"Devastating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was seen the demon had checked his steed and backed him, so that he had escaped without injury, and he stood at the edge of the flaming circle watching the progress of the devastating element; but at last, finding that his pursuers had taken heart and were approaching him, he bestirred himself, and rode round ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... into which powder had entered but little, and this was the introduction of huge torpedo shells, which did nor rely for their efficiency upon the dispersion of the pieces of the shell, but upon the devastating force of the bursting charge itself upon everything within the radius of its explosive effect. It is in this field that we may look for the most remarkable results, and it is here that the absolute power of the explosive thrown is of the utmost importance, provided that it can be safely used. Attention ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... this quarter struck terror into the Faliscians also, and a sally from the camp opportunely made put them to flight, thrown into disorder as they now were. The victors, having then pursued them in their retreat, made great slaughter amongst them. And soon after those who had been devastating the territory of Capena, having met them as it were by chance, entirely cut off the survivors of the fight as they were straggling through the country: and many of the Veientians in their retreat to ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... has been but lightly touched by the devastating hand of man. A log road cuts the forest here and there and sometimes we saw a train of ox-carts winding through the trees; but the primitive beauty of the mountains remains unmarred, save where a hillside has been ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... we have one supreme and devastating study of the illiterate minor official in Bumble. That one figure lit up and still lights the whole problem of Poor Law administration for the English reading community. It was a translation of well-meant regulations and pseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... great intermediate region, the fierce Cachalot inclines toward the south, devastating the warm waters. On the contrary, the Free Whale fears the warm waters,—we should rather say, that they did, formerly, fear them,—they have become so scarce. They are never found in the warm southern current; it is that fact that led to the current being noticed, and thence to the discovery ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. He sought to regain his lost dignity ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Robert Bruce. Prince Edward, a master of the art of war, although still young, and already marked by that sternness of character which distinguished his latter days, was in chief command, and he pursued his devastating course through the Midlands. Nottingham and Leicester, whence his great opponent derived his title, opened their gates to him. He marched thence for London, but Earl Simon threw himself into the city, returning from Rochester, which he had cleverly taken by means of fire ships ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... the rest, fought with spanner and hammer and whatever improvised weapon they may have found. "Come on, give 'em hell!" The three Earthmen dashed out, weapons in hand. But friend and foe were so intermingled that they could not use the devastating ray of their hand-guns. The fighting Venusians were vanishing under a tossing sea of yellow imps. And still the dwarfs poured forth from the ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... stagnation in business, followed by the closing of factories and penury among laborers. To others it means three dollars a day for unskilled labor, fire, clothes, and something to eat. Again, if one wished to present the horrors of devastating disease, in the South he would mention yellow fever, in the North smallpox; but to a lady who saw six little brothers and sisters dead from it in one week, three carried to the graveyard on the hillside one chill November morning, all the ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... do, Captain? Are we absolutely spick and span?" Marjorie turned slowly about, then made a laughing dive at her mother and enveloped her in a devastating embrace. ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... slowly developing tourist industry. Transfers from the US Government add substantially to American Samoa's economic well-being. According to one observer, attempts by the government to develop a larger and broader economy are restrained by Samoa's remote location, its limited transportation, and its devastating hurricanes. ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to be instead? Not—I hear you cry appealingly—not panoramas of Zurich or Cape Town? No, not those devastating views of scenery, but home-made films "featuring" English performers, with an eye not only to entertainment but instruction. That is the new movie note. And for a start a wonderful picture has just been completed, under the title "The Birth ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... this nth power. He had given the best of himself, all his thoughts, illusions, hopes, endeavors, to his ideal of success, but his ambition had never been concentrated enough to serve as a lens through which the rays of his efforts might focus themselves into the single beam of devastating heat on which Paul counted so certainly to burn away the obstacles between himself and success. Various protesting comments rose to his lips, which he kept back, disconcerted to find how much they resembled certain remarks of ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... lurks disease" (So dreamt this lively dreamer), "Or devastating caries In humerus or femur, If you can pay a handsome fee, Oh, then you may remember me— With joy elate I'll amputate Your ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... hand rested lightly on a Sheraton table; in the immediate background was a portion of a low ornamental garden wall, in the distance was a ruin principally composed of Ionic columns in various positions—presumably the devastating work of the warrior in the foreground, "Look on that," he said bitterly, and as I returned it, "and on this, the backbone of the British Army," smiting his manly breast. I looked, and in the bronzed, unshaven ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... clocks imperturbably strike nine, and the battle which is to decide the fate of Europe, and perhaps the world, begins with three booms from the line of the allies. They are the signal for a general cannonade of devastating intensity. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... coast by one slight battle; advancing, then, with their fleet to Honosca, and making a descent from the ships upon the coast, when they had taken the city by storm and pillaged it, they afterwards made for Carthage: then devastating the whole surrounding country, they, lastly, set fire also to the buildings contiguous to the wall and gates. Thence the fleet laden with plunder, arrived at Longuntica, where a great quantity of oakum for naval purposes had ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... we have traced the course of events which ended in the complete overthrow of Xerxes and his great army. Our present task is to describe the chief incidents in the cruel and devastating war, commonly known as the Peloponnesian War, which lasted for twenty-seven years, and finally broke up the Athenian Empire. The cause of that war was the envy and hatred excited in the other states ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... politics of Constantinople; and having with energetic celerity arranged matters on the Gallic frontier, he marched overland through Illyricum and confronted Alaric in Thessaly, whither the Goth had traced his devastating path ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... result, but also inasmuch as the region to which they transferred the war was in dangerous agitation, and a good part of the army which they opposed to Caesar was likewise in a troublesome temper. The fearfully strict levy, the carrying off of the supplies, the devastating of the smaller townships, the feeling in general that they were being sacrificed for a cause which from the outset was foreign to them and was already lost, had exasperated the native population against the Roman republicans fighting out ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... barbarism when about B.C. 880 the Assyrians swept over the various Semite lands. Loud were the laments of the Hebrews; terrible the tales of cruelty; deep the scorn with which the Babylonians submitted to the rude conquerors. We approach here a clearer historic period; we can trace with plainness the devastating track of war;[5] we can read the boastful triumph of the Assyrian chiefs, can watch them step by step as they adopt the culture and the vices of their new subjects, growing ever more graceful and more enfeebled, until ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... and on, year after year and year after year; and at last England stretched France prone with that fearful blow at Crecy. But she rose and struggled on, year after year, and at last again she went down under another devastating blow—Poitiers. She gathered her crippled strength once more, and the war raged on, and on, and still on, year after year, decade after decade. Children were born, grew up, married, died—the war raged on; their children in turn grew up, married, died—the war raged on; their children, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a fine equipage. I plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I desired and possessed everything, for fasting had made me light-headed like the tempted Saint Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at last to these devastating trances; and on the morrow science would beckon me, smiling, and I was faithful to her. I imagine that women reputed virtuous, must often fall a prey to these insane tempests of desire and passion, which rise in us in spite of ourselves. Such dreams have a charm of their own; they ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... they were in. Of course, putting hats on Geraldine was a very fascinating game, which everybody enjoyed except the girl herself. There was one hat especially in which Miss Upton reveled, mentally considering its devastating effect upon Ben Barry. It was very simple, and at the most depressed point of the brim nestled one soft, loose-leaved pink rose with a little foliage. Miss Upton's eyes glistened and she drew ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... minister was only a man who preached the Gospel, which every Christian man is bound to do, the limitations of Christian service to the official class became an illogical survival, utterly incongruous with the fundamental principles of our conception of the Christian Church. And yet here it is, devastating our churches to-day, and making hundreds of good people perfectly comfortable, in an unscriptural and unchristian indolence, because, forsooth, it is the minister's business to preach the Gospel. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... stretched the road to Mantua. Was it only last April that upon this road he and Valerius had had that revealing hour? The most devastating of all his memories swept in upon him. Valerius had had his first furlough in two years and they had spent a week of it together in Verona. The day before Valerius was to leave to meet his transport at Brindisi they had repeated a favorite excursion of their childhood to an ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... can be transmitted to other matter, as we have numerous examples from our observation and experience, in the case of windmills driven by the motive power of the winds, and also balloons urged along by the same cause; apart from the devastating effect produced in towns and country by ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... star Shone, not a sound was heard; the very winds, Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice Slept, clasped in his embrace.—O, storm of death! Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night: 610 And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still Guiding its irresistible career In thy devastating omnipotence, Art king of this frail world, from the red field Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, 615 The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne, A mighty voice invokes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... heavy-metal atomic reactors—all useless for power purposes. The value of the stock in those companies dropped to zero and stayed there. The value of copper metal fell like a bomb, with almost equally devastating results—for there was no longer any need for the millions of miles of copper cable that linked the power ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... expansion of the German nation has been so extraordinary during the last twenty-five years that the conditions existing before the war had become insupportable." In other words, there was no outlet but a devastating war. So we are called upon to repeat, with fresh emphasis, Petrie's question: Can it be avoided? All humanity, all civilisation, call upon us to take up our stand on this vital question of birth control. In so doing we shall each of us ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... upon the subject, but what they told, bore out in every particular Amadi Fatouma's account. They said that the attack was caused by the English having been mistaken for an advanced guard of Fellatahs, who were then devastating Soudan. The King of Boussa received Clapperton and Lander with great kindness. Here they found boats lying ready for them, with a message from the Sultan of Youri, requesting a visit, and promising, if they consented, to deliver up some books and papers of Mungo Park, which he said he had in his ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... prominently before the country; besides military fame addresses itself to every capacity, and strange as it may seem, there is no quality so popular with man and woman, too, as the art of successfully killing our fellow-man, and devastating his country. It is ever a successful claim to public honors and political preferments. No fame is so lasting as a military fame. Caesar and Hannibal are names, though they lived two thousand years ago, familiar in the mouths of every one, and grow brighter as time progresses. Philip and his more ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... held ninety men, Canute's vessel, which carried sixty, and the two vessels of Olaf the Saint, which carried sometimes 200 men. The Sea-kings, as they often called these adventurers, lived on the ocean, never settling on shore, passing from the pillage of a castle to the burning of an abbey, devastating the coasts of France, ascending rivers, especially the Seine, as far as Paris, sailing over the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, establishing themselves later in Sicily, and leaving traces of their incursions or their sojourn in all the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... A devastating epidemic of measles, much aggravated by the improper treatment given to patients by the natives, now broke out. Even Vailima did not escape its ravages, and Mrs. Strong writes of it ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... taken possession of a large skittle ground at the back of the Red Lion; that they had been drinking for an hour, having already taken two quarts of strong beer each, and were preparing to take another quart each before they sallied forth, to put in execution the devastating scenes that they had contemplated. I contrived to communicate with the landlord, who said that they were so far intoxicated that he dared not refuse them beer, and that they had taken forcible possession of his cellar, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... Joel admirably illustrates the intimate connection which subsisted for the prophetic mind between the sorrows and disasters of the present and the coming day of Jehovah: the one is the immediate harbinger of the other. In an unusually devastating plague of locusts, which, like an army of the Lord,[1] has stripped the land bare and brought misery alike upon city and country, man and beast—"for the beasts of the field look up sighing unto Thee," i. 20—the prophet sees the forerunner of such an impending day of Jehovah, bids the ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... he was not there. A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness. And she approached mechanically to the altar. Never had she known such a pang of utter and final hopelessness. It was beyond death, so utterly ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... behind the closed shutters eyes peered furtively at the conquerors, masters by right of might, of the city and the lives and fortunes of its inhabitants. The people in their darkened dwellings fell a prey to the helpless bewilderment which comes over men before the floods, the devastating upheavals of the earth, against which all wisdom and all force are unavailing. The same phenomenon occurs each time that the established order of things is overthrown, when public security is at an end, and when all that the laws of man or of nature protect is at the mercy of some blind elemental ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... to the guns by night, and was distributed in small quantities near to them. Before long the enemy became alive to the fact that we were contemplating some move, and consequently increased his devastating fire by night, with the result that many dumps in the vicinity were exploded by him. He was bound to hit something, the countryside was so packed with all manner of ammunition. He had no idea, however, of the magnitude ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... XII centuries which saw the important beginnings of the great Cathedrals of both North and South. These were the years when religion was the dominant idea of the western world,—when everything, even warfare, was pressed into its service. Instead of devastating their own and their neighbour's country, Christian armies were devastating the Holy Land; doing to the Infidel in the name of their religion what he, in the name of his, had formerly done to them. The capture ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... from the South or East, and that in the latter case the inhabitants of Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire would, in the event of a flank movement through the Eastern Counties for London, be among the first to bear the brunt of the devastating march! The horror of the expected invasion was intensified a thousandfold by the Englishman's attachment to his home and family, and deliberations of the village councils often showed less regard for the national scheme of defence than the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... of husbandman and capitalist to turn it to lucrative account. A humdrum life is incompatible here with the constant emotion kept up by typhoons, shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, brigands, epidemics, devastating ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the power and nature of life in all its glory. But he could not realize the nature and effect of death and sorrow until he should eat of the fruit of the tree of death, and become intoxicated with the mania of its devastating forces. And for this cause Jehovah commanded Adam that he should not eat of the fruit of the tree of death ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... where strength was stronger or beauty beautifuller than right here in Hoskins' Corners. He prayed with all his heart, though it was almost too much to hope, that the cholera, which was raging in Kentucky, would pass this Eden by; that the yellow fever, which was devastating Tennessee, would halt abashed before this stronghold of health, though he felt bound to add that it was a peculiarly malignant and persistent disease; that the smallpox, which was creeping southward from Canada, would smite the next town instead of ours, though he must ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... more for humanity than for politics, must do his utmost to postpone the conflict which a few extremists on each side of the barricades so fanatically desire. If that conflict is indeed inevitable, its consequences will be less devastating to a Europe cured of her wounds than to a Europe scarcely, even by the most hopeful, to be described as convalescent. But the conflict may not be inevitable after all. No man not purblind but sees that Communist Europe is changing no less than Capitalist Europe. If we succeed ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... and his friends, half-way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing—it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... over, then? Was he really leaving? Fear, and a prophetic breath of the devastating loneliness he should yet know, came upon him, paralyzed his mind, made him weak and aghast. He was going out into the night of death, launching on his frail raft into the barren boundless ocean of darkness, leaving the last landmarks, drifting out in utter nakedness ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the battle. St. Leger took advantage of this, and sent a white flag to the fort with false information, declaring that the relief-party had been annihilated, that Burgoyne had reached and captured Albany, and that, unless the fort was surrendered, he could not much longer restrain the Indians from devastating the valley settlements ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... banners, of pennons on the breeze; the smiling of beautiful Court Ladies and great, silken Nobles; the swaying of howdahs on camel and elephant, and the awesome shaking of the earth beneath the elephant's feet, and the gleam of his small but devastating eye (every one declared he looked the alarmed Mr. Snoddy full in the face as he passed, and Mr. Snoddy felt not at all reassured when Tom Martin severely hinted that it was with the threatening glance of a rival); then the badinage of the clown, creaking along in his ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... began to see how it might be with him. She was still the woman he loved,—she believed that; he was weaker than she had thought,—that was all, weaker and not so wise. This being true, she must put aside her own pain and bewilderment, her own devastating disillusionment, and comfort him, and help him. She rose from her bed that morning firmly resolved to see him before the day ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... and he left her without breaking his silence more than was needed to wish her good night, she sat on for a time, reviewing what he had said. If love is a devastating fire which melts the whole being into one mountain torrent, Mary was no more in love with Denham than she was in love with her poker or her tongs. But probably these extreme passions are very rare, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... so unexpected, so devastating to the human mind, that fear filled Millicent's heart. Instinctively she had drawn a little closer to Michael. She craved for arms to guard her, to protect her from the terror ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... unexplored; and I do not think the end of that wasteful system can be lamented by anyone who believes in the English. Rather it should reconcile us to the disillusionments of this present time of transition. They are devastating, I admit; for me, they have spoilt a great deal of that pleasure which the English country used to give me, when I still fancied it to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living. I know now that the landscape is not peopled by a comfortable folk, whose dear and intimate ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Gap, "that when our esteemed fellow-citizen Hank Mulligan and twenty gallant shots and riders like himself went in a body to General—— at the cantonment and offered their services as volunteers against the Sioux now devastating the homesteads and settlements of the Upper Missouri and Yellowstone valleys, they were treated with haughty and contemptuous refusal by that bandbox caricature of a soldier and threatened with arrest if they did not quit the camp. When will the United States learn that its frontiers can ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... proclaim it, and withdraw his people from the rebellion, in pursuance of what was known as the policy of "separate State action." I told him, if he saw Governor Brown, to describe to him fully what he had seen, and to say that if he remained inert, I would be compelled to go ahead, devastating the State in its whole length and breadth; that there was no adequate force to stop us, etc.; but if he would issue his proclamation withdrawing his State troops from the armies of the Confederacy, I would spare the State, and in our passage across ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... ministers, Harry Lauder, Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, clergymen, Montenegrins, and the Editor of John Bull, at the government's expense—and I am bound to say he deserved them all, being a man of infinite tact, many languages, and a devastating sense of humor. There was always a Charlie Chaplin film between moving pictures of the battles of the Somme. He brought the actualities of war to the visitors' chateau by sentry-boxes outside the door, a toy "tank" in the front ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... been our good fortune, even when we have seen the foot almost detached from the limb by the devastating inroads of the pus, to see the suppurative process by this means gradually overcome, a reparative anchylosis set in, and the animal restored to good health and usefulness, ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... overcoat he dropped into a chair before the library fire. A devastating weariness possessed him, but he knew he could not hide there in his home. To-day he might, to-morrow even, but the time would come when he must go out and face the world, must listen to the endless speculation concerning ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... obvious. Sonya is in town, as it happens, stopping at the Warwick. She has brought the Infant Samuel to New York to have his adenoids cut out. Samuel made a devastating visit here this morning. He's getting as fat as a little pig, and when he walks he puffs like a worn-out automobile going up a steep grade. He came up my stairs on 'low,' and I'm sure they heard him on the avenue. I almost offered him a glass of gasolene. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... any flaw to find in a really charming play, I think it was a mistake for Mrs. Marden to let Mr. Pim into the secret of her past. As with the sweet influences of Pippa, so with the devastating havoc wrought by the inexactitudes of Mr. Pim, I think he should have been left unconscious of the effect of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... pink gas as his eyes were drawn irresistibly to hers. What he saw in those gold-flecked depths sent a shiver of apprehension chasing down his spine. Savage, devastating desire mingled with ill-concealed rage at his coldness. This beautiful animal could turn like a flash and rend him limb from limb—and would on ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... already to form the most unfavourable anticipations of his future conduct. He lowers obliquely like a dark thundercloud on the horizon, which gradually approaches nearer and nearer, and first pours out the devastating elements with which it is charged when it hangs over the heads of mortals. Two of Richard's most significant soliloquies which enable us to draw the most important conclusions with regard to his mental temperament, are to be found in The Last Part of Henry the Sixth. As to the value and the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... of the race must have declined; and Tenkoruti, the grandfather of Tembinok', was the chief of a village at the north end of the island. Kuria and Aranuka were yet independent; Apemama itself the arena of devastating feuds. Through this perturbed period of history the figure of Tenkoruti stalks memorable. In war he was swift and bloody; several towns fell to his spear, and the inhabitants were butchered to a man. In civil life this arrogance was unheard of. When the council ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... your article in No. 51, on the forest fires and drought following a very wet season, and remarking that we should have such extremes, is it not due—our irregularity of climate—to our careless devastating of whole portions of the country of trees? Many claim so. We are in sore need of national or state ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 53, November 11, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... measure taken by the Estates lacked finesse, but it had one advantage over the usual diplomatic transactions in their devious course, that it was direct and final in its effect, namely, to precipitate a great devastating war, and to leave Bohemia hopelessly enchained ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... any reason on earth that has manifested itself for this devastating and terrible war it is that it has been a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Herrick asked Taveeta where that island was, and he replied that, by what he gathered of folks' talk as they went up together from the beach, he supposed it must be one of the Paumotus. This was in itself probable enough, for the Dangerous Archipelago had been swept that year from east to west by devastating smallpox; but Herrick thought it a strange course to lie from Sydney. Then he remembered ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... mysterious space Are one by one subdued by lordly man. The awful lightning that for eons ran Their devastating and untrammelled race, Now bear his messages from place to place Like carrier doves. The winds lead on his van; The lawless elements no longer can Resist his strength, ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... which the published accounts numbered by hundreds, whole districts leveled by waterspouts which destroyed everything they passed over, several thousand people crushed on land or drowned at sea; such were the traces of its fury, left by this devastating tempest. It surpassed in disasters those which so frightfully ravaged Havana and Guadalupe, one on the 25th of October, 1810, the other on the 26th of ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... at three minutes past noon on Friday, October 9th, that the Germans entered the city, which was formally surrendered by Burgomaster J. De Vos. Antwerp had then been under a devastating and continuous shell fire ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... had become more than an incident—more than a passing adventure to the beast, and more than an irritating happening to the man. It was, for the time, the elemental raison d'etre of their lives. Baree hung to the trap line. He haunted it like a devastating specter, and each time that he sniffed afresh the scent of the factor from Lac Bain he was impressed still more strongly with the instinct that he was avenging himself upon a deadly enemy. Again and again he outwitted McTaggart. ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... although these might be bribed or threatened, pleased or made angry, their actions were regarded as beyond prediction or control. The procession of the seasons, the routine of day and night, the placid appeasement of the rains, the devastating roar of storms, the shining of the rainbow, the bubbling of springs, the terrors of famine and pestilence; all these—the varying environment which makes or mars human life—were regarded as inevitable and capricious. The whole progress ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: that is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to our memory so ironically when we hear people sentimentalizing about natural affection. We even get tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic to contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will without conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and school system is to set the will of the parent and the school despot above conscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and absolutely for ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... reviving, like the hammer of a note in the piano. This constitutes an irritant, which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife's timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every season has ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... suffered severely in the many counter-attacks, but held on, like true British bull-dogs, to what had been our original front line. The craters were lost as it was impossible for any troops to hold them under the devastating fire of the German guns. Nearly every battalion of the Second Canadian Division had retaken one or more of them but, as it only resulted in additional loss of life, it was decided by the higher command to give it up and endeavor to reestablish our ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... said in a brief flash of his saving humor. "It would be better for me, perhaps, if I could hurt you. That ability comes dangerously close to a constant of love. You mustn't think I am complaining. I haven't the slightest reason in the face of your devastating honesty. I didn't distress you and I had the necessary minimum—the fifty thousand." His manner was so even, so devoid of sting, that she could smile at the expression of her material ambitions. "I realize exactly ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... has not been dearly purchased, by the very large sums that have been expended, and the valuable lives that have been lost in its exploration; the arid and waterless wastes of the interior, which have now been proved equally subject to terrific droughts and devastating floods, make it improbable that the Settlements of the North Coast and the Southern Colonies can be connected by a continuous line of occupation for many years to come; the rich pastoral tracts of Arnheim's ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... Bloomfield and the lustre about the name "McCallum"—two rocks upon which she had builded the edifice of her confidence—were found of a sudden to be but shifting sands, hard-packed enough on the surface, but subjected to the most insidious and devastating undertow. Many a weaker spirit would have thrown up his arms and dived with desperation overboard in search of solid footing. But not so Mary Louise. She had a momentary whirl at negation and then a firm and ever-increasing ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... tossed up in earth and flame. From one of old Vauban's earthworks outside the walls I saw lines of our men going up in assault beyond the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent to Roclincourt, through a veil of sleet and smoke. Our gun-fire was immense and devastating, and the first blow that fell upon the enemy was overpowering. The Vimy Ridge was captured from end to end by the Canadians on the left and the 51st Division of Highlanders on the right. By the afternoon ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... which a chronometer bears to the sun. Blot the sun from the sky, and the chronometer is useless; deny God, and conscience is powerless. And the vices which, if not subdued, were yet curbed and restrained by the overawing sense of an unseen omnipresent Power, will burst forth with devastating fury, snapping asunder the feebler fetters of human law, and overleaping the barriers of selfish prudence itself; vanity and pride, ambition and covetousness, sensual indulgence and ferocious cruelty, will rise into the ascendancy, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... political storm increased tenfold in velocity and destructiveness by race hatred that had swept through the old city of Wilmington, devastating homes, leaving orphans, widows and ruined fortunes in its wake, was slowly abating. A city in a state of siege could not have presented a more distressing appearance. Soldiers and armed white men ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... troops watched for it to move out again. Artillerymen had guns ready to fire upon it if they ever got firing coordinates and permission to go into action. Planes were ready to drop bombs if they ever got leave to do so. And a few miles away there were rockets ready to prove their accuracy and devastating capacity if only given a launching command. But nothing happened. Not even a flare was permitted to be dropped by the planes far up in the sky. A flare might ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... lost the Wilhelmstrasse, and now here is Whitehall going out into the suburbs.... No doubt our leading Ministers, attracted by the more salubrious air, will establish themselves in the environs of the Metropolis, leaving behind them only the lower class of civil servant. Have you considered the devastating effect of this change? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... going to be fit for a Vestal but that I wasn't fit for a Vestal and I hadn't been fit for a Vestal; that I not only was going to do harm, not only was doing harm, but had done harm. If the Parthians are devastating the frontier along the Euphrates and the Marcommani and the Quadi are storming the outposts along the Danube and the Rhine, perhaps that is because my presence in the Atrium is an offence in the eyes of Vesta, my prayers an affront to my Goddess, my care of ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... And its story is an illustration of the old-world promise, hoary with antiquity and founded upon the coming, ushered in every year by the Pass-over or cross-over of the equator by the sun at the Vernal Equinox, of the bounteous harvests of summer after the dearth of devastating winter; bidding us ever hope, not indeed for the avoidance of death and therefore of defeat, but for such victory as may happen to ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... good joke, such as Mark Twain loved—a carefully prepared, harmless bit of foolery. He wrote Robert Collier, threatening him with all sorts of revenge, declaring that the elephant was devastating Stormfield. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Austrian army, awfully arrayed, Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade. Cossack commanders, cannonading, come, Dealing destruction's devastating doom; Every endeavor engineers essay For fame, for fortune, forming furious fray. Gaunt gunners grapple, giving gashes good; Heaves high his head heroic hardihood. Ibraham, Islam, Ismael, imps in ill, Jostle John, Jarovlitz, Jem, Joe, Jack, Jill; Kick kindling Kutusoff, kings' kinsmen ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... original art-form that America has yet contributed to literature. Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age, might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Moliere; his surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the sardonic ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... committing great cruelty and putting many in irons, and enslaving great numbers of freemen in the ways above told, and sending shiploads of them to the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, where they could best he sold, he finished devastating all that province. Eighty Indians, reasonable beings, were given in exchange for a horse. 2. From Panuco, he was sent to govern the city of Mexico and all New Spain as President, with other great tyrants as Auditors: ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... noise of a devastating avalanche, the herd came as though nothing had happened. The late moon that had been touching the peaks of the far mountains now lifted a rim over them, flooding the world with a soft radiance. Sanderson had reached the center of the trail, through ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... August fifteenth, and it held out for nearly a fortnight. Finally, on September sixteenth, Massena crossed the Portuguese frontier, and Wellington, who lay near by but had not ventured to assume the offensive, began a slow and cautious retreat down the valley of the Mondego, devastating the country as he went. At last he made a stand on the heights near Busaco, over against a gorge where the river breaks through the hills into the plains below. Massena attacked on September twenty-seventh and was repulsed ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of the army was concentrated at the Southern extremity of Russia, for it was here that the fleets of the allied powers would be encountered. Like devastating swarms of locusts the semi-barbarous warriors descended upon the fertile fields, destroying all that lay in their path. Great was the misery of the peasantry in that section of the Empire; greater still the hardships endured by the Jews, who were despoiled of their ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... rage. I tried to say something, but I couldn't. The lion of my anger had me down, by this time, with his paw on my breast. The power of speech was squeezed out of my carcass. I could only stare at my husband with a denuding and devastating stare of incredulity touched with disgust, of abhorrence skirting dangerously close along the margins of hate. And he stared back, with morose and watchful defiance ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... great city, which was never seriously threatened with danger, should have acted thus, there is undoubtedly much excuse to be found for the Vesuviani themselves, whose houses and lives were certainly in danger from the devastating streams of lava. It was with a sigh and a smile that we learned how the good people of Portici attributed their escape from the fate of Bosco-Trecase to the direct interposition of a wonder-working Madonna enshrined ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... aid of the cause of freedom, and for depositing supplies for friends in the field. The Brushy Mountains were but a few miles distant, and were infested with Tories, who made predatory incursions into this part of Iredell, carrying off stock, devastating farms, and ambuscading and shooting Whigs, who were ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... Scots of Ireland were their natural foes, but conflict with these enemies served only to stimulate the national life. But actual disaster threatened them when in the fifth and sixth centuries the heathen Angles and Saxons bore down in devastating hordes upon the land. It is at this critical period in the national history that Arthur must have lived. How long or how valiant the resistance was we cannot know. That it was vain is certain. A large body of Britons fled from annihilation across the channel, and founded in the region of Armurica ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Henry the II was unable to enter into this inheritance during the lifetime of Rodolph, the latter's nephew, the Emperor Conrad the Salique, assumed control of the kingdom which then was incorporated into the German Empire. Not without devastating wars and desperate opposition on the part of the heirs of the Rodolphian line was the country preserved to the German sovereign, and under his distant rule it became a prey to continuous dissensions between the bishops and ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... was one vast seething furnace from whose throat the fire burst now southward and upward with a roar. The wind was bringing its element of peril to add to the conflagration's own; it caught the white heat from the blazing mass of buildings and started it sweeping southward in a devastating wave of superheated ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... days had elapsed since Carson had gloomily predicted at Larne that peace was impossible "unless something happens, the evidence of which is not visible at present." But that "something" did happen—though it was something infinitely more dreadful, infinitely more devastating in its consequences, even though less dishonouring to the nation, than the alternative from which it saved us. Balanced, as it seemed, on the brink of civil war, Great Britain and Ireland together toppled over on the other side into the maelstrom ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... she was free now to encompass her desire, the only dominating, devastating desire that she had ever known in all her dead, well-ordered life. But it was not even with so active a consciousness as this that she thought this out. She thought out nothing save that she must see Morris, be with Morris, catch from Morris ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... pose of "understanding" them. His experience was of the slightest; the love and veneration felt for his own mother had set the entire sex upon the heights. His affairs with women, if so they may be called, had been transient—all but those of early youth, which having never known the devastating test of fulfilment, still remained ideal and superb. There was unconscious humour in his attitude—from a distance; for he regarded women with wonder and respect, as puzzles that sweetened but complicated life, might even endanger it. He certainly was not ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... in naval warfare, have been somewhat overrated. Visions of air-ships hovering over a doomed city and devastating it with missiles dropped from above are mere fairy tales. Indeed the whole subject of aeronautics as an element in future human progress has excited far more attention than its ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... Glaciers and Transported Boulders in North Wales." London, "Phil. Mag." xxi. p. 180.] At first I imagined that they had been precipitated from the mountains around; and I referred the shingle to land-shoots, which during the rains descend several thousand feet in devastating avalanches, damming up the rivers, and destroying houses, cattle, and cultivation; but though I still refer the materials of many such terraces to this cause, I consider those at the mouths of valleys to be due to ancient ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... degrees and kinds of rigor and destructive power. In the torrid zone it took the form of excessive rain and humidity, excessive heat, or excessive dryness and aridity. In the temperate and frigid zones, life was a seasonal battle with bitter cold, torrents of cold rain in early winter or spring, devastating sleet, and deep snow and ice that left no room ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... which was hung with human heads, and painted red with blood. As the paladin was viewing the scene with amazement a hideous old woman made her appearance at the edge of the pit, and told him that he was destined to be thrown to a monster, who was only kept from devastating the whole country by being supplied with living human flesh. Rinaldo said, "Be it so; let me but remain armed as I am, and I fear nothing." The old woman laughed in derision. Rinaldo remained in the pit all night, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... were at first eager to advance, and were not altogether without hope that they would be able to take Rome itself by assault. But when they saw the enemy drawn up in order, and learned before long from a prisoner what had happened, they abandoned the idea of attacking the city, and began devastating the country-side instead, and setting fire to the houses. In these first raids they collected an innumerable amount of booty, for the field of plunder upon which they were entered was one into which no one had ever expected ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strange body called a Local Board—it was the Age of Boards—and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading tentacles of the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... regard to the political and social rights of those great families, such doubt did not exist for the remainder of the Irish race. They were absolutely without rights. Depriving them of their lands, pillaging their houses, devastating their farms, outraging their wives and daughters, killing them, could not subject the guilty to any civil or criminal action at law. In fact, as we have shown, such acts were in accordance with the spirit, even with the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of the empire among the undutiful sons of Louis, the pirates did not fail to take advantage of the general confusion; braving the sea almost every summer in their light coracles, sailing up the Seine, the Somme, or the Loire, and devastating the best parts of France, almost without resistance. In 845, they went up to Paris, pillaged it, and were on the point of attacking the royal camp at St. Dennis; but receiving a large sum of money from Charles the Bald, they retreated from thence, and ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... gave them a sense of direction. Many times they fell, skinning their shins and their foreheads against trees, but they picked themselves up again, entirely unconscious of bruises, and ran on as fast as they could go with the hot devastating wind behind them. Suddenly the whole mountainside was illuminated by a flash of lightning, like a jagged stream of fire stretching from heaven to earth. A deafening roar of thunder followed. Then all the forest seemed to be perfectly quiet. Such a stillness settled over the place that the ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... Dragon—Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy. He drew so vivid a picture of its foul iniquity that Zora was convinced that the earth had never harbored so scaly a horror. Of all Powers of Evil in the universe it was the most devastating. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... numbers of the Indians—perhaps not more than 500 warriors in all Acadia—they were capable of devastating remote settlements and of creating general ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... so sure. The reaction may be devastating. But it's a sign of grace that they've at last discovered sufficient intelligence to be bored with their somewhat monotonous selves. And Mrs. Oglethorpe always does exactly as she pleases. Better drop ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... was always being brought in by spies and scouts. The enemy was approaching fast; he was devastating all before him and covering the banks of the river with the slain, who were being swept down the rapid ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... Maria (played by Miss GLADYS GORDON with a nice sense of fun). Mr. HENRY CAINE, as "The Daisy," presented very effectively the rough-and-ready humour and the frank brutality of his type; but he perhaps failed to convey the devastating attractions which he was alleged to have for the frail sex; and his sudden spasms of tragic emotion seemed a little out of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... Dead? The devastating loneliness that swept him at the sight of the still body was unnerving. He breathed a long sigh of relief as the lanky figure rose slowly to its feet. Winslow was alive! They would show these beastly, unearthly ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... eloquently to their infamy until the supremacy of Delhi, but not of Islam, was shaken for two centuries by Timur, who appeared out of the wild spaces of Tartary and within a year disappeared into them again like a devastating meteor. From his stock, nevertheless, was to proceed the long line of Moghul Emperors who first under Baber and then under Akbar won the Empire of Hindustan at the gates of Delhi, and for a time succeeded in bringing almost ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... destructive a nature that it seemed as if every string must be broken. This mania spread until even the outlying bassoons, triangles, and celestas were infected. A piercing note of command, however, from a clarinet caused a devastating dumbness to fall suddenly on every instrument except the piano, which continued self-consciously alone. The pianist looked at the ceiling mostly, but one note seemed to be an especial favourite with him, and whenever he played it he looked closely and paternally at it, almost indeed applying ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... built. And at that moment he realised so keenly how irreparable was the breach, how irremediable the evil, how deathly the cancer of misery, that he understood the actions of the violent, and was himself ready to accept the devastating and purifying whirlwind, the regeneration of the world by flame and steel, even as when in the dim ages Jehovah in His wrath sent fire from heaven to cleanse the accursed ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... are not always destroyed [20] by the first uprooting; they reappear, like devastating witch-grass, to choke the coming clover. O stupid gar- dener! watch their reappearing, and tear them away from their native soil, until no seedling be left ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... handle, and none should embark upon the parlous enterprise of arousing it without due regard for the consequences. We may not let loose a young lion from its leash, and, when dire consequences follow, excuse ourselves on the score that we thought the devastating feature was ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... a devastating tornado across Miss Mapp's mind, rooting up all other growths, buffeting her with the necessity of knowing what the two whom she had been forced to leave in the garden were doing now, and snatching up her opera-glasses she glided upstairs, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... may seem a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to unchristianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom off childhood, in short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence stands alone. Look at the Elder Brother, moral, hard-working, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... I say, you are quick, Mr. Pim. Well, if you take my advice, when you've finished your business with George, you will hang about a bit and see if you can't see Olivia. She's simply devastating. I don't wonder George fell in love ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... along so far in this world, have been so few that I have never needed to ask direct aid of the host of good men and women who have cheered my life, though many a gift has come to me. And this late calamity, however rude and devastating, soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins, so that I can hardly feel any right to this munificent endowment with which you, and my other friends through you, have astonished me. But I cannot read your letter or think of its message without delight, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... had witnessed the devastating effects of the whirlwind which passed through Guelph, and which I have described in a previous chapter, I had a dread of being exposed in the woods to the fury of such a tempest. In this instance, however, we had the good fortune to reach the shanty just ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... shell-torn hilltop, looking across to where the Krupp surprise wrote its own testimonials at its first time of using, in characters so deadly and devastating, I found myself somehow thinking of that foolish nursery tale wherein it is recited that a pig built himself a house of straw, and the wolf came; and he huffed and he puffed and he blew the house down. The noncommissioned ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... capturing the eastern half of the French Legation, pushed their barricades nearer and nearer, and only one hundred yards behind their advanced lines they brought two guns into action, firing segment and shrapnel alternately. Under this devastating bombardment, almost a bout portant, as the French say, the last line of French trenches and their main-gate blockhouse became untenable. Pieces of shell tore through everything; men were wounded more and more quickly, and in the most sheltered part a French volunteer, Wagner, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... gladness, after a long night of gloom and anxiety; then two or three days of calming down, by degrees —a receding of tides, a quieting of the storm-wash to a murmurous surf-beat, a diminishing of devastating winds to a refrain that bore the spirit of a truce-days given to solitude, rest, self-communion, and the reasoning of herself into a realization of the fact that she was actually done with bolts and bars, prison, horrors and impending, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... words rushing forth like a flood suddenly released after breaking through the dam, sweeping everything before it,—resistless, devastating, cruelly rapturous. She thought nothing of the hurt she was inflicting upon the man beside her; he was an atom in the path of the torrent, a thing that went down and was left behind as the flood swept over and by him. As suddenly as it began the torrent was ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... any optimistic hopes that Micah held for a continuation of improvement in the condition of the common people, in which he had been instrumental up to this time. The costs of war always fell heaviest on the poor, and the devastating results of war upon ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... more poems than articles, two hundred was the highest figure it had yet attained. And supposing the poems came and the articles didn't? For in these things he was in the hands of the god. Therefore he had long been a prey to devastating anxiety. But he hoped great things from the transformation of The Museion. It certainly promised him a larger and more certain revenue in the future, almost justifying his marriage in the autumn. It had been expressly understood that ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... I do remember is your spitfire rages—very vaguely, but they must have been rather devastating to have made an impression ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... everything else, is easier to tear down than to build up, and one of the most devastating instruments of destruction is discourtesy. A contact which has taken years to build can be broken off by one snippy letter, one pert answer, or one discourteous response over the telephone. Even collection ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... the Magi chapel the work flagged in consequence of the wars then devastating the provinces of North Italy; nevertheless by the middle of the sixteenth century we learn from Torrotti that some ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... to kill the Chimaera, a monster which was at this time devastating the country. The fore part of its body was that of a lion, the centre of a goat, and the hind part of a dragon; whilst out of its ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... removed to higher ground in time, but before all was got out a sudden increase in the rushing river sent a huge wave curling round the entire piece of ground on which their farm lay. It came on with devastating force, bearing produce, fences, fruit-trees, piggeries, and every movable thing on its foaming crest. The brothers dropped their loads and ran. Next moment the cavern was hollowed out to twice its former size, and the sofa, the rude cupboard, ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... more terrible in their destruction of life, more devastating in their engines of war, than any ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the concentration of authority was taken in Galveston, Texas, where the people, looking upon the ruin of their city wrought by the devastating storm of 1901, and confronted by the difficult problems of reconstruction, felt the necessity for a more businesslike management of city affairs and instituted a new form of local administration. They ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... Agsan Valley as far south as Verula. They were tailed men from all accounts, the tail of the men being like a dagger, and that of the women like an adze of the kind used by Manbos. For 14 years they continued their depredations, devastating the whole valley till all the Manbos had fled or been killed, except one woman on the Argwan River or, as ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the first visit of these unwelcome strangers. Thirteen years afterwards they returned, and were not so easily got rid of. An enormous horde crossed the River Ural and advanced into the heart of the country, pillaging, burning, devastating, and murdering. Nowhere did they meet with serious resistance. The Princes made no attempt to combine against the common enemy. Nearly all the principal towns were laid in ashes, and the inhabitants were killed or carried off as slaves. Having ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... party stood on the summit of the hill, where the black flag waved over a scene of utter desolation. The vegetation was withered to pallid rags: even the tiniest weedling in the rock crevices had been poisoned by the devastating blast. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... driven out of Pannonia by the Romans and Goths, almost fifty years after they had taken possession of it. Then Valia found that the Vandals had come forth with bold audacity from the interior of Galicia, whither Athavulf had long ago driven them, and were devastating and plundering everywhere in his own territories, namely in the land of Spain. So he made no delay but moved his army against them at once, at about the time when Hierius and Ardabures ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... at twelve o'clock promptly, being unable to remain away any longer, and gave an excellent imitation of a visitation of locusts performing their well-known devastating act. If any two travellers by land or sea ever received their money's worth in food it was Steve and Tom. They took the menu card and briskly demanded everything in order, and when, having finished their dessert, they made the discovery that a criminally careless waiter had deprived ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... in frightful danger. This elemental disturbance is volcanic, and how it will end cannot be foretold. No doubt an earthquake is devastating the nearest land, or will do so before many hours have elapsed. At any moment rocks or islands may arise from the sea, and obstruct our passage. All we can do is to hold ourselves in readiness for whatever ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... carriage, descended, and ran after his. On overtaking it, I found the dark clouds accumulated on his brow, and learned with indescribable pain that he was on his way home from Florence, where he had just lost his second and only remaining son, from an attack corresponding in its suddenness and its devastating rapidity with that which had struck down his eldest ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley |
