"Suffocation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and suffering in the Crimea; and after the battles of Balaclava and Inkermann, and the fearful storm of the 14th of November, the worst anticipations were realized. Then we knew that the hospitals were full to suffocation, that scarcity and exposure were the fate of all in the camp, and that the brave fellows for whom any of us at home would have split our last shilling, and shared our last meal, were dying thousands of miles away from the active sympathy ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... so much as to groan." What wonder that I was petrified by sounds so dreadful! Murderers lurked in my closet. They were planning the means of my destruction. One resolved to shoot, and the other menaced suffocation. Their means being chosen, they would forthwith break the door. Flight instantly suggested itself as most eligible in circumstances so perilous. I deliberated not a moment; but, fear adding wings to my speed, I leaped out of bed, and, scantily robed as I was, rushed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... crammed to suffocation when Marcos and his father entered by this door. At the foot of the shallow steps descending from the porch to the floor of the Cathedral, Sor Teresa's white cap rose above the heads of the people. Here and there a nun's cap or the blue veil of a nursing sister showed itself ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... was dancing through his veins, and a choking sensation as of impending suffocation troubled him; the arteries in his temples beat painfully, and he lay ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... piped, fluted, trumpeted, brayed, thundered. It has played so loud that everybody was deafened, and so soft that nobody could hear. The pedals played for thunder, the flutes languished and coquetted, and the swell died away in delicious suffocation, like one singing a sweet song under the bed-clothes. Now it leads down a stupendous waltz with full brass, sounding very much as if, in summer, a thunderstorm should play, 'Come, Haste to the Wedding,' or 'Moneymusk.' Then come marches, galops, and hornpipes. An organ playing hornpipes ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... "this breathing world," and is usually strangled by the hands of its unnatural mother immediately upon its birth. The manner in which this act is said to be performed, is by filling up the mouth of the babe with rice, and holding its nostrils closed with the hand until suffocation is produced. ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... dinner was that which Mr. Gladstone delivered on the following day to the mass meeting of Leeds working men. Fully thirty thousand persons attended this meeting, which, like the dinner, took place in a temporary building. It was crowded to suffocation—literally to suffocation. When I arrived, shortly before the proceedings began, I found that the whole thirty thousand people were gasping for breath, and that many were fainting. We had quite forgotten to arrange ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... and he sank like a stone. He had resolved not to attempt to swim, and for the first moment kept his arms raised above his head, in order to sink the quicker. But, as the short, sharp agony of suffocation caught him, and the shock of the icy water dispelled the mental intoxication under which he was labouring, he desperately struck out, and, despite the weight of his irons, gained the surface for an instant. As he did so, all bewildered, and with the one savage instinct of self-preservation predominant ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... was not even in peril of death. She knew enough of medical lore to know that it was but the insensibility of exhaustion and suffocation; and she did not care that he should waken. She dropped her head over him, moving her hand softly among the masses of his curls, and watching the quickening beatings of his heart under the bare, strong nerves. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... circulation of the venous blood and the reflex action from the wet and chilling skin, usually starts the contractions of the diaphragm at once and life is insured. Among the obstacles to breathing may be named suffocation before or during birth from compression of the navel cord and the arrest of its circulation; the detachment of the fetal membranes from the womb before the calf is born; a too free communication between the two auricles (foramen ovale) of the heart by which ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... which she feared, Anna was curiously deliberate and calm. It did not seem to have struck her that her wisest course would have been to have first rushed in and roused her cousins, and have given them at least a chance of escape from burning or suffocation. Now, too, instead of running with her mother to their help, she crept into the bed and lay down, apparently overcome with terror, though with her ears very much on the alert for any sounds which might reach them. Perhaps she shrank from the sight that might meet her eyes ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... slowly got better (and, after all, I was not much damaged, as soon as I had got over the effects of the suffocation and terror of that awful night) I heard more about the fire. Permission was given me to see one friend a day for ten minutes at a time, and the reader may imagine the wild excitement ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... dresses of passing women and children—went suddenly black, indistinct, and confused to his sight, so that he seemed to be falling through some depth of dark and untenanted space, while the dust, thick, stifling, clinging, fell with him, encircling, enveloping him with a horror of suffocation, of crushing, impalpable, yet ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... to me, hot, panting, and trembling in every limb, after narrowly escaping suffocation, and when I wanted to take up the task where he had left off, he clung to me more tightly and would not let ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... curtsey to Mrs Dombey (who inclined her head without one word, and whose eye avoided everyone but Florence), and gave one last parting hug to her young mistress, and received her parting embrace in return. Poor Susan's face at this crisis, in the intensity of her feelings and the determined suffocation of her sobs, lest one should become audible and be a triumph to Mrs Pipchin, presented a series of the most extraordinary ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the blood. The feverishness and restlessness increase, the cough becomes incessant, the respiration extremely rapid and laboured, the nostrils dilating with each effort, and evidence of impending suffocation appears. The surface of the body is pale or dusky, the lips are livid, while breathing becomes increasingly difficult, and is attended with suffocative paroxysms which render the recumbent posture impossible. Unless speedy relief is obtained by successful ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... road between Dohnavur and Neyoor became to us, as the months passed and frequent journeys were made with little new babies! Sometimes those journeys were very wearisome. There was great heat, or a dust-laden wind filled the bandy to suffocation and blew out the spirit-lamp when we stopped to prepare the babies' food. How glad we used to be when, in the early evening, the white gleam of the stretch of water outside Nagercoil appeared in sight! We ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... the same way of God because He is called a Spirit. This idea of the spirit and the soul has come from the fact that spirit and wind in some languages are the same word; also, that when a man dies, he is said to give up the ghost or spirit; also, that life returns, after suffocation or swooning, when the spirit or breath of the lungs comes back. Because in these cases nothing but the breath or air is perceived, it is concluded from the eye and bodily sense that the spirit and soul of man after death ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the excitement, yet this day has been full of bitterness. "Come, G.," said Mrs. F. at breakfast, "leave your church for to-day and come with us to hear Dr. —— on the situation. He will convince you." "It is good to be convinced," I said; "I will go." The church was crowded to suffocation with the elite of New Orleans. The preacher's text was, "Shall we have fellowship with the stool of iniquity which frameth mischief as a law?" ... The sermon was over at last and then followed a prayer ... Forever blessed be the fathers of the Episcopal Church for giving us a fixed ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... grate from basement to attic had a fire lighted in it, and little pans of brimstone were burning in every room and hall in the house, while we, astonished, indignant, frightened, and amused, sat enduring the torments of vapor and sulphur baths to the point of suffocation. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... silent, looking inquiry, mistrusting speech. Aunt M'riar used a touch on his arm, and a nod towards the door of the little parlour, to get safe out of the children's hearing before risking speech, with that suffocation in her throat. Then when the door ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... of suffocation, while utterance intensifies experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley's Skylark, "singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth." Above all, the instinct for the Unseen is developed by exercise; obedience to our heavenly visions sharpens the eyes of the heart. Charles ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... a possibility what would be the gain? Rebellion means disorder—once the ventilating machinery of the city and the food processes were disturbed we should all perish in this trap—we should all die of suffocation and starvation." ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... letter, and then snatching up the other, devoured its contents almost at a glance, while her breath came in panting gasps and her heart seemed trying to burst through her throat. She could neither move nor cry out for a moment, but she sat like one turned into stone with that sense of suffocation oppressing her, and that horrible pain in her heart. She had thought the grave was closed, the old wound healed by time and silence; and now a little child had torn it open, and it was bleeding and throbbing again with a pang such as she had never felt before, while ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... through the mouth. They are apt to breathe noisily, especially when they eat and drink. They sleep with their mouth open, breathe hard and snore. They have attacks of slight suffocation sometimes, especially seen in young children. There may be difficulty in nursing in infants; they sleep poorly, toss about in bed, moan, talk, and night terrors are common. They may also sweat very much during sleep. A constant hacking or barking cough is a common symptom ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... they all retired to their apartments. Mary always slept with Ann, as she was subject to terrifying dreams; and frequently in the night was obliged to be supported, to avoid suffocation. They chatted about their new acquaintance in their own apartment, and, with respect to the ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... we endure squeezing and suffocation, and no morn was ever more welcome than that which revealed to us Paris. With matted hair, wild, glaring eyes, and dusty and dishevelled habiliments, we entered the gay capital, and blessed every stone upon which we placed our feet, in the ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... only supposed to visit the innocent and pure of conscience, but which in truth just as often refreshes the senses of the depraved and dissolute, provided they are satisfied with evil as their good. How many hours he slept he did not know, but he was wakened at last by a terrible sense of suffocation, and he sat up gasping for breath, to find the cell full of thick smoke and burning stench. The flickering reflection of the lamp was gone, and as he instinctively leaped from his bed and grasped his clothes, he heard the monastery bell above him swinging to and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of the central lunatic asylum by fire, during the night of the 18th inst., causing the death, by suffocation, of six of the patients, and incalculable distress and suffering to the remainder, will require investigation and prompt action on your part. In rebuilding the asylum, the erection of a fire-proof building will occur to you as alike the suggestion ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... was for flight and, safely on the road again, she found her heart beating to suffocation; she was filled with an indignation that almost brought her to tears; it was as though Aunt Rose had deliberately robbed her of treasure—Aunt Rose, who was almost middle-aged! For a moment she despised that fair, handsome ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... show them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those whose change of heart has had less violent accompaniments. On the whole, unconsciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and suffocation, must be simply ascribed to the subject's having a large subliminal region, involving nervous instability. This is often the subject's own view of the matter afterwards. One of Starbuck's correspondents writes, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... fiat upon his back, for the atmosphere of the wigwam was too warm for covering, his ponderous belly rising and falling like a wave of the sea, and his throat giving forth that peculiar rattling of the glottis, which might be mistaken for suffocation. The boys certainly would have been outside, basking in the genial sunshine, had not their mother, Keewaygooshturkumkankangewock, positively denied them that coveted privilege. The commands of the father might be trampled upon with impunity, but the ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... struggle. In my fifteenth year, Mr. Lindsay, when a thin, loose-jointed boy, I did the work of a man, and strained my unknit and overtoiled sinews as if life and death depended on the issue, till oft, in the middle of the night, I have had to fling myself from my bed to avoid instant suffocation—an effect of exertion so prolonged and so premature. Nor has the man exerted himself less heartily than the boy—in the roughest, severest labours of the field, I have never yet met a competitor. But my labours have ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Bright's disease, etc., where the patients were so feeble as to require assistance in walking, many of them under medical treatment, and the results have been all that we could ask—no irritation, suffocation, nor depression. We heartily commend it to all as the anaesthetic of the age." Dr. Morrill, of Boston, administered Mayo's anaesthetic to his wife with delightful results when "her lungs were so badly disorganized, that the administration of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... I wake up with the same sense of vain struggle against a mountain tide which is about to overwhelm me. I shall die by suffocation, and the suffocation has begun; the progress it has already made ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... record the death of one of the crew, William Nicholls, who, for some time past, and particularly during the last three days, had been suffering from a dropsical complaint; his death was occasioned by suffocation, having very imprudently laid down with his head to leeward while we were under sail: this poor fellow had been for nearly three months on our sick list; he was a native of Norfolk Island, and, when in health, had been one of my ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... to suffocation; and, as it sometimes happens on such occasions, the greatest crowd was close about the doors, from the fact that few saw, on their first entrance, where there might be possible spaces into which they could wedge themselves. Yet ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... passages, and formalities, till presently Beatrice found herself in a kind of bird-cage, crowded to suffocation with every ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... me only once more. The reason is, that I was looking at your cousin over there, and calculating the chances of her surviving suffocation." ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... ground shelters frogs. But to hear all this you must go to the old jungle, where the tall trees stand near together and shut out the light of day, and almost the air, for there is a painful sense of suffocation in the dense wood. ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... barren been called "pregnant," the chill of death "the breath of life," the atrophied "pulsating," that when we really come upon a work with beating heart we find it difficult to give it place that has not already been stuffed to suffocation with misplaced dummies. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... plague me too. For instance, TRUBERRY, whom I meet occasionally, has a wild and venomous habit of relating to me his infinitesimal jokelets. That I could pardon. But when, having related one, he bursts, as he always does, into a helpless suffocation of purple laughter, the savage within me awakes and I murder TRUBERRY in fancy to an accompaniment of refined and protracted tortures. Once, as I helped him on with his overcoat, he joked and exploded. My fingers were horribly near his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... Eglantine will create another Pun-ic war," said Sparkle. "I move that we have him crossed in the buttery{32} for making us laugh during dinner, to the great injury of our digestive organs, and the danger of suffocation." "What! deprive an Englishman of his right to battel{33}" said Echo: "No; I would sooner inflict the orthodox fine of a double bumper of bishop." "Bravo!" said Horace: "then I plead guilty, and ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... to subscribe had accomplished comparatively little by obtaining receipts or state notes; it was still necessary to go to the Hotel de Nevers, where the subscriptions were received. The entrances there were crowded to suffocation. The hall servants made considerable sums by subscribing for those who could not get through the crowd to the offices. Some adventurers, assuming the livery of Law, performed this service, charging and obtaining a very large fee. The most humble employees ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... with gigantic force from the quay wall. Before the base, cheating, faithless scoundrel could make one exclamation, he was plunged into the Liffey—even before one mental aspiration for mercy, he was in the throes of suffocation! The heavy splash in the water caught the attention of those whose approach had alarmed the murderers, and seeing a man and woman running, a pursuit commenced, which ended by Newgate having two fresh tenants ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... thought of this when the sense of suffocation had impelled her to seek the air, to rush where it might blow over her and through her, lift her hair about her throbbing temples and help her to forget. Oh God—Omnipotent ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... sensation of lying at the bottom of a steep hill—on a sharp inclined plane, as it were, with his feet uppermost—a sense of suffocation, too, as if his throat had been full of blood. There seemed to him to be blood in his eyes also; and he could only see things in a dim cloudy way—a room—what room he could not remember—one candle flaring on the mantelpiece, and the light of an ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... ministry; and spoke with such vehemence as produced a violent headache, which obliged him to retire. He underwent proper evacuations, and seemed to recover; but next day, in the evening, became lethargic, and being seized with a suffocation, instantly expired. The king deeply regretted the death of this favourite minister, which was the more unfortunate as it happened at such a critical conjuncture; and he appointed lord Town-shend to fill his place of secretary. Earl Stanhope was survived but a few days by the other ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... in the rear—yea, the very floor he trod—the very table on which he leant—the very hearth, dull and fireless as it was, opposite his gaze—all took a familiar meaning in his eye, and breathed a household voice into his ear. And when he entered the inner room, how, even to suffocation, were those strange, half sad, yet not all bitter emotions increased. There was the bed on which his father had rested on the night before—what? perhaps his murder! The bed, probably a relic from ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... closely covering the chimney, by the aid of some half-rotten chips a dense smoke was raised, the doors and windows being closed at the same time to prevent its escape, and in an instant the apartment became filled to the point of suffocation—too much so for the Indians, who gladly ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... location was some nine or ten thousand feet above the sea. The lightness of the air gave some inconvenience and many surprises to new comers. They would get out of breath in a few minutes in walking up a hill. I would wake up several times in a night with a feeling of suffocation, draw deep breaths for a few minutes and thus get relief before going to sleep again. It took ten minutes to boil eggs, two to three hours for potatoes, and beans for dinner were usually put on the fire at ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... the effect of stuffing with green fruit to utter suffocation manifested itself in a general and alarming cholera-morbus among the junior Triangles, and the whole house was up ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the element which, in deep mines and vaults, causes almost instant insensibility and suffocation to persons subjected to its influences, and instantly extinguishes the flame of any light lowered into it. The normal quantity of this gas contained in the air we breathe is 0.04; one per cent, of it causes distress in breathing; two per cent, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... of all this, however, from the point of view of the Slavs of Bulgaria and Serbia, Turkish rule was synonymous with suffocation. If the Turks were all that their greatest admirers think them the history of the Balkan peninsula in the nineteenth century would have been very different from what it has been, namely, one ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... needs to be a continual supply of fresh air sent down by means of a tube connected with the upper air. Death by drowning and death by suffocation, both threaten constantly, and each is held off, one by the air, and the other by the continual supply of fresh air. The man's ability to work and his very life depend upon the uninterrupted connection with the fresh ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... knives and forks are laid out upon the long deal table. The little coffee-room—so called, though whiskey-room, or punch-room, or porter-room would be much the more appropriate name, unless indeed there is a kind of "lucus a non lucendo" propriety in the appellation—is full nearly to suffocation. There is not an unoccupied chair or corner of a ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... boiling at 36.5 deg. C. It has a pungent odour. It is best administered, as in the case of ethyl chloride, by limiting the amount of air during inhalation. The induction is much slower than in the case of the last two drugs, and it is accompanied by a feeling of suffocation, owing to the pungent odour of the ether. On that account the anaesthetic is best started with nitrous oxide or ethyl chloride. The recovery is always marked by some nausea and very frequently by vomiting. The mortality is small during the actual operation, but fatalities from respiratory ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... themselves so effectually under a roof or canopy constructed of their own shields, in the manner practised in war previous to the exclusive use of fire-arms, that they were enabled to approach so near the mosque, as to set fire to its doors; when its tenants, menaced with suffocation, made a desperate sally, in which many perished, and the remainder surrendered at discretion. The prisoners thus made were all massacred on the spot, without distinction, of sex or age, according to the Saracen accounts. But ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... benefactors to the human race by introducing stiff cravattes and endless swathes of linen round the region of jugular veins and carotid arteries; if a man wishes to be comfortable any where, it is surely in his neck; let old gentlemen with scrofulous chins muffle themselves up to suffocation if they please, but why should we, who have nothing the matter with us, and wish to turn our heads ad libitum, be thus girt about and half stifled? Our climate, no doubt, requires some protection for the neck, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... this resolution with pain. M. Greffulhe became every day fatter and subject to all the inconveniences of extreme obesity, and died of suffocation when he was ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... thought of that,' he said, 'and I believe that I can manage to let him down gently, so that he shall die of suffocation, instead of having his neck put out of joint. I ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... being in too much of a hurry after his first glimpse of the danger to take further interest in those on board The Firefly. The result of Morley's decision was that those on the pursuing yacht saw clouds of smoke pouring out of the funnel, and knew that the furnaces were being crammed to suffocation. There was a shout of joy from The Firefly's crew, for ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... point of honour, and transmit that spirit to their latest posterity. This is just the effect your disqualifying laws have produced. They have fed Dr. Rees, and Dr. Kippis; crowded the congregations of the Old Jewry to suffocation: and enabled every sublapsarian, and superlapsarian, and semi- pelagian clergyman, to build himself a neat brick chapel, and live with some distant resemblance to ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... burdened with love. The passionate tremor that shakes the bird's throat at mating-time seemed to shake the unseen instruments that now discoursed strange melody, and Gervase, listening dreamily, felt a curious contraction and aching at his heart and a sense of suffocation in his throat, combined with an insatiate desire to seize in his arms the mysterious Ziska, with her dark fathomless eyes and slight, yet voluptuous, form,—to drag her to his breast ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... 1479. Asphyxiation (suffocation) by Gas. Asphyxiation by gas is treated the same as in the case of drowning, omitting, of course, the operation of getting the ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... all was suffocation and horror. Unwounded, but buried and battered, with his musket torn from his grasp, Fritz struggled out through the writhing heap of humanity, and saw that the head of the column had fallen back for a breathing space, ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... three four-legged creatures stood on their hind legs and, joining paws and wings with the chicken, went through a solemn Alice-in-Wonderland-like dance. This was always terminated abruptly by some animal or another's being overcome by mirth or suffocation, and rushing unceremoniously back into the cage to recuperate. When the Happy Family was again reunited, Mary announced that they could also sing, and, each in a different key, the creatures burst forth with the "Animal Song," dear to the hearts ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... Emperor was induced to read it. He underwent a new sensation, and, in the exuberance of his delight, summoned the author to a grand feast. When the Antique heard of this, she swallowed her chopsticks in a fit of rage and spite, and died of suffocation. Mien-yaun was then satisfied. He went to the dinner. The noble and the mighty again lavished their attentions upon him, but he turned from them with disgust. He saw through the flimsy tissue of flattery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... echoed to the dreadful sounds of hissing. Sometimes she had drunk feverishly of the very doubtful water against which Emile had so often cautioned her. When it was nearly dawn she gave in, and lay huddled up on the bed, half-delirious with the pain and feeling of suffocation. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... that, for some shorter or longer period of the evening, their parties are pretty sure to be overcrowded. Soon after midnight, it may be, all the world and his wife will just have arrived together, and the abomination of suffocation sets in. The staircase is congested and impassable: the dancing area in the ball-room is encroached upon till a space about as big as a dining-table is all the dancers have to dance in. At which crisis ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... congestion of the terminals of the bronchial tubes, by which entrance of air into the cells is made difficult, even in some cases to the point of suffocation. This condition as a disease may be called bronchial catarrh, as in most cases there is such a condition of the larger tubes as to cause the habitual raising of a discharge. As to the disease itself, you have only ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... know a single word; after an examination I should have had to stand last of the forty scholars educated at this little college, and I should have been held unworthy to sleep along with them in one of those little double closets, where more delicate youths would have died of suffocation the very first night. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... dispossessed swallows. The drama was complete and terrible; the vengeance inexorable and fatal. The unfortunate sparrows not only expiated their theft in the nest they had taken possession of, whence they could not escape, and where suffocation and hunger were gradually killing them, but they heard the songs of love from the two swallows, who thus so cruelly made them wipe out the crime of their theft. During the fight the female remained alone, languishing and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now, scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy wave. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging; the laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... made Michael shiver; but he knew by experience how intolerable was that sense of suffocation, and he stood by patiently until that ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Sunday in February this year I found myself surrounded by a black, thick London fog—almost as dense as the blackest midnight, and an overpowering sense of suffocation creeping over me—in the midst of an encampment of Gipsies at Canning Town, and, acting upon their kind invitation, I crept into one of their tents, and there found about a dozen Gipsy men of all sizes, ages, and complexions, squatting upon peg shavings. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... the danger of suffocation precluded the building of an adequate fire, and the miserable night wore interminably upon the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... in cases of the suffocation of the womb, a woman may live thirty days without breathing. I know that a very excellent woman was six-and-thirty hours without giving any sign of life. Everybody thought she was dead, and they wanted to enshroud ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Nisida herself plunged into the river with the wild hope of aiding her lover to conquer his foe, or to rescue him from the grasp which the bandit maintained upon him with the tenacity that was strengthened rather than impaired by the agony of suffocation. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... Oh, the delight of it, this rapid passing through crisp air! and how well I was doing it, ten—twenty—fifty yards in safety! Why, it was quite easy. How disappointed dear old Billy would be! Then, suddenly, a check, a whirl through the air, a sense of chill and suffocation, blindness, deafness. What had happened?—Where was I?—What was this hard thing in my mouth? Why was I standing on my head? Where on earth ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... first indication of a mishap, found his chief lying in collapse on the lever platform. Walker promptly opened certain levers which allowed the steam to escape freely; then he carried his comrade out of the spume to the deck. It was too late. Partial suffocation had placed too great a strain on a diseased heart; by the time Dr. Christobal was summoned, a brave man ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... attempted to reason on the probable cause of my being thus entombed. I could summon up no connected chain of reflection, and, sinking on the floor, gave way, unresistingly, to the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment crowded upon me as the prominent disasters to be encountered. At length there returned to me some portion of presence of mind. I arose, and felt with my fingers for the seams or cracks of the aperture. Having found them, I examined ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... staircase on the other side. I had frequently been cautioned not to leave my windows open, as someone might get in. But, as I always slept with an open window, winter and summer, I thought I would take the risk rather than endure a feeling of suffocation night after night. The blinds were solid, and to close them was to exclude all the air, so I left them open about a foot, braced by an iron hook. A favorite resort for a pet donkey was under my window, where he had uniformly slept in profound silence. But one glorious moonlight night, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... hole through a sound apple (integrum malum digito terebraret), and wound the head of a child or even a youth with a fillip, (caput pueri, vel etiam adolescentis, talitro vulneraret.) His excesses must, however, have enervated his frame long before his death by suffocation. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... air, and it moved very rapidly.... We all lay flat on the ground ... till it was blown over. The meteor, or purple haze, which I saw was, indeed, passed, but the light air which still blew was of a heat to threaten suffocation." He goes on to say that he did not recover the effect of the sandblast on his chest for nearly two years (Brace's Life and Travels, ed. 1830, p. 470).—Note to ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... rug were too circumspect for him. Surrounded by the comforts of middle-class respectability, and profoundly oppressed, even in his youth, by the Puritan ideals of the household, he sometimes experienced a sense of suffocation. He wanted free air and he wanted free life; he wanted the lights, the lights, and the music. He abandoned the bourgeoisie irrevocably. He went forth in a May twilight, carrying the evening beefsteak with him, and ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... everywhere filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed: and when I learned that the moving picture houses were full to the doors every day and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera, and religious concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country was suffering from an unparalleled depression. This diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It has been freely estimated that at the time I refer to almost two million men ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... a suffocation of strange delight he could find no word that seemed the right word, and left it to silence, which, perhaps was best. He looked at the road, also, as if he would search with her there for grains of gold, or for lost hearts which leap out of maidens' breasts, ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... sent for in haste to a woman in desperate illness. She came, and found a young Jewess, with a ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women friends in a state of raging delirium. The room, was full to suffocation of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns. It had been Marcella's first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an instant. The noisy ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... giving light to the alley, and at no time did this serve much more than to make darkness visible; at present the blind man would have fared as well in that retreat as he who had eyes, and the marvel was how those who lived there escaped suffocation. In the Gardens themselves volumes of dense smoke every now and then came driven along by the cold gusts; the air had a stifling ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... True, they might sometimes have broken a bone, or plucked out an eye, and been silent; but they never grappled iron and whalebone into the very nerves and life-blood of their system. They might possibly have passed a dagger too deeply info the heart, and died; but they never drew a ligature of suffocation around it, and expected to live! They never tied up the mouths of the millions of air-vessels in the lungs, and then taxed them to the full measure of action and respiration. Even Pharaoh only demanded bricks without straw for a short time; but the fashionable lady asks ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... them, as hardly believing the good news. In another instant, as the truth flashed across their delighted minds, they rushed upon me in a body, and before I had time for self-defence, I found myself in the arms of a naked beauty who kissed me almost to suffocation, and with a most unpleasant embrace licked both my eyes with her tongue. The sentries came to my assistance, together with the servants, who withstood the grateful crowd; otherwise both my wife and myself would have been subjected to this ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... pouring down the cabin-stairs and swamping the ship. If they were kept closed for more than two days, it was no uncommon thing to find two or three children or invalids among the unfortunate emigrants dead of slow suffocation; and many of those who were alive would later have pneumonia and other inflammations of the lungs. On one or two horrible occasions, when the crew had had a hard fight to save the ship and were afraid to open ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... made no doubt that once his limbs were freed he would try to kill me. The others were still asleep while I tiptoed over to his corner. At first sight I got a fearsome shock, for I thought he was dead of suffocation. He had worked the gag out of his mouth, and lay as still as a corpse. But soon I saw that he was sleeping quietly, and in his slumbers the madness had died out of his face. He looked like any other sailorman, a trifle ill-favoured of countenance, and dirty ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... recited over him the names graven upon the seal-ring of Solomon David son (on whom be the Peace!), for this is what we use to do with children newly born among us; and now thou needst not fear for him drowning or suffocation in all the oceans of the world, if he should go down into them; for, even as ye walk on the land, so walk we in the sea." Then he pulled out of his pocket a casket, graven and sealed and, breaking open the seals, emptied it; whereupon there fell from ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... he was ejected into blazing, blinding light, into a suffocation of wild water as the bullet in an ancient Terran rifle might have been fired at no specific target. Gasping, beaten, more than half-drowned, Shann was pummeled by waves, literally driven up on a rocky surface which skinned his body cruelly. He lay there, his arms moving feebly until ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... is a stillness abnormal, unnatural, accompanied by a scorching heat, with an atmosphere so close as to threaten suffocation. ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... The labored breathing of suffocation and of lung diseases is due to the excessive stimulation of this center, caused by the excess of carbon dioxid in the blood. Various mental influences from the brain itself, as the emotions of alarm or joy or distress, modify the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... with his sighs and jubilations with the utmost coolness, when his companions suddenly saw him reel forward, and he and his horse fell down in a lump. Was it giddiness, or worse still, suffocation, caused by the high temperature? They ran to him, exclaiming: "Paganel! Paganel! what is ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... brought the thing so near to Cleggett that it seemed as if he could touch the contorted faces; he could see the tall man's neck muscles work as if that person were panting; he could see the signs of suffocation in Heinrich's countenance. The fact that he saw so plainly and yet could hear no sound of the struggle somehow added ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... run-away slave, who was for a considerable time, closely boxed up, a gentleman remarked that if the poor fellow had only known that a renewal of the air was necessary to the support of life, he could not have lived there an hour without suffocation: I have frequently thought that if the occupants of the rooms I have been describing, could only know as much, they would be ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... suicide, the best means of concealing it, and all the time the greed for it was increasing until his veins seemed to run with a liquid fire of monstrous passion, the passion of a mortal man for his own immolation upon fate, and all the time that sense of intolerable suffocation by existence itself, by the air of the ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the court was crowded to suffocation. All eyes were bent on the prisoner. She rose, calm and quiet, and begged leave to say a few words ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... of its very massiveness, like the mountains. Nothing human is so vast. Nowhere on earth have men conceived such dwellings. Columns after columns, higher and more massive than towers, follow one another so closely, in an excess of accumulation, that they produce a feeling almost of suffocation. They mount into the clear sky and sustain there traverses of stone which you scarcely dare to contemplate. One hesitates to advance; a feeling comes over you that you are become infinitesimally small and as easy ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... compare opposing desires or aversions, and that which is the most interesting at length prevails, and produces action. Similar to this, where two pains oppose each other, the stronger or more interesting one produces action; as in pleurisy the pain from suffocation would produce expansion of the lungs, but the pain occasioned by extending the inflamed membrane, which lines the chest, opposes this expansion, and one ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... use the Owl for moving obscurely from city to city. This particular train is bound south to Washington, and at least half its tenants are citizens of colour. Even the endless gayety of our dusky brother is not proof against the venomous exhaustion of that boxed-in suffocation. The ladies of his race are comfortably prepared for the hardships of the route. They wrap themselves in huge fur coats and all have sofa cushions to recline on. Even in an all-night session of Congress you will hardly note so ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... the House of Commons, which everybody agrees was such a scene of violence and excitement as never had been exhibited within those walls. Tavistock told me he had never heard anything at all like it, and to his dying day should not forget it. The House was crammed to suffocation; every violent sentiment and vituperative expression was received with shouts of approbation, yet the violent speakers were listened to with the greatest attention.[7] Tom Duncombe made one of his blustering Radical harangues, full of every sort of impertinence, which was received ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... when her house was burning Mme. Cherrier, who was coming out of the cellar to escape suffocation, was drenched with an inflammable liquid by some soldiers who were sprinkling the walls. One of them told her that it was benzine. She then ran behind a dunghill to hide herself with her parents, but the fire raisers dragged ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... 1914, Embourg was stricken into ruin. On the same day the electric lighting apparatus of Fort Boncelles having been destroyed, the few living men of its garrison fought through the following night in darkness, and in momentary danger of suffocation from gases emitted ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... leaned forward in her chair with an attention so breathless, a sympathy so quick, and an admiration so artless and unconscious that in an instant she divided with the speaker the attention of the whole assemblage. It was very hot; the court was crowded to suffocation; even the open windows revealed a crowd of faces outside the building, ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... throat almost suffocated me; I had to struggle for breath and life. After an hour or more of the most acute suffering, my dear wife remembered the lemon mixture, and called the servant to get up and bring it. It was just in time. I was black in the face with suffocation; but this compound relieved, and, in fact, restored me. I was greatly exhausted with the effort and struggle for life, and after two hours I fell asleep. I was able to rise in the morning and breathe freely, though my chest ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... had marked them in health, the outlaw's fingers fastened upon his hairy throat. The long, thin hands clamped themselves upon his neck, and for a moment Monkey Mack was helpless in the agonies of suffocation. Then his left hand pointed the revolver at Ryder's ear; there was a sharp report, and the outlaw fell limply, and rolled back upon the flat water-worn rock, his shattered head to the stone, his arms out thrown, his lifeless face turned up ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... no time to exchange further words, for wreaths of thick smoke were descending, filling the place where we stood, and we had quickly to make our way down to avoid suffocation. ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... leave me a minute's peace; they are wearing me out and my health is suffering in consequence. Although the air in the interior of Back Cup is pure, I become subject to attacks of suffocation, and I feel as though my prison walls were falling upon me and crushing me under their weight. I am, besides, oppressed by the feeling that I am cut off from the world, as effectually as though I were no longer upon our planet,—for I know nothing of ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... where they had left their wherry. A few hurried words told them the fearful story. Maurice Kirkwood was lying in the chamber to which every eye was turned, unable to move, doomed to a dreadful death. All that could be hoped was that he would perish by suffocation rather than by the flames, which would soon be upon him. The man who had attended him had just tried to reach his chamber, but had reeled back out of the door, almost strangled by the smoke. A thousand ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... SUFFOCATION FROM NOXIOUS GASES, ETC.—Remove to the fresh air; dash cold vinegar and water in the face, neck, and breast; keep up the warmth of the body; if necessary, apply mustard poultices to the soles of the feet and to the spine, and try artificial ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... skirts or made the blue boots dance a sort of jig upon the door. Hanging was evidently not a painful operation, for she smiled contentedly, and looked as if the red ribbon around her neck was not uncomfortably tight; therefore, if slow suffocation suited her, who else had any right to complain? So a pleasing silence reigned, not even broken by a snore from Dinah, the top of whose turban alone was visible above the coverlet, or a cry from baby Jane, though her bare feet stuck ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... heroes, and the Stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their soul, which they conceived to be a fire, stood probably in fear of an easier way of death; wherein the water, entering the possessions of air, makes a temporary suffocation, and kills as it were without a fever. Surely many, who have had the spirit to destroy themselves, have not been ingenious in the contrivance thereof.'—'Cato is much to be pitied, who mangled himself with poniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carried his delivery, not in the point ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... the attempt, and was accordingly rowed to the right bank of the river, when I took to the swamp, hungry and savage enough to have eaten any alligator fool-hardy enough to assail me. After a hard scramble, together with two or three plunges waist deep, I escaped suffocation, and gained one of the banks dividing and draining these vast fields: following this, unimpeded by other difficulty, I reached, after half an hour's march, the high land; and, attracted by the sounds of merriment, ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... John X., who was staying in the Lateran Palace, murdered his brother Pietro before his eyes, and dragged him through the streets of Rome to the castle. The unfortunate Pope lingered awhile in a dark dungeon, and was ultimately killed by suffocation. Marozia, perhaps to dispel the suspicions of a violent death, allowed him to be buried with due honors near the middle door of the Lateran, at the foot of the nave. His gravestone was seen and described ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... latter word, from the treatment of Captain Boycott of Co. Mayo in 1880, seems to have supplied a want, for Fr. boycotter and Ger. boycottieren have become every-day words. Burke was hanged at Edinburgh in 1829 for murdering people by suffocation in order to dispose of their bodies to medical schools. We now use the verb only of "stifling" discussion, but in the Ingoldsby Legends it still ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... wind disturbed the glassy wave—all nature appeared hushed into one horrible calm. It was not until the shades of night were covering the solitude that Francisco ventured forth from his retreat; but he found little relief; there was an unnatural closeness in the air—a suffocation unusual even in those climes. Francisco cast his eyes up to the vault of heaven, and was astonished to find that there were no stars visible—a gray mist covered the whole firmament. He directed his view downwards to the horizon, and that, too, was ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... guard it and they air it, and give themselves a world of trouble, and yet for all their wealth they cannot eat more than they have stomach for—they would burst asunder if they did—nor wear more clothes than they can carry—they would die of suffocation—and so their extra wealth means nothing but extra work. [22] For my part, I serve the gods, and I stretch out my hands for more and more; only when I have got what is beyond my own requirements I piece out the wants of my friends, and so, helping my fellows, I purchase their love ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... broken by the monotonous voices of the bankers, or by an occasional angry ejaculation from some unlucky subaltern who saw his last dollar drawn into the vortex, without any means occurring to him whereby to replenish his empty pockets. The other apartments were thronged to suffocation; even the balconies were filled with idlers, leaning over the balustrade, puffing their cigars and listening to a band of amateur musicians, who performed a serenade, in honour of his late victory, under ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... unpack one's valise for that? And anyhow would not the atmosphere of the picture be marred, the pose of the explorer be rendered unnatural by his consciousness of insincerity and his fear of imminent suffocation? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... resorted to. Suffocation, from Substances in the Throat. Common Cuts. Wounds of Arteries, and other severe Cuts. Bruises. Sprains. Broken Limbs. Falls. Blows on the Head. Burns. Drowning. Poisons:—Corrosive Sublimate; Arsenic, or Cobalt; Opium; Acids; Alkalies. Stupefaction from ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... style of Robinson Crusoe. Saw a bloody cravat on the end of the log of which his house was built. We intend to call and see the balance of the fraternity out of curiosity. Traveled over prairies just burned and through woods on fire. Smoke and dust, together with the want of water, almost produced suffocation, families sending miles for water to drink. The prairies extend for miles, indeed, as far as the eye can reach, level as a plank floor. The soil generally is a bed of manure, the land uncultivated and without any person to claim it. The few inhabitants ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... mastered him. The sisters came next, with audible sobs, and cheeks suffused with tears. A moment or two they gazed upon the expressionless face of their dear little playfellow, and then the coffin lid was shut down, while each one present experienced a momentary feeling of suffocation. ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... But they must be near water line, or the rascals could never have made 'em. Unluckily we can't raise her to her water line; and I hate to send men down into that slime. It might mean suffocation. ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... to the side wall and raised themselves up, gasping for fresh air. Their senses wavered and swooned in that half-suffocation and slowly they comprehended that they were still alive and that the dust was settling. "Are you all right?" they called to each other in acute unison, their voices betraying a great apprehension, and then, reassured for the instant, they sagged weakly against the walls and each reached ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Miss Rossano and her father in the vestry of a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. The room was crammed almost to suffocation, and there was such a crowd outside that it took us ten minutes' hard fighting to reach the neighboring school-room in which the public meeting was to be held. The way was cleared at last, and a score or so of us filed on to the platform, which was erected at one end ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... the rose light, and Stanley limped with the pain of his bruised leg: but both had recovered from their partial suffocation as completely ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... perished in Germany, being stifled under professor Bopp and Sanscrit, Professor Semler and Scepticism, Professor Jahn and Jacobinism, and the whole vast feather-bed suffocation of Professor Kotzebue and Comedy. But in England it was endeared to us by associations "deep in every truly British heart," as the chairmen of our tavern parties say over their third bottle. We had seen it for ages gallantly climbing the slippery heights of the kingly crown on show boards, carriages, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... his wife would appear, holding their little son by the hand, and standing on the opposite side of a river that rolled between, beckoning him to cross. But whenever he made the attempt the waves would close over his head, and he awoke with a sense of suffocation and gasping for breath. At another time the scene of the drowning fisherman would be repeated, but with innumerable variations. Sometimes, in some way or other, Holden would be mixed up with it, sometimes Faith, and sometimes, most horrible of all, he ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Suffocation threatened Mont with a painful end, yet he was so weak and prostrate that he seemed unable to make ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... least resistance, and was conscious of nothing but of being rapidly borne along in somebody's arms. When this hazy view of things passed away, her new sensation was, the intensely uncomfortable one of being on the verge of suffocation. She made one frantic but futile effort to free herself and scream for help, but the strong arms held her with most loving tightness, and her cry was drowned in the hot atmosphere within the shawl, and never passed beyond it. Most ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... sent to prison, and cruel persecutions were exercised everywhere. A committee of public safety was established and immediately the prisons of Caracas and Puerto Cabello were filled with men, many of whom died of suffocation. Into a dungeon in Puerto Cabello, a Spaniard threw five flasks of alkali, thus causing the death by asphyxiation of all ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... of grief which had overwhelmed Melissa began now to subside, as the waves of the ocean gradually cease their tumultuous commotion, after the turbulent winds are laid asleep. Deep sobs and long drawn sighs succeeded to a suffocation of tears. The irritation of her feelings had caused a more than usual glow upon her cheek, which faded away as she became composed, until a livid paleness spread itself over her features. Alonzo feared that the delicacy ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... paunch, in consequence of the animal's having eaten large quantities of wet grass, luxuriant clover, turnips, etc. An accumulation of gas is the result of this fermentation, which greatly disturbs the haunch and left side of the belly, causing much pain to the animal, and frequently threatening suffocation. ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... head far out between the rungs of his chair-back, and affects to be unable to withdraw it again, making movements of simulated suffocation. The Brat is stealthily walking on his knees across the space that intervenes between them to Barbara, with intent, as I too well know, of unseemly pinchings. If father unbutton his eyes, or move his head one barley-corn, we are all dead men. I hold my breath in a nervous agony. Thank ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... furiously angry—at myself, at the mantel door, at everything. I did not fear suffocation; before the thought had come to me I had already seen a gleam of light from the two small ventilating pipes in the roof. They supplied air, but nothing else. The room itself was shrouded ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened—ages later, it seemed to him—by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fibre of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... to the same degree as Shot, who, within an hour, had a head as large as a small calf's, and his eyes were completely closed. I had not the slightest hope of his recovery, as his throat had swollen to an enormous size, which threatened suffocation. I could do nothing for the poor dogs but oil their mouths, although knew that the poison would assuredly spread throughout the system. The dogs had been bitten at about 3.40 P.M. At 8 P.M. (our dinner-hour) Shot was a shapeless mass, and his limbs were stiff; the skin of his ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... sort of views to which suffocation is the most appropriate end," snapped the School-Master. "Any man who asserts, as you have asserted, that life on a canal-boat has its advantages, ought to go further, and prove his sincerity by ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... precept and illustration to regard themselves as dead to the world; that they should be held practically incommunicado, no visitors, letters at most but once a month, no conversation between prisoners—silence, solitude, suffocation in this terrible quicksand of jail for months, years, or a lifetime, at the mercy of men to whom mercy is a jest. Such a regimen is still in force at many jails, and when combined with contract labor, nothing in the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... real suffocation for above a quarter of an hour in the tub, I was moved to the bed and wrapped in blankets. — There I lay a full hour panting with intolerable heat; but not the least moisture appearing on my skin, I was carried to my own chamber, and passed the night without ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Khan's fort. How I reached the spot where Mahomed Akber was receiving the gratulations of the multitude I know not, but I remember a fanatic rushing on me, and twisting his hand in my collar until I became exhausted from suffocation. I must do Mahomed Akber the Justice to say, that, finding the Ghazees bent on my slaughter, even after I had reached his stirrup, he drew his sword and laid about him right manfully, for my conductor and Meerza Baoodeen Khan were obliged to press me up against the wall, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... contrast with the lurid creatures of his imagination come like a draught of cold water to a traveller in a tropical waste of sand and thorns. It is almost as if the poet himself were oppressed by the suffocation of the atmosphere that he has created, and, gasping for breath, sought relief by summoning up to remembrance the sweet security of pastoral life. So, when the devils are shrunk to enter Pandemonium, they ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh |
