"Parching" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glided out into the gloom of the haven. The orator paced homeward alone. Everything had favoured him. He had even cleared himself of the curse of the Furies and the pursuit of Nemesis. He had, he congratulated himself, shown marvellous qualities of mercy. Glaucon lived? Yes—but the parching sand-plains of Libya would be as fast a prison as the grave, and the life of a slave in Africa was a short one. Glaucon had passed from his ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... to set the teeth, as with strong determination, and cemilhuitia, to run during a whole day. Sahagun, Historia, Lib. iii, cap. iii, and Lib. x, cap. xxix; compare also the myth of Tezcatlipoca disguised as an old woman parching corn, the odor of which instantly attracted the Toltecs, no matter how far off they were. When they came she killed them. Id. Lib. iii, ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... body, and boiling over in his head? There I lay, twisting and tumbling, the pillow continually descending into the depths of infinity, but never getting any where—the bed rolling like a dismantled hulk upon a stormy sea—the room filled with steaming and hissing urns—a fearful thirst parching my throat, while myriads of horrid bearded Russians were torturing me with tumblers of boiling-hot tea dashed with vodka—thus I lay a perfect victim of tea. I could even see Chinamen with long queues ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... one's side, though hour by hour "The path runs on; though Summer's parching star "Burn all the fields, or blackest tempests lower, "Or monitory rainbows threaten far. "If he would hasten o'er the purple sea, "Thyself the helmsman or the oarsman be. "Endure, unmurmuring, each unwelcome toil, "Nor fear thy unaccustomed hands to spoil. "If to the hills he ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... garments. Then he choked and spluttered, for the hot fluid scalded him, and a roar of laughter saved the situation. Made as it was over a cup of very smoky tea, that compact was carried out faithfully under parching heat and bitter cold, in the biting dust of alkali and under the silence of the primeval bush. For an hour we lounged smoking and chatting in ox-hide chairs, watching the red glow from the range door flicker upon the guns and axes on the wall, or the moonlight broaden across the silent grass ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... that make such poor returns. But my head akes at the bare thought of letter writing. I wish all the ink in the ocean dried up, and would listen to the quills shivering [? shrivelling] up in the candle flame, like parching martyrs. The same indisposit'n to write it is has stopt my Elias, but you will see a futile Effort in the next No., "wrung from ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... saw she left the dregs in her cup, she was not satisfied, and bade her drink those, even with tears in her eyes. Maggie drank them as she bade her, and then the bright one vanished, leaving the child quite well and vigorous. The weariness vanished from her frame, the parching thirst from her mouth, and, what was yet more amazing, she found the little Dove quite well, and she stood with it in her arms before the ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... Compels me to disturb your season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some melodious tear. Begin then, sisters, of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring; Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string. Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse, So may ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... whose dews distil Upon the parching clod, And clothe with verdure vale and hill, That is not ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... only their parching thirst that induced the horses to remain anywhere near the camels, and immediately they got sufficient water, they de-camped, though short-hobbled, at a gallop over the high red sandhills from whence we had come; ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... which fell like dew upon the parching misery of the day, Annie burst into tears. Mr Cowie was greatly distressed. He drew her between his knees, laid his cheek against hers, as was his way with children, and said with ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... human authority over our unhappy fellow-creatures." Torments, however, were always inflicted in these cases. The punishment was gibbeting alive, and exposing the delinquents to perish by the gradual effects of hunger, thirst, and a parching sun; in which situation they were known to suffer for nine days, with a fortitude scarcely credible, never uttering a single groan. But horrible as the excesses might have been, which occasioned these punishments, it muse be remembered, that they were committed by ignorant savages, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... carrying with him on the long desert march. Still, he had been sad and thwarted, and the music of the tomtoms and raeitas, instead of tributes to his triumph, had been like voices mocking at his failure. Then Sanda had magically appeared in the desert: fair and sweet as the moon in contrast with the parching sun. He had held out his arms on the impulse and she had fallen into them. Her youth, her white beauty in the blue night, lit a flame in him, and he fanned it greedily. It was good to know that he was young enough still to light another fire so soon on half-cold ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... regions of the world. The next instant its blazing summit breaks into splinters on every side. Occasionally fearful hail-storms sweep over the plains; and at other times the air from the south comes heated, as from a furnace, drying up all moisture from the skin, and parching the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... midst of an arid, sandy desert. The sun's rays seemed to pelt down with blistering intensity on my uncovered head. There was not a single tree, nor a scrap of foliage anywhere in sight, to afford a moment's shelter:—all was barrenness; parching ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... cast him down: and there he sat all alone, astonished and confounded, like Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, when she sat alone upon the parching rock. Like Rizpah, he watched the dead corpses of all his hopes and plans, all for which he had lived, and which made life worth having, withering away there by his side. But it was told David what Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, had done. And it is told to one ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... accounted for by its total immunity from cold, the density of the air at sea-level, and the warm moist breezes it received from the tepid ocean. The climate was about the same as that of the Riviera or of Florida in winter, and there was, of course, no parching summer. "This shows me," said Bearwarden, "that a country's climate depends less on the amount of heat it receives from the sun than on the amount it retains; proof of which we have in the tops of the Himalayas perpetually covered ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... moss; And each cardoon, like a full moon, Fairy-spun of the thistle floss; And the beech grove, and a wood dove, And the trail where the shepherds pass; And the lark's song, and the wind-song, And the scent of the parching grass! ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... will not prematurely magnify her into a woman. There are so few unaffected, natural children in this generation, that it is as refreshing to contemplate our little girl's guileless purity and ingenuous simplicity, as to gaze upon cool green meadows on a sultry, parching August day. Keep her a child, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... (Phleum pratense var. ? Hudson.)—This affects a drier soil than the Timothy-grass: it grows very frequently in dry thin soils, where it maintains itself against the parching sun by its bulbous roots, which lie dormant for a considerable time, but grow again very readily when the wet weather sets in,—a curious circumstance, which gives us an ample proof of the wise contrivance of the great Author of Nature to fertilize all ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... a sense of a parching and suffocating heat. She started up with the idea of fire in her drowsy mind. But a glance at him revealed the real cause. His face was fiery red, and from his lips came rambling sentences, muttered, whispered, that indicated the delirium ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... "the sum of two hundred crowns for the expenses of myself and master; but before the end of the year, all our money went away in the smoke of our furnaces. My master, at the same time, died of a fever, brought on by the parching heat of our laboratory, from which he seldom or never stirred, and which was scarcely less hot than the arsenal of Venice. His death was the more unfortunate for me, as my parents took the opportunity of reducing my allowance, and sending me only sufficient for my board and lodging, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of nature which blesses man. On the other hand, he changed under the impression of the harmful phenomena of nature, the dark and close-packed clouds which hold back the rain and intercept the sunshine, the parching heat of summer, which dries up the rivers and hinders growth and fruitfulness, and these also he erected into objects of awe and religious adoration. From this view of nature sprang the Indian mythology. The oldest divinity (Deva) ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... lovely pool by the wayside—all this I cannot here describe. But most wonderful of all is the monsoon which rages over the country, wrapping the earth sometimes in sheets of lightning which turn sea, sky and earth to one vivid world of flame. The wind is dry and parching, so that all windows are kept carefully closed at night; but, indeed, the mosquitoes are sufficient excuse for that. I have seen ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the Harvest walked by the side of his cornfields in the early year, and a cloud was over his face, for there had been no rain for several weeks, and the earth was hard from the parching of the cold east winds, and the young wheat had not been able to ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... might turn; He walled it in and hung with care A ladle at the brink; He thought not of the deed he did, But judged that all might drink. He passed again, and lo! the well, By summer never dried, Had cooled ten thousand parching tongues, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... shattered nerve in our hero's frame tingled and thrilled in answer to it. He stood petrified, scarcely so much as daring to breathe; and then, observing that his mouth was agape, he moistened his dry and parching lips, and drew his ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... passed the lips of that wan company since the pittance of the night before, and yet for nine long hours of that fearful day, the air so heated that it hardly fed the lungs, and the sun blazing so pitilessly upon the log structure that a faint odor of parching wood mingled with the torrid air within the Fort, yes, for nine long hours the elder prayed, or preached, or recited aloud the deep abasement of the penitential psalms, and the wail of the prophets, proclaiming, yet deprecating, the wrath of an ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... water had often to be carried long distances in pails, and it may be imagined how the housework would go in such circumstances. For my part I have never wondered at roughness or squalor in the village since that parching summer when I learnt that in one cottage at least the people were saving up the cooking water of one day to be used over again on the day following. Where such things can happen the domestic arts are simplified to nothing, and it would be ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... neither could be soothed "by silence nor by speaking." A devouring melancholy preyed upon his heart, and seemed to be drying up the very blood in his veins. It was not a soft melancholy—the disease of the affections; but a parching, withering agony. I could see at times that his mouth was dry and feverish; he almost panted rather than breathed; his eyes were bloodshot; his cheeks pale and livid; with now and then faint streaks athwart them—baleful gleams of the fire that was consuming his heart. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... a desert 'cross which hosts of Death are marching, And a hot sirocco wanders under skies all red and parching, Lined with skeletons of armies through the centuries fierce and acre Bones of heroes and of sages marking Time's lapse year by year, Unmoistened by the night-dews 'mid the solitudes of fear —As ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... unavailing attempts to ford the creek with infantry,—their entire right and centre, marched out the Charles City Road, and gave impetuous battle at New Market. The accounts and the results indicate that the Federals won the day at New Market, sheerly by good fighting. They were parching with thirst, weak with hunger, and it might have been supposed that reverses had broken their spirit. On the contrary they did not fall back a rod, during the whole day, and at evening Heintzelman's corps crowned their success by a grand charge, whereat the Confederates broke and were ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the dry; heavy fogs forming during the transition. These last till the end of September. Occasional showers, too, continue till November. Then the weather becomes really clear and dry, until, towards the end of January, the dry parching wind, called the Harmattan, sets in, with its over-stimulant action upon the human system, and clouds of penetrating impalpable sand. If this is not blowing, the atmosphere is loaded with moisture; and this it is, combined with ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... not far to seek," I answered, more to myself than her, as I ran down the stairs to discomfit that old man. At the open door, with the hot wind tossing worn white curls and parching shriveled cheeks, now wearily raising his battered hat, stood my dear Uncle ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... a little and set the tumbler to her lips, and she drank eagerly. The fear of death is more parching than wound-fever or passion. ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... hundred and fifty species of Opuntia, which elect to grow in parching sands, beneath a scorching sun, often prostrate on baking hot rocks, on glaring plains, beaches, and deserts, from Massachusetts to Peru - for all are natives of the New World - show so marvelous an adaptation to environment in each instance ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Intense heat. Sultry, parching, enervating, sure precursor, if she had thought to remember, if she had been less engrossed in the bitterness of her ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... the soil is only moistened at the time of sowing, it induces the projection of the radicle, or first root, which, in very parching weather, and in clayey cutting soil, withers away, and the crop is consequently lost, for want of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... apparent on scraping the surface of the ground with his foot in passing, and a crop of beans was planted, grown and gathered therefrom, without as much rain as will usually fall in a shower of fifteen minutes' duration, while vegetation on the next field was parching for ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... shower just before he had set out, and now, although rain had ceased, the sky remained blackly overcast and a curious, dull stillness was come. The air had a welcome freshness and the glistening pavements looked delightfully cool after the parching heat of the day. In the quiet square, no doubt, it was always restful in contrast with the more busy highroads, and in the murmur of distant traffic he found something very soothing. About him then were peace, prosperity, ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... far excell'd;— Itself surpassing far the age of brass. The ancient durance of perpetual spring He shorten'd, and in seasons four the year Divided:—Winter, summer, lessen'd spring, And various temper'd autumn first were known. Then first the air with parching fervor dry, Glow'd hot;—then ice congeal'd by piercing winds Hung pendent;—houses then first shelter'd man; Houses by caverns form'd, with thick shrubs fenc'd, And boughs entwin'd with osiers. Then the grain Of Ceres first in lengthen'd furrows lay; And ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... the Prince Camillo's zest after pleasure that he pursued it abroad in spite of the weather, which was abominable. A searching mistral blew through the streets for four days, parching the blood, and on the night of the fourth rose to something like a hurricane. Our players fought their way against it to the theatre, only to find it empty; and returned in the lowest of spirits. The ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... de Fernan Nunez, whose sedate and polished manners suited the occasion perfectly. He did not encourage any attempt at gaiety. Oh dear, no! Far from it! I felt myself gradually freezing, and our conversation was of the most uninteresting character and dry almost to parching. ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... which he lies, and then pulls it swiftly back again, enjoying the cozy warmth the more for this little reminder of the bitter chill. Here, where the air is cool, pure, and soft, let us think of a hoarding round some old house which the labourers are pulling down, amid clouds of the white, blinding, parching dust of lime, on a sultry summer day. I can hardly think of any human position as worse, if not intended directly as a position of torture. I picture, too, a crowded wharf on a river in a great town, with ships lying alongside. There is a roar of passing drays, a cracking of draymen's whips, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... him in the lurch, things looked very bad indeed for the doughty defenders of little Gueldersdorp—certainly up to afternoon-tea time, when a couple of Scotch girls crossed the two hundred yards of veld that lay between the Fort and the town, carrying cans of steaming tea for the parching Britons penned up there. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... between the cold-water tap in his bath-room to the bedside of his young daughter, Mertice, eighteen times in three hours, this being the number of her demands for water to drink. When interviewed after the eighteenth lap, Mr. Lasbert said: "I wouldn't do it another time, not if the child were parching." Shortly after that ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... had risen, that icy wind that cracks the rocks and leaves nothing alive on those deserted heights, and it came in sudden gusts, which were more parching and more deadly than the burning wind of the desert, and again Ulrich shouted: "Gaspard! Gaspard! Gaspard." And then he waited again. Everything was silent ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... They were out for a couple of hours, landed on the opposite bank, and paid a visit to their friends, the Bernards, who lived a mile or two below them. The air was delightful, the country looked beautiful—fresher, perhaps, than at midsummer; for the heat was no longer parching, and the September showers had washed away the dust, and brought out the green grass again. Harry had become interested in the conversation, and was particularly agreeable; Miss Agnes was pleased ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... humble prayer You with stern countenance declare The artifice of villany— I hear your harsh, reproachful cry. If ye but knew how dreadful 'tis To bear love's parching agonies— To burn, yet reason keep awake The fever of the blood to slake— A passionate desire to bend And, sobbing at your feet, to blend Entreaties, woes and prayers, confess All that the heart would fain express— Yet with a feigned frigidity To arm the tongue and e'en the eye, To be in conversation ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... ashamed into a hole. On the very day on which the wretched creature died, death came also to the rich man, casting his well-fed body into the grave and his soul into hell. And there his wretched soul endured most horrible torture, gnawing hunger and parching thirst, and the pain was increased when the dead man looked into Paradise and saw there the man he had sent away despised from his door sitting by Abraham. He saw how ripe fruits grew there, and clear springs gushed forth. Then he called up, 'Father Abraham. I implore you, tell the ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... had a fearful jostle with a Yeomanry corps (who were on the march with us), the Indians, and a whole tribe of mules which turned up from somewhere. In the afternoon we arrived at our camp, a bare, dusty hill, parching under the sun. ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... this, although salt and bitter, is relished by camels. During the hot season in which we unfortunately travelled, the heat was intense, the thermometer ranging from 106 degrees to 114 degrees Fahr. in the shade. The parching blast of the simoom was of such exhausting power, that the water rapidly evaporated from the closed water-skins. It was, therefore, necessary to save the supply by a forced march of seven days, in which period we were to accomplish the distance, and to reach Abou Hammed, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... with her sunken eyes from the dust of the parching fields And tapped the door with her bony hands and her fingers gaunt and thin; Ah, Hearts grow faint at the hunger-cry and the arm of the master yields When all the world is a heap of dust that its ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... person has come to know the advantages of contemplation, and of dwelling upon pictures derived from his own thought-world, he is apt to develop a tendency to withdraw himself from the impressions of the outer world. Yet such a step only leads to parching and withering the inner life; and he will go farthest who manages to retain an unchecked receptivity for all impressions of the outer world, while possessing the power to withdraw within his own inner self. It is by no means necessary to think only of the so-called ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... good lads, go bravely on By the parching hills of pain, An armor of shade ye soon may don And meet the allies of rain: And night in the bivouac hours will sing Praise of the march ye made, And into your pockets good gold will bring, Men of ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... agriculture in the Crimea and in these regions generally, has been greatly increased by the disappearance of the forests of central and southern Russia, which formerly to some extent protected the coast-provinces from the parching ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Then, like raging hounds, they rushed to search for a spring; for besides their suffering and anguish, a parching thirst lay upon them, and not in vain did they wander; but they came to the sacred plain where Ladon, the serpent of the land, till yesterday kept watch over the golden apples in the garden of Atlas; and all around the nymphs, the Hesperides, were busied, chanting their lovely song. But at that ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... down, untouched of steel, like so much young velvet on his cheek. He, too, died in the longboat. And the captain gasped out his last under the palm trees of the isle unnamable while the brown maidens wept about him and fanned the air to his parching lungs." ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... as more cautiously than ever he crept on, so as to get within springing distance of the hole, he began to think of the long, deep, cool drink in which he would indulge—for his throat felt dry, and he was suffering from a parching, burning thirst. ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... him without his perceiving it:—so they continued to fire as directed, until they are either sent down to the cock-pit themselves, or have a momentary respite from their exertions, when, choked with smoke and gunpowder, they go aft to the scuttle-butt, to remove their parching thirst. So much for the lower and main deck. We will now ascend to the quarter-deck, where we shall find old Adams at the conn, and little Willy standing ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... For her sake he aspired to make the best of himself; to make this hillside yield its purple banners from the secret storehouses within. So he had struggled with soil and season, with suns that scorched and winds that chilled, with parching days that opened the earth in great crevices, and with torrents that made the paths between the vines impassable ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... caught his brother's extended hand, and dropped upon his knees beside him. "Lionel...Boy!" he cried. It was as if all that had befallen in the last five years had been wiped out of existence. His fierce relentless hatred of his half-brother, his burning sense of wrong, his parching thirst for vengeance, became on the instant all dead, buried, and forgotten. More, it was as if they had never been. Lionel in that moment was again the weak, comely, beloved brother whom he had cherished and screened ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... imagination, when one is sitting, will not work unless the back is supported. Besides, it began to be cold; notwithstanding the shiny, specious appearance of things, it was cold, except in a sheltered nook or two where the sun beat. This was nothing to be complained of by persons who had left the parching land in order to get cool. They knew that there would be a wind and a draught everywhere, and that they would be occupied nearly all the time in moving the little stools about to get out of the wind, or out of the sun, or out of something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... song of other days, Serenely placid, safely true, And o'er the present's parching ways Thy verse ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... be the utmost exertion of human authority over our unhappy fellow-creatures." Torments, however, were always inflicted in these cases. The punishment was gibbeting alive, and exposing the delinquents to perish by the gradual effects of hunger, thirst, and parching sun; in which situation they were known to suffer for nine days, with a fortitude scarcely credible, never uttering a single groan. But horrible as the excesses might have been, which occasioned these punishments, it must be remembered, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... five minutes—a long, long time. No one had seen him beneath the apple-tree. He was not afraid of the teasing, but he was afraid of a withering look from his Heart's Desire,—a look that he felt with a parching fear in his throat would throw the universe into an eclipse for him. He observed that she got up and changed her seat to be rid of Mealy Jones. At first Piggy thought that was a good sign, but a moment later he reasoned that the avoidance of Mealy was inspired probably by ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... for my own sake, to kindle a fire. And yet God knows, in such an open spot, and the country alive with savages, the act was little short of lunacy. Ballantrae seemed never to observe me; but at last, as I was about parching a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that at first. After a while you begin to think of how delightful it is, and what a change from pacing over the burning sand in the daylight with the sun making the air quiver and glow like a furnace, and your mouth turn dry and lips crack with the parching you have to undergo." ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... refreshing April-like showers, which beautify the sun-shine, she shall stand a deluge of complaisance, be wet to the skin with it; and what then? Why be in a Lybian desert ever after!—experience a constant parching drought and all her attributed excellencies will be swallowed up in the quicksands of matrimony. It may be otherwise with you; and it must be so; because there is such an infinite variety in your excellence. But does Mr. B. think it must be so in ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... swamp, so I am to lay by, make the drawings, and draw up the report, while Mr. Currie and Randolf do my work over again, all my marks having been effaced by his majesty the Fire King, and the clearing done to our hand. If I could only get rid of the intolerable parching and thirst, and the burning of my brains! I should not wonder if I were in for ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... looked I loved, loved madly, and all my heart was wounded, woe is me, and my beauty began to wane. No more heed took I of that show, and how I came home I know not; but some parching fever utterly overthrew me, and I lay a-bed ten days and ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... boredom, the harsh constriction of warm bodies full of gestures and attitudes and aspirations into moulds, like the moulds toy soldiers are cast in. The phrase became someone shouting raucously in his ears: "Arbeit und Rhythmus,"—drowning everything else, beating his mind hard again, parching it. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... not that he cared less, rather more, Tony thought. His strange, tragic eyes rested hungrily upon her whenever they were together and it seemed as if he would drink deep of her youth and loveliness and joy, a draught deep enough to last a long, long time, through days of parching thirst to follow. He was very gentle, very quiet, very loveable, very tender. His stormy mood seemed to have passed over leaving a great weariness ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... warmth as much as from nervousness. He had gone all day without water. And a collie, more perhaps than any other dog, needs plenty of fresh, cool water to drink; at any and all times. The hot wind and the smoke were parching his throat. His ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... became better peopled, there were four churches built in it, which were served by so many priests. The austerities of St. Macarius were excessive; he usually ate but once a week. Evagrius, his disciple, once asked him leave to drink a little water, under a parching thirst; but Macarius bade him content himself with reposing a little in the shade, saying: "For these twenty years, I have never once ate, drunk, or slept, as much as nature required."[4] His face was very pale, and his body weak and parched up. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... God, can't You hear my cry? 'Water! A poor, little cup!' It's laughing, the cursed sun! See how it swells and swells Fierce as a hundred hells! God, will it never have done? It's searing the flesh on my bones; It's beating with hammers red My eyeballs into my head; It's parching my very moans. See! It's the size of the sky, And the sky is a torrent of fire, Foaming on me as I lie Here on the wire . . . ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... had tasted the bitter cup of persecution. Happy is he whose moral sense has not been corrupted by bigotry, whose heart is not hardened by misfortune, whose soul—the spring of generous impulse—has never been dried up by the parching adversities of life! The founders of Maryland brought with them, in the Ark and the Dove, the elements of that liberty they had so much desired, themselves, in the Old World, and which to others in the New, of a different faith, they were too good ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... they advanced three days' march, through much snow and a level plain, a distance of fifteen parasangs; the third day's march was extremely troublesome, as the north wind blew full in their faces, completely parching up everything and benumbing the men. One of the augurs, in consequence, advised that they should sacrifice to the wind, and a sacrifice was accordingly offered, when the vehemence of the wind appeared to everyone manifestly to abate. The depth of the snow was a fathom, so that many ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... defensive position, but the trenches still had to be dug and, as luck would have it, this digging, which ought to have been nothing to our men fit as they were, in ordinary weather, was turned into a very high trial indeed by a khamsin. This red-hot and parching wind, blowing off the desert, makes thirst a positive torture when water is limited, and it was very limited at that time. We were getting rather less than half a gallon per man for all purposes, which is perhaps just about the quantity used by the ordinary ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... the conflict with the dog-days. Your Bengalee mounts defences of tattees and punkahs that cool down a hot wind, or whistle air into presence in a trice. Whereas in this part of the world, as the Sirocco blows, so it must steal into your room, parching your face, and covering you all over with a clammy stickiness, through which you may distinctly feel the subdolent shudder of incipient ague. When he has darkened his room, and spread cool mats on the floor, the poor Smyrniot ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... across the stony plain lying between us and the hills, the heated and parching blasts that came upon us, were more than we could bear. We were in the centre of the plain, when Mr. Browne drew my attention to a number of small black specks in the upper air. These spots increasing momentarily in size, were evidently ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... swearing at the east wind for parching your verdure, and are now weeping for the rain that drowns your hay. I have these calamities in common, and my constant and particular one,-people that come to see my house, which unfortunately is more in request than ever. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Hollowed in smooth hard brightness, now dissolved To infinite soft depth, and smoulder'd down Low as the roofs, dark burning blue, and soared Clear to that winking drop of liquid silver, The first exquisite star. Now the half-light Tidied away the dusty litter parching Among the cobbles, veiled in the colour of distance Shabby slates and brickwork mouldering, turn'd The hunchback houses into patient things Resting; and golden windows ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... everything,' says one of the prisoners, a British officer, in his narrative, 'we envied the fate of those whose lifeless corpses no longer needed sustenance. The sense of hunger was already lost, but a parching thirst consumed our vitals.' ... 'Almost lost to a sense of humanity, we no longer looked with pity on those who were the speedy forerunners of our own fate, and a consultation took place, to sacrifice some one to be food to the ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... Bible was not his only solace. For now, under the parching African sun, we catch glimpses, for the first time, of Gordon's hand stretching out towards stimulants of a more material quality. For months together, we are told, he would drink nothing but pure water; and then ... water that was not so pure. In his fits ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... the Arkansas village, and began their homeward voyage on the seventeenth of July. It was no easy task to urge their way upward, in the heat of midsummer, against the current of the dark and gloomy stream, toiling all day under the parching sun, and sleeping at night in the exhalations of the unwholesome shore, or in the narrow confines of their birchen vessels, anchored on the river. Marquette was attacked with dysentery. Languid and well-nigh spent, he invoked his celestial ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... of this openly, one Sunday afternoon at Lydia's. They were sitting on the lake shore, for the day was parching hot. Both the young men were in flannels and hatless, and lolled on the grass at Lydia's feet, as she sat with her back against a tree. She noticed how Kent was all grace, and ease, while Billy, whose face had lately become thinner, was ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the plain which lay stretched to their right. Under the unclouded sun, which by its own "sun-time" had only reached half-past four in the afternoon, though the clock in the village church had already struck half-past five, the air was dry and parching, and the fields all round, the road itself, and the dusty hedges ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about the middle of May, and lasts until nearly the middle of June. Earlier than this, winter is apt to return on its traces, and to blight the opening beauties of the year; and later than this, begin the parching, and panting, and dissolving heats of summer. But in this genial interval, nature is in all her freshness and fragrance: "the rains are over and gone, the flowers appear upon the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... grateful dew that cools the upland air and moistens the bunch-grass that has been bleaching all day in the fierce rays of the summer sun, a little column of infantry is swinging steadily southward. Long and toilsome has been the march; hot, dusty, and parching the day. Halts have been few and far between, and every man, from the colonel down, is coated with a gray mask of powdered alkali, the contribution of a two hours' tramp through Deadman's Canon just before the sun went ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... cautious progress across weathered slopes of loose rock. Madeline followed, finding in this ride a tax on strength and judgment. On an ordinary horse she never could have kept in Stewart's trail. It was dust and heat, a parching throat, that caused Madeline to think of time; and she was amazed to see the sun sloping to the west. Stewart never stopped; he never looked back; he never spoke. He must have heard the horse close behind him. Madeline ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... deep and let the parching morrow Quench what thirst its newer need may bring! Slake the senses now, that soul hereafter Go not forth ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... quarter threaten man's estate, And danger in a thousand forms prepare! They drive impetuous from the frozen north, With fangs sharp-piercing, and keen arrowy tongues; From the ungenial east they issue forth, And prey, with parching breath, upon thy lungs; If, waft'd on the desert's flaming wing, They from the south heap fire upon the brain, Refreshment from the west at first they bring, Anon to drown thyself and field and plain. In wait for mischief, they are prompt to hear; With guileful purpose our ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... desert dreams that these lips never dare reveal—recalled upon earth, to testify the powers of Heaven—once more mortal, the witness of immortality; I drew a new being from the grave. O faded—O lost Jerusalem!—Him from whom came my life, I beheld adjudged to the agonized and parching death! Far in the mighty crowd I saw the light rest and glimmer over the cross; I heard the hooting mob, I cried aloud, I raved, I threatened—none heeded me—I was lost in the whirl and the roar of thousands! But even then, in ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the Harvest walked by the side of his cornfields in the springtime. A frown was on his face, for there had been no rain for several weeks, and the earth was hard from the parching of the east winds. The young wheat had not been able to ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... and madden in me. When you are beside me, your hand, if it trembles, is not on fire, your voice, if it is more subdued, does not falter with the emotions it dares not express: your heart is not like mine, devoured by a parching and wasting flame: your sleep is not turned by restless and turbulent dreams from the healthful renewal, into the very consumer, of life. No, Emily! God forbid that you should feel the guilt, the agony which preys upon me; but, ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the congregation of the Hebrews, who seconded so well his military plans, appear at that juncture on the page of history in no other light than that of veteran troops, rendered hardy by long service in a parching climate, and formidable by the arts of discipline under a ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... and foggy winter air, and serious derangements of the respiratory organs are the natural consequence. If, moreover, this pernicious habit of breathing be once contracted, we shall soon also sleep with open mouths, thus parching our throats, and sowing the seeds ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... glowing as a brand; And faint before the parching heat, The strength forsakes the feeble feet: "Thou hast saved me from the robbers' hand, Through wild floods given the blessed land; And shall the weak limbs fail me now? And he!—Divine one, nerve ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... their teeth enviously. Bukta, had he chosen, might have invited them all. But he went out alone with Chinn, two days in a shooting-cart and a day on foot, till they came to a rocky, glary valley with a pool of good water in it. It was a parching day, and the boy very naturally stripped and went in for a bathe, leaving Bukta by the clothes. A white skin shows far against brown jungle, and what Bukta beheld on Chinn's back and right shoulder dragged him forward step by step ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... story well, though I say it who shouldn't. I pictured a flight across the Kalahari to German Africa, the crackling, parching days, the wonderful blue-velvet nights. I described an attack on my life on the voyage home, and I made a really horrid affair of the Portland Place murder. 'You're looking for adventure,' I cried; 'well, you've found it here. ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... are low, and when the tides are still, And the round moon rises inland over the naked hill, And o'er her parching seams the dry cloud-shadows pass, And dry along the land-rim lie the shadows of thin grass, Then aches her soul with longing to launch and sink away Where the fine silts lift and settle, and sea-things drift and stray, To make the port of Last Desire, and slumber with her peers ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Through arid plains, with blistering feet, Beneath a burning sky, they toil along. The lad no longer talks of birds and flowers, But begs for water—water just to cool His parching throat; and likely 'twas that when Noon's shadows mirrored the encircling hills, He saw the empty flask, and must at last Have ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass
... company with him, and a muleteer undertook their transport to Shiraz. It was a terrible journey up the parching mountain paths of Persia, where Alexander's army had suffered so much, with the sun glaring down upon them, never, in that rainless belt around the Persian Gulf, tempered by a cloud. They travelled only by ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... conspiring against it,—king, queen, court, ministers, authorities, foreign powers,—it threw itself headlong into the arms of its defenders. The most eloquent in its eyes was he who inspired it with most dread—it had a parching thirst for denunciations, and they were lavished on it with prodigal hand. It was thus that Barnave, the Lameths, then Danton, Marat, Brissot, Camille Desmoulins, Petion, Robespierre, had acquired their authority over the people. These names had ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... meantime had become very hot. The southern sun beat down on Bellerivre, parching its hillsides, and tanning its people to a dusky brown. But the peasants complained not of the high temperature, for was not this torrid sun that burned so fiercely the very factor they were calculating upon to complete for them the final ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... cleared his throat. It was parching, and he felt that words were impossible. What trick was this Peter had played on him? He longed to flee, yet in the face of all that crowd he could not. He knew he must smile, and with all the power of his body he set himself to ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... have hesitated about including Yucca among these articles; but when I see the bloom destroyed ruthlessly by thousands who cut it to decorate touring automobiles and fruit and vegetable stands beside the highways, who carry it from its native location and stick it in the parching sun of the seashore as a temporary shelter, I feel that the bloom stems might as well be used for food as to be so ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... occupying the center of a rocky plain, which the sun scorched with its parching rays. This was formed by a considerable elevation of the soil, which seemed to offer to the members of the Gun Club all the conditions requisite for ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... gray to gray; the parching north wind poured down the plain and darkened the air with gritty dust; the sky, though cloudless, grew murkier every day. Then the wind shifted to the south, and the sky grew darker yet with surging heaps of clouds, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... that, they did make bloody work with the poor ladies at Naseby. But the dame there will be safe enough," he added, as she was already on the move down hill. "Has no one a keg of cider to give her? I know what 'tis to lie parching ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The imperishable marble glows white in the sunlight as it did in the days of Shah Jehan. The great red bastions of the Fort frown over the same placid Jumna, and watch each morning the pearly dome of the Taj Mahal rise like a moon in the dawn-glow, shimmer through the parching glare of an Indian day, and at eve sink, rosy, into the purple shadows of swiftly-falling night, as they did when Shah Jehan sat "in the sunset-lighted balcony with his eyes fixed on the snow-white pile at the bend of the river, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a mass of combustibles,—loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture, and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the newspaper reports, "a perfect tinder-box," and would probably be a heap of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick man lying between life and death, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his way into the presence of the chief priests and scribes, as they were congratulating themselves on the success of their plot. There was despair on his face, a piercing note in his voice, anguish in his soul; the flames of hell were already consuming him, the thirst of the bottomless pit already parching his lips; his hand convulsively clutched the ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... stronger than the preceding; that is, the fear of death, or the desire of preserving himself, necessarily prevails over the painful sensation caused by his eagerness to drink. But, (it will be said) if the thirst is very parching, an inconsiderate man, without regarding the danger, will risque swallowing the water. Nothing is gained by this remark: in this case, the anterior impulse only regains the ascendency; he is persuaded, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... comes to me like air on parching grass; His eyes are wells where truth lives, found at last; Summer is fragrant should he this way pass; His calm love is a chain that binds me fast.... Yet often melancholy will forecast That time when I shall have grown old—when he— Still rapturous in ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... of bad water in a tropical country, or the blessings of a cool, pure draught. I have been in districts of Ceylon where for sixteen or twenty miles not a drop of water is to be obtained fit for an animal to drink; not a tree to throw a few yards of shade upon the parching ground; nothing but stunted, thorny jungles and sandy, barren plains as far as the eye can reach; the yellow leaves crisp upon the withered branches, the wild fruits hardened for want of sap, all moisture robbed from vegetation by the pitiless ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... listened in terror. Herhor was pale; the tablets fell from Pentuer's fingers; Mefres held the amulet hanging on his breast, and prayed while his lips were parching. ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... fever boiled under the fuel of his humiliating thoughts. The wagon was a bake-oven, but there was no sweat in him to cool his parching skin. He begged Rabbit to let him go and lie under the wagon, where the wind could blow over him, but she shook her head in denial and pressed him down on the bunk. Then she gave him a drink that had the bitterness of opium in it, and he threw down his ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... the Bay of Bengal, whence its lowest strata imbibe a quantity of moisture, moderate in amount, yet still leaving the great mass of air far below saturation. Hence it reaches Ceylon comparatively dry, and its general effects are parching and disagreeable. This character is increased as the sun recedes towards its most southern declination, and the wind acquires a more direct draught from the north; passing over the Indian peninsula and almost totally digested of humidity, it blows down the western coast of the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... as it were; and as the mustache appeared to have been recently shaven off, there was a white blueness on the upper lip, that contrasted unpleasantly with the dark tinge which he had gallantly wrought for on the glowing sands of Egypt, and the bronzing of his general features from fierce suns and parching winds. His bare neck and hands were delicately fair, the former firm and muscular, the latter slender and tapering, like a woman's. He was reading a gazette, or some printed paper, when we entered; and although there was a tolerable clatter of muskets, sabres, and spurs, he never once ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... "Many parching summers are come and gone," continued the sage, "since I drank of the water of my own rivers. The children of Minquon* are the justest white men, but they were thirsty and they took it to themselves. Do they ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... I gazed around me; and, indeed, the prospect was anything but inviting. On both sides of the creek the soil showed evidences of the severity of the past drought. Great gaping fissures—usun cracks we called them—traversed and zig-zagged the hot, parching ground, on which not a blade of grass was to be seen. Here and there, amid the grey-barked ghostly gums, were oases of green—thickets of stunted sandalwood whose evergreen leaves defied alike the ...
— "Five-Head" Creek; and Fish Drugging In The Pacific - 1901 • Louis Becke
... towns lose their power to interest, they journey north to Rajputana to revel in Jeypore, the unique—at least, lovers of Kipling do. And the effect on jaded senses is like a cooling draught after a parching thirst. Kipling called Jeypore "A pink city, to see and puzzle over," It surely is pink, all of it that is not sky-blue, and for various reasons it is more satisfying than ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... His kind provision Waving in the grain, Shining in the sunbeams, Falling in the rain; Parching days of summer, Cool the dewy fall, Hoary frost of ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... down on the sandy soil, with his back propped against his saddle, and watch the shimmering haze of heat across the sun-scorched plains. It made him think of the stories he had heard of the weary traveller lost in the desert, no water with which to moisten his parching throat, his tongue swollen, black, and immovable in his mouth, with already the first signs of delirium and insanity showing in his erratic and aimless actions. He shuddered as the picture presented itself, and thanked his stars that he was seated, though ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... he exclaimed, "she drives me mad, and I believe she would look on, if I was parching with thirst in the torments of hell, and not give me ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... walked quite as rapidly as the heat would permit. She crossed the Park, and, striking into Fulton Street, continued toward the river, but turned into Water Street. The old peach-women at the corners, sitting under huge cotton umbrellas, and parching in the heat, saw the lovely face going by, and marked the peculiarly earnest step, which the sitters in the streets, and consequent sharp students of faces and feet, easily enough recognized as the step of one who was bound upon some especial errand. Clerks looked ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Blackheath for the summer; where unseasonable frost and snow, and hot and parching east winds, have destroyed all my fruit, and almost my fruit-trees. I vegetate myself little better than they do; I crawl about on foot and on horseback; read a great deal, and write a little; and am ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... hot parching winds bent the rank grass, which gave forth a dry, almost rasping sound, very different ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... fallow the summer before, and had served no further use than the grazing of some picketed cows. Then, one parching July day it had been cut, to kill the thistles and pigweed that overran it, and in the following May had been plowed, dragged, and sown to wild timothy. The few mounds dotting it had been turned ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... placed in a warm room, will afford a good means of testing seeds. Seeds placed on that wool, will vegetate sooner than they would do in the soil. But a more speedy, and generally sure method, is by putting a few seeds on the top of a hot stove. If they are good they will crack like corn in parching; otherwise they will burn without noise, and with very little motion. The improvement or declension of fruits, grains, and vegetables, depend very materially upon the manner of gathering and preserving ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... by which it is immediately preceded and followed. It is then that Nature, who seems from the creation to have bestowed all of grandeur and sublimity on the stupendous Americas, looks gladly and complacently on her work; and, staying the course of parching suns and desolating frosts, loves to luxuriate for a period in the broad and teeming bosom of her gigantic offspring. It is then that the forest-leaves, alike free from the influence of the howling hurricane of summer, and the paralysing and unfathomable snows ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... light burst upon my dreariness. It was amid this gloom of human agony, these heartrending scenes of real mourning, that the brilliant star shone to disperse the clouds which hovered over our drooping heads,—to dry the hot briny tears which were parching up our miserable vegetating existence—it was in this crisis that Marie Antoinette came, like a messenger sent down from Heaven, graciously to offer the balm of comfort in the sweetest language of human compassion. The pure emotions of her generous soul made her unceasing, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... you go," said the hunter, "and mind, too, that you get back soon, because my throat is parching. I'd like to have one deep ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... charity of half a cigarette, of one teaspoonful of liquor, of anything, though it were deadly poison, that could rest his agonised nerves for a single hour, for ten minutes, for an instant, offering his life and soul for it, parching for it, burning, sweating, trembling, vibrating with horror, and sick with fear for the want ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... limits. The Animal Kingdom consists of sentient beings, that enliven the external parts of the earth. They possess the powers of voluntary motion, respire air, and are forced into action by the cravings of hunger or the parching of thirst, by the instincts of animal passion, or by pain. Like the vegetable kingdom, they are limited within the boundaries of certain countries by the conditions of climate and soil; and some of the species prey upon each other. Linnaeus has divided them into six classes;—Mammalia, Birds, Fishes, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... away, Wilt thou not cast a wish behind? Say, can'st thou face the parching ray, Nor shrink before the wintry wind? Oh, can that soft and gentle mien Extremes of hardship learn to bear, Nor sad regret each courtly scene, Where thou wert ...
— Old Ballads • Various
... of trouble Tresler had so quickly discovered to be flowing beneath its calm surface. The sun was pouring down upon the wiltering foliage with a fierceness which had set the insect world droning its drowsy melody; the earth was already parching; the sloughs were already dry, and the tall grass therein was rapidly ripening against the season of haying. But in spite of the seeming peace; in spite of the cloudless sky, the pastoral beauty of the scene, the almost inaudible murmur of the distant river, the tide ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... sickly warmth suffused: Thus were the brave Iberians when they saw The king of nations from his throne descend. Scarcely, with pace uneven, knees unnerved, Reached he the waters: in his troubled ear They sounded murmuring drearily; they rose Wild, in strange colours, to his parching eyes; They seemed to rush around him, seemed to lift From the receding earth his helpless feet. He fell—Charoba shrieked aloud—she ran— Frantic with fears and fondness, mazed with woe, Nothing but Gebir dying she beheld. The turban that ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... icy wind which cracks the rocks, and leaves nothing alive on those deserted heights. It came in sudden gusts, more parching and more deadly than the burning wind of the desert, and again Ulrich shouted: "Gaspard! Gaspard! Gaspard!" Then he waited again. Everything was silent on the mountain! Then he shook with terror, and ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... and the murder of Joseph Smith was accounted a righteous act. The emigrant had many warnings to lay to heart—against Indian surprises in the mountains, against mosquitoes on the plains, against quicksands in the Platte, against stampedes among the cattle, against alkaline springs and the desert's parching heats. And quite as important as any of these was that against the Latter Day Saint with the Book of Mormon in his saddlebag and his long-barreled ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... suggest the opinion, that such plants alone of other parts of the continent are indigenous to the North-west Coast, as are capable of sustaining themselves in a soil subjected to seasons of protracted parching droughts. This may apply to some species upon that coast, but it cannot be reduced to a general conclusion; for, on the one hand, it is singular so few of the plants of the South and South-west Coasts, and particularly that none other of their genera of Proteaceae ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... vegetation is generally of a class suited to resist the droughts, having hard, coriaceous leaves. Such is the shrubbery described in a former chapter, which, exempt from severe frosts on the one hand, and thriving in an arid soil and parching heat on the other, clothes half the surface of the island with perpetual verdure. There have been seasons when even these shrubs were so burnt up that the slightest accident might have caused a wide-spread conflagration. When we travelled, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... shall hunger pain their souls, He bids their parching thirst be gone, And spreads the shadow of his wings To screen ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... thy road may lie, Or which way mine may be; If mine will lead through parching sands, And thine beside the sea; Yet "God keeps watch 'tween thee and me," So, never fear. He holds thy hand, he claspeth mine, And ...
— My Three Days in Gilead • Elmer Ulysses Hoenshal
... hot sun has been parching the fields. Nature is expanding beneath its rays; the fields are green as far as the eye can see. The big azure dome of the sky is unclouded. The farms of Normandy, scattered over the plains and surrounded by a belt ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... and ague, is prevalent. The mean temperature of the year is 75 degrees, and the thermometer has never been seen lower than 68 degrees. The atmosphere is dank, steamy, and heavy with moisture during the wet season, and parching and malarial during the ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of the wind in the branches made them afraid. At nightfall, where they rested, one stayed in that place, and the next night another dropped behind; and so it was at the end of each day's journey. They crossed a great plain where waters of mirage rolled over a cracked and parching earth, and the rim of the world was hidden in a bluish mist. So they came at last to another range of hills, not so high, but tumbled thickly together; and beyond these, at the end of the hundred days, to the Big Water, quaking along the sand at the foot ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... the sweet song of other days, Serenely placid, safely true, And o'er the present's parching ways Thy verse distils like ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Scandinavia; thence the eye returns: And lo! great Lebanon—abrupt and dark With pines, and airy Carmel, rising slow Above the midland main, where hang the capes Of Italy and Greece; swart Africa, Beneath the parching sun, her long domain Reveals, the mountains of the Moon, the source Of Nile, the wild mysterious Niger, lost Amid the torrid sands; and to the south Her stormy cape. Beyond the misty main 300 The weary eye scarce wanders, when behold Plata, through vaster territory poured; And Andes, sweeping ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... Eden thus have smil'd Had wine to Eden come? Would Horeb's parching wild Have been refreshed with rum And had Eve's hair Been dressed in gin Would ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... which Peter Martyr relates with various excuses for its silliness and exclamations at its absurdity. Perhaps the fault lay less in its lack of meaning than in his want of insight. It was to the effect that men lived in caves, and were destroyed by the parching rays of the sun, and were destitute of means to prolong their race, until they caught and subjected to their use four women who were swift of foot and slippery as eels. These were the mothers of the race of men. Or ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... prepare food for the ten days' journey ahead of them. Guzman's wife, and I suppose the wives of our other carriers, spent the morning grinding chuno (frozen potatoes) with a rocking stone pestle on a flat stone mortar, and parching or toasting large quantities of sweet corn in a terra-cotta olla. With chuno and tostado, the body of the sheep, and a small quantity of coca leaves, the Indians professed themselves to be perfectly contented. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... come over Larry. His only physical sensations were the quick hammering of his heart, and a parching dryness in his throat. Terror stiffened him. Though he would not have admitted it, he ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson |
