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Sultry   Listen
adjective
Sultry  adj.  (compar. sultrier; superl. sultriest)  
1.
Very hot, burning, and oppressive; as, Libya's sultry deserts. "Such as, born beneath the burning sky And sultry sun, betwixt the tropics lie."
2.
Very hot and humid, or hot, close, stagnant, and oppressive, as air. "When in the sultry glebe I faint, Or on the thirsty mountain plant."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sultry" Quotes from Famous Books



... to-day is hotter than usual, but it is never really very oppressive here unless there is an exceptionally hot wind blowing from the desert, but even that is partially cooled before it arrives. To us it appears delightful after our sultry voyage and the heat ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... sensations that so incessantly pour in from the overtense excited body the overtense and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you never give yourself up wholly to the chair you sit in, but always keep your leg and body muscles half contracted for a rise; ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... hill above the Indian town, and then, with drum beating and flag flying, began their march. "A fine prairie country," writes Bourgmont, "with hills and dales and clumps of trees to right and left." Sometimes the landscape quivered under the sultry sun, and sometimes thunder bellowed over their heads, and rain fell in floods on ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... creed were sound! For thou dost soothe the heart, thou church of Rome, By thy unwearied watch and varied round Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home. I cannot walk the city's sultry streets, But the wide porch invites to still retreats, Where passion's thirst is calmed, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... in the western sky; the horizon to the eastward was paling from violet-black to pearly-grey; and the stars in that quarter were beginning to lose their lustre. The air, which during the earlier hours of the night had been oppressively sultry, now came cool and refreshing to the fevered brows of the anxious watchers; the insects had subdued their irritating din, as is their wont toward the dawn; the watch-fire had smouldered down to a heap of grey, feathery, faintly-glowing ashes; the two sentinels at the entrance of the bush-path ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... Poe's even then celebrated poem was ringing through my brain on that sultry August day, I remember, like a tolling bell, as I looked my last on the gloomy abode of the La Vignes; but I only said aloud, in answer to the sympathizing glances of one who sat before me—the gentle and quiet Marion—who had suddenly determined ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... prayers, screaming, and fainting, but she was such a simpleton as not even to notice them, unless, in the usual sweet, low tone of her voice, to remark that they were delightful places to sit in, during the sultry part of the day; or she would stop her pony over a precipice to gather some curious flowers, drooping from a natural arch; or to pluck the pendant and waving boughs of the most graceful of Indian tress, the imperial mimosa, sensitive and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various

... Melmoth's little parlor unoccupied; that gentleman being deeply engaged in his study, and his lady busied in her domestic affairs. The evening, notwithstanding Ellen's remark concerning the chillness of the breeze, was almost sultry; and the windows of the apartment were thrown open. At one of these, which looked into the garden, she seated herself, listening, almost unconsciously, to the monotonous music of a thousand insects, varied occasionally by the voice of a whippoorwill, ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... dark that the five men returned to the camp on the east shore. The night was hot and sultry. No slightest breeze ruffled the foliage of the trees or rippled the mirror-like surface of the ocean. Only a gentle swell rolled softly in upon ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... springest up alone in the bosom of thy native valley! And the bright sun arises every day to glass himself in thy morning mirror; and the beaming moon, after a sultry day, hastens to fan thee with her breezy wing, and the angels of God, lulling thee by night, spread over thee a starry canopy, such as king never possessed. Who can tell from what quarter the tempest may bring from afar, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various

... Oft we stand And watch the ground with anxious brooding eyes Complaining of the slow unfruitful yield, Not knowing that the shadow of ourselves Keeps off the sunlight and delays result. Sometimes our fierce impatience of desire Doth like a sultry May force tender shoots Of half-formed pleasures and unshaped events To ripen prematurely, and we reap But disappointment; or we rot the germs With briny tears ere they have time to grow. While stars are born and mighty planets ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... not far off," Dr. Barnett said, one sultry August night, after he had left the sick-room. "I shall go down and telegraph for Olive to ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving

... rid of the flowing robe which would have made of him a marked man. Fortunately the night was hot and sultry, and so far he suffered no inconveniences, but he knew that this disguise was only a makeshift and that by fair means or foul, he must come into the possession of some sort of costume in which he could face the light of ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... flames; one spark might have set the whole country on our side in a blaze, and then no food would remain for the cattle, not to mention the danger to our stores and ammunition." "Fires prevailed extensively at great distances in the interior, and the sultry air seemed heated by the general conflagration;" these expressions convey rather alarming ideas of the dangers to which travellers are exposed in the bush, and from which it is not always easy to make ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... in the woods as usual. It was very sultry; not a leaf stirred. Louise lay with her elbow on the moss-grown roots of a tree; her eyes were heavy. Maurice, before her, smoked a cigarette, and watched for the least recognition of his presence, thinking, meanwhile, that she looked better already for these ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... the sultry stillness of the chamber, save only the droning of an imprisoned bee and the rustling of paper when the eager student turned a leaf. Deeper and deeper grew his absorption; his eyes seemed to devour the lines, and he clutched his hair with both hands, as if he would tear it out by the roots. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... psychological folks were all in London, and the capacities of the Progressive Library are not palatial. Miss Chandos had a crowded meeting whether she desired it or not. Genius will not be concealed; and Miss Chandos was learning that lesson in a very satisfactory way. It was a sultry evening when a small boy opened the back door of the little first floor apartment in Southampton Row, and squeezed me in like the thirteenth in an omnibus, and I found myself walking on people's toes, and sitting down on their hats in the most reckless manner. At length, however, I struggled ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... wreath from pantaloons; Nankeen of late were worn the sultry weather in; But now, (so will the Prince's light dragoons,) White jean have triumph'd o'er their ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... at the time I speak of, one evening of last summer, a horrible thing befell, which took all play of childhood from me. The fifteenth day of last July was very hot and sultry, long after the time of sundown; and I was paying heed of it, because of the old saying that if it rain then, rain will fall on forty days thereafter. I had been long by the waterside at this lower end of the valley, plaiting a little crown of woodbine crocketed ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... stand, And Honour linger ere it leaves the land. But all our praises why should lords engross? Rise, honest Muse! and sing the Man of Ross: Pleased Vaga echoes through her winding bounds, And rapid Severn hoarse applause resounds. Who hung with woods you mountain's sultry brow? From the dry rock who bade the waters flow? Not to the skies in useless columns tost, Or in proud falls magnificently lost, But clear and artless, pouring through the plain Health to the sick, and solace to ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... in some way that she cannot see, but it is certainly not with her, and, if it is not with him, then it is with the summer, which is a season so unreasonable that it will not allow itself to be satisfactorily disposed of. In town it is intolerable; in the mountains it is sultry by day and all but freezing by night; at the seaside it is cold and wet or dry and cold; there are flies and mosquitoes everywhere but in Europe, and, with the bottom once out of Europe, you cannot go there without dropping through. In Lindora's experience the summer has had the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... in Ft. Smith one sultry Sunday afternoon, It was in the month of May, the early month of June, Up stepped a walking skeleton with a long and lantern jaw, Invited me to his hotel, ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various

... through my lattice, thou That cool'st the twilight of the sultry day, Gratefully flows thy freshness round my brow: Thou hast been out upon the deep at play, Riding all day the wild blue waves till now, 5 Roughening their crests, and scattering high their spray, And swelling the white sail. I welcome thee To ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... irritated him, a pale, haunted face had pleaded with him. He had tossed himself awake, had listened thankfully to the soft breathing beside him, had kissed the fragrant braid across his face, and sunk again into heavy, sultry nightmare, doomed to live that shameful day through every clock-tick. And now his brain was cloudy with it. His hand lay ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... In a general way, after you have had two or three days of rain, the air and sky are healthily clear, and the sun bright. If it is hot also, the next day is a little mistier—the next misty and sultry,—and the next and the next, getting thicker and thicker—end in another ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... sultry, yellow sky, On the yellow sand I lie; The crinkled vapors smite my brain, I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... the weather never seemed hot, except perhaps for an hour or two at a time. Morning after morning the sun would rise in a blaze of yellow, which anywhere else would have betokened a scorching day; and just as people had begun to say, "What a sultry morning!" lo, in one moment the wind would set in from the sea, strong, salty, fresh, invigorating; and, behold, it was cool! Or if the afternoon seemed for a little while oppressive in the streets of the old town, it was only necessary to go down to the end of the Avenue to find ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge

... been warm, very warm and sultry, a day of surprises, beginning with the sudden disappearance of Monsieur X.'s trusted head clerk—a German boy who has been in the office for fifteen years and who knew every phase of the situation. What reason on earth could he have had for vanishing like that with all his personal belongings, ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow

... matter the fat countess of Calpi is a crowd of herself, and though it were the depth of winter, her presence would raise the thermometer to "boiling water." Well! I must say, it's mighty inconsiderate in corpulent people to come abroad in sultry weather; and if I were a senator, I'd make it high treason for persons above a certain weight to squeeze themselves into public places after ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various

... as of the other; and the elderly dames, in particular, had been so curious as to dip their little stumps into the water in order to have a peep into the barges as they glided slowly along; but here, among the whole crowd, not a single female was visible. Although the day was extremely sultry, the thermometer of Fahrenheit being 88 in the shade, as a mutual accommodation their heads were all uncovered, and their bald pates exposed to the scorching rays of the sun. It was an uncommon spectacle to see so many bronze-like heads stuck as close together, tier above ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... only retire—nurse being thus convinced that to let him see another stranger to-night would only do further harm. Nuttie and nurse succeeded in reassuring him that he was safe at home and with them, and in hushing him off into what they hoped would be a quiet wholesome sleep in spite of the hot sultry night, on which Annaple laid a good deal of the blame of ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to the troubles of the little party, the day proved very hot and sultry, not a breath of air stirring. By noon all were very thirsty, and when night came without bringing any relief from the heat, they began to suffer severely for ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... to "the world of fashion," as the admirers of the polite novel of would say. The noon-day sun broke hot and sultry through half-closed curtains of roseate silk, playing in broken beams upon rare and fragrant exotics, which cast the perfumes of southern summers over a chamber, moderate, indeed, as to its dimensions, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Caesar's genial patriotism could not make it young again. The blush of dawn returns not until the night has fully descended. Yet with him there came to the much-tormented races of the Mediterranean a tranquil evening after a sultry day; and when after long historical night the new day broke once more upon the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-guided movement began their course toward new and higher aims, many were found among them in whom the seed of Caesar had sprung up,—many who owed him, and who owe him ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... thousand ochered, feathered horsemen come thundering down upon the camp, their horses running flat, their rifles popping, while the valley rocked to their battle-cries and to the answering clamor of the army which rode forth to meet them. Five sultry days had I spent wandering unnoticed, ungreeted, and disdained, an alien in a hostile land, tolerated but unwelcome. Five evenings had I witnessed the tents begin to glow and the campfires kindle until the valley became hooped about as if by a million giant fireflies. Five nights ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... comparison be made between the coast of Brazil and the western shore of South America, as, for example, between Bahia and Lima, the difference will be found still more considerable; for, though the coast of Brazil is extremely sultry, yet the coast of the South Sea, in the same latitude, is perhaps as temperate and tolerable as any part of the globe; since we, in ranging it along, did not once meet with such warm weather as is frequently felt in a summer day in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... sultry afternoon, Granville Kelmscott found himself, after various strange adventures and escapes by the way, in a Koranna hut, far in the untravelled heart of the savage ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... squalls vex the Elsinore. One hour we may be rolling sickeningly in a dead calm, and the next hour we may be dashing fourteen knots through the water and taking off sail as fast as the men can clew up and lower away. A night of calm, when sleep is well-nigh impossible in the sultry, muggy air, may be followed by a day of blazing sun and an oily swell from the south'ard, connoting great gales in that area of ocean we are sailing toward—or all day long the Elsinore, under an overcast sky, royals and sky sails furled, may plunge ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... the morning of a close sultry day in July, and Mrs. Lawson was seated in her drawing-room. She was dressed carefully and expensively as of old, but she had been dunned and threatened at least half-a-dozen times for the price of the satin dress she wore. Her ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various

... fire of cocoanut-husks as usual in the morning to cook my coffee and eggs, when a whistle split the sultry air. Far from the bay it came, shrill and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... steady at it. Mark me, drab, we Camilli Mean what we say." Stone after stone still flies, But aimed to knock chips from the pine-boles now; For she is busy gathering sticks, increasing Her distance as she may. The noon is sultry, Heated and clammy, I, Towards the live waves turning, slip my tunic, Then run in naked. Cooled and soothed by swimming, Both mind and heart from their late tumult tuned To placid acquiescent health, I float, suspended in the limpid water, Passive, rhythmically governed; So ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... seen perhaps a dozen such to-day, stopping at the farm landings as well as at the crude and infrequent hamlets,—mere notches of settlement in the wooded lines of shore,—doing a small business in chance cargoes and in passengers who flag them from the bank. A sultry atmosphere has been with us through the day. The glassy surface of the river has, when not lashed into foam by passing boats, dazzled the eyes most painfully. The hills, from below Stewart's Island, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... civic strength; and, even under this limitation, they were supposed to owe more to the circumstances of their position—their climate, their remoteness, and their inaccessibility except through arid and sultry deserts—than to intrinsic resources, such as could be permanently relied on in a serious trial of strength between the two powers. The kings of Parthia, therefore, were far enough from being regarded in the light of antagonist forces to the majesty of Rome. And, these withdrawn from ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... with a promise of sultry heat, and as the sun rose higher and higher in the heavens the heat grew more and more intolerable to their ill-protected heads and thirsty tongues. The gaiety of yesterday was gone; the enchantment had vanished from the waste spaces, ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... of Scribe compared with this? how else could the avowal of love be brought about with such instant and stupendous effect? Quite as amazing is the second act. Almost from the beginning to close on the end the lovers fondle each other, in a garden before an old castle in the sultry summer night; and just as their passion reaches its highest pitch, Mark breaks in upon them. For Tristan, at least, death is imminent; and the mere presence of death serves to begin the change from the desire of the flesh to the ecstatic spiritual passion. That change ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... of a sultry day in July that Mr. John Louder and his neighbor Bly were returning from Boston in a cart. As usual, their conversation was of the solemn kind, characteristic of the Puritan. The many mysteries in nature and out ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... run to earth one sultry evening in the Brevoort, welcomed Kirk as a brother, as a rich brother. Even when his first impression, that he was to have the run of the house on Fifth Avenue and mix freely with touchable multi-millionaires, had been corrected, his altitude was still brotherly. He parted ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... a sultry day in July, in the year 1812, might have been seen a young man riding along the beautiful west bank of the Niagara River, about three miles above its mouth. His appearance would anywhere have attracted attention. He was ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... he adorned the triumphal procession of his conqueror Marius, and was finally cast into this cell, perishing there of cold and hunger. What a terrible ending to the career of a fierce, free soldier, who had spent his life on horseback in the boundless sultry deserts of Western Africa! The temperature of the place is exceedingly damp and chill. Jugurtha himself, when stripped of his clothes by the executioners, and let down into it from the hole in the roof, exclaimed ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... colony, of which we are especially speaking, has already been peopled! The majestic rusa, captured in the sultry forests of Bengal, and the elegant gazelle, which has once bounded over the parching deserts of Barbary, have become intimate and make their couch with the white reindeer, brought from the icy wastes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... the blue air. I was ashamed to shout aloud, but I exulted inwardly, and shuffled about so on the foot-board behind the carriage that I well-nigh lost my fiddle from under my arm. But when the sun rose higher in the sky, while heavy, white, noonday clouds gathered on the horizon, and the air hung sultry and still above the gently-waving grain, I could not but remember my village and my father, and our mill, and how cool and comfortable it was beside the shady mill-pool, and how far, far away from me it all was. And the most curious sensation overcame ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... had been some little time out, the wind suddenly dropped, and there fell on us an airless, sultry calm. When the order came to get the topmasts on deck, and to shift the large sails, we all knew what to expect. In little better than an hour more, the storm was upon us, the thunder was pealing over our heads, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... mind. Either the cross thou bearest, and thy knees Among the silent caves of Palestine Wear the sharp flints away with midnight prayer; Or thou shalt keep the fasts of Barbary, Shalt wait amid the crowds that throng the well From sultry noon till the skies fade again, To draw up water and to bring it home In the cracked gourd of some vile testy knave, Who spurns thee back with bastinadoed foot For ignorance or ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor

... removed into the sitting-room next it, that, sleeping or waking, she might be within call. All the family portraits held a conclave in the other front-parlor, and its north and east windows were shut all the year, save on some sultry summer day when Keery flung them open to dispel damp and must, and the school-children stared in reverentially, and wondered why old Madam Hyde's eyes followed them as far as they could see. Visitors came now and then to the kitchen-door, and usurped Keery's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... "It's kind o' sultry," said the same lady, wiping her face. "I declare these ellums o' yourn do cast an elegant shadder. It allays sort o' hampers me to drive, and I don't feel free till I can let the reins fall; that's how I come to be so heated. Dear me, you do excel in notions!" she exclaimed, as ...
— Diana • Susan Warner

... should indulge in no such thought, till an idea struck him, and he got up, and, drawing back the blinds from the open window, looked out into the night. It was the last day of June, and the weather was very sultry; but the night was dark, and it was now near midnight. On a sudden he took his hat, and feeling with a smile for the latchkey which he always carried in his pocket,—thinking of the latchkey which had been made at Prague for the lock ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... for that purpose. The stunted fir-trees on the Down gave so little shadow that I was glad to find a hawthorn under whose branches I could rest on the sward. The prevalent winds of winter sweeping without check along the open slope had bent the hawthorn before them, and the heat of the sultry summer day appeared the greater on that exposed height. On either hand hills succeeded to hills, and behind I knew they extended farther than the eye could reach. Immediately beneath in front there was a plain, at its extreme boundary ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... sound, like a small army of tin pans on a rampage, suddenly woke the echoes one still, sultry afternoon. Auntie Jean thought it was the circus, and sighed as she wondered if they were going to keep it up long enough to make it worth while for her to leave her cool room and her afternoon nap, to go and stop them. Grandma heard it, and supposed ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow

... hard to bear. Then, too, her little heart was very sad as she thought of her father's displeasure, and feared that he would withdraw from her the affection which had been for the last few months the very sunshine of her life. Besides all this, the excitement of her feelings, and the close and sultry air—for it was a very warm day—had brought on a nervous headache. She leaned forward and rested her head against the instrument, feeling in momentary danger ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley

... Where forc'd and frivolous the themes arise, With bow and smile unmeaning, O! how palls At thee, and thine, my sense!—how oft it sighs For leisure, wood-lanes, dells, and water-falls; And feels th' untemper'd heat of sultry skies! ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... almost every hour of the day. Damietta was a large city, while Moorestown was only a small town; but the latter was pleasantly located and had a large and excellent hotel, where quite a number of guests spent the most sultry months of summer. ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis

... that he seemed always to be looking for something startling to occur; and in a dearth of the new and sensational from without, he produced excitement for the community from within. The weather, for instance, was growing warmer, and the summer was apparently to be a sultry one: hence, before the season was ended we were to look for the most sweeping epidemics of disease; a comet had been sighted by one of our comet-hunters, and we were all to say later whether or not it would have been better if we'd never been born, and so on, and so on. His mind teemed with a prescience ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... the great event that had been announced, the nature of the coming event was not known, though a hundred speculations were rife. The city was astir early, for the night had been too sultry for much sleeping, and everyone was more or less excited, as to what would be the great event which the next thirty hours—more or less—was to bring. As the sun mounted higher and higher the whole ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... measured accurately; events moved slowly in an unreal world of sultry heat and smoke and a red sun wading heavily through the copper-brown sky from the east to the west, and a moon as red which followed ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower

... the air for some days had been hot and sultry, scarcely modified by the cool delicious breeze that usually sets in about nine o'clock, and blows most refreshingly till four or five in the afternoon. Hector and Louis had gone down to fish for supper, while Catharine busied herself in collecting leaves and dried deer-grass, moss and fern, ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... With cold water (as every child is now-a-days aware) you may lash a fluid into angry ebullitions of heat; with hot water, as with the rod of Amram's son, you may freeze a fluid down to the temperature of the Sarsar wind, provided only that you regulate the pressure of the air. The sultry and dissolving fluid shall bake into a solid, the petrific fluid shall melt into a liquid. Heat shall freeze, frost shall thaw; and wherefore? Simply because old things are brought together in new ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... in one of the large manufacturing towns. It was the hottest part of a sultry day in June. He was returning home, and sat in a broiling third-class carriage reading a paper. Apparently what he read was the reverse of gratifying for there was a look of annoyance on his usually serene face; he was displeased with the report of ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... beams bemock'd the sultry main Like April hoar-frost spread; But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth

... bound books. These last, with bowls and vases of flowers, were scattered over the various tables. The scent of the flowers mingled with the strange fumes of some Oriental incense. He had draped pieces of flame-coloured silk over the windows. Everything looked bizarre, and the atmosphere was sultry. When I entered he was not pleased to see me—in fact, he showed a disposition to sulk. I laboured to convince him that he would forfeit the respect of all honourable men unless he showed some just resentment at his ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... morning; but the day promised to be sultry, and all the windows of Ishmael's chamber were open to facilitate the freest passage of air. Ishmael lay motionless upon his cool, white bed, letting his glances wander abroad, whither his broken limbs could ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... that long and sultry spring and summer of the earth's early history, a time probably longer than has since elapsed, played a part in the development of life analogous to that played by our spring and summer, making it opulent, varied, gigantic, and making possible the condensation ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... turn to Kentucky, and note the opposite influences of slavery. A narrow and unfrequented path through the close and sultry canebrake conducts us to a wretched hovel. It stands in the midst of an unweeded field, whose dilapidated enclosure scarcely protects it from the lowing and hungry kine. Children half clad and squalid, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... frosty air, and into his comfortable parlor. A Heidenberg stove, filled to the brim with intensely burning anthracite, was sending a bright gleam through the isinglass of its iron door, and causing the vase of water on its top to fume and bubble with excitement. A warm, sultry smell was diffused throughout the room. A thermometer on the wall farthest from the stove stood at eighty degrees. The parlor was hung with red curtains, and covered with a red carpet, and looked just as warm as it felt. The difference betwixt the atmosphere here and the cold, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... presence, and dimly caught a word of dangerous illness; and then came the agony of the parting scene, and the clear, hard, pitiless school bell, cutting on our hearts the sense of an irreparable loss, as it thrilled through the sultry darkness of ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... from the lofty summit of laudable ambitions into the sultry plains of domestic drudgery and menial toil, nearly every ray of hope had perished upon the strained vision of the Negro. The only thing young Colored men could aspire to was the position of a waiter, the avocation of a barber, the place of a house-servant or groom, and teach or ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... with the regular trade wind. But, to our extreme vexation, we were baffled for near a month, either with tempestuous weather from the western quarter, or with dead calms and heavy rains, attended with a sultry air. As our hopes were so long baffled, and our patience quite exhausted, we began at length to despair of succeeding in the great purpose we had in view, that of intercepting the Manila galleon; and this produced a general dejection amongst us, as we had ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter

... in Coralio on that sultry afternoon. Among those that were may be mentioned a noise of enraptured and unrighteous laughter from a prostrate Irish-American, while a sunburned young man, with a shrewd eye, looked on him with wonder and amazement. Also the "tramp, tramp, tramp" ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... satisfied disposition, otherwise they must inevitably sink under such a complication of misery and wretchedness; what is singularly remarkable, they always carry out a piece of fire, and kindle one near their work, let the weather be so hot and sultry. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... particular morning felt far from comfortable. It may have been the hot sultry day, or it may have been the general oppression of his own feelings, which gave him a sense of something— probably a thunderstorm impending. His class remarked that he was less exacting than usual, and even Jeffreys became aware that ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed

... is described with a gentle blending of humour and pathos. Clifford Pyncheon—the sybarite made for happiness and hideously cheated of his destiny—is delineated with curious insight and sympathy. It is Judge Jaffery Pyncheon, with his "sultry" smile of "elaborate benevolence"—unrelenting and crafty as his infamous ancestor—who lends to The House of Seven Gables the element of terror. Hour after hour, Hawthorne, with grim and bitter irony, mocks and taunts the dead body ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... hearts to leap within us. A disabled wheel meant a tedious delay in a latitude where the resources are decidedly limited. Often we thought of the miserable millions away down East simmering in the sultry summer heat, while the thermometer with us stood at 45 degrees in the sun, and the bracing salt air ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... expecting to buy a number of horses, I walked back and looked this one carefully over. He was very peculiarly color-marked in the mane. I inquired for his owner, but they told me that he was not about at present. It was growing dusk when we started out again. The evening was warm and sultry and threatening rain. We had been on our way about an hour when I realized we had left the main road and were bumping along on a by-road. I asked the driver his reason for this, and he explained that it was a cut-off, and that by taking it we would save three miles and ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams

... There was not a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the sea; but there was a slight glassy swell, and that only served to show curious opalescent tints under the suffused light of the sun. There were no clouds; there was only a thin veil of faint and sultry mist all across the sky: the sun was invisible, but there was a glare of yellow at one point of the heavens. A dead calm; but heavy, oppressed, sultry. There was something in the atmosphere that seemed to weigh ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... lady had been pleased with her present, Drusus could not tell; although he had sent along a letter explaining the circumstances of the case. But Quintus had other things on his mind than Agias and his fortunes, on the morning when at last he turned his face away from the sultry capital, and found his carriage whirling him once ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... appeared, Blue-based, white-crested, in the afternoon; And westward, darker masses, plashed with blue, And outlined vague in misty steep and dell, Clomb o'er the hill-tops: thunder was at hand. The air was sultry. But the upper sky Was ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... silence. The little old lady with the knitting looked down the street into the sultry darkness which ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... On a sultry tropic day, when the last flicker of the far southeast trade was fading out and the seasonal change for the northwest monsoon was coming on, the Kittiwake lifted above the sea-rim the jungle-clad ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London

... had to be provided, and great care was taken in this respect to make the voyage as attractive as possible, attention having been somewhat turned to the Lake Superior country as a Summer resort, where the sultry beats of the "lower country" could be exchanged for pure air and cooling breezes. When launched, the City of Superior proved a complete success, and her first voyage up was a perfect ovation, a new era having been opened in the history of travel between the upper and middle lakes. But, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... story is wide, and extends to a small piazza in the rear. The front half of this family thoroughfare, partitioned off by sliding-doors, can thus be made into a roomy apartment. Its breezy coolness causes it to be a favorite resort on sultry days, but now it is forsaken, except that a great heater, with its ample rotundity and glowing heart, suggests to the visitor that it stands there as a representative of the host until he shall appear. Some portraits, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... late-comers sat upon the ground in the doorway, or as near as they could get to it. As the people inside knelt or stood, so did they who had been left, not out in the cold, but in the heat, for the sun had broken through the mist, and the weather was sultry. As I walked round the church I found women sitting with open books and rosaries in their hands near the apse, amidst the yarrow and mulleins of forgotten grave mounds. They were following the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... very hot, thirty degrees Reaumur in the shade. The sultry air was stagnant and motionless, and a long spider-web, stretching from the chestnut-tree to the ground, hung limply and did ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... as always, and the sultry west wind was sweeping the filth down the street canons. Here in the district of wholesale business houses a kind of midsummer gloom reigned. Many stores were vacant, their broad windows plastered with play-bills. Even in the warehouses along ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... on the deep— Tossed by the restless billow and the breeze, It drifts o'er sultry leagues of tropic seas. Where long Pacific surges swell and sweep, When pale-faced stars their silent watches keep, From their far rhythmic spheres, the Pleiades, In calm beatitude and tranquil ease, Smile sweetly down upon its cradled sleep. Erewhile, with anchor housed and sails unfurled, We ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston

... come in more sultry and warm than August had been; even out in the open streets, towards the mountain, the motionless air was hot and stifling. It was a trying day in the narrow alleys and in the low parts of the city, where many an invalid lay ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson

... intellectually inspiring, and spiritually restful, need not always be serious. It must be alert and intelligent, and mean more by its suggestions and allusions than is said. There is the light touch-and-go play about topics more or less profound that is as agreeable as heat-lightning in a sultry evening. Why may not a person express the whims and vagaries of a lambent mind (if he can get a lambent mind) without being hauled up short for it, and plunged into a heated dispute? In the freedom of real conversation the mind throws out half-thoughts, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... said Bartle; "I don't care a trawneen; I'll stay where I am, thin, an' do you go beyant; let us hurry, too, for, if I'm not mistaken, it's too sultry to be long without rain, the ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... is Mr. Justice Stephen. He pitied the poor devils, but he did not believe in them. They were neither happy nor wise, and he saw no reason to believe they would ever become either. 'Leave me alone,' he cried to the sultry mob, bawling 'Wilkes and Liberty.' 'I at least am not ashamed to own that I care for neither the ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... with small craft of every description, from the large felucca-rigged boat down to the fishing canoe simply constructed of a hollowed-out log, and steamers crowded with passengers plied between the city and the opposite shore. The seabreeze died away, and was succeeded by a sultry calm; after a short interval, the grateful land wind, laden with sweet odours, advanced as a dark line slowly stealing along the surface of the water, and the deep boom of the evening gun echoing from hill to hill may be said appropriately ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray

... sultry summer morning—scarcely a breath of air stirred the clematis and woodbine blossoms that peeped in and clustered around the breakfast-room window, greeting us with fresh fragrance; but on this morning no pleasant air breathed sighingly over them, and they ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... had gone to his room she sat in the arm-chair by the fire, her hands idly folded on her lap. She let happiness pour in upon her as water floods in upon a dried and sultry river-bed. She was passive, her tranquillity was rich and full, too full for ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... throw a peculiar and Oriental charm over the Andalusian mode of living may be traced to the Moors. Whenever I enter these beautiful marble patios, set out with shrubs and flowers, refreshed by fountains, sheltered with awnings from the sun; where the air is cool at noonday, the ear delighted in sultry summer by the sound of falling water; where, in a word, a little paradise is shut up within the walls of home, I think on the poor Moors, the inventors of all these delights. I am at times almost ready to join in sentiment with a worthy friend and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Age was never more fully-shewn than in its treatment of this writer—its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission to prejudice and to the fashion of the day. Five-and-twenty years ago he was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off:—now he has sunk ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... unforgettable sultry days we have endured the ghastly pleasantries of charwomen, better qualified to victual the lower animals than mankind. To call the first meal "breakfast" is sheer blasphemy: lunch is a hollow mockery: dinner, the abomination of desolation. I do what I can with grape-nuts ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... there, and was in command during the engagement. He had been sent with a company, the night before, about a thousand strong, to throw up a redoubt on Bunker's hill. He made a mistake, and performed the work on Breed's hill. The British had no suspicion of the work that went on during that sultry June night, and were greatly alarmed when they saw a formidable breastwork overlooking their shipping in the harbor, and menacing the city. During the engagement, General Putnam was on Bunker's hill, urging on reinforcements ...
— The Military Journals of Two Private Soldiers, 1758-1775 - With Numerous Illustrative Notes • Abraham Tomlinson

... basket and sickle to gather green herbage wherever he could and had brought it to his rice paddy. The day in July was extremely sultry. We came upon him wading in the water half way to his knees, carefully laying the herbage he had gathered between alternate rows of his rice, one handful in a place, with tips overlapping. This done he took the attitude seen in the illustration and, gathering the materials into a compact ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King

... the spring Amid the wild alone; A burning wild o'er which the wing Of cloud is seldom thrown; And blest is he who meets that fount, Beneath the sultry day; How gladly should his spirit mount, How pleasant be ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... too soon. The clouds which had been hovering about for several days, finally gathered together one afternoon, and rolled in heavy, thunderous masses up out of the southern sky. The air grew dark and sultry, lightning flashed from the depths of the purple cloud-bank; soon the thunder crashed overhead, and the waves lashed themselves in fury against the shore. The storm was upon them in all its might. It was not of long duration, but was followed by a good deal of rain during the night, ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis

... exceedingly hot and sultry one. Daisy had no visitors until quite late in the afternoon; however it was a peaceful day. She lay quiet and happy, and Juanita was quite as well contented that the house should be empty, and they two alone. Late in ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell

... hall struck ten; and at the same moment a sudden gust of wind swept through the room, strewing the table with petals from the over-blown roses in the jar, and blowing Clarissa's curls about her head. It was a welcome breeze, coming as it did after the sultry stillness, and she stood up between the two windows to enjoy the draught. Then, after pacing the long room to and fro for awhile, she sat down to her frame again, and began to think about her ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... opened the door and stood back against the wall for Christian to pass in. The Provincial was seated at the table near the window, which was open, the afternoon being sultry although the autumn was nearly over. At his left hand stood the small Venetian mirror which enabled him to see who was ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... of America's most famous watering-places, in midsummer, its softly-wooded hills dotted here and there with picturesque "frame" villas of dazzling white, and below the purple Atlantic sweeping in restlessly on to the New Jersey shore. The sultry day has been one of summer storm, and the waves are tipped still with crests of snowy foam, though now the sun is sinking peacefully to rest amid banks of cloud, aflame with ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar

... classic sight it is to see The black gowns flaunting in the sultry air, Boys big with literary sympathy, And all the glories of this great affair! More classic sounds!—within, the plaudit shout, While Punchinello's ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... his advance entered with my pickets, whom he had charged and badly stampeded, without, on their part, the pretense of a fight in behalf of those whom it was their duty to protect until proper dispositions for defense could be made. The day was excessively hot, one of those sultry debilitating days that had caused the suspending of all military exercises; and as most of the men were lounging or sleeping in their tents, we were literally caught napping. The alarm spread instantly through the camp, and in a moment ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan

... you fret about the weather 'Cause it seems a little hot; You will find it rather sultry Over yonder, like as not! And unless you mend your manners You will land without a doubt, Where the brim-stone keeps a blazin' And the fire ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller

... was delightful, about like our October. The showers were frequent, there was no dust and no sultry air. ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell

... Harper's Ferry at two o'clock P. M., crossed the river on pontoons at Sandy Hook, and advanced into Virginia. Monthly returns for June were made before our march commenced. The weather is very warm and sultry. On the twentieth we resumed our march at ten A. M., and advanced to Leesburg, where we fed our horses and rested. In the decline of the day we marched to Goose Creek, on whose grassy banks ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier

... Pitfall of Sentiment yawned visible, but this lady's strength had been too little tried for her to lack absolute faith in it. So, out of deep silences, the two leapt to speech and immediately subsided to the depths again: as on a sultry summer's day fishes flash their tails in the sunlight and leave a solitary circle widening ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a sultry summer's day a hundred and fifty years ago, and John Wesley was on the rocky road to Dublin. 'The wind being in my face, tempering the heat of the sun, I had a pleasant ride to Dublin. In the evening I began expounding the deepest part of the ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham

... With a soul so weak and fearful, with the doubts I never knew? Dost thou not remember that the thorns are clustered with the rose, And that every Zin-like border may a pleasant land enclose? Oh, across these sultry deserts many a fruitful scene we'll find, And the blooms we gather shall be worth the ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... forests at the south and in New York and New England, and correspondingly uncommon wherever the woodsman's axe has laid the pine trees low throughout its range. Its "simple, sweet, and drowsy song," writes Mr. Parkhurst, is always associated "with the smell of pines on a sultry day." It recalls that of the junco and the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan

... upon my way, Thro'out the sultry years, But pause no more, by night, by day, Beside the Fount ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... six weeks have been very unhealthy. We had an unusually hot dry summer—quite a drought; the wells, for example, were never so tried. There was also an unusual continuance of north-east winds- -our sultry close wind. And when the dry weather broke up, the rain and damp weather continued for many days. Great sickness prevailed in Auckland and the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge



Words linked to "Sultry" :   hot, sultriness, stifling, sulphurous, sulfurous



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