"Vitals" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wolf Death gnawing at his vitals, had said all that it was necessary for him to say. Wilmot Allen's strong arm about him, his mouth vaguely smiling, he fell heavily forward as if under the weight of a new and overpowering wonder ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... Plates are the "vitals" of a battery, and their troubles affect the life of the battery more seriously than those of the other parts. It is often difficult to diagnose their troubles, and the following descriptions are given to aid ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... gradually get control of the offices of this land, and this is her main object, for if she can control the officials, she will see that such laws are passed as will enable her to coil her slimy self about the vitals of Protestant America, and just as long as the Protestant denominations allow themselves to be made Protestant simpletons of, just that long Catholicism will fool Protestant hosts by offering the "vote bait" to ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... the Colorado River, the sublimity of the Almighty Builder's beauty and omnipotence was voiced in one stupendous Word, wrought in enduring color in everlasting stone. Cleaving its way westward to some far-off sea, a wide abyss, a dozen miles across from lip to lip, yawned down to the very vitals of the earth. We stood upon the rim of it—a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet of solid limestone, in one plummet line, to other cliffs below, that dropped again through furlongs of black gneiss, red sandstone, ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... for Rome that her kings grew corrupt soon, so as to be driven out before the taint of their corruption had reached the vitals of the city. For it was because these were sound that the endless commotions which took place in Rome, so far from being hurtful, were, from their object being good, beneficial to the commonwealth. From which we may draw this inference, ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... they rushed in and, fastening their teeth in the belly of the serpent, caused it to writhe and twist in its anguish. Instantly Gozon was upon his feet again, and, watching his opportunity, plunged his sword into the exposed vitals of his enemy. Mortally wounded, the serpent flung itself high in the air with a convulsive effort, and falling backwards pinned the knight to the ground beneath its enormous bulk. The servants, who had been ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... the heavy days before her and the blank before me. I could not let go her wrists. We were fools to waste our youth. I could work for her in America. My vitals were being torn from me. I should go to the devil without her. I don't know what I said. But I knew the brute love which had risen like a lion in me would never conquer the woman who kissed me in the darkness and held me ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... spirits of any kind are allowed, the character of Englishmen in general being that of Brutus, Quicquid vult valde vult [whatever he desires he desires intensely]. But why should such a canker be tolerated in the vitals of a State, under any pretense, or in any shape whatsoever? Better by far the whole present set of distillers were pensioners of the public, and their trade abolished by law; since all the benefit thereof put together would not balance the hundredth part ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... came a scream. It pierced the heavy tense silence of the hall, ghastly in its timbre, like nothing any of us had ever heard before. And in it was conveyed agony as though Brayley had not merely pinched that flabby arm, but had thrust a red-hot knife into its vitals. ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... strength through lack of food, And fever germs on vitals preyed; Yet they o'er trouble did not brood, By night or day of cheerful mood; This burden on them weighed— To keep the flag afloat—in brief, Till Buller came to ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... red-ravening, fell With greed, shall tatter piecemeal all thy flesh To shreds and ragged vestiges of form— Yea, an unbidden guest, a day-long bane, That feeds, and feeds—yea, he shall gorge his fill On blackened fragments, from thy vitals gnawed. Look for no respite from that agony Until some other deity be found, Ready to bear for thee the brunt of doom, Choosing to pass into the lampless world Of Hades and the murky depths of hell. Hereat, advise thee! ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... had always loved, for his very failings were endearing, was dead or at the point of death, like the gallant young man at his side, and I myself was dying. Tremors shook my limbs; horrible waves of blackness seemed to well up from my vitals, through my breast to my brain, and thence to evaporate in queer, jagged lines and patches, which I realized, but could not actually see. Gay memories of my far-off childhood arose in me, particularly those of a Christmas party where I had met a little girl ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... our humble lot. As just returning from a house of call, The parson bade us set about his wall. Flush'd with good liquor, cheerfully we strove To place big stones below and big above; We made too quick work—down the fabric came; It crush'd our vitals: people call'd out shame! But we heard nothing, mute as fish we lay, And shall lie sprawling till the judgment day. From our misfortune this good moral know— Never to work too fast nor ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... taught her place in the world. England must give up her claims. In hot moments he had gone further, and had declared that England must be—whipped. He had been specially loud against that aristocracy of England which, according to a figure of speech often used by him, was always feeding on the vitals of the people. But now all this was very much changed. He did not go the length of expressing an opinion that the House of Lords was a valuable institution; but he discussed questions of primogeniture and hereditary legislation, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... the inner man refreshments bring, For vino and cigars may clear our minds. (Exit muchacho) Reflectively: My firm insistence did one cancer cure But when my mem'ry speaks of vandal hand Which once did throttle me in vulgar strife My vitals gripe me with a righteous wrath. I did presume that Seldonskip would feel A proper rev'rence for officials high, And fear on God's anointed, to bestow A mighty kick upon his nether parts But these Americanos know not fear And each ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... the bows of the ship were not visible. Masthead and sidelights were obscured by the pelting scud. The engines thrust the vessel forward like a lance into the vitals of the storm. Wind and wave gushed out of the vortex ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... odious envy; and yet never did any poor wretch lead so miserable a life as I have done; for every blessing they enjoyed was as so many daggers to my heart. 'Tis this envy that has caused all my ill health, has preyed upon my very vitals, and will now ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... even reeds that think; we cry out for idols. Who is there that will set up a golden ass that we may fall down and worship? We glory in our shame, in our swelling hearts, in our eyes heavy with tears. We want sympathy at all costs; we run about showing our bleeding vitals, asking one another whether they are not indeed a horrible sight. Englishmen now are proud of being womanish, and nothing is more manly than to weep. To be a man of feeling is better than to be a gentleman—it is certainly much easier. The halt of mind, the maim, the blind of wit, have ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... contest between France, under Louis XIV., and the allies, led by Marlborough and Prince Eugene, we find Valenciennes again playing a leading part. And during the last blind, desperate effort of France to shake off the domination of the scoundrels who had fastened themselves upon her vitals at Paris after the collapse of the monarchy, Valenciennes became the theatre of the tolerably well-conceived, but intolerably ill-executed, attempt of Dumouriez to make himself a French Duke of Albemarle. It was quite as unprincipled as his political operations ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... car out and drove to Schutzen Park and back. Bud opined that she didn't bark to suit him, and she had a knock in her cylinders that shouted of carbon. They ran her into the garage shop and went deep into her vitals, and because she jerked when Bud threw her into second, Bud suspected that her bevel gears had lost a tooth or two, and was eager to find ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... mutual dependence—a great part, practically the whole of Ulster, would box the compass and go in for complete independence, as the best thing possible under the circumstances. England would then feel something in her vitals, something serious and something astonishing. The only rebellion that ever gave England any trouble was worked by Ulstermen. The most effective agitators have nearly always been renegade Protestants. Let England think what she ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... bad—as all that—money?" questioned Mr. Vandeford. "You'll have to show me," he added calmly, though in the vitals of his heart he was relieved that Howard still spoke of "The Purple Slipper" as a carcass ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... if you had to answer this question on oath, "Whom do you think you are most like in this world?" I don't mean superficially, but deep down in your vitals, what would you say? Your mother, your uncle, one of your friends on the ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... sturdy thrust from the poker, produces an instantaneous blaze. But, unfortunately, should any untoward "o'er-night clishmaclaver" occasion the neglect of this duty, and the fire be left, like envy, to feed upon its own vitals, a remedy is at hand in the shape of a pan "o' live coals" from some more provident neighbour, resident in an upper or lower "flat;" and thus without bundle-wood or "shavings," is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... is on fire-come Clarence, drive your delicious pego into my vitals-see, I open the ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... the great monster carried it down the mountain side. Before the bear could make the turn, the brave was beside his Aggretta in the tree. But no sooner had he cleared the ground than the monster was underneath the tree, tearing at the lower limbs, while the shaft remained buried in his vitals. ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... saddle and glancing back, I saw, just back of the cantle, just to the right of the spine in the glossy brown back, that one tiny, grimy, powder-stained hole. I knew the deadly bullet had ranged downward through his very vitals. I knew that Van had run his last race, was even now rushing toward a goal he would never reach. Fast as he might fly, he could ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... cheery, helpful creature is what I want to make life pleasant. Every thing else is used up; why not try this, and make the most of my last chance? She does me good, and I don't seem to get tired of her. I can't have a long life, they tell me, nor an easy one, with the devil to pay with my vitals generally; so it would be a wise thing to provide myself with a good-tempered, faithful soul to take care of me. My fortune would pay for loss of time, and my death leave her a bonny widow. I won't be rash, but I think I'll ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... Frequently, while he was punishing me, and while the blood was running almost in streams from my lacerated back, I have looked him steadily in the face, and I could fancy I saw him enjoying the same sort of savage ferocious delight, that a hungry wolf would discover in gorging upon the mangled vitals of the unoffending lamb. Such is the effect which tyranny produces upon the noble mind, that although I was of a tender delicate frame, and rather of a timid nature, yet I soon became so inured to punishment, that I constantly ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... Agnes battled with the demon fever which was gnawing at the vitals of her beloved George. At intervals her care seemed to get the better of the disorder, and to cause it to loosen its grip. But, alas! after twenty-four hours of unceasing toil and anxiety, poor devoted Agnes was ...
— Angel Agnes - The Heroine of the Yellow Fever Plague in Shreveport • Wesley Bradshaw
... her face is turned so her lips are about to be pressed upon his. You approach still closer, and a feeling of horror flashes through you—you see that the beautiful arms of the woman end in hairy claws. The claws embrace the man in deadly grasp, and are digging deep into his vitals. On his face is a look of fearful pain, and every splendid muscle ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... undefinable, but still terrible—were impending over me. Was it my lord's approaching death of which I had a presentiment? I know not! Weeks passed away; the count's visits occurred at intervals growing longer and longer—but his affection toward me had not abated. No: a malady that preyed upon his vitals retained him much at home;—and at last, about two months ago, I received through Antonio the afflicting intelligence that he was confined to his bed. My anguish now knew no bounds. I would fly ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... stirreth not out of home. O king, none can by nature be any person's foe. He is one's foe, and not anybody else, who hath common pursuits with one. He that from folly neglecteth a growing foe, hath his vitals cut off as by a disease that he cherished without treatment. A foe, however insignificant, if suffered to grow in prowess, swalloweth one like the white ants at the root of a tree eating off the tree itself. O Bharata, O Ajamida, let ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... sees red, the nations had rushed madly at each other, thirsting to gore each other's vitals with their horns. Men of peaceful vocations were at that very moment slaughtering their brother-men. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... sought it openly. Self—from first to last, the same under all names and all disguises. Nay, the wicked were truer than the good, for the self-seeker inflicted no lasting injury on any save himself, while the ardor with which the self-immolator flourished the sacrificial knife imperiled other vitals ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... drawing near, desired him to rise up, and repeating the same kind things he had spoken before, he once more promised him to make his peace with Antipater. But Demosthenes, perceiving that now the poison had pierced and seized his vitals, uncovered his head, and fixing his eyes upon Archias, "Now," said he, "as soon as you please you may commence the part of Creon in the tragedy, and cast out this body of mine unburied. But, O gracious Neptune, I, for my part, while I am yet alive, arise ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... shades of some army cut down in swathes and pitted in the fashion of the Cornal's bloodiest stories. And now they were the foreign invader, dumb because they did not know the native language, pitying this doomed community but moving in to strike it at the vitals. ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... wisdom burned at least as clearly and steadily then as now; and it is by that light alone that the shades of unbelief can be dispelled. Of course, wisdom without knowledge must starve or prey on its own vitals, and this was the intellectual danger of the middle ages; but knowledge without wisdom is so much food undigested and indigestible, and this is the evil of our own day, when to be passably well-informed so taxes our time ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... which we notice this pamphlet, is, with a view to the proof of that large intestine mischief which still lingers behind in the vitals of the Scottish establishment. No proof, in a question of that nature, can be so showy and ostensive to a stranger as that which is supplied by this vindictive pamphlet. For every past vote recording a scruple, is the pledge of a scruple still existing, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... when they selected thee without dissenting thought or voice. If, then, thou feel capable of what they claimed for thee, come thou to the task and understand that a man's son and heir is the very fruit of his vitals and core of his heart and liver. My desire of thee is thine instruction of him; and to happy issue Allah guideth!" The King then sent for his son and committed him to Al-Sindibad conditioning the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... his play, Thou steal'st his golden pointed darts away: Those darts which never fail; and in their stead Convey'st malignant arrows tipt with lead: The heedless God, suspecting no deceits, Shoots on, and thinks he has done wondrous feats; But the poor nymph, who feels her vitals burn, And from her shepherd can find no return, Laments, and rages at the power divine, When, curst Discretion! all the fault was thine: Cupid and Hymen thou hast set at odds, And bred such feuds between those kindred gods, That Venus cannot reconcile her sons; When one appears, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... within its glittering folds has press'd— He vainly struggles to escape its fangs, The reptile triumphs, and the victim hangs His head in agony, and bending low, Feels the cursed venom through his life-blood flow. On through his veins the burning poison speeds, Drinks up his spirit—on his vitals feeds, Till, tortured life extinct, the senseless clay In ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... with what your canting fools call a mission; and his mission is to take care of number one. Not dishonestly, mind you, nor violently, nor rudely, but doucely and calmly. The care a brute like me takes of his vitals, that care Lusignan takes of his outer cuticle. His number one is a sensitive plant. No scenes, no noise; nothing painful—by-the-by, the little creature that writes in the papers, and calls calamities PAINFUL, is of Lusignan's breed. Out to-day! of course he was out, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... the world, she moved calmly in her proud beauty, and was envied by the miserable, for the apparent happiness and splendor of her lot, a fierce beast was tugging at her heart-strings, more savage than that which tore the vitals of the boy of Lacedaemon. It ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... author" with anxiety on his brow, will be apt to step forward, and say, "Will you celebrate the man of the sword, who transfers the blush of his face to his back, and neglect the man of the quill, who, like the pelican, portions out his vitals to feed others? Which is preferable, he who lights up the mental powers, or he who puts them out? the man who stores the head with knowledge, or he who ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... Ireland, and the apparent incapability of the English public to realize it. "I have been lately over the south-west of Ireland," he wrote, "in the hope of discovering how some settlement could be made of the Irish question, which, like a fretting cancer, eats away our vitals as a nation." After the bold and, as some would think, unstatesmanlike proposal, "that the government should, at a cost of eighty millions, convert the greater part of the south-west of Ireland into Crown lands, in which landlords should have no power of control," Gordon concluded, "I must say, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... fever; it is not so open, so threatening and dangerous, as the ordinary distemper which goes by that name, but it preys upon the spirits, and, when its degrees are increased to a height, is as fatal and as sure to kill as the other: it is a secret enemy, that feeds upon the vitals; and when it has gone its full length, and the languishing tradesman is weakened in his solid part, I mean his stock, then it overwhelms ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... man was laid out on the floor of the saloon; and through curiosity, for it could hardly have been much of a novelty to the inhabitants of Frenchman's Ford, hundreds came to gaze on the corpse and examine the wounds, one above the other through his vitals, either of which would have been fatal. Officer's prisoner admitted that the dead man was his pardner, and offered to remove the corpse if released. On turning his six-shooter over to the proprietor of the place, he was given his freedom to depart ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... of his friends, it was really this fact of Prince Michael's witness of his misfortune—his second disgrace—which, through all these months, had been eating, like some poisonous acid, into the very vitals of Ivan's manhood, Ivan's courage. It was evident to him that his father, having somewhere beheld a programme of the concert, finding his son's name in famous company, had determined to give him one more chance of favor. He had come to hear the symphony: to find out whether, after all, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... boy," said Cappy amiably, yet with a queer sinking feeling in his vitals, for he did not like the look in Skinner's eye; and something told him there was ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... explosion to the right of the Queen Mary. Frank and Jack, as well as all others on the Queen Mary, gazed in that direction. The battle cruiser Invincible suddenly sprang into a sheet of flame and parted in half. A German shell had struck her vitals. ...
— The Boy Allies at Jutland • Robert L. Drake
... Landor was one nail; another, I think, would be good for you and the public. Indeed I would do the Keats. He is worth doing; it is a brave and a sad little story, and the critical part lies deep in the very vitals of art. All summed, I would do him; remember it is but a small order alongside of Landor; and L100, and kudos, and a good word for the poor, great lad, who will otherwise fall among the molluscs. Up, heart! give me a John Keats! Houghton, though ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with "his harmonious strains" the tortures of eternal punishment, Prometheus did not doubtless show as much delight as he ought to have done, on discovering that the beak of the vulture was no longer gnawing at his vitals, "scarcely daring to believe in such good fortune." Orpheus is the Commune; Eurydice, Liberty; "the infernal regions," the Government of the 4th September; "the harmonious strains," the decrees of the Commune; Prometheus, the tenant; and ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... were always wrong; nor am I certain that she did not by these provocations contribute to my death: for, as experience had taught me to give up my resentment to my bread, so my passions, for want of outward vent, preyed inwardly on my vitals, and perhaps occasioned the distemper of which ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... with his eyes on the bear, "if you're on my side, let my knife git 'im quick in 'is vitals, an' if you're on 'is side, let 'im finish me fust off. But, O God, if you're nootral, you jist sit thar on that stump, an' you'll see the darndest bear fight you ever hearn ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... whether poor Sister Marie-Aimee's legs were swollen to three times their size, like those of Bonne Justine. Her cries got worse and worse. One of them was so terrible that it seemed to come right out of her vitals. Then we had heard her moaning, and that was all. A few moments afterwards Madeleine had come up and whispered to Marie Renaud, Marie Renaud had put on her dress, and I heard her go downstairs; Directly ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... make restitution? Therefore, although, obedient to the will of her master, she left the room in silence, she cast on the old man, as she turned away, a look, which, in spite of the wine he had drunk, and the wine he hoped to drink, he felt freeze his very vitals—a look it was of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... during the revolutionary war. The sentence of death was accordingly remitted by the President, but his name was struck off the army list, and this republican hero, who had forgotten the art of war, went in his old age, broken-hearted and disgraced, to a living grave, with a worm in his vitals, gnawing and torturing him, more terribly than thousands of Indians, practising the most unheard of cruelties could have done, until death, so long denied, came to him, naturally, as ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... writing obstinately hold an intrenched position, checking the point of the German wedge, while the French forces from north and south beat upon the sides of the triangle, trying to force it back across the Meuse and out from the vitals of the ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... of honour, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... dull green parrot, the kea. But the kea is also a wretched pest, for it has learned how to kill sheep since the sheep-herders came to New Zealand. The kea darts out of the air, fastens its talons in the side of the sheep, and quickly makes a gaping hole into the animal's vitals. Thousands of sheep are ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... do no harm to send the boy. It will placate the Left and please the Clerics—it will also consolidate our reputation for liberality and largeness of mind. Also the young man will either be killed or fall a victim to the sinister influences of that corruption which, alas, has so entered into the vitals ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... brightly, and the air was deliciously cool after the scorching heat of the day. Strange to say, I no longer felt hungry. The craving for food was gone, but its place was more than supplied by an increased agony of thirst which seared my vitals as with fire. My lips were dry and cracked; my tongue felt shrivelled and hard in my mouth. I tried to speak to Dumaresq, who was lying in the bottom of the boat with his glazed eyes turned up at the stars, but I could give utterance only to ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... "just laws are her right. You are her son; and if you do not make one in the grand attempt to rescue her from the bloodhounds which tear her vitals, the guilt of parricide will be on your soul! Think not, sir, to preserve your home, or even your gray hairs, by hugging the chains by which you are bound. You are a Scot, and that is sufficient to arm the enemy against your property and life. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... allowed my son to put his hand to the lips of my cash box whenever he had a mind, he would plunge it deep into the vitals, he would take all I have!" cried old Sechard. "That is the way with children; they eat up their parents' purse. What did I do myself, eh? I never cost my parents a farthing. Your printing office is standing idle. The rats and the mice do all the printing that is done ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... even attempt now to hide his dislike of me, nor to draw for me that cloak of suave composure over the fierce temper that is always gnawing at his vitals as surely as fox ever gnawed little Spartan. He sees that it is useless, I suppose. As I went upstairs to greet Madeleine, I laughed to myself to think how Fate had circumvented ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... without a pause, biting, chewing, gulping ferociously. Loiseau, hard at work in his corner, urged his wife in a low voice to follow his example. She resisted for some time, then, after a pang which gripped her very vitals, she gave in. Whereupon her husband, rounding off his phrases, asked if their "charming fellow-traveler" would permit him to offer a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... put an arch with a skull and crossbones underneath, and this motto, "Expiring in the hopes of a resurrection to life again." In one corner was a coffin, and the words, "The last remains of the Pennsylvania Journal, which departed this life the 31st of October, 1765, of a stamp in her vitals. Aged 23 years." The Pennsylvania Gazette, on November 7, the day of its first issue after the Stamp Act became law, published a half sheet, printed on one side, without any heading, and in its place the words, "No ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... been fishing up the river and had caught a tremendous eel. An eel can hold out to wriggle a very long time. He has no vitals. Even with talon-tipped claws he is slippery and more than a clawful; so the old hawk took a short cut home across the railroad-track and the corner of the woods ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... this all, nor the worst. There is another article, and far more damaging, in the indictment. Through Protection, and because of it, Paternalism has crept in; and, like a huge cancerous growth, is eating steadily into the vitals of the political system. Instead of supporting a government economically administered by money contributed by the People, a majority of the People to-day are looking to the government for support, either directly through pension payments or indirectly through some form ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... white upturned face. That was himself, lying there with face illumined by the fire, and men would call him dead! But he would not be dead! He would be living on with that inward fire, gnawing at his vitals, telling him continually what he might have been, and showing him what high heaven was that he had had, and lost. He saw it now. He had deliberately thrown away that heaven that had been his. He saw that hell ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... the way. It is as I suspected," continued the host, when the man had departed on his errand, "they are Andalusians, and are about to make what they call gaspacho, on which they will all sup. Oh, the meanness of these Andalusians! they are come here to suck the vitals of Galicia, and yet envy the poor innkeeper the gain of a cuarto in the oil which they require for their gaspacho. I tell you one thing, master, when that fellow returns, and demands bread and garlic to mix with the oil, I will tell him there is none in the house: as he has bought the oil ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... and Turkey to-day are patients in a world hospital. It is plain that they are stricken with death. The foul cancer of militarism has fastened itself upon Germany. The cancer of autocracy is eating into the vitals of Austria. The cancer of polygamy is enmeshed in the life of Turkey. Of late the disease has been spreading. Now these surgeons, named Foch, Haig and Pershing, have been anointed by the ointment of war black and sulphurous, and, lifting their scalpel, these men have been ordained ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not find it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very vitals of his artistic effort. He is seeking always to be that which he is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... his recent fall certainly must be laid to Ringfield, who had lifted neither voice nor hand to hinder; for while pursuing an evil course the latter seemed powerless to cast out the emotions of blinding hate and jealousy that tore at his vitals and rendered him a changed and miserable creature. The next morning he visited Crabbe again and found him, as he had hoped, absolutely sodden and useless; his elasticity and nerve, his good looks, his air of authority, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... wing, suspends it, as if for a spectacle to be exulted over: then stalking to the door of his cell, turns about, glotes over it at a distance; and, sometimes advancing, sometimes retiring, preys at leisure upon its vitals. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... obey," quavered the unfortunate orderly, shaken with a palsy of fear. Without a quiver, the Arab would rush a machine-gun position or face a bayonet-charge; but this betrayal of his kin struck at the vitals of his faith. Still, the Master's word was law even above Al Koran. With trembling lips ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... and lock us in. Where is the creed's foundation? I've shrived a thousand souls—I cannot now absolve my own. To quench this awful thirst, I cut an artery in my arm and sucked its blood. The thirstness did not cease. They lied. 'Twas not the vultures at Prometeus' heart, 'twas hunger at his vitals gnawed. The salt drops that I swallowed from that vein have set my brain on fire. What's that? The ground's a-tremble 'neath my feet as touched with life. Earth, rend your breast and let me in! For anything ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... many days together. The interests of the persons in her novels supplied the lack of interest in her own life; and Memory and Imagination found their appropriate work, and ceased to prey upon her vitals. But too frequently she could not write, could not see her people, nor hear them speak; a great mist of head-ache had blotted them out; they ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... more. He expired to-day at a few minutes after twelve o'clock at noon. He had been ailing for a few days, but we anticipated no serious result, conjecturing that a portion of the white paint he swallowed last summer might be lingering about his vitals without having any serious effect upon his constitution. Yesterday afternoon he was taken so much worse that I sent an express for the medical gentleman (Mr. Herring), who promptly attended, and administered a powerful dose of castor oil. Under the influence of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of "hauling in" and "letting run" being often renewed several times at the taking of a single fish. When the boat can be hauled near enough, the officer at its head darts his lance into the whale, aiming at a vital part. If the creature "spouts blood," it is well; but if not hit in the vitals, away it goes, and the whole business of "letting run," "towing," and "hauling in" has ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... than civil on Emathian (1) plains, And crime let loose we sing; how Rome's high race Plunged in her vitals her victorious sword; Armies akin embattled, with the force Of all the shaken earth bent on the fray; And burst asunder, to the common guilt, A kingdom's compact; eagle with eagle met, Standard to ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... whose heart is all the while bleeding for another woman, to whom he would willingly sacrifice the world; but, because he must sacrifice her interest as well as his own, never durst even give her a hint of that passion which was preying on his very vitals? 'Do you believe, Miss Fanny, there is such a wretch on earth?' I answered, with an assumed coldness, I did not believe there was. He then took me gently by the hand, and, with a look so tender that I cannot describe it, vowed he was himself that wretch. ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... well as she did, an' after consultin' wid Mandy Ann an' prayin' for light, it come dat I must sen' on, an' I did, hopin' he wouldn' come, for to part wid de lil chile was like tearin' my vitals out, an' Mandy Ann's, too. He did come,—a big, gran' man, wid a look which made me glad Miss Dory was in heaven 'stead of livin' wid him. He'd been hyar oncet before. Mebby I tole you, at de funeral. My mind gets leaky, an' I can't 'member ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... form that seemed made from flame, that was nodding and turning in the fire, occasionally darting its tongue at them or allowing its tail to fall out and lie along the stone floor. As he came to the door he, too, was transfixed, and the fire seemed burning his vitals, until he felt water sprinkled on his face, and saw that his wife, whom he had left at home too ill to move, stood behind him and was casting holy water into the furnace, speaking an incantation as she did so. At that ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... writing the OLD VAGABOND or JACQUES. Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to be poor, 'was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty' in his ill days. Thus it is that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the fox burrowing in their vitals. ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... most vital and yielding portions of the female system. What of all that? Fashion is superior to health and life. What if it shrivel a woman into a mummy, and fade her into a ghost, and plant in her vitals the never-dying worm of consumption! What is beauty and physical womanhood to Fashion? Who would not rather fade at twenty-five, and die at thirty, than to ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... out on the beautiful winter landscape, and have been wrought up by our daily researches almost to a frenzy of justice, intolerance, and enthusiasm to crush the viper that is eating out the vitals of the nation. Oh, what a blessed privilege to be engaged in labor for the oppressed! We often think, if the slaves are never emancipated, we are richly rewarded by the hallowed influence of abolition principles on ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... who comes to live and labour with you. You are the twin branches of one tree; you are the sons of one mother. Is this goodly land not wide enough for you, that you should rend each other's flesh at the bidding of those who will wet their beaks within both your vitals?—Look up, see, they circle in the air ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... gnawing at their vitals. He felt it too. But there seemed no immediate danger, so, with a ray-gun in each hand, he summoned a blustering courage and said to the ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... too late, and Mrs. Stanford had to keep up appearances, and smiles, though the serpents of envy and regret gnawed at her vitals. It was very gay there! Life seemed all made up of music, and dancing, and feasting, and mirth, and skating, and sleighing, and dressing, and singing. Life went like a fairy spectacle, or an Eastern drama, ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... oath, and snatching the musket from the hands of the soldier boy, he rushed upon the soulless miscreant, and transfixed him upon the bayonet. Uttering fierce curses all the time, he plunged the bayonet again and again into the vitals of the rebel, till ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... contented here,' said Wainamoinen, 'in these roomy caverns. I can eat thy heart and flesh and for drink I will take thy blood. And I will set my forge still deeper in thy vitals, and will swing my hammer still harder on thy heart and lungs and liver. I shall never leave thee until I learn all thy wisdom, and the three lost words, that all thy magic knowledge may not perish with ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... allowed to win the weather berth, imagine her trying, while she rolled down to her middle deck, to damage one of these belted brutes, who meantime would be leisurely picking out the particular plank by which she intended to introduce into her enemy's vitals a weight of explosive metal sufficient in all truth to blow her ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... he said, 'it is not upon my head that I do not wed this wench. You be my witness that I would wed; it gores my heart to see her look so pale. It tears my vitals to see any woman look pale. As Lucretius says, "Better the ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... seen by you as you pass under the tree. I leave it as a signal to tell you that your tree has already stood too long. It is past its prime. Millions of insects, engendered by disease, are preying upon its vitals. Ere long it will fall a log in useless ruins. Warned by this loss, cut down the rest in time, and spare, O spare ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... Proscribed by the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the empire, the Donatists still maintained in some provinces, particularly in Numidia, their superior numbers; and four hundred bishops acknowledged the jurisdiction of their primate. But the invincible spirit of the sect sometimes preyed on its own vitals: and the bosom of their schismatical church was torn by intestine divisions. A fourth part of the Donatist bishops followed the independent standard of the Maximianists. The narrow and solitary path which their first leaders had marked out, continued ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... further the hatred to ceremonies forms, orders, rites, and positive institutions. Even baptism and the Lord's supper, by all other sects believed to be interwoven with the very vitals of Christianity, were disdainfully rejected by them. The very Sabbath they profaned. The holiness of churches they derided; and they would give to these sacred edifices no other appellation than that of shops or steeplehouses. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... tears; and the vehemence of her feelings tearing so delicate a frame (now rendered weak unto death by a consuming sickness, which her late exertions and present griefs had made seize on her very vitals), seemed to threaten the immediate extinction of her being. Bruce, aroused by her smothered cries, as she lay almost expiring, upheld by Gloucester, hurried to her side. By degrees she recovered to life ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... greatness and grandeur, or its self-complacent but essential vacuity. It is possible for a nation, through subtle delusions, to get such an attack of the big head that it bends over backwards, and it is liable, in this exposed position, to get a thrust in its vitals. ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... after a long, fatiguing session with the vitals of a Ford that refused to be cranked, Casey was busy gathering brush, for his supper fire when Fate came walking up' the trail. Fate appears in many forms. In this instance it assumed the shape of a packed burro that poked ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... there certainly had been no cause for their rejection. Mr Apjohn from the first had looked at him with accusing eyes; his servants were spies upon his actions; this newspaper was rending his very vitals; and now this one last friend had deserted him. He thought that if only he could summon courage for the deed, it would be best for him to throw himself ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; it looks like PMD." Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. MD, you must know, are not women." "God Almighty preserve you both and make us happy together." "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives." "Farewell, dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy day since he left you, as ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Gerers strikes the admiral, The shield he breaks, the hauberk unmetals, And his good spear drives into his vitals, So well he's pinned him, clean through the carcass, Dead on the field he's flung him from his hand. Says Oliver: "Now is ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... [366] and he will e'en have me seek her of Thy Grace, [367] so thou mayst marry her with him, and I cannot do away this conceit from his wit, for that the love of her hath gotten possession of his vitals, so that he saith to me, 'Know, O mother mine, that, except I attain my desire, assuredly I am a dead man.' Wherefore I crave Thy Grace's clemency and hope that thou wilt pardon me and my son this effrontery neither ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... raging seas I rode: The storm was loud, the night was dark; The ocean yawned, and rudely blowed The wind that tossed my foundering bark. Deep horror then my vitals froze, Death-struck, I ceased the tide to stem, When suddenly a star arose; It ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... efforts to throw her influence all the more affectionately over her home. Wounded deeper and ever deeper, she will toil on, hiding from the world the pangs of wounded affection, "as the wounded dove will clasp its wings to its side and cover and conceal the arrow that is preying on its vitals." But the shafts of continuous neglect will pierce her heart at last—a husband's continuous neglect extinguish, at last, the sacred flame upon the domestic hearth. She, too, finds home irksome. She, too, learns to find more pleasure abroad than in her home. She, too, thinks light of liberties ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... machinations of his enemies to heart more than he ought to have done; he even began to feel that an insidious disease, resulting from chagrin and dejection, was gnawing at his vitals. In this unhappy frame of mind he designed and executed two large pictures which excited quite an uproar in Rome. Of these one represented the transitoriness of all earthly things, and in the principal figure, that of a wanton female ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... its vitals; and our then ministers were not ashamed to say, that they sympathized with the feelings of our merchants. The universal alarm of the whole trading body of England, will never be laughed at by them as an ill-grounded or a pretended panic. The universal desire of that body will always have ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with rapid-fire guns you may shoot away the lightly armored superstructure, but as long as the vitals are protected and the turret armor is intact the guns in the turret will be able to do execution, and large-calibred guns will be necessary to perforate the armor and disable those weapons. Even with ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... accept a gift from a person that is low and vulgar. One should never jitter such words as trouble other people or as are inauspicious or are as' sinful. Wordy shafts fall from the mouth. Pierced therewith, the victim grieves day and night. The man of wisdom should never shot them for piercing the vitals of other people. A forest, pierced with shafts or cut down with the axe, grows again. The man, however, that is pierced with words unwisely spoken, becomes the victim of wounds that fester and lead to death.[462] Barbed arrows and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... awe-inspiring in the cough. The captain was a huge and rugged man. His cough was a terrible compound of a choke, a gasp, a rend, and a roar. Only lungs of sole-leather could have weathered it. Each paroxysm suggested the idea that the man's vitals were being torn asunder; but not content with that, the exasperated mariner made matters worse by keeping up a continual growl of indignant ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... outer fringes of the ionosphere—that upper layer of rarified protons, the rapidly moving current of high velocity ions known as the plasmasphere—she bucked like a kicked horse. From deep within her vitals, the throb began, a strumming, thrumming sound with a somewhat higher note imposed upon it, making a sound like that of a bass viol being plucked rapidly on its ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... dictate the course of the game and to whom there is no risk. The Louisiana lottery is a positive evil, a cancerous sore on the body politic. But Wall Street is a far greater evil; it is a cancer whose roots have already fastened upon the vitals of our political, educational, and religious institutions; an evil which nothing can remedy, save a political revolution of the great earnest masses of our people. The pulpit is abashed in its presence because so many leading lights and pillars in each wealthy congregation are connected with ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... moon. Not to see that old man of the moon (no, Josiah wuz my choice); but I always did want to know what wuz on the other planets, and though I'm most ashamed to say it, after all my talk agin Coney Island, yet if it hadn't been for the kankerin' worm of anxiety knawin' at my vitals, I should have enjoyed myself first rate as the air-ship sailed off, with a ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... kid brother of mine. Bob, I hope you'll fall desperately in love some day, and that you will have a devil of a time winning the girl. You need something to stir up your vitals. By George! and I hope she won't have a cent ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... of a mad dog, your most strenuous efforts will not bring desired results, and fatal disease may be clutching at your vitals. If a mad dog succeeds in biting you, it is a sign that you or some loved one is on the verge of insanity, and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... and stable about a big machine like the Sky-Bird II which a pilot soon begins to love with a passion he never feels toward the little 'plane. An exquisite community of spirit grows up between machine and pilot; each, as it were, merges into the vitals of the other. The levers and controls are the nervous system of the airplane, through which the will of the aviator may be expressed—expressed in an infinitely fine degree. Indeed, a flying-machine is something entirely apart from and above all other contrivances of man's ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... gleams that shoot from their kindled eyes, are ornaments which a plain battle between factions cannot boast, but which, notwithstanding, are very suitable to the fierce and gloomy silence of that premeditated vengeance which burns with such intensity in the heart, and scorches up the vitals into such a thirst for blood. Not but that they come by different means to the same conclusion; because it is the feeling, and not altogether the manner ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... back; he flung up his arms in a gesture of finality, shaking clenched fists into the sky. He was at the point of surrender. The torture had reached his vitals. He floundered aft. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... her disgrace was passing into the annals of Monterey, and that half her beauty was falling from her. Then she found herself seated on the horse in front of her mother, who encircled her waist with an arm that pressed her vitals like iron. After that there ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... of London, which sucks the vitals of trade in this island to itself, is the chief reason of any decay of business in this place; and I shall, in the course of these observations, hint at it, where many good seaports and large towns, though farther off than Ipswich, ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... a vulture whose claws are hard to unloose from the vitals of the spirit, I think it is jealousy. I found it had got hold of me, and was tearing the life out of me. I knew it in time. O sing praise to our King, you who know Him! he is mightier than our enemies; we need not be the prey of any. But I struggled and prayed, more than one night through, ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... naught save a flitting breath * And an eye whose babe ever wandereth. There remains not a joint in his limbs, but what * Disease firm fixt ever tortureth. His tears are flowing, his vitals burning; * Yet for all his tongue still he silenceth. All foemen in pity beweep his woes; * Ah for freke whom the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... beforehand, they preferred getting the money from the Club, keeping themselves in difficulties and poverty until the debt was paid off. Such a practice is worse than living from hand to mouth: it is living upon one's own vitals. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... emits a nauseous steam! The black blood oozing from her nostrils proclaims how terrible the inward struggle. The whole frame bends and shrinks, and warps like a fragment of leather thrown into a furnace—the flame has reached her vitals—at last, by ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... compared to sudden scaldings: he was being scalded to death by degrees, covered from head to foot with blisters. A telegram in the hall for Ulick, a hesitation in Ulick's voice, a sudden shifting of the eyes—anything sufficed—and therewith he was burnt to the bone, far beyond the bone, into the very vitals. Even now in his study, he waited another scalding. At any moment Ulick might come in, and though he never betrayed himself by any word or look, still his presence would suggest that he had just come from Evelyn. Perhaps he had been walking with her in the park? But why ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... of others and cherishes [1] his own, can neither help himself nor others; he will be called a moral nuisance, a fungus, a microbe, a mouse gnawing at the vitals of humanity. The darkness in one's self must first be cast out, in order rightly to discern [5] darkness or to ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... woman she hired me to, she, "God bless her soul", she told me, "Fannie yo' are free, an' I don't have to pay your Master for you now." You stay with me. She didn't give me no money, but let me stay there an' work for vitals an' clothes 'cause I ain't had no where to go. Jesus, Jesus, God help us! Um, Um, Um! You Chillun don't know. I didn't say nothin' when she wuz tellin' me, but done 'cided to leave her an' go back to the white folks ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States, From Interviews with Former Slaves - Virginia Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... an intoxicating joy. The wet earth, the drenched cedars, the oak buds, the spongy moss, the reddening blackberry-bushes, and the sprouting grain, all mingled in a queer creation odor that went right through the pores of my skin into my vitals and made me feel as strong as an ox, or rather, as Sam's new mule. I caught a glimpse of that mule through a vista before I came out of the lane, plodding along before Sam and the plow with a great splendid lurch of a gait that threw the black dirt as high as Sam's knees as he plunged ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the attack. Could she but pierce the skin, her paralyzing venom would quickly do its work. Then the murderous task would be easy. Eggs would be laid deep in the wound; grubs would hatch from them, and batten luxuriously on their unwilling host, sapping his strength, but cunningly avoiding his vitals, until they were full-fed. As they turned to pupae he would die, and from caterpillar, or may be chrysalis, there would then issue, in place of gorgeous butterfly, a host of dingy hymenoptera. So would the race of ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... is as an ulcer upon a finger to an ulcer in the vitals. Small-pox does not vitiate the blood of a people; this disease does. Its existence in a primary ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... the land was full of garrisons, the embayed waters full of fleets. With the impunity of a Levanter, Paul skimmed his craft in the land-locked heart of the supreme naval power of earth; a torpedo-eel, unknowingly swallowed by Britain in a draught of old ocean, and making sad havoc with her vitals. ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... with the trapper's instinct of hoarding every possible item, rolled it up and put it in his pocket. Of food there was none; Maria had done her best to put him beyond the need of sustenance, but, now that he was himself once more, the yearning to eat seized his vitals, and he knew he must make all haste to satisfy it. When he was struck, his snowshoes had been on his feet, and the Indians in their haste, or because of the darkness, had not removed them, so he had this slight help in the problems he faced. ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... day and a night and a day the starving wolf voyaged down the flood, till his gaunt sides clung together, and a fierce ache gnawed at his vitals. But with the fasting and the ceaseless soothing of his tongue his wound rapidly healed; and when, after sunset of his second evening on the river, the islet grounded in an eddy under the bank, he sprang ashore with speed little impaired. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... bring forth," murmured the white-haired man in the clerical garb far back in the crowded room. Had he learned the law of Truth to error, "Thou shall surely die"? Did he discern the vultures gnawing at the rich man's vitals? Did he, too, know that this giant of privilege, so insolently flaunting his fleeting power, his blood-stained wealth and his mortal pride, might as well seek to dim the sun in heaven as to escape the working ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and defy each other. Both smite each other with their iron-tipped lances with all their strength. The shields that hang about their necks are not worth two coats of bark: the leather tears, and they split the wood, and they shatter the meshes of the hauberks. Both are pierced to the vitals by the lances, and the horses fall to earth. Now, both the warriors were doughty. Grievously, but not mortally, wounded, they quickly got upon their feet and grasped afresh their lances, which were not ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... Feodor during an evening call he interned him in the vitals of a tuneless Baby Grand, and for three hours played on him CHOPIN'S polonaise in A flat major, with the loud pedal down. On his release Feodor had lost his reason and rushed to the nearest police-station to ask to be sent to the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... a 'thing,' Eve Marsham," the other broke in with a laugh, "or we'll quarrel. I'm just a plain woman with sense enough to say nothing when Gay gets home with more whiskey aboard than is good for his vitals. And don't you think I'm not putting a good value on myself when I say that. Not that Gay's given to sousing a heap. No, he's a good feller, sure, an' wouldn't swap him for—for your Will—on'y when he snores. So you see it's a kindness to me ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... remarks. The faces before him grinned and gibbered at him like a horde of monkeys. They had got him at last—all for a few pieces of rotten beef! That lean, hungry wolfhound would tear his tongue out by the roots if he even opened his mouth; claw wide open his vitals. And old Tutt was fixing him with the eye of a basilisk and slowly turning him to stone. Somebody sure had welshed! He had once been in a side show at Coney Island where the room simulated the motion of an ocean steamer. The courtroom began to do the same—slanting this way and that and spinning ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... them. Perhaps the responsibility in part lies at the door of Protestantism. Unamuno remarks that Catholicism knew little of that anxious preoccupation with sin, so destructive of heroic greatness, which has gnawed at the vitals of the Protestantism which we have inherited, if only in the form of a barren Freethought spreading its influence far beyond ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... one subject that goes to the vitals of every rural American; and a Hoosier will talk ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... thereon, and the old man burnt them on cleft wood and made libation over them of gleaming wine; and at his side the young men in their hands held five-pronged forks. Now when the thighs were burnt and they had tasted the vitals, then sliced they all the rest and pierced it through with spits, and roasted it carefully, and drew all off again. So when they had rest from the task and had made ready the banquet, they feasted, nor was their heart aught stinted of the fair banquet. But when they had put away from them the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... of Years beneath A griesly troop are seen, The painful family of Death, More hideous than their Queen: This racks the joints, this fires the veins, That every labouring sinew strains, Those in the deeper vitals rage: Lo, Poverty, to fill the band, That numbs the soul with icy ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... spending his time painfully to catch a beaver, or entrap an enemy, without stores of thought, without leisure, with nothing often to eat, and nothing to put on but tatters and rags, and, withal, with the whole Anglo-Saxon race treading on his toes and burning out his vitals with ardent spirits. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... guiding star of your policy toward us. This grave question settled, the vast army of Negro leaders absorbed in the momentous work of adjusting this external problem, will be free to turn undivided attention to the curing of those ills that are gnawing at the vitals of the race. ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... was sullenly retreating. The central bulk remained, a vast, obstinate mass, but most people thought it would somehow end by consuming itself, if indeed this doom were not anticipated by fresh scatterings of salt striking at its vitals as soon as the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... his most beloved friends, because they enlarged the happiness of his wife; and, strange as it may appear, I believe that he had as little cause to complain as Othello, and therefore never permitted his repose to be disturbed by those suspicions which preyed upon the vitals of the hapless moor. The ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... most powerful side decreased. Force, then, gradually interfered, and acts of Parliament were considered the only logical refutation of a philosophical heresy. The anomaly of our laws interfered again. Collins was rich, and so must escape the fangs of the law. Thomas Woolston was poor, so his vitals were pierced by laws which Collins escaped—yet both committed the same offence. In later times Gibbon traced the rise of Christianity, and about the same time Paine accomplished another portion of the same risk—and the Government which prosecuted the plebeian, flattered the patrician. But ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... upon the ground, over and over again. The red blood covered us both. I saw it welling from the lips of the fierce monster, and I joyed to think that my knife reached his vitals. I was wild—I was mad—I was burning with a fierce vengeance—with anger, such as one might feel for ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... whose only object in existence seems to be to eat and consume, and who, besides, by their idleness and habits, keep up a system of detraction, jealousy, and discord among otherwise well-disposed citizens, that, like so many cancers, are eating into the very vitals of the public morals. Let not the American citizen, therefore, bewail the certain decline and rapid decay of the institutions of sectarianism, but rather pray for the dawn of that glorious approaching day when, as we are but a one people and a united ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... despair and suffering; a dull, hopeless misery in their sunken eyes, a pathetic patience fit to touch a heart of stone; while others still have grown frantic with that terrible pain, the hunger gnawing at their very vitals, and go staggering about, wildly ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... 1930 that the great thing began in my life. There was then a very great man who performed operations on his fellows to compose their vitals—we called such men surgeons. John Granden wore the title "Sir" before his name, in indication of nobility by birth according to the prevailing standards in England. But surgery was only a hobby of Sir John's, if I must be precise, for, while he had achieved an enormous reputation as a surgeon, ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker
... of paroxysms of rage, but nothing upset him. In hearing of the death of Napoleon, he swore that he would eat the heart of England; the slow agony of the pale and interesting heir of the Empire, inspired him with a passion to tear the vitals out of Austria. When the drama was over and the curtain fell on Schoenbrunn, he dashed away his tears and said: "It is well. I have lived in a moment a man's entire life. Now show ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... God's will. We need not stain our hands with innocent blood. If we but sit passive, and leave their fate to time, they will die away in discouragement and despair. Already disease is sapping their vitals. Like other weak races, they will vanish from the pathway of the strong, and there is no place for them to flee. When they go hence, it is to go forever. It is the law of life, which God has given to the earth. To coddle them, to delude them with ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt |
