"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a moment, And nothing did he say, But the cheek of Argyle grew ghastly pale, And he turned his eyes away. The painted harlot by his side, She shook through every limb, For a roar like thunder swept the street, And hands were clenched at him; And a Saxon soldier cried aloud, "Back, coward, from thy place! For seven long years ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... not; but the shout of delight rose louder as they saw the flames dance higher o'er their victims; and Silas looked on all—but Leemah's eye was on his—he knew his slightest movement was death to her as well as to himself. Like a demon through the flame leaped the ghastly form of the Red Eagle, (he to whom Leemah had been espoused) and with searching glance glared on his victims, but saw not there the one he sought with deeper vengeance than the others—'twas Silas he looked for; and, with the speed ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... later General Havelock and his little band of heroes—some one thousand Englishmen who had marched with him from Allahabad, recaptured by Neill for England, and on to ghastly Cawnpore—arrived at Lucknow, and relieved the slender British force which since May had been holding the Residency against the fierce and ever-renewed assaults of the thousands of rebels who poured themselves upon it. He came in time to save many a brave life that should yet do ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... robed in a long red dressing-gown, a candle in one hand, a loaded blunderbuss in the other, and with a most ludicrous expression on his pallid face, as though he were making up his mind to kill somebody, but was a little afraid that somebody might kill him instead! His wife, looking ghastly in her curl-papers with her eyes and mouth wide open in fright, was trying to pull him back, and was evidently terrified to glance round the kitchen, lest some midnight robber should meet her gaze. Away I scudded, my sides ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... a wailing chant—a hopeless prayer for mercy and deliverance. A guttering candle shed a ghastly light ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... effects of terror than those of the blow. His nose, however, again gushed out blood, a system of defence which seemed as natural to him as that resorted to by the race of stinkards. He then raised himself on his knees and hams, and raising up his ghastly face, while the blood streamed over both ears, he besought his life of his brother, in the most abject whining manner, gaping and ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... those, the fiends, who, near allied, O'er Nature's wounds, and wrecks, preside; Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, 20 Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: On whom that ravening[15] brood of Fate, Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait: Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, And look not ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... to go out looking for work, but that ceased, and she seemed in a half-conscious state. As I was a charitable gentleman, would I go and speak to her? Well, rather reluctantly, I did. I went upstairs to a dreary back room, and found a decidedly lady-like young woman, neatly dressed enough, but ghastly white with dull eyes. She seemed to be dusting some books, but looked too weary to do much. She was not surprised or moved in any way at seeing me. When I apologized for intruding upon her, she murmured that I was very good. Then I asked if I could help her in any way. She thanked me, but suggested ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... she treats that ghastly experience! It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience. Susy had that disposition, and it was one of the jewels of her character that had come to her straight from ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... every now and then to be photographed, and try to persuade her horse to stop also. Or keep looking up to see if another family jar threatened. Or look around to see if any of the party or the pack was rolling down over the spareribs of that ghastly skeleton. No; the little mermaid's problem was a simple and ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... fascinated theirs—they beheld in that fearful countenance the very image of a corpse!—the same, the glazed and lustreless regard, the blue and shrunken lips, the drawn and hollow jaw—the dead, lank hair, of a pale grey—the livid, green, ghastly skin, which seemed all surely tinged and tainted by ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the part which pulpits play in the death of kings is the most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, the blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the falsehood and sycophancies—all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous Threnodies ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... covered the whole middle of the Place, reaching almost to the pavement on the other side—had their heads all turned towards the Cathedral. 'What are you gazing at, my friend?' I said to one by whom I stood. He looked up at me with a face which looked ghastly in the gloom. 'Look, M. le Maire!' he said; 'cannot you see it ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... condemned to disease through arrested growth. And where neither Christianity, nor any other religion conveying some moral help, has reached, the animal energy of such races necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of evil, and the grotesque or frightful forms assumed by their art are precisely indicative of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... stream they saw the fitful light of an eternal burning whose ghastly glare lit the water crests ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... the banks of the polluted Ganges, panting for breath, they tore more widely open the lips of their gaping wounds, to accelerate their dissolution; and while their blood was issuing, presented their ghastly eyes to heaven, breathing their last and fervent prayer that the dry earth might not be suffered to drink their blood, but that it might rise up to the throne of God, and rouse the eternal Providence to avenge the wrongs of their country,—will it be said that all this ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... anti-human is better; outre-human, in the sense of beyond, outside, almost grotesque in its attitude towards, would nearly convey it. Everything is anti-human. How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible are the creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! The distorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes; the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings; monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design. There is no idea ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... same moment that my dream-self awoke in my dream, my actual self woke in reality, and with the same ghastly horror. ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... twist the lad's arms and administer a certain number of hard blows upon them. This he did every day so long as the whim lasted. As for the smoking, poor Brokenribs had to smoke a certain number of pipes every day. A single pipe made him look ghastly, and the whole series made him dreadfully ill. I remember his white face at such times; but he attained his reward in becoming an accomplished ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Ojibway shone, Or the scalp-knife gleamed in a swarthy fist. Undaunted the braves of Wakwa's band Jumped into the thicket with lance and knife, And grappled the Chippewas hand to hand; And foe with foe, in the deadly strife, Lay clutching the scalp of his foe and dead, With a tomahawk sunk in his ghastly head, Or his still heart sheathing a bloody blade. Like a bear in the battle Wakwa raves, And cheers the hearts of his falling braves. But a panther crouches along his track,— He springs with a yell on ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... be conducted to the morning-room, and be rendered a less ghastly spectacle, by some very uncomfortable sticking-plaster moustaches, which hardly permitted him to narrate his battle distinctly. He thought the boys, even of Tibb's Alley, would hardly have ventured any violence after he had interfered, but for some young men who aught to have known better; he ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him, half frightened and much surprised, but the boy showed no symptoms of astonishment. His face relaxed into a ghastly leer, which showed the whole range ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... until her eyeballs rattled in her head. The doll fell to the floor and lay there with closed eyes. Her face was pallid and ghastly. Her bonnet had fallen off, and her hair stuck out wildly in every direction. Her legs were doubled under her in the most helpless fashion. She was the forlornest figure of a doll imaginable. Presently Mary drew her ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... and poets of the Middle Ages, representing a kind of spiritual masquerade, in which persons of every rank and age appear dancing with the skeleton form of Death. In this Spanish version it is perhaps more striking and picturesque than in any other—the ghastly nature of the subject being brought into very lively contrast with the festive tone of the verses. This grim fiction had for several centuries great success ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... vain— The deathlike spell was on him like a chain, And his clogged tongue, that still he strove to teach, Denied all answering speech! The monarch bade him mark The clotted blood that, dark, Distained his royal bosom, and that found Its way, still issuing, from a mortal wound, Ghastly and gaping wide, upon his throat! The shadow passed—another took his place, Of the same royal race; The noble Yumuri, the only son Of the old monarch, heir to his high throne, Cut off by cunning in his youthful ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... do no good,' he replied. 'We shall kill you, burn you in a fire slowly, scald you with boiling water, cut you in little pieces,' and he went on to threaten the lone woman with the most fiendish and ghastly outrages, such as I dare not even give ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... masses, fresh from the factory of God. There was not a tree, not a shrub, not a flower, not a blade of grass. No bird sang its cheering song, or delighted the eye with its gorgeous plumage; not even a frog croaked, a cicada rattled, or a serpent hissed. All was barren desolation, fearful silence and ghastly newness. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... time it was no false alarm. The bullet had done too well its cruel work. For a moment Valentine seemed to recognize him, and looking up, with his left hand still clutching at his breast, made a ghastly attempt to smile. Then, with a groan, he fell over on his ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... of those who had been executed were stuck on these spikes, and stayed there until they rotted away. All the people passing along the street could look up and see the heads, and sometimes, when the wind was high, a ghastly head came tumbling down into the street. We cannot think of such things without horror; but in those days people were accustomed to them, and did not mind them very much. When Mary came to Temple Bar she asked for ink and paper, and wrote there ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... his amusement. He considered Viola in corals as too rude a jest to share with her. Had poor Viola once grasped Harold Lind's estimation of her she would have as soon gazed upon herself in her coffin. Harold's comprehension of the essentials was beyond Jane Carew's. It was fairly ghastly, partaking of the nature of X-rays, but it never disturbed Harold Lind. He went along his dance-track undisturbed, his blue eyes never losing their high lights of glee, his lips never losing their inscrutable smile at some happy understanding between life and himself. Harold had fair ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... over all of them a false and pallid light; his characters are seen in a spectral atmosphere. If a romance is to be judged, not by literary rules, but by its power of making an impression upon the mind, such power as a ghastly story has, told by the chimney-corner on a tempestuous night, then Mr. Brown's romances cannot be dismissed without a certain recognition. But they never represented anything distinctively American, and their influence upon ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... one of the shops, and hastily bought her a feather fan,—a magnificent thing of deep magenta dye shading into blue, with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the centre. When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, "Who's that for, Basil?" demanded his wife; "the cook?" But seeing his ghastly look at this, she fell upon his neck, crying, "O you poor old tasteless darling! You've got it for me!" and seemed about to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... earlier—it was a mere chance that I got it at all. The paper stated that you were to start immediately for your residence on the Isle of Wight, consequently I went directly there, thus losing much more time. But—oh, I cannot stop for all these details now," the young man cried, with a ghastly face, the perspiration standing in great beads upon his brow, while he was terribly excited. "Of course Violet is not your wife, even though ten thousand ceremonies were performed over you. She is mine—mine! Oh, Heaven! am I going mad? Where is she? Tell me—tell me! Why are you still here? ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... ghastly dream! Ghastly, for all its cold and lofty state. Nay, what have I to do with yearning thoughts Of immortality? I am young with life! I shall not die! Hope and the eager years Of labor rise before me as I press Clear of these shadows. I have dreamed dark dreams— One very dark of late—but now ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... dropped asleep in a minute's interval between trains, and dreamed that she was lost in Fifty-Ninth Street. It was as long as the way to England, and a ghastly street to be lost in. Its sky line—if it knew anything about the sky—was as irregular as a Wagner dragon's teeth—high buildings and low buildings, and shanties where coloured families lived; little, sinister-looking houses where people could be murdered and their bodies ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... all Christina could say, for his effort at gaiety formed a ghastly contrast with the gray, livid hue that overspread his fair young face, his bloody armour, and damp disordered hair, and even ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I have told you how the great religious wars took place more than a century after the first open act of the Reformation and if you will compare the chapter on the Thirty Years War with that on Inventions, you will see that this ghastly butchery took place at a time when the first clumsy steam engines were already puffing in the laboratories of a number of French and German and English scientists. But the world at large took no interest in these strange contraptions, and went on with a grand theological discussion ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... to tell you the rest of this story as the old Pottawatomie told it to me, for it is near bedtime and these are the very trees between which the ghostly, ghastly figures flitted in the darkness. It is all past and gone now and you need have no fear. You boys on the outer edge who are crowding up to the light of the camp-fire are just as safe as the fellows in the middle. The thing to interest you is what the Indians did with ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... the movement: none but a fool could have supposed that it would. Nevertheless, it had one ghastly effect on contemporary painting. When I returned to Paris in the autumn of 1919 I found the painters whom I had known before the war developing, more or less normally, and producing work which fell nowise short of ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... awoke with a start. It was his first experience with the shock of a Southern Florida dawn. Dawns of many sorts he had seen—the ghastly ashy, clanging dawns of cities, the gray, creeping dawns of Northern winter, the bluish dawns of the Western mountains—but a dawn which came flaring up from the sea like a clap ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... at Dillon. He was pale and white as a ghost, but I could see that he was breathing, though with difficulty. In the glare of the headlight of a car which Garrick had turned on him, he looked ghastly. I looked again to discover traces of blood. But there ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... grief, or anger, or excitement—she was always being chided for not restraining her feelings—she was always being gently lectured for using too strong expressions. What did Primrose mean by throwing down this kind though somewhat mysterious, letter, and by making use of so ghastly a word as "separation?" Who was going to divide them? Certainly ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... us this day our daily bread!" O prayer By Jesus taught, thou hast become a cry For starveling mouths in Famine's ghastly lair— A beggar's plaint when ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... hosts, Of ghosts, And that without reflectors; And creepy things With wings, And gaunt and grisly spectres! He can fill you crowds Of shrouds, And horrify you vastly; He can rack your brains With chains, And gibberings grim and ghastly. Then, if you plan it, he Changes organity With an urbanity, Full of Satanity, Vexes humanity With an inanity Fatal to vanity - Driving your foes to the verge of insanity. Barring tautology, In demonology, 'Lectro biology, Mystic nosology, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... hour longer profound silence prevailed. Then Grandidier came out of the pavilion, bareheaded and still ghastly pale. Passing the little glazed work-shop on his way, he perceived Thomas and Pierre there, and at once came in. But he was obliged to lean against a bench like a man who is dazed, haunted by a nightmare. His good-natured, energetic face retained an expression of acute anguish; and his ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the screen. Through ghastly photographic boulevards the spectre conquerors marched. They came on endlessly, as though somewhere out of sight a human dam had burst, whose deluge would never be stopped. I tried to catch the expressions of the men, wondering whether this or that or the next had contributed his toll ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... before us and seem present to the Eye without the Assistance of Bodies or Exterior Objects. He can transport the Imagination with such beautiful and glorious Visions, as cannot possibly enter into our present Conceptions, or haunt it with such ghastly Spectres and Apparitions, as would make us hope for Annihilation, and think Existence no better than a Curse. In short, he can so exquisitely ravish or torture the Soul through this single Faculty, as might suffice to make up the whole Heaven ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... flow'ret 'mid the desolation drear, Or a spray of pleasant verdure which the gloomy scene might cheer; Nought but frowning crags and boulders, and long sea-weeds, ghastly, dank, With the mosses and pale lichens, to the wet rocks ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... turned into the Old Bailey. The chief trade done by the coffee house was in the early morning. After market hours there were few customers save when there was to be an execution at Tyburn the next morning, and those eager to secure a good sight of the ghastly procession and perhaps take part in it, assembled opposite the prison door over night. Mrs. Fenton in the evenings thought no more of business, but betook herself to the theatre or one of the pleasure gardens in the ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... the heart of Peter the Brazen deliberately skipped a beat. Black swam into his eyes, and he trembled, then became stiff, as his gaze was glued to that ghastly pantomime. He hesitated, then leaped across ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... in college rooms. Thackeray, in the "Book of Snobs," describes youths at a University wine-party as "drinking bad wines, telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk punch—smoking—ghastly headache—frightful spectacle of dessert-table next morning, and smell of tobacco." But the satirist is often tempted to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at least too highly coloured. In the recently published ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... of terror. My sister, who had gone to her room, rushed down to me; the girls, in their dressing-gowns, just as they were preparing for bed, followed, calling out, "Auntie! O Auntie! what is it? Who is screaming? What can be the matter?" Hardly were they in the room when Mary rushed in, ghastly, her eyes staring, and in a voice hoarse with terror, gasped out, "Come! come! he's found! he's murdered! I saw him. He's lying in the cellar, with his throat cut. Oh, it's horrible!" Then she began ...
— J. Cole • Emma Gellibrand
... ring-barked a couple of seasons or more before this time, with the result that they were now the very haggard skeletons of mighty trees, naked for the most part, their white bones open to all the winds of heaven, but here and there sporting a ghastly kind of drapery, remnants of their grave-clothes as it might be, in the shape of long hanging streamers of dead bark, which moaned and rustled eerily in the night breezes. High above the tattered grave-clothes of their lifeless trunks, the knotted, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... from her retreat in the ravine, to which she had again retired. On the morning of Margaret's funeral she could be seen, pale and haggard, tottering toward the grave-yard. The simple peasants recoiled before the ghastly figure, which, tall and trembling, with a black gown and death-white face, passed among them like a spectre. Before she reached the church she fell senseless to the ground. The humanity of those who observed her triumphed over their fears, and ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... a bride, who is fond and bold, And loveth the wood's deep gloom; And, with eyes like the shine of the moonstone cold, She awaiteth her ghastly groom. Not a feather she moves, not a carol she sings, As she waits in her tree so still, But when her heart heareth his flapping wings, She hoots out her ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [March 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... Lloyd was startled by a hasty rap at the door, and on opening it beheld her husband supported between two men, his face ghastly pale, and stained with blood from a wound on his forehead. She was a brave woman, and although her heart almost stood still with agonised apprehension, she did not lose control of herself for an instant. Directing ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... own hand. On account of my faithful services, he has given me a warrant to go straight to Paradise, without tarrying one moment in Purgatory." At these words the king and all the haggard train gave a ghastly grin, to escape from laughing outright; but the other full of wrath at their ridicule, commanded them aloud to show him the way. "Peace, thou lost fool!" cried Death, "Purgatory lies behind you, on the other side of the wall, for you ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... effective, as was remarked of old, to divert attention from scoundrelism as to make a brilliant show of patriotism. In the very act of looting Government and people and devastating the army and navy, the capitalists did the most ghastly business under the mask of the purest patriotism. Incredible as it may seem, this pretension was invoked and has been successfully maintained to this very day. You can scarcely pick up a volume on the Civil War, or a biography of the statesmen or ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... must—let His will overpower your will. Nothing but complete sacrifice will satisfy you or Him, and I believe in you profoundly. I am sure that, whatever be the ghastly struggle, you will go through with it, and find your strength in ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... rode slowly back to Pontefract. The soldiers bearing Sir John de Bury had reached there some time before, and he lay on the couch in his own room. There was no material change in his condition, though under the candle-light there was less of the ghastly pallor of death in the face; and about the ears were evidences that the blood was beginning to circulate more strongly. The King's own physician, Antonio Carcea—an Italian—sat beside him with his hand on the pulse and, ever and anon, bent ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... heard a voice that awakened me. I drew the curtain, and in the casement of the window I saw, by the light of the moon, a woman leaning through the casement into the room, in white, with red hair and pale and ghastly complexion. She spoke loud, and in a tone I had never heard, thrice. "A horse;" and then, with a sigh more like the wind than breath, she vanished, and to me her body looked more like a thick cloud than substance. I was so much frightened, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... was quite dark, the hollow echoes of old London Bridge responded to the rumbling of the cart which contained the ghastly load, the object of Will Marks' care. Sufficiently disguised to attract no attention by his garb, Will walked at the horse's head, as unconcerned as a man could be who was sensible that he had now arrived at the most dangerous part of ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... second book, Salammbo—a romance of Carthaginian history at the time of the Mutiny of the Mercenaries. Even Sainte-Beuve—no weak-stomached reader—was put off by its blotches of blood and grime, and by the sort of ghastly gorgeousness which, if it does not "relieve" these, forms a kind of background to throw them up. It was violently attacked by clever carpers like M. de Pontmartin, by eccentrics of half-genius and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... The moment was ghastly. I saw his face change, his finger tremble where it hovered above the fatal button; saw—though only in imagination as yet—the steely edge of that deadly plate of steel advancing beyond the lintel, and was about to dare all in a sudden ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... confidential servant, I find he has obtained leave of absence, to attend a public entertainment to be given in Frankfort, on which occasion a magnificent sword, is to be presented to him. Never, Gerald," continued Matilda her voice dropping into a whisper, while a ghastly smile passed over and convulsed her lips, "never shall he live to draw that sword. The night of his triumph is that which I ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... of it, the ground was strewn thickly with the graves of Europeans, Indians, and Arabs, and so shallow were these that from each of them there oozed a dark, dreadful stain. To add to the horrors of the scene, portions of mangled and putrefying corpses protruded from many of them—ghastly skulls, from the sockets of which the eyes had been picked by vultures and other obscene birds. Limbs of brave men upon which the hyena had already begun his dreadful work, and half-skeleton hands, with fingers spread ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... shot into the radio room. It showed me Snap lying there on the floor. He was bound with wire. His torso had been stripped. His livid face was ghastly ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... made by the first, shows a great deterioration.[29] There was no acknowledged principle of succession. Arbitrary force determined it. One robber followed another upon the throne; so that the eastern despot seemed to imitate that ghastly rule, in the wood by Nemi, "of the priest who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain". If the army named one man to the throne, the fleet named another. If intrigue and shameless deceit gained it in one ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... lady's knees seemed to crumble under her. Her poor old painted face looked out ghastly and ashamed from her wedding finery. But Evelyn in her red coat flew to her and took her in her arms as though she was a child. And like a child, Mrs. Kingdon sobbed and made excuses and begged to ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... hardly dry on the grass in Lexington Common; on the very morning on which its session opened, the colonial troops burst into the stronghold at Ticonderoga; and when the session had lasted but six weeks, its members were conferring together over the ghastly news from Bunker Hill. The organization of some kind of national government for thirteen colonies precipitated into a state of war; the creation of a national army; the selection of a commander-in-chief, and of the officers to serve ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... of this lonely temple and the knowledge that it was Aphrodite's—she thought always of Hathor as Aphrodite—preyed again upon her spirit as when she first came to it. She felt the dreadful brevity of a woman's, of any woman's triumph over the world of men. She felt the ghastly shortness of the life of physical beauty. She seemed to hear the sound of the movement of Time rushing away, to see the darkness of the End closing about her, as now the dimness of this desolate shrine of beauty and love ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... grin was ghastly and pathetic. "I never could stand height," Carson confessed. "It always did get me. Do you mind if I stop a minute and clear my head? Then I'll make those heel-holds deeper so I ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be. From Eddystone to Berwick bounds, from Lynn to Milford Bay, That time of slumber was as bright and busy as the day; For swift to east and swift to west the ghastly war-flames spread, High on Saint Michael's Mount it shone, it shone on Beachy Head. Far on the deep the Spaniards saw, along each southern shore, Cape beyond cape in endless range, those twinkling ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... the contrary; as whether His Royal Highness has or has not actually appeared at one of his imperial mamma's drawing-rooms in a Newmarket cutaway,—how, it is asked, can we expect that beings of this bent may properly heed those ghastly and incessant wants which are forever making of humanity the forlorn tragi-comedy it is? The yawp of socialism is excusably despised by plutocracy. Socialism is not merely a cry of pain; if it were only that its plaints might have proved ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... cooling, distilling and mixing. I heard him sighing like a soul in despair; I heard him praying, and I noticed how he held his breath. The lamp burnt out, but he did not observe it. I blew up the fire in the coals on the hearth, and it threw a red glow on his ghastly white face, lighting it up with a glare, while his sunken eyes looked out wildly from their cavernous depths, and appeared to grow larger and more prominent, as if they would burst from their sockets. 'Look at the alchymic glass,' he cried; 'something ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Marsile reached Sarraguce.— Dismounting 'neath a shady olive-tree, He strips himself of breast-plate, helmet, sword, And sinks upon the sward with ghastly look. His right hand severed from the wrist whence blood Is gushing forth, has made him swoon with pain. Before Marsile, his spouse, Queen Bramimunde, Bursts into tears, and cries, and woeful moans. Around stand more than twenty thousand men Who with one voice accuse Sweet France and Carle; Apollo's ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... which felled him. He dropped across the threshold of Chorister's kennel; the doors of all opened outwards, and the weight of his body kept this one shut. But he saw the other three hounds run out, saw the Squire turn with a ghastly face, drop the lantern, and run for it as White Boy snapped at his boot. Jim heard the crash of the lantern and the snap of teeth, and with that he fainted off in the darkness. He had cut his forehead against the bars of the big kennel, and when he came to himself ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had suddenly dropped dead; for I could not hear from her a single sigh or gasp or breath, though I stepped closer and listened—not a sign of life did she give. So I put my arm under her and raised her up, only to see that her face was ghastly white, and that she seemed quite dead. I picked her up, and found that, though she was slight and girlish, she was more woman than child, and carried her over to the well where there was cold water in the trough, from which I sprinkled a few icy drops in her face—and she gasped and looked at ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Claiborne; it's funny. It's too funny for any use. When your teeth show it's something ghastly. For God's sake go in ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... I had brought myself, when I saw a white robe come round the corner, arm in arm with a frock coat of black broadcloth. Also there came Everett, looking still more ghastly, his nose and lip having become purple, and in places green. Also there was Korwsky, and two other men; Moneta, a young Mexican cigarmaker out of work, and a man named Hamby, who had turned up on the previous evening, introducing ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... it up again with an air of satisfaction. Then he resumed his seat, drew a folded slip of paper from his breast pocket, a chart from another, turned up the lamp and began to write. His face, as he stooped low, escaped the soft shade and was for a moment almost ghastly. Every now and then he turned and made some calculations on the blotting-paper by his side. At last he leaned back with a little sigh of relief. He had barely done so before the door ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... man," the woman said compassionately, seeing the ghastly pallor of his face, "but I pity you. The street is furious that these wretches should have carried off that sweet young creature, who was so good to everyone; but what could we do? We hissed the men, and we would have pelted ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... is terrible, ghastly. But how can you stop it? You wouldn't advocate the destruction of our Army and Navy. It ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... obliged to have distinguished himself in war, and his coronation did not take place until a successful campaign had provided enough captives to grace his triumphal entry into the capital, and enough victims for the ghastly sacrifices which formed an important part of all their religious ceremonies. Communication was held with the remotest parts of the country by means of couriers, who, trained to it from childhood, travelled ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... her cattle, or less than cattle. As the life-giver and race- conserver, I should have imagined her a Lady Bountiful, tripping regularly into that ghastly steel-walled hospital room of the midship- house and dispensing gruel, sunshine, and even tracts. On the contrary, as with her father, these wretched ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... with his back against a gnarled stump, which gave him some support. He had his hand to his chest, and as he breathed a ghastly whistling sound came from the wound, and spirts of blood rushed from his mouth. His glazed eyes were fixed upon the man who had shot him, and a curious smile played about ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... attired in black, the first glimpse of whose face gave me such a shock as I had not experienced since the priest of the earth-worshipers seized me for his prey. I have never seen anything remotely resembling that face. It was without beard, and of a ghastly paleness. It was seen only in profile, except when, with a lightning-like movement, it turned, for the fraction of a second, toward us, and was instantly averted again. It made my nerves creep to look at it. The nose was immense, resembling a huge curved beak, and ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... her now—ill and exhausted from the combined effects of excitement, horror, and the unaccustomed ride across the desert—most anxious for his daughter—worried, to the verge of desperation, by the ghastly news ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... the drawing-room, ghastly pale, and almost immediately gave her the letter; then turned his back, feigning delicacy. In reality he was quaking with fear lest she should suspect the handwriting. But the envelope was addressed by Staines, and paved the way for the letter; she was unsuspicious and good, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... it up, saying in a loud voice, 'This is the head of a traitor.' He then dropped it into the coffin, which being removed, another was brought forward, and they proceeded to cut down the next body and to go through the same ghastly operation. It was observed that the mob, which was very large, gazed in silence at the hanging of the conspirators, and showed not the least sympathy; but when each head as cut off and held up, a loud and deep groan ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Then I wheeled my office-chair in front of bird and bust and door; And upon its cushion sinking, "I," I said, "will smash like winking This impeachment you are bringing, O you ominous bird of yore, O you grim, ungainly, ghastly, grumbling, gruesome feathered bore!" Croaked the Raven, "You ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... tried to realize the scene which had once been acted there. She tried to imagine the poor Queen and her attendant and her favourite Rizzio, sitting there at supper, and how that door, that very door, had opened, and Ruthven's ghastly figure, pale, and weak from illness, presented itself, and then others; the alarm of the moment; how Rizzio knew they were come for him, and fled to the Queen for protection; how she was withheld from giving it, and the unhappy man pulled away from her, and stabbed with a great many wounds, ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the dark beneath the broken window with Spike beside him, was presently aware of the sickening sounds of furious struggling close at hand, and of a hoarse, panting voice that cursed in fierce triumph—a voice that ended all at once in a ghastly strangling choke; and recognising this voice, the Spider hunched his great shoulders and bore Spike to a remote spot where stood a solitary lamp-post. Here he waited, calm-eyed and chewing placidly, one ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... were there so exquisitely blended, that to determine the leading characteristic of the scenery was impossible. Mountains, clad to the loftiest summit in perpetual verdure; gigantic trees, rich in blushing fruits; pensile plants, aglow with the choicest flowers; proud-rifted rocks, pale and ghastly, as if cleft by an earthquake; foaming cascades springing madly down the cliffs, leaping through chasms spanned with aquatic creepers, and then dwindling into ever-gurgling streams, that glided through ravines ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... You may hereafter decide on millions of money, and on the lives of your fellow men; but it is not likely that a question of this magnitude will ever twice be brought before the same jurymen. Opportunities to extend a far-reaching and ghastly wickedness, or to do great service for mankind, come but seldom in any man's life. Your verdict concerns all the people of the United States; its influence will reach to ages far remote, blessing or cursing whole generations not yet born. The ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... scarlet Ghost Bear reared; on his crest the scarlet feathers slanted low. The Yellow Moth was unbelievably hideous in the poisonous hue of a toad-stool; his crest and all his skin glistened yellow, shining like the sulphurous belly of a snake. But the Grey-Feather was ghastly; his bony features were painted like a skull, spine, ribs, and limb-bones traced out heavily in yellowish white so that he seemed a stalking and articulated skeleton as he moved in the dim twilight of the trees. And I could see that he was ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... be a joke at the bottom of it all. He therefore commenced searching for an opening, but had not proceeded far when a faint gleam of light flashed through a crevice near the entrance, and, to his horror, discovered rows of rude coffins, standing upright, but with the ghastly faces of their inmates exposed, and made more unnatural by a pale glow of light playing over them. "Protect me, O father, protect me, for I am but a weak sinner, at thy mercy," he muttered, and fell upon his knee, as every ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the shrubbery was full of blanched faces, rendered doubly ghastly by the faint glimmer of the lanterns and candles. Samuel was there, taciturn as usual, and the most self-possessed person present. He came direct from his room when the alarm was given. Miss Blake was led by Mrs. Schultz into ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... with them a long time without a word being said. Mr. Carleton knew that she was not weeping nor faint. But as the light of the lamps was now and then cast within the carriage, he saw that her face looked ghastly; and he saw too, that its expression was not of a quiet sinking under sorrow, nor of an endeavour to bear up against it, but a wild searching gaze into the darkness of possibilities. They had near ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Breathless and panting, he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me; but this time it was more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord. We precipitated ourselves into the landing-place. ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... her eyes met his without blenching she turned ghastly white, her face seeming to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... reached our feet and threatened to tear away our boat. In order to prevent this latter calamity, we hauled the boat farther up and held the cable in our hands. Occasional flashes of lightning shone with a ghastly glare through the watery curtains around us, and lent additional horror to the scene. Yet we longed for those dismal flashes, for they were less appalling than the thick blackness that succeeded them. Crashing peals of thunder seemed to tear the skies in twain, and fell upon our ears through ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... Then he fought for manly dignity, and said, with a lamentable mixture of sham sprightliness and real anguish, "Thank you, sir; I only trust that you will always find servants as devoted to your interest as my gratitude would have made me. Good-morning, sir." He clapped his hat on with a sprightly, ghastly air, and ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... Ma'am," any romance that had gathered round him fled away, leaving the saddest of all sad facts in living guise before me. Not only did the manhood seem to die out of him, but the comeliness that first attracted me; for, as he turned, I saw the ghastly wound that had laid open cheek and forehead. Being partly healed, it was no longer bandaged, but held together with strips of that transparent plaster which I never see without a shiver and swift recollections of scenes with which it is associated ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... and the hour of Rhoda's spectral encounter, and Brook felt like a guilty thing. The artless disclosure startled her; she did not reason on the freaks of coincidence; and all the scenery of that ghastly night returned with double ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... sometimes be called rough as to workmanship. But, unhappily there are few of the lesser arts that have fallen so low as the plasterer's. The cast work one sees perpetually in pretentious rooms is a mere ghastly caricature of ornament, which no one is expected to look at if he can help it. It is simply meant to say, 'This house is built for a rich man.' The very material of it is all wrong, as, indeed, mostly happens with an art that has ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... Heracles. It is all in keeping that he should arrive tired, should feast and drink and sing; should be suddenly sobered and should go forth to battle with Death. It is also in keeping that the contest should have a half-grotesque and half-ghastly touch, the grapple amid the graves and the ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... directions they turned and fled, the sailors in their eagerness dashing after them and cutting them down. The scene of the fight was a ghastly sight now. All around lay the dead and dying, and every minute added fresh victims ...
— Young Glory and the Spanish Cruiser - A Brave Fight Against Odds • Walter Fenton Mott
... the great square, with its obelisk and circle of statues, its pavilions and balustrades; beautiful now, and peaceful, but peopled with ghastly memories—for it was here the Revolution set up its guillotine, and it was here that some four thousand men and women, high and low, looked their last upon this earth, mounted the scaffold and passed under the knife. Surely, if any ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... bygone happiness, flock to your recollection at the sound of that gasping, breathing, while big hot tears fall slowly from your eyes. Poor wee man. Your hand seeks his little legs, and you dare not touch his chest, which you have kissed so often, for fear of encountering that ghastly leanness which you foresee, but the contact of which would make you break out in sobs. And then, at a certain moment, while the sunlight was flooding the room, you heard a deeper moan, resembling a cry. You ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... I shall be a different woman by that time." The contralto voice dropped oddly and suddenly with these words: an effect of the headache, of course. And the pallor of the dark face was almost ghastly. Angela thought that her hostess looked very ill. "You may expect me," ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... left hand on the gunwale and vaulted lightly upon deck. He stood a few moments as if transfixed, then turning abruptly about leaped to the ground, and, breaking into a run, hurried back to his friend, who noticed that his face was more ghastly than before, while his eyes stared as if they ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... a most kind motley woman," Harry said. "But it isn't the Back Kitchen, neither," he added, with a ghastly sigh. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as his predecessor did. Now when the stomachs of those that are thus turned out of doors, grow keen, they rob no less keenly; and what else can they do? for when, by wandering about, they have worn out both their health and their clothes, and are tattered, and look ghastly, men of quality will not entertain them, and poor men dare not do it; knowing that one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the neighbourhood with an insolent ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... as well as to the material prosperity of the passive elements of the community and stung the poilus to the quick. "But what justice," these asked, "can the living hope for, when the glorious dead are so soon forgotten?" For one ghastly detail remains to complete a picture to which Boccaccio could hardly have done justice. "While all this wild dissipation was going on among the moneyed class in the capital the corpses of many ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... I looked at her in surprise. She had suddenly turned ashen and ghastly; her face had set like a mask of stone, with parted lips and staring eyes that were fixed in horror on ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... strangely enough we were neither of us utterly hopeless, and even when the evil that we dreaded was upon us, and that which we greatly feared had come, we sat in the car of the balloon with the waters up to our middle, and still smiled with a ghastly hopefulness to one another. ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... block?" Lord Kenmure, in reply, laid down his head on the block, and spread forth his hands. The headsman instantly performed his office. The usual words, "This is the head of a traitor!" were heard as the executioner displayed the streaming and ghastly sight ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... given the place its name. A troop under Captain James camping at this point, because of the water and grass, had been surprised and wiped out by five hundred Indian braves of the wicked and famous Red Crow. There were ghastly signs about the place yet; Morgan had seen them, but soldiers may not have nerves, and it ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... I cannot see. Oh, my God!" His staring eyes saw something invisible to the others; his hands plucked continually at the counterpane. Suddenly he shuddered and gasped: "The cemetery—me—my God!" He did not speak again. He lay there motionless and ghastly. The hours dragged on; the clock of a neighboring convent ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... popular mourning for the Barmecides,[FN277] whose echo has not yet died away, must have added poignancy to his tardy penitence. The crime still "sticks fiery off" from the rest of Harun's career: it stands out in ghastly prominence as one of the most terrible tragedies recorded by history, and its horrible details make men write passionately on the subject ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... man was dead. Dr. Church, physician of the prison, examined the wound, and said there was scarcely a possibility that he could survive, though the wind-pipe was not entirely separated. But even the terrible admonition of that ghastly spectacle produced no relenting feelings in the hard heart of the slaveholder. He still demanded to have his victim delivered up to him. When the keeper declined doing it, and urged the reason that the physician said he could not be moved ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... Hal's face turns ghastly. "Do you believe me guilty, sir?" Detained in camp on parole. "I'll fight every inch of the way." Word that the Mexicans are rising. American women in peril. Lieutenant Overton's ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... glimmering. We shall see in its place what sort of thing he proposes. But before he commences his operations, in order to scare the public imagination, he raises by art magic a thick mist before our eyes, through which glare the most ghastly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... another form of industry that is a ghastly hybrid, the "home-work" that has been born of the union of advanced factory methods and primitive home appliances. Such a combination could never have come into existence, had the working classes at ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... face turned ghastly white; she put her hand upon her heart, and was on the point of falling to the ground when McKay vaulted lightly over the fence and saved her by putting his ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... her thought. He had taken his flask from the saddle pocket, and was kneeling down by the Squire. Roderick had lifted the heavy head, and turned the ghastly face to the waning light. He tried to force a little brandy between the ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... with agitation, he set forth to pay this call. For two or three nights he had scarcely closed his eyes; he looked ghastly. The weather was execrable, and on that very account he made choice of this afternoon, hoping that he might find his widowed Laura alone. Between ringing the bell and the opening of the door, he could hardly support himself. He asked for Mrs. Palmer in a gasping ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... the soul by the difference; he was tired of her ignorances, which she showed every minute, of her ghastly, unclean ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the first spots which the Frenchmen visited bore evidences of a ghastly tragedy. So numerous were the human bones bleaching on the sandy soil that they called it Massacre Island (to-day Dauphin Island). It was surmised—and with some plausibility—that here had perished some portion of the ill-fated following of Pamphile de Narvaez. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... the high balconies strange lights flashed, developing in hideous outlines the phosphorescent colors of the skeletons and long, fuzzy, exaggerated lines of the accompanying worms. The effect was thrilling. Every sound save the soft swish of the ghastly robes and the delicate footfall of ghostly feet ceased. Not a whisper from a sap-headed youth or a yap from an aged degenerate or a giggle from a silly woman broke the ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... slight frame collapsed in some way, and leaned heavily against him as he sat. Turning his eyes from the dim, rippling water, so little of which could be seen in the darkness and the fog, to the face of the priest, he saw that it had turned ghastly pale, and that the eyes were glazing over as if with the approach of death. Plainly the fugitive had received some bodily hurt of which he had not spoken, and the question what to do with their helpless burden became ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... and refused to revolve. It was the merest skeleton of a coach. The cushions had long since been removed, and the leather hangings, where they had not crumbled away, dangled in shreds from the worm-eaten frame. A load of ghosts and a span of phantom horses to drag them would have made the ghastly thing complete. ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... scarce Columbia's arms the fight sustains, While her best blood gushed from a thousand veins. Then thine, O Brown, that purpled wide the ground, Pursued the knife through many a ghastly wound. Ah! hapless friend, permit the tender tear To flow e'en now, for none flowed on thy bier, Where cold and mangled, under northern skies, To famished wolves a prey, thy body lies, Which erst so fair and tall in youthful grace, Strength in thy nerves and beauty in thy face, Stood ...
— Colonel John Brown, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the Brave Accuser of Benedict Arnold • Archibald Murray Howe
... It was a ghastly morning when Kittredge showed Rudd a telegram saying that his eldest son, Thomas, had thrown himself in front of a train because of the discovery that his accounts were wrong. Kittredge had found him ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... grey; What ho! bring book and bell! Ban yonder ghastly thing, I say; And, look ye, ban it well! By cock and pye, the Humpty's face!" The form turned quickly round; Then totter'd from ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the tragic Muse, Rude were the actors, and a cart the scene, Where ghastly faces, smear'd with lees of wine, Frighted the children, and amus'd ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. Twenty-three ghastly figures staggered out of the charnel-house, one hundred and twenty-three bodies were hastily thrown into a pit and covered up, and the Black Hole of Calcutta has gone into history as a synonym for all that is dreadful and all that is possible ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... free from privations, free from danger, let us, each of us, do his part as nobly as those heroes of ours are doing it at the front. [Cheers.] It would be horrible for us to think that those who fall fall through our neglect. It would be a still more ghastly reflection to think that those who fell have given their lives in vain through any slackness or selfishness on the part of any one of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... houseful of—well, you know the sort of chap the average Kayite is. They'd keep me busy even if I were allowed a free hand. But I'm not. Whenever I try and keep order and stop things a bit, out springs the man Kay from nowhere, and takes the job out of my hands, makes a ghastly mess of everything, and retires purring. Once in every three times, or thereabouts, he slangs me in front of the kids for not keeping order. I'm glad this is the end of the term. I couldn't stand it much longer. ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... not mention the visit, but you quite recognize the fact, Isobel, that he does not regard you as being in any way concerned in this ghastly affair." ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... his arm; "we banish thee from our presence! This is our palace!—and our guards are at hand!" pointing to the still and skeleton trees that grouped round in ghastly bareness. "Begone!" ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... took me to Christina's room. The poor girl was under the influence of morphine and sleeping a troubled sleep. Her face was very pale from loss of blood; and her head and neck were all bound up in white bandages, here and there stained with the ghastly fluid that flowed from her wounds. It was a pitiable sight: her short, crisp yellow curls broke here and there, rebelliously, through the folds of the linen bandages; and I thought how she used to shake ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... amongst us did not arrive until something like two hundred and sixty years had winged their flight from Agincourt. And yet Pope's doctrine had been that, in the conquest of France, we English first met with the Prometheus that introduced us to the knowledge of fire and intellectual arts. Is not this ghastly? Elsewhere, indeed, Pope skulks away from his own doctrine, and talks of 'correctness' as the particular grace for which we were indebted to France. But this will not do. In his own 'Art of Criticism,' ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... to be another dream, I turned over and shut my eyes. The waiter approached and, touching me on the arm, repeated his ghastly communication. With a frightful effort I explained that I had the ague and could see nobody for some days. Mercifully he retired, and for a little space I lay in a sort of trance. After a bit I began to wonder what, in the name of Heaven, I was to do. I was afraid to get up, and I was afraid ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... that gentleman, if you please," dodging his head towards an old gent in specs, who sat near the head of the table, grinning a ghastly smile over the field of ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... no answer, unless by a motion of his hand. As he turned back the collar from his face, we saw by the waving light that it was pale as death. The long wet locks already lay upon his cheeks, making them more ghastly as he struggled to speak. "O Stephen Lee, it's no time to be sitting by the fire, when old Asa Osborn is rolling in the waters. A man's drownded; and who's to get the body for the wife and the children—God pity them!—afore the ebb carries ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... severing my jugular vein, even going so far as to test against my throat the edge of a razor which, after the deadly impulse first asserted itself, I had secreted in a convenient place. I really wished to die, but so uncertain and ghastly a method did not appeal to me. Nevertheless, had I felt sure that in my tremulous frenzy I could accomplish the act with skilful dispatch, I should at ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... not seem to realise it. Sometimes I would rise up with the sole intention of finding out whether this frightful thing was or was not a ghastly dream. Then my memory would go back over the long years, and every little instance of unselfishness and devotion would rise before my mind. As I looked at the prostrate and attenuated form that lay silent ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... the occasion of a previous play, and then had appeared at breakfast the next morning with lowering eyebrows and a hectic flush on each cheek. "You must remember that foot-lights take a lot of color," she explained condescendingly. "You'd look ghastly if I let you go the way you wanted to ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... leaden clouds were scourged through the sky by a howling southeastern gale, and the lashed waters of the bay broke along the shore with a solemn, continued boom. The rain fell drearily, and sheet lightning, pale and constant, gave a ghastly hue to the scudding clouds. It was one of those lengthened storms which, during the month of August, are so prevalent along the Gulf coast. Clara Sanders sat near a window, bending over a piece of needlework, while, with her hands clasped behind her, Beulah ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... that he was witnessing? Or were his eyes playing some ghastly joke upon him? No, impossible though it was—it was true—the head was moving slowly to the fallen body. It placed itself upon the shoulders, the body rose, and the creature, seemingly as good as new, ran ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... refined. It was this peculiarity and their strong family resemblance which led their brother-in-law, the good-humored St. Addlegourd, to say that, "'Pon my soul, you know, the whole precious mob looked like a ghastly pack of court cards, you know." St. Addlegourd was a radical. Having a rent-roll of 15,000,000 pounds, and belonging to one of the oldest families in Britain, he could afford ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... ornaments, —weak, helpless, naked,—and undergoing the last fearful metempsychosis from its erect and godlike image, the living temple of an enshrined divinity, to the loathsome clod and the inanimate dust. Of what ghastly secrets of moral and physical disease is he the depositary! There is woe before him and behind him; he is hand and glove with misery by prescription,—the ex officio gauger of the ills that flesh is heir to. He has no home, unless it be at the bedside of the querulous, the splenetic, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... terrible disappointment to him," said Marjorie. "It's a ghastly mistake if poor old Captain Dinshaw really believes ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... make haste." And the horses, black as night, were urged on and on. "See those ghastly skeletons dancing!" Faust screamed, as the fearful spectres ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... her and tried to smile, but the attempt was a ghastly failure. Katie, gazing up into his face, saw that he was unhappy, and slunk away, without further speech, to her distant chair. There, from time to time, she would look up at him, and her little heart melted with ruth to see the depth of his misery. 'Why, oh why,' thought she, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Fargo's messenger was the neatest practical joke that had occurred in the county for some time. The always serious and anxious sheriff told the driver the accusation, and it was a genuine cry of horror that the young lover gave at hearing the truth at last, and at feeling the ghastly chain of probability that ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... well be phantoms in this ghastly mansion; but they had nothing to do with me; only the absent master of the house was any concern of mine; and, finding at last the window I sought for, I shoved it open and climbed to the sill, landing upon the floor inside, my moccasined feet ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... then pull a string and the poor spectator, besides being nearly deaf, would see some hideous recoiling portion shoot straight at his stomach, stop within an eighth of an inch of his belt buckle, and slide slowly back—a ghastly ordeal. ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... of thunder. Hark, hark! the horrid sound Has raised up his head; As awaked from the dead, And amazed he stares around. Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries, See the Furies arise! See the snakes that they rear, How they hiss in their hair, And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Behold a ghastly band, Each a torch in his hand! Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain And unburied remain Inglorious on the plain: Give the vengeance due To the valiant crew! Behold how they toss their torches on high, How they point to the ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... health had been just struck down by a violent kick from a horse, and was not expected to live more than a few hours. The blow had broken his skull bone, and cut out a piece as large as the palm of his hand, presenting a ghastly ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... laugh scornfully, but her heart gurged within her, and instead of laughter, her voice broke out into wild and horrid yells, and falling back in her chair, she grew stiff and ghastly to behold, in so much that both Elspa and my grandfather were terrified, and had to work with her for some time before they were able to recover her; nor indeed did she come rightly to herself till she got relief by tears; but they were tears of rage, and not shed for any remorse ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt |
