"Clammy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... save for a faint blue glow from the steel eye of Tharagavverug that peered restlessly about it from the hilt of Sacnoth. Heavily in the chamber hung the clammy odour of a ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... last quite cease in those who have made too long Harrangues, in speaking, and whose Jaws are quite dried with an immoderate Heat; for in both these cases the top of the Wind-pipe is covered over with a clammy ...
— The Talking Deaf Man - A Method Proposed, Whereby He Who is Born Deaf, May Learn to Speak, 1692 • John Conrade Amman
... thread. She was sitting up in bed, and seemed to keep upright with great difficulty. Her large black eyes, dimmed by fever, no doubt, and half-dead already, hardly moved under the bony arch of her eyebrows.—There,' he added, pointing to his own brow. 'Her forehead was clammy; her fleshless hands were like bones covered with soft skin; the veins and muscles were perfectly visible. She must have been very handsome; but at this moment I was startled into an indescribable emotion at the sight. ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... meeting with Capitola at the altar of the Forest Chapel to fire his clammy heart, stagnant blood and sated senses with the very first passion that he had ever known. Her image, as she stood there at the altar with flashing eyes and flaming cheeks and scathing tongue defying him, was ever ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... increased action of the cutaneous glands or capillaries poured upon the skin this fluid, previously absorbed from the lungs; why is not the whole surface of the body covered with sweat? why is not the skin warm? Add to this, that the sweats above mentioned were clammy or glutinous, which the condensed perspirable matter is not; whence it would seem to have been a different fluid from ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... chauffeur with his hand upon the starting handle, French with the steering wheel of the police car already in his hand. And then the little party seemed suddenly turned to stone. For a few breathless seconds not one of them moved. Out into the clammy night air came the echoes of a hideous, inhuman, blood-curdling scream. Quest was the first to recover himself. He leaped from his seat and rushed back across the empty hall into the study, followed a little way behind by French and the others. An unsuspected ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for mercy's sake," cried the prince, pressing his icy hands upon his clammy brow, "do not play with me! I have no need to be a king to ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... that sounding silence of the hushed and darksome night, going more slow, more soft, as I went nearer, a sob in my throat, my feet leading me to her, till I touched the carriage. And against it a long time I leant my clammy brow, a sob aching in my poor throat, and she all mixed up in my head with the suspended hushed night, and with the elfin things in the air that made the silence so musically a-sound to the vacant ear-drum, and with the dripping splash in the cave. And softly I turned the door-handle, and heard ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... lay the paste lightly on them, notch the edges, and bake it a light brown. The oven must be moderate. If it is too hot, the paste will bake before it has risen sufficiently. If too cold, it will scarcely rise at all, and will be white and clammy. When you begin to make paste in this manner, do not quit it till it is ready for the oven. It must always be baked in a close oven where no air can ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... the meals by. Half the window panes are broken, and the holes stuffed with rags. The sleeve of an old coat hangs out of one, and beats drearily upon the sash when the wind sweeps over the fence and rattles the rotten shutters. The family wash, clammy and gray, hangs on a clothes-line stretched across the room. Under it, at a table set with cracked and empty plates, a discouraged woman sits eying the children's show gloomily. It is evident that she has been drinking. The peaked faces of the little ones wear ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... She took him by the hand. Her own hand was shaking, and very cold and clammy. Her knees were weak as she led him toward the door. She could feel them trembling so that every step was an effort. And her hand on the knob had barely strength to turn it. But turn it she did and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... infinite space on to deep water, came upon his ear; and he saw that the sides of the abyss were covered with slime; and the damp air made him cough, and the cap had got over his spectacles and nearly blinded him; and he was perspiring with a cold, clammy sweat. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... from ten to six thousand and got rid of our clammy suits. Tim shut off and stepped out of the Frame. The Mark Boat was coming up behind us. He opened the colloid in that heavenly stillness ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... invited him with her strange eyes, and as she did so she was as mysterious as ever she had been. He bent down responsively. She put her hot, clammy hands on his shoulders, and kept his head at a little distance and looked through his eyes into his soul. The letter had ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... and Jerry looked at Gyp. By some process of mental communication they agreed to say nothing about Uncle Peter's ghost. Back here in the softly-lighted, warm living-room, those weird voices and clammy fingers seemed unreal. However, there was the ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... to recollect his whereabouts. The way grew less difficult—occasionally there were signs of a path. Every moment the soft, damp heat grew more intense and clammy. Every time he touched his forehead he found it dripping. But of these things he recked very little, for every step now brought him nearer to the end of his journey. Faintly, through the midday silence he could hear the clanging of copper instruments and the ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gone out without success that morning, and they talked of waiting until the next day before visiting their jambins. All three of them, seated on blocks of stone, watched the tide come in, their backs rounded, their mouths clammy, half-asleep. ...
— The Fete At Coqueville - 1907 • Emile Zola
... be considered to count, he had long ago made up his mind about her. Some time before, when he had found it impossible for him to be in her presence, still less to converse with her, without experiencing a warm, clammy, shooting sensation and a feeling of general weakness similar to that which follows a well-directed blow at the solar plexus, he had come to the conclusion that he must be in love. The furious jealousy which assailed him on seeing her embraced by and embracing a stout person old enough ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... white dust on the highway! Oh the stenches in the byway! Oh the clammy fog that hovers o'er the earth; And at Home they're making merry 'neath the white and scarlet berry— What part have India's ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Turk may have it in his blood to do so: the ordinary Christian has not got the trick of it. To carry about a wet towel twisted round one's head needs a trained acrobat. Every few minutes the wretched thing works loose. In darkness and in misery, you struggle to get your head out of a clammy towel that clings to you almost with passion. Brain power is wasted in inventing names for that towel—names expressive of your feelings with regard to it. Further time is taken up before the glass, ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... the most tender care beside me, as though the nurse were putting the child to bed, he unwound his yards of trunk and began to feel me all over with its tip, commencing at the back of my neck. Oh! the sensation of that clammy, wriggling tip ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... we dressed in the half-light, and again went back to bed in the daylight. This time the show had been postponed because of low clouds and a thick ground-mist that hung over the reeking earth. It was a depressing dawn—clammy, moist, and sticky. ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... the starred burning axletree of heaven. Out of it hath been shown to me a priestess of Massylian race, warder of the temple of the Hesperides, even she who gave the dragon his food, and kept the holy boughs on the tree, sprinkling clammy honey and slumberous poppy-seed. She professes with her spells to relax the purposes of whom she will, but on others to bring passion and pain; to stay the river-waters and turn the stars backward: she calls up ghosts by night; thou shalt see earth ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... said she, raising her starry eyes to his, and clasping with her small, firm hand his cold and clammy fingers. "By the memory of Rome, and the dark-rolling waters of the Tiber, from which you rescued me that night, I promise. And now let us pledge each other in a draught from the depths of the Styx. Look around you, Carl, and realize that ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... open the now stiffened jaws, he found—to his amazement, to his stupefaction—that, neatly folded beneath the dead tongue, lay just such another piece of papyrus as that which he had removed from the bed. He drew it out—it was clammy. He put it to his nose,—it exhaled the fragrance of honey. He opened it,—it was covered by figures. He compared them with the figures on the other slip,—they were just so similar as two draughtsmen hastily copying from a common model would make them. The ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... every minute you must come. I kept looking and waiting, and still you didn't come. I telephoned Doctor Geddes, when I couldn't stand it any longer. And then The Author came down-stairs. And oh, Sophy, there was such an unearthly, clammy, waiting sort of feeling in the house—all those lights, all those empty rooms—I felt as if something terrible must be happening!" She clung to me as she spoke, kissing me, and shook, and wept. "And when you still didn't come, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... five minutes the grey curtain of mist dropped slowly down again over the magnificent picture, and it faded gradually from sight, leaving us almost in doubt whether it had been a reality, or only a bright deceptive vision. We are enveloped now, as we have been nearly all day, in a thick clammy fog. ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... malediction. I hate it so much, and yet I am always so very glad to see it, that I am in a state of constant indecision on this subject. When I first made acquaintance with Calais, it was as a maundering young wretch in a clammy perspiration and dripping saline particles, who was conscious of no extremities but the one great extremity, sea-sickness—who was a mere bilious torso, with a mislaid headache somewhere in its stomach—who had been put into a horrible swing in Dover Harbour, and had tumbled giddily ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... you and pull out four thousand dollars he's got in the bank. If he does that, we can't pay our guarantee. You've got to call him back." She flared up as if to stop him, but he went on: "Oh, I know, Molly Culpepper—but this is no game of London Bridge. It's bad enough, but it's business—cold clammy business, and sometimes we have to do things in this world for the larger good. That roan simply can't leave this town and you must bold him. It's ruin and perhaps prison to Bob and his father if he goes; and as for your own father and ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... to-day a mere handful of people other than dealers had drifted in to wait for the sale to begin—something for which the weather was largely to blame, for the day was dismal with a clammy drizzle settling from a low and leaden sky—and with a solitary exception these few ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... shut them up within himself; nor had the boy been ever able to penetrate that frigid outward barrier. But Arthur had been his father's pride and glory through life, and his name the last which John Pendennis had tried to articulate whilst he lay with his wife's hand clasping his own cold and clammy palm, as the flickering spirit went out into the darkness of death, and life and the ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and allowed to become hard before the next was put on. This gave a hard, cool, smooth surface with no stickiness. Modern work, done with paint and French varnish, has not this delightful feeling, but is nearly always clammy to the touch, and the colors are hurt by the process of polishing. Chippendale did not use much lacquer, but in the "Director" he often says such and such designs would ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... been somewhat squally, and the royals and topgallant-sails were stowed; but the weather was now clearing, and as "three bells" chimed out musically upon the clammy morning air, Mr Seaton, the first lieutenant, who was the officer of the watch, having first scanned the heavens attentively, gave orders to loose and set again the light ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... unreasonable objection to seeing their Officers avail themselves of these lifts. Then the heavens were kind, and it rained; they turned faces to the clouds and let the drops fall on their features, unshaven, glazed with the sun, and clammy with sweat. They took off their hats and extended the palms of their hands. It was refreshing, invigorating, ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... mid-winter, the poor child's short breath, fluttering pulse, and cold, clammy sweat alarmed me, and I felt sure that unless the dear Lord interposed in her behalf, her time with us was very short. I lingered by her bed till near midnight in prayer for her recovery. I could not give her up. Again in my own room I poured out my ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... rather hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with the skull, thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was aimed at me. But Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a personality, being in his cloudiest mood of generalization. So I only concealed the handkerchief, while I said, as easily as I might, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... morning Jane found her missing letter in the exact spot from which it had disappeared two nights before. She was mystified; but when she saw the printed words beneath her signature, she felt a cold, clammy chill run up her spine. She showed the letter, or rather the last sheet with the signature, ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... red cotton pillows I discovered a hideous object, a cap of the same color as the coverlet, but coated with a greasy glazing which prevented its texture from being recognisable; a worn, shapeless, clammy, oily thing. I am sure that its owner prizes it highly and that he finds it warmer than any other cap. A man's life, the perspiration of an entire existence, is secreted in this layer of mouldy cerate. How many nights it must have taken to make it so thick! How many nightmares have galloped under ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... reserving their domestic pieties and customary devotions for the brighter and newer chapels of the fashionable churches in Ravenna. So the old monk is left alone to sweep the marsh water from his church floor, and to keep the green moss from growing too thickly on its monuments. A clammy conferva covers everything except the mosaics upon tribune, roof, and clerestory, which defy the course of age. Christ on His throne sedet aternumque sedebit: the saints around him glitter with their pitiless uncompromising eyes and wooden gestures, as if twelve centuries ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... heat and dryness of the canon bed, Lennon suddenly felt his skin bathed in clammy sweat. For the first time in his life he knew terror. He glared into the cold, malignant eyes of the snake and saw death, certain and horrible. Panic seized him. He writhed and dug his fingers and boot toes into the sand in a frantic ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... their retreat, rising every moment a little nearer to them. Following the tide had come a dense sea fog, that drifted down the bay, veiling the sun, and, creeping round the rock, wrapped the girls in its clammy, concealing folds, cutting them off effectually from all possibility of being seen from the neighbouring cliff. In a few minutes the whole prospect was blotted out; they seemed in a world of white mist, as absolutely isolated and alone as if they were in mid-ocean. Trembling ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... whirl in the air, The evening gnats; and there The owl opes broad his eyes and wings to sail For prey; the bat wakes; and the shell-less snail Comes forth, clammy and bare. ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... advanced two miles, because the stiff clay so clogged the wheels that it could not be easily removed. Seeing the cattle so distressed I was compelled to encamp, and await the effect of the sunshine and the breeze on the clammy surface. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... on trifling bodily impressions. The trivialities of daily existence were an armour for the soul. And this thought reinforced the inward quietness of Razumov as he began to climb the stairs familiar to his feet in the dark, with his hand on the familiar clammy banister. The exceptional could not prevail against the material contacts which make one day resemble another. To-morrow would ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... untrodden under their spotless mantle of ice the rigid polar regions slept the profound sleep of death from the earliest dawn of time. Wrapped in his white shroud, the mighty giant stretched his clammy ice-limbs abroad, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... the wilful zephyrs. Now it lifts a bully head as it creeps unimpeded across the sea and spreads, infinitely soft, all-encompassing. As if by magic the mainland is blotted out. The sea is dark and death-like, the air clammy, turgid, and steamy. Heavy vapour settles upon the hills of the Island, descending slowly and with the passivity of fate, until there is but a thin stratum of clear air between the gloomy levels and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... did or said just then; for timidly coming forward out of the shade, I saw the fair vision of the morning, but now deadly pale—the maiden whom a couple of hours before I had rescued from so horrible a death. She was dressed in a simple muslin, and her long fair hair, yet clammy and damp, was tied with a piece of blue ribbon, and hung down her shoulders. It was the same sweet English face that might be seen in many a country home far away in our northern islands; but out there, in that tropic land, with ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... waste ground, blighted with the unwholesome smoke of factory chimneys, and echoing the clank of iron wheels and rush of troubled water. Its internal accommodations amply fulfilled the promise of the outside. The rooms were low and damp, the clammy walls were pierced with chinks and holes, the rotten floors had sunk from their level, the very beams started from their places and warned the timid stranger from ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... one evening, after dinner. It had been the good old English dinner of Simpson's, preceded by two vermuths, accompanied by a pint of claret, and covered in the retreat by four maraschinos. It was a picturesque night. A clammy fog blanketed the whole world. It swirled and swirled. Hoxton Street was a glorious dream, as enticingly indefinite as an opium-sleep. Simple Simon had an appointment here. The boys were to be out that night. Jimmie Flanagan, their leader, had passed ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Keith followed her several steps down until they reached a place in the opposite wall where a single very tall step led up to another iron door, square-cut and narrow, back of which lay the cellar used by the Wellanders. Lena lighted a candle that burned with difficulty in the clammy air. ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... chance of reaching the abodes of men by any other route. We were booked till the gale chose to ease—at any rate till morning; and for myself, I contemplated a moist bivouac under streaming Jove, with one clammy elk-skin for ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... deep Unknown, where ugly spirits keep! Thou smoke from hellish stews uphurl'd To mock and mortify the world! Thou spider-web of giant race, Spun out and spread through airy space! Avaunt, thou filthy, clammy thing, Of sorry rain the source and spring! Moist blanket dripping misery down, Loathed alike by land and town! Thou watery monster, wan to see, Intruding 'twixt the sun and me, To rob me of my blessed right, To turn my day to dismal night. Parent of thieves and patron best, They brave pursuit ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... standards—even, perhaps a celebrated seducer, a soldier with a future—but the mere sight of him suffices to paralyse an American esophagus. Besides, there is the smell of chocolate, sweet, sickly, effeminate, and at two in the afternoon! Again, there is the music of Grieg, clammy, clinging, creepy. Away to the Mathaeserbraeu, two long blocks by taxi! From the Munich of Berlinish decadence and Prussian epaulettes to the Munich of honest Bavarians! From chocolate and macaroons to pretzels and ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... natives. The entrance would usually be by a narrow passage-way, excavated from a snow-drift, six to eight feet below the surface, and perhaps twenty-five or thirty feet long. They had no fires for heating the igloos, and, consequently, there was a clammy, vault-like atmosphere indoors that was anything but pleasant. They use oil only for light, and, even in the depth of winter, cook what little food they do not eat raw with moss. As I approached the village I was walking ahead of my guides, who were with the sled. It was getting late, and ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... up was not an easy task. It took stern will, and all the strength of muscle he had left, and when he finally achieved it there was a clammy dew of pain upon his face. With slow guarded movements he began to dress himself. Any sudden or violent action might burst the delicate gassed spots in his lungs or throw out of place one of the lower ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... empty gin-case. Without the tempest shrieked and howled, the great wind shook the Kaffir hut of grass and wattle, piercing it in a hundred places till the light of the lantern wavered within its glass, and the sick man's hair was lifted from his clammy brow. From time to time fierce squalls of rain fell like sheets of spray, and the water, penetrating the roof of grass, streamed to the earthen floor. Leonard crept on his hands and knees to the doorway of the hut, ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... was tremendous. It went on for days whose number it was difficult to estimate in the grope of the unchanging twilight. A day's work might be a single hill conquered. It might be a moist, clammy valley crossed. Perhaps two miles, three, or even five. Distance remained unconsidered. For always was the next effort no less than the last, till mind, and heart, and body were worn well-nigh threadbare. There was ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... fond fancy finds there now To mind of spring or summer days, Are sodden trunk and songless bough. The past sits widowed on her brow, Homeward she wends with wintry gaze, To walls that house a hollow vow, To hearth where love hath ceased to blaze: Watches the clammy twilight wane, With grief too fixed for woe or tear; And, with her forehead 'gainst the pane, Envies the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... of an hour of this fun, very muddy, clammy with perspiration, and thoroughly winded, the party reached firmer ground, and the guides called ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... cellar, and from behind the curtain came a gust of wind that smelled horribly of stagnant sea-water. I laid hold of something that had the shape of a man's arm, but was smooth, and wet, and icy cold. But suddenly, as I pulled, the creature sprang violently forward against me, a clammy, oozy mass, as it seemed to me, heavy and wet, yet endowed with a sort of supernatural strength. I reeled across the state-room, and in an instant the door opened and the thing rushed out. I had not had time to be frightened, and quickly recovering ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... stepped from behind the bar and leaned upon the table beside Mac Strann. Even while leaning in this manner the bartender was as tall as the average man; he waved back the others with a gesture of his tremendous arm. Then he reached out and took the hand of Mac Strann in his clammy fingers. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... waxy, cold, and clammy, Indian pipes rise like a company of wraiths in the dim forest that suits them well. Ghoulish parasites, uncanny saprophytes, for their matted roots prey either on the juices of living plants or on the decaying matter of dead ones, how ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... attempted to fill his congested lungs with cool, sweet air, and again the attempt ended in a groan and he relaxed, gasping, while upon his forehead the cold sweat stood in clammy beads. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... him like black, clammy fur. He felt the utter futility of even being afraid. He would simply remain as he was, and soon ...
— The Memory of Mars • Raymond F. Jones
... secretions are manifested by the deficiency in the salivary, gastric, intestinal, and nephritic secretions, the tongue being furred, the mouth clammy, and there occurring anorexia, thirst, constipation, and scanty, high-colored ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... a cell, on such a couch, lay the concubine of a supreme king and the mother of a royal prince of Siam, her feet covered with a silk mantle, her head supported by a pillow of glazed leather, her face turned to the clammy wall. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... worried about his life. The slightest irritant causes him to go off the handle. As he works himself up into his hysterical state as a reaction to a disagreeable person or problem, irregular blotches may appear on his face and neck. Generally, his hands and feet are clammy and perspiring, his face is abnormally flushed or pallid, the eyes are worried or starey, unwonted wandering sensations involving now this area of the body, or now that obsess him. As the blood pressure is too low for the age, the circulation is nearly always inadequate and palpitation ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... which even when not in leaf cast dense shadows around them. It was in truth a weird spot: owls hooted dismally about them, bats flitted here and there in their erratic flight, and sometimes almost brushed the faces of the boys with their clammy wings. The strange noises always to be heard in a wood at night assailed their ears, and mingled with the quick beating of their own hearts; whilst from time to time a long unearthly wail, which seemed to proceed from the interior of the house itself, filled them with an unreasoning ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... was so hazy that it seemed to fade away into the air around them. These air-snakes were of a very light grey or smoke colour, with some darker lines within, which gave the impression of a definite organism. One of them whisked past my very face, and I was conscious of a cold, clammy contact, but their composition was so unsubstantial that I could not connect them with any thought of physical danger, any more than the beautiful bell-like creatures which had preceded them. There was no more solidity in their frames than in ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of one of the oldest libraries in the country a curious pamphlet. It fell into my hands like a bit of old age and darkness itself. The pages were coffee-colored, and worn thin and ragged at the edges, like rotting leaves in fall; they had grown clammy to the touch, too, from the grasp of so many dead years. There was a peculiar smell about the book which it had carried down from the days when young William Penn went up and down the clay-paths of his village of Philadelphia, stopping to watch the settlers fishing ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... service, happy as the day was long, now mothers, with babies at their breasts—happy still perhaps; but that pretty face is woefully wan—that hair did not use to be so dishevelled—and bony, and clammy, and blue-veined is the hand that lay so white, and warm, and smooth in the grasp ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... say that we had a merry evening. The rain poured down with quiet persistency. Everything in the boat was damp and clammy. Supper was not a success. Cold veal pie, when you don't feel hungry, is apt to cloy. I felt I wanted whitebait and a cutlet; Harris babbled of soles and white-sauce, and passed the remains of his pie to Montmorency, who declined it, and, apparently insulted by the offer, went ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... pawing efforts to dislodge the clammy kelp, she drew him along until the streamer broke. Then still talking their happy nonsense, they trotted side by side toward ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... your teeth and take a fresh grip of your rifle and go forward with greater determination to strike a blow in the cause of freedom and honour. Maybe you reach your objective, your clothes sodden with sticky, clammy mud and possibly the red of your ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... scarcely now recall the feelings of that week without undergoing a partial return of the same painful sensations. My soul was striving as with itself, and seeking an outlet for escape. I panted, as if for breath—my tongue was parched—my lips clammy—my voice, in the language of the poet, clove to the roof of my throat. Altogether, I have never felt such emotions ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... that you love me, I can do anything," she said, and her white hand crept slowly into the cold, clammy one which lay ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... for one moment he suspected Nevitt. Guy Waring was too innocent to suspect anybody. But as he woke up more fully now to the nature of his own act, a horrible sense of guilt and pollution crept slowly over him. He put his hand ito his forehead. Cold sweat stood in clammy small drops upon his brow. Bit by bit, the hateful truth dawned clearly upon him. Nevitt had lured him by strange means, he knew not how, into hateful crime—into a disgraceful conspiracy. Word by word, the self-accusing sentence framed itself ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... have found you sooner! All these dreadful years I have lived at God's feet—with one prayer: let me help my Bertie, let me see my brother's face," moaned Beryl, pressing her lips to the clammy, fleshless hand she held against ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... lifted the heavy drapery and essayed to enter, but a cold hand grasped mine and prevented me. A woman's figure, slight and youthful, with white face, great sad eyes, and long yellow hair, stood in the arched doorway and pressed me back with her clammy hand. I started up from my pillow in alarm to find myself alone; the pale moonbeams streaming through the looped curtains of the window and glancing upon my forehead, I thought, probably accounted for the cold hand of my dream. I slept, and dreamed ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... lay thick over valley and hills; a clammy rime gathered on my clothes and made them heavy, my face was cold and wet. Only now and then came a breath of wind to make the sleeping mists rise and fall, ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... of the doorway into the Cathedral. His feet had scarcely touched the pavement before he felt on his face the cold touch of the clammy air, like an underground vault. In the church it was still dark, but above the stained glass of the hundreds of different-sized windows glowed in the early dawn, looking like magic flowers opening with the first splendours ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in the refrigerator for a bit of ice. She ho no idea of the high cost of ice in that region—it came from "the store," like all their provisions. It did not occur to her that fish and milk and melons made a poor combination in flavor; or that the clammy, sub-offensive smell was not the natural and necessary odor of refrigerators. Neither did she think that a sunny corner of the back porch near the chimney, though convenient, was an ill-selected spot for a ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the paddle swept pirogue and paddler into a strange and lonely world. The tall cypress-trees on each bank, draped with funeral moss, cast impenetrable shadows on the water; the deathlike silence was broken only by the occasional ominous hoot of an owl or the wheezy snort of an alligator; the clammy air breathed poison. But the stars overhead were bright, and ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the flanks and nostrils of the shivering horses, and clung with clammy paws to frosted hats and dripping boughs. A soulless, skyless, catarrhal day, as if that bustling dowager, old mother Earth—what with match-making in spring, and fetes champetres in summer, and dinner-giving in autumn—was fairly ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... was in the northeast—when it broke, swift and vicious, from the sullen waste of water beyond, whipping up the grey sea, driving in the vagrant ice, spreading clammy mist over the reefs and rocky headlands of the long coast—our harbour lay unruffled in the lee of God's Warning. Skull Island and a shoulder of God's Warning broke the winds from the north: the froth of the breakers, to be sure, came creeping through the north tickle, when the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... tent, and from their stores they brought the very best, Whisp'ring of speedy help to come as each clammy hand they pressed. "Nay, friends," he said with a short, sharp laugh, more painful than sob to hear, "No help send back, for myself and wife must perforce ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... thanks from his two-by-four soul! But among men who are men, among physicians who have cause to know his worth, among scientists big enough to get out of their own shadows, and, thank God, among the people who haven't been fossilised by clammy universities out of all sense of human values—among them, I say, Karl Hubers is appreciated for what he was close to doing when this damnable fate stepped ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... breaking when he awoke shivering with cold. His buckskin clothes were wet and clammy, and ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... His dinner coat or his tail coat, if he wears a tail coat, is invariably too tight in the sleeves; nine times out of ten it binds across the back between the shoulders, and bulges out in a pouch effect at the collar. His shirt front, if hard-boiled, is as cold and clammy as a morgue slab when first he puts it on; but as hot and sticky as a priming of fresh glue after he has worn it for half an hour in an overheated room—and all public rooms in America are overheated. Should it be of the pleated or medium well-done variety, no power ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... than before. I felt that I must have some natural explanation for this appearance or I would go mad. I took up the head again—and never in my life have I had so overpowering an impression of the might of death and decay than in this moment. Myriads of disgusting clammy insects poured out of every opening of the skull, and a couple of shining, wormlike centipedes—Geophiles, the scientists call them—crawled about in the eye sockets. I threw the skull back into the coffin, sprang over the heaps of bones without even ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... person to see you, Miladi, on business,' and immediately retired. In the one instant while these events passed, timid little Mrs. Ferrari mastered her own throbbing heart; stepped over the threshold, conscious of her clammy hands, dry lips, and burning head; and stood in the presence of Lord Montbarry's widow, to all outward appearance as supremely self-possessed ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... of frogs, because they are cold and clammy, but she was very polite by nature as well as breeding, so she did not show her dislike, though she could not ...
— The Sleeping Beauty • C. S. Evans
... "happeneth to all;" the doom certain, the hour uncertain; coming in infancy, youth, maturity, as often or oftener than in age. These were the thoughts that filled Thurston's mind as he stood and wiped the clammy dews from the ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... upon my brow The clammy death-sweats coldly rise; How dim and strange your features grow Through the hot mist that ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... did not raise his head, or he would have noticed how deathly pale her face was and how very light her breathing had become. Suddenly his grief ceased; a great fear had entered his heart—What caused the hand that his face was hid in to be so clammy and cold? It had not been so when he first pressed it to his face. "She is dead," whispered his heart brutally. "It is a lie, a wicked lie! she is not dead," he muttered. "Raise your head and see, ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... covering, the best we have. However, it is very irritating to the skin and has a tendency to make the wearer too warm. It does not dry out readily. Consequently the wearer remains damp a long time after perspiring. The result is a moist, clammy skin. A skin thus pampered in damp warmth becomes delicate, and like other hot-house products unable to hold its own when exposed to inclement weather. A good way to take cold easily is to wear wool next to the skin. The best recipe for getting cold feet is to wear woolen ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... living thing. It crushed down upon the summerhouse with huge, downy black wings. A very faint rustling started up in the dry leaves of the creeper on the roof and clammy little draughts of air came twisting through the cracks. All the languorous glamour of the night had passed. It was merely autumn moonlight, and too late in the year to be sitting out in a summerhouse mouthing inconsequentialities—two people who were ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... began to understand: a great lump came in my throat, and taking hold of one of Fee's cold, clammy hands, I commenced stroking and patting ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... clammy, and there's not a single thump in his arteries," he said with solemn gravity; and letting fall Larry's hand he proceeded to examine his neck. "The vertebra broken, cracked, dislocated," he continued, in the same ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... dogs, bound for Fort Pitt. This time the drivers were all English half-breeds, and that tongue was chiefly used to accelerate the dogs. The temperature had risen considerably, and the snow was soft and clammy, making the "hauling" heavy upon the dogs. For my own use I had a very excellent train, but the other two were of the useless class.' As before, the beatings were incessant, and I witnessed the first example of a very common occurrence in dog-driving—I beheld the operation known ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... friends, the tall runner had always felt a decided antipathy for all crawling things, and would never handle even an inoffensive garter-snake; indeed, slimy greenbacked frogs he abominated, claiming that they had the same clammy ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... when the bravest of us get the creeps. We were in our new home, and had to see about some shelters. We would dig into the side of the parapet just enough for a man to crouch up into. I can tell you that although it was clammy and wet it seemed like heaven to us at times. Well, there was an attack planned for the 28th of April. The night of the 28th we dug a jumping off trench and it was understood that "D" Co. should form the left flank of the attack. "C" Co. digging ...
— Over the top with the 25th - Chronicle of events at Vimy Ridge and Courcellette • R. Lewis
... face, Mr Prothero almost thought it was death and not sleep; but when Lion began to bark joyously, and to lick the cold hands and cheek, and when Mr Prothero ventured to stoop down and whisper, 'Gladys! Gladys!' and to take one of the damp, clammy hands in his, the white eyelids unclosed, and with a little scream of terror, the poor ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... it gently in his, and found it cold and clammy. "It is nearly all over now, Sir Henry," ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... had unnerved her! It was that other awful thing he had said: that ghostly, ghastly, uncanny, dreadful story of a Presence! She almost shrieked again as she said it, and she shivered away from him, as if still there were something cold and clammy in his touch ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... was aware, for a long time, and in my sleep they had first become audible. I sat there nervously wide awake as though I had not slept at all. It seemed to me that my breathing came with difficulty, and that there was a great weight upon the surface of my body. In spite of the hot night, I felt clammy with cold and shivered. Something surely was pressing steadily against the sides of the tent and weighing down upon it from above. Was it the body of the wind? Was this the pattering rain, the dripping of the leaves? The spray blown from the river by the wind and gathering in big drops? ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... when the dew was still heavy, Ellenbog went out with some brethren to gather apples. At the top of the orchard[17] one of them called out that he had found 'a star'. It was a damp white deposit on the grass, clammy and quivering, cold to the touch, very sticky, with long tenacious filaments. Ellenbog had never seen anything like it, but he found out that the peasants and the shepherds believed such things to be droppings from shooting stars,[18] if not actually fallen stars, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... hand, she hesitated, and then she took the coin. The fingers which for a moment brushed lightly against her palm were icy cold—cold and clammy. Mr. Sleuth was evidently ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... paddles were still in the craft as they had been left. As he did so he became conscious of a strong musky odour, and while he was still pondering what this might portend his hand came in contact with a cold, clammy, scaly body which his touch told him, before he hastily withdrew his hand with a low cry of astonishment and repugnance, must be not far short of as thick as his own body. And the next instant there occurred a sudden rustling ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... heart, did her coming presage death—had her soul been sent to claim his that had brought upon her such fearful destruction? A muffled cry that was scarcely human broke from him, his eyes dilated and the clammy sweat poured down his face as she bent toward him and he saw the dusky lashes tremble on her dead white cheek and knew that in a second the anguished eyes would open to him in all their accusing awfulness. The bed shook with the spasm that passed through him. Slowly ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... of pulseless quiet a terrible cry came from Pierre's lips, and when Philip looked up the dying half-breed had struggled to a sitting posture, blood staining his lips again, his eyes blazing, his white face damp with the clammy touch of death, and was staring through the cabin window. It was the window that looked out over the lake, toward the rock mountain half a mile away. Philip turned, horrified and wondering. Through the window he saw a glow in the sky—the glow of a fire, leaping up in a crimson ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... face, cold and clammy, was pressed upon his, the faint light seemed to fade into darkness, and ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... way through palmetto thickets; and now turning from their path to shun some pool, quagmire, cypress swamp, or "hummock," matted with impenetrable bushes, brambles, and vines. As they bent before the tempest, the water trickling from the rusty head-piece crept clammy and cold betwixt the armor and the skin; and when they made their wretched bivouac, their bed was the spongy soil, and the exhaustless clouds ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... time he glanced at the watch on his wrist and each time his face grew blacker. If he would only speak! His silence was worse than anything he could say. What was he going to do? He was capable of doing anything. The suspense was torture. Her hands grew clammy and she wrenched at the soft open collar of her riding-shirt with a feeling ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... we found a singular acacia, the leaves being covered with a clammy exudation resembling honey-dew. It differed from A. graveolens in its much more rigid habit, shorter and broader leaves, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... man taking one, we mounted the steep, tortuous, and slippery foot-path of damp, green stones, through the thorny shrubs that beset it, to the low entrance to the outer cavern. Stooping uncomfortably, we passed into a small, vacant antechamber, having a low, dripping roof, perpendicular walls, clammy and green, and a rocky floor, sloping inward through a narrow arch to a long, double, transverse gallery, divided in the direction of its length, partly by a face of rock, partly by a row of pillars. Here were innumerable images of Guadma, the counterfeit presentment of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various |
