"Headless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... son, having resolved to defend him. With these anxieties Cot-sen was walking one afternoon through the fort on Hermosa Island which he had gained from the Dutch. His mind began to be disturbed by visions, which he said appeared to him, of thousands of men who placed themselves before him, all headless and clamoring for vengeance on the cruelty and injustice which had been wreaked on them; accordingly, terrified at this vision (or else a lifelike presentation by his imagination) he took refuge in his ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... have been given the title of Sirnet by an emperor of Delhi, because they would not bow their heads on entering his presence, and when he fixed a sword at the door some of them allowed their necks to be cut through by the sword rather than bend the head. The term Sirnet is supposed to mean headless. A Chauhan column with an inscription of Raja Bisal Deo was erected at Nigumbode, a place of pilgrimage on the Jumna, a few miles below Delhi, and it seems a possible conjecture that the Nikumbhs may have obtained their ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... devour him without attempting to employ his weapon, the venomous dagger which would form a formidable defence; it reminds us also of the male of the Praying Mantis, which still embraces the female though reduced to a headless trunk, while the latter devours him by small mouthfuls, with no rebellion or defence on his part. There are other examples of hymeneal rites to which the male offers ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... ornate art, and grotesque art, not of pure art. We live in the realm of the half educated. The number of readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning but aimless; wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The aristocracy of England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in the days of its full power, of its unquestioned predominance, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... hundred years ago. Since the statue lacked a head and was otherwise of no especial value as a work of art, the Viceroy of Naples very generously presented this object to the place of its discovery, whose citizens, doubtless thinking the appearance of the headless statue uncanny, popped a stray antique occiput (of which a goodly number, more or less mutilated, are constantly brought to light by the peasants) upon Lollianus' vacant shoulders. Anything more comical and at the same time more repellent than this hybrid statue it would be impossible to imagine, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... house). The abbey was refounded, for monks only, under the Benedictine rule, in 1073, by William de Percy. The nuns in Scott's "Marmion" are mythical ones. The Ammonites of the Scar are said to be headless snakes turned into a coat of stone ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... there is no objection to his seeing all sorts of people indifferently like everybody else, but why should certain persons always be found in his rooms and such an intimate association among these gentlemen?... The King does not want any rallying point; a headless assemblage in a State is always dangerous."—Ibid., p.33: "The reputation of this establishment was too great. People were anxious to put their children in it. Persons of rank sent theirs there. Everybody expressed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... walked slowly about the house, gathering up blocks, and headless dolls, and tailless dogs, and laying them carefully away in a drawer until little Julia should return to visit the family in ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... found the bodies of the whole of their companions. All were headless, the Malays having carried off these coveted trophies. They did not attempt to bury the bodies for, in such a climate, decomposition sets in rapidly, and swarms of insects complete the work. In the grass near the hut they found one ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... yews and firs were like waving funeral plumes and mantled, headless goddesses; then the giant beeches would lash themselves to frenzy, and, stooping, would scourge the ice on Undern Pool and the cracked walls of the house, like beings drunken with the passion of cruelty. This was the second mood of ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... with pleasure, They behold the tempting treasure, Headless, in the pan there, lying, Hissing, browning, ...
— Max and Maurice - a juvenile history in seven tricks • William [Wilhelm] Busch
... its having rising rows of seats around the central space, with a channel leading into this from the river. As the shadows of evening lengthened, the heat of the day was moderated, and I sauntered along the bank of the stream till I came to a large headless statue of a female figure lying in the water. Some men lifted it upon the green bank for me; but it was far too heavy to be transported to Jerusalem for the Literary ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... bas-reliefs the majority of the figures have only legs and a portion of the body; their heads and shoulders have disappeared with the upper parts of the walls. But they seem to have preserved their vitality: the gesticulations, the exaggerated pantomime of the attitudes of these headless things, are more strange, more striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And they have preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of their antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their robes of turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... not so apparent, the significance remains. You may perhaps look with a smile on the profusion of Latin mottoes—some crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing on a scroll from angels' trumpets—on the emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in Germany how disappointed we were at not finding a ghost in that old castle, which was said to be haunted by a headless apparition? Well, I have heard of a house in London which, I have reason to hope, is decidedly haunted. I mean to sleep there to-night. From what I hear, there is no doubt that something will allow itself to be seen or to be heard—something, perhaps, excessively horrible. Do ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... and graceful navigation of the Medusae, or Jelly-fishes, render them much admired in their native haunts, and prized for the aquarium. But they are very delicate. How beautiful and remarkable are these headless Discophori, as they float, and propel themselves with involutions of their disks and gently trailing tentacles, and the central peduncle hanging far below, like the clapper of a transparent bell! And yet these wonders are but so much sea-water, inclosed in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... much to give them something to do as for any real good, one day, who in a few hours pulled up enough docks to fill a cart. They came across a number of snakes, and decapitated the reptiles with their hoes, and afterwards hung them all up—tied together by the tail—to a bough. The bunch of headless snakes hangs there still, swinging to and fro as the wind plays through the oak. Vermin, too, revel in weeds, which encourage the mice and rats, and are, perhaps, quite as much a cause of their increase as any acts of ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... shine, Whate'er is lovely or divine. All other joys to this are folly, None so sweet as melancholy. Methinks I hear, methinks I see Ghosts, goblins, fiends; my phantasy Presents a thousand ugly shapes, Headless bears, black men, and apes, Doleful outcries, and fearful sights, My sad and dismal soul affrights. All my griefs to this are jolly, None so damn'd as melancholy. Methinks I court, methinks I kiss, Methinks I now embrace my mistress. O blessed days, O sweet content, In Paradise ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... burning when they went out, and they carried the other to light them home again. Nowhere along the trail did they find their father; he had not been injured in the path, nor could they find where he had fallen over a cliff. So they passed on to the garden; there they found their father's headless body. They searched for blood in the bushes and grass, but they found nothing — no blood, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... afraid of ghosts but I never saw one. There was a graveyard beside de road from our house to town and I always was afraid to go by it. I'd shut my eyes and run for dear life till I was past de grave yard. I had heard dat there was a headless man dat stayed there on cold rainy days or foggy nights he'd hide by de fence and throw his head at you. Once a man got hit and he fell right down dead. I believed dat tale and you can imagine how I felt whenever I had to go past there by myself ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... speaks as well in the intricate, yet harmonious lines of the body, and the ever-varying play of the limbs. Look at the torso of Ilioneus, the son of Niobe, and see what an agony of terror and supplication cries out from that headless and limbless trunk! Decapitate Laocooen, and his knotted muscles will still express the same dreadful suffering and resistance. None knew this better than the ancient sculptors; and hence it was that we find many of their statues of distinguished men wholly or partly ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... was impaled upon the counter by means of a headless hatpin. There was something very largely and badly written on it. Sarah Brown read: "Well Soup it looks like my Night's come and what dyou think Sherry's come too. Im an me as gone off to a place e knows that's a fine place for such a boy as Elbert ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index fingers. Aristotle's experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... has been said about courtesy on the part of the customer and the public—that great headless mass of unrelated particles. Business is service, we say, and the master is the public, the hardest one in the world to serve. Each one of us speaks with more or less pitying contempt of the public, forgetting that we ourselves are the public and that the sum total of ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... of wreckage. The work proceeded slowly, for the heavy broken timbers pressed mercilessly on the object beneath, and when at last it lay revealed in the dim lantern light its ghastly appearance caused all to step back in horror. It was a headless corpse! ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... Great Serpent, the Kenabeek, With his bloody crest erected, Creeping, looking into heaven; In the sky the sun, that listens, And the moon eclipsed and dying; Owl and eagle, crane and hen-hawk, And the cormorant, bird of magic; Headless men, that walk the heavens, Bodies lying pierced with arrows, Bloody hands of death uplifted, Flags on graves, and great war-captains Grasping both the earth and heaven! Such as these the shapes they painted On the birch-bark and the deer-skin; Songs ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... wished to live in an ideal world and paint a great picture. Mrs. Hobbs would come to my bedside in the morning and ask me if I would like to buy a fowl. When I looked upon the fowl, limp in death, with its headless neck hanging dejectedly over the edge of the plate, its giblets and kidneys lying in immodest confusion on the outside of itself, and its liver 'tucked under its wing, poor thing,' I never wanted to buy it. But one ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... wounded. They have proved themselves well that day. But Alexander won the greatest distinction; for he leads away four knights bound to his person and taken prisoners. And the dead lie on the strand; for many there lay headless, ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... were thrown across the bowl and their life-blood gushed into it as the cruel swords descended, while the King gloated over the sight with an expression of pleasure upon his oily sinister face, until the heap of headless trunks grew large, and the number sacrificed must have been ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... without special permission, and during mother's absence he had gone, just to look at a book of butterflies which Father had shown him one day. In pulling the book down, he had let another book fall on to the precious vase. Now the headless china shepherd was turned round so as to be on the shady side of the vase, and the head was in Hugh's pocket. And oh! how heavy it seemed, and what horrid lumps Hugh felt in his throat, and what a queer feeling at his heart! ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... delicately-traced patterns carved on the walls, the medallions and pendant ornaments, in stone, of the thirteenth century, are scarcely surpassed at Chartres; side by side with these, there are headless and armless statues of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which have been painted, and tablets (such as we have sketched) to commemorate the ancient founders of the church; and underneath the choir, the crypt ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... man cut his own head off before jumping into the river, it was suicide," he said carefully, "for the body is headless. As for myself, I have never witnessed such a phenomenon, ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... Smith slowly; "I suppose you are right. There are historic instances, of course: Glamys Castle and Spedlins Tower in Scotland, Peel Castle, Isle of Man, with its Maudhe Dhug, the gray lady of Rainham Hall, the headless horses of Caistor, the Wesley ghost of Epworth Rectory, and others. But I have never come in personal contact with such a case, and if I did I should feel very humiliated to have to confess that there was any agency which could produce a physical result—death—but ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... suggest that the saint was quoting from the heathen pages of Herodotus, the Father of Lies. Nothing of the kind. He is too conscientious to speak from hearsay of such marvellous matters; he says that he personally went among these headless monocular folk; he says that he spoke to them and lived with them; that he made a study of their morals and social institutions, which, in this particular sermon, he holds up as an example to his ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... (and a remarkable one) of the symbolic form of second-sight is that in which the headless apparition of the person whose death is foretold manifests itself to the seer. An example of that class is given in Signs before Death as having happened in the family of Dr. Ferrier, though in that case, if I recollect rightly, the vision did not occur until the time of ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... knight, riding a headless horse, and wearing a chain armor, with a triangular shield flung behind his ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... procuring her abduction by a crew of pirates while on an excursion to the Pharos. The vessel of the captors is, however, chased by a guard-boat, and on the point of being taken, when Leucippe is brought on deck and decapitated by the pirates, who throw the headless body into the sea, and make their escape; while Clitophon stays the pursuit, to recover the remains of his mistress for sepulture. Clitophon now returns to Alexandria to mourn for his lost love, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... battle both Saul and Jonathan were slain. The next day when the Philistines searched for spoils among the dead they found Saul and his three sons, and they cut off his head to carry it as a trophy to Philistia; but they took the headless trunks of the king and his sons to Beth-shan and fastened them against its walls as a terrible warning to the Israelites. But, "when the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead heard of that which the Philistines had done to Saul, all the valiant men arose and went all night ...
— My Three Days in Gilead • Elmer Ulysses Hoenshal
... still hold the places they so largely occupy now, and hundreds of vociferous busy-bodies will multiply. You have no choice; either you must help furnish this race from within its own ranks with thoughtful men of trained leadership, or you must suffer the evil consequences of a headless ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... that I have beheld strange worlds and strange people in my life, and it is true that I have. I have seen the headless people of that red world Iralo, the ant people, the dragon-fly people, the terrible carnivorous trees of L-472, and the pointed heads of a people who live upon a world which may not be named. But I have still to see a more terrible ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... remarkable feature of this sham cemetery. In a line with the tomb, on the edge of the cultivation, is the funerary temple belonging to it, which was found by Mr. Randall-Maclver in 1900. Nothing remains but the bases of the fluted limestone columns and some brick walls. A headless statue of Usertsen ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... breasts into eyes and his navel into a mouth, removed his head, leaving him without nose and ears, thus cutting him off from smell and sound, and banished him to the Long Sheep Mountains, where with a shield and axe, the only weapons vouchsafed to the people of the Headless Country, he and his posterity were compelled to defend themselves from their enemies and provide their subsistence. This, however, does not in the least seem to have affected their tempers, as their bodies are wreathed in perpetual smiles, except when they flourish their warlike weapons on ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... inclination. The Wangs were invited to an entertainment at the Futai's boat, and Major Gordon saw them both in the city and subsequently when on their way to Li Hung Chang. The exact circumstances of their fate were never known; but nine headless bodies were discovered on the opposite side of the creek, and not far distant from the Futai's quarters. It then became evident that Lar Wang and his fellow Wangs had been brutally murdered. Major Gordon was disposed ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... sessile life. In the shell-fish, on the other hand, the principle of armour-plating has its greatest development. It is assuredly a long and obscure way that leads from the ancestral type of animal we have been describing to the headless and shapeless mussel or oyster. Such a degeneration is, however, precisely what we should expect to find in the circumstances. Indeed, the larva, of many of the headless Molluscs have a mouth and eyes, and there is a very common type of larva—the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... severed head, Close-sheared it all, behind and eke before. He found, among the rest, the fatal thread. Then pale became the visage, changing sore, Turned up its eyes, and signals sore and dread Of the last agony of nature wore; And the headless body seated in the sell, Shuddered its last, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... between two hills," the Dutch called it Sleepy Haven Kill, hence Sleepy Hollow. "Far in the foldings of the hills winds this wizard stream," writes the grand sachem of all the wizards, who wove the romance of the headless horseman and the luckless schoolmaster so tightly about the spot that they are to-day part and parcel of it. The bridge over which the scared pedagogue scurried was some rods further up the stream than is the present crossing, for in those days the Post Road ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... natural science; and if those who are its rightful lords can recover the soil, we bid them heartily, God speed! We have been driven to these remarks by a twofold impulse. First, we can never forget the injury that has been inflicted on science by the oppositions of a headless religion; any more than we can forget the injury which has been inflicted on religion by the oppositions of a heartless science. Secondly, we have seen this very question of the inhabitation of the planets and satellites rendered a topic of ridicule ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... accident, thirty-eight years ago, in my father-in-law's house in Elmira. There was a scarred and battered and ancient billiard-table in the garret, and along with it a peck of checked and chipped balls, and a rackful of crooked and headless cues. I played solitaire up there every day with that difficult outfit. The table was not level, but slanted sharply to the southeast; there wasn't a ball that was round, or would complete the journey you started it on, but would always get tired and stop half-way and settle, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the house. Shrieks of laughter from wicked Molly and her coadjutor, Grif, greeted this explosion of wrath, which did no good, however, for half an hour later the same cars, all in a heap, were on the steps again, with two headless dolls tumbling out of the cab, and the dilapidated engine labelled, "No. 11 ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... coming round it, his eyes caught the red light of free Levi's fire, and he heard the sound of a hammer falling upon heated iron. The little path was somewhere in the darkness, and as he vainly sought for it, he stumbled over a row of stripped and headless cornstalks which ran up to the cabin door. Once upon the smooth stone before the threshold, he gave a boyish whistle and lifted his hand to knock. "It is I, Uncle Levi—there are no 'hants' about," ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... saw good paintings in rags and in gardens statues covered with the moss of centuries smashed. In many places, still on the pedestal, you would see a headless Venus, or a flying Mercury ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... hours' hewing could not open; a voice that you know crying after you from God knows where; a mass of long, fair hair visible here, a foot there, three fingers of a hand over there; the snow bright-red under foot; charred limbs and headless trunks tossed about; strong men carrying covered things by you, at sight of which other strong men have fainted; the little yellow jet that flared up, and died in smoke, and flared again, leaped out, licked the cotton-bales, tasted the oiled machinery, crunched the netted wood, danced on the heaped-up ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... some of the neighbours went to the house, saw the ghost, and even described to Mr. Thompson what they had seen. According to one man it appeared in the shape of a human being with a pig's head with long tusks. Another described it as a horse with an elephant's head, and a headless man seated on its back. Finally a "station" was held at the house by seven priests, at which all the neighbours attended. The station commenced after sunset, and everything in the house had to be uncovered, lest the evil spirit should find any resting-place. A free passage was left ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... a day terrible to remember in its heat and hunger and unbearable thirst, with about them the headless dead, festering in the sun and blackening, and over them the sky without a cloud, and always at their hearts the dread of Asi and the chiefs, returning to kill them both. At dusk it seemed as though O'olo could never get his father to his feet, so destroyed was the old man by weakness and ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... more proof To tell of, but that conscience makes me firm, The boon companion, who her strong breast-plate Buckles on him, that feels no guilt within And bids him on and fear not. Without doubt I saw, and yet it seems to pass before me, A headless trunk, that even as the rest Of the sad flock pac'd onward. By the hair It bore the sever'd member, lantern-wise Pendent in hand, which look'd ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... of her own age far more interesting than imaginary conversations with dolls. After they were both tired of jumping, in which exercise Sophia Jane's spare form was by far the most successful, the headless body of the murdered doll was dragged out from behind a ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... man he both hated and despised. He was transferred to London, lodged in the Tower, and executed in a bungling manner by "Jack Ketch"—the name given for several centuries to the public executioner. He was buried under St. Peter's Chapel, in the Tower, where reposed the headless bodies of so many noted saints and political martyrs—the great Somerset, and the still greater Northumberland, the two Earls of Essex, and the fourth Duke of Norfolk, and other great men who figured in the reigns of ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Following the falcon, they soon reached the spot where Triphyna lay dead. After they had all knelt in prayer, St. Gildas said to the corpse, "Arise, take thy head and thy child, and follow us." The dead body obeyed, the bewildered troop followed; but, gallop as fast as they could, the headless body was always in front, carrying the babe in her left hand, and her pale head in the right. In this manner, they reached the castle of Comorre. "Count," says St. Gildas, "I bring back your wife such as your wickedness has made her, and thy child such as Heaven ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... muddy mash. By the side of the gentleman in the dark jacket, amidst the bright verdure, where the two little wrestlers so lightly tinted were disporting themselves, there remained naught of the nude, headless, breastless woman but a mutilated trunk, a vague cadaverous stump, an indistinct, lifeless patch of ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... bound I was on the spot just in time to see her fearlessly approaching the prostrate form of a German soldier, the upper extremity of whose body was hidden beneath the top of a tin wash boiler. The child raised the lid, beheld, as we did, a headless human trunk, and fell ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... head. One party of them fixed it, like that of the vilest traitor, on an immense pole, and bore it in triumph all over Paris; while another division of the outrageous cannibals were occupied in tearing her clothes piecemeal from her mangled corpse. The beauty of that form, though headless, mutilated and reeking with the hot blood of their foul crime—how shall I describe it?—excited that atrocious excess of lust, which impelled these hordes of assassins to satiate their demoniac passions upon the remains of this ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... on foot. After many inquiries and defeats, there was pointed out to them in a lane, a very small cottage residence, with a board across the open doorway, hooked on to which board by the armpits was a young gentleman of tender years, angling for mud with a headless wooden horse and line. In this young sportsman, distinguished by a crisply curling auburn head and a bluff countenance, the Secretary descried ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... account of the darkness of the night, and the clamour of cannon and musketry mingled with the cries of the wounded. Much it was to Filer's astonishment, then, when the surgeon asked him what he had brought in a headless trunk for; he declared that the lieutenant had a head on when he took him up, for he had himself asked him to take him from the breach, and that he did not know when the head was severed, which must have been done by one of the bullets of which there ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... and arrows, bead-work, trappings, &c., belonging to the deceased; quantities of food, consisting of dried fish, roots, herbs, &c., were placed with the body also. The grave was then filled up, covering the headless body; then a bundle of fagots was brought and placed on the grave by the different members of the tribe, and on these fagots the head was placed, the pile fired, and the head consumed to ashes; after this was done the female relatives of the deceased, who had appeared as ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... elsewhere, over the death of "The Witnesses" was wilder than the "Mafficking" [Transcriber's note: Mafeking?] in England of the Boer war days. The two Witnesses had been a source of torment and fear upon all peoples (save those who clove to God) and now that their headless bodies lay stark and dead on the marble pave of "The Broadway," the people "rejoiced upon them, made merry, and sent gifts one to ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... molestation in a very decided manner. Why does it so struggle to get away when I pinch its toes? Doubtless, you will say, because it feels the pinch and would rather not have it repeated. I now behead the animal with the aid of a sharp chisel. . . . The headless trunk lies as though it were dead. The spinal cord seems to be suffering from shock. Probably, however, it will soon recover from this. . . . Observe that the animal has now spontaneously drawn up its legs and arms, and it is sitting ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... which shows how much Jesus loved John. It was after the foul murder of the Baptist. The record is very brief. The friends of the dead prophet gathered in the prison, and, taking up the headless body of their master, they carried it away to a reverent, tearful burial. Then they went and told Jesus. The narrative says, "When Jesus heard of it, he departed thence by ship into a desert place apart." His sorrow at the tragic death of his faithful friend made him wish ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... extreme severity to correct it. The other untoward humours of the multitude, should there be no powerful chief to foster them, are easily dealt with; because, while on the one hand there is nothing more terrible than an uncontrolled and headless mob, on the other, there is nothing feebler. For though it be furnished with arms it is easily subdued, if you have some place of strength wherein to shelter from its first onset. For when its first fury has somewhat abated, and each man sees that he has to return to his own house, all begin ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... followed a sharp, cracking noise, like the explosion of a percussion-cap, and the head of the rattlesnake spun twenty feet or more out over the swamp. It struck the branch of a tree, and, dropping to the water, sunk out of sight. The headless body of the reptile now writhed and doubled over itself, and smote the tree in the most horrible agony. Oonomoo walked quietly forward, and with his feet shoved it from the log. Still twisting and interlocking, it sunk down, down, down into the clear spring-like waters ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... the election (20 Oct.) denounced the conspiracy in the full senate and in presence of its principal leaders. Catilina did not condescend to deny it; he answered haughtily that, if the election for consul should fall on him, the great headless party would certainly no longer want a leader against the small party led by wretched heads. But as palpable evidences of the plot were not before them, nothing farther was to be got from the timid senate, except that it gave its previous sanction in the usual way to the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Whose hostile king the brave Tydides slew; Sleeping he died, with all his guards around, And twelve beside lay gasping on the ground. These other spoils from conquer'd Dolon came, A wretch, whose swiftness was his only fame; By Hector sent our forces to explore, He now lies headless on ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... its hills; and on the other edge of the cup of the sky the old walls of the city, the front of Saint John's Church, surmounted with statues which danced in black silhouette.... Silence.... A fiery sun.... The wind passed over the plain.... On a headless, armless statue, almost inundated by the waving grass, a lizard, with its heart beating tranquilly, lay motionless, absorbed, drinking in its fill of light. And Christophe, with his head buzzing with the sunshine (sometimes ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... appearance of the Head-hunter. The streets were deserted throughout the day, and with but few exceptions the only pedestrians were police officers, who now traveled in pairs or squads. The evening papers were brutally frank in predicting that before dawn a sixth headless corpse would be discovered, and this expectation was shared ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... benches on the right Nine headless bodies rose to sight, And on the left, from grim repose, Nine heads that had no ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... in a circle, bumping into trees and rocks, but not getting a step nearer home. SO they took his hand and led him back to the palace, where every one was filled with sorrow at the sad sight of the headless King. Indeed, his devoted subjects, for the first time in their lives, came as near to weeping as an inhabitant of the Valley of ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... is hidden, but very near. A moment later, Gloster enters, black as night, hisses his monstrous charge, and before noon of that same day poor Hastings is a headless corpse. ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... The headless bodies of the slain, scattered about in the bush after a battle, if known, were buried, if unknown, left to the dogs. In some cases the whole body was pulled along in savage triumph and laid before the chiefs. One day, when some of us were in a war-fort endeavouring ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... some of them be called Cyno[ce]phali, for they have heads as hounds, and seem by the working, beasts rather than men, and some be called Cyclops, and have that name, for one of them hath but one eye, and that in the middle of the forehead, and some be all headless and noseless, and their eyen be in the shoulders, and some have plain faces without nostrils, and the nether lips of them stretch so, that they hele therewith their faces when they be in the heat of the sun: and some of them have closed mouths, in their ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... meant to let Emily advise, but to sweep her aside if she perpetrated atrocities. The first shop, however, went to my head. It was one of those where you walk into a kind of drawing-room with figurines, or whatever you call them—slender, headless ladies in model dresses—grouped about, and other equally slender, but long-headed ladies in black satin trains, showing ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Chamber to the top of the oak staircase. This last insult so enraged him, that he resolved to make one final effort to assert his dignity and social position, and determined to visit the insolent young Etonians the next night in his celebrated character of "Reckless Rupert, or the Headless Earl." ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... answer for me, who will defend me, when my judges will be so many pale, cold shapes, me in whose hands were Death and Terror? And if we meet together above there—or, perchance, down below, we, the executioner and the executed, and sit down at one table! oh! those bloody souls!—moving about headless, perchance, even in the other world, oh! horrible, horrible! To have to answer for the head of a man! And what if he were innocent besides, what if the judge erred, and the blood of the condemned cries out to Heaven for vengeance? Alas! oh, Mighty ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... of Professor Panky's clothes, he remembered having given his own old ones to the Queen, and having thought that she might have got a better dummy on which to display them than the headless scarecrow, which, however, he supposed was all her ladies-in-waiting could lay their hands on at the moment. If that dummy had never been replaced, it was perhaps not very strange that the King could not at the first glance tell back from front, and if he did not guess right at first, ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... room, came to rest on the figure of a heavy duty robot of familiar design. Semi-human in form, it looked like some misshapen, bent, headless giant. He inspected it: Meyers Robot, Inc. Earth designed for mining ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... adopted,—while in shaping machines he was the first to use the revolving cutter attached to the slide rest. Then, in 1828, he fluted the taps for the first time with a revolving cutter,—other makers having up to that time only notched them. Among his other inventions in screws may be mentioned his headless tap, which, according to Mr. Nasmyth, is so valuable an invention, that, "if he had done nothing else, it ought to immortalize him among mechanics. It passed right through the hole to be tapped, and was thus enabled to do the duty of ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... which looked as though it could not believe what had happened, and raised itself a little as if to show there was nothing the least bit wrong. Solem let the body go. It lay still for a moment, then kicked its legs, leaped to the ground and began to hop, the headless body reeling on one wing till it struck the wall and spattered blood in wide arcs before ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why) was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death. When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who had stood in their pride on this road and looked upon yonder river and the great stone wolf that guarded it, which wolf, so said the legend, howled at the approach of foes. But now he howled no more, for he lay headless beneath the waters, and there he lies to this day. Well, they were dead, everyone of them, and even their deeds were forgotten; and oh! how small the thought of it made them feel, these two young men bent upon a desperate quest in a strange ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... understood well the harmony between man's feelings and his surroundings. The Sylvan Dance in "The Marble Faun" is wonderfully handled. Irving, in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," throws about the story a "witching influence," and long before the Headless Horseman appears, the reader is quite sure that the region abounds in "ghosts and goblins," dwelling in its "haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses." The danger in the use of description for ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... ravishing creations, the chapeaux, rise in a row high upon their slim and lovely stems. This one is the establishment of Mlle. Edythe, that of Mme. Vigneau. Countless, too, are the terrestrial heavens devoted to "gowns." Headless they stand, these symphonies in feminine apparel, side by side here in the windows of the Maison la Mode, there of the Maison Estelle. Frequent are the places where the figure is cultivated with famous corsets, the retreats of "corsetieres"; this one before you bears the name Fayette; it is where ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... in eager expectation. A few blows sufficed to remove the head of the cask. Horror! a sickening stench arose, and there became visible the headless trunk of a human being. That portion of the body which was not immersed in the wine, was putrid. 'Look here!' cried I, in mad triumph, plunging my arm into the cask, and drawing forth the ghastly head of Lagrange. I held aloft the horrid trophy of my vengeance; there were ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... spent an hour very pleasantly in the National Academy, in the same building as the National Gallery. Many of the paintings here are of a fine order. Oliver Cromwell looking upon the headless corpse of King Charles I., appeared to draw the greatest number of spectators. A scene from "As You Like it," was one of the best executed pieces we saw. This was "Rosalind, Celia, and Orlando." The artist ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... she is there; that hellish shout, That deadly stroke, she hears them plain, And from the headless trunk starts out Even over ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... and pulled—and while he pulled felt in a moment no grip, no weight at all. Between two hateful screams a face slid by him, out of reach, silent, with parted lips; and as it slipped away he fell back staggering, grasping the useless, headless crutch. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... every four years. We are not now discussing the advantages or disadvantages of the hereditary principle; the point that I desire to make is that at any given time American society, instead of being truncated and headless, has the equivalent of an aristocracy, whether the first, second, third, or fifth generation of nobility, just as abundant and complete as if it were properly labelled and classified into Dukes, Marquises, Viscounts, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... were thrown to the ground, and, in a few moments, their headless trunks lay stretched on the earth, while their heads were borne aloft ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... ironical incongruity. The garments seemed to have never fitted the wearer, but to have been assumed in ghastly jocularity,—a boot half off the swollen foot, a ripped waistcoat thrown over the shoulder, were like the properties of some low comedian. At first the body appeared to be headless; but as Brice cleared away the debris and lifted it, he saw with horror that the head was twisted under the shoulder, and swung helplessly from the dislocated neck. But that horror gave way to a more intense and thrilling emotion as he saw the face—although strangely free from laceration or ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... whose litter was near, thrust her head out, and with her hand holding one of the shafts, exclaimed, "Royal Richard, beware what you do! see, these arrows are headless!" ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... off to play chaupur with King Sarkap. And as he journeyed there came a fierce storm of thunder and lightning, so that he sought shelter, and found none save an old graveyard, where a headless corpse lay upon the ground. So lonesome was it that even the corpse seemed company, and Rasalu, sitting down beside ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... Narayana instantly cut off with his discus the well-adorned head of the Danava who was drinking the Amrita without permission. And the huge head of the Danava, cut off by the discus and resembling a mountain peak, then rose up to the sky and began to utter dreadful cries. And the Danava's headless trunk, falling upon the ground and rolling thereon, made the Earth tremble with her mountains, forests and islands. And from that time there is a long-standing quarrel between Rahu's head and Surya and Soma. And to this day it swalloweth ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... eyes burned, . . . his mind grew troubled. . . . He grasped the knife like a madman, and the innocent blood spurted into his eyes. Diabolical laughter resounded on all sides. Misshaped monsters flew past him in herds. The witch, fastening her hands in the headless trunk, like a wolf drank its blood. . . . All went round in his head. Collecting all his strength, he set out to run. Everything turned red before him. The trees seemed steeped in blood, and burned and groaned. The sky glowed and glowered. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... Testament, [2] usually placed Jerusalem in the center of the world. A Scriptural reference to the "four corners of the earth" [3] was sometimes thought to imply the existence of a rectangular world. From classical sources came stories of monstrous men, one-eyed, headless, or dog-headed, who were supposed to inhabit remote regions. Equally monstrous animals, such as the unicorn and dragon, [4] kept them company. Sailors' "yarns" must have been responsible for the belief that the ocean boiled at the equator and that in the Atlantic—the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the line of our ancestry. A later human embryonic form (the chordula) points just as clearly to a worm-like ancestor (the prochordonia), the nearest living relation of which is found among the actual ascidiae. To this succeeds a most important embryonic stage (acrania), in which our headless foetus presents, in the main, the structure of the lancelet. But we can only indirectly and approximately, with the aid of comparative anatomy and ontogeny, conjecture what lower forms enter into the chain of our ancestry between the gastraea and the chordula, and between this and the lancelet. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... treasures pressed close to them. Stuffy bedrooms lined with hints of Sabbatical horror, strewn with bizarre refuse; musty smelling books out of whose pages fantastic shapes rear themselves against the gaslights, macabre worlds in which unreason rides like a headless D'Artagnan; evenings in the park arguing suddenly with startled strangers on the existence of the philosophers' stone or the astrological causes of influenza—these form a background for the curious men whom the rain has ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... his oily den, his little house of tin, Headless and heedless there he lies, no move of tail or fin, Yet full as beauteous, I ween, that press'd and prison'd fish, As when in sunny seas he ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... Athenian fowl,[419] Which Chalcis gods, and mortals call an owl, Now see an Attys, now a Cecrops[420] clear, Nay, Mahomet! the pigeon at thine ear; Be rich in ancient brass, though not in gold, And keep his Lares, though his house be sold; To headless Phoebe his fair bride postpone, Honour a Syrian prince above his own; Lord of an Otho, if I vouch it true; Bless'd in one Niger, till he knows ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... him the queer story Peter Rabbit had told. "I've been sent up here to find out if you have seen this legless, headless, tailess ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... spindle-legs curled up to meet red-gimleted black faces, donkeys headless and legless, or sieves of shrapnel; camels with necks writhed back on to their humps, rotting already in pools of blood and bile-yellow water, heads without faces, and faces without anything below, cobwebbed arms and legs, and black skins ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... instant, sleepily rubbing their eyes with their brazen fingers, while all the snakes on their heads reared themselves on end with surprise, and with venomous malice against they knew not what. But when the Gorgons saw the scaly carcass of Medusa, headless, and her golden wings all ruffled and half spread out on the sand, it was really awful to hear what yells and screeches they set up. And then the snakes! They sent forth a hundredfold hiss, with one consent, and Medusa's snakes answered them out of ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... the Tower, and shortly afterwards to execution. His headless body was buried under the communion table of that little chapel of St. Peter within the Tower grounds, where the remains of Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, and many other royal victimsf, are gathered. No sadder spot exists on earth, "since ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... about her, Mrs. Fabian placed the picture, face downwards, on the table near by and tried to draw out the old headless tacks driven in to hold the backboard snugly ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the poison than be a disfigured, headless corpse, I drank what remained, and died within five minutes of ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... to amuse little Jacques, and prevent him from trotting between the boxes, putting all sorts of undesirable goods into them; and Ulysse had collected his toys, and was pleading earnestly that a headless wooden horse and a kite, twice as tall as himself, of Lanty's manufacture, might ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... remarkable things connected with this discovery. The boots were what are called "rights and lefts," and in a good state of preservation. The crosier was perfect, and a part of the body was hard, and of a copper-coloured hue, whilst the other part was decomposed. The body was headless, and a piece of lead was found lying in place of the skull, with this inscription ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... not the Rokuro-Kubi, viewing with astonishment her own body (left behind) cry out, "Oh, what a headless goblin have you become!"] ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... to the ground as he cried, "Hosanna, save us now!" All through the night his father prayed in the synagogue, but the child went home to bed, after a gallant struggle with his closing eyelids, hoping not to see his headless shadow on the stones, for that was a sign of death. But the ninth day of Tabernacles was the best, "The Rejoicing of the Law," when the fifty-second portion of the Pentateuch was finished and the first portion begun immediately all over again, to show that the "rejoicing" was not because the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... headless, and that their blood-curdling cries seem to emerge from a phosphorescent glow of evil smoke that hovers about the place where the head should be. Others describe them as gaunt, dark beasts with huge white fangs and lolling ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... it was a female figure kneeling to a colossal pair of legs, destined to support a warrior, whose upper proportions waited to be drawn out of the spool-baskets. Another had been a year at work on a headless Virgin with a babe in her arms, finished only to the eyes. Sometimes ten, or even twenty years, are expended by one man upon a single piece of tapestry; but the patience of the workmen is not more wonderful than the art with which they select and blend ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Ture Joensson's body was found lying headless in the street, whether thus punished by Christian for his lies or by some Swede for his treason, is ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... with the snake and the washbowl, her nerves were not strong enough. She recoiled in dismay, also, from the sight of two yellow, paper-covered books on the table, flaunting shamelessly the titles: "Jack; the Pirate of Red Island," and "Haunted by a Headless Ghost." ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... finding himself in a dreadfully small minority) retired into his garden with his daughter, and there hanged both himself and the lady. On no account would he have decapitated either; since in that case the corpses, being headless, would in Chinese ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... hence to Bagdad; in high festal day At his round table, when the caliph, plac'd In stately pomp, with splendid emirs grac'd, Enjoys the banquet rang'd in proud array, Slay him who lies the monarch's left beside, Dash from his headless trunk the purple tide. Then to the right draw near; with courtly grace The beauteous heiress of his throne embrace; And thrice with public kiss ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... mother refuse, however, to believe that this man—a notorious coward—has performed any such feat, and hasten out to the battle-field. There they find not only the headless dragon, but the unconscious Tristram, and the tongue which proves him the real victor. To nurse him back to health is no great task for these ladies, who, like many of the heroines of the mediaeval epics and romances, are ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... The Romance intitled Sir Gawayne and the Grene Kny[gh]t follows, fol. 91. Prefixed is an illumination of a headless knight on horseback, carrying his head by its hair in his right hand, and looking benignly at an odd-eyed bill-man before him; while from a raised structure above, a king armed with a knife, his queen, an ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... monarchs dear, some hundred miles astray, Oft have they seen Fate give the fatal blow! The seer, in Skye, shrieked as the blood did flow, When headless Charles warm on the scaffold lay! As Boreas threw his young Aurora forth, In the first year of the first George's reign, And battles raged in welkin of the North, They mourned in air, fell, fell Rebellion slain! And as, of late, they joyed in Preston's fight, Saw at ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... curls tangle into lugs as they grow. I think that's all, dear Grethel, for I love you so much that I'm sure to be easy to please. Only remember—it's a trifle—but when I want you, never keep that headless doll on your knees. I'd much rather not have her in my house—there, don't cry! if you will have her, I suppose it must be; Though I can't think what you want with Katerina when you've got Nickel and me." So I said, "Thank you, dear Fritz, for letting me bring her, for I've had her so long I shouldn't ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... I will have heads and lives for him as many As I have manors, castles, towns, and towers!— Treacherous Warwick! traitorous Mortimer! If I be England's king, in lakes of gore Your headless trunks, your bodies will I trail, That you may drink your fill, and quaff in blood, And stain my royal standard with the same; You villains that have slain my Gaveston!— And, in this place of honour and of trust, Spenser, sweet Spenser, I adopt thee ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... bigness, with no commensurate contents to show for it, and now I detested it more than ever. A physical fooling of turgescence and congestion in that region, such as swimmers often feel, probably increased the impression. I thought with envy of the Aztec children, of the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, of Saint Somebody with his head tucked under his arm. Plotinus was less ashamed of his whole body than I of this inconsiderate and stupid appendage. To be sure, I might swim for a certain distance under water. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... scarcely credible that the movements of a headless frog, when it wipes off a drop of acid or other object from its thigh, and which movements are so well coordinated for a special purpose, were not at first performed voluntarily, being afterwards rendered easy through long-continued habit ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... buildings within the walls are the church, the white tower, the ordnance office, the jewel office, the horse armory. The church is called "St. Peter in Vincules," and is remarkable as the depository of the headless bodies of numerous illustrious personages who suffered either in the Tower or on the hill. Among these were Anna Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, Catharine Howard, the Duke of Somerset ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... by a strong arm, the shaft when released flew faster and farther than the maker of what he thought of chiefly as a thing of sport had imagined could be possible. He had long to search for the headless arrow and when he found it he went away to where were bare open stretches, that he might see always where it fell. Once as he sent it from the string it struck fairly against an oak and, pointless as it was, forced itself deeply into ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... I, having just finished winding up my line and disconnecting my rod, bade him take up the fish, while I walked towards the clump of trees where he had seen the headless ghost. ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... the glow. The great suspended stud; the background of shelves and boxes; the scissors-like overalls against the wall; a clothes-line of children's factory-made print frocks; a center-bin of women's untrimmed hats; a headless dummy beside the door, enveloped in a long-sleeved ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... been set up on London bridge, or on Temple Bar, or some other dreadful place. And then as we went round I was told that here was the spot where Lady Jane Grey was beheaded; and there was the window from which she saw the headless body of her husband carried by; and there stood the rack on which Anne Askew was tortured; and there was the prison where Arabella Stuart died insane; and here was the axe which used to be carried before the Lieutenant when he took a prisoner to his trial, and was carried before the prisoner ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... had just time to say this and Petru had not even a chance to unfasten the bridle properly, when the Welwa stood before him, a monster so frightful, so terrible, that he could not look at it. It has no head, yet it is not headless, it does not fly through the air, yet neither does it walk on the earth. It has a mane like the horse, horns like the stag, a face like the bear, eyes like the polecat, and a body that resembles every thing except a living being! Such was the Welwa ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... with little children—she loved them dearly. Some of the smaller ones in question were beautiful little creatures, and her heart warmed to them for Nan's sake. She could not stoop to conciliate the older girls, but she could make an effort with the babies. She knelt on the floor and took up a headless doll. ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... Vaillant! His headless body was then being taken to Clamart, and the crowds for whom he had wept, worked, and died were now going quietly away, indifferent and bored. Poor Vaillant! His ideas were exaggerated ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... all his race were exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophytic members of half-moulded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... ripened by long experience, results were obtained differing greatly from the headless scene of confusion attending the embarkation of our troops at Tampa, as described by witnesses. Only experience can fully meet the difficulties of a great operation of this character, and we were {p.091} without experience; nor can experience like that of British officials ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... horror, Gordon set off at once for the place of the murder, and found the nine headless corpses lying as they had fallen. Englishman and soldier though he was, tears of rage forced their way into his eyes at the thought that by this act of treachery on the part of the Chinese his honour and that of his country had been trampled in the dust. Then, taking a revolver instead of the ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... Chervil " Cream of Asparagus " Crecy (Belgian recipe) " Fish " Flemish " Green Pea " Hasty " Immediate, or Ten Minutes " Leek " Mushroom Cream " Onion " Ostend " Potage Leman " Sorrel " The Soldiers' Vegetable " Starvation " Tomato " Tomato Puree " Vegetable " Waterzoei Sparrows, Headless Speculoos Sprats, To Keep Spinach a la Braconniere Stew, A Quickly Made Strawberry Fancy Strawberry Tartlets Sweet Drinks and Cordials Orgeat ...
— The Belgian Cookbook • various various
... the solicitor treated on the stage? Almost always with contempt, at the best as a humble adviser. He is the comic character or the villain; generally, as a further insult, the secondary villain. The attorney is sometimes the hero of a farce, as in The Headless Man—never in comedy, or to be more correct, hardly ever, for Mr Granville Barker in The Voysey Inheritance gave a very fine and sympathetic study of a young solicitor. The dramatist may say in defence ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... been used, was to put shame upon his skill. "For my own part," he said, "and in the land where I was bred, men would as soon take for their mark King Arthur's round table, which held sixty knights around it. A child of seven years old," he said, "might hit yonder target with a headless shaft; but," added he, walking deliberately to the other end of the lists, and sticking the willow wand upright in the ground, "he that hits that rod at five-score yards, I call him an archer fit to bear bow ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... rapidly that the words fairly tumbled over one another, "'in the land where he was bred, men would as soon take for their mark King Arthur's round table, which held sixty knights around it. A child of seven might hit yonder target with a headless shaft.' Oh, this ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... outstretched to smell the dead snake and then went forward and grasped the hamadryad's tail with both hands, striving to hold it still. But it dragged him from side to side and the writhing coils of the headless body nearly enfolded him, so he let go and stepped back. As well as he could judge the king-cobra was more than seventeen ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... attracted by sounds that did not seem expressive of admiration, ventured to approach, and found the poet sunk in profound, but not silent, slumber. From such absurdities as these, or of the enthusiast who went into raptures about the head of the Elgin Ilissos (which is unfortunately a headless trunk), we are happily spared in the pages of Smollett. In him complete absence of gush is accompanied by an independent judgement, for which it may quite safely be claimed that good taste is in the ascendant in the ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... niche. The night was not too dark to show the interior. Athor, a torso, broken in twain, headless, armless, was prostrate. It had been pushed over against the great cube that sheltered it and the fall against the hard limestone had ruined it. Kenkenes clenched his hands and choked back the angry ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... lofty mass of rock rising above the bed of the Plym, on the southern edge of Dartmoor. During a deep snow, the traces of a naked human foot and of a cloven hoof were found ascending to the highest point. The valley below is haunted by a black headless dog. Query, is it Dewerstone, Tiwes-tun, or Tiwes-stan?—(Kemble's Saxons, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... Castle for his crimes. Not only have the stains of this bloody tragedy ever since been indelible, but the spirit of Walter Calverley could not rest, having often been seen galloping about the district at night on a headless horse.[28] And, speaking of ghosts which appear in this eccentric fashion, we may note that Eastbury House, near Blandford—now pulled down—had in a certain marble-floored room, ineffaceable stains of blood, attributable, it is said, to the suicide of William Doggett, the steward of ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... the time had gone so fast, it is almost noon; I must hurry or I shall have Catalina very hot waiting with a cold supper. By the way Madre, she sent her best respects to you and hopes that you will not bewitch any more of her poultry, for if you do, they will be a headless lot in ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... contemptuous breach of sacred ties, By headless Charles see heartless Henry lies; Between them stands another sceptered thing— It moves, it reigns—in all but name, a king; Charles to his people, Henry to his wife, —In him the double tyrant ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton |
