"Fleshless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and lift, straightway, as mist again. So that, all the while Nature was trying to give lustier life to every living thing in the lowland Bluegrass, all the while a gaunt skeleton was stalking down the Cumberland—tapping with fleshless knuckles, now at some unlovely cottage of faded white and green, and now at a log cabin, stark and gray. Passing the mouth of Lonesome, he flashed his scythe into its unlifting shadows and went stalking on. High up, at the source of the dismal little stream, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... journeyed on till sunset, when we came to a deep dry gully, on the very edge of the prickly pear barrier, and there we encamped for the night. To go farther without something to eat was impossible. The wild and haggard looks of my companions, their sunken eyes, and sallow, fleshless faces, too plainly showed that some subsistence must be speedily provided more nutritious than the unripe and strongly acidulated fruit presented to us. We drew lots, and the parson's horse was doomed; in a few minutes, his hide was off, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... our right flank we can just make out the skeletons of what a few hours before had been a cluster of smiling farmhouses. They do not smile now; they grin horribly in the sunlight, grin as the fleshless skulls of dead men grin on a battlefield after those sextons of the veldt the grey-hooded, curved-beaked vultures have screamed their final farewell to the charnel-houses of war—noble war, splendid war, pastime of potentates ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... breeze to whistle in our ears. Great tufts of retem, like fleshless skeletons, were tossed to ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... touched him, severed his bonds, dragged him roughly up. Then, as he staggered, powerless for the moment to stand, an arm, hard and fleshless as the arm of a skeleton, caught him and urged him forward. Irresistibly impelled, he left the glare of the fire, and stumbled ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... long straight rifle, looking into the fire. He is six feet in his moccasins, and of a build that suggests the idea of strength and Saxon ancestry. His arms are like young oaks, and his hand, grasping the muzzle of his gun, is large, fleshless, and muscular. His cheek is broad and firm. It is partially covered by a bushy whisker that meets over the chin and fringes all around the lips. It is neither fair nor dark, but of a dull-brown colour, lighter around the mouth, where ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... hair is in confusion, his robe soiled and torn; no dagger in his belt nor sword at his side; his lips are blue and shivering, his brow pallid; he looks as if Death were breathing on him as he passed, and he fled in terror from the fleshless phantom. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... distance on the right hand. It was a gibbet, with its grisly burden. He rode swiftly towards it, and, reining in his horse, took off his hat, bowing profoundly to the carcase that swung in the morning breeze. Just at that moment a gust of air catching the fleshless skeleton, its arms seemed to be waved in reply to the salutation. A solitary crow winged its flight over the horseman's head as he paused. After a moment's halt, he wheeled about, and again shouted to Luke, waving ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... two young lady-performers alleged by the programme to be "Serios and Bone Soloists," whereas they were the reverse of lugubrious; nor were their physiognomies fleshless or osseous; but, on the contrary, so shapely and well-favoured that JESSIE did remonstrate with me upon the perseverance with ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... movement, the spectators perceived another— equally indicative of a desire on the part of the birds to betake themselves to repose. This was the drawing up of one of their long fleshless legs, until it was entirely concealed under the loose feathers of the belly—a movement made by both so exactly at the same instant, as to lead to the belief that they were actuated by like impulses, by some spiritual union that existed ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... dance was executed with great spirit, and elicited tumultuous applause from all the beholders. The earl now retired, and Chowles took his place. He was clothed in an elastic dress painted of a leaden and cadaverous colour, which fitted closely to his fleshless figure, and defined all his angularities. He carried an hour-glass in one hand and a dart in the other, and in the course of the dance kept continually pointing the latter at those who moved around him. His feats of the previous evening were nothing to his present achievements. ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was scented and mysterious. The wind was playing an eerie fleshless melody in the reeds of the brook hollow. The sky was dark and starry, and across it the Milky Way flung ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Nuttall made all speed, regardless of the heat, in his journey from Bridgetown to Colonel Bishop's plantation, and if ever man was built for speed in a hot climate that man was Mr. James Nuttall, with his short, thin body, and his long, fleshless legs. So withered was he that it was hard to believe there were any juices left in him, yet juices there must have been, for he was sweating violently by the time he ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Sir Priest, the fading footprints of adventurous Castile. Thou hast seen the declining glory of old Spain,—declining as yonder brilliant sun. The sceptre she hath wrested from the heathen is fast dropping from her decrepit and fleshless grasp. The children she hath fostered shall know her no longer. The soil she hath acquired shall be lost to her as irrevocably as she herself hath thrust the Moor from ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... the deep; Nor wind nor wave shall tire Those fleshless arms, whose pulses leap With floods of living fire; Sleep on, and, when the morning light Streams o'er the shining bay, Oh think of those for whom the night Shall never ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Volsungs laid dead before his feet, Back came his men ere the noontide, and he deemed their tidings sweet; For they said: "We tell thee, King Siggeir, that Geirmund and Gylfi are gone. And we deem that a beast of the wild-wood this murder grim hath done, For the bones yet lie in the fetters gnawed fleshless now and white; But we deemed the eight abiding sore minished of ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... humans—the sole survivors of all earth's children—were man and wife—Omega and Thalma. They were burned a deep cherry by the fierce rays of the sun. In stature they were above the average man now on earth. Their legs were slender and almost fleshless, because for many centuries man had ceased to walk. Their feet were mere toeless protuberances attached to the ankle bone. Their arms were long and as spare as their legs, but their hands, although small, were well-proportioned and powerful. Their abdominal regions were ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... the shade or stand in the water. The active and air-cutting-swallows, now beginning to assemble for migration, seek their prey about the shady places; where the insects, though of differently compounded natures, "fleshless and bloodless," seem to get for coolness, as they do at other times for warmth. The sound of insects is also the only audible thing now, increasing rather than lessening the sense of quiet by its gentle ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... forget me?" chuckled the fleshless lips by his ear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now, for ever and a day. 'Misery loves company,' and it wouldn't be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity, would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... kings strain forward to see, one holding his nose for the stench of death which meets him; and before them are three open coffins, in which lie, in three loathsome stages of corruption, from blue and bloated putrescence to well-nigh fleshless decay, three crowned corpses. This is the triumph of Death; the grim and horrible jest of the Middle Ages: equality in decay; kings, emperors, ladies, knights, beggars, and cripples, this is what we all come to be, stinking ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... took him and sent him into her chamber, and the jailers went to seek another, and led out Messire Thibault, who was the husband of the Lady; and in sorry raiment was he, for he was dight with long hair, and had a great beard; he was lean and fleshless, as one who had suffered pain and dolour enough. When the Lady saw him, she said unto the Soudan: "Sir, again with this one would I willingly speak, if it please thee." "Dame," said the Soudan, "it pleaseth me well." So the Lady came to Messire Thibault, and asked him of whence he was, ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... elf-locks scowled; These were my people! all I had, I gave— They snatched it thankless (was it not their own? Wrung from their veins, returning all too late?); Or in the new delight of rare possession, Forgot the giver; one did sit apart, And shivered on a stone; beneath her rags Nestled two impish, fleshless, leering boys, Grown old before their youth; they cried for bread— She chid them down, and hid her face and wept; I had given all—I took my cloak, my shoes (What could I else? 'Twas but a moment's want Which she had borne, and borne, day after day), And ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... cover their Eyeless Sockets with their Fleshless Hands and fade forever from the ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... aside his cloak, and exhibited the figure of an exceedingly emaciated and feeble old man, who had all the appearance of ninety years, though he was little more than sixty; his face was worn and fleshless to a painful degree; his hair was of the whitest shade of great age, but his eyes had grown much more serene in their expression than in his earlier days, notwithstanding a cast of suffering which his whole countenance exhibited. He was plainly, but most carefully and ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under the bony hand—a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home at ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... to a ghost which has lain down promiscuously in the picture gallery. Most appalling, however, of all is the adventure which happened to Count Frederick in the oratory. Kneeling before the altar was a tall figure in a long cloak. As he approached it rose, and, turning round, disclosed to him the fleshless jaws and empty eye-sockets of a skeleton. The ghost disappeared, as ghosts generally do, after giving a perfectly unnecessary warning and the catastrophe is soon reached by the final appearance of the whole suit of armour with the ghost inside it, who bursts the castle ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... not sit still any more. He noiselessly arose and entered the corridor. The parlor door was wide open, and he saw the gray-haired woman sitting at a table and looking all around her. Her small, fleshless lips parted, ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... before him. Brandon stood motionless, mute. The face was turned toward him—that face which is at once human and yet most frightful since it is the face of Death—the face of a skeleton. The jaws had fallen apart, and that fearful grin which is fixed on the fleshless face here seemed like an effort at a smile ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... own, for he neither stopped nor hesitated. Everywhere along the walls, packed like the berths upon an emigrant ship, lay the Christians of old Rome. The yellow light flickered over the shrivelled features of the mummies, and gleamed upon rounded skulls and long, white armbones crossed over fleshless chests. And everywhere as he passed Kennedy looked with wistful eyes upon inscriptions, funeral vessels, pictures, vestments, utensils, all lying as pious hands had placed them so many centuries ago. It was apparent to him, even in those hurried, passing glances, that this was the earliest and ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... on his fleshless face, is hurrying them along to it as fast as his troika can go. Three black horses abreast he drives—Dishonour, Disappointment, and Disgrace—and the more audacious of the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... length. His brow, austere and naked, Shines like a fleshless skull, and on it ye may mark A mighty weight of woe. Around him—all is dark; Behind, a tented field. Tranquil and stern he raises His mournful eye, and with contemptuous calmness gazes. Be't that the artist here embodied his own thought, When on the canvass ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... phenomenon, a manifestation bizarre, simple, and meritorious that, to the beholders, should be a profound and an everlasting lesson. "Just look at 'im, 'ee knows what's what—never fear!" he exclaimed now and then, flourishing a hand hard and fleshless like the claw of a snipe. Jimmy, on his back, smiled with reserve and without moving a limb. He affected the languor of extreme weakness, so as to make it manifest to us that our delay in hauling him out from his horrible ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... noticed this man several times already. Poorly clad in an old black frock-coat, he looked still young, although his sparse beard was already turning grey; and, short and emaciated, he seemed to experience great suffering, his fleshless, livid face being covered with sweat. However, he remained motionless, ensconced in his corner, speaking to nobody, but staring straight before him with dilated eyes. And all at once Marie noticed that his eyelids were falling, and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... shapeless monster which was gathering itself together, and shrinking back, inch by inch, as the little spark of light moved forward. The gaunt beams, the jagged bits of iron, bent and twisted into fantastic shapes, stretched and thrust themselves from every side, and again the girl fancied them fleshless arms reaching out to clutch her. But hark! was that a sound,—a faint sound from the farthest and darkest corner, where the great wheel raised its toothed and broken round from ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... of his own death appeared to him accompanied with all the superstitious imaginings of Slavonic poetry. As a Pole he lived under the nightmare of legends. The phantoms called him, clasped him, and, instead of seeing his father and his friend smile at him in the ray of faith, he repelled their fleshless faces from his own and struggled under the grasp of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... could not be classed as a prayer exactly, for when she began her utterance she looked around as if to find sympathy in the assembled faces, and her deep-set piercing eyes seemed alight with intense feeling. At first she grasped the back of the settee in front with her long fleshless fingers, and then later clasped and finally raised them above her upturned face, while her body swayed with the vehemence of her feelings. Her garb, too, lent a pathos, for it was naught but a faded calico dress that hung from her attenuated frame like the raiment of a scarecrow. It may have ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... she stretched out to him her fleshless arms, and straining him to her heart with the strength of a tiger, she burst into a violent laugh, broken by deep, tearless sobs, which caused her to fall back suffocating on ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... called as he brought his roadster to a halt with a sudden grinding of brakes. It was two days later and a cutting east wind skirled about the driveway of the Park, rattling the naked branches of the trees like the fleshless arms of a ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... fleshless hand, that lay outside the covers, he made a gesture of resignation, but the gray eyes, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... bedside and grasped his little fleshless hand as it lay upon the white sheet, bathing his cold brow with kisses of grief. Life was gone-the spirit had winged its way to the God who gave it. Thus closed the life of poor Tommy Ward. He died as one resting in a calm sleep, far from the boisterous sound of the ocean's ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... is better to have a nephew by name than a son by nature. Do you hear? If you love your uncle pray with all your soul that he may never have a son to grudge him his life." The thrust-out fingers, little more than bleached skin drawn tight over fleshless bones, were shaken in a convulsion of passion, from the sunken, dull eyes a sudden fire glared, and the thin lips shrank upon the uneven teeth. But in an instant the spasm passed and Louis sank back upon the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... prayed. When the sun rose, she murmured, "To-morrow!" and through the day her fancy wandered to the verge of madness. Sometimes visions of beckoning angels swarmed around her; then they fled, and in their places stood a hideous skeleton, that, with ghastly smile, held out his fleshless hand, and strove ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... fruitless exercise, though not one drop of moisture appeared on the freckled forehead of the urchin, which looked like a piece of dry and discoloured parchment, drawn tight across the brow of a fleshless skull. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... mumbled Bukawai through his fleshless jaws. "It was I who commanded the white jungle god to ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... half-moon is dipping to the west, And the cold fog invades the sleeping land. Lo! how the grinning skulls in the level light Litter the place! Methinks that every skull Is a most lifelike portrait of my Sen, Drawn by the hand of Death; each fleshless pate, Cursed with a ghastly grin to eyes unrubbed With love's magnetic ointment, seems to mine To smile an amiable smile like his Whose amiable smile I—I alone Am able to distinguish from his leer! See how the gathering coyotes ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... room for such misgivings when the electric shock of actual presence was felt—the thin hollow-cheeked face shone with welcome, the liquid brown eyes smiled with thankful sweetness, the fingers, fleshless, but cool and gentle, were held out; and the faint voice said, "My darling! Once try to ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... face and filmy blue eyes were tuned upon him. He was in his shirt-sleeves, with his cambric frills breaking through his open red satin long-flapped vest. The scorching sun seemed to have no power upon his fleshless frame, for he wore a low fur cap, as though it had been winter. A many-coloured band of silk passed across his body and supported a short, murderous sword, while his broad, brass-buckled belt was ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... forest-shadows more horrible. The huge trunks of the pines and maples towered up, up—they could scarcely see how far, grim, and gloomy and silent; here and there a dead branch thrust itself out against the sky, in that hideous likeness to a fleshless hand which night and darkness always lend to them. Even Gypsy, though she had been in the woods many times at night before, shuddered as she stood looking up. A queer thought came to her, of an old fable she had sometime read in Tom's mythology; a fable of some huge Titans, angry ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... entered to us, quietly, the most remarkable-looking man that I had ever seen. Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West. His forehead ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... guest! Who, with thy hollow breast Still in rude armor drest, Comest to daunt me! Wrapt not in Eastern balms, But with thy fleshless palms Stretched, as if asking alms, Why ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... element in historical events is that which takes the strongest hold upon the imagination and sensibility; and it puts a certain degree of life into the fleshless forms of even the commonplace historian. The incidents of a nation's annals cannot be narrated in a style sufficiently dry and prosaic to prevent the soul of poetry from finding some expression, however short of the truth. It seems to us that there is much error in the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... making his decision. Beside him stood Harry, silent, morose. Before him,—Fairchild closed his eyes in an attempt to shut out the sight of it. But still it was there, the crumpled heap of tattered clothing and human remains, the awry, heavy shoes still shielding the fleshless bones of the feet. He turned blindly, ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... below Lay cold in many a coffined row; You might see them piled in sable state, By a pale light through a gloomy grate; But War had entered their dark caves,[qo] And stored along the vaulted graves Her sulphurous treasures, thickly spread In masses by the fleshless dead: 980 Here, throughout the siege, had been The Christians' chiefest magazine; To these a late formed train now led, Minotti's last and stern resource Against the foe's ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... in such a manner did Bull Hunter drink in the words and the acts of Pete Reeve. And, indeed, where guns were the subject of conversation it would have been hard to find a man more thoroughly equipped to pose as an expert than Pete Reeve. That fleshless hand, all speed of motion as it whipped out the gun from the nerve and sinew, became an incredible ghost with the holster and the long, heavy Colt danced and flashed at his fingertips as though it ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... white as linen thread. She was sitting up in bed, and seemed to keep upright with great difficulty. Her large black eyes, dimmed by fever, no doubt, and half-dead already, hardly moved under the bony arch of her eyebrows.—There,' he added, pointing to his own brow. 'Her forehead was clammy; her fleshless hands were like bones covered with soft skin; the veins and muscles were perfectly visible. She must have been very handsome; but at this moment I was startled into an indescribable emotion at the sight. Never, said those who wrapped her in her shroud, had any living ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... should be—when midway in the road, Slow tottering from the hovel where he hid, Crept forth a wretch in rags, haggard and foul, An old, old man, whose shrivelled skin, suntanned, Clung like a beast's hide to his fleshless bones. Bent was his back with load of many days, His eyepits red with rust of ancient tears, His dim orbs blear with rheum, his toothless jaws Wagging with palsy and the fright to see So many and such joy. ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... removed, there lay a strange sight before the Pilgrims' eyes. Inclosed in a great quantity of fine red powder, emitting a pungent but agreeable odor, lay the skeleton of a man, fleshless, except upon the skull, where clung the skin and a mass of beautiful hair, yellow as gold, and curling closely as ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... an ashen sky of autumn, as night was creeping in, she saw the Arabian ascending the hill to the castle. His tall figure, as fleshless as a mummy's, was swathed in a white robe like a winding sheet; his beaked face and hollow eye-sockets were like a vision of Death. Without taking her eyes from ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... to your left are by the early masters of Spain,—Morales, called in Spain the Divine, whose works are now extremely rare, the Museum possessing only three or four, long, fleshless faces and stiff figures of Christs and Marys,—and Juan de Juanes, the founder of the Valentian school, who brought back from Italy the lessons of Raphael's studio, that firmness of design and brilliancy of color, and whose genuine merit has ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... circumstantial and horrible. I am a low-caste spirit-subduing spectre. Observe my blood and my bones. I am grisly and nauseous. No depending on artificial aid. Work with grave-clothes, a coffin-lid, and a galvanic battery. Turn hair white in a night." The creature stretched out its fleshless arms to me as if in entreaty, but I shook my head; and it vanished, leaving a low sickening repulsive odour behind it. I sank back in my chair, so overcome by terror and disgust that I would have very willingly resigned ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... a rule the monk came in, wiping the perspiration from his brow with a coarse blue handkerchief, and loudly assuring the prisoner how pleasantly cool it was in his cell. But this time he was nervous and ill at ease. How did the prisoner look? Emaciated to a skeleton, his teeth prominent between fleshless lips, his eyes wide open, a wondrous fire burning ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... generations. The giant bones of warriors rested beside the more delicate skeletons of their women, or the skeletons, slenderer still, of little children of the ancient race. The warrior's bow lay beside him with rotting string; the child's playthings were still clasped in fleshless fingers; beside the squaw's skull the ear-pendants of hiagua shells lay where they had fallen from the crumbling flesh ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... wooded land wherein willows frame the fields. And it is not a rare thing to find in the hollow of one of these old willows the skeleton of a Chouan pressing his gun against his breast and holding his beads in his fleshless fingers. I shall have my programme posted on the bark of oaks. I shall say 'Peace to presbyteries! Let the day come when bishops, holding in their hands the wooden crook, shall make themselves similar ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... throne Hercules saw Death the Reaper. He was clothed in a black robe spotted with stars and his fleshless hand held the sharp sickle with which he is said to cut down mortals as the reaper cuts ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... I folded the sanguine Sergeant's stiffening hands together across his fleshless ribs, and helped carry his body out to the dead-house at Andersonville, in order to get a piece of wood to cook my ration ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... which gazed ever into the dumb darkness where It lay—my dread companion through the watches of the night. I pictured It in every abhorrent form which an excited fancy could summon up: now as a skeleton; with hollow eye-holes and grinning, fleshless jaws; now as a vampire, with livid face and bloated form, and dripping mouth wet with blood. Would it never be light! And yet, when day should dawn I should be forced to see It face to face. I had heard that specter ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... vigorous that it was some seconds after she had released him before he could make any reply; and while he was trying to get his breath the fleshless Mr. Treat took him solemnly by the hand, and cleared his throat as if he were determined to take advantage of the occasion to make one of ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... slight responsibilities of new recruits—not till sleepless nights have grown to us familiar will Thought seem to take, as it were, strength, not exhaustion, from unrelaxing exercise—nourish the brain, sustain the form by its own untiring, fleshless, spiritual immortality; not till many a winter has stripped the leaves; not till deep, and far out of sight, spread the roots that support the stem—will the beat of the east wind leave no sign on ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... picture, the workman's son turned monk, and clerk to a lord. Let us turn to the other side, the ploughman's son who didn't turn monk, whose head was 'shet' in the straw, who delved and ditched, and dunged the earth, eat bread of corn and bran, worts fleshless (vegetables, but no meat), drank water, and went miserably (Crede, l. 1565-71). What education did he get? To whom could he be apprenticed? What was his chance in life? Let the ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... man, perceiving by the laugh that now went round, the sly tendency of the question—"no, nor to your family either, for he had nothing of the ass in him—eh? will you put that in your pocket, my little skinadhre (* A thin, fleshless, ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... houses, And the books read A million times ago. Come, we must go far Away from the city. Let us lie down In this gentle meadow. Let us raise, threatening yet helpless Against the mindless, large, Deadly blue, shiny skies, The fleshless, dull eyes, The cursed hands, Swollen ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... our riches, we had the two bags of doubloons which the pirates had recovered from the fleshless fingers of the dead man. They were old worn coins, most of them, many dating from the seventeenth century, and bearing the effigies of successive kings of Spain. Each disk of rich, yellow Peruvian gold, dug from the earth by wretched sweating slaves and bearing the name ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... rest, the grim skeleton wears no unkind smile; though that he is Death makes it look a ghastly-enough pleasantry. But toward the poor and the aged he is better than merry; he is kind. His fleshless hand is raised in benediction over the aged woman; and the bent patriarch leans on his arm, listening to Death's attendant playing the sweet old melodies of Long-Ago as he stands on the verge ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... youth had been handsome, but of that peculiar Jewish cast which age renders harsh and prominent. The high narrow wrinkled forehead, the small deep-set jet-black eyes, gleaming like living coals from beneath straight shaggy eyebrows, the thin aquiline nose, the long upper lip, the small fleshless mouth and projecting chin, the expression of habitual cunning and mental reservation, mingled with sullen pride and morose ill-humor, gave to his marked countenance a repulsive and sinister character. Those ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... I thou fearful guest Who, with thy hollow breast Still in rude armor drest, Comest to daunt me! Wrapt not in Eastern balms, Bat with thy fleshless palms Stretched, as if asking alms, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... great deal of money, and a long siege, they shall have stormed and taken it by a violent and impetuous assault? May not these fathers and mothers, think you, be sorrowful and heavy-hearted when they see an unknown fellow, a vagabond stranger, a barbarous lout, a rude cur, rotten, fleshless, putrified, scraggy, boily, botchy, poor, a forlorn caitiff and miserable sneak, by an open rapt snatch away before their own eyes their so fair, delicate, neat, well-behavioured, richly-provided-for and healthful daughters, on whose breeding and education they had spared no cost ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... position under a wide spreading gum tree, enveloped, or more properly, shrouded, in the bark of the papyrus. All the bones were closely packed together, the larger being placed outside, and the general mass surmounted by the head, resting on its base, the fleshless, eyeless skull grinning horribly over the right side. Some of the natives arrived shortly after we had discovered this curious specimen of their mode of sepulture; but although they entertain peculiar opinions upon the especial ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... drawn each ghastly skull around, Each fleshless form's arrayed in sable vest, About their hollow loins the cord is bound, Like living Fathers of the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... omen Harshly 'mid thy billows' roar; Fleshless bones of shipwreck'd seamen Dash against thy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... name in grateful remembrance. The telescope through which he was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the movements of which had been the source of such odd fancies on my part, is now the property of a Western College. You smile as you think of my taking it for a fleshless human figure, when I saw its tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was an arm, under the white drapery thrown over it for protection. So do I smile now; I belong to the numerous class who are prophets after the fact, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... have found you sooner! All these dreadful years I have lived at God's feet—with one prayer: let me help my Bertie, let me see my brother's face," moaned Beryl, pressing her lips to the clammy, fleshless hand she held ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... viewed through the clearing before the cabin, his gaze came around to his father seated on the doorstep. Taciturn and brooding the latter had always been, but the pity and sorrow struck at the son's heart as he perceived what a mere shell of a man now sat there, gray-haired, bent, fleshless, consumed body and soul by the destroying acid of some dark secret. Even when a lad Steele Weir had sensed the mystery clouding his father's life. Like an evil spell it had condemned them to solitude here in the mountains, until Steele's youth ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... that had once been beautiful. Only the immense dark eyes, feverishly bright beneath the sunken temples, and the still lovely line from jaw to pointed chin, remained unmarred, their beauty mocked by the pinched nostrils and drawn mouth, and by the scraggy, almost fleshless throat. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... wind swept them, and we glided past in phantom silence. Beyond, like a great black wall, arose higher ground, occasionally jutting into bare bluffs outlined against the lighter sky; again diversified by gaunt dead trees, their fleshless limbs extended upward toward ghostly pillars of vapor ever floating from off the river's surface. Occasionally, jaggedly uneven, close-set trunks of forest growth would appear, spectral in solemn ugliness, a veritable hedge, impenetrable ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Donatello's Wooden Statue of the same penitent in the Baptistery, seems a female Robinson Crusoe,—hirsute, cadaverous, fleshless, uncombed and uncomely,—certainly a more edifying spectacle than the voluptuous, Titianesque exhibitions of fair frailty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... glass case that contains the old brown mummied priest with his shaven skull, his long, narrow feet, his flattened nose and fleshless hands, and the mark of the embalmer's stone knife still visible upon his poor old empty stomach. And she didn't like him at all. There was something grisly and repellent to her in the idea that living people should make of this poor old dead man a spectacle ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... that the panels of imitation stained glass quiver in the thin front-door. Even the family that occupies the topmost story of a building without a lift is on his ghastly visiting-list. He rattles his fleshless knuckles against the door of the gypsy's caravan. Into the savage's tent, wigwam, or wattled hut, he darts unbidden. Even on the hermit in the cave he forces his obnoxious presence. His is an universal beat, and he walks it with a grin. But be sure it is at the sombre portal of the nobleman ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... me wish that a thousand times, Tom," she answered with passionate bitterness. "See that wasted arm," and suiting the action to her words she stripped up her sleeve; "look at my fleshless face—what has brought me to this but starvation and drudgery? Hear the moaning of that helpless babe in the cradle, crying for nurse that starvation has dried up. Oh, Tom! how can you spend your money in whiskey when you know we are starving at home? You knew when you left this morning there ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... stained early and for life with the corpse-like coloring of malarious fevers, was a fit setting for such optics. Although it was nearly oval in contour, and although the features were or had been fairly regular, yet it was so marked by hard, and one might almost say fleshless muscles, and so brutalized by long indulgence in savage passions, that it struck you as frightfully ugly. A large dull-red scar on the right jaw and another across the left cheek added the final touches to this countenance of ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... dejection began to possess him, for his stores of all kinds were beginning to fail, and he could not entirely put behind him the memory of the various well-intentioned warnings which he had received, or the sight of the fleshless ones who had lined his path. On the eighth day, being weak with hunger and, by reason of an intolerable thirst, unable to restrain his body any longer in the spot where he had hitherto continuously ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... Besides being diminutive and fleshless, his features were very small and very, very sharp. The generous hand of Nature had sprinkled freckles across his nose. He had lost a front tooth, which fact made his ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... happy humour to-day, the Sultan related many things of his youth; his exploits, of course, which all men relate, and which I shall likewise do, I imagine, if I live to be old. Showing us his withered fleshless arms, and taking hold of his armlets, he observed: "The time was when these armlets could not slip off. Now, see how easily they come away." He then abused me for my leanness, and admired the Taleb (Overweg), because he had more flesh on his ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... of dropping unexpectedly, seemed always to be gazing, in thoughtful surprise, at something that was visible to them alone. As to the small, frail body, it existed only for sake of the hands: narrow hands, with long, fleshless fingers, nervous hands, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of the body is not desirable. It was almost fleshless, wasted away, except his wounded haunch. That was nearly twice its normal size; about one half of it was maggots. The stench drove us all away. This I had done, and I had ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... with horror; for just then, by the light of a tall torch and two altar candles, I saw distinctly that this woman was fresh from the graveyard. She had no hair. I turned to fly. She raised her fleshless arm and encircled me with a band of iron set with spikes, and as she raised it a cry went up all about us, the cry of millions of voices—the shouting ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... creatures to obtain it was a herculean task. To go out when the storms were raging, would be almost impossible for a well, strong man. To struggle through the deep, loose drifts, reaching frequently to the waist, required, at any time, fearful exertion. The numb, fleshless fingers could hardly guide, or even wield the ax. Near the site of the Breen cabin, to-day, stands a silent witness of the almost superhuman exertions that were made to procure fuel. On the side of a pine tree are old ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... room, with a vaulted ceiling, and one tiny grated window. Imbedded in the wall was a huge iron ring, and chained to it was a gaunt skeleton, that was stretched out at full length on the stone floor, and seemed to be trying to grasp with its long fleshless fingers an old-fashioned trencher and ewer, that were placed just out of its reach. The jug had evidently been once filled with water, as it was covered inside with green mould. There was nothing ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... we can scarce imagine what the delay of another fortnight meant. It was drawing near to Christmas. From the English camp two priests were seen advancing towards those phantoms of still visible humanity that stretched their fleshless arms to heaven from the city moat. The King was sending food and drink to them for the love of Him whose birth was celebrated on the morrow. The miserable creatures ate and drank with hideous cries that brought the starving ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... suppressed sort of way, and of a mental type not made for worldly successes; but he must have dreamt about her and loved her well enough. How she felt for him I could never gather; it seemed to be all of that fleshless friendliness into which we train our girls. Then abruptly happened stresses. The man who became her husband appeared, with a very evident passion. He was a year or so older than either of them, and he had the habit and quality of achieving his ends; he ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... with a lofty dome, around which appeared fifty portals of bronze, secured with as many fastenings of iron. A funereal gloom prevailed over the whole scene. Here, upon two beds of incorruptible cedar, lay recumbent the fleshless forms of the pre-Adamite kings, who had been monarchs of the whole earth. They still possessed enough of life to be conscious of their deplorable condition; their eyes retained a melancholy motion; they ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... but, being such an unthrifty changeling, might have been considerably older. It was all covered with blotches, and preternaturally dark and discolored; it was withered away, quite shrunken and fleshless; it breathed only amid pantings and gaspings, and moaned painfully at every gasp. The only comfort in reference to it was the evident impossibility of its surviving to draw many more of those miserable, moaning breaths; and it would have been infinitely less heart-depressing to see it die, right ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her body has been found and identified? What could the spectral voice have meant by the prophecy about burial 'in a cave' and 'trodden down with stones'? What if the body of Oswald Langdon, too, has passed out to the boundless deep, and his fleshless skeleton now is awaiting identification in some ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... burned, street by street. But Verdun has been bombarded every day for weeks and months and years. The town is a royal skeleton, erect and on its feet, its jewelled sceptre damaged, but still grasped in a fleshless hand. The Germans have never ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... waves now to starboard, now to larboard.[1] Then I saw leap into the body of the triumphal vehicle a she fox,[2] which seemed fasting from all good food; but rebuking her for her foul sins my Lady turned her to such flight as her fleshless bones allowed. Then, from there whence he had first come, I saw the eagle descend down into the ark of the chariot and leave it feathered from himself.[3] And a voice such as issues from a heart that is afflicted issued ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... a scene which never varied, even if my indiscretion had been confined to raspberries at five cents a pound, or currants at a cent less. She would wring her hands, long and fleshless as fan handles, and, her great green eyes phosphorescent with distress above her hollow cheeks and ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... search was vain, and years had passed; that child was ne'er forgot, When once a daring hunter climbed unto a lofty spot, From whence, upon a rugged crag the chamois never reached, He saw an infant's fleshless bones the ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... Who comes? What approaches there? What soundless tumult, what breath in the air Takes the breath in the throat, the blood from the heart? In a flame of dark, to the unheard beat Of an unseen drum and fleshless feet, Without glint of barrel or bayonets' glance, They approach—they come. Who comes? (Hush! Hark!) "Qui ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... sound of this clear, fresh, ringing child's voice, the recluse trembled; she turned her head with the sharp, abrupt movement of a steel spring, her long, fleshless hands cast aside the hair from her brow, and she fixed upon the child, bitter, astonished, desperate eyes. This glance ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... in all its living bloom, Sat vis-a-vis, while tender twilight hours Went softly by us, treading as on flowers. Then suddenly I saw within the room The old love, long since lying in its tomb. It dropped the cerecloth from its fleshless face And smiled on me, with a remembered grace That, like the ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... applied to human youth (Lane's Lex. s. c.). The first Caliph was a cloth-merchant, like many of the Meccan chiefs. He is described as very fair with bulging brow, deep set eyes and thin-checked, of slender build and lean loined, stooping and with the backs of his hands fleshless. He used tinctures of Henna and Katam for his beard. The Persians who hate him, call him "Pir-i-Kaftar," the old she-hyaena, and believe that he wanders about the deserts of Arabia in perpetual rut which the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... come athwart our bows, and, if she had, one of us must have gone to the bottom; and since the brig had so much more bulk, and consequently, weight in her favour, than the Iris could muster, the chances are, that my fleshless skull would have been long ago a resort for cockles under the rocks of Cronenborg; but, a friendly wave, full of feeling as of water, struck the brig to windward, and, heeling under the blow, she took a broad sheer on our starboard bow, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... was I guilty? Did I, in the eyes of any watching angel, consciously cast my life, brittle and blind as it was, away in that fashion? In the water, helpless now for any effort after upper air, side by side with the fleshless anatomy of a brute, over-sailed by gray fishes with speckled sides, whose broad, unwinking eyes glared at me with maddening shine and stare,—oppressed, and almost struggling, yet all unable to achieve the struggle with the curdling blood that gorged every ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... and platonic seclusion he had learned to love this naive, insinuating woman, whose frank simplicity seemed equal to his own, without thought of reserve, secrecy, or deceit. He had gradually been led to think of the absent husband with what he believed to be her own feelings—as of some impalpable, fleshless ancestor from whose remote presence she derived power, wealth, and importance, but to whom she owed only respect and certain obligations of honor equal to his own. He had never heard her speak of her husband with ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... claws; in addition to his arms, which were furnished with sharp talons, he had four outspread wings, two of which fell behind him, while the other two rose up and surrounded his head; he had a scorpion's tail, a human face with large goggle-eyes, bushy eyebrows, fleshless cheeks, and retreating lips, showing a formidable row of threatening teeth, while from his flattened skull protruded the horns of a goat: the entire combination was so hideous, that it even alarmed the god and put him to flight, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... were immolated in his diary; and we see them, now that it has been published, like so many flies with pins stuck through them, fastened to the paper. Poor Charles Lamb stands there, bloodless, fleshless; but we think scarcely the less of gentle Elia as we look upon him, but far less of the cruel perpetrator of the atrocity. Leigh Hunt, too, has a pin quite through his warm heart; and Stuart Mill, and many others. One wonders sometimes if Froude himself escaped, or if he were there ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... all that you held in reverence is held in scorn by us. Thine idols are overthrown in the dust; fleshless anchorites clad in rags and tatters, martyrs with the blood fresh on them, and their shoulders torn by the tigers of thy circuses, have perched themselves on the pedestals of thy fair desirable gods. The Christ has enveloped the whole world ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... dreadfully, that it was wonderful that they continued to exist. Their emaciated appearance might have led to the supposition that they had been nearly starved during the passage, did not the varied miseries to which they were subjected, sufficiently account for their fleshless forms. A great number of them were now upon deck, and clad in long woollen shirts, in order to be sent to the warehouses on shore. Miller, heartily sick of this disgusting scene, took leave of the master; but, unable to control the indignation he felt, he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... but little food was to be had. I shall never forget the scene which I that night witnessed: mothers striving, by the heat of their own persons, to preserve the lives of their little ones; women stretching out their fleshless arms, imploring for food and shelter; old men tottering to the destination where they were to receive shelter. The odour from the clothes and persons of those poor people was dreadfully offensive, and the absence of active complaints clearly ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... looked unsubstantial and wan in the firelight, and so ethereal, so fleshless, appeared her figure, that it seemed to me I could see through it to the shining of the flames before ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... favored, though a quick, restless black eye, keen and searching, had in it a lurking malignity, like that of a snake, which impressed the spectator with suspicion at the first casual glance. His nose, long and sharp, was almost totally fleshless; the skin being drawn so tightly over the bones, as to provoke the fear that any violent effort would cause them to force their way through the frail integument. An untrimmed beard, run wild; and a pair of whiskers so huge, as ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... graceless Coalitionist promptly answered, "Votes!" but he soon got going again. Ireland, he declared, was a unit. The Bill gave her dualism "with a shadowy background of remote and potential unity." The vaunted Council was "a fleshless and bloodless skeleton." He remarked upon "the sombre acquiescence of the Ulstermen," and wondered why they had accepted the Bill at all. "Because we don't trust you," came the swift reply ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... dead above, and the dead below Lay cold in many a coffined row; You might see them piled in sable state, By a pale light through a gloomy grate; But War had entered their dark caves, And stored along the vaulted graves Her sulphurous treasures, thickly spread In masses by the fleshless dead: Here, throughout the siege, had been The Christians' chiefest magazine; To these a late formed train now led, Minotti's last and stern resource ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... like the work of some master sculptor; his high forehead, overhanging brows, aquiline nose, broad flat chin, and protruding cheek bones, gave singularly bold relief to his countenance. Such a face would, with advancing age, become too bony, as fleshless as that of a knight errant. But at this stage of youth, with chin and cheek lightly covered with soft down, its latent harshness was attenuated by the charming softness of certain contours which ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... wondered, at the time, why the Germans were almost without horses. Their dash across Belgium in the previous year explained the mobs of broken-backed, split-heeled and fleshless wrecks we met in ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... from your garments, while you slept—I sped to the chamber of death—I visited the depository of horrible mysteries—and for the first time I became aware that two skeletons were contained in that closet! And whose fleshless relics those skeletons were, the dreadful manuscript speedily revealed to me. Then was it also for the first time that I learnt how Margaretha was the detestable spy whose agency had led to such a frightful catastrophe ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... smile or frown Of some vain woman bend thy knee? Here take thy stand, and trample down Things that were once as fair as she. Here rave of her ten thousand graces, Bosom, and lip, and eye, and chin, While, as in scorn, the fleshless faces Of Hamiltons and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... divine world. The placid minds even of Olympian gods are troubled with thoughts of a limit to duration, of inevitable decay, of dispossession. Again, the supreme and colourless abstraction of those divine forms, which is the secret of their repose, is also a premonition of the fleshless, consumptive refinements of the pale, medieval artists. That high indifference to the outward, that impassivity, has already a touch of the corpse in it: we see already Angelico and the Master of the Passion in the artistic future. The suppression of the sensuous, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... He had come through many perils in the past, but he had never been nearer a fatal end than he was at that moment. But the thought of the undying Friend lifted him buoyantly above the dread of death, and he could look with an unwinking eye right into the fleshless eye-sockets of the skeleton, and say, 'I fear no evil, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... should show themselves like discontented loiterers near to the places which, but for the manner in which you have prosecuted your remorseless warfare, might have ere now afforded them rest? Or do you marvel that these fleshless warriors should interrupt your marches, and do what else their airy nature may permit to disturb your councils, and meet as far as they may the hostilities which you make it your boast to carry on, as well against those who are deceased, as against any ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... hand snatches back a performer in the midst of his part, and him, whom yesterday two infinities (past and future) would not suffice, a handful of dust is enough to cover and silence for ever. Nay, we see the same fleshless fingers opening to clutch the showman himself, and guess, not without a shudder, that they are lying in wait for ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... later days of trial and hardship, he would often look out wearily upon Madrid, the city of his adoption, the scene of his crushing struggle with necessity, as it lay outspread before his windows,—"dirty, black, and ugly as a fleshless skeleton, shivering under its immense shroud of snow,"[1] and in his mind he would conjure up the city of his youth, his ever cherished Seville, "with her Giralda of lacework, mirrored in the trembling Guadalquivir, with her narrow and tortuous Moorish streets, in which one ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... skeleton and the Fat Woman, and to that end started toward the place where their tent had been standing; but to his sorrow he found that it was already being taken down, and he had only time to thank Mrs. Treat and to press the fleshless hand of her shadowy husband as they entered their ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... the eyes of maternal love of Rosa's to recognize our jaunty Dick in the emaciated, fleshless face that lay imbedded in the disarray of the cot. Dick's blue eyes were sunken and dim, his lips chalky and parched. He made no sign of recognition when Rosa drew back with her arm under his head to scrutinize ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... being tested in like manner and in like manner standing the test, were deepened and confirmed. Depend upon it, he was a better man all his days, because he had been brought close up to Death and looked it in the fleshless eye-sockets, unwinking and unterrified. And I dare say if, long after, he had been asked, 'Would you not have liked to have escaped those two or three days of suspense, and to have been let go at an earlier moment?' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... permission from his excellency to present to him his friend Jansoulet. Scarcely had he finished his sentence before a tall spectre, with flabby face and hair and whiskers diversely coloured, bounded from the dressing-room into the chamber, with his two hands folding round a fleshless but very erect neck a dressing-gown of flimsy silk with violet spots, in which he was wrapped like a sweetmeat in its paper. The most striking thing about this mock-heroic physiognomy was a large curved nose all shiny with cold cream, and an eye alive, keen, too young, too bright, for the ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... exposure to a Southern sun, was seated on a wood-pile, quietly smoking a pipe; while near him, Washington, divested of regimentals, and clad in a modest suit of reddish-gray, his thin locks frosted by time, and his fleshless visage showing great age, was gazing, in rapt admiration, at a group of dancers in ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... to foot, without evincing any disagreeable surprise. Merely a faint pout appeared for a moment on her lips. Then, standing by, she began to smile at her husband's demonstrations of affection. Quenu, however, at last recovered his calmness, and noticing Florent's fleshless, poverty-stricken appearance, exclaimed: "Ah, my poor fellow, you haven't improved in your looks since you were over yonder. For my part, I've grown fat; but what would ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... the portals of their churches. Gravity of thought, word, and accent, harmonized in this man and became him well. Seeing his dark eyes hollowed by austerities and surrounded by a brown circle; seeing, too, his forehead, yellow as some old stone, his head and hands almost fleshless, men desired to hear the voice and the instructions which issued from his lips. This purely physical grandeur which accords with moral grandeur, gave this priest a somewhat haughty and disdainful air, which was ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... platform, on which ten skeletons were disposed at full length, with the skulls still covered with long hair, and the fleshless limbs glimmering white and stretching back into ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang |
