As she stood reflecting that papa would really be very nice if he would shave more carefully—for the remains of his adieu was still rasping her cheek—she was aware of the voice of the carpet; she heard it complain, through the medium of its layer, or stretcher, who seemed to mean to pass the remainder of his days scratching the head of perplexity on the scene of his recent failure to ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... in his low, rasping voice, with more detail than Hugh had given, set out the story of those two combats at Crecy, of the sparing of the wolf knight and the slaying of the ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard

... coarse and grating were the sounds to be heard around me! Lack, nay, not lack, but utter freedom from the first instincts of cultivation, was to be heard even in the great heavy footfalls and the rasping sharp voices which fell on my ears. So different had I been listening in a room at Caddagat to my grannie's brisk pleasant voice, or to my aunt Helen's low refined accents; and I am such a one to ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... brutal drivers seem utterly callous and indifferent to the pitiful sufferings of these patient toilers. Numbers of instances are observed this morning where the rough, ill-fitting breech-straps and ropes have literally seesawed their way through the skin and deep into the flesh, and are still rasping deeper and deeper every day, no attempt whatever being made to remedy this evil; on the contrary, their pitiless drivers urge them on by prodding the raw sores with sharpened sticks, and by belaboring them unceasingly with an instrument of torture in the shape of whips with six inches ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... Wolfe emerged with a smile of welcome and bade us enter. In a small courtyard a German N.C.O., with a loud rasping voice, ordered the prison guard to take us to our quarters. After much jangling of keys we were separated, to our amazement, and each one of the party locked in a cell by himself. Near the ceiling was one small window ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight

... nostrils. The odour was as interminable as the half-accomplished tune, and Breezy Bill writhed. He was not new to the game, but bad luck had been the portion of the ship from the start, and small things irritated him, rasping his far from ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... decided I must study with him. I played for him and he accepted me as a pupil. I am free to admit that my tone, which people seem to be pleased to praise especially, I owe entirely to Leonard, for when I came to him I had the so-called 'German tone' (son allemand), of a harsh, rasping quality, which I tried to abandon absolutely. Leonard often would point to his ears while teaching and say: 'Ouvrez vos oreilles: ecoutez la beaute du son!' ('Open your ears, listen for beauty of sound!'). Most Joachim pupils you hear (unless they have reformed) ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens

... to his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads up to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated in an excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek—and the Honorable William Linder experienced upon the undefended rear of his person the most violent kick of a lifetime not always devoted to the arts of peace. It projected him clear of the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... storm of doubts and questionings. I put on my gown, without the faintest idea of whether it is inside out, or the reverse. I go slowly down-stairs, every banister marked by a fresh decision. I open the dining-room door. Father's voice is the first thing that I hear; father's voice, raised and rasping. He is standing up, and has a letter in his hand; from the engaging blue of its color, and the harmony of its shape, too evidently ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... she came home late from the store. The stars were thick in the sky; the katydids made the night oppressive with their rasping questionings, and a hoarse revel of frogs kept the ponds from falling asleep in ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... were too choice for every-day use. They were always tightly closed, with green paper shades down, lest the blessed sunshine should get a peep at her gaudy red and green carpets, and put the least mellowing touch an their crude and rasping colors. Nimpo thought of the best parlor with a sort of awe which she never felt toward any ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various

... naked Christ thundering with His empty hand among them; the voices moving up and down, round and round in endless unended cadences, become strange instruments (all sense of register and vocal cords departing), unearthly harps and bugles and double basses, rasping often and groaning like a broken-down organ, above which warbles the hautboy quaver of the sopranos. And the huge things on the ceiling, with their prodigious thighs and toes and arms and jowls crouch and cower and scowl, and hang ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... loaf sugar is used, and there is a very common practice of holding a lump in one hand and following a sip of the unsweetened tea with a nibble at the sugar. When several persons are engaged in this rasping process ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... sudden I heard a strange rasping noise, and I woke up, with the feeling that there was someone in the room. I don't know just why I felt so sure of that, whether it was merely a sense of someone's presence, or the sound of someone moving about near ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks

... marked more by weather than age, and his narrow brow was bald and smooth. He had instantaneously formed an opinion of Jules St.-Ange, and the multitude of words, most of them lingual curiosities, with which he was rasping the wide-open ears of his listeners, signified, in short, that, as sure as his name was Parson Jones, the little Creole ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... to contact it with his home-made radio, and once again he received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he could not doubt were speech of some kind or other—a rasping, grating speech, to be sure, utterly unlike the speech of McIlvaine's own kind. It rose and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing—McIlvaine sensed all this and strove mightily ...
— McIlvaine's Star • August Derleth

... uniform and consistent. There are three creatures, the squirrel, the field-mouse, and the bird called the nut-hatch (sitta Europaea), which live much on hazel nuts; and yet they open them each in a different way. The first, after rasping off the small end, splits the shell in two with his long fore-teeth, as a man does with his knife; the second nibbles a hole with his teeth, so regular as if drilled with a wimble, and yet so small that one would wonder how the kernel can be extracted through it; ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... I broke with Alfarez because of what his son did to you. I juggled the politics of this country, I threw him over and took Garavel—Garavel! My God! What a mockery! But I won't let you—I won't let that girl spoil my work." Her voice trailed off in a kind of rasping whisper. She struggled a moment for composure, then went on: "It was I who promoted you to Runnels' position—he'll tell you that. It was I who put ideas of advancement into his head. I fostered this quarrel between Jolson and the Superintendent, ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... trees and rubber-vines all about us a colony of long-armed wah-wah monkeys whistled and chattered, and farther away the sharp, rasping note of a cicada kept up a ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman

... of gear, Nicholas—Your voice is rasping, your remarks are bitter, and you must be ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn

... came from a brooding curlew, a faint sigh from a plover, and the wild rasping cry of a lapwing greeted them overhead. Yet there was a silence, a silence broken for a moment by the cries of the birds, but a silence thick and heavy. Between the calls of the birds Mysie could almost hear her heart's ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh

... means of separating the flour from the other materials, by which it may be abstracted from the tubers when in the greatest abundance, and be preserved unchanged for the use of man. This is done by simply rasping down the potatoes over a seirce, and passing a current of water over the raspings. The water passes through the seirce milky from the starch suspended in it. The starch is allowed to fall to the bottom, and is ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various

... cheeks grew thinner, her cough more rasping. But after the campaign against Troy was over, she turned with the same intensity of interest to the National Convention of the American Federation of Labor which was to meet there in November. For a year she had been making plans, eager to make this convention a landmark ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... layin' out a whitefeller," assented the prince, still rasping at his cockroach, like Ugolini at the living skull of Ruggieri, in Dante's airy conception of the place where wrongs are rectified. (That unhappy ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... will!" shouted the elephant. And with that, in his strong trunk, he lifted Flop up on his broad back. Still the skillery- scalery alligator came on, and he cried in his rasping voice: ...
— Curly and Floppy Twistytail - The Funny Piggie Boys • Howard R. Garis

... boons in vain long sought! Now, careless, let us stray, or stop To see the partridge from the covey drop, Or, while the evening air's like yellow wine, From the pure stream take out The playful trout, That jerks with rasping check the struggled line; Or to the Farm, where, high on trampled stacks, The labourers stir themselves amain To feed with hasty sheaves of grain The deaf'ning engine's boisterous maw, And snatch again, From to-and-fro tormenting racks, The toss'd and hustled straw; Whilst others ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore

... of Boecklin, the raucous heroism of Hodler, the serene vision and humor of Gottfried Keller, the living tradition of the great popular festivals, and the sap of springtime swelling the trees,—the still young art, sometimes rasping to the palate, like the hard fruits of wild pear-trees, sometimes with the sweetish insipidity of myrtles black and blue, but at least something smacking of the earth, is the work of self-taught men not cut off from the people by an archaic culture, but, with them, reading in the same ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... said a voice at the door. Montgomery looked up, for the voice was a loud and rasping one. A young man stood at the entrance— a stocky, bull-necked young miner, in tweed Sunday clothes and an aggressive neck-tie. He was a sinister-looking figure, with dark, insolent eyes, and the jaw and throat ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the little battle, no dead left as luck had it, but many a gout of blood. The white gables clanged back the cries, in claps like summer thunder, the crows in the beech-trees complained in a rasping roupy chorus, and the house-doors banged at the back of men, who, weary or wounded, sought home to bed. And Splendid and I were on the point of parting, secure that the young laird of MacLachlan was at liberty, when that gentleman himself came scouring along, hard pressed ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... they'd of give you a good name!" And the agreeable youth instantly rewarded himself for the wit with another yell of rasping laughter, after which he pointed suddenly ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... side from Stronmealachan to Eredine, and many of the folk of Glen Shira and the town. A day of pleasant weather, with a warm wind from the west, full of wholesome dryness for the soil that was still clogged with the rains of spring. It filled the wood of Kincreggan with sounds, with the rasping and creaking of branches and the rustle of leaves, and the road by the river under the gean-trees was strewn with ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro

... With a rasping scream that set the Earthmen's teeth on edge, it charged for the wall on Dex's side. Dex just managed to swerve it with a blast from the tube so prolonged that half its great ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst

... from the panhandler's thoughts than flight. His rags fluttered freely in the evening air and his sole-less shoes flopped up and down upon his feet, rasping his bare toes, as he ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... been painfully exercising the minds of the editor and readers of the Church Times; and it was then that the curate's friend, without moving a muscle of his face, suddenly leaned forward and said, in a rasping voice: ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... towards him in single file. Cawing rooks streamed back from the fallow-fields across the valley. Thrushes and blackbirds carolled. A wren, in the bramble brake close by, broke into sharp sweet song. The recurrent ring of an axe came from somewhere away in the fir plantations, and the strident rasping of a saw from the wood-yard in the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... have been attempted. But this last resource was denied to the despairing seamen, from the fact that two enormous bergs, the vanguard of the fleet, had already reached the edge of the floe, on opposite sides of the bay, to windward of the entrapped barque, and were rapidly rasping their way down toward the apex of the triangle where the whaler was already shooting into stays for what must evidently be her last tack. This would be so short that she could scarcely fail to miss stays on her ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... largely relative—like everything else in the world, don't you think?" I said, letting him feel the raw edge of the bitterness that was rasping at me. "In coming to me, as you have, you, yourself, are compounding ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde

... worried Black Bill—long time his post commander—to the verge of exasperation with his perpetual hair-splitting and quibbling. He had played his last trump with Tintop early in the campaign, and received that grizzled veteran's rasping intimation that one more experiment would lead to arrest and court-martial, and received it with every appearance of amaze and pain, which might have been effective had not Hastings been called upon beforehand to give his version ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... it until our own nerves were shattered, and the draper's wife ran down the loaning to see if we were in need of anything. The twisted bar of iron stands out from the door and the ring is drawn up and down over a series of nicks, making a rasping noise. The lovers and ghaists in the old ballads always "tirled at the pin," you remember; ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... black sleigh, a heavily built, elderly man, had picked himself out of a drift with the assistance of his lackey and was brushing the snow from his long fur cloak. A fur cap, pulled down over his eyes, hid his face, but his gestures were angry, and his voice was high and rasping. ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs

... drenched with perspiration and so nearly exhausted with his suffocating imprisonment, that his voice was rasping and hollow. ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman

... which could drown the other's instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men with long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient verve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the fiddler learns the witchery of the clanging reel and the swing of the Strathspey. It is doubtless not high art, ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... battle of the iron ships. It was the first of the kind in the world. Close against each other, iron rasping on iron, they exchanged their heaviest volleys. Five times the Merrimac tried to run down the Monitor, but her huge beak only grated over the iron deck, while the Monitor glided out unharmed. Despairing of doing anything with her doughty little antagonist, the Merrimac ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.

... cleared, and his imaginary cares fell from him; while his wife's very real ones were forgotten as she listened, and there was a blessed truce to trouble for a time. Unfortunately, however, as the reading proceeded, he came to a rasping bit of the story, which began to grate upon his nerves. The first part had been pleasurably exciting, but when he found the sensation slipping from him, he thought to stay it with a stimulant, and went to the sideboard for ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... some firm revolves. Some power crowned is near death's gates. There is some peril on the other shores and on this, yet the links for chains of co-operation come later on. First, there are spears, guns, rasping files; secret orders, too, which shall in due time become fully known to Uncle Sam, for, see you the boxes and the broken lines, like a serpent yet, living cables with its intricate workings. I am ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara

... His rasping note of annoyance brooked no delay. I set the child down. I said, "I will land us in an hour. Depend ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... came with a sort of rasping scream that did not sound human, and then broke into wild laughter, interrupted ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford

... he paused to rest he had studied scents. When he straightened again he was occupied with every voice of earth and air around and above him, and the notes of singing hens, exultant cocks, the scream of geese, the quack of ducks, the rasping crescendo of guineas running wild in the woods, the imperial note of Ajax sunning on the ridge pole and echoes from all of them on adjoining ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter

... strain," said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, "are any of you fellows—you deck beams, we mean—aware that those exceedingly ugly knees of yours happen to ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various

... along the path now to reach the house and shut the night outside, for every moment the cold and dark were growing heavier; the snow rasping under their feet, as its crust cracked; overhead, the sky-air frozen thin and gray, holding dead a low, watery half-moon; now and then a more earthy, thicker gust breaking sharply round the hill, taking their breath. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... he was being eyed in curiosity and impatience by the eager folk behind. He heard Mrs. Tutts's rasping whisper ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... with shaking fingers, and pinned on her hat. The voices still went on below, monotonous, endless; the rasping of Rudolph's throat, irritated by cheap cigarets, the sound of glasses on the table, once a laugh, guttural and mirthless. It was ten o'clock when she knew, by the pushing back of their chairs, that they were preparing ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... sombre, and beneath them there were heavy, dark stains of sleeplessness and care, his very voice, when presently he spoke, seemed to have lost the musical timbre that had earlier distinguished it; it was grown harsh and rasping. Disappointment after disappointment, set down to ill-luck, but in reality the fruit of incompetence, had served to sour him. The climax had been reached in the serious desertions after the Philips Norton fight, and the ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini

... was a faint rasping sound, then a sharp crack, and the rustle of two half-nutshells through the leaves. One of them struck the side of the hazel-stump and bounded off like an elastic ball. Before the dormouse had collected his wits, a fine kernel was thrust through the nest and the squirrel ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... the manager's wire of praise—and Richard thought it marked a weakness in him—that, too, had warmed the cockles of his heart. Being in good humor, he listened without interrupting comment to the rasping, parrot tones of Mr. Gwynn while that gentleman, without inflection or emphasis or slightest shade of personal interest, told the tale of the night's adventures, from Mrs. Hanway-Harley's flattery and Mr. Harley's song, to Senator Hanway's last handclasp ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... the door until finally there came the joyous, rasping sound of a key in the lock, and then excited exclamations filled the ears ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon

... frankness, her philosophy and her reasoning, the rasping hurt at her heart remained—a hurt so cruel it seemed to her the end of all peace or ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... you tell me you were going to camp in the middle of the morning?" Stott demanded in his rasping ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... character began when mowers brought their clattering machine, and with rasping noise and confusion dire laid low the grass which had isolated him from the rest of the world, and that impertinent world poured in. First came crows, from their homes in the woods beyond the pasture, to feast on the numerous hoppers ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller

... monotonosity of it I cain't stand!" he whined, as he drove his boot-heel down on the rasping brake-lever and waited sullenly for the inevitable bump from the trailer. "Gawd never meant fer a feller tuh do this work. I don't know Him very good," wailed Cassidy, "but I bet He wouldn't deal no such a raw hand. It ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... the moonlit scenery, and to muse on—mamma, wondering if she missed her child, and felt as lonely and depressed as I did. So I fell asleep in my chair, and was awakened suddenly by the touch of an icy hand, and a rasping cough in my ear. I started up. Oh, heavens! I was not alone! Beside me stood the figure of an old monk with a ghastly white face and glassy ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller

... rasping sound as he drew his first and second fingers across his closely shaven chin. It is a singular thing that cynics usually reserve their ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... feet to find that his muscles still were reluctant to respond to orders; he helped the professor to arise. And from the group that drew back further into the far end of the room came a subdued and rasping tumult of discordant sound. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... thrilling, rasping sound was heard; and then the top-man seemed parted in twain at the hip, as the leg slowly slid into the arms of the pale, gaunt man in the shroud, who at once made away with it, and tucked it out of sight under one ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... bar, Burton brought all his weight to bear upon it. There was a dull, cracking sound and a sort of rasping. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... big-boned, florid, dark-eyed woman, well over thirty, somewhat inclined to be down-at-heel and slatternly, though not yet quite destitute of some small share of good looks; a woman solid of step and unattractive to the eye of youth; moreover, as they knew from recent experience, possessed of a rasping tongue. ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang

... the old woman was teasing him, and instead of being angry, as she expected, he looked so worried and distressed that she was sorry, and her rasping old ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.

... open it at once, miss. I put my hear to the crack and listened. And there it was, a long kind of snore, like—only it wasn't just what you'd call a snore. It was more like this." He drew a deep, rasping, stertorous breath. "Awful, it was, miss, just like somebody in liquor. 'It's liquor,' I says, and not wantin' to be mixed up in no low company I wasn't for openin' the ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established the fact that McGuire was breathing ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... at No. 124 Constantine Road. As she did so, a high, rasping, and fretful voice screamed to her ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade

... of the hold, that seemed in one spot to have been strengthened by fresh timbers. Attacking this stealthily with the aid of some tools hidden in his oil-skin clothing, in the light of the lantern he bore a fanciful resemblance to the predatory animals around him. The low continuous sound of rasping and gnawing of timber which followed heightened the resemblance. At the end of a few minutes he had succeeded in removing enough of the outer planking to show that the entire filling of the casing between the stanchions ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... eyes and a shock of tangled red hair, bearing in his hands a small unpainted cross, which he held high so that all men might see it. He seemed to be in the last extremity of fright, with a face the color of clay and his limbs all ashake as one who hath an ague. Behind him, with his toe ever rasping upon the other's heels, there walked a very stern, black-bearded man with a hard eye and a set mouth. He bore over his shoulder a great knotted stick with three jagged nails stuck in the head of it, and from time to time he whirled it up in ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... an answer. How the blood coursed through the old man's veins as he listened! There it was again. It was coming nearer, but very slowly. He wondered how many were in the flock, and called once more. This time, to his surprise, an answer came from a different direction—a long, rasping sound, a sort of cross between a cock's crow and a ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... seen no more of her father that day. She had hoped that Father White would come and see her, but he had not come; she had sat in her room alone, and after dinner her mother had scolded her because she did not talk to Lord Chiselhurst, an old man who had talked to her in a loud rasping voice. He was overpowering; her strength had given way, she had fainted, and she had been carried out of the room. When she opened her eyes St. Clare was standing by her.... She was glad it was he and not Lord Chiselhurst who ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... claim their attention was the ships themselves. These, being lashed together by means of the grapnels, were grinding and rasping each other's sides so alarmingly, as they rolled and plunged in the sea that was running, that they had already inflicted upon each other an appreciable amount of damage, and threatened to do a great deal more if prompt preventive measures were not taken. Marshall therefore called upon Winter, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... checked; of the French, who talk at great length of much more than they will ever accomplish; of the slovenly English, who toil hopelessly and cannot understand that inclination does not imply power; of the Americans, whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon strain tense-drawn nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to indigestion; of tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor to bind, who tell the girls ghost-stories till the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... where the faint moonlight fell upon him, the tiger was seen to be a beast of extraordinary size. He emitted one rasping snarl while sailing through the air, but was already dead when he fell into the water, where it could not be seen he had made a struggle. The sinewy body dipped out of sight, bobbed up again and the next minute was swept beyond view by ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis



Words linked to "Rasping" :   utterance, vocalization, cacophonic, cacophonous



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