"Rasping" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brass to his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads up to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated in an excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek—and the Honorable William Linder experienced upon the undefended rear of his person the most violent kick of a lifetime not always devoted to the arts of peace. It projected him clear of the window-sill. His last sensible ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... puritanic quiet here reviles The almost whispered warble from the hedge, And takes a locust's rasping voice and files The silence ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... of the smoke had been prearranged, the discovered troops burst into a rasping yell, and a hundred flames jetted toward the retreating band. A rolling gray cloud again interposed as the regiment doggedly replied. The youth had to depend again upon his misused ears, which were trembling and buzzing from the melee of musketry ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... for the rent!" exclaimed a rasping voice. "This is about the tenth time, I guess. Have you got it?" and a burly man thrust himself into the room from ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... hammers; sawyers worked in the pits, making the stout beams and ribs and cutting great trunks into thin planks. Black cauldrons of boiling tar smoked and bubbled over the fires. The clattering of hammers, the rasping of saws, the whirring of wheels, and the clamour of men's voices sounded from earliest morning until the setting of the sun; and the work went on apace all day and every day, saving on Sunday, when no man was allowed to touch a nail or lift ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... the doctor, a Scotch burr faintly rasping his bluff voice. "Morning, Fred. I passed young Hartmann at the gate. He looks as if he was taking a pleasure trip to his own funeral. What ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... was about to argue the point when all at once there began to be other sounds up above—the rasping noise of a saw, and the noise of a little dog, ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... blood is tainted with insanity. He raves, is suspicious, is at war with all things and all men; rails at the social system, not from any broad sympathy with better things, but from a strident selfishness, rasping and self-proclamatory, lacking elevation, save as his love puts wings beneath him for a moment and lifts him, as eagles billow up their young; is weak, and tries to cover weakness up by ranting. We pity, then despise him, then pity him once more, and ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... without being asked. Though fabulously senile, he had preserved and even improved his faculty for enjoying a catastrophe. He now went to funerals with gusto, contentedly absorbed in the task of burying his friends one by one. It was he who said, in his high, trembling, rasping, deliberate voice: "It's a pity her didn't live long enough to hear as Federation is going on after all! That would ha' worritted her." (For the unscrupulous advocates of Federation had discovered a method of setting at naught the decisive result of the referendum, and that day's ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... with a rasping oath, but, before he could reach the ground, General Jackson had propelled himself to the fringe of humanity. He made a last, convulsive effort to rise, his jaws snapped.... A short, iron bar ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... little woman, sometimes came down to breakfast a little late, "to find her brother standing on the hearth-rug, with his prayer-book open in his hand, waiting for her arrival to begin prayers to the assembled household. He had a wonderfully strong rasping voice, the tones of which were rarely modulated under any circumstances. I can hear now his reverberating, 'Five minutes too late again, Mrs. Anne' 'Dearly beloved brethren,' etc.; the change of person addressed, ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... his trick of sticking out his jaw became an offence, his rasping voice a torture. The Boy's occasional ebullition of spirits was an outrage, the Colonel's mere size intolerable. O'Flynn's brogue, which had amused them, grew to be just part of the hardship and barbarism that had overtaken them like an ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... buttons on his blue coat and a sword at his side, and taking me by the arm he asked me in a commanding voice where I lived—the name of the street and the number of the house. I couldn't tell him; then I began to get frightened on account of his sword and big black moustache and loud rasping voice, and suddenly ran away, and after running for about six or eight minutes found myself back at home, to my surprise ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... all. It has seen more wisdom than the best of them; but two or three hours of brutal strength sufficed to lay it low. Which of these dolts could make a tree? I'd like to see them do anything like it. How noisy and clumsy are all their movements,—chopping, pounding, rasping, hammering. And, after all, what do they build? In the forest we do everything so quietly. A tree would be ashamed of itself that could not get its growth without making such a noise and dust and fuss. Our life is the perfection of good manners. For my part, I feel degraded at ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Father White would come and see her, but he had not come; she had sat in her room alone, and after dinner her mother had scolded her because she did not talk to Lord Chiselhurst, an old man who had talked to her in a loud rasping voice. He was overpowering; her strength had given way, she had fainted, and she had been carried out of the room. When she opened her eyes St. Clare was standing by her.... She was glad it was he and not Lord Chiselhurst who had carried ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... see it through between us; you and I-and Clarissa," he said with his rasping laugh, rising to follow her. He caught her hand and gave it a short pressure as they re-entered the drawing-room, where Ellie was saying plaintively to Fred Gillow: "I can never hear that thing sung without wanting to ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... a rasping, mean, cold, starving, bony, freezing, busy-bodying side,' was the reply, delivered energetically; whereat Waring concluded the little man had had his own page of history back somewhere among ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... begun to wonder how long they must wait when Queex again went into action. Its clawed front legs upraised, it brought the pinchers deliberately together and sawed one across the other, producing a rasping sound which was almost a vibration in the air. Back and forth, back and forth, moved the claws. Watching them produced almost a hypnotic effect, and the reason for such a maneuver was totally ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... men must toil for bread; The tragedy of life he has not read, Or deems it but the comedy of fear: He never lifts his eyes above the ground To gaze upon the glittering world of stars; The poet's richest music only mars The rasping of the locust's strident sound. And yet I've never seen a wilder light Glow in the beauteous eyes of dawning love, Than flashes from this strange man's soul at sight Of some rare flower he finds in mountain cove: Mere fungus, or the poisonous, dank mushroom, ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... been perched on one of the cherry-trees in the garden. He rose with a shaking of branches and a flapping of broad black wings. He crossed the lake, croaking as he flew with a note more harsh, rasping and cynical than the consequential caw of English rooks. His was a malevolent presence "from the night's Plutonian shore," the symbol of something unclean and sinister lurking behind this dainty beauty and this ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... the stars twinkled in the west, and both of us were reminded of the frosty mornings on our Iowa farm, when we used to eat by candle-light in order to husk corn by starlight. My hands felt as they used to feel when, worn by the rasping husks, they burned with fever. Heavy as hams, they refused to hold a pen, and my mind refused to compose even letters—but the pen was not needed. "My poem is composed of wood and steel," I remarked ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... owing to his rasping tongue or their own growing resentment at the impudence of the minor leaguers, the All-Americans broke the ice ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... world of pain. He had endured his share of it, and inflicted far more than his share on others. When the tooth parted from its locked hold in the jaw and the forceps raked across the other teeth and out of the mouth with a nerve-rasping sound, old Koho's eyes fairly sparkled, and he looked with glee at the poor black, collapsed on the veranda floor and groaning terribly as he held his head in ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... he had a right to expect, for the leaden pellet bored its way through the skull of the wolf, who, with a rasping yelp, made a sidelong plunge, as if diving off a bank into the water, and, striking on the side of his head, rolled over on his back, with his legs vaguely kicking at the moon, and as powerless to do harm as a ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... of meaningless noises had never been heard by human ears. There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming. There were the rustling of leaves, the croaking of frogs, the hissing of steam, and the flapping of birds' wings. There were clicks from telegraph wires, scraps of talk from other telephones, and curious little squeals that were unlike ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... his feet, and in a hoarse whisper there escaped from his lips a name that he had long years ago cursed and forgotten. His hands opened and shut again convulsively, and then his savage, vindictive nature asserted itself again as he found his voice, and with the rasping accents of passion poured out curses upon the brown, half-naked man that stood before him. Then he turned to go. But the other man put out ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... can see and admire its tusks. Agelan would like nothing better than to show off all his pigs, and if I were a native I would pass them in review as we Europeans visit picture-galleries; but I refuse as politely as I can. We return to the cook-house, where the cocoa-nut rasping is finished; the man washes his hands in the water of a nut, splitting it open and squeezing the water in a little spray on to his hands. Mrs. Agelan knows a simpler way; she fills her mouth with water and squirts it on her hands. The cocoa-nut gratings are kneaded with a little ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... wife had laughed at his singing; and for twenty years the fibre ached. Nothing, again, was more notable than the formal chivalry of this unmannered man to the person on earth with whom he was the most familiar. He was conscious of his own innate and often rasping vivacity and roughness and he was never forgetful of his first visit to the Austins and the vow he had registered on his return. There was thus an artificial element in his punctilio that at times might almost raise a smile. But it ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... baskets into the depths of the cellar, watching them glide down the rails laid over the steps, and listening to the rasping noise which the casters of these osier waggons made in their descent. Down below there was a scene of exquisite horror. They entered into a charnel-house atmosphere, and walked along through murky puddles, amidst which every now and then purple eyes seem to be glistening. At times the soles ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... season yet," answered the other, with loud, rasping voice; "but the day of a rising is at hand, and shows with a laughing face how those whom she will destroy are rushing swiftly ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... crape cage is brought and hung up outside the bungalow. At intervals that seem almost as regular as the striking of a clock, this interesting pet stretches itself up at full length and gives utterance to a succession of rasping cries, strangely loud for so small a creature. A horse is likewise brought into the garden, for the pleasure it will presumably afford me to watch it munch bunches of pulled grass, and switch horseflies away ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... long, was coiled under the pillow of the sick woman. I see snakes in all withered twigs, and am ready to flee at "the sound of a shaken leaf." And besides snakes, the earth and air are alive and noisy with forms of insect life, large and small, stinging, humming, buzzing, striking, rasping, devouring! ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... may be the song to make, at last, amends For many sighs and boons in vain long sought! Now, careless, let us stray, or stop To see the partridge from the covey drop, Or, while the evening air's like yellow wine, From the pure stream take out The playful trout, That jerks with rasping check the struggled line; Or to the Farm, where, high on trampled stacks, The labourers stir themselves amain To feed with hasty sheaves of grain The deaf'ning engine's boisterous maw, And snatch again, From to-and-fro tormenting racks, The toss'd and hustled straw; Whilst others tend the shedded ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... common sense reasserted itself. It was something, at any rate, that she was out of the Chapel, away from Mr. Crashaw's piercing eyes, Mr. Thurston's rasping voice, Mr. Warlock's reproachful melancholy. She felt this evening as though by struggling with all her strength she could shut the gates upon new experiences that were fighting to enter into her soul, but must, at all costs to her ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... coming from Wild Burro Springs, so named because the burros common to this region come there to drink. Just as we drew rein to allow our horses to quench their thirst, the sultry silence was shattered beyond repair. Such a rasping, choking, jarring sound rolled and echoed back and forth from crag to crag! "What's that?" I gasped, after I had swallowed my heart two or three times. The Chief pointed to a rock lying a few feet ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... book upon the prophet Daniel had been painfully exercising the minds of the editor and readers of the Church Times; and it was then that the curate's friend, without moving a muscle of his face, suddenly leaned forward and said, in a rasping voice: ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... spirit. Without uttering the words of any language — Poe's "Nevermore" was, of course, a poetic license — people of all nationalities appear to understand that some dire calamity, some wicked portent, is being announced every time the unbirdlike creature utters its rasping call. The superstitious folk crow with an "I told you so," as they solemnly wag their heads when they hear, of some death in the village after "the bird of ill-omen" has made an unwelcome visit to the neighborhood—it receives the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... braced firmly against a surface of rock, and whirled the surprised miner over upon his back with a degree of violence that caused his breath to burst forth in a great sob. A desperate struggle ensued, mad and merciless—arms gripping, bodies straining, feet rasping along the loose stones, muttered curses, the dull impact of blows. Neither could see the other, neither could feel assured his antagonist possessed no weapon; yet both fought furiously,—Burke enraged and merciless, Winston intoxicated with the lust of fight. Twice they reversed positions, ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... cut and bleeding, that his cheeks were bruised and cut where Tommy Ashe's hard-knuckled fists landed with impressive force, that his heart pounded sickeningly against his ribs, and that every breath was a rasping gasp. Nor was he conscious of pity when he saw that Tommy Ashe was in no better case. It seemed fit and proper that they should struggle like that. There was a strange sort of pleasure in it. It seemed natural, as natural an act as he had ever performed. The shock ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... their ways into our senses, And rend our body as they enter in. In short all good to sense, all bad to touch, Being up-built of figures so unlike, Are mutually at strife—lest thou suppose That the shrill rasping of a squeaking saw Consists of elements as smooth as song Which, waked by nimble fingers, on the strings The sweet musicians fashion; or suppose That same-shaped atoms through men's nostrils pierce When foul cadavers burn, as when the stage Is with Cilician saffron sprinkled ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... singers, struck up the second air, and the People's Favorite appeared. She may have had by nature a sweet and tuneful voice; perhaps it was in order to please her friends, the people, that, she converted it into a harsh and rasping voice, that she delivered her words with even too much gesture, and that she uttered a kind of shriek at the beginning of every verse, which was not in the composer's original music, but was thrown in to compel attention. She was dressed with great simplicity, in plain frock, apron, and white ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... beneath her. Should she call out? One last bon voyage? The sound of a voice floated upward; a hard, rasping voice, unfamiliar, yet strangely familiar. In the leading canoe the Indians ceased paddling. The canoe lost momentum and drifted broadside to the current. The men were lifting something; something long and dark. There was a muffled splash, and the dark object disappeared. The ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... superficial amenities, the soothing fictions, the smotherings of the burning heart,... really paramount in this world, and never to give way? and when a soul of power, unable to refrain, rubs off, though it be with rasping words, all the varnish from rottenness and lies, is he to be tried in our courts of compliment for a misdemeanor? Is there never a higher duty than that of either pitying or converting guilty men,—the duty of publicly ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... brought and did its work promptly. There was a rasping, groaning sound, as if the box were complaining at this rude assault upon its privacy, then, with a hand that trembled a ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... flag, Uncle Sam and America. See the guns they leave behind, though they appear well armed by some firm revolves. Some power crowned is near death's gates. There is some peril on the other shores and on this, yet the links for chains of co-operation come later on. First, there are spears, guns, rasping files; secret orders, too, which shall in due time become fully known to Uncle Sam, for, see you the boxes and the broken lines, like a serpent yet, living cables with its intricate workings. I am stirred by its forces, now international. ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... was sedate and formal in the extreme. The favourite dance was a fast, hopping waltz, in which the swain seized his partner firmly in both hands under the arms and put her through a vigorous test of wind and agility. The floor was rough and sanded, and the rasping of feet almost drowned the music. There were long Virginia reels, led with peremptory dash by a master of ceremonies, full of grace and importance. Swarthy faces were bedewed with sweat and dark eyes glowed with excitement, ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... listening. There were the thud of hammers, the rasping of a saw, and the clatter of wood from the ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he went through the day's particular and general business, the wild words in the rasping, incoherent voice haunted Christopher so persistently that he heard them through the enthusiastic platitudes of congratulations, the calm official statements of plain facts, behind even Patricia's healing voice of love. It was not till the following Sunday ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... sheered, but the ships ran foul; With a gnarring shudder and growl— He gave us a deadly gun; But as he passed in his pride, (Rasping right alongside!) The Old Flag, in thunder tones, Poured in her port broadside, Rattling his iron hide, And cracking ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... was going to the Ba-ba-bastille; she had no notion what the place was. It proved to be the largest building that Darius had ever seen; and indeed it was the largest in the district; they stood against its steep sides like flies against a kennel. Then there was rattling of key-bunches, and the rasping voices of sour officials, who did not inquire if they would like a meal after their stroll. And they were put into a cellar and stripped and washed and dressed in other people's clothes, and then separated, amid tears. And Darius was pitched into a large crowd of other boys, all clothed ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... verge of eternity. Half-strangled in the arms of the taller ruffian, I saw the other approach the fatal box. He stooped over it and seized the string. I breathed one prayer when I saw his grasp tighten upon it. Then came a sharp snap, a strange rasping noise. The trigger had fallen, the side of the box flew out, and ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... decently, but from slighter and more irregular degrees and kinds of misshapenness in the eye, most of which fall under the well-known heading of astigmatism. These interfere only slightly with vision, but keep the eye perpetually on the strain, on a twist, as it were, rasping the entire nervous system into a state of chronic irritation. Our motto now, in all cases of chronic headache, is, first examine the patient's habits of life, next ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... all worn away. So he put the lantern behind him, and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes. It was good sagacity. The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... agony, whilst the yellowness of his complexion deepened to a livid, lurid black, that was so inconceivably repellent and hellish that I sprang away from the bed—appalled. There was then a gasping, rasping noise, and a voice that, despite its unnatural hollowness, I identified as that of Ralph, broke forth: 'I have been wanting to speak to you for ages, but something, I cannot explain, has always prevented me. I have been dead a month; not ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... clear notes of the leader rang above rasping of scabbards and suggestive clank of steel. The men straightened. A suppressed exclamation ran along the line and died to a whisper. Whispers faded into silence. A fraction of a second, perhaps, and then, high above the stillness, when British and French alike were silently ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... reformer and opposing him with an unpopular regular of the most offensive type—more offensive even than a professional politician of unsavory record. At last victory was to reward the tactics of Victor Dorn, the slow, patient building which for several years now had been rasping the nerves ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... none in whose personality I felt so profound an interest. Tourgueneff is far from being a model novelist, but his tales are written with wonderful power, and yet are neither indecent nor melodramatic nor rasping to the nerves. That the burden of strong natures is in proportion to their strength, that human nature in general is weak, and that the Devil still sometimes appears incarnate in the person of lovely woman, seem to form his theory of life. Hence his stories are ever sad, but they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... remonstrance[538]. Hammond at once replied quoting the language of Russell's letter of December 20 and stating that further representations would be made[539]. On the sixteenth Russell again instructed Lyons to speak to Seward, but now was much less rasping in language, arguing, rather, the injury in the future to the United States itself in case the harbours were permanently destroyed since "... the object of war is peace, and the purposes of peace are mutual goodwill and advantageous commercial intercourse[540]." To-day it seems absurd that any ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... began talking his voice was mild and persuasive, and Shields and McNally listened expectantly. As the minutes went by and he did not get the information he wanted, it became evident that the cocksure young man at the other end of the line was rasping through what was left of Porter's patience as an emery wheel does through soft iron. As might be expected, the process was accompanied with a shower of sparks. Porter's voice rose and swelled in volume until at last he shouted, "You don't care who I am? Why, you damned ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... florid, dark-eyed woman, well over thirty, somewhat inclined to be down-at-heel and slatternly, though not yet quite destitute of some small share of good looks; a woman solid of step and unattractive to the eye of youth; moreover, as they knew from recent experience, possessed of a rasping tongue. ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... the yellow flood, hour after hour. Then, some time toward midnight, while most of the passengers were attempting some sort of rest, wrapped in their blankets along the deck, there came a slight shock, a grating slide, and a rasping crash of wood. With a forward churning of her paddles which sent water high along the rail, the River Belle shuddered and lay still, her engines ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... The rather rasping, authoritative voice was so well known and familiar that the girls scrambled up and turned round, to find—no desperate villain armed with revolver and bowie-knife, but Miss Gibbs, in a neat, shiny-black mackintosh and rainproof hat to match. She advanced ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... cry from the look-out forward of: "Port your helm, sir; port your helm!" followed, before Murray could spring to the assistance of the quartermaster at the wheel, by a splintering crash, the rending sound of steel rasping through steel. Then the little craft heeled over to starboard, until Murray felt himself sliding bodily down the steeply inclined deck towards the sea; while above, right over his head, as it seemed, he could dimly perceive the outline of a great, towering metal stem that ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... conscious that he was being eyed in curiosity and impatience by the eager folk behind. He heard Mrs. Tutts's rasping whisper as he ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... in the U.S.A., And first the Indians, the red sort, owned it, But later to Uncle Sam they loaned it, Who afterwards made no bones, but boned it In the fine Autolycus way; And though life wasn't a matter vital He kept with the lake its rasping title, Which recalls the croak of an amorous frog Or a siren heard ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... that realization of the facts would produce these symptoms in him, but now that they had presented themselves she was finding them rasping to the nerves. "I should have thought ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... satisfaction of all. Example is more powerful than precept in all cases. Were our constitutions free from all class distinctions, with what power our representatives could now press their example on the Southern States. Is there anything more rasping to a proud spirit than to be rebuked for shortcomings by those who are themselves guilty of the grossest violations of law and justice? Does the North think it absurd for its women to vote and hold office, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... I say? What could I do but go away sorrowfully, and with a heavy heart take up farm affairs where I had left them? It was very hard to realize that these rough words, still rasping my ears, had issued from Mr. Stewart's lips. I said to myself that he must have had causes for irritation of which I knew nothing, and that he must unconsciously have visited upon me the peevishness which the actions of others had engendered. All the same, it ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... Mexico, the Tarahumares are fond of music and have a good ear for it. When the Spaniards first came, they found no musical instruments among the Tarahumares except the short reed flute, so common to many Mexican tribes, the shaman's rattle, and the rasping stick. But they soon introduced the violin and even the guitar, and throughout Mexico the Indians now make these instruments themselves, using pine wood and other indigenous material in their construction, sometimes with remarkable skill and ingenuity, and for glue the juice of a certain ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... bewildered with the shock, the like of which he had never known before, McTeague turned from Trina, gazing bewilderedly about the room. The struggle was bitter; his teeth ground themselves together with a little rasping sound; the blood sang in his ears; his face flushed scarlet; his hands twisted themselves together like the knotting of cables. The fury in him was as the fury of a young bull in the heat of high summer. But for all that he shook his huge head ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... days ago Emile had stormed at her in his rasping French, because she had, with the vehemence of youth, denounced the Anarchist ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... there came to his ears a roaring, as of some high-powered car traveling under full pressure of gas. The burros followed him, but William lifted his head and brayed tremulously three times in the dark. Casey had never heard him bray before, and the sudden rasping outcry startled him. ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... a scraping that chalk made! He searched about with his fingers around the big boulder. Yes, there it was; the wind, no doubt, had blown it off. He pulled it toward him. The pebble was drawn across the boulder with another and louder rasping that sounded fearfully in the night. Then at once a gasp, a scuffle, a rush, a splash of something in mud, or water—horrible sounds of a being choking, strangling or trying to speak. For a moment Yan sank down in terror. His lips refused to move. But the remembrance of the cow ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a highly built instrument. The raising of the bridge in modern times is due to other causes, the most important being that of allowing better play or room for bowing rapidly over from side to side without rasping the border at the waist. It is an alteration which accompanied the lengthening of the neck and stop in the early ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with themselves, and the girl said it was so cold and rough that she wished her father had not gone, either. The general appeared just before dinner and frankly avowed the same wish. He was rasping and wheezing from the dust which filled his lungs; he looked blown and red, and he was too angry with the company he had been in to have any comments on the manoeuvres. He referred to the military chiefly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not hurry the horse. He merely walked in front holding the bridle slackly. The horse followed him as good as gold—and picked up his feet at nearly every spike. Once or twice a hind hoof grazed a spike-head with a rasping sound that sent Racey's heart bouncing up into his throat. Lord, so much depended on a ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... seen him. His face was thin, pale, and haggard, his eyes were more sombre, and beneath them there were heavy, dark stains of sleeplessness and care, his very voice, when presently he spoke, seemed to have lost the musical timbre that had earlier distinguished it; it was grown harsh and rasping. Disappointment after disappointment, set down to ill-luck, but in reality the fruit of incompetence, had served to sour him. The climax had been reached in the serious desertions after the Philips Norton fight, and the flight of Paymaster Goodenough ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... the case. Yet they were affecting the cams and cogs and pulleys of young Mr. Perry's love affairs, and he felt the matter must be repaired, and put in running order. For he knew that love affair was the mainspring of his life. And the mechanic in him—the Yankee that talked in his rasping, high-keyed tenor voice, that shone from his thin, lean face, and cadaverous body, the Yankee in him, the dreaming, sentimental Yankee, half poet and half tinker, fell upon the problem with ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... I heard across the river the clacking of the windlass, and the rough rasping of the anchor chain as it was drawn through the iron ring ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... it past the crisis safely. Stamps had been starving himself for days and had gone without fire for weeks, but the wheels had refused to budge for the sum he managed to produce. He was weak, and so feverish with anxiety and hunger that his lips were cracked and his tongue dry to rasping. ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... time he paused to rest he had studied scents. When he straightened again he was occupied with every voice of earth and air around and above him, and the notes of singing hens, exultant cocks, the scream of geese, the quack of ducks, the rasping crescendo of guineas running wild in the woods, the imperial note of Ajax sunning on the ridge pole and echoes from all of them ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... Saint-Saens' Arabian music. Ah! those men understand my instrument. It is no instrument of percussion to them. It has a soul. It is the heart of the orchestra. Its rhythmic throb is the pulse of musical life. What are your strings, your scratching, rasping strings! What signifies the blare of your brass, or the bilious bleating of your wood-wind! I am the centre, the life giver. From me the circulation of warm, musical blood emanates. I stand at the back of ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... to see you again," said he. "Why did you refuse my diamonds and my flowers? Why did you avoid my eyes at dinner? Your coldness is an insult which I shall not brook." Then he raised his voice to that rasping, almost blood-curdling tone which even his hardiest soldiers dreaded: "I will have you know that I mean to conquer you. You SHALL—yes, I repeat it, you SHALL love me! I have restored the name of your country. It owes ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... my chance of that," said Chauvelin, with a dry, rasping little laugh. "At any rate we could send him to the guillotine first to cool his ardour, then, when there is a diplomatic fuss about it, we can apologise—humbly—to the British Government, and, if necessary, pay compensation to ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... vacant—apparently for Arthur, as a distinguished stranger: but he had turned shy, and had placed himself next to the young lady in spectacles, whose high rasping voice had already cast loose upon Society such ominous phrases as "Man is a bundle of Qualities!", "the Objective is only attainable through the Subjective!". Arthur was bearing it bravely: but several faces wore a look of alarm, and I thought it high time ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... nothing but the machine and his own rasping breath. Then suddenly, he was stumbling over the edge of an embankment, flailing his arms and twisting himself around so that he managed to land on his back. It hurt and the wind went out of him. He was sliding and rolling. Somehow ...
— The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... Missioner rubbed his hands in a queer rasping way. The movement of those rugged hands and the curious, chuckling laugh that accompanied it, radiated a sort of cheer. They were expressions of more than satisfaction. "It's a great many miles to my own cabin, but it's home—all home—after I get into the forests. My cabin is at the ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... close against each other, were still for a long moment, and then my gasping, rasping voice came back ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... animal followed the boys for quite a distance, keeping well out of sight behind the timber. It had a shrill, rasping voice that was very aggravating. Jerry declared it to be a lynx or wolverine, and Hamp agreed with him. A little later something more serious occurred. Three hungry wolves stole out of the forest and down to the ice. They evidently ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... chose, for the moment, to pretend ignorance. He kept on drinking and talking, his voice growing louder and louder, until it resounded all over the village. He held in his hand a long knife, with which he had been rasping tobacco; this he kept flourishing backward and forward, as he talked, by way of giving effect to his words, brandishing it at times within an inch of the governor's throat. He concluded his tirade by repeating that the country ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... earth below, in which the umbrella staff could have been stuck, the manoeuvre must have failed; but the shelf was nearly all rock, against some fragments of which the stick was propped. There was no failure then. There came up a faint rasping sound as of wood over stone, as the cord tightened, and then very slowly the umbrella began, parachute-like, to rise in the air, higher and higher, as it was hauled up hand over hand till the spike touched the lower twigs of the ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... again. The scene came back in vivid flashes. His eyes, glowing like two balls of blue fire, froze the blood in her veins—his voice the rasping cold steel of a file. And this coarse, ugly beast had held her in the spell of love. She had clung to him, kissed him in rapture and yielded herself to him soul and body. And he had gripped her delicate throat and choked her into insensibility, dropping her limp form from his hands like a strangled ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... little to one side of me, with eyes on the old hag's and my hand held between her two, Maga began chanting in English. The fact that her voice was musical and low where the bag's had been high-pitched and rasping heightened interest, if ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... it whistle through the air, and the next instant it had descended on his back with a dull thump, rasping away a red line of flesh. Now Eric knew for the first time the awful reality of intense pain; he had determined to utter no sound, to give no sign; but when the horrible rope fell on him, griding across his back, ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... that voice. The conclusion of the incident is given in the words of Lamon: "The judge never could whisper, but in this case he probably did his best. At all events, in attempting to whisper to Mr. Lincoln he trumpeted his rebuke in about these words, and in rasping tones that could be heard all over the court room: 'Lincoln, I have been watching you and Lamon. You are impoverishing this bar by your picayune charges of fees, and the lawyers have reason to complain of you. You are now almost as poor as Lazarus, and if you don't make people pay you more for ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... pull out again the objects of my praises. The telephone bell rings and awakens me from my reveries,— It is the voice of the beautiful prima donna herself; But the melodious notes the critics have praised are changed. There is a raucous, strident tone in the voice; It sounds like the rasping bark of the harpies. "How dare you use those terrible photographs?" "What do you mean by insulting my beauty?" There is a slam down of the telephone receiver,— I turn to my work of writing an advertisement about the ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... he repeated with a rasping voice, as he dashed the blood and dirt from his lips. "We war fightin' ter kill, an' I reckon yo' kin guess what hit war erbout," he added, flinging the last words up at ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... breakfasted. Through the long heats of the day he will be the life and soul of the hunt, urging on the beaters with voice and example, climbing trees, peeping under bushes, carrying orders, giving advice, changing the line, until that supreme moment when shots are fired, when the rasping growl tells that the shots have taken effect, and when at length the huge cat lies stretched out dead. And all this on a ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... these patient toilers. Numbers of instances are observed this morning where the rough, ill-fitting breech-straps and ropes have literally seesawed their way through the skin and deep into the flesh, and are still rasping deeper and deeper every day, no attempt whatever being made to remedy this evil; on the contrary, their pitiless drivers urge them on by prodding the raw sores with sharpened sticks, and by belaboring them unceasingly with an instrument ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... accent. It had been so with all the old French names, the L'Homme-Dieus and Des Isles and Beaulieus; the air, or the granite, or one knows not what, caused an ossification of the consonants, a drying up of the vowels, till these names, once soft and melodious, became more angular, more rasping in utterance, than ever Smith or Jones ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... was moving; coming forward; holding the light upon us. I thought I heard its voice—and a horrible, hollow, rasping laugh. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... further from the panhandler's thoughts than flight. His rags fluttered freely in the evening air and his sole-less shoes flopped up and down upon his feet, rasping his bare toes, as he approached ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... fearlessly practised, rather unimaginable; but there was no one like her in the Boston time for cursing queens and eagle-beaked mothers; the Shakespeare of the Booths and other such would have been unproducible without her; she had a rusty, rasping, heaving and tossing "authority" of which the bitterness is still in my ears. I am revisited by an outer glimpse of her in that after age when she had come, comparatively speaking, into her own—the sight of her, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... blast of heat was rising over the land and the rasping cries of the cicala fretted their talk; and Caterina bade him follow her down into the voto—the vast, cool, underground chambers which, for the patricians of Cyprus, made life possible during this heated term, between the freshness of ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... pleased her, and soothed in some way an indefinable rasping sense of the general futility of all feeling and all striving. Surely she, with her young-old heart, her world-worn memories, and her youth that never was, should know that ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... was glad of the talk about obligation. It set him at a distance, immediately. He ceased to look lovingly, to indulge in the nerve-rasping little caresses. He became carefully formal. He was evidently eager to prove the sincerity of his protestations—too eager perhaps, her perverse mind suggested. Still, sincere or not, he held to all the ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... part in the causation of sand-crack. Removal of the periople by excessive rasping of the wall is most certainly a predisposing cause. Cracks, or their starting-points, may also be caused by using too wide a shoe, or by the use of nails too large in the shank. Also, they may arise from unskilful fitting of the toe-clip, especially in the hind-foot ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... Glasgow, where I went to church, and wondered over the uncouth ancient psalmody, which I believe is still retained in use to this day. I was seasoned to that kind of poetry in my early days by the verses of Tate and Brady, which I used to hear "entuned in the nose ful swetely," accompanied by vigorous rasping of a huge bass-viol. No wonder that Scotland welcomed ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... touched deeply, and some were brought to Christ and joined his "Daniel Band." Moreover, Ned kept to his own district and class. He did not assume that all rich church-goers are hypocrites, and that it was his duty to stand in conspicuous places and howl to them the message of salvation, in tones of rasping discord. No, it was noted by his mates, as particularly curious, that the voice of the man who could, when he chose, roar like a bull of Bashan, had become soft and what we may style entreative in its tone. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... and rubber-vines all about us a colony of long-armed wah-wah monkeys whistled and chattered, and farther away the sharp, rasping note of a cicada kept up a continuous protest ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman |
