"Shrillness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ira Aldridge, the Foulah actor, play in Macbeth, Othello, and his other famous parts, saw nothing negro about him, except the length of his arm, the shrillness of his voice in excitement, the terrible animality of the murder-scenes, and his tendency to exaggerate. "The bright-colored nails were very evident, and his whole physiognomy, in spite of his beard, was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... close to me!" There was a sudden shrillness in the voice of honey, and the six words were run so rapidly together they seemed to form but one. After a moment Cora added, with a deprecatory ripple of laughter not quite free from the ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... lingered. No one was in sight. Then the metallic shrillness of a bicycle bell broke the silence. He wheeled about. Noiselessly threading his way down the village highway came a thick-set, rosy-faced boy of sixteen or seventeen ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... have tuned my music to the trees, And there were voices, dim below Their shrillness, voices swelling slow In the blue murmur of hills, and a golden ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... a cry, coming from no one knew where, which, unearthly in its shrillness and the power it had on the imagination, reverberated through the house and died away in a wail so weird, so thrilling and so prolonged that it gripped not only my own nerveless and weakened heart, but those of the ten strong men congregated below me. The diamond dropped ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... she cried with a sudden shrillness. "If admissions are necessary I shall wait until Abdullah confronts you. Then, when I have told my ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... said slowly, "though you told the boy." Her eyes, velvet-black in the shadow upcast by the lamp, opened slowly. "There has been much trouble with Father Antoine, and now small numbers go to mass or confession." Her voice had the effect of shrillness though it remained low; her hands flew out, grasping the table-edge at arms' length with an oddly masculine gesture. "He deserved that! To tell his canaille that I—that we——He dared! But ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... aroused by the attention paid it, trilled upward in a mounting ecstasy of shrillness that went up and up and up through her head ... louder and louder ... shriller and yet more shrill ... bird and cage became misty, swum around her.... Missus and Tim must have carried her to the bed in which ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... uncultivated mind must ruin any budding desire for subtler harmony. The noises of the street, with all the whistles of the factories and the horns of the motor cars, are bad enough, and the antinoise crusade is quite in order. Yet the destructive influence of those chaotic sounds is far weaker than the shrillness and restlessness of these modern specimens of so-called literature. The mind is tossed up and down and is torn hither and thither, following now a column of text while the advertisements are pushing in from both sides, and then reading the latest advertisement while ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... shrillness in the scream, a kind of hysteria on the stretch, that (contrasted with his big threat) might have provoked them at other times to a roar of laughter. But there was a sincerity in his rage to-day that rose above its faults of manner; and an immediate silence took ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... guide. Then another story illustrating the strange ways of lions. The elephant gun figured in still another tale, this time of a vicious rhinoceros. His audience was quiet now, breathless with interest, and he welcomed the respite from shrillness he had won for ...
— The Hunters • William Morrison
... to break down; Alice wept with silent joy as she continued to chafe the man's limbs; and Poopy went off into a violent fit of hysterical laughter, in which her "hee, hees!" resounded with terrible shrillness among the surrounding cliffs. ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... the attorney, with sudden shrillness. "Have a care what you're about. You are here to sell for the underwriters, let me tell you—not to act for Mr. Douglas Longhurst. This sale has been already disgracefully interrupted to allow that person to hold ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... I wandered to the pavilion of Zingalee gipsies, where a band of these wild sons of Hagar were creating a perfect furor by the shrillness and discord of their voices. Never was such terrific music inflicted upon mortal ears. It went through and through you, quivering and vibrating like a rapier; but the common classes of Russians delight in it above all earthly sounds. They deem it the very finest kind of music. It ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... that people who are near death die generally at the change to dawn or at the turn of the tide. Anyone who has when tired, and tied as it were to his post, experienced this change in the atmosphere can well believe it. All at once we heard the crow of the cock coming up with preternatural shrillness through ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... fantastic: a bawling, laughing, jostling, sweating mob, parti-coloured, parti-speeched, crackling and sputtering under the hot sun like a dish of fritters over a kitchen fire. Tony, agape, shouldered his way through the press, aware at once that, spite of the tumult, the shrillness, the gesticulation, there was no undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency to horse-play, as in such crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of facetious suavity which seemed to include everybody ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... two the senses of both were paralysed. It is not easy for most of us, who have not been through the cruel suffocation of a dynamite explosion, to realise completely how the crushed collapse of the nervous system leaves mind, thought, and feeling absolutely prostrate before the mere shrillness of sound. We are not speaking now of the cases in which serious harm is done—of course anyone can understand that—but only of the cases, after all, and in even the best carried out and most brutally contrived dynamite attempt—the vast majority of cases in which the intended, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... very midst of this activity, we heard the voices of men, walking round the building. They again whistled, with a piercing shrillness; and, though we heard nothing distinctly, yet we caught tones that were coarse, rude, and savage; and words, that denoted anger and anxiety, for the perpetration of some dark purpose no doubt corresponding to the fierce ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... jewelled stars themselves sprang this way and that; and with one more long cry the marvellous machine righted itself, beat with its wings, and settled down, with the note of the flying air passing through rising shrillness into vibrant silence, to its ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... quite understanding that she stood on it. The next moment, she reeled against the desk. "Giddy," she said, faintly and thickly. "My head." Her eyes looked at him, cold and big and staring. They maddened the poor affectionate creature with terror. The frightful shrillness of the past days in Bedlam was in his voice, as he screamed ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... girls yet breathing heavily from the speed with which they had run, and looking up in their faces, grunted and squeaked without any apparent cause; and some of these swine told their wants, or affection, with such painful shrillness, that it was almost impossible to ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... 't was but this instant That I entered here, alarmed By the strange and sudden shrillness Of thy voice; and though I had On my hands important business, Grave and weighty, since to me Hath the Emperor transmitted This decree, which bids me search Through the mountains for the Christians Hidden there, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... to form and desk And sudden floods of noise When fifteen minutes' fun and frisk Make happy girls and boys. As shrill as swifts in upper air Was our young shrillness: 'Twas joy of life, 'twas strength to ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... God! that it should come to this! Ah! the cruelty! But still I will fight to the last—I will never go.' Her voice had risen to shrillness, her face was contorted by anger; she looked incarnate rage, a Megaera. Suddenly her features resumed their usual expression—nay, more, it was the face of ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... vouldn't go. Oi! Oi! Vat a man! Shoor I'll go. Coitenly! You have been good to me and they have been devils. I hope they die." He shook a bony fist in the direction of the camp, while his voice took on its fanatical shrillness. "They shall be in h—— before I help them, the pigs, but you—ah, you have been my ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... the tones—there's a shrillness in them not to be mistaken. Farewell! I must depart; you have heard the proverb, 'those who are bound must obey.' Young Jack, I presume, is squalling, and I must either nurse him, rock the cradle, or sing comic tunes for him, though heaven knows with what a disastrous heart I often sing, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... and without an upper story like the rest of the houses, attracted attention on account of this attic window in the gabled roof. I stood still. A soft distinct note increased to loudness, diminished, died out, only to rise again immediately to penetrating shrillness. It was always the same tone repeated as if the player dwelt upon it with pleasure. At last an interval followed; it was the chord of the fourth. While the player had before reveled in the sound of the single note, now his voluptuous enjoyment of this harmonic ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Teacher, Teacher!"—the accent on the first syllable and each word uttered with increased force and shrillness. No writer with whom I am acquainted gives him credit for more musical ability than is displayed in this strain. Yet in this the half is not told. He has a far rarer song, which he reserves for some nymph ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... road he was aroused from this profitable meditation by a shriek, the shrillness of which told him that it was a woman's. He looked up, and saw close to him, among the smouldering ruins of a farmhouse, two ruffians driving before them a young girl, with her hands tied behind her, while the poor creature ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... lightning, literally blue, I could not see the forecastle boatswain's mate of the watch, who stood close by my elbow, ready pipe in hand. The rain came down in buckets, and in the midst of all the wind suddenly shifted, taking the sails flat aback. The shrillness of the boatswain's pipes is then their great merit. They pierce through the roar of the tempest, by sheer difference of pitch, an effect one sometimes hears in an opera; and the officer of the deck, our ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... tongue-strings evidently loosened by the strange recurrence after so many years of those familiar English sounds, "Pretty Poll! Pretty Poll!" opened his mouth again in a loud chuckle of delight, and cried, with persistent shrillness, "God save the king! A fig for all ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... hulking fellow, visibly the worse for drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a river, and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the same unconscious blending of colors. The choir was composed of a large number, mostly colored, of all ages. The front seats were filled by children of various ages—the rear, of adults, rising above these tiny choristers, and softening the shrillness of their notes by the deeper ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... we got; in came Madame's box and my bag; Madame stood at the door, and, I think, frightened away intending passengers, by her size and shrillness. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... what would you be pleased to say next?" cried Deb, her voice rising in shrillness with ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... confronted by waving beards, condemning eyes, denouncing faces, clenched hands and pointing fingers. From full twenty throats at once one is beset by shrill interrogations; but, owing to the universal rapidity of utterance and the shrillness of enunciation, one is quite unable, in the present state of one's mind, to distinguish a single ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... him, Fenton was conscious of a tingling excitement in every vein, but outwardly he was only the more calm. A close observer might have noticed a nervous quickness in his movements, and a certain shrillness in his voice, but the sitter gave no heed to these tokens, which he would have regarded as of no importance had he seen them. The talk was at first rather rambling, and was not kept up with much briskness on either ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... been, I should call it a change from the crudity of the older english thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it was religious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism derived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from german technicality and shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain vague, and to be, in, the ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... howling of wolves. But as they neared the spot from which the sound proceeded, on rounding a bend in the river, they saw the glare of fires in the darkness; the sounds at the same time redoubled in shrillness and volume, and they knew then that a large body of Indians were below them and would almost inevitably discover their boats. The numerous fires on the Illinois shore and the peculiar yells of the savages led them to believe that a flat-boat ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... shoulder was perched a three-year-old child which laughed and gurgled with delight, holding tight to her widespread hands. The woman's face was hidden by the child's body, but her voice, deep-throated and rich with sliding minor tones, mingled with the high shrillness of the little ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... lowest notes come out as clear and ringing as the highest, and her highest are as soft and sweet as the lowest. Her tones are never muffled or indistinct, nor do they ever offend the ear by the slightest tinge of shrillness; mellow roundness distinguishes every sound she utters. As she never strains her voice, it never seems to be loud; and hence some one who busied himself in anticipatory depreciation said that it would be found to fail in power, a mistake of which everybody was convinced who observed how ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... curious to note again how that occasional exaggerated shrillness of the feminine voice when raised in the open air—how it amused the mob. They imitated the falsetto with squeals of delight. Each time she began afresh she was met by the shrill echo of her own voice. The contest went ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... the conclusion of her story, there arrived in the room where the two ladies were sitting a noise, not unlike, in loudness, to that of a pack of hounds just let out from their kennel; nor, in shrillness, to cats, when caterwauling; or to screech owls; or, indeed, more like (for what animal can resemble a human voice?) to those sounds which, in the pleasant mansions of that gate which seems to derive its name from a duplicity of tongues, issue from the mouths, and sometimes from the nostrils, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... up, and speaking in a hoarse voice, which told of the inward pain, "tell me, nurse! Is he DEAD, did you say? Have you sent for a doctor? Oh! send for one, send for one," continued she, her voice rising to shrillness, and starting to her feet. Helen lifted herself up, and looked, with breathless waiting, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... doorway, and Warwick, turning, faced the old judge. Time had left greater marks upon the lawyer than upon his office. His hair was whiter, his stoop more pronounced; when he spoke to Warwick, his voice had some of the shrillness of old age; and in his hand, upon which the veins stood out prominently, a decided ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... any double letter, preserve it double before any additional termination, not beginning with the same letter;[115] as in the following derivatives: wooer, seeing, blissful, oddly, gruffly, equally, shelly, hilly, stiffness, illness, stillness, shrillness, fellness, smallness, drollness, freeness, grassless, passless, carelessness, recklessness, embarrassment, enfeoffment, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... hardly uttered these words, when the sharp crack of the remaining Indian's rifle, who had recovered from the blow given him by Hamilton, and was glad of the opportunity of so speedily avenging it, rung in his ear with piercing shrillness, and looking in the direction of the flying couple, Durant saw Hamilton stagger with his burden, and then both fell to the earth. Instantly the demon was roused within him; every emotion of fear was swallowed up in his usually cowardly heart by the burning thirst for revenge ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... stood patiently as if understanding why Mel had not followed, but determined to wait until he did. The reporter stirred and rose from the chair, his legs withering beneath him. The figure of Dr. Winters grew larger as he approached. The morning clatter of the hospital seemed an ear-torturing shrillness. The door of the office closed and ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... and strong, and victory seemed to incline toward him; but Mrs. Melmoth now made use of a tone whose peculiar shrillness, as long experience had taught her husband, augured a mood of mind not to ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... strangely and edged cautiously away. His eyes, like those of the others, had a dazed, stricken look. A woman was sobbing softly as she clung to her husband. From the streets far below came a quavering shrillness of sound. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... next thing in his range of vision—one face in particular, sallow and still with eyes glancing sideways, seeing all things;—divining much! soft steps, and bandages, and out of silence the excited shrillness of Don Diego Maria Francisco Brancadori the tutor:—the shepherd who had lost track of ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... money!"—not even these people, whose only worry was to find investment for the surplus they were unable to spend. Something of the meanness of it all penetrated her. Were these the real visages of these people, whose faces otherwise seemed so smooth and human? Was Leila Mortimer aware of the shrillness of her voice? Did Agatha Caithness realise how pinched her mouth and nose had grown? Did even Leroy Mortimer dream how swollen the pouches under his eyes were; how red and puffy his hands, shuffling a new pack; how pendulous and dreadful his red under-lip ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... brown and vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane was maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white and silver in the soft, September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy show the laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts of treble shrillness. "Villain, monster, scoundrel," squeaked a voice. Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards, was a prostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave's uniform belabored with a stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... foreigner not merely an Englishman, but an Englishman of title. He would soon be charmed by the women who beamed on every side of him. Their refinement of manner would be obvious, though in some cases they might shock him by a shrillness and nasal harshness when speaking, while in other cases both their tone and accent might repel him through extreme affectation of "elegance." But for the most part he would pronounce these women bright, cultivated, and often remarkably handsome. They would not require ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... coal-cellar. She opened the door to Mr. Critchlow's knock. Mr. Critchlow entered without any formalities, as usual. He did not seem to have changed. He had the same quantity of white hair, he wore the same long white apron, and his voice (which showed however an occasional tendency to shrillness) had the same grating quality. He stood fairly straight. He was carrying a newspaper ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... a day when he told her a childish falsehood. She did not whip him, but stood him in front of her and began to reason with him and explain the wickedness of an untruth. By-and-by she broke off in the midst of a sentence, appalled by the shrillness of her own voice. From argument she had passed to furious scolding. And the little fellow quailed before her, his contrition beaten down under the storm of words that whistled about his ears without ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the third ran a long passage, where a greenish yellow dusk from some unseen lamp prevailed. The walls were of unpainted wood, made of slips as thin as laths, and several doors were roughly cut in it. At the end, one of these doors gaped open, music of a peculiar shrillness floated out. Also a smell as of musk and sandalwood drifted through the crack, with small, fitful trails of ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... selfishness, like that produced by fear, presided over the disorder of our landing. People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, their families following how they could. Children fell, and were picked up to be rewarded by a blow. One child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit; an official kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark her distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest. I was so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in the hundred yards or so between the pier and ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suspense. The silence was first broken by the sound of the boatswain's whistle, followed by the hoarse cry of "All hands, up anchor, ahoy!"—the former rising on the night air, from its first low mellow notes to a piercing shrillness that gradually died away on the waters; and the latter bellowing through every cranny of the ship, like the hollow ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a deeper pink, his lip trembled, and there was a huskiness in the voice that murmured "My dear boy!" Then he recollected himself, threw back his great head and frowned. His voice resumed its habitual shrillness. "You realize, I hope, that you have behaved damnably... damnably, and with ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... regularly up to the year 1708, I cannot but hope he may be able to produce some notices of what Mr. P. Cunningham calls, "the Puritanical fervour" of this little parish. "St. Antling's bell," and "St. Antling's preachers," were proverbial for shrillness and prolixity, and the name is a familiar one to the students of our old dramatists. Let "W.C." bear in mind, that the chaplains of the Commissioners of the Church of Scotland, with Alexander Henderson at their head, preached here in 1640, commanding crowded audiences, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... dull one with him. I observe he whistles the popular airs of the period with less shrillness and intensity. Providence, however, looks not unkindly on him, and delivers into his hands as it were two nice little boys who have at this moment innocently strayed into our street. They are pink and white children, and are dressed alike, and exhibit a certain air of neatness and refinement which ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... fine, performer; he lacked the bird-like richness; he could scarce have extracted all the honey out of "Cherry Ripe"; he did not fear—he even ostentatiously displayed and seemed to revel in—the shrillness of the instrument; but in fire, speed, precision, evenness, and fluency; in linked agility of jimmy—a technical expression, by your leave, answering to warblers on the bagpipe; and perhaps, above all, in that inspiring side-glance of the eye, with which he followed the effect and (as by ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heart. But by nature polite he waited till the orator was sitting down before he rose, and, with the three leaders firmly grasped in his hand, walked deliberately up to the seated speakers. Turning his back on them, he said, in a voice to which nervousness and emotion lent shrillness: ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... which stood near the inn door. I hoped sincerely that no militia bullet would find any part of either of us. Then the drums began to play us out of the town with their morning roll. A fife whined out, going down to our marrows with its shrillness. Lights showed at the windows. We saw dark heads framed in yellow patches. People called to us. In the door of the great inn stood Monmouth; his face seemed very white in the glare of the torches. He raised his ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... flung its burr of sound Against the hush and clung there, wound In night's deep mane: then, in a tree, A grig began deliberately To file the stillness: all around A wire of shrillness seemed unwound. ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... far more suspicious than the common species. Its harsh, loud song consists of a series of cries—can! can! can! can!—with no intervals of silence subdividing the poem into stanzas. Thanks to its monotony and its harsh shrillness, it is a most odious sound, especially when the orchestra consists of hundreds of performers, as is often the case in my two plane-trees during the dog-days. It is as though a heap of dry walnuts were being shaken up in a bag until the shells broke. This painful concert, which ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... offered fear-spersing, for fear-dispersing. But ear-piercing is an epithet so eminently adapted to the fife, and so distinct from the shrillness of the trumpet, that it certainly ought not to be changed. Dr. Warburton has been censured for this proposed emendation with more noise than honesty, for he did not himself put it ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... sounds. There can be no doubt but this bird is one of our finest songsters. If it would only thrive and sing well when caged, like the canary, how far it would surpass that bird! It has all the vivacity and versatility of the canary, without any of its shrillness. Its song is indeed a little cascade ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... syncopation, preparation, suspension, resolution. staff, stave, line, space, brace; bar, rest; appoggiato[obs3], appoggiatura[obs3]; acciaccatura[obs3]. note, musical note, notes of a scale; sharp, flat, natural; high note &c.(shrillness) 410; low note &c. 408; interval; semitone; second, third, fourth &c.; diatessaron[obs3]. breve, semibreve[Mus], minim, crotchet, quaver; semiquaver, demisemiquaver, hemidemisemiquaver; sustained note, drone, burden. tonic; key ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... can't walk anywhere. This whole planet is a death trap. Let's get back in the ship!" The shrillness of hysteria was at the edge of her voice, as well as ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... the hospital-corps men and the engineers hugged the breastwork for cover. The leaves clipped from the trees by bullets were blown aside with the hurricane breaths of shrapnel bursts; bullets whistled so near Marta that she heard their shrillness above every other sound. She was amazed that the house still remained standing—that any one was alive. But she had a glimpse of Dellarme maintaining his set smile and another of Feller, who had crept up behind the automatic, making impatient "come-on! come-on! ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer |
