"Ordeal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an effort to match the sickness of actual war. Certain zones were set apart as unwholesome, especially those near great rivers and lakes, and troops unfortunate enough to find themselves in these miasmic plains had to undergo the ordeal of the dice-box. Swiss or Guards, musicians, Arabs, chubby cavalrymen or thin, all had to pay Death's toll in a new and frightful form. But we rather overdid the miasma, so it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with a dense, thorny hedge. Then as this stalk is no longer cropped, it leads the tree upward. The lateral branches are starved, and in a few years the tree stands with little or no evidence of the ordeal it has passed through. In like manner the nature of the animals prompts them to the deeds they do, and we think of them as the result of a mental process, because similar acts in ourselves are the ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... badly. Many of them sobbed. To see and hear a man sob is terrible, almost as terrible as some of the wounds I have seen—and they have been very awful. However, as quite a number of the men had only recently come out, it was natural enough that we should be upset by this ordeal. Time and repeated experiences of this kind toughen if they do not harden a man—but for many this was ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... VENENOSUM.—A strong leguminous plant, the seeds of which are highly poisonous, and are employed by the natives of Old Calabar as an ordeal. Persons suspected of witchcraft or other crimes are compelled to eat them until they vomit or die, the former being regarded as proof of innocence, and the latter of guilt. Recently the seeds have been found to act powerfully ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... been studied as a soldier, a statesman, an organizer, a politician. In all he was undeniably great. But men will always like to know something about him as a man. Can he stand that ordeal? These volumes will answer that question. They are written by one who joined the First Consul at the Hospice on Mt. St. Bernard, on his way to Marengo, in June, 1800, and who was with him as his chief personal attendant, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... eyes were more meditative, and his expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... considerably higher attainments than those who have come in upon simple nomination; and, we may add, that we cannot doubt that if it be adopted as a usual course to nominate several candidates to compete for each vacancy, the expectation of this ordeal will act most beneficially on the education and industry of those young persons who are looking forward to ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... while we thought the Hansom Cab a very ingenious plot which helped us to forget the tedium of a railway journey, I do not know that there is a copy on our shelves. Certainly it is not lying between The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Mayor of Casterbridge. But some of us venture to think that in that admirable historical romance which moves with such firm foot through both the troubled England and the mysterious Italy of the seventeenth ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... Du Prel spoke of her past. Hadria was able to read between the lines. When a mere girl, Miss Du Prel had been thrown on the world—brilliant, handsome, impulsive, generous—to pass through a fiery ordeal, and to emerge with aspirations as high as ever, but with her radiant hopes burnt out. But she did not dwell on this side of the picture; she emphasized rather, the possibility of holding on through storm and stress to the truth that is born in one; to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general," procured the death, "in one year and in one county, of more than three times as many as suffered in Salem during the whole delusion"; several persons were tried by water ordeal, and drowned, in Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire, at the same time with the Salem executions; and capital punishments took place there some years after the end of the trouble here. It is well known, also, that persons were put to death for witchcraft in two ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Douglas felt so unnerved by the ordeal through which he had just passed that his brain seemed numbed to such an extent that he scarcely realised what was going on around him. Villavicencio's taunts passed him by almost unheeded, and Jim most certainly did not realise that he was ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... London on the 6th of June; on the night of the 4th he could talk to his friends only of their kindness and of his eagerness to be home. To a friend, who stayed to help him through the painful ordeal of undressing, he murmured his thanks and ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... told so well and so often that I spare you its details. Set this good hint of Cotton Mather against that letter of his to John Richards, recommending the search after witch-marks, and the application of the water-ordeal, which means throw your grandmother into the water, if she has a mole on her arm;—if she swims, she is a witch and must be hanged; if she sinks, the Lord have mercy on ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is. The minister and Grace were coming up the aisle and behind them came Captain Nat Hammond and Keziah Coffin. Nat was smiling and self-possessed. Never before in his life had he entered the Regular meeting house as a worshiper, but he seemed to be bearing the ordeal bravely. It was Grace's first visit to the church, also, and she was plainly embarrassed. To be stared at by eighty-odd pairs of eyes, and to catch whispered comments from the starers' tongues, is likely to ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... number of ladies then passed in review, each being introduced by the gentleman who accompanied her, and Mr. Lincoln underwent the new ordeal with much good humor. All that day the hotel was crowded with members of Congress and others, anxious to see the President-elect, of whom they had heard so much, and among them were several newspaper corespondents, who had known him while he was a member of the House of Representatives. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Burns Celebration probably caused many humble men to think of the number of great minds who have been compelled to undergo this ordeal of poverty. How perfectly, in some instances, does the man's soul and intellect seem to have been separated from the man himself. It does seem a marvel that seventy years ago this man should have been in want and harassed by fears for the family he was to leave ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... always been one of the most pointed examples of her religious education. In her first experience of public life her radiant health and colouring shamed all meaner aids and had been amply sufficient for the brightest lights and the longest hours. But that fierce ordeal of acclimating under conditions of constant travel and hard work had drained even the magnificent vitality that had been her heritage from generations of seamen, and typhoid and unhappy maternity had robbed her ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... without guile or insincerity of any kind, gratified the king with many soft words, and then said, 'O king, thou hast completely subjugated the five organs of action and the five organs of knowledge with the mind as their sixth. Thou hast for this come out unscathed from the fiery ordeal I had prepared for thee. I have been properly honoured and adored, O son, by thee, O foremost of all persons possessed of speech. Thou hast no sin, not even a minute one, in thee! Give me leave, O king, for I shall now proceed to the place I came from. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... yesterday," and the dreaded ordeal would be over. But somehow he could not utter the words. Instead he descended from the landing and followed the others into the library where the conversation immediately shifted to other topics. In the jumble of narrative his chance to speak was swallowed up nor during ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... much does George Meredith (1828-1909) belong to our own day that it is difficult to think of him as one of the Victorian novelists. His first notable work, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was published in 1859, the same year as George Eliot's Adam Bede; but it was not till the publication of Diana of the Crossways in 1885, that his power as a novelist was widely recognized. He resembles Browning not only in his condensed ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... supposed that the snow-walls melted under this ordeal; nothing of the sort. Their tendency to do so was checked effectually, not only by a sharp frost, but by the solid backing of snow behind them; and the little that did give way in close proximity to the fire ran unobtrusively ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... all his faults, the hero too! In that dark large eye lurked the profound and fiery enthusiasm of his ill-starred passion. In the thin but exquisite lip I read the courage of the paladin, who would have 'fought his way,' though single-handed, against all the magnates of his county, and by ordeal of battle have purged the honour of the Ruthyns. There in that delicate half-sarcastic tracery of the nostril I detected the intellectual defiance which had politically isolated Silas Ruthyn and opposed him to the landed oligarchy of his county, whose retaliation had been a hideous slander. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... that summer, the clergyman immersed me in the river, while a wondering crowd watched from the shore. The very waters seemed to protest, for as I gasped for breath at the cold backward plunge, I imbibed copious draughts of the briny deep, and was well-nigh strangled. I survived the ordeal, and that afternoon preached in the church to nearly the entire population of the town on the "Final state of ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... think it would, ma'am. It would a'most raise the dead," said Liffie, who also prepared herself for the ordeal. ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... years old before a line from his pen appeared in type. He found employment in a machine-shop, and it was only very gradually—probably after much doubt and hesitation—that he came to the determination to subject his private creations to the ordeal of print. His first venture was a poem in blank verse, the title of which we have been unable to ascertain. A few copies were printed anonymously and distributed among personal friends. It was a premature birth, which never knew a moment's life, and the father ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... do not. He is as well as a nervous boy can be after such an ordeal. He is looking forward to seeing you this afternoon to try to say to you what we all feel. ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... gravely. "This has been a trying ordeal for you. I understand that. But we are coming to the end. I want you to read this description of Mlle. Celie through again to make sure that nothing is omitted." He gave the paper into the maid's hands. "It will be ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... few preparations, which lasted some days, and that it would prove repugnant to enumerate, the fakir declared himself ready to undergo the ordeal. The Maharajah, the Sikhs chiefs, and Gen. Ventura, assembled near a masonry tomb that had been constructed expressly to receive him. Before their eyes, the fakir closed with wax all the apertures in his body (except his mouth) that could give entrance to air. Then, having taken ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... of sex shall fall down by the caste of color, and humanity alone shall be the criterion of all human rights. The Republican party has been the party of ideas, of progress. Under its leadership, the nation came safely through the fiery ordeal of the rebellion; under it slavery was destroyed; under it manhood suffrage was established. The women of the country have long looked to it in hope, and not in vain; for to-day we are launched by it into the political arena, and the Republican party must hereafter fight our battles ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... hemp. Dipping this in the pail, she soon made a lather with the soap, and, taking up limb after limb, scrubbed hard and long—scrubbed until my skin tingled, and in the damp mysterious heat I began to wonder how much of my body would emerge from the ordeal. This scrubbing was a long process, and if the Finns wash one another as industriously as Saima washed me, no one in Finland should ever be dirty, although most of them must lose several skins a year. Pails ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... tiptoes, encased himself in his mitt and turned, tense and alert. He had gone through his first ordeal triumphantly. No chances had come to him in the field, but at bat he had accidently succeeded in being hit, and though he had struck out the next time he had hit a foul and knew the jubilant feeling that came with the crack of ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... by her ordeal that she did sleep, but it was fitfully and without genuine rest. She had her meals sent up to her room, and ate automatically, not ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... to retire. The ordeal had strained his patience and had left his brain feeling the stress of unaccustomed exercise. Therefore, allowing Melvina to drive him before her much as she would have driven a docile Jersey from a cabbage patch, he made his way downstairs, ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... through this ordeal with indifference. Boris, finding that his kindly greetings were thrown away,—that even his old acquaintances in the bazaar howled like the rest,—sat with head bowed and despair in his heart. The beautiful eyes of Helena were heavy with tears; but she no longer ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... burned his feet'—the Christian spell of Thangbrandr being stronger than the heathen spell of the Berserkir. What the saga says is not evidence, and some of the other tales are merely traditional. Others may be explained, perhaps, by conjuring. The mediaeval ordeal by fire may also be left on one side. In 1826 Lockhart published a translation of the Church Service for the Ordeal by Fire, a document given, he says, by Busching in Die Vorzeit for 1817. The accused communicates before carrying the red-hot iron bar, or walking on the red-hot ploughshare. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... to blushing that he ever had, as he answered that he guessed he did. There was something in the girl's voice and manner and in her beaming countenance, telling of her happiness in the possession of her new finery—though she had feared the ordeal of wearing it to school, perhaps because of the contrast it made to her usual garment—that he felt a queer feeling in his throat. But relief was at hand for him in his embarrassment, for the path that led down to the camp was in sight, and he ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... minds than the absurdity is amusing. Meantime it must not be forgotten, that the principle concerned, though it may happen to disgust men when associated with ludicrous circumstances, is, after all, the very same which has latently governed very many modes of ordeal, or judicial inquiry; and which has been adopted, blindly, as a moral rule, or canon, equally by the blindest of the Pagans, the most fanatical of the Jews, and the most enlightened of the Christians. It proceeds upon ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... when I entered the University fell late in April, so that the examinations were fixed for St. Thomas's Week, [Easter week.] and I had to spend Good Friday in fasting and finally getting myself ready for the ordeal. ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... useless, as the young gentleman had not been informed of it. Anthony asked if he might see Mistress Corbet. No, that too was impossible; she was gone upstairs with the Queen's Grace and might not be disturbed. Anthony, in despair, not however unmixed with relief at escaping a further ordeal, was about to turn away, leaving the officious young gentleman swaggering on the stairs like a peacock, when down came Mistress Corbet herself, sailing down in her splendour, to see what was become of the gentleman of ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... women and girls in a town and its neighborhood. These police spies have power to take up any woman they please, on suspicion that she is not a moral woman, and to register her name on a shameful register as a prostitute. She is then forced to submit to the horrible ordeal of a personal examination of a kind which cannot be described here. It is an act on the part of the Government doctor such as would be called an indecent or criminal assault if any other man were to force it upon a woman. And it is the State which forces this ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... special election called for that purpose, the question shall be presented to the electors whether the judge shall be permitted to continue in office or some other specified person shall be substituted in his place. This ordeal differs radically from the popular judgment which a judge is called upon to meet at the end of his term of office, however short that may be, because when his term has expired he is judged upon his general course of conduct while he has been in office and stands or falls upon that as a whole. ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... neighbors spoke to him, asking him if he felt no grief, he cursed and stormed out of the house. Later, after the neighbors departed, his father came upon him in the stable and beat him unmercifully. He came, dry-eyed, through the ordeal, raging inwardly, but silent. And that night, after his father had gone to bed, he stole stealthily out of the house, threw a saddle and bridle on his favorite pony and rode away. Such had ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life;" the "terrible" superstitions of the past, such as human sacrifices, trial by ordeal, &c., show us, he says, "what an indefinite debt of gratitude we owe to the improvement of our reason, to science, and our accumulated knowledge." We see the fruit of Darwin's repeated visits to the Zoological Gardens, especially in his study of the habits and mental powers of ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... aspect of things, though he can also be powerful in tragedy; and his enthusiasms for the beauty of the world and for the romance of youthful love are delightful. He may perhaps best be approached through 'Evan Harrington' (1861) and 'The Ordeal of Richard Feverel' (1859). 'The Egoist' (1879) and 'Diana of the Crossways' (1885) are among his other strongest books. In his earlier years he wrote a considerable body of verse, which shows much the same qualities as his prose. Some of it is rugged in form, but other parts magnificently ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... trial as the idea of judicial settlement diffused itself through the mind of the English people causing established forms to give way to something better. Dispensing with the blood feud, which hardly deserves the name of trial, the oldest form of such institution was trial by ordeal which, according to Thayer in his "Evidence at the Common Law," seems to have been "indigenous with the human creature in the earliest stages of his development." This form gradually fell into disuse before the more rational form of compurgation introduced into Teutonic courts in the fifth century. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... back on their record as a great achievement. Enormous difficulties were faced with stout hearts, and the Royal Flying Corps spirit surmounted them. It was one long test of courage, endurance, and efficiency, and so triumphantly did the airmen come through the ordeal that General Allenby's Army may truthfully be said to have secured as complete a mastery of the air as it did of the plains and hills of Southern Palestine. Those of us who watched the airmen 'carrying on,' from the time when their aeroplanes were inferior to those ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... gods were once graciously good to me. One wondrous evening before hope died utterly I survived the ordeal of walking home ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... The ordeal was ended. No touch of colour, no golden sunbeam or crimson shadow stained the ghastly surface of those snows, they were pallid as the faces ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... of our Union is strong, but our economy is troubled. For too many of our fellow citizens—farmers, steel and auto workers, lumbermen, black teenagers, working mothers—this is a painful period. We must all do everything in our power to bring their ordeal to an end. It has fallen to us, in our time, to undo damage that was a long time in the making, and to begin the hard but necessary task of building a better future for ourselves ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... relatives exceedingly, and retired to a distant colony where the standard was lower. His name was never mentioned till at his decease it was found that he had left L30,000 to be divided among the survivors of the ordeal. And finally, here was Heriot, a credit to his parents, his porridge, and his ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... Wentworth's admirers specially prided themselves. Perhaps a momentary human gratification in the consciousness of having utterly baffled curiosity, passed through the Curate's mind as he took off his robes when the service was over; but he was by no means prepared for the ordeal which awaited him when he stepped forth from the pretty porch of St Roque's. There his three aunts were awaiting him, eager to hear all about it, Miss Dora, for the first time in her life, holding the principal place. "We are going away to-morrow, Frank, and of course you are coming to lunch with ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... reason to expect—her countenance changed in an instant to a haughty self-possession, her eyes flashed defiance, and, becoming immovable as a statue, she stood there perfectly calm and beautiful. She was satisfied that she now had an ordeal to pass and a victory to gain worthy of her powers. In a moment her eye scanned the immense audience, the music began and then followed—how can I describe it?—such heavenly strains as I verily believe mortal never ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... their grasp of things stronger than her own. One day she must marry. She knew that. It was, she insisted laughingly, an ignoble state of slavery, a humiliating, degrading condition of subjection to the male which every woman must endure, necessary perhaps, but an ordeal to be put off, something unpleasant to be postponed as long as possible, like the taking of a dose of unsavory physic or having a tooth pulled at the dentist's. Meantime, heart whole and fancy free, she enjoyed life to the limit and kept her ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... catastrophe. It is the same man who, for three years, followed Carter and Van Amburgh, always hoping that a day would come when the animals would sup with their masters, and upon their masters." Considering the preparatory ordeal and frequent perils of their profession, dancers fairly earn the money and honours paid to them. Crowned heads have condescended to treat them as equals. At Stuttgart, we are told, Taglioni, towards the commencement of her career, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... tante, somewhat tremulous from the ordeal of embarking, settled down in her place, while Mueller lifted Mam'selle Marie into the boat, as if she had been a child. I then took the oars, leaving him to steer; and so we ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... instructions for the voyage, I was conducted by the illustrious Hilaro Frosticos, the Lady Fragrantia, and a prodigious crowd of nobility, and placed sitting upon the summit of the whale's bones at the palace; and having remained in this situation for three days and three nights, as a trial ordeal, and a specimen of my perseverance and resolution, the third hour after midnight they seated me in the chariot of Queen Mab. It was a prodigious dimension, large enough to contain more stowage than the tun ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... comfort but at a loss how to do so, withdrew a short distance from the stricken ones, then they too sat down. The girls were in sore need of consolation themselves, for they were faint and weary after the trying ordeal through which they had passed. It was therefore no wonder that through utter exhaustion they fell into slumber; for youth and weariness will assert themselves against the tyranny of nerve-racking stress. A slumber ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... came up about her and took her breath away as the old Scotch nurse led her in, and Beth clung to her hand and panted "Wait!" as she nerved herself for the dip. Nurse had promised to wait until Beth was ready, and it was Beth's faith in her promise that gave her courage to go bravely through the ordeal. The old Scotch nurse never deceived her as Jane had done, and so Beth learnt that there are people in the world you can ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... yourself. Judgment and retribution proceed within the soul and not from sources outside of it. That is the philosophic drift of the poet's thought expressed and implied in his poem. It was Man, in his mortal ordeal—the motive, cause, and necessity of which remain a mystery—whom he desired and aimed to portray; it was not merely the triumph of a mocking devil, temporarily victorious through ministration to animal lust and ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... was pounding. There was war in Sam's shout. She felt its savage thrill. She gripped herself for the ordeal. There should be no vain regrets, no foolish words. Her soul rose in the ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... ordeal of eating and drinking in presence of his family. If he had not been hungry, he could not have done it, despite the fact that he was content to receive humiliation this night. He swallowed the coffee with effort. When he had finished he sat irresolute for some time; then he arose and ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... answered Jack, pulling out the nut from his pocket. "I've answered the three questions, and now I'll have the lady." "No, no," said the king, "not so fast. You have still an ordeal to go through. You must come here in a week's time and watch for one whole night with the princess, my daughter. If you can manage to keep awake the whole night long you shall ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... bodies of egotism to which they give those names. I put Man in the pillory of self-judgment; it is for you to deal evangelically with what remains of his temperament when he comes down out of the ordeal." ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... the Formula?" Eloise asked, and Ruby told her, while Eloise listened bewildered, and glad that she was to escape an ordeal she could ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... harder than ever. But the office was at least warm. Some of her failing courage came back as she moved, following her papers, round the table. They were given back to her at last, and she went out. She had passed the first ordeal. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of waiting and uncertainty were a severer ordeal to Mrs. Jocelyn and Mildred than ever. Mr. Jocelyn, bent on gaining time, kept putting them off. His new duties upon which he had entered, he wrote, left him only the evening hours for his quest of rooms, and he had not ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... if she would gladly forego her dinner to escape the French asking for it, and yet not quite so neither. But this ordeal was more terrible to her by far than all the rest; she could face them, indeed, they had ceased to be anything but pleasure—or pleasure with a spice that enhanced it; but at this she trembled. To the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... sent out by the prisoners were carefully inspected and subjected to the "ordeal by fire," so that, to use the expressive language of an old soldier, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... this world, were also "laying up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt." Want had taught them its hard lessons, and they had come out of the fiery furnace of affliction the wiser and the better for the severe ordeal. The mother's foolish pride had been rebuked, the daughter's true pride had been encouraged. They had learned that faith and patience are real supports in the hour of trial. The perilous life in the streets which Katy had led for ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... Mabel is in a state of complete nervous prostration caused by the shock of this calamity. I wish you would come to us at once. I fear for my dear child's reason unless you prove able to calm and quiet her through this ordeal. Hasten then, my dear son; every moment before you arrive will seem an age of sorrow and anxiety to ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the fall the baby was born. It proved to be a boy. Orde, nervous as a cat after the ordeal of doing nothing, tiptoed into the darkened room. He found his wife weak and pale, her dark hair framing her face, a new look of rapt inner contemplation rendering even more mysterious her always fathomless eyes. To Orde she seemed fragile, aloof, enshrined among her laces and dainty ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... I felt myself placed in a most cruel dilemma if I refused to submit my case to the proposed ordeal, I stood an impostor confessed. If I consented to see these strangers, it was probable they would not recognise me, and possible that they might deny me in terms calculated to make my position even worse, if that might be. I hesitated but, Rosny standing inexorable before me awaiting ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... Burgundians and of the Anglians were more severe than those of the Germanic race, for they granted to the disputants trial by combat. After having employed the ordeal of red-hot iron, and of scalding water, the Franks adopted the judicial duel (Fig. 300). This was imposed first upon the disputing parties, then on the witnesses, and sometimes even on the judges ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... anywhere, most of the time. It was a peculiar combination of circumstances that plunged us into such a maelstrom of adventure. And yet—I don't see why you should hope for such a placid courtship for them. It took just that ordeal to bring out your really fine points. They were there all the time, dear, but I might never have known they were there. Why, I've lived over those few days, step by step, a hundred times! The wreck, the celebration at Wolf River—" she paused and shuddered, ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... the relations of men and women as a good thing, out of cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues is ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, to collectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Every device that could be contrived to trap Joan into wrong thinking, wrong doing, or disloyalty to the Church, or sinfulness as a little child at home or later, had been tried, and none of them had succeeded. She had come unscathed through the ordeal. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it will be a proof that recent events may be so managed in tragedy as to command popular attention; if it is unsuccessful, the question must remain undetermined until some more powerful writer shall again make the experiment. The Poem is now submitted to the ordeal of closet examination, with the Author's respectful assurance to every reader, that as it is not his interest, so it has not been his intention, to offend any; but, on the contrary, to impress, through the medium of a pleasing stage exhibition, the ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... and thoroughly upright. [Footnote: The following passage occurs in a letter from Airy to his wife, dated 1845, Sept. 17th: "I am sorry that —— speaks in such terms of the 'Grand Master,' as she used to be so proud of him: it is only those who have well gone through the ordeal of quarrels with him and almost insults from him, like Sheepshanks and me, that thoroughly appreciate the good that is in him: I am sure he will never want a good word from me."] In power of mind, in pursuits, and interests, Airy ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main galleries. You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed; and on inquiry you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small, wormy-looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... stoutest hearts could not withstand this withering blast of bullets and shells without returning the fire. The enemy opened upon us a terrific fire, both from the columns in front and from the sharpshooters in the housetops in the city. After giving us battle as long as human endurance could bear the ordeal, they, like their companions before them, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... control of evil spirits,' who, alone, receive religious worship. Though he leaves things uncontrolled, yet the chief being (as in Homer) ratifies the Oath, at a treaty, and is invoked to punish criminals when ordeal water is to be drunk. So far, then, he has an ethical influence. 'Grossly wicked people' are buried outside of the regular place. Fetishism prevails, with spiritualism, and Wilson thinks that mediums might pick up some good tricks in Guinea. He gives no examples. Their inspired men ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... to see the picture, which they declared was very poetical, and 'quite large enough for anything' (the canvas was six feet by four), and invited the artist to dinner. This first dinner-party, in what he regarded as 'high life,' was an alarming ordeal for the country youth, who made prodigious preparations, drove to the house in a state of abject terror, and in five minutes was sitting on an ottoman, talking to Lady Beaumont, and more at ease than he had ever been in his life. In truth, bashfulness ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... not so very remarkable that I should do my best to safeguard the ship and such of her passengers and crew as survive last night's ordeal." ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... years have elapsed," he resumed, "since that December night; but my very soul trembles now, when I recall it! There was a big house-party at Dhoon, but I had been prepared, for some weeks, by my father, for the ordeal that awaited me. Our family mystery is historical, and there were many fearful glances bestowed upon me, when, at midnight, my father took me aside from the company and led me to the old library. By God! Dr. Cairn—fearful ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... memories; the first act of this kind would have been one appealing to every generous motive of those people, again to reconsider the question of how we could live together, and through that bloody ordeal to have brought us into the position in which our fathers left us. There need have been no collision, as there could have been no question of property which that State was not ready to meet. If it was a question of dollars and cents, ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... This is what I mean by the possibilities, by the sharp actualities indeed, that she accepted. She took our friend out, she showed her at home, never attempted to hide or to betray her, played her no trick whatever so long as the ordeal lasted. She drank deep, on her side too, of the cup—the cup that for her own lips could only be bitterness. There was, I think, scarce a special success of her companion's at which she wasn't personally present. ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... which had robbed the trees in the Park of their fresh June greenness and converted the progress of foot-passengers along its sultry pavements into something which called to mind the mediaeval ordeal of walking over ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... justice of his admonitions, and professed myself willing to undergo any ordeal which reason should prescribe. What, I asked, were the conditions, on the fulfilment of which depended my advancement to the station he alluded to? Was it necessary to conceal from me the nature ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... you, I have bought a house near St. James's, and set up an establishment second to none. I will confess that I find myself like to be overawed by my retinue of servants, and their grave and decorous politeness; I also admit that dinner is an ordeal of courses,— each of which, I find, requires a different method of attack; for indeed, in the Polite World, it seems that eating is cherished as one of its most important functions, hence, dining is an art whereof the proper manipulation ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... describe the child of nine years and a half old, that was forced to undergo this terrible ordeal. We will suppose that, by the aid of the dancing-master and the drill-sergeant, I have been cured of my vulgar gait, and that my cockney accent has disappeared. Children of the age above-mentioned soon assimilate their tone and conversation with those around them. I was tall for my years, with ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... once to Kenilworth Mansions, but he went against his will. And the reason of his disinclination was that he scarcely desired to encounter Geraldine. It was an ordeal for him to encounter Geraldine. The events which had led to this surprising condition of affairs ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... severe ordeal was, for the moment, over. She perceived that her companions had finished breakfast, and so she arose from the table, leaving her example ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... with his ticket on Mr. Vanderbilt's line will ever again patronize that enterprising capitalist, unless he sells his ships and becomes a stockholder in the Pacific Railroad. The most enthusiastic lover of the sea must abjure his predilections, when brought to the ordeal of the steamer Champion. Crowded like rabbits in a hutch or captives in the Libby into such indecent propinquity with his kind that the third day out makes him a misanthrope,—fed on the putrid remains of the last trip's commissariat, turkeys ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... acknowledge in the creations of Old Mortality, the Bride of Lammermoor, and others of these narratives. But I, nevertheless, threw the manuscripts into my drawer, resolving not to think of committing them to the Ballantynian ordeal, until I could either obtain the assistance of some capable person to supply deficiencies, and correct errors, so as they might face the public with credit, or perhaps numerous and more serious avocations might permit me to dedicate my own time ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... They are worse than the sea, and that was inhospitable enough. The saints be praised that that is over, at any rate. Oh, the intolerable scent of pitch, and the tossing and the heaving! Heaven spare me such an ordeal again! I thought I should have died of the smells. And here, can it be? Is it possible that there is a distinct odour of—pah! what? Oils, as I am a Christian, and close to the very palace of ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... struggled hard to keep his resolution to kill Ravengar, but it had melted away; he had fanned the fire of his mortal hatred, but it had cooled, and at length he had admitted to himself, angrily, reluctantly, that Ravengar had escaped the ordeal of the vault. And this being decided, what could he do with Ravengar? Retain him under lock and key? Why? To what end? Such illegal captivities were not practicable for long in London. Besides, they were absurd, melodramatic, and futile. ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... the team were badly shaken, until C.S.M. Gorse and Corpl. B. Staniforth came along and helped to reorganize the post with a few new men. The trench contained no real cover, and the bombardment lasted for about half an hour; a severe ordeal for men who had already had a stiff fight followed by a night of bombing. Many of the telephone lines were broken, and L.-Corpl. Fisher, who had done such gallant work the previous day, was killed entering our trench just ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... future state, nor have they any religion except a belief in medicine; and every headsman is a doctor. No Arab has ever tried to convert them, but occasionally a slave taken to the coast has been circumcised in order to be clean; some of them pray, and say they know not the ordeal or muavi. The Nassick boys failed me when I tried to communicate some knowledge through them. They say they do not understand the Makonde language, though some told me that they came from Ndonde's, which is the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... Lady Charlotte fixed herself at first on Catherine, whose quiet dignity during the somewhat trying ordeal of the dinner had impressed her, but a few minutes' talk produced in her the conviction that without a good deal of pains—and why should a Londoner, accustomed to the cream of things, take pains with a country clergyman's wife?—she was ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... narrow passage leading into a cylindrically vaulted cell with niches in the walls. At the north-east corner is the curious slit or 'Needle' that has been thought to have been used for purposes of trial by ordeal, the innocent person being able to squeeze through the ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the appearance of religion are those practised on taking an oath, and at their funeral obsequies. A person accused of a crime and who asserts his innocence is in some cases acquitted upon solemnly swearing to it, but in others is obliged to undergo a kind of ordeal. A cock's throat is usually cut on the occasion by the guru. The accused then puts a little rice into his mouth (probably dry), and wishes it may become a stone if he be guilty of the crime with which he stands charged, or, holding up a musket bullet, prays it may be his fate in ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden |
