"Pungent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after the leaves had turned red and brown and the mornings grown chilly and pungent, a crowd of people, strangers to Comet, came to the big house at Oak Hill. With them were automobiles, trunks, horses. All this was tremendously exciting, and with noses pressed against the chicken wire of their yard Comet and his brothers and sisters ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... plants, of which there are three so far naturalized in this country as to be able to grow in the open air: these are the Guinea, the Cherry, and the Bell pepper. All the pods of these are extremely pungent to the taste, and in the green state are used by us as a pickle. When ripe, they are ground into cayenne pepper, and sold as a condiment. The best of this, however, is made in the West Indies, from what is called the Bird pepper, on account of hens and turkeys being extremely partial to it. It ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Wiggins; very pungent, suitable to the present political position; offering a beautiful contrast of Wig-ins and Wig-outs; capable of great ramifications, and may be done at least twice a-night in a half whisper in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... entered the Punch dining-room a little late, apologising for his unpunctuality through having been detained at a christening, at which he had stood sponsor to his friend's boy, to be met with Jerrold's pungent exclamation—"Good Lord, Thackeray! I hope you didn't present the child with your own mug!" And still less was he flattered when he heard that, on its being reported in the Punch office that he was "turning Roman," simply because he defended Doyle's secession, Jerrold tartly ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... whose name was Mr. Puff-up, and mischievous pieces they were. They in the camp also did stoutly, for they saw that unless they could open Ear-gate it would be in vain to batter the wall.' And so on, through many allegorical, and, if sometimes somewhat laboured, yet always eloquent, pungent, and heart-exposing pages. ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... as the smoke of yesterday's sacrifice. With what manner of eyes have you frequently journeyed through Ching-fow of late, if the signs and omens there have not already warned you to prepare a coffin adequately designed to receive your well-proportioned body? Has not the pungent vapour of burning houses assailed your senses at every turn, or the salt tears from the eyes of forlorn ones dashed your peach-tea ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... bees take great care of these eggs, and instead of putting ordinary food into the cell, they fill it with a sweet, pungent jelly, for this larva is to become a princess and a future queen bee. Curiously enough, it seems to be the peculiar food and the size of the cell which makes the larva grow into a mother-bee which can lay eggs, for if a hive ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... probably be, they cannot fail to exhibit that fundamental resemblance in this respect which betokens a community of origin, a common foundation on the general facts and the obvious suggestions of modern science. Indeed—to turn the point of a pungent simile directed against Darwin—the difference between the Darwinian and the Owenian hypotheses may, after all, be only that between homoeopathic and heroic doses of ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... against the man, rather than dislike to the poetry.[8] It is said, that he felt more resentment on account of the character of imbecility adjudged to his father in "Absalom and Achitophel," than for all the pungent satire, there and in the "Medal," bestowed upon his grandfather; an additional proof, how much more easy it is to bear those reflections which render ourselves or our friends hateful, than those by which they are only made ridiculous and contemptible. The Whig poets, for many assumed that ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... News," and smart reporters were detailed to the prayer-meeting or the sermon, as having greater popular interest, for the time, than the criminal trial or the political debate. Such papers as the "Tribune" and the "Herald," laying on men's breakfast-tables and counting-room desks the latest pungent word from the noon prayer-meeting or the evening sermon, did the work of many ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... simple creature, farmer or fisherman—well, there is always that touch of common humanity, that sense of eternal needs, to fashion a link of conversation. From a professional—lawyer, doctor, engineer—you may pick up some pungent trifle which yields food for thought; it is never amiss to hearken to a specialist. But the ordinary man of the street, the ordinary man or woman of society, of the world—what can they tell you about art or music or life or religion, about tailors and golf and exhaust-pipes ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... comprehensively significant and conclusive that, to the day of her death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband anything but the bright nickname—"Youth." Mark Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller of tales, pungent as stylist. But he has achieved another sort of eminence that is peculiarly gratifying to Americans. "They distinguish in his writings," says an acute French critic, "exalted and sublimated by his genius, their national qualities of youth and of gaiety, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... had worked and worked well, and now all was ready and to her entire satisfaction. Something which shall be nameless simmered in a tin cup on the back of the stove before her, and every now and then she broke her reverie to sip of it. It smelled sweet and pungent and suspicious, but, then—this was Christmas Eve. She was half drowsing when a brisk knock startled her into wakefulness. Thinking it was one of the neighbours in for a call she bade the visitor enter, without ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the honoured mother of such a student and such a minister as John Brown of Wamphray. This letter has a bite in it—to use one of Rutherford's own words in the course of it—all its own. And it is just that profound and pungent element in this letter, that bite in it, that has led me to take this remarkable letter for my ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... African race delight. But she most pleasured our sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed and the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her stand at the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air with its pungent odors. If we surprised her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe from her lips and put it behind her, with a low, mellow chuckle and a look of half-defiant consciousness, never guessing that none of her merits took us half so much ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... drams; muriate ammonia, granulated, 6 drams; oil neroli. 5 minims; oil lavender flowers, 5 minims; oil rose, 3 minims; spirits ammonia, 15 minims. Put into the pungent a small piece of sponge filling about one-fourth the space, and pour on it a due proportion of the oils, then put in the mixed salts until the bottle is three-fourths full, and pour on the spirits of ammonia in proper ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... There is no distinction of dress between the numerous slaves and the humbler free workers and traders; but there is obvious distinction between the artisan of bent shoulders who shambles out of yonder pungent tannery, with his scant garments girded around him, and the graceful gentleman of easy gestures and flowing drapery who moves towards the Tholos. There is great POLITICAL democracy in Athens, but not so much SOCIAL ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... chivalrous towards ladies, and at public entertainments he distinguishes himself by his neat little speeches, which are always good-natured, very much to the point, and seasoned with attic salt of a piquant but not too pungent quality. He is merciful to the absurdities of his fellow-citizens; it is no business of his to impress them with any affectation of soldierly gravity or stiffness; and if at first sight his stern, ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... had been forgotten, and with an ominous hiss and a pungent odor, the seething mass boiled over the top of the kettle and was promptly licked up by the eager flames of the stove. A great cloud of smoke filled the kitchen, and the paralyzed girls awoke to their ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... and prized beyond gems; my senses have reeled in the intoxication of those wondrous extracts whose Oriental, tangible richness of fragrance holds me in a spell almost mystical in its enthralment; but I dare aver that no blossom's breath, no pungent perfume distilled by the erudite inspiration of Science, ever possessed a tithe of the delicious agony of that whiff of unromantic ammonia, which, powerful as the touch of magic, and thrilling as the kiss of love, snatched me back to life, arrested my tottering senses, as they blindly staggered ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... this peculiarity of Binning is displayed in a manner that is singularly striking. In the sermons of those who are most opposed to the doctrines which he was at such pains to inculcate, we shall search in vain for more pungent addresses to the consciences of mankind, or more unfettered exhibitions of the gospel as a remedial scheme, in which all the descendants of Adam are warranted to regard themselves as having an interest. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... America, upon the political rights of the black man (for on this subject the ruling whites are in both Colonies unanimous), but upon land rights and the regulation of native labour. They are not at this moment actual and pungent issues, but they are in the background of every one's mind, and the attitude of each man to them goes far to determine his political sympathies. One cannot say that there exist pro-native or anti-native parties, but the Dutch are by tradition more disposed than the English to treat the native severely, ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... pungent article, a gentleman called at the "Tribune" office and inquired for the editor. He was shown into a little seven-by-nine sanctum, where Greeley, with his head close down to his paper, sat scribbling away at a two-forty rate. The angry man began by asking if this was Mr. Greeley. "Yes, sir; ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the ranch for Portland, where conventional city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown eyes soon compel his return. ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... dressing-table stood a little dark-green bottle. I pulled the ground-glass stopper from it and a most pungent odor of carbonate of ammonia filled the room. Quickly I held it under her nose, but ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... and there were men with heads racked from last night's deep potations who would still lie abed and curse their ill-luck; but there was noisy bustle in the stable yards, the champing of bits and jingling of harness, and in the servants' quarters a hurrying to and fro with eager haste, and a pungent atmosphere of cooking food. Lord Rosmore was starting for Dorsetshire within the hour, and his men were being fed with that liberality for which the Abbey ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... pungent, humorous sketch.... A bright, amusing book, which is thoughtful as well as amusing, and may stimulate, somewhere, thinking that shall bear fruit in some ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... bravely from the burning mass; but after all, the result was not what had been desired. It rolled up through the opening above, and gathered in blue masses in the room where Clive and David were imprisoned. They felt the effects of the pungent vapors very quickly, more especially in their eyes, which stung, and smarted and emitted torrents of tears. Their only refuge from this new evil was to thrust their heads as far out of the windows as was possible; and this they did by sitting on the ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... other always, and the summer evenings when they wandered, and the noises in the full streets, and the music of the organs, and the dancing, and the warm smell of the people, and of dogs and of the horses, and all the joy of the strong, sweet pungent, dirty, moist, ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... valley late the next day. Finding shelter, they made camp, and after dividing a small bannock between them they sat talking gloomily. Their fire had been lighted to lee of a cluster of willows, and it burned sulkily because the wood was green. Pungent smoke curled about them, and they shivered ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... pen, have been successful coiners of phrases—phrases that have stuck: "entangling alliances," "era of good feeling," "innocuous desuetude," "a condition, not a theory." Lincoln was happiest at this art, and there is no need to mention any of the scores of pungent sayings which he added to the language and which are in daily use. President Roosevelt was no whit behind in this regard. All recognize and remember the many phrases to which he gave birth or currency: "predatory wealth," "bull moose," "hit the line hard," "weasel ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... consumed nearly to the end, burned noisily. Small explosions took place in the heart of the flame, driving through its smoky blaze strings of hard, round puffs of white smoke, no bigger than peas, which rolled out of doors in the faint draught that came from invisible cracks of the bamboo walls. The pungent taint of unclean things below and about the hut grew heavier, weighing down Lingard's resolution and his thoughts in an irresistible numbness of the brain. He thought drowsily of himself and of that man who wanted to see him—who waited to see him. Who waited! Night and day. ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... episcopal note, which he ridiculed in a pun, Luther published a short and pungent reply in Latin and German. He was particularly indignant that this occasion should have been seized to tax his sermon with false doctrine, since the wish he there expressed did not contain, as even his enemies must admit, anything contrary to any dogma of the Church. ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... dhotar to awaken the echoes which eddy loudly round the vault and rouse the wild birds that have built their nests in the holes and cornices. The birds as well as the bats which lurk in the darker recesses of the chapel are said to be responsible for the very pungent and unpleasant odour which greets one on entering and forces one to cut short one's visit. And what of him who built the shrine? Deep in the back wall of the verandah is graven, in characters long since obsolete, an inscription interpreted some time ago ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... between—now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea—in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dances, during the first days of their meeting. Ivan's mind whirled in a chaos of regimental introductions and instruction, wearying hunts for suitable bachelor quarters, long afternoon hours filled with the pungent smell of tanbark and the careerings of a horse with whom he never came to be on terms of absolute equality; evenings spent in the glamour of strange restaurants, the discussion of French entrees, and the contemplation ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... chamber. Resolutely and carefully she reviewed the past, back to her first faint trembling hope. Rigorously, as in the presence of her Maker, she scanned her first departure from the narrow path; and if her earlier convictions were pungent, tenfold more intense was the agony ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... slope of Penetier, carried a strong, pungent odor of burning pitch. It brought also a low roar, not like the wind in the trees or rapid-rushing water. It might have been my imagination, but I fancied it was like the sound of flames blowing through ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... on," Norma told her companion. They stopped for some molasses peppermints, and their pungent odour mingled for Norma in the impression of this happy hour. "Wolf, how do they do that?" the girl asked, watching an electric sign on which a maid mopped a dirty floor with some prepared cleaner, leaving the ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... the covert of friendship to ourselves, and love to the world, we war against God, and destroy our own souls. I say, first, amity to the world carries enmity to God in the bosom of it, and if you believe not this, hear the apostles sharp and pungent question, you adulterers and adulteresses, know you not that the amity of the world is enmity with God? He doth not speak only to persons guilty of that crime, but to all natural men, who are guilty of adultery or whoredom ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... on the dusty pillow and opened another window. He stumbled over the cup and spoon, and a bottle fell from the table and broke sending out a pungent odor. But Billy crept close to his friend once more and began rubbing his hands and forehead and crooning to him as he had once done to his dog when he suffered from a broken leg. Nobody would have known Billy just then, as he stood crooning ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... which hath been culled from the flowers of all books,' including striking passages, pungent apothegms, brilliant thoughts, etc., from the great men of all ages. Every writer and speaker, professional man and student, should own ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... gainsay the truth, we fancied the Morando much. A nutty, pungent flavor it had; like some kinds of arrack distilled in the Philippine isles. And a marvelous effect did it have, in dissolving the crystalization of the brain; leaving nothing but precious little drops of good humor, beading round the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... returned from the scene in the confessional we have already described. That day had brought to him one of those pungent and vivid inward revelations which sometimes overset in a moment some delusion that has been the cherished growth of years. Henceforth the reign of self-deception was past,—there was no more self-concealment, no more evasion. He loved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... few seconds is pushed upwards by a force acting from beneath to a height of between twenty and thirty feet. It then suddenly explodes with a loud noise, scattering in every direction a quantity of black mud, which has a strong pungent smell resembling that of coal-tar, and is considerably warmer than the air. With the mud thus thrown out there has been formed around the mound a large perfectly level and nearly circular plain, about half a mile in circumference. The water ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... a can in which a kind of strong liquor sometimes comes,' I said. Then I unscrewed the top. The can was empty, but I showed him that there was still a strong and pungent odor which lingered in it. The explanation satisfied him. The late governor had been known to be a man who had more than a passing liking ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... what our own example evinces, the states of Barbary are unsuspected of. No, let me rather make the supposition that Great Britain refuses to execute the treaty, after we have done everything to carry it into effect. Is there any language of reproach pungent enough to express your commentary on the fact? What would you say, or rather what would you not say? Would you not tell them, wherever an Englishman might travel, shame would stick to him—he would disown ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... ago,) that tiny light-blue butterfly, that hovers over our ripening corn, and is not known but as a stranger, in the south; also, that minute diamond beetle[1] who always plays at bo-peep with you from behind the leaves of his favourite hazel, and the burnished corslet and metallic elytra of the pungent unsavoury gold beetle;[2] while we miss the grillus that leaps from hedge to hedge; the thirsty dragon-fly, restless and rustling on his silver wings; the hoarse cicadae, whose "time-honoured" noise you durst not find fault with, even if you would, and which you come insensibly to like; ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... it is not correctness of grammar nor elegance of enunciation that charms us; it is spirit, VERVE, the sudden turn of humour, the keen, pungent taste of life. For this reason a touch of dialect, a flavour of brogue, is delightful. Any dialect is classic that has conveyed beautiful thoughts. Who that ever talked with the poet Tennyson, when he let himself go, over the pipes, would miss the savour of ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... lighted a cigarette; I took mine upon my knee, and gazed at the river banks: they were now old friends: I had gazed at them many times before; how much I had experienced, and how much had happened since I first saw them! Could it be that I should ever come to love them, and the pungent smell of the arrow-weed which covered ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... affected either the pronunciation or the spelling of them. If we look down the columns of any English dictionary, we shall find these later Latin words in hundreds. Opinionem became opinion; factionem, faction; orationem, oration; pungentem passed over in the form of pungent (though we had poignant already from the French); pauperem came in as pauper; and separatum ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... much passion, that they fainted, and would have fallen, if the woman who followed Schemselnihar had not hindered them. They supported them to a sofa, where they were brought to themselves, by throwing odoriferous water on their faces, and applying pungent ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... the miserable abode of souls, the imagination of fanatics, who were desirous of governing the people, strove to assemble the most frightful images, to render it still more terrible: fire is of all beings that which produces in man the most pungent sensation; not finding any thing more cruel, the enemies to the several dogmas were to be everlastingly punished with this torturing element: fire, therefore, was the point at which their imagination was obliged to stop. The ministers of the various systems ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... intended to say here was that at least one of the aromatic herbs resembled sage, hyssop, wormwood, and southernwood, and that there were junipers and dwarf cedars. The pungent-smelling herb was the wild sage, now celebrated in stories of adventure as the sage-brush. It grows abundantly in the alkali country, and is browsed upon by a species of grouse known as the sage-hen. Junipers ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... the self-revelation of an extremely vivacious and reflective intelligence; it is the living quintessence of all Latin criticism of life, and of a large part of Greek; a quintessence as fresh and pungent as the essayist's expression of his special individuality. For Montaigne stands out among all the humanists of the epochs of the Renaissance and the Reformation in respect of the peculiar directness of his contact with Latin literature. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... the fused state, and at the usual temperature, ammonia is a pungent gas, and exerts a reaction upon litmus paper similar to potash and soda. Ammonium is considered by chemists as a metal, from the nature of its behavior with other substances. It has not been isolated, but its existence is now generally conceded by all chemists. ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... speaking of the fate of the poor who are packed in crowded quarters during this bright holiday season. For them the midsummer days and midsummer nights are a term of tribulation. The hot street reeks with pungent odours, the faint airs that wander in the scorching alleys at noonday strike on the fevered face like wafts from some furnace, and the cruel nights are hard to endure save when a cool shower has ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the sting of Bees, Wasps, and Hornets of all kinds, is so nearly, if not quite identical, that I shall make no distinction between them. There are very few, if any persons, who do not know the symptoms, at least the local effects of the Bee sting. Pungent, stinging, aching pain, redness and swelling of the part. The wound has at first, and for some time, a white spot or point where the sting entered, surrounded by an areola of bright scarlet, growing fainter and paler as it recedes. The swelling is not pointed, but ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... for a pack of cards. In Ireland he learnt to be "a frank rider" without a saddle, and had awakened in him his "passion for the equine race": and here he had his cob shoed by a "fairy smith" who first roused the animal to a frenzy by uttering a strange word "in a sharp pungent tone," and then calmed it by another word "in a voice singularly modified but sweet and almost plaintive." Above all there is a mystery which might easily be called Celtic about his memories of Ireland, due chiefly to something in his own blood, but also to the Irish atmosphere ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... patron, the Earl of Devonshire, where his only annoyance was the society of the Earl's chaplain, Jasper Mayne, he had found the Protectorate comfortable enough for all his purposes, and had been publishing new books under it, including his pungent disputations with ex-Bishop Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity and with Wallis of Oxford on Mathematics.[1]—Hobbes's friend DAVENANT had for some time been less lucky. His return to England had been involuntary. He had been captured at sea in 1650 on his way to Virginia (Vol. ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Anna her bedroom, and when she had gone, Anna gave one look round at the evergreen wreaths with which it was decorated and which filled it with a pungent, baked smell, and then ran out to see what her house was like. Her heart was full of pride and happiness as she wandered about the rooms and passages. The magic word mine rang in her ears, and gave each piece of furniture a charm so ridiculously ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... layer of whitening. At this point, the street, wide and deserted, has a quiet, provincial aspect, with a somewhat ecclesiastical touch. Large gateways stand wide open showing a succession of deep roomy yards; from a cowkeeper's establishment comes a tepid, pungent smell of litter; and the dead wall of a convent stretches away for a goodly length. It was between this convent and a herbalist's that the shop transformed into a studio was situated. It still bore on its sign-board the inscription, 'Fruit and ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... did his God—from a printed book—and that compiled in England. Until they began to investigate they were puzzled by contradictions. The first prompt bee-bite—there are many varieties of Australian bees, some pugnacious and pungent—diverted attention from the school-book romances. It was discovered that thousands of square miles of Australian soil never catch glimpses of the sun in consequence of the impenetrableness of the shade of Australian trees; that the scent of the wattles, the eucalypts, the boronias, the hoyas, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... where he did wonderful things with strange-shaped instruments and bottles which we were told contained deadly poison. His apparatus was still ranged on the shelves, thick in dust, and the air was heavy with the pungent smell of acids. The large drawing-rooms with their heavy hangings looked shabbier and dingier than of old; I could not help noticing the neglected look of everything. I had hardly entered them during the ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... top, rapidly, backward and forward in a pan until smoke appeared at the point of the rod. Powdering some bark, he threw it into the pan, and when it began to blaze, he added some of the damp moss. Gradually a thick, pungent smoke arose. It curled upward, enveloping him and almost choking him with its overwhelming aroma, but it dispelled the mosquitos immediately, and Piang continued his ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... scarcely visible clefts and joinings, escaped a pungent vapor, which infected the atmosphere of the cavern. The wall was broken by large cracks, some of which extended to within two or three feet of the ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... aside all scruples, he started to walk beside his ragged comrade of the road, finding, with some secret satisfaction, that after a few paces his own step was light and easy compared to the heavy shuffling movement with which Peke steadily trudged along. Sweet and pungent odours of the field and woodland floated from the basket of herbs as it swung slightly to and fro on its bearer's shoulders, and amid the slowly darkening shadows of evening, a star of sudden silver brilliance sparkled ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... was furnished by a divan spread with silken carpets, a low Moorish table in coloured wood mosaics bearing the newly lighted lamp, and a tiny brazier in which aromatic gums were burning and spreading a sweetly pungent perfume for the fumigation ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... aloofness, but it certainly lacks the camaraderie, the jolly good-fellowship, of those picturesque auberges and osterie where twenty or thirty of one calling are gathered together under one roof, meeting daily at table, where artistic criticism is pungent and free, artistic assistance ungrudging, tales of artistic experience and adventure racy, the atmosphere stimulative to the spreading out of every artistic theory possible to the sane ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the contents into the fire, which flared up. Quick as thought the bottle was at the sick man's lips. He was a heavily built man with powerful limbs. Guy seized his arm, closed with him, and for a moment there was a deadly struggle, while the pungent odour of the poison filled the atmosphere. At last Guy fell back on art: he tripped his father cleverly, and they both rolled ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... craft was quite dry inside, and filled with a clean pungent scent of warm tar. Mandy Ann shook out her red skirt and her yellow curls, and set down the big covered basket on the bottom of the bateau. The basket ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... fortune-hunter, who came running back with the rubber gloves. Mr. Damon was no more than half way to the power house, which was quite a distance from the Swift homestead. Meanwhile Tom's airship was slipping more and more, and a thick, pungent smoke now surrounded it, coming from the burning insulation. The sparks and electrical ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... boat-hook in his right hand and kept his eyes and ears alert. He heard a dog bark somewhere in front of him in the whitish-gray obscurity. Presently he came to where the path kinked and sloped down among a jumble of rocks, and at the same moment he caught the pungent, comforting smell of wood-smoke on the fog. Then he knew that Chance Along—the roof which sheltered Flora Lockhart—lay hidden and dripping beneath him. He was about to commence a cautious descent of the path, when a clamor of voices drifted ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... been too thorough to permit of his refusing sustenance or attention to any guest of his master's, no matter how unworthy, and it was not many minutes before he was picking over "de ba'el" containing that peculiar pungent variety of plant so common to ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the highway to the forest. The scent of the pinewoods rushed to meet his sudden thought. Should he, dare he, break cloister, and taste the wondrous delight of an unwalled world? It were a sin, a grave sin, in a newly-made novice, cloister-bred. The sweet, pungent smell overpowered him; the trees beckoned with their long arms and slender fingers; the voice of the forest called, and Hilarius, answering, walked swiftly away, with bowed head and beating ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... Bowen has said: "It seems to me that a firm and well-grounded faith in the doctrine of Christian Metempsychosis might help to regenerate the world. For it would be a faith not hedged round with many of the difficulties and objections which beset other forms of doctrine, and it offers distinct and pungent motives for trying to lead a more Christian life, and for loving and helping our brother-man." And as James Freeman Clarke has said: "It would be curious if we should find science and philosophy taking ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... fertile, with their tangled thickets of the most various trees. The African oil-tree rose above the mass, with leaves fifteen feet in length upon its stalk, the latter studded with sharp thorns; the bombax, or silk-cotton-tree, filled the wind, as it swept by, with the fine down of its seeds; the pungent odors of the pendanus, the "kenda" of the Arabs, perfumed the air up to the height where the Victoria was sailing; the papaw-tree, with its palm-shaped leaves; the sterculier, which produces the Soudan-nut; the baobab, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... subsequent wedding of Princess Marie d'Orleans, the amateur sculptress, to Duke Alexander of Wurtemberg, a dilettante, like herself, in letters. The occasion provoked the German poet Heine, then lying ill at Paris, to some of his most pungent witticisms. Ailing though he was, Heine was made a member of the new "Societe des Gens de Lettres," founded by Balzac, Lamennais, Dumas and Georges Sand. Further events in French letters were the publication of Eugene Sue's "Latreaumont," and ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... plain, wooden benches lining the four sides, no pictures or ornaments of any kind. A single two-arm gas-pipe descended from the center of the ceiling. It was permeated by a peculiarly stale and pungent odor, obviously redolent of all the flotsam and jetsam of life—criminal and innocent—that had stood or sat in here from time to time, waiting patiently to learn what a deliberating ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... and hacked, ran down the centre of the room, flanked by rows of stone stools. Built around two sides of the room was a series of rude bunks. Over the edge of one of these a head of rough and matted black hair was visible. An odor of stale liquor, scorched meat, and pungent wood-smoke hung heavy in the air. Myleia entered, from the kitchen beyond, with a tray of half-cooked beef. Nicodemus went to the bunk and shook ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... work, in which are preserved the choicest expressions and opinions of the great thinkers and writers of all ages, from Confucius to Ruskin. These pungent apothegms and brilliant memorabilia are all carefully classified by topics; so that the choicest work of many years of patient labor in the libraries of America and Europe is condensed into perfect form and made readily available. It will be indispensable to all writers and speakers, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... sleep, and a cooler skin; with the result that he had successfully induced an amused medical officer to report him 'fit for duty.' But Nature is relentless; and Lenox, driving back from 'orderly room' through a white-hot glare, and a haze of pungent dust, found himself speculating vaguely—as though the question concerned some unknown entity in another world—how he was going to drag a protesting body and brain through the rest of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... came to her senses, she found herself in half darkness, in a sultry dusk permeated by a horrid, pungent smell. Slowly everything came back to her. A great paralyzing sadness settled in her heart. She wanted to cry: the ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... clung to the broken brick-work of the walls, and a little fruit still clung to the knotted branches, while great hedges of box, ragged and uncared for, traced the old order of the walks. The heavy dew and warm morning sun brought out that antique fragrance,—the faint pungent odor which wakes the utmost memories of the past. Tom Burton thought with a sudden thrill that the girl with the sweet eyes yesterday had worn a bit of box in her dress. Here and there, under the straying ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... at the withered flowers which the old man had thrown him. He could detect their sweet scent above the pungent fumes of tobacco and as Obadiah's triumphant chuckle recurred to him, the gloating joy in his eyes, the passionate tremble of his voice, a grim smile passed over his face. The mystery was easy of solution—if he was willing to reason along ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... springs Vivaraises, under a grotto; and, adjoining them, the spring Juliette, while a little beyond is La Dlicieuse. The springs Madeleine, St. Jean, Prcieuse, and the others, belonging to the Socit Gnrale, are all farther up the river, nearer the town, at the second bridge. None of them are so pungent nor so agreeable to the palate as the Juliette and the Dlicieuse. The properties of all are much the same. They give tone to the stomach, assist the action of the liver and kidneys, and remove paralysis of the bladder. They are all cold, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... these wretched animals should be flung into that vortex of slaughter. He pitied them intensely, the sight of them hurt him; and the smell of them nauseated him. Every memory of the whole advance is saturated with that odour. It was pungent, vigorous, demoralising. It filled the air, and one's lungs shrank before it. Once, when a man drove his pick through the crisp, inflated side, a gas spurted out that was positively ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... generally of a rich, tawny, Indian hue, somewhat inclined to luster; is exceedingly agreeable to the touch; diffuses a pungent odor, as of an old dusty bottle of Port, newly opened above ground; and, altogether, is an object which no man, who enjoys his dinners, could refrain from hanging over, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... Out in the kitchen, the minister's wife, who had brought up a dish of jelly, was talking to Mrs. Spencer about the Sewing Circle. Through the open window, where the red vines hung, came the pungent, sun-warm October air. The sunshine fell over Sylvia's chestnut hair like a crown of glory ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... until at some sixty or eighty feet from the ground it reaches a branch bearing a nest. The taking of the nests is usually accomplished after nightfall. A man ascends the ladder carrying in one hand a burning torch of bark, which gives off a pungent smoke, and on his back a large hollow cone of bark. Straddling out along the bough, he hangs his cone of bark beneath the nest, smokes out the bees, and cuts away the nest from the bough with his sword, so that it falls into the cone of bark. Then, choosing ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... Then the pungent, penetrating fragrance of blossoming vineyards was wafted across the air; the flowery richness of orange groves, and the sacred odor of crushed bay leaves, such as is pressed from them when they are strewn upon the flat pavement ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... hurrying homeward through the short twilight, along silent wood roads from which the birds had departed, breathing deep of the pure air with its pungent tang of ripened leaves, sniffing the first night smells, listening now for the yap of a fox, now for the distant bay of a dog to guide me in a short cut over the hills to where my room in ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... been known for centuries, but the explanation only since chemistry came to be applied to matters of common life. The onion belongs to the genus Allium, all the species of which possess a peculiar, pungent, acrid juice, with a powerful odour. The garlic has a stronger smell than the onion, but the onion has more of the volatile oil which all the members of the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... tolerably good-looking. As the pipe passed round among the men, a lively conversation went forward, more merry than delicate, and at length two or three of the elder women (for the girls were somewhat diffident and bashful) began to assail Raymond with various pungent witticisms. Some of the men took part and an old squaw concluded by bestowing on him a ludicrous nick name, at which a general laugh followed at his expense. Raymond grinned and giggled, and made several futile attempts at repartee. Knowing ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... let us pass, the box pinned between him and the wall. Never in my life have I known roses with a more pungent and penetrating odour! Britton seemed to ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... slacker, scorning to insert his head in the scrum, assumes a commanding position outside and from this point criticises the Game-Captain's decisions with severity and pith. The last end of the partial slacker is generally a sad one. Stung by some pungent home-thrust, the Game-Captain is fain to try chastisement, and by these ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... of vapour. So old, they went through civilisation ten thousand years since; they have worn it all out, even hope in the future; they merely live acquiescent to fate, like the red deer. The crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter of the fern-owl, the red embers of the wood fire, the pungent smoke blown round about by the occasional puffs of wind, the shadowy trees, the sound of the horses cropping the grass, the night that steals on till the stubbles alone are light among the fields—the gipsy sleeps in his tent on mother earth; it is, you see, primeval man with primeval ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... manuscript pages had to be disentangled by a calligraphic Taunton bookseller before they could be sent to press. This fastidiousness in part gained its purpose; won temporary success; gave to his style the glitter, rapidity, point, effectiveness, of a pungent editorial; went home, stormed, convinced, vindicated, damaged, triumphed: but it missed by excessive polish the reposeful, unlaboured, classic grace essential to the highest art. Over-scrupulous manipulation of words is liable to the "defect of its qualities"; as with unskilful goldsmiths of ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... him from condensing his speeches, often makes them tediously digressive and long; but in society he treads the ground with so elastic a step, he touches everything so lightly and so adorns all that he touches, his turns and his breaks are so various, unexpected, and pungent, that he not only interests and amuses, but always exhilarates his audience so as to render weariness and satiety impossible. He is now coquetting a little with the Tories, and especially professes great deference and profound respect for the Duke of Wellington; ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... heath, along a road pitted with shell-holes to the skeleton of a shell-smashed town like some ghostly sentinel to the gates of war. Here the sweet smell of a September evening was every now and then rendered hideous by pungent odors through the dead town, where the smell of gas still clung to houses and issued up from cellars. Now trenches lay along the road, and the golden harvest moon turned to silver and flooded the scene, casting long, strange shadows on the ground. A deepening roar, followed by the whizzing ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... slowly shoved the stem of the pipe in the comer of his immense mouth, sent out several pungent puffs towards the face of Otto, who, accustomed as he was to the sickening odor of his father's tobacco, was forced to recoil a step and cough the strangling vapor ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... Massachusetts, Italianate outwardly in almost ludicrous degree. He wore a fur-lined overcoat indoors; his feet, cased in thick woollen shoes, rested on a strip of carpet laid before his table; a man who had lived for forty years in the pungent atmosphere of an air-tight stove, succeeding a quarter of a century of roaring hearth fires, contented himself with the spare heat of a scaldino, which he held his clasped hands over in the very Italian manner; the lamp that cast its light on the book open before him was the classic lucerna, ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... the blaze and writhed and wriggled horribly what time the flames peeled the garments from them and licked the flesh from the bones. At length they fell still and sank down into the white heat of the logs, a hideous, pungent odour spreading through the chamber. From the old man by the buffet, who had stood spellbound during this ghastly scene, there broke at last ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... merely mixed, but they may be made to combine so as to form molecules, each consisting of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. In this condition they constitute water. So also chlorine and sodium are elements, the former a pungent gas, the latter a soft metal; and they unite together to form chloride of sodium or common salt. In the same way the element nitrogen combines with hydrogen, in the proportion of one atom of the former to three of the latter, to form ammonia. Picturing in imagination ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... a few strange chords, and then fell into a monotonous melody with a recurring refrain repeated again and again. The blue smoke from the incense-brazier curled lazily upward in long spirals and floated through the room, filling it with a pungent and heavy sweetness; the monotonous music went on, the strange rhythm recurring in an ever stronger beat. The Mariposa who had sat motionless gazing at the ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... freezing; and if the materials are bought of any of the wholesale druggists or dry salters, it is exceedingly economical. It is open, however, to the very great objection, that the spirit of salt is an exceedingly corrosive liquid, and of a pungent, disagreeable odour: this almost precludes its use for any purpose except ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... be entirely expelled at a temperature of from 226 to 230 degrees Fahrenheit. Wool when ignited does not burn with a bright flame, as vegetable fiber does, but consumes with a feeble smouldering glow, soon extinguishes, spreading a disagreeable pungent vapor, as of burning horn. By placing a test tube with a solution of five parts caustic potash in 100 parts water, a mixture of vegetable fibers and wool fibers, the latter dissolve if the fluid is brought to boiling above ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... first minutes, a few disappointed exclamations here and there in the boxes, "Why, it is in verse!" the house began to feel the charm of this invigorating and healthy piece, as if there had been sprinkled on it, in its rarefied atmosphere, some fresh and pungent essence, an elixir of life perfumed with thyme from ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... trees by the side of the ditch and athwart the apple trees outside, and was making the cocks crow on the dunghill, and the pigeons coo on the roof. The smell of the cow stable came through the open door, and blended in the fresh morning air with the pungent odor of the stable, where the horses were neighing, with their heads ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... The most expressive and pungent of all Mr. Coleridge's self-upbraidings, is that, in which he thrills the inmost heart, by saying, with a sepulchral solemnity, "I have learned what a sin is against an infinite, imperishable being, such as is the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... on uptown, Hawksley highly amused, exhilarated, but frequently puzzled. The pungent irony of her observations conveyed to him that under this gayety was a current of extreme bitterness. "I say, are all American ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... about we could start a fire, although it probably would not be noticed with so many glows on the horizon to-night." He stopped to look about. Dull splashes of red in the sky pointed out remnants of the day's conflagration still eating their way through the foothills. The air was full of the pungent but not unpleasant smell of ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... fall day, with the brilliant sunshine peeping in under the edge of the awning, creeping up almost to the feet of the girls, while vagrant breezes, spicy and pungent with the smell of burning leaves, fanned their faces, and stirred them to a new restlessness, ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... young wife and the young woman embraced each other tenderly—for deep regrets and pungent remorse at last attuned the mind of Nisida to sweet and ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... some very unpleasant, and some very picturesque. Isel, who was recognised as a woman of a complaining spirit, was commonly spoken of as Isel the Sweet; while her next neighbour, who lorded it over a very meek husband, received the pungent appellation ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... Feliciana have graced my poor services—she hath paid me as little and as cold regard as if I had been some hob-nailed clown of these bleak mountains! Nay, this very day, while I was in the act of kneeling at her feet to render her the succours of this pungent quintessence, of purest spirit distilled by the fairest hands of the court of Feliciana, she pushed me from her with looks which savoured of repugnance, and, as I think, thrust at me with her foot as if to spurn me from her presence. These things, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... night, not long after Bibbs returned the abandoned wraps; and during the first days of Sibyl's illness the doctor found it necessary to be with her frequently, and to install a muscular nurse. And whether he would or no, Gurney received from his hysterical patient a variety of pungent information which would have staggered anybody but a family physician. Among other things he was given to comprehend the change in Bibbs, and why the zinc-eater was not putting a lump in the operator's gizzard ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... dreary refuge the Countess had fled. She wanted the silence of its still rooms in which to think. Wretched herself, its wretchedness called her. As the carriage which had brought her from, the railway turned into its woods; and she breathed the pungent odor of pine and balsam, she relaxed ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Hawaiian, the Nuhou (News). {270} The two first are moral and respectable, but indulge in the American sins of personalities and mutual vituperation. The Nuhou is scurrilous and diverting, and appears "run" with a special object, which I have not as yet succeeded in unravelling from its pungent but not always intelligible pages. I think perhaps the writing in each paper has something of the American tendency to hysteria and convulsions, though these maladies are mild as compared with the "real thing" in the Alta California, which is largely taken here. Besides these there are monthly ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... cut the dusk. Most of the aliens were now flat on the ground, sending a creeping line of fire into the perimeter of the camp area. A dark form moved between Shann and the nearest patch of burning moss. The Terran raised a spear to the ready before he caught a whiff of the pungent scent emitted by a wolverine hot with battle rage. He whistled coaxingly. With the Throgs eager to blast any moving thing, the animals were in danger if they prowled ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... sign of 'WARTER CRACKERS' in the window of an obscure grocery that he required a supply of these articles, and we therefore entered. There was a splendid Rhode Island cheese on the counter, from which the shop-mistress was just cutting a slice for a customer. Abel leaned over it, inhaling the rich, pungent fragrance. ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... smell of red roses in this June landscape. Just tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched for a whole year with a tinful ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... cake in it, or they are skimming jelly, or attending to some other of the so-called higher branches of cookery, while the bread is quickly passing into the acetous stage. At last, when they are ready to attend to it, they find that it has been going its own way,—it is so sour that the pungent smell is plainly perceptible. Now the saleratus-bottle is handed down, and a quantity of the dissolved alkali mixed with the paste,—an expedient sometimes making itself too manifest by greenish streaks or small acrid spots in the bread. As the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... this, spread a generous portion on my hot biscuit, placed some red-hot beans on that, and began to eat like a hungry hunter. At first I thought I was only burned. Then I recognized the taste and burn of the acid and knew something was wrong. Picking up the tin, I examined it, smelled the pungent odor and felt a queer numb sense of fear. This lasted only for a moment, as I well knew the use and power of the acid, and had not swallowed enough to hurt me. I was about to make known my mistake in a matter-of-fact way, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... and half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy boy began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent, even among the other odours of that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied it up in a bit of sacking, and ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri State Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the Idiosyncrasies of its officers and members. He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print. He shunned the sessions of Senate and House and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson |
