"Pestiferous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "These yere pestiferous chilluns!" exclaimed the colored man, trying to mop up the flood. "And dem cups was near 'nough to ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... over the watering-place is that of baneful literature. Almost every one starting off for the summer takes some reading matter. It is a book out of the library or off the bookstand, or bought of the boy hawking books through the cars. I really believe there is more pestiferous trash read among the intelligent classes in July and August than in all the other ten months of the year. Men and women who at home would not be satisfied with a book that was not really sensible, I found sitting on hotel-piazzas or under the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... and bewildered, yet had the wit to believe that this quiet voiced young man meant every word he said. He reasoned quickly that the freeing of a pestiferous Englishman at Semlin could have no possible effect on Austria's subsequent action. She might please herself whether or not the threatened invasion of her territory should be deemed a cause of war, while to yield ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... a confidence not misplaced they followed near in the furrows that Leonard was making in the garden, and that Abram was turning on an adjacent hillside, and not only the comparatively harmless earth-worms suffered, but also the pestiferous larvae of the May-beetle, the arch-enemy of the strawberry plant. Even on that day of such varied and etherealized fragrance, the fresh, wholesome odor of the upturned earth was grateful. Suddenly Webb straightened himself from the sowing of the scale-like parsnip-seed in which he was then engaged, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... which is so useful for making cocktails and bathing one's feet; and these people make the new town rather warm for a while. But by and by the earnest and honest citizens get tired of this ungodly nonsense and organize a Vigilance Committee, which hangs the more vicious of the pestiferous crowd to a sour-apple tree; and then come good municipal laws, ministers, meeting-houses, and a tolerably sober police in blue coats with brass buttons. About five thousand able-bodied men are in the mines underground, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... is said never to have asked him a single question relative to that glorious victory which had so astonished the world. On the contrary, all the scandalous insinuations, and licentious remarks, with which the Jacobinical foreign journalists had filled their pestiferous pages, relative to our hero and his friends in Italy, and which had found their way into the most thoughtless and depraved of our own newspapers, were preserved for his lordship's immediate amusement. Without introducing the reader behind the sacred veil of the connubial curtain, let it ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... you call it—of being arrant asses," retorted the doctor, "and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough. I think it most probable—though, of course, it's only an opinion—that you'll all have the deuce to pay before you get that malaria out of your systems. Camp in a bog, would you?—Silver, I'm surprised at you. You're less a fool than many, take you all round; but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... exercise the quality which all industrial managers agree he does not possess—his initiative. Now a man who has the desire to exercise initiative and does not know how to put anything through is not only a useless person in society but the most pestiferous fellow in existence. Allowing that he is does not mean that he has not the power of initiative or that he could not have learned to put this initiative to good use, if at any time in his manhood or youth he had been taught to use it, instead of being required to ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... collected on the bark of the decaying wood; others were of gigantic proportions, equal in circumference to the trunks of the enormous trees amid which they grew. No vegetables except moss and toadstool-like productions could exist in that airless and pestiferous region. In every direction lay the trunks of enormous trees blown down by some hurricane, so completely rotted by damp that a stick run into them went right through. They lay like vast skeletons, serving to nourish ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... they become brutish; but a war for true liberty, for national life, for our homes and our inheritance, and for the oppressed, is elevating, purifying. War is terrible in itself, and in some of its consequences, but there is a bow on the cloud. When the bolt has spent itself in the pestiferous air, all nature is bright and glorious. With true discipline, soldiers are made vigorous in body; they are also quickened in mind by the tactics and incitements of warfare, they are ennobled by high motives, and may leave the campaign better than when they ...
— Government and Rebellion • E. E. Adams
... time the members of the household had supposed they were poisonous. After a few more bites of the morning meal the birds went all around the house, inspecting every nook and crevice. But they found every place fully occupied by the pestiferous English sparrows, who darted at them maliciously. For two whole days the blue birds stayed around the lawn and garden, but the sparrows made their lives miserable and finally they went to the timber an eighth of a mile away and selected an abiding place in the cavity of ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... that might have a tendency to teach the people anything outside of their tenets which were the outcome of their weird imaginations. If anything could cause a doubt to arise in the Creative Mind as to the wisdom of letting loose on this small planet the pestiferous peoples that have swarmed over and possessed it, it must have been aroused by their demoniacal performances in the name of religion, that have disgraced the nature of man from the beginning of our knowledge of the world. While ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... am not able to determine any thing on this question, I shall content myself with collecting, into one view, the several properties of this pestiferous brood, with which we are threatened, as hints to more sagacious and fortunate readers, who, when they shall find any red animal, that ranges uncontrouled over the country, and devours the labours of the trader and the husbandman; that carries with it corruption, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... grand jury that had indicted the Morrisites made a presentment to Judge Kinney, in which they said, "We present his Excellency Stephen S. Harding, governor of Utah, as we would an unsafe bridge over a dangerous stream, jeopardizing the lives of all those who pass over it; or as we would a pestiferous cesspool in our district, breathing disease and death." And the chief justice assured this jury that they addressed him "in no spirit of malice," and asked them to accept his thanks "for your cooperation in the support of my efforts to maintain and enforce the law." It is ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... ornithologist will condescend to enlarge his list by counting in the English sparrow — too pestiferous to mention," writes Mr. H. E. Parkhurst, and yet of all bird neighbors is any one more within the scope of this book than the audacious little gamin that delights in the companion ship of humans even in ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the little valley, which four days ago was smiling with all the health of nature and the contentment of industrious man, is waxing pestiferous with the awful odor of decaying human bodies. Buzzards, invited by their disgusting instinct, gather for a promised feast, and sit and glower on neighboring perches or else circle round and round in the blue empyrean over the location of unfriended corpses, known only to their ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... nonnaturals^; plague spot; malaria &c (poison) 663; death in the pot, contagion; toxicity. Adj. insalubrious; unhealthy, unwholesome; noxious, noisome; morbific^, morbiferous^; mephitic, septic, azotic^, deleterious; pestilent, pestiferous, pestilential; virulent, venomous, envenomed; poisonous, toxic, toxiferous^, teratogenic; narcotic. contagious, infectious, catching, taking, epidemic, zymotic^; epizootic. innutritious^, indigestible, ungenial; uncongenial &c (disagreeing) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... He had a fancy for sketching, and it was on his conscience to take a few pictorial notes. There were two old inns at Siena, both of them very shabby and very dirty. The one at which Longueville had taken up his abode was entered by a dark, pestiferous arch-way, surmounted by a sign which at a distance might have been read by the travellers as the Dantean injunction to renounce all hope. The other was not far off, and the day after his arrival, as he passed it, he saw two ladies going in who evidently belonged to the large fraternity of ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... dad sell out to you for eight thousand; he pockets one thousand and with the other seven your money-grabbing, pestiferous old granddad is paid off. Then you and I frame ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... many sharp practices, indeed, having been resorted to by a few conscienceless publishers, and by a certain class of unscrupulous agents, that buyers have become wary, not to say weary, of being made the victims of their deceptive inventions. It is indeed lamentable that a few such pestiferous schemers should thus bring a certain degree of reproach upon the entire publishing business. It is a common practice among these soi-disant publishers—many of whom possess neither capital, credit, nor sense of honor—to buy some lot of etchings or old prints from a junk-shop, ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... conceive how, under any less beneficent dispositions of their masses of hill, the continents of the earth might either have been covered with enormous lakes, as parts of North America actually are covered; or have become wildernesses of pestiferous marsh; or lifeless plains, upon which the water would have dried as it fell, leaving them for great part of the year desert. Such districts do exist, and exist in vastness; the whole earth is not prepared for the habitation of man; only certain small portions are prepared for ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... the savages, who take a singular pleasure in hearing us sing the praises of our God." Among all his trials, none afflicted him so much as the flies and mosquitoes. "If I had not kept my face wrapped in a cloth, I am almost sure they would have blinded me, so pestiferous and poisonous are the bites of these little demons. They make one look like a leper, hideous to the sight. I confess that this is the worst martyrdom I suffered in this country; hunger, thirst, weariness, and fever are nothing ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... it was not that which grieved him. Some other affair of his was yet unsettled—an affair which tortured him and required his attention. In his imagination rose the gloomy scenes of the hundreds and thousands of human beings pent up in the pestiferous air. The laughter of the prisoners resounded in his ears. He saw again among the dead bodies the beautiful, angry, waxen face of the dead Kryltzoff; and the question whether he was mad, or all those who commit those evils and think themselves wise were mad, bore ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... these mosquitoes couldn't pull Bully and Bawly out of bed, for the pestiferous insects weren't strong enough, they nipped the frog boys all over, until their legs and arms and faces and noses and ears smarted and burned terribly, and their mamma had to put witch hazel and talcum powder ...
— Bully and Bawly No-Tail • Howard R. Garis
... to exterminate the roving bands of guerillos and rancheros involved great rapidity of movement, and he had officers and men under his command eminently fit for such service. One of the most pestiferous of the guerillo leaders was a Catholic priest called Padre Juarata. He seemed to be everywhere at once, and notwithstanding his party was frequently met by the Americans, sometimes surrounded and always ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... peevishly. "Please not to suggest by pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing, built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any time"—he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,—"the pestiferous asses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep true to what I see. The difference between them—I mean the critics who call me morbid—and myself, is in the ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... more properly called king than Tarquin, who was able to govern neither himself nor his family; he will deserve to be called the master of the people more than Sylla, who was only the master of three pestiferous vices, luxury, avarice, and cruelty; he will be called rich more properly than Crassus, who would never have desired to cross the Euphrates without any legitimate cause for war, if he had not been in want of something. Everything will be properly ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... where poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper, came at night and swept the stones as his last tribute to the friend who "was very good" to him. There are three striking descriptions of this place in the novel. "A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene—a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Kafir would shudder at. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... The Papacy having the power to enforce her decrees, Christians had to embrace her faith, or be handed over to the secular power for punishment. They produced death by compelling men to apostatize, by withholding from them the word of life, by infusing into their minds pestiferous doctrines, and by the fear of the civil power,—symbolized by the sword, famine, pestilence, and ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... annually entombed by it? and that it proves ruinous to your government? You go to Africa to purchase slaves for foreign markets, and lose the advantages of all the proper articles of commerce, which that country affords. You bury your seamen upon the pestiferous shores; and, shocking to humanity! make monsters of all ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... see of Turin, so displeasing to the Quirinal, and disapproved of the secret intrigues with the Italian Government. According to their leader, who was the very eminent personage Donna Rosetta now proposed calling upon, other measures should be adopted to liberate the Holy Father from the pestiferous influence of a rationalist varnished over with mysticism. These things Donna Rosetta had learned from the Abbe Marinier, who smiled knowingly about them in her salon. It was inconceivable how many poisonous accusations were being ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... many different languages and sold at such low prices that the poor could have access to it, and within a short time millions of Bibles were in the hands of the people. The Papal system denounced these Bible societies as "pestiferous Bible societies". The time had come, however, for an increase of knowledge and the Lord was fulfilling his promise by putting it within the reach of those who were hungry for truth. The people began ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... upon Blaines College, and paying a high and confident tribute to his qualities as a citizen. The young acting-editor, who never wrote what he did not think, had taken much pains with this editorial, especially the sketchy part. Of course the pestiferous Chronicle took an entirely different view of the situation. "The Chronicle has won its great fight," so it nervily said, "against classism in Blames College." And it had the vicious taste to add: "Nothing in Mr. West's ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to resist, as he said, the threatened attacks of Duke Eric of Brunswick and his German mercenaries. A printing-press was established in the place, whence satirical pamphlets, hymn-books, and other pestiferous productions, were constantly issuing to the annoyance of government. Many lawless and uproarious individuals enjoyed the Count's hospitality. All the dregs and filth of the provinces, according to Doctor ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... her so—I expostulated with her on her rashness, but all in vain. I told her to send them as much wine and jellies as she pleased, but to keep out of these pestiferous cottages. She only looked at me with those big ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... of the horrors of an Esquimaux existence,—sucking blubber instead of roast beef, train-oil their usual beverage, and a seal their bonne-bouche; the long gloomy winter spent in pestiferous hovels, lighted and warmed with whale-oil lamps; the narrow gallery for an entrance, along which the occupant creeps for ingress and egress. This and much more has been told us; yet, now that I have seen it all,—the Esquimaux's home, ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... had but little faith in physicians, laughed, and exclaimed, "But, my dear sir, when you see so many men alive in England at this instant, why should you believe in the impossibility of your living even in this pestiferous country?" ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... had been one jewel, one colossal sapphire, a single gem fashioned into a planet. And on the luster of the great calm waters the Judea glided imperceptibly, enveloped in languid and unclean vapours, in a lazy cloud that drifted to leeward, light and slow: a pestiferous cloud defiling the splendour of ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... dismissed favourite Du Barry were still working underground. Their pestiferous vapours issued from the recesses of the earth, to obscure the brightness of the rising sun, which was now rapidly towering to its climax, to obliterate the little planets which had once endeavoured to eclipse ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... euery Author that had done no better then I haue, had done no worse: and it were to be wished that some caprichious Coxecombes, with their desperate wits, were not so forward to disbowell the entrails of their own ouerweening, singular, infectious, & pestiferous ...
— The Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine • Samuel Rid
... "Then let us go, and no revengement take For this brave knight, though it lie in our power: No, no, that courage rather newly wake, Which never sleeps in fear and dread one hour, And this pestiferous serpent, poisoned snake, Of all our knights that hath destroyed the flower, First let us slay, and his deserved end Example make to ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... had an inspiration from heaven this day. What I have been through! the sole comfort is that I have lost twenty pounds at least, from sheer anxiety. Imagine that you had not been gone an hour, when up they ride, the guerrilla that was reported to us yesterday. At their head, that pestiferous Col. Diego Moreno. He dismounts, demands coffee, bananas, what there is. I go to get them; and, the saints aiding me, I meet in the face the pretty Manuela. Another instant, and she would have been on the ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... "You are a pestiferous son-in-law," said Warren, as Lyman entered the room. "And I have taken possession of your private quarters," he added, pointing to a pile of country newspapers. "I have brought them in here to see if I could gouge some state ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... the embellishment of the capital and its environs, the rebuilding of the Louvre, the completion of Fontainebleau, the improvement of the navigation of the Seine, etc. Henri ordered the demolition of the old royal residence, the Palais des Tournelles, and its pestiferous moats were filled up. He is represented as being inordinately fond of processions, and every event, of good or bad omen, was made a pretence for one of these public displays. Catherine de Medicis ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... cemetery, they saw a column erected to the memory of the officers and men of the 59th Regiment, which regiment, in the course of nine years, lost 644 persons, including a number of women and upwards of 100 children; the greater number cut down not by the weapons of the enemy, but by the pestiferous climate. ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... not to-night. What? Why, it would take until breakfast to tell what 'all this means,'—the story of that pestiferous darky Bras Coupe, with the rest? Oh, no, sir. I would sooner not have any bread and cheese. What on earth has waked your curiosity ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... Martin, had spent arduous and futile years in order to find it out for himself. The magazines were all Brissenden had said they were and more. Well, he was done, he solaced himself. He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh. The visions of Tahiti—clean, sweet Tahiti—were coming to him more frequently. And there were the low Paumotus, and the high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners or frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at Papeete ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... are fissures in the rocks exhaling pestiferous emanations; these are the spiracula, the breathing-holes, of the dragon within. The dragon legends of Naples and Mondragone are probably of this origin, and so is that of the Roman Campagna (1660) where ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you have shut your mouth hard and said nothing; and if you are only a man in the making, you have recognised that yours was quite a special case, and you yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nothing of more pestiferous consequence to his city than to give young men the liberty of introducing any change in their habits, gestures, dances, songs, and exercises, from one form to another; shifting from this to that, hunting after novelties, and applauding the inventors; ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Town, Though last, not least in size, I own. A butcher of the olden time, Who furnished roasts and steaks most prime, In the old George Street Market House, Where cats held many a grand carouse, Ere rats to Bytown emigrated In swarms pestiferous and hated. And if I have forgotten one, Whom memory could not fasten on, Let him feel no neglecting smart, I have not passed him with my heart, I've done my best 'neath friendship's spoil, So Lower ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... horse, and at last had to force one from the governor by my importunities. I collected wine and cordials, and whatever could be of service, and after his first outburst my young brother-in-law helped me in a way I can never forget. No doubt the pestiferous air caused by the horrible carnage of Freiburg had poisoned the wound. As soon as possible my husband was removed; but the mischief had been already done; the wound was in a bad state, fever had set in, and though he struggled on stage after stage, declaring that he should be well ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... horizon. Dunfield offered no prominent features save the chimneys of its factories and its fine church, the spire of which rose high above surrounding buildings; over all hung a canopy of foul vapour, heavy, pestiferous. Take in your fingers a spray from one of the trees even here on the Heath, and its touch left ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes. And I knew well enough the pestiferous danger of such a character where there are no means of legal repression. And I knew well enough also that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... disease! I know not, new or old, But it may well be call'd poor mortals' Plague; For like a pestilence it doth infect The houses of the brain: first it begins Solely to work upon the phantasy, Filling her seat with such pestiferous air, As soon corrupts the judgment, and from thence, Sends like contagion to the memory, Still each of other catching the infection, Which as a searching vapour spreads itself Confusedly through every sensive part, Till ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... possible delay. He had a small flotilla on the Nile, which served to guard his right flank: the infantry marched over burning sand at some distance from the river. The miseries of this progress were extreme. The air is crowded with pestiferous insects, the glare of the sand weakens most men's eyes, and blinds many; water is scarce and bad: and the country had been swept clear of man, beast, and vegetable. Under this torture even the gallant spirits of such men as Murat and Lannes could not sustain themselves:—they trod their cockades ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... having but narrowly escaped from being swallowed up and buried beneath one of those smiling plains which he could hear cracking at each step he took. The giant grass, nourished by all the collected humus, concealed pestiferous marshes, depths of liquid mud; and amongst the expanses of verdure spread over the glaucous immensity to the very horizon there were only narrow stretches of firm ground with which the traveller must be acquainted if he would avoid disappearing for ever. One night the man sank down ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... according to my poor judgment," replied the Palmer. "No one is bound to faith with those who mean to observe none with him. Anticipate this treachery of your uncle, and let his now short and infirm existence moulder out in the pestiferous cell to which he would condemn your youthful strength. The royal grant has assigned you lands enough for your honourable support; and wherefore not unite with them those of the Garde Doloureuse?— Eveline Berenger, if I do not greatly mistake, will scarcely say nay. Ay, more—I vouch it ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... chosen, unhealthy, and more pestiferous than Sardinia. All the colonists look pale, like men sick of the jaundice. It is not exclusively the climate of the country which is responsible, for in many other places situated in the same latitude the climate ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... encourage us to proceed. "What an ugly brute! what a hideous dog!" but as he engages the attention of our party, these expressions become modified, and before reaching the bottom of the hill, nobody cares about the remains of Otricoli, nor looks any longer at the yellow reaches of the pestiferous Tiber, that was winding far along the plain; the dog alone occupies every thought. "Such a discerning creature! What clever eyes he has! See how well he understands what we are saying about him; suppose we take him on to Rome? We might get his grizzly beard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... or less infected. They were sick-and so were the purest of their brethren— with the plague of sin. A deadly sickness, indeed! Feeling its symptoms within the breast, men concealed it with fear and shame, and were only the more cruel to those unfortunates whose pestiferous sores were flagrant to the common eye. Nothing save a rich garment could ever hide the plague-spot. In the course of the world's lifetime, every remedy was tried for its cure and extirpation, except the single one, the flower that ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had passed by, and even then the battalions of the rebels were gathering in readiness to be hurled upon our devoted army. While the regiment, whose fortunes have been more intimately connected with our story, was retiring from the pestiferous swamp, the commanding general received information of the approach of Stonewall Jackson. These proved to be sad tidings; for the anticipated triumphal march into the rebel capital was changed into a bloody but glorious retreat. The battles which were to be fought for a victorious advance ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... against those who can fly over the highest Walls; I must therefore inform him, that their strong Holds have all the open Places cover'd with Canvass stretch'd from Side to Side; upon which is strew'd an Herb so venemous, that, in six Hours after it has been expos'd to the Sun, it emits so pestiferous a Stench, that no Fowl can approach it by many Yards, but what will fall dead; and this Stench, by the Effluvia mounting, is no way offensive to those below. This is the Reason their Sieges are rather ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... up in our night's adventures was now soon explained. Our guide, through ignorance or thoughtlessness, had allowed us to take up our bivouac within a very unsafe distance of one of the most pestiferous swamps in the whole province. Shortly after we had fallen asleep, a party of Mexican travellers had arrived, and established themselves within a few hundred yards of us, but on a rising ground, where they avoided the mephitic vapours and the musquittoes which had so tortured Rowley ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... distant of the landward posts sounded ominous, like that of a lost bird at night. Although the moon shone brightly, it was difficult to distinguish the whole outline of the building, on account of the pestiferous vapors which arose from the moat, and hung like a pall over the recently flooded plain. Through these mists the city chimes sounded muffled and melancholy. It was solitude—of all solitude the most fearful—a prison solitude in the neighborhood of a great town. The very ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... others louder still would be raised for bread. In every hovel we entered, we found the dying or the dead. In one of these straw-roofed burrows, eight persons had died in the last fortnight, and five more were lying upon the fetid, pestiferous straw, upon which their predecessors to the grave had been consumed by the wasting fever of famine. In scarcely a single one of these most inhuman habitations was there the slightest indication of food of any kind to be found, nor fuel to cook food, nor any ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt
... architecture must have been exchanged for the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been no tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water access to the doors of the palaces would have been impossible; even as it is, there is sometimes a little difficulty, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... Wherefore, as soon as I knew the judgment of this astronomer, I thought it expedient and my duty with all speed to ascertain your good lordship of all the premises; that in time your lordship may advertise my lord his Grace, and my lord of London. It will be a gracious deed that he and all his pestiferous works, which he carrieth about, might be taken, to the salvation of his soul, opening of many privy heresies, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... therefore, were mostly effected by their boats, which were sent up the rivers to lie in wait for the slavers, or to attack them when they were known to be at anchor. This species of service caused a great mortality among their crews, as a night spent in the pestiferous miasma of an African river was sufficient to produce fever among all those exposed to it, while the hot sun of the day was almost equally trying to English constitutions. Thus for many years the mortality among the blockading squadron was very great, and vessels have been known ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... long-stemmed roses. She went down a trifle apprehensively, for by this time the current tales of Bob's drunken freaks had given her cause to think somewhat seriously, and she feared an unpleasant encounter. More than once she had witnessed quarrels in the alleyway behind the Circuit, where pestiferous youths of Wharton's caliber ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... love of money; who have no other reason for action or forbearance, for compliance or refusal, than that they hope to gain more by one than by the other. These are indeed the meanest and cruellest of human beings, a race with whom, as with some pestiferous animals, the whole creation seems to be at war; but who, however detested or scorned, long continue to add heap to heap, and when they have reduced one to beggary, are still permitted ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... all gaiety, all wit and all elegance, it drifted to its doom. Six years passed, when Louis was smitten by confluent small-pox and a few poor women were left to perform the last offices on the mass of pestiferous corruption that once was the fifteenth Louis of France.[154] None could be found to embalm the corpse, and spirits of wine were poured into the coffin which was carried to St. Denis without pomp and amid ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... gained under its auspices, who was at once the child and champion of all its atrocities and horrors? Our security in negotiation is to be this Buonaparte, who is now the sole organ of all that was formerly dangerous and pestiferous in the Revolution.... If peace afford no prospect of security; if it threaten all the evils which we have been struggling to avert; if the prosecution of the war afford the prospect of attaining complete security; and if it may be prosecuted ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... hard-bitten, and his supply of conventional small talk was practically non-existent. To get the best out of Hank, as has been said, you had to let him take his coat off and put his feet up on the back of a second chair and reconcile yourself to the pestiferous brand ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... whipping-post of custom, simply because by an accident I am called Susan or Hepzibah instead of Peter or Lazarus? So long as my convictions of truth (which custom brands as vagaries) are innocuous, I have a perfect and inalienable right to indulge them; but the instant I become pestiferous to society, let me be consigned to the tender mercies of strait-jacket and insane-asylum regimen. If I creep quietly along my own intellectual and ethical trail, taking heed not to touch the sensitive toes of custom, why should it ungenerously insist upon bruising mine? My seer was right ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... without difference, children be put foorth to suche Noursses, whose honestie and conditions, in the tyme of the putting foorth, be vtterly vnknowen. Shall we suffer therefore, this our infant to be corrupted with pestiferous milke? Shall we abyde a newe nature and spirite, to bee renued in his mynde and bodye, deriued from that whiche is moste vile and wicked? Muche like to the same, whiche many tymes wee see and wonder, howe diuers chyldren borne of chaste and honest women, haue ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... what to say, Mr. Carvel," he answered with much humility; "to speak truth, 'twas zeal to my employers, and methought to you, that caused you to retrace your steps in this pestiferous storm. I travel," he proceeded with some importance, "I travel for Messrs. Rinnell and Runn, Barristers of the town of New York, and carry letters to men of mark all over these middle and southern colonies. And my instructions, sir, were ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... same river been called the Miramichi or the Irrawaddy, it would have been despoiled of half its charms, and have sunk down into a vulgar stream, the atmosphere of which might have suited well enough Russian boors, but which would have been pestiferous to men ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... this attitude is, the practice of it is so easy and lazy and uppish that it is very common, but its cry is drowned by a louder and more sincere one. We who do not want to know, also do not want to go blind, to go mad, to be disfigured, to be barren, to become pestiferous, or to see such things happening to our children. We learn, at last, that the majority of the victims are not the people of whom we so glibly say, 'Serve them right,' but quite innocent children ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... I'll pocket my outraged pride, also the one hundred per cent increase in salary, and let you have the further benefit of my services. But I want it distinctly understood by every one present," he added, as he faced around to the others, "that I wouldn't have those pestiferous Puddingham cuff-buttons as a gift! Comprenez vous cela, Mr. Hemlock Holmes of Baker Street, London, and ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... slumbering tranquilly in the shade of the wagon, his saddle blanket beneath him and his folded arms for a pillow as he slept on his face. The herd chewed its cud drowsily under the quaking asp nearby, out of the mid-day heat and away from pestiferous flies, while under a bush not far from the wagon a lamb lay with eyes half closed, waggling its narrow jaw, and grinding ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... of war, boy," replied the other, folding the note and placing it in a pouch inside the breast of his flannel shirt. "It seems that that pestiferous British frigate the Talisman, lies at anchor in the bay, on the other side of ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... hours after noon, and though to the Fair Strangers it seemed they had travelled more than forty or a hundred miles, they were apparently no nearer than ever to the heart of the labyrinth: and this from the first had been the pestiferous peculiarity of that malignantly meandering maze. So they dismounted, and tied Enbarr to the branch of a tree, while they refreshed themselves with a mouthful of Toma's loaf; and Finola now put her thumb under her 'tooth of knowledge,' ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the wise Chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, when, in his practical and personal Introduction to "Utopia," he alludes to what he calls the "bad custom" of keeping many servants, and then says: "In France there is yet a more pestiferous sort of people; for the whole country is full of soldiers, that are still kept up in time of peace,—if such a state of a nation can be called a peace." Then, proceeding with his judgment, the Chancellor holds up what he calls those "pretended statesmen" whose maxim is that "it is necessary ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... detective agencies in the United States. They make a specialty of bank work and from the number of forgers apprehended and convicted know just how the work is done. A careful reading of this chapter will put bankers and the public on their guard against the most pestiferous rascals they have to ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... proportions, who ranges up and down the country, creating devastation and dismay in every direction. No corner of the land is safe from his ravages; no one can hope to escape the consequences of his appearance. Every day his insatiable maw must be fed with the body of a young maiden, while so pestiferous is the breath which exhales from his throat that it causes a plague of a character so violent that whole districts have been depopulated by it. He commences his career of destruction at dawn every morning, and till his victim is ready he continues to ravage the land. When he has swallowed ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... her mother's—and she shivered at the thought. The long train wandered on under its shroud of dust, and stood still when it reached the Necropolis; then the sledge with the bier came back empty on red hot runners—but she was not one of the mourners—she was imprisoned in the pestiferous house. Then, when she was freed again—she saw it all quite clearly—two heads had been cut off in the courtyard of the Hall of justice: Orion's and Paula's—and she was left alone, quite alone and forlorn. Her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... importance, and it would not be difficult to prove that we should feel the want of one or two large quadrupeds much less than of one or two species of these despicable-looking insects. Mankind in general are sensible that nothing is more disagreeable or more pestiferous than putrid substances; and it is apparent to all who have made observation, that those little insects contribute more to the quick dissolution and dispersion of putrescent matter than any other. They are so necessary in all hot climates, that ever in the open ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... the tremendous sweep of the stick held at arm's length, tested the metal of the blade to its utmost, and, as the wielder's hand was thoroughly palsied, drove it out of the opening fingers, and all heard it splash in the black and pestiferous waters under ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... pestiferous for whites in the whole world. The coast of Africa, which enjoys a dreadful reputation in this way, is not so deadly in its climate as is Chagres. The thermometer ranges from 78 deg. to 85 deg. all the year, and it rains every day. Many a traveler who has incautiously remained ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... frightful catastrophe. It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogether innocent; but Dante has represented her as such. Her husband carried her with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the pestiferous effects of the air. Never would he tell his wife the reason of her banishment into so dangerous a place. His pride did not deign to pronounce either complaint or accusation. He lived with her alone, in a deserted tower, of which I have been to see the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... move on to the next, and he would take you in at four bits more per day. It was the nearest approach to a working-man's paradise that Jimmie had ever encountered. There was really only one drawback—the pestiferous draft-boards that never stopped snooping round. They were for ever hauling you up and threatening and questioning you—putting you through the same scene over and over. Why couldn't the fools give you a card, showing ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... thing they valued above all else was salt. Their country contained no saltpans, and they were cut off from the sea by a strip of pestiferous jungle, which, moreover, belonged to the Portuguese or was supposed so to belong. Fortunately I had brought with me a small bag of salt; it contained about a pound in weight. Men used to come from long distances to beg for a pinch. As I did not want ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... the hotel, while he was talking to the group of young persons and acquaintances, were two strangers, whose dilapidated dress, frowzy heads, and surly faces, showed they belonged to that pestiferous class of vagrants known as tramps. They sat apart, after taking a drink in the bar-room, and with scowling but interested looks listened to the chatter going on around them. It did not take them long to catch the ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... are much talked about just now as breeding-grounds for the pestiferous Influenza microbe. The worst "low-lying" districts Punch knows are the editorial offices of certain scurrilous journals, and the social pestilences they engender and disseminate sorely need abatement. Perhaps when they have duly fumigated the House, they ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... vigorously flourished, and the "independent voter" was as hateful to the party managers on both sides as we find him to-day. Those who refused to wear the party collar were branded by the "organs" as a "pestiferous and demoralizing brood," who deserved "extermination." Discipline was rigorously enforced, and made to take the place of argument. As regards the tariff question, Mr. Polk's letter to Judge Kane, of Philadelphia, of the 19th of June, enabled his friends completely to turn the tables on the ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... city, and rendered them unfit for use. After he had been shown all this, the stranger led him into another large chamber, filled with gold and precious stones, all of which he offered him if he would kneel down and worship him, and consent to smear the doors and houses of Milan with a pestiferous salve which he held out to him. tie now knew him to be the Devil, and in that moment of temptation, prayed to God to give him strength to resist. His prayer was heard - he refused the bribe. The stranger ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... citizens who were coming. There was no anxiety as to the date of their arrival; it was sufficient that they should be expected. Inside Rome the companies which had been formed in connection with the new thoroughfares passing through the old, demolished, pestiferous districts, certainly sold or let their house property, and thereby realised large profits. But, as the craze increased, other companies were established for the purpose of erecting yet more and more districts outside Rome—veritable little towns, of which there was no need whatever. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... account of my first, my last, my only real sweetheart, for I considered the professions of that pestiferous jackeroo as merely a grotesque caricature on the ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... robbers; so near an alliance there is between those two sorts of life. But this bad custom, so common among you, of keeping many servants, is not peculiar to this nation. In France there is yet a more pestiferous sort of people, for the whole country is full of soldiers, still kept up in time of peace; if such a state of a nation can be called a peace: and these are kept in pay upon the same account that you plead for those idle ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... rowdies, and the outlaws. As between the Negro, no matter how illiterate he may be, and the "poor white," the property-holders of the South prefer the former. Excepting a few impudent, half-educated, and pestiferous pretenders, the Negro masses of the South are honest, well-meaning, industrious, and safe citizens. They are in sympathy with the superior race; they find protection and encouragement with the old slave-holding class; if left alone, they would furnish the bone and sinew of a secure ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... towered indignantly at her side, joining in wrathful denunciations of the tyrant man; and fair, persecuted Dr. Simcoe's assenting voice was faintly heard amid the fiendish shrieks of those pestiferous younglings, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... by a miner,—sufficiently competent, indeed, to afford him guidance and comfort during the ordinary perils of his labour, but certain to be extinguished should he encounter the more formidable hazard of earth-damps or pestiferous vapours. It was now, however, once more rekindled, and with a throbbing mixture of hope, awe, and anxiety, Waverley watched the group before him, as those who had just arrived snatched a hasty meal, and the others assumed their arms, and made ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... from an invasion of small water animals. It reminded me of the mosquito netting as a safe-guard against flies and other insects in our world. But the mosquito baffles our genius, for he seems to be able to get through as small an opening as air can. Likewise, the pestiferous water animals seem to invade the homes of Stazza, ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... English Garden—spot beloved of the people for its welcome shades, where artificial waterfalls, from the "Isar rolling rapidly," add chill to the natural dampness; where unwilling streamlets creep slowly through tortuous channels toward a stagnant pond, and pestiferous miasma, rising like incense at the going down of the sun, broods over the meadows until his rising again. It was in one of the streets bordering this park that the cholera broke out in 1873, and there too, Kaulbach, one of its last victims, had his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... here," announced Jed Wallop. "But you might strike something jest as bad, especially if the snow keeps on gittin' deeper. The wolves in this neighborhood git mighty pestiferous when they can't git ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... inspire terror by their mysterious movements were chosen, as serpents appearing and disappearing with startling suddenness, or ugly scorpions, against whom it was difficult to protect oneself, or the fabulous monsters with which graves and pestiferous spots were peopled. Regions difficult of access—the desert, the deep waters, the high mountains—were the favorite haunts of the demons. Some of these demons were frequently pictured in the boundary stones between fields, in order to emphasize ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... been sketching. She offered me a handsome sum to return for it, and bring it to her at Naples; so I went in the evening. I found it sure enough, and was about to return, when I saw a figure that seemed to emerge from the crater itself. The air was so pestiferous that I could not have conceived a human creature could breathe it and live. I was so astounded that I stood as still as a stone, till the figure came over the hot ashes and stood before me face to face. Sancta ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... taken sick, but hope that the first attack of fever will season them. Possibly, this is as wise a course as the British officers could adopt; for, unlike ourselves, they are compelled by duty to trust themselves in pestiferous situations, particularly in the ascent of rivers, where there is scarcely a chance of escaping the deadly influence of the atmosphere. They therefore confront the danger at once, and either fall beneath it, or ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... of the distinctions of modern philanthropy is the prison-discipline reform. When Howard began his labors (1773), the prisons in England were generally dirty, pestiferous dens, crowded with inmates of both sexes,—nurseries of loathsome disease, and of still more loathsome vice. Soon after this time, a serious effort began to make prisons a means of reform, instead of schools of debauchery and crime. There was a movement for the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... strictly limited houses swarming with multiplying broods. On the Saturday the gates of the Ghetto were officially closed. The plague was shut in. For three months the outcasts of humanity were pent in their pestiferous prison day and night to live or die as they chose. When at length the Ghetto was opened and disinfected, it was the dead, not the living, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... box in which some mounted moths had been sent me by a friend in Louisiana, and when I went to examine my cocoons toward spring, to my horror I found the contents of the box chopped to pieces and totally destroyed. Pestiferous little 'clothes' moths must have infested the box, for there were none elsewhere in the Cabin. For a while this appeared to be too bad luck; but when luck turns squarely against you, that is the time to test the essence and quality of the word 'friend.' So I sat me down and wrote ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... tongue good for medicine, and a horse's tongue pestiferous? A. By reason of some secret property, or that the tongue of a dog is full of pores, and so doth draw and take away the viscosity of the wound. It is observed that a dog hath some humour in his tongue, with which, by licking he doth ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... Pestiferous little man disturbed nature, and it all seemed so absurd out there on those quiet gray hills. It made me feel, as I slowed down and gazed at the vastness of things, like a superior sort of bug. In the middle distance several hundred troops are of ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... discovered for this often pestiferous weed with which nature carpets moist soil the world around is to feed caged song-birds. What is the secret of the insignificant little plant's triumphal progress? Like most immigrants that have undergone ages of selective struggle in the Old World, it successfully competes with ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... Remedie against the pestiferous Writings of all English Sectaries, and in {360} particular against Dr. Whitaker, Dr. Fulke, Dr. Bilson, Dr. Reynolds, Dr. Sparkes, and Dr. Field, the chiefe upholders, some of Protestancy, some of Puritanisme; divided into ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... but back in Jerusalem Hunt finished the goat. Ruskin's description of the picture helps one to feel all the desolation of the subject: "The salt sand of the wilderness of Ziph, where the weary goat is dying. The neighbourhood is stagnant and pestiferous, polluted by the decaying vegetables brought down by the Jordan in its floods, and the bones of the beasts of burden that have died by the way of the sea, lie like wrecks upon its edge, bared by the vultures and ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... It shall, though. Oh, Artie, my pure-souled youth, let us tell our darling Reggie about Pestiferous Stinkadores." ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... he himself was wedded; and that to this alone, might be traced much of the suffering he had undergone. This was it that had so weakened mind and body, as to render change of scene necessary;—this was it that exposed Acme to the air of the pestiferous marshes, and which left George himself—a broken hearted man—totally incapable of ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... authorities, which had created an enormous sensation up and down the Little Missouri, but had settled nothing so far as the horse-thieves were concerned. In the Bad Lands the thieves became daily more pestiferous. Two brothers named Smith and two others called "Big Jack" and "Little Jack" conducted the major operations in Billings County. They had their cabin in a coulee west of the Big Ox Bow, forty miles south of Medora, in the wildest part of the Bad Lands, and "worked the country" from there ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... happiness of my life, that fortune has given me a name that corresponds with my nature and constitution. Patriotism is the strongest passion; and I glory in being a Yankee.—A Yankee is any man born in New-England—and New-England contains the three northern States, and a certain little, pestiferous, pseudo Island. My countrymen generally have the credit of being a good-natured, psalm-singing, religious kind of men, very honest, but plaguy hard in their dealings—insomuch that a Carolinian or a Georgian frequently swear that the very Satan himself could never get ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks |
