"Appalling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sold his soul to go. He even meditated ways of suicide if the Commander, for a punishment, should veto his going. During the last three weeks he had run up an appalling tally of black marks, and yet it was generally agreed that the Commander would relent if Link would only keep his temper and behave with common ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... anything but glimpses and ruins of the divinest? Sophocles is a pure Greek temple; but AEschylus is a rugged mountain, lashed by seas, and riven by thunderbolts: and which is the most wonderful, and appalling? Or if one will have AEschylus too a work of man, I say he is like a Gothic Cathedral, which the Germans say did arise from the genius of man aspiring up to the immeasurable, and reaching after the infinite in complexity and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... woodland which had been allowed to run entirely wild. We soon peopled this very satisfactorily with two tribes of Red Indians, two bands of peculiarly bloodthirsty robbers, a sufficiency of bears, lions and tigers, and an appalling man-eating dragon. I fear that in view of the size of the little wood, these imported inhabitants must ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... great calamity, and we have accepted the verdict of later scholarship, that this Apocalypse of St. John appeared about 68 or 69 A.D. Was this a time of trouble in that Eastern world? Verily it was; the most appalling hour perhaps in the world's history. The unspeakable Nero was either still upon the throne of the Roman Empire, or had just reeled from that eminence to the doom of a craven suicide. The last years of his life were gorged with horror. The murder of his brother, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... foolishness, when regarded from an advanced religious position, are three facts calculated to appall every thoughtful man and startle him into amazement." "It is vain," he said, "to undertake to impart a competent conception of the crimes and miseries belonging to war. Their appalling character and magnitude stun the imagination and pass off like the burden ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... blest by the Gang Be the Rhymester who sang Their praises in doggrel appalling; More now were a sin— Ho, waiters, begin! Each ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... on this front, but its place was taken by constant shelling and the deadly sniping which claimed so many victims at this time. The weather during November and December was truly appalling. All trenches were knee-deep and more in mud and water, and it is on record that the B.G.C., 19th Infantry Brigade, had his boots sucked off by the mud and went round trenches without them. Parapets would not stand and were so flimsy that many men were shot through them. But the weather eventually ...
— A Short History of the 6th Division - Aug. 1914-March 1919 • Thomas Owen Marden
... made up his mind then and there that when it came time for him to die he would see to it that he did not do it in the night. For, despite the gay lights of the city, there were always sombre shadows for one to be jerked into by the relentless hand of death; there was something appalling about being dragged off into a darkness that was to be dissipated at ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... the ground heaved with a mighty convulsion beneath their feet, and an appalling roar rent the air, the ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... them to the proper floor; and they went to their rooms down a corridor walled with blood-red marble and paved with carpet soft as a cushion. Here were six rooms of palatial size, with carpets, drapery, and furniture of a splendour quite appalling to Montague. ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... The appalling magnitude of the evil against which he felt himself especially called to contend was painfully manifest to John Woolman. At the outset, all about him, in every department of life and human activity, in the state and the church, he saw evidences ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... speaker will be affected for good or for evil by the words that escape his lips. This fully accords with the discovery of modern science, so eloquently and poetically enunciated by Babbage, of the indestructibility of force or energy when once applied. How appalling is the sanction (which is not a myth) under ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... interest, the hollowness which lies beneath. But the only meaning of the lectures is to point out more forcibly than ever that besides the obvious riddles of man's life there is one stranger and more appalling still—that a religion which M. Renan can never speak of without admiration and enthusiasm is based on a self-contradiction and deluding falsehood, more dreadful in its moral inconsistencies than ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... marigold head lit up her familiar places. The two days were days of relief, yet mitigated with a certain uneasy apprehension of the return of Sarah Walker, or—more alarming thought!—the Sarah Walker element in a more appalling form. So strong was this impression that an unhappy infant who unwittingly broke this interval with his maiden outcry was nearly lynched. "We're not going to stand that from YOU, you know," was the crystallized sentiment of a brutal bachelor. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... lantana, and a hundred species of ferns and orchids, with myriad mosses, covered every foot of soil, or stretched upon the trunks and limbs, so that exquisite tapestries garlanded the trees and hung like green and gold draperies between them. Mape-trees prevailed, immense, weirdly shaped, often appalling in their curious buttresses, their limbs writhing as if in torture, suggestive of the old fetishism that had endowed them with spirits which suffered and spoke. Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was a bare trail ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... and were in the closest kind of an alliance to save the situation. He discovered that until prices had fallen fifty points neither of them had been in the market to any significant extent; and that, to avert the appalling calamities which seemed imminent, both were ready if necessary to impoverish themselves or to take unusual risks of so doing. He learned the real causes of the panic, so far as these were not hidden from ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... of her back being turned towards him, eyed her severely. The hardihood of the girl was appalling. His gaze wandered from her to the bureau, and, as his eye fell on the key sticking up in the lid, the idea of reading her a much-needed lesson presented itself. He stepped over the pail towards the bureau and, catching the girl's eye as she ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... of the company had been disappointed by the pacific termination of the meeting betwixt the Earl of Etherington and Tyrrel, the anticipation of which had created so deep a sensation. It had been expected that some appalling scene would have taken place; instead of which, each party seemed to acquiesce in a sullen neutrality, and leave the war to be carried on by their lawyers. It was generally understood that the cause was removed out of the courts of Bellona into that of Themis; and although the litigants ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... did for you I must have done no less for Zevle [her sister]. If I had feared death as much as the Regent does, I could not have returned alive and alone. My venture into infinite space involved possibilities of horror more appalling than the mere terrors of death. You asked of me as my one bridal gift leave to share its perils. How unworthy of you should I be, if I did not hold the possession of Eveena, even for the two years of her promise, well ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... less terrifying than their brothers. They had their father's fierce, hawklike profile, softened by youth, and the appalling height and robustness due to the freedom and fresh air of a nomadic existence. Their costumes might, Mary thought, have been fashioned out of gunny-sacks by the simple expedient of cutting holes for the head and arms. The description of the dress worn by the charcoal-burner's daughter ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... respirators in time. There was no warning, although after this gas alarms were given by ringing church bells. Other prisoners, from the 63rd, regiment, had such vivid recollections of the attack that they said: "The effects of the English gas are said to be appalling." Collecting information from prisoners belonging to this or that Company, and carefully checking by cross-examination, it is clear that this attack must have been responsible ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... Spanish language, she retired to Bath, where she lives slenderly on an annual present from Sir Leicester and whence she makes occasional resurrections in the country houses of her cousins. She has an extensive acquaintance at Bath among appalling old gentlemen with thin legs and nankeen trousers, and is of high standing in that dreary city. But she is a little dreaded elsewhere in consequence of an indiscreet profusion in the article of rouge and persistency in an obsolete pearl necklace like ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... festal treat. Their places taken, they, with eyebrows rais'd, Sit patiently, and fain would be amaz'd. I know the art to hit the public taste, Yet ne'er of failure felt so keen a dread; True, they are not accustomed to the best, But then appalling the amount they've read.. How make our entertainment striking, new, And yet significant and pleasing too? For to be plain, I love to see the throng, As to our booth the living tide progresses; As wave on wave successive rolls along, And through heaven's narrow portal forceful presses; Still in broad ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... were lined with the villages of the Indians. Their wigwams were of a great variety of structure. The scenes presented were astonishing in their wild and picturesque aspect. Crowds of weird-like savages would often be collected on the bluffs, watching the appalling ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... not," she replied; "I was alone. Yet I felt as though some living thing were nigh—some unseen form, of terrible and appalling attributes! Was it not ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... of the appalling waste which has been characteristic of our administration of natural resources, the outlook is distinctly encouraging. Resources used by past generations are gone forever, but at last we are making rapid strides in conserving what is left. Not only this, but ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... until some degree of preparation was made; and I have no doubt at all that the war would have been averted had not the Maine been destroyed in Havana harbor. The country forced us into it after that appalling catastrophe. ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... to nausea her recent attempts to placate him, to turn him from an enemy into an ally. Had she done that in order to blind him the more completely to what was going on? The idea suggested a degree of calculating inhumanity appalling to contemplate. He lived over again the moment when she had clung to him caressingly and pressed her perfumed cheek against his breast.... How could he have been such an utter fool? He set his teeth with a feeling ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... dense forest reigned supreme in the noonday heat. The whispered consultations and the occasional footfall of some one of the party on a dry teak-leaf seemed to echo for miles and to break rudely the well-nigh appalling quiet of the jungle. Here and there, sometimes crossing our path, were the fresh footprints of deer and of antelope, of pig and the lordly sambar stag that had passed this way last night to drink at a time when the presence ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... alcoholic liquors in the West, we are bound to admit that the comparison is very much to the disadvantage of the latter. Where opium kills its hundreds, gin counts its victims by thousands; and the appalling scenes of drunkenness so common to a European city are of the rarest occurrence in China. In a country where the power of corporal punishments is placed by law in the hands of the husband, wife-beating is unknown; and in a country where an ardent spirit can be supplied to the people ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... the nature of those constellations of bright stars which have been recognised from all antiquity, and of the host of smaller stars which our telescopes disclose? Can it be true that these countless orbs are really majestic suns, sunk to an appalling depth in the abyss of unfathomable space? What have we to tell of the different varieties of stars—of coloured stars, of variable stars, of double stars, of multiple stars, of stars that seem to move, and of ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... object soon rivetted the attention of the multitude, and proved how much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... toward Chalmette he could see the great bend in the stream, outlined by the row of electric lights. Across the river Algiers lay, a long, irregular blot, made darker by the dawn which lightened the sky beyond. An industrious tug or two, coming for some early sailing ship, gave a few appalling toots, that seemed to be the signal for breaking day. The Italian luggers were creeping nearer their landing, laden with early vegetables and shellfish. A vague roar, subterranean in quality, from dray wheels and street cars, began to make itself heard and felt; and the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... hasn't armed his guards with any unique weapon, but has merely left them to watch us. And the Orconites don't know how to fight! Think of the ease with which I got away with Hargrib last night. When it comes to dealing destruction with scientific weapons, their power is appalling. When it comes to a slugging match, they are only so many sheep. And Leider's forgotten to ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... just across the western divide, the principal one of which Mr. Griggs, with picturesque inaccuracy, named the "Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes"; for, from its floor and sides and the floors and sides of smaller tributary valleys, superheated steam issues in thousands of hissing columns. It is an appalling spectacle. The temperatures of this steam are extremely high; Griggs reports one instance of 432 degrees Centigrade, which would equal 948 degrees Fahrenheit; in some vents he found a higher temperature at ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... "German national faith," in which the rights of each citizen should be no more or no less than the rights of all others, with each man working for all men and all men for each man, this poetical idea was only another evidence of how the noblest minds place the illusion and the dream before the appalling fact of human selfishness in the universal struggle ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... everything pertaining to spiritual religion. In his simple obedience to the Word of God, he braves all dangers, sure of the Divine blessing and support while encountering obloquy, contempt, allurements, and persecution, in its varied polluted forms and appalling cruelties. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Hermann's heart was sick within him; he had no spirit left for the revelry. An indescribable feeling of terror and anxiety possessed him. The clock struck twelve; the guests dispersed. They had hardly left the house when a terrific storm broke forth, appalling in its awful violence; the house shook, trees were uprooted, lightning blazed continually. The tempest was nothing, however, compared to that in Hermann's breast; he could not rest or sleep; fearful visions assailed him: he seemed to hear his beloved Lenore calling him, ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... word was uttered; but the two guilty wretches staggered to the mainmast, where they remained petrified with horror, until the officer, who had been sent for, approached to take them into custody. They then seemed in a measure to be recalled to a sense of their appalling predicament, and uttered the most piercing expressions of lamentation ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... with sound wine and plenty of it. But there were moments when he overflowed. Perhaps half a dozen times in the history of his married life - "Here! tak' it awa', and bring me a piece bread and kebbuck!" he had exclaimed, with an appalling explosion of his voice and rare gestures. None thought to dispute or to make excuses; the service was arrested; Mrs. Weir sat at the head of the table whimpering without disguise; and his lordship opposite munched his bread and cheese in ostentatious disregard. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... very much after the style of the Wars of the Roses in English history. This novel, a very long one, occupies perhaps the warmest corner in the hearts of the Chinese people. They never tire of listening to its stirring episodes, its hair-breadth escapes, its successful ruses, and its appalling combats. ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... ought to be a certain thing now, and the only appalling possibility the sight of the ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... said, decisively. "What is one of the strangest diagnostics of madness—what is the first appalling sign of mental aberration? The mind becomes stationary; the brain stagnates; the even current of reflection is interrupted; the thinking power of the brain resolves itself into a monotone. As the waters of ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... spot, and as far as he could see, the sheer base of the cliff offered him no place where it was possible to rest a foot, no place where he could mount three feet above the shingle. But his scrutiny brought home to him another appalling fact—namely, that the sea-mark, where the highest tide fringed its barriers with a triumphal wreath of hanging seaweed, and below which no foliage grew, was high up upon the ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... leaders fronted them with buoyant and unquailing spirit, and rose, where other men of less faith and courage would have given up in despair, to the level of seeming impossibilities, and to the top of a truly appalling situation. Where were they, indeed, to procure arms? There was a blacksmith among them, who was set to manufacturing pike-heads and bayonets, and to turning long knives into daggers and dirks. Arms in the houses of the white folks they designed to borrow after the manner of the Jews from ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... few more facts before I get so far as a theory, Mr. Mac," said he, kneeling down beside the body. "Dear me! these injuries are really appalling. Can we have the butler in for a moment? . . . Ames, I understand that you have often seen this very unusual mark—a branded triangle inside a circle—upon ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... airplane. Once started the gun continued firing automatically and Guynemer's task was to follow his enemy pitilessly keeping that lead-spitting muzzle steadily bearing upon him. In September, 1917, he went up to attack five enemy machines—no odds however appalling seemed to terrify him—but was caught in a fleet of nearly forty Boches and fell to earth in ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... hurt?" he gasped, his eyes blazing into her face with an intensity that she afterwards remembered as appalling. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... phrases. The mechanical voice, the words themselves, his air of abstraction appalled her. And he hadn't done yet; she caught some more of his unconcerned mumbling: "There is nothing I don't know," and the absurdity of the statement was also appalling. Mrs. Travers gasped and with a ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... passion for the chase are still alive within him. The wild enjoyments which formerly animated him in the woods painfully excite his troubled imagination; and his former privations appear to be less keen, his former perils less appalling. He contrasts the independence which he possessed among his equals with the servile position which he occupies in civilized society. On the other hand, the solitudes which were so long his free home are still at hand; a few hours' march will bring ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... and he looked up at her and then went on with his work without speaking, for now, as always, the appalling thought was perpetually in his mind: "Must she not have known what it was she had with her in the car when ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... extravagant forms, generally obscene, sometimes bloody. It is divided into two schools—that of the right hand and that of the left. The former runs into mysticism and magic in complicated observances, and the latter into the most appalling licentiousness. The worship of the Sakti, or female principle, has become a most elaborate system. The beings adored are "the most outrageous divinities which man has ever conceived."[30] Sorcery began early in India; but it is in connection ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... a pinching crevice, burying him to the eyes in a snow drift, throwing him on jagged boulders, or lacerating him on sharp lava jaws. But he held fast to his hiaqua. The blackness grew ever deeper and more crowded with perdition; the din more impish, demoniac, and devilish; the laughter more appalling; and the miser more and more exhausted with vain buffeting. He at last thought to propitiate exasperated Tamanous, and threw away a string of hiaqua. But the storm was renewed blacker, louder, crueler than before. String by ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... they should concentrate their minds on some organization that would be of service to other widows, poor women without the alleviations of wealth and social eminence, many of them a prey to black despair. Calling in other young widows of their own circle to help (the number was already appalling), they went about their task in a business-like way, opening offices in the Rue Vizelly, which were subsequently ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Mr Martin, with a mollified air. 'Of course it is not to be expected that an old bachelor such as I am should be worried by an infant's screams. The screams of a baby have to me an appalling sound. Do what you think well with the child, ma'am, and let me know in the morning; only I may as well state that I think ...
— Dickory Dock • L. T. Meade
... all the swift steps of the appalling discovery? You have guessed the truth already. There was the wrapper, the bottle, and the white powder inside, some sort of powder! But it wasn't quinine. One look at it was quite enough. I remember that at the ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... was white, seething, inconceivably swift, with a thousand flashing tongues. It traveled ahead of smoke. It was so thin he could see the branches through it, and the fiery clouds behind. It swept onward, a sublime and an appalling spectacle. Slone could not think of what it looked like. It was fire, liberated, freed from the bowels of the earth, tremendous, devouring. This, then, was the meaning of fire. This, then, was the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... under cover of the escarpment on the beach. There Colonel Doughty-Wylie and Captain Walford rallied them on the morning of the 26th and covered by a heavy bombardment by the warships set out to clear the village. Desperate hand-to-hand fighting followed and the casualties were appalling. Most of the houses contained squads of riflemen and the more important machine guns. Each had to be carried separately. By noon, however, the town had been cleared. Captain Walford had fallen, bravely leading his troops in a way that earned ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... them in their analysis of philosophy and religion, and that the result could be no other than it was, to bring them to the conclusion that there is nothing absolute in justice or in law. To what an appalling condition society has arrived, when it reaches the positive conclusion that there is no truth, no religion, no justice, no virtue in the world; that the only object of human exertion is unrestrained physical enjoyment; the only standard of a man's position, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... on their tramp up the slopes, peering right and left as they went for any indication of the absent woman. Wingate's old grief was knocking at his heart once more. A woman lost in the appalling vastness of this great Western land was entering into his life again. It took them a full hour to go that mile, although both were experts on the shoes, but as they reached the rim of the canyon they were rewarded by seeing a thin blue streak of smoke curling ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... over, but I had still my accounts for that entertainment to square. And the result of that operation was appalling. It was a fortnight since my salary had been raised, but so far I had not a penny saved. The extra money had gone, I couldn't exactly say how, in sundry "trifling expenditures," such as pomatum, a scarf-pin, and a steel chain for my waistcoat, all of which it had seemed no harm to indulge ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... the other was in a stupor. Neshevna's words cleaved his very soul. The American, the puritan in him, swiftly rose to her eloquent exhortation. All life was corrupt, he had been taught; art was corrupt, a snare, a delusion. Yet—was all its appalling power, its sensuous grandeur to be wasted in the service of the world, the flesh, the devil? Lenyard paused. "Oh, come on, Len. Why do you bother your excitable, sick heart with that lunatic's prophecies? Illowski is a big man, a very big man; but he is mad, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... rose higher the slope down on either hand seemed more appalling; and once, as Saxe climbed to him, Melchior said, with ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... in a lichenous hollow. Our lungs were painful. We sat holding our sides and recovering our breath, looking appreciation to one another. Cavor panted something about "amazing sensations." And then came a thought into my head. For the moment it did not seem a particularly appalling thought, simply a natural question arising ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... walks, and often went in to service in the cathedral. He says that he was in a state of tense excitement, and the solitude and introspection had an alarmingly depressing effect upon him. He says that the result of this was an appalling mental agony: "It seemed to me after a day or two that there was no truth in religion, that Jesus Christ was not God, that the whole of life was an empty sham, and that I was, if not the chiefest of sinners, at any rate the most monumental of ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the inn?" she stammered, looking about her, bewildered. Then, as the appalling truth struck home, she grew pale ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... horizon like a huge impenetrable snare; the sun shone, the birds sang, carters passed by whistling; sheep, lambs, and pigeons were scattered about, leaves quivered and rustled; the grass, a densely thick grass, was full of flowers. It was appalling. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... Helen May was undergoing the transition from a mild satisfaction with her education and mentality, to a shamed consciousness of an appalling ignorance and mental crudity. Holman Sommers was unwittingly the cause of that. There was nothing patronizing or condescending in the attitude of Holman Sommers, even if he did run to long words and scientifically accurate descriptions of the smallest subjects. It was the work he placed before her ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... other alternative but to deny it." Elizabeth was speaking. She still wore her impish glacial smile. "As a usual thing, we are opposed to fibbing on the high moral ground that it is not a lady's pastime, but in view of the perfectly appalling results that would follow our failure to fib in this particular case, I'm afraid we'll have to join hands, Mr. Daney, and prove Nan Brent a liar. Naturally, we count on your help. As a result of his conversation with you, father believes ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... drop the piece of wood on the floor, or, what was worse, to drop it on the fire instead of laying it on. The scattering of ashes on the floor of the temple was held unseemly, that live coals should fall from the Altar was considered almost sacrilegious. Meffia, more than once, perpetrated such appalling blunders. Very tardily did she learn her duties; only after four years could she be trusted to take her regular turn in care of the fire and to stand her watch of half a night each time her turn came between sunset ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... calmly and peacefully as it now slumbers in the genial sunshine of a summer's afternoon, what visions it conjures up of bloodshed and rapine, plague, pestilence, and famine, and of all the calamities wrought by human hands, and all the appalling visitations of a divine power by which this ill-fated spot has been afflicted. Looking back through the wide waste of years, the mighty hosts of Tamerlane uprise before us, pouring through the passes of the Ural, and sweeping over the plains ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... looked sternly at her, and raised his hand in denunciation. The action and the look were so appalling, that the affrighted woman would have fled if her husband had ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... awful storms are no part of heaven. They are wholly of earth, and seem the counterparts of those wild outbreaks of human passion from which I and so many poor women in the past have suffered;" and a low sob shook her frame. "I wish I had more of good Mr. Yocomb's spirit; for this appalling cloud seems to me the very incarnation of evil. Why does God permit ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Prisons in England and Wales (1779, fourth edition, 1792), and his Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe (1789). The prisoners, he says, had little food, sometimes a penny loaf a day, and sometimes nothing; no water, no fresh air, no sewers, and no bedding. The stench was appalling, and gaol fever killed more than died on the gallows. Debtors and felons, men, women and children, were huddled together; often with lunatics, who were shown by the gaolers for money. 'Garnish' was extorted; the gaolers kept drinking-taps; gambling flourished: and prisoners ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... this violent and appalling seizure was but too obvious. The approach of the young girl and the dread that she was about to lay her hand upon me had called up the same train of effects which the moment of terror and pain had already occasioned. The old nurse saw this in a moment. "Go! go!" she cried ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... restraint, adaptability, and reasonable brevity. There is an appalling waste of words on all sides, hence you should constantly guard yourself against this fault. When there is nothing worth-while to say, the best substitute ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... daily contact with the most appalling cases of disease and death, they come and go briskly with jocular greetings on the stair-ways. They return to their homes each night to read, to smoke their pipes, deporting themselves like commonplace ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... of a passing state of society, though criminals also were deported. Virginia and other colonies vigorously protested against this practice, but their protests were ignored by the Crown. When, however, it is recalled that in those years the list of capital offenses was appalling in length, that the larceny of a few shillings was punishable by death, that many of the victims were deported because of religious differences and political offenses, then the stigma of crime is erased. And one does not wonder that some ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... massacres already had occurred. There was also a well-supported rumour that a portion of the Illinois militia, some two hundred and fifty men in all, had been routed on Hickory Creek by Black Hawk's invincible warriors, with appalling losses to the whites. He bore a stirring message from his commanding officer, urging the men of Tippecanoe to rouse themselves and join Warren County troops in an immediate movement to repel or at least to check the Sacs and Miamis and Pottawattomies who were swarming ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Sun") is the name of a villa among the mountains near Geneva, where Mr. Browning, with his sister and a friend of many years standing, spent part of the summer of 1877. The poem so christened is addressed to this friend, and was inspired by her death: which took place with appalling suddenness while they were there together. The shock of the event re-opened the great questions which had long before been solved by Mr. Browning's mind: and within sight of the new-made grave, he re-laid the foundations of his faith, that there is another ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... have it in me to be happy—an appalling capability. Let us say no more about it. I must join myself to eternity, and so ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... acquainted with the place, he says. I could spend a month doing that." She looked at the littered bench, the wall cabinets with sliding doors half open, the jars of reagents sitting on the sink, the drainboard, on top of the refrigerator and on the floor. The disorder was appalling. "How he ever manages to work in here is beyond me. I suppose that I'd better start somewhere—perhaps I can get these bottles in some sort of order first." She sighed and moved toward the wall cabinets. "Oh well," she mused, ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... thus it sighed The eve thy sainted mother died; 135 And such the sounds which, while I strove To wake a lay of war or love, Came marring all the festal mirth, Appalling me who gave them birth, And, disobedient to my call, 140 Wailed loud through Bothwell's bannered hall, Ere Douglases to ruin driven, Were exiled from their native heaven. Oh! if yet worse mishap and ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... for first of all we must have a taste of those dainty lips; stand back, bl—t you," he vociferated with a volley of appalling oaths, that sent the disorderly men, who were again crowding behind him, back into the rear; "we would be alone, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... to the appalling clamor; but when the word was passed round to get ready, he rose to his feet and climbed to the firing-step without any overpowering sense of fear. A sentence from the man on his left had done a ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... shots in all were fired upon the fortress, and produced the most appalling destruction. There was no smoke or flame visible from the guns of the air-ship, and the explosives with which the missiles were charged must have been far more powerful than anything hitherto used in warfare, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... he would have paid me back in kind; had I not been magnanimous? I climbed to the top of the chalet, and my eyes followed him on the road. Ah! my dear Renee, he vanished from my sight with an appalling swiftness. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... taken up, on the same grounds, by many other persons. If Agassiz told me that the forms of life which had successively tenanted the globe were the incarnations of successive thoughts of the Deity; and that he had wiped out one set of these embodiments by an appalling geological catastrophe as soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found myself not only unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from the facts of paleontology, upon which this astounding hypothesis was founded, but I had to confess my want of any means ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... started with our knapsacks and left the families, for it was plain the women and children must go very slow, and we felt we could go over rougher and shorter roads on foot and get through sooner by going straight across the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Our condition was certainly appalling. We were without water, all on the verge of starvation, and the three poor cattle which yet remained alive were objects of pity. It seemed almost a crime to kill the poor beasts, so little real food was there ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... machine, a locking index for gunmaking machinery, and a few gear trains—the great majority were for converting reciprocating motion to rotary motion. Even a cursory examination of these patents reveals an appalling absence of sound mechanical sense, and many of them appear to be attempts at "perpetual motion," in spite of an ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... authentic stories related of Newfoundland dogs saving life in cases of shipwreck. Indeed, they are regularly trained to the work in some countries; and nobly, fearlessly, disinterestedly do they discharge their trust, often in the midst of appalling dangers. Crusoe sprang from the bank with such impetus that his broad chest ploughed up the water like the bow of a boat, and the energetic workings of his muscles were indicated by the force of each successive propulsion as he ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... you, my brother, you have released him. To you Trenck owes his life and liberty. I thank you that these fearful chains, which held my soul in bondage, have fallen apart. Once more I breathe freely, without the appalling consciousness that every breath I draw finds this echo in a cavern of the earth. You have released me from bondage, oh, my brother, and henceforth I will love you with all the strength of my being. Yes, I will love you," cried ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... manner in which some young women treat themselves at the menstrual period, is quite appalling to one who is acquainted with the painful and inveterate character of the evils which arise from such abuse. It is no uncommon thing for young ladies to attend balls, visit skating rinks, and otherwise expose themselves to the influences in every way the best calculated ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... whole number only three individuals were able to walk from the boat. Can those be men—those little, livid, brown, ash-streaked, monkey-looking dwarfs?" (Cambridge Magazine, August 26, 1916, Supplement "Prisoners," p. iv.) In spite of such appalling horrors (worse than the atrocities of rage and fear and drink) the North and South became reconciled, and with the passing of war bitterness passed too. The South was hard pressed, supplies often ran out, and there was indifference at Richmond. And so the military ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... at the sinister brown envelope with its black lettering, and a chilly fear clutched his heart. One catastrophe after another suggested itself, each to be discarded in favor of another more appalling. Persis had lost her money. She had met with an accident. She was dead. His bony hand shook till the envelope rattled, and the small boy who had brought the message ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... name began to appear in the newspapers with appalling frequency. He leaped to instant fame by being the first man in California who paid ten thousand dollars for a single bull. His livestock specialist, whom he had filched from the Federal Government, in England outbid the Rothschilds' Shire farm for ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... literature of Germany, of France, and of England has exceeded the multiplicity of the productions of Italy, and an appalling population of authors swarm before the imagination.[235] Hail then the peaceful spirit of the literary historian, which sitting amidst the night of time, by the monuments of genius, trims the sepulchral lamps of the human mind! Hail to the literary Reaumur, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... sometimes yawns, sometimes cries, and sometimes causes others to cry. He sometimes assumes the guise of one that is mad, and sometimes of one that is intoxicated, and he sometimes utters words that are exceedingly sweet. Endued with appalling fierceness, he sometimes laughs loudly, frightening all creatures with his eyes. He sometimes sleeps and sometimes remains awake and sometimes yawns as he pleases. He sometimes recites sacred Mantras and sometimes becomes the deity ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... delightful idea," the taller one said, turning towards her host. "An eight-mile drive before tea sounded appalling. Where shall we sit, and may ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so. Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... seemed to subside, but only for half a moment, and in the doubly fierce renewal of elemental strife, amid deafening peals if thunder and the unearthly glare that preceded each reverberation, there came other sounds more appalling, and as the church rocked and quivered some portion of the ancient edifice fell, adding its crash to the diapason ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... child forgot her pain for a moment and smiled. At that instant there was a blinding flash of lightning, and the appalling thunder-peal followed ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... have been his impression if he had taken the evidence only of his ears. Alas, in those days for the refined ears that were musical! great was their torture when discord, with its thousand diversities of tone, struck up this appalling anthem—there was no escape from it. The migratory minstrels of Savoy caught the strain, and pealed it down the long vistas of quiet streets, till their innermost and snuggest apartments re-echoed with the sound. Men were obliged to endure ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... to investigate, but the only result was to discover that no one interrogated had any notion of truth, except John Taylor, and he knew nothing of the matter. The mass of falsehood, spite, violence, and dishonesty, that became evident, was perfectly appalling, and not a clue was to be found to the truth—scarcely a hope that minds so lost to honourable feeling were open to receive good impressions. It was a great distress to Ethel—it haunted her night and day—she lay awake pondering on the vain hopes for her poor children, and slept to dream ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... noticed how cheerless the house was. Again there came to him that odor of mustiness—of all smells the most eerie and drear—which he had noticed on his arrival. Somehow, as long as Nur-el-Din had been there, he had not remarked the appalling loneliness ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... been good originally, and age had improved it. Used as he was to the appalling balloon juice sold in the drinking dens of the "Barbary coast" at San Francisco, or the public-houses of the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... reach to the tops of their boots; these skirts are always made of cotton goods, and their boots are thick, clumpy, laced affairs, heavier than those worn by the workmen in this country—very often they have wooden soles. As you may imagine, the appearance of these girls' feet is something appalling. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 54, November 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... date. And, surely, in the life of so earnest and thoughtful a man as Shakespeare, there might well be, nay, there must have been, times when, without any special woundings or bruisings of fortune, his mind got fascinated by the appalling mystery of evil that haunts ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... child as barnacles with such appalling adhesive powers that even his ingenuity at "crowding out" had been baffled. In justice to him, it must be admitted that Mrs. Mumpson was a type of the poor relation that would tax the long suffering of charity itself. Her husband ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... gaining members and power every day. The situation was truly alarming. Their heretofore trustworthy "wage plugs" were showing unmistakable symptoms of intelligence. Workingmen were waking up. They were, in appalling numbers, demanding the right to live like men. Something must be done something new and drastic—to split asunder this on-coming phalanx ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... reminder.—(Scene, Thanksgiving dinner, everybody commenting on the immense size of the turkey.) An appalling silence fell upon the crowd when Tommy cried out, "Mamma, is that the old ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... impending above them, it seemed to hesitate in its progress down, was more full of human terror than any utterance which followed the event. With the exception of a groan, wrung forth here and there from the half-crushed victim, in nature's agony, the deep silence which ensued was painful and appalling; and even when the dust had dissipated, and the eye was enabled to take in the entire amount of the evil deed, the prospect failed in impressing the senses of the survivors with so distinct a sentiment of horror, as ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... overgrown boy, some eighteen years old, with a head as round and about as large as a pumpkin, and fever-and-ague fits had dyed his face of a corresponding color. He wore an old white hat, tied under his chin with a handkerchief; his body was short and stout, but his legs of disproportioned and appalling length. I observed him at sunset, breasting the hill with gigantic strides, and standing against the sky on the summit, like a colossal pair of tongs. In a moment after we heard him screaming frantically behind the ridge, and nothing doubting that he was in the clutches of Indians or grizzly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... weather was appalling. Nature seemed to be dissolving in a cold, ceaseless rain—a rain like that which announces the approach of winter. All the way to the laboratory my ears were tortured with the criers announcing the names of the condemned, a large number of men, women, and children. The bloody harvest was over-rich. ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... once in her life, said nothing—being too much awed and astonished to reply. To think that I should actually enter the house, and be face to face with the formidable Mrs. Eylton? The idea was appalling; and for sometime I sat biting my nails in thoughful silence. It was so sudden, it had always appeared to me that a great deal must be gone through with—a great many different degrees of intimacy surmounted, before I should ever find myself within the house of Mrs. Eylton; but ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... of victory by firing on the fleeing enemy. The present European War has greatly increased the prestige and importance of this arm of the service. The amount of artillery on the Western front and the amount of ammunition consumed daily is appalling. ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... The appalling roar of a thousand cannon answered on the part of the Danes, and soon the very wind of heaven was stilled by the thundering reverberations of the artillery. We leave the historian to describe minutely the progress of the fight, and turn to the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... is really only an extension or an exaltation—confound the language of the third dimension—I can't say it! Although I understand what it is, it won't go into words. What am I to do with it? Its possibilities are, of course, a little appalling—that is to say, from the point of view of N3. I have not the slightest desire to shake the fabric of Society to pieces, as I could do, and still less have I taste for spending the rest of my scientific career in what the world would very easily believe ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... business," the judge had remarked, while Trent was being examined in chief; a little after, on fuller information—"They call it a bank," he had opined, "but it seems to me to be an unlicensed pawn-shop"; and he wound up with this appalling allocution: "Mr. Trent, I must put you on your guard; you must be very careful, or we shall see you here again." In the inside of a week the captain disposed of the bank, the cottage, and the gig and horse; and to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with but few leaders to conduct the broken ranks in precipitate retreat. On our left, in the front of the Tennesseans and Kentuckians, the greatest execution had been done. The slaughter here was appalling. Within a space three hundred yards wide, and extending out two hundred yards from our breastwork on the battlefield, an area of about ten acres, the ground was literally covered with the dead and desperately wounded. A British officer, who became also historian, says ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... be defiled; when the divine office of sex is prostituted; why all sex relations may not be eternal yet moral; the mistaken teaching of the church regarding sex, and the result; inane ideas of Paradise; an appalling prospect of heaven; perfect sex-union the incentive to aspiration; Humanity progresses in spite of fear; prophecy literally true; the true business of business; the final test; the Love that is merging, melting; satisfying and ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... into the neck of the sufferer, as he called to an assistant-supervisor to run to the hospital for Dr. Almeida, hoping to be able to close the severed jugular from which welled an appalling stream ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... dashing wildly to the staircase. The torrent jammed up, and unable to find outlet by the stair, burst the balustrades, and down like a cataract poured the maddened throng into the central well, falling on the paved lobby beneath. The scene was appalling. 'Before the current could be arrested, the well was filled with the bodies of children to the depth of about eight feet. At this juncture, the alarm reached the Ninth Ward Station-house, the fire-bell was rung, and a detachment of the police hurried to the scene. Here a new difficulty presented ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... hearts would sicken — We would grieve for them with a bitter pain, If the past could live and the dead could quicken, We then might turn to that life again. But on lonely nights we would hear them calling, We should hear their steps on the pathways falling, We should loathe the life with a hate appalling In our lonely rides by the ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... and green, armed with muskets, sabres, forks, pistols and reaping hooks, intoxicated with wine, and stained with the blood of the protestants whom they had murdered on their route, they presented a most hideous and appalling spectacle. In the open place in the front of the barracks, this banditti was joined by the city armed mob, headed by Jaques Dupont, commonly called Trestaillon. To save the effusion of blood, this garrison of about 500 men consented to capitulate, and marched out ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... he had been compelled to serve under the yoke, totally destitute as to any knowledge of his parents' whereabouts; how the intense love of liberty and desire to get back to his mother had unceasingly absorbed his mind through all these years of bondage; how, amid the most appalling discouragements, prompted alone by his undying determination to be free and be reunited with those from whom he had been sold away, he contrived to buy himself; how, by extreme economy, from doing over-work, he saved up five ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... you. The proper person, who always does and says the correct thing—well, I think that person is almost sure to be a liar. At the same time, the contradictions in the human individual are bewildering, even appalling!—Now I must go to my study, and think out a thing that's bothering me!—By the way,"—he always said that when he was going to make her a certain kind of present; she knew what was coming—"here's ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... Volcanic to a degree all these; nor are the Russians wanting, though they get more and more astonished: Tempelhof, who was in it, says he never, except at Torgau next Year, heard a louder cannonade. Loud exceedingly; and more or less appalling to the Russian imagination: but not destructive in proportion; the distance being too considerable,—"1,950 paces at the nearest," as Tempelhof has since ascertained by measuring. Friedrich's two batteries, however, as they took the Russians ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... obeisance, and went away on foot, leading his horse behind. And I stood, looking after him in a stupor, like one struck by a bolt from heaven, in the form of his appalling news. And I said to myself: Go I must, or my mother is ousted, and the raj lost. And yet if I go, the sun will set in the Queen's garden, and I shall not ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... buildings at the second milestone of the Via Ostiensis was taken, as I have just said, in consequence of the inroads of the Saracens, which, under the pontificate of John, had become so frequent. The atrocities which marked their second landing on the Roman coast were so appalling that the whole of Europe was shaken with terror. Having failed in his attempt to secure help from Charles the Bald, John placed himself at the head of such scanty forces as he could gather from land and sea, under the pressure of events. Ships ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... I never seen such appalling courage! Do you not know that you go upon a quest as hopeless as death? This tribe,—I have heard a deal too much about them, and once they came to York two seasons back,—are unlike any others of the Indians of the country. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... wonder who can lie there, and what things may be done there at night, at an hour when the alley is a cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under the cloak of night. This question, frightful in itself, becomes appalling when we note that these dwelling-houses are shut in on the side towards the Rue de Richelieu by marshy ground, by a sea of tumbled paving-stones between them and the Tuileries, by little garden-plots and suspicious-looking hovels on the side of the great galleries, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... are removed. Probably no one branch of medical surgery has been more assiduously cultivated than this; and the number of supporters, pessaries, braces, and levers which have been recently brought before the medical profession for this purpose is simply appalling. There are women and men who make it their business to carry them through the country and sell them on commission. We distinctly warn our readers against this class. They are almost invariably ignorant and unscrupulous, rich in promises, and regardless of performances. She who patronizes ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... wreathed serpents represent to us that inevitable destiny which often involves all the parties of an action in one common ruin. And yet the beauty of proportion, the agreeable flow of the outline, are not lost in this violent struggle; and a representation, the most appalling to the senses, is yet managed with forbearance, while a mild breath of gracefulness is diffused ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... what patience wouldst thou sit sewing by a crack in the shutters, an inch wide, rejoicing in thy immaculate paint and clear glass! But was there ever a thing of thy spotless and unsullied belongings which a boy might use? How I trembled to touch thy scoured tins, that hung in appalling brightness! with what awe I asked for a basket to pick strawberries! and where in the house could I find a place to eat a piece of gingerbread? How like a ruffian, a Tartar, a pirate, I always felt, when I entered thy domains! and how, from day to day, I wondered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Kerry's memory, or, indeed, within the memory of any member of the Criminal Investigation Department, Detective-Sergeant Coombes had ceased to smile when the appalling truth was revealed to him that Sin Sin Wa had vanished—that Sin Sin Wa had mysteriously joined that invisible company which included Kazmah, Mrs. Sin and Mrs. Monte Irvin. Not a word of reprimand did the Chief Inspector ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... had not been destroyed, and there had been an outlet from agriculture into industry, the evil effects of the agrarian system would have been mitigated. As it was, in one of the richest and most fertile countries in the world the congestion and poverty were appalling. Competition for land meant the struggle for bare life. Rent had no relation to value, but was the price fixed by the frantic bidding of hungry peasants for the bare right to live. The tenant had ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... science, which has enormously increased the wealth of the world, it is doubtful if this war, which is mainly a war about wealth, would have taken place at all. Or if a war had broken out, it would not have involved the appalling destruction of human life and property we are now witnessing—such that, within a space of two years, about six million human beings have been killed, thirty-five millions wounded, and wealth destroyed ...
— Progress and History • Various
... "Appalling Calamity. Loss of 115 Lives on Georgian Bay. Only Two Saved. Graphic and Exciting Account of Our Special ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... journey was made, first to Bombay and then further into the interior, to many places, never visited by a bishop before, and with no chaplain or anything to keep up the sense of religion. At Aurungabad, the utter ignorance of the English officers was appalling. The old Colonel-commandant had not heard a sermon for twenty years, and thought every sentence on the text, "Walk in love," was a personal attack on himself. He refused to attend another service, or to bid the Bishop farewell! And when ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and was not married. He could not exactly be called ugly in spite of his hangdog countenance, in which I saw the outward signs of cruelty, disloyalty, treason, pride, brutal sensuality, hatred, and jealousy. The mixture of bad qualities was such an appalling one that I thought his physiognomy was at fault, and the goods better than the sign. He asked me to come and see him so graciously that I concluded that the man gave the lie ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... cry of distress: an appalling sound; the wail of brave men. And they had borne it all so bravely, so cheerfully, till now. But now they knew something must go, or else the ship; the suspense was awful, but very short. Crack! crash! the fore and main topmast ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... and to know we are needed? One line in the Book of Chronicles, when I read it, flies up at me out of the printed page as though it were alive, conveying newly the age-old agony of a misplaced man. After relating the short and evil history of Jehoram, King of Judah, the account ends—with the appalling terseness which often crowns the dramatic climaxes ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... the thinking myself. Every now and then, at some particular phase of the moon, he sets his intellect in operations and the consequences are, as the Brahmin boy described the result of his examination, "appalling." It was our Hamal's duty to fill the filter, and at a time when the water was very bad, orders were given that it should be boiled before being filtered. One day, my wife saw the Hamal in the act of ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... who have been in the country, and have fallen in with this animal in its wild and savage state, can have any idea of the appalling effect of a lion's roar. What is heard in a menagerie is weak, and can give but a faint conception of it. In the darkness of the night it is almost impossible to tell from what quarter the sound proceeds; this arises from the habit which the animal has of placing his mouth ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... carking. intolerable, insufferable, insupportable; unbearable, unendurable; past bearing; not to be borne, not to be endured; more than flesh and blood can bear; enough to drive one mad, enough to provoke a saint, enough to make a parson swear, enough to gag a maggot. shocking, terrific, grim, appalling, crushing; dreadful, fearful, frightful; thrilling, tremendous, dire; heart-breaking, heart-rending, heart-wounding, heart-corroding, heart-sickening; harrowing, rending. odious, hateful, execrable, repulsive, repellent, abhorrent; horrid, horrible, horrific, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... excess over males as Germany has, and this disproportion of sexes tends yearly to increase. We read in every fresh return of emigration that it is men and not women who are leaving England and Scotland. That Irish emigration, appalling as its ravages have been since 1846, is still maintained on a naturally healthier basis the sex returns for 1911 make clear. The figures for Ireland at ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... is appalling, for these wild robbers of the desert fear neither man nor devil, and when once they retreat to their hiding-places in the mountains, it is next to folly to dream ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... the appalling message that the British were victorious, and our men in full retreat! High hopes had been built on this combat; no wonder if for a while we felt disheartened. The end of regular warfare had been reached; it was imperative that an entire change of tactics be adopted. Steyn was for ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... so vivid as he wished, the pale-glimmering headless skeleton in the intense darkness of the interior was appalling enough in all conscience. Fortunately the fumes of the sulphur fed on the bony substance. They endured a sufficient time to scare every Dyak who caught a glimpse of the monstrous object crouching in luminous horror within the ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... character rarely to be met with (and, in their case, how shamefully rewarded!), from having occurred at a crisis when their minds were occupied in affairs of such deep importance, and amidst the appalling dangers which hourly threatened ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... spirits evidently occasioned by the humiliating necessity of ushering his polished friends into the wretched asylum of penury, the Poet led the way with tardy reluctancy, while his visitors regretted every step of ascent, under the appalling circumstance of giving pain to adversity; yet they felt that to recede would be more indelicate ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... side of the frame all in readiness, Mars appeared, but it still had a little farther to climb before it would be visible from the level of the wires. Nevertheless, I turned on the current from the batteries. All was darkness; never before had darkness seemed to me so profound, so absolutely appalling. Minutes passed like hours, but still that ominous darkness reigned. I felt the keen disappointment of failure; I grew incredulous as the time passed, and found myself admitting and rehearsing the absurdity of it all. I even blamed myself for having been ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... spring walks through Dublin, I found a depth of mud appalling even to one who had lived three years in Charlesbridge. The streets were passable only to pedestrians skilled in shifting themselves along the sides of fences and alert to take advantage of every projecting ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... exposed to its mercy for its food. If a kid, hare, lamb, porker or what not is turned into one of Nemestronia's walled gardens and the leopard let in, she will, at first sight of the game, crouch belly-flat on the ground and give out a really appalling series of screams or whatever they should be called, entirely unlike any other noise she ever makes. Her hunting- squall, as Nemestronia calls it, rises and falls like a tune on an organ, and besides changing from shriller to less ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... destiny was appalling; and though our ideas of destiny were rather vague, we could grasp one dreadful fact: Will had refused to be President of the United States! So we ran crying to mother, and burying our faces in her lap, sobbed out: "Oh, mother! Will says he ain't going to be President. ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... still going about her with gloved hands, as it were, she was ready to throw herself into the arms of the first likely man she met. He could not help himself: in this connection, every little trait in her that was uncongenial to him, started up with appalling distinctness. Hitherto, he had put it down to his own sensitiveness; he was over-nice. But for the most part, he had forgiven her on account of all she had come through; for he believed that this ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... before, sank into a state of the most heartrending destitution, as is testified by Captain Wynne, writing from the same place a fortnight or three weeks after, to Colonel Jones.[148] "I must again," he says, "call your attention to the appalling state in which Clare Abbey is at present. I ventured through that parish this day, to ascertain the condition of the inhabitants, and although a man not easily moved, I confess myself unmanned by the extent and intensity of suffering I witnessed, more especially ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... marvelous scene that vast black valley with its lake of fire at the bottom—its cone of fire on one hand. The discharges were constant, and had something appalling in their sound. We were almost too much excited for observation. Now we looked at the cone of green and gold that sank and rose, faded and brightened, smoked or flamed; then at the seething lake; then at the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various |
