"Pungent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an extreme sensation of heat. The pungent perfume of explosive drugs brought the tears to his eyes and clawed at his throat. At the same time he was chilly and felt his forehead freezing in a ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... "connected with you, I cannot understand; you call yourself a thorough-going Papist, yet are continually saying the most pungent things against Popery, and turning to unbounded ridicule those who show any inclination ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... but of vapour. So old, they went through civilisation ten thousand years since; they have worn it all out, even hope in the future; they merely live acquiescent to fate, like the red deer. The crescent moon, the evening star, the clatter of the fern-owl, the red embers of the wood fire, the pungent smoke blown round about by the occasional puffs of wind, the shadowy trees, the sound of the horses cropping the grass, the night that steals on till the stubbles alone are light among the fields—the gipsy sleeps in his tent on mother earth; it is, you see, primeval ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... eyes from the highway to the forest. The scent of the pinewoods rushed to meet his sudden thought. Should he, dare he, break cloister, and taste the wondrous delight of an unwalled world? It were a sin, a grave sin, in a newly-made novice, cloister-bred. The sweet, pungent smell overpowered him; the trees beckoned with their long arms and slender fingers; the voice of the forest called, and Hilarius, answering, walked swiftly away, with bowed head and beating ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... front, was to be an original. There was nobody in whose company one felt so much of the ineffable comfort of being quite safe against an attack of platitude. There was nobody on whom one might so surely count in the course of an hour's talk for some stroke of irony or pungent suggestion, or, at the worst, some significant, admonitory, and almost luminous manifestation of the great ars tacendi. In spite of his copious and ordered knowledge, Pattison could hardly be said to have an affluent mind. He did not impart intellectual direction like Mill, nor morally ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... instance, in Act II of the Valkyrie, when Wotan stops the action to give Bruennhilde an elementary lesson in Schopenhauer-cum-Wagner metaphysics. The funny thing is that Wagner never renounced anything: to the end he was greedy, avid of life. He might have benefited by a careful study of Schopenhauer's pungent phrases; but instead of thus developing his own natural gift in that direction, his sentences afterwards grew longer and more complicated than ever. His Beethoven is a splendid essay; how much finer it might have been had he not ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... savagely. He appeared to be not only very angry, but surprised as well. When he fell to clawing frantically at his eyes and nose with both paws, Mrs. Gammit almost strangled with the effort to keep from laughing. But she held herself in, and continued to shake down the pungent shower. A moment more, and the wildcat, after an explosion of sneezes which almost made him stand on his head, gave utterance to a yowl of consternation, and turned to flee. As he bounded across the yard he evidently did not ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... unsuccessful. The first indication of revival was afforded by a partial descent of the iris. It was observed, as especially remarkable, that this lowering of the pupil was accompanied by the profuse out-flowing of a yellowish ichor (from beneath the lids) of a pungent ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... impracticable by chancellors of the exchequer; and knowing this, you will be the better able to understand why he had not swerved from the conviction that he had made an eligible marriage, in spite of the too-pungent seasoning that nature had given to the eldest Miss Dodson's virtues. A man with an affectionate disposition, who finds a wife to concur with his fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that no other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... to him, his childish spirit had left the circle of thatch roofs, and had gone on tremulous expeditions into the jungle. Far away, the trumpet-call of a wild tusker trembled through the moist, hot night; and great bell-shaped flowers made the air pungent and heavy with perfume. A tigress skulked somewhere in a thicket licking an injured leg with her rough tongue, pausing to listen to every sound the night gave forth. Little Shikara whispered ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... satchel, and was looking for a little vial. He found it almost empty. But there were four or five drops of the yellowish, oily liquid. He poured them on his handkerchief and held it close to the lady's mouth. She was still breathing regularly though slowly, and as she inhaled the pungent, fruity smell, like the odour of a jargonelle pear, a look of relief flowed over her face, her breathing deepened, her arm and her lips relaxed, the terror faded ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... of spirits, I slept like a top. When I awoke the room was in pitch darkness. A curious smell at once attracted my notice. I thought, at first, it might be but the passing illusion of a dream. But no—I sniffed again—it was there—there, close to me—under my very nose—the strong, pungent odour of drugs; but not being a professor of smells, nor even a humble student of physics, I was consequently unable to diagnose it, and could only arrive at the general conclusion that it was a smell ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... to which is the mustard of the parable—this common Black Mustard, or a rarer shrub-like tree (Salvadora Persica), with an equivalent Arabic name, a pungent odor, and a very small seed. Inasmuch as the mustard which is systematically planted for fodder by Old World farmers grows with the greatest luxuriance in Palestine, and the comparison between the size of ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... yet in flames. For a moment he held it vertically, but then it slipped away from him and fell over toward the councilor's house where it broke in a window-frame on the second story. Mogens ran up the ladder, and in through the opening. At first he had to close his eyes on account of the pungent wood-smoke, and the heavy suffocating fumes which rose from the charred wood that the water had reached took his breath away. He was in the dining-room. The living-room was a huge glowing abyss; the flames from the lower part of the ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... advice, promptly dug out a little with her nail, and applied it to her nose. But with no effect. So digging out again a good quantity of it, she pressed it into her nostrils. Then suddenly she experienced a sensation in her nose as if some pungent matter had penetrated into the very duct leading into the head, and she sneezed five or six consecutive times, until tears rolled down from her eyes and mucus trickled ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... a faint grayness which betokened strong emotion showing through his tan. The lantern above them flickered in the icy draughts, and from out of the shadows beyond its light came the stamping of restless, horses and the smell of prairie hay which is pungent with the ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... taste—an extraordinary fact, showing that this bitumen is of a nature quite different from that of pyrotechnic mineral or vegetable tar. In its dry state it is quite insoluble in water, though when charged with essential oil, as it exudes from nature's laboratory, it imparts a pungent and unpleasant taste. A considerable quantity of gas bubbles up through these bituminous springs, showing that decomposition is still active amongst the materials whence it exudes. Some of the recent bitumen has an odour resembling vegetable gum. Mr. Johnson, the very obliging proprietor ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... a freedom from commonplace, and a power to hold the interest to the close, which is owing, not to a trivial ingenuity, but to the spell which her personages cast over the reader's mind as soon as they come within his ken.... The humor, which is a marked feature of Miss Wilkins's stories, is of a pungent sort.—Atlantic Monthly. ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... February, 1850, with what joy would he look down upon the opening of a still larger, more commodious, and handsome meeting-house, bearing his name, and capable of holding 1150 worshippers. One of Bunyan's pungent, alarming sayings to the careless was, 'Once die, we cannot come back and die better.'[328] If anything could tempt him, in his angelic body, to re-visit this earth, it would be to address the multitude at the new Bunyan Chapel with his old ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... late autumn was in the air—delicately acrid—the scent of frost-killed brake and ripening wild grasses, of brilliant dead leaves and black forest loam pungent with mast from ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... some red-hot beans on that, and began to eat like a hungry hunter. At first I thought I was only burned. Then I recognized the taste and burn of the acid and knew something was wrong. Picking up the tin, I examined it, smelled the pungent odor and felt a queer numb sense of fear. This lasted only for a moment, as I well knew the use and power of the acid, and had not swallowed enough to hurt me. I was about to make known my mistake in a matter-of-fact way, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... how easy it had been to find out what was choking the life out of Hunston. His open countenance, democratic manners, and pungent speech produced a most favorable impression, and it was undeniable that, for the moment at least, he had the house with him when he ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... through the early autumn night. It was just not raining. The damp air was cool and pungent with the smell of fallen leaves, which lay thick under their feet. Advena speared the dropped horse chestnut husks with the point of her umbrella as they went along. She had picked up half a dozen when he spoke again. "I want ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... how we got home that evening. On the road there were everywhere strange presences, and the thud of phantom hoofs encircled us. In my nose was the pungent circus-smell; the crack of the whip and the frank laugh of the clown were in my ears. The funny man thoughtfully abstained from conversation, and left our illusion quite alone, sparing us all jarring criticism and analysis; and he gave me no chance, when ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... hydrogen are elements when separate, or merely mixed, but they may be made to combine so as to form molecules, each consisting of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. In this condition they constitute water. So also chlorine and sodium are elements, the former a pungent gas, the latter a soft metal; and they unite together to form chloride of sodium or common salt. In the same way the element nitrogen combines with hydrogen, in the proportion of one atom of the former to three of the latter, to form ammonia. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... of helpless babies and wild beasts, the babies crying or staring in blank amazement at padding tigers whose phosphorescent eyes never left these morsels beyond the bars. The two girls wandered about, their arms closely locked, but the strange atmosphere, the roars of the beasts, the ineffable, pungent odour of the circus, of sawdust mingled with the effluvia of animals, had aroused an excitement that was slow in subsiding. Some time elapsed before they were capable of taking a normal ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... torch that was held near her face, it was evident that she was in the agonies of death, while the blood that trickled from her bared bosom betrayed the nature of the injury she had received. The pungent, peculiar smell of gunpowder, too, was still quite perceptible in the heavy, damp night air. There could be no question that she had been shot. Judith understood it all at a glance. The streak of light had appeared on the water a short distance from ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... Adj. feeling &c v.; sentient; sensuous; sensorial, sensory; emotive, emotional; of feeling, with feeling &c n.. warm, quick, lively, smart, strong, sharp, acute, cutting, piercing, incisive; keen, keen as a razor; trenchant, pungent, racy, piquant, poignant, caustic. impressive, deep, profound, indelible; deep felt, home felt, heartfelt; swelling, soul-stirring, deep-mouthed, heart-expanding, electric, thrilling, rapturous, ecstatic. earnest, wistful, eager, breathless; fervent; fervid; gushing, passionate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a bed of flowers in full bloom, over which darted and poised a pair of humming birds. The flowers were not attractive to the eye or of pleasant odor; but the long corollas held a pungent, honeyed sweetness that attracted the birds and many insects. Its technical name was Agave Americana. The seed had been brought from Mexico by the former owner of the place who, after making a great fortune in mining, had first settled ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... place was in my heart!" replied Jean, heartily. The compliment was taken with a smile, as it deserved to be. "Look you, Babet, I would not give this pinch of snuff," said Jean, raising his thumb and two fingers holding a good dose of the pungent dust,—"I would not give this pinch of snuff for any young fellow who could be indifferent to the charms of such a pretty lass ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... silence was the utmost that could be expected of his tolerance or his self-control; his refusal to speak on the subject showed his opinion well enough, and he must not be blamed too severely if he listened without protest and perhaps with pleasure to Mrs. Baxter's pungent criticisms. Of course she had been reminded of something—of the strictures which a certain Provincial Editor had passed on the household arrangements of a certain Minor Canon; a libel action had ensued, and the jury had been beguiled into finding for ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... was the only publication in the Empire; to-day several hundred newspapers are published, many of them daily. A censorship of the press still exists, however, and leads to the usual mode of evasion. Pungent political articles are conveyed under cover of criticisms ostensibly upon the blunders of lands not so enlightened as Japan. Here is a specimen: "In America during the Civil War paper currency was issued and made legal tender. At every successive issue ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... oily and colourless liquid, of specific gravity 1.541 at 0 deg. C., and boiling-point 97.7 deg. C. It has a greasy, somewhat bitter taste, and gives off a vapour at ordinary temperature which has a pungent odour and an irritating effect on the eyes. The word chloral is derived from the first syllables of chlorine and alcohol, the names of the substances employed for its preparation. Chloral is soluble in alcohol and ether, in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... and stimulus to his writings, while at the same time it makes the reader crave a little more body and substance. The succulent leaf and stalk of certain garden vegetables is better to one's liking than the more pungent seed. If Emerson could only have given us the essence of Father Taylor's copious, eloquent, flesh-and-blood discourses, how it would have delighted us! or if he could only have got the silver out of Alcott's bewitching ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... leaves the ranch for Portland, where conventional city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown eyes soon compel his return. A wholesome ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... human race, restored to the rights with which they were endowed by your and their Creator, but of which they have been robbed by ruffians of their own race, shall send their choral shouts of redemption to the skies in blessings upon your names. O, with what pungent mortification and shame must I confess that in the transcendent glories of that day our names will not be associated with yours! May Heaven in mercy grant that we may be spared the deeper damnation of seeing our ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... had evidently traversed it. Before me was a heavily curtained archway. Irritably, I pulled the curtain aside, learnt that it masked a glass-paneled door, opened this door—and found myself in a small court, dimly lighted and redolent of some pungent, ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the restoratives that had been tried was pungent in the room, but had no fragrance in the dull and languid air the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... talk was interesting and smart. Mr. J.H. Chamberlain was often positively brilliant in his little sallies of speech, whilst Mr. J.T. Bunce would put in dry, sententious words of wit and wisdom. Mr. G.J. Johnson laid down the law with pungent perspicuity, and Mr. William Harris was amusingly epigrammatic. Mr. Sam Timmins on these occasions was ever ready with an apt remark, very often containing an apt quotation, and Mr. Sebastian Evans smoked and laughed much, made incisive ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... late, but as yet there was no sign of Lois. He composed himself to wait, watching the birds come home to roost, and the insects, whom the heat had brought out of the earth, crawl away into oblivion. The air was sweet with the smell of flowers. From a little further afield came the more pungent odor of a fire of weeds. The great front of the house, ablaze though it was with lights, seemed almost deserted. No one entered or issued from ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... grass near the track. A glimpse of an animal that looked something like a fox and something like a wolf, and wasn't either one, a wild animal that was sneaking around the train for the odd bits of food that were sometimes left in its wake. As the pungent scent of this beast reached the bulldog's snub nose, the leash that held him to the trunk became a thing of little worth. With a violent lurch he broke it, leaped from the door, landed sprawling alongside the track, and was off in pursuit of ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... as to a posthumous state. Now, fear is from our earliest infancy the 'never-failing companion and offspring of ignorance.' Knowledge alone can rescue us from perpetual suffering, because all security depends upon knowledge. Pain, moreover, is far more 'pungent' and distinct than pleasure. 'Want and pain are natural; satisfaction and pleasure artificial and invented.' Pain, therefore, as the strongest, will dictate our anticipations. The hope of immortality is by the orthodox described as a blessing; but the truth, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... warning that sap is beginning to work in a soil that looks to have none of the juices of life in it; it is the sort of smell that sets one thinking what a long furrow the plough would turn up here, the sort of smell that is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the plant's best, and leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There is the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage from campoodies and sheep camps, that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon long acquaintance, ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... Thus when he was sent by the Journal to Jefferson City to report the proceedings of the Missouri State Legislature, what his paper got was not an edifying summary of that unending grist of mostly irrelevant and immaterial legislation through the General Assembly hopper, but a running fire of pungent comment on the Idiosyncrasies of its officers and members. He would attach himself to the legislators whose personal qualities afforded most profitable ammunition for sport in print. He shunned the sessions ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... one ventured in the glare of the open, or even to cross the narrow, unshadowed street, whose dull red dust seemed to glow between the lines of straggling houses. The heated shells of these green unseasoned tenements gave out a pungent odor of scorching wood and resin. The usual hurried, feverish toil in the claim was suspended; the pick and shovel were left sticking in the richest "pay gravel;" the toiling millionaires themselves, ragged, dirty, ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... during their lifetime. The session was opened with prayer by the Rev. Olympia Brown, a veteran suffragist, and the presiding officer was Mrs. Eliza Wright Osborne (N. Y.), daughter of Martha C. Wright and niece of Lucretia Mott. Each resolution was presented and commented on in a brief, pungent speech, the speakers including Mr. Blackwell, husband of Lucy Stone, both pioneers, and another pioneer, the Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first ordained woman minister; Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Mrs. Stanton; Mrs. Fanny Garrison Villard, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... of Vitriol, though no such gross salt, was by the same operation so fixt, as to stay behind: Besides that the same, by a competent heat yeilded a substance, though not insipid, yet not at all of the taste of Sea-salt, or of any other pungent one, much less having the highly corrosive acidity of oyl ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... and leave a friend. 2. Curtail the plant, and give a pungent spice. 3. Syncopate the plant, and find an envelope. 4. Behead the spice, and leave affection. 5. Syncopate and transpose the friend, and find learning. 6. Behead the envelope, and leave above. 7. Syncopate and transpose the envelope, and give the inner part. 8. Transpose above, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... appearance, smell, and taste, and is very often substituted for it; but it may be readily distinguished: it is thicker in substance, less quilled, breaks shorter, and is more pungent. It should be chosen in thin pieces: the best being that which approaches nearest to Cinnamon in flavour; but that which is small and broken ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... known up and down the east coast of Great Britain as some of the very finest types of fishermen. Their cobbles, which vary in size and colour, are uniform in design and the brilliance of their paint. Brick red, emerald green, pungent blue and white, are the most favoured colours, but orange, pink, yellow, and many others, are ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... another river just like this, with its decoction of walnut hulls frothed with bubbles; and to contribute to the suggestion, the more clearly to evoke a vision of the dismal Bievre, the rank, acrid, pungent smell of tan, steeped, as it were, in vinegar, came up in fumes from this broth of medlar juice brought ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... grotto; and, adjoining them, the spring Juliette, while a little beyond is La Dlicieuse. The springs Madeleine, St. Jean, Prcieuse, and the others, belonging to the Socit Gnrale, are all farther up the river, nearer the town, at the second bridge. None of them are so pungent nor so agreeable to the palate as the Juliette and the Dlicieuse. The properties of all are much the same. They give tone to the stomach, assist the action of the liver and kidneys, and remove paralysis of the bladder. They are all cold, easily digested, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... Indeed, it would have been difficult to determine which afforded him more pleasure—his self-laudations or the colorful, pungent, often preposterous language ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... is subjected to the process by which tar is extracted from other pines, it yields a much thinner liquid than tar—of a dark red colour, and very pungent smell. This liquid is known as "cedar oil;" and is used by the hill people as a remedy for skin diseases—as also for all ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... the room, the untidiness of it all striking his sensitiveness. He noted the pungent smell of fried fish mixed with inferior grease, the ant-covered bread, the confusion of ragged bed-clothes, and lastly of all, the other Frederick. Tessibel gasped as the newcomer looked longest upon her dead. She thought she saw him shiver as ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... midst of its rarity, seated as they were on the grassy hill-side overlooking the dry-land farms near at hand and the valley below, through which tumbled the brook. The wild odor of hill plants mingled with the pungent fragrance of choke-cherry blossoms. The air was as clear as crystal. The mountains stood about them in silent, solemn watchfulness, strong and sure as the ages. The red glowed in Carlia's lips again, and the roses in her cheeks. The careworn look was gone from her ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... dispelling these creatures by pungent pleasantries-of routing them by sharp censure. They are, apparently, to go on practically unmolested to the end. Meantime we are cast down with a mighty proneness along the dust; our shapely anatomy is clothed in a jaunty suit of sackcloth liberally embellished with the ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... so-called higher branches of cookery, while the bread is quickly passing into the acetous stage. At last, when they are ready to attend to it, they find that it has been going its own way,—it is so sour that the pungent smell is plainly perceptible. Now the saleratus-bottle is handed down, and a quantity of the dissolved alkali mixed with the paste—an expedient sometimes making itself too manifest by greenish streaks or small acrid spots in the bread. As the result, we have ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... advantages in this aloofness, but it certainly lacks the camaraderie, the jolly good-fellowship, of those picturesque auberges and osterie where twenty or thirty of one calling are gathered together under one roof, meeting daily at table, where artistic criticism is pungent and free, artistic assistance ungrudging, tales of artistic experience and adventure racy, the atmosphere stimulative to the spreading out of every artistic theory possible to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... gentleman should, to be immediately taken back into favour. He was educated—was, in fact, a university man of the German sort; he could write and spell, and add up rows of figures, and had many other accomplishments which gentlemen of the period affected a little to despise. He had a pungent and a copious wit. He had quite a commercial genius; he was an impresario, and had engagements to offer other people instead of having to beg for engagements for himself; and he was always treated by the British with all the respect ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... the deserted corridor and up the stairs, O'Malley making no resistance, moving in a kind of dream. He has a fleeting recollection of an odor, sweet and slightly pungent as of horses, in his nostrils. The wind of the open decks revived him, and he saw to his amazement that the East was brightening. In that cabin, then, hours had been compressed ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... clever comedy, rather free in language and thought, chiefly about the danger of gambling. Some of the sayings are very pointed. It has been stated that the author frequented the principal coffee-houses in town, and picked up many pungent remarks there; however this may be, the literary men who at the present time frequent clubs, have, I am afraid, not the same chance. As a specimen of free and easy—rather too easy—wit, let me mention the remarks of ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... the net had been lay at my feet. I stooped and took out from it a wicker basket. Karamaneh stood watching me and biting her lip, but she made no move to check me. I opened the basket. It contained a large phial, the contents of which possessed a pungent and peculiar smell. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the publicity sense of the developing advertising director. One book could best be advertised by the conventional means of the display advertisement; another, like Triumphant Democracy, was best served by sending out to the newspapers a "broadside" of pungent extracts; public curiosity in a novel like The Lady, or the Tiger? was, of course, whetted by the publication of literary notes as to the real denouement the author had in mind in writing the story. Whenever Mr. Stockton came into ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... they would all rush for the stairway that led out-of-doors, the air gradually became filled with something even more stifling than coal-dust—something that choked them and made their eyes smart. It was the pungent smoke of burning wood; and by the time they fully realized its presence the air was thick with it, and to breathe seemed wellnigh impossible. Then, just as the boys were beginning to start from their seats, and cast frightened glances at each other, the machinery stopped; ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... the evening purifying fires at street corners and in the open spaces. The air on the river had been cool and pleasant enough, but it was stifling in the narrow lanes leading up from the stream to the hill of St. Paul's. The pungent smoke from the newly-kindled wood piles came quite refreshingly to ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... were very deft. In less than no time, she made a little lint pad, soaked it in the pungent turpentine, applied it to the unsightly swelling, and bound it firmly to the young man's head with a snowy band. In all of Mr. Queed's life, this was the first time that a woman had ministered to him. To himself, he involuntarily ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... flavor that savored intimately of the rancid odor of the den. Nevertheless, they devoured a great quantity of the tough, unpalatable food, washing it down with bitter drafts from the pool of dirty snow-water, thick with ashes and the pungent animal reek. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... loaves heaped up in high baskets also cost a penny apiece. Hanging from the poles which upheld the awnings were sausages, chitterlings, and hams. Some of the open-air restaurateurs were frying potatoes, and others were concocting more or less savoury messes of inferior meat and onions. A pungent smoke, a violent odour, arose into the sunlight, mingling with the dust which was raised by the continuous tramp of the promenaders. Rows of people, moreover, were waiting at each cantine, so that each time a party rose from table fresh customers took possession ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in sessile, axillary, umbellate clusters; leaflets 5 to 9, ovate-oblong, downy when young. Flowers appear before the leaves. Shrub, scarcely at all tree-like, with bark, leaves, and pods very pungent and aromatic. Common north, and ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... kirk has a great reputation for dourness—but it has probably kindled more humour than it ever quenched. The pulpits have inevitably been filled by a race of men disproportionately rich in "characters," originals, worthies with a gift for pungent expression and every opportunity for developing it. There is a fund of good stories here which forms a worthy sequel to Dean Ramsay's Reminiscences and a living history of an old-world life. The illustrations ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... placed in the first rank. But while in any collection of Greek epigrammatic poetry these authors naturally sink to their own place, Martial, as well by the mere mass of his work—some twelve hundred pieces in all, exclusive of the cracker mottoes—as by his animation and pungent wit, set a narrow and rather disastrous type for later literature. He appealed strongly to all that was worst in Roman taste—its heavy-handedness, its admiration of verbal cleverness, its tendency towards brutality. Half ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... medicines are requisite. They particularly amend the acid in the nervous juice, and thus restore the equal motion of the spirits, which were obstructed or retarded by spasms or convulsions. By the volatile oil and volatile pungent salt, obstructions are opened, and the motions of the languid blood increased to a healthy degree of circulation. They resolve coagulated phlegm in the stomach, preserve the fluidity of the juices, and promote digestion, by assisting the bile in ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... wife and the young woman embraced each other tenderly—for deep regrets and pungent remorse at last attuned the mind of Nisida ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... they were both holding the plates of sausage and scrambled eggs, from which rose a pungent odor, inevitable to the occasion. And, in a silence which fell upon them, Lee realized the absurdity of their position behind the door. "We can't keep this up," he declared, and moved into the eddying throng, the intermingling ceaseless conversations. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... proceeding from Karna, was a wordy arrow, sharp, cutting all hopes, hitting the tenderest parts of the organisation, and frightful. It buried itself deep in Arjuna's heart. When the sons of Pandu were about to adopt the garments made of the skins of black deer, Dussasana spoke the following pungent words, "These all are mean eunuchs, ruined, and damned for a lengthened time." And Sakuni, the king of the Gandhara land, spoke to Yudhishthira at the time of the game of dice the following words by way of a wily trick, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the rifle to his face. Then it was necessary to think of something else. Whether to approach nearer or to fire at once; where to aim. The smaller the distance the surer the shot—therefore nearer and nearer!—forty paces, too many yet;—thirty!—twenty! Already the breeze carried the pungent animal odor. ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... an involucre directly under the flower; that if we search we shall find some with four, more rare than four-leaved clovers; that the plant which was fragrant last year will also be fragrant this year; that the furry stems are slightly pungent,—enough to give spice to a sandwich; these preliminary observations fit us for more intricate problems ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... white peak silhouetted hard and sharp above them against the blue. Then she became conscious of the silver mist streaming ethereally athwart the sombre verdure from the river hollow, and that a new and pungent smell cut through the odours of dust and creosote which reeked along the track. It came from a cord of cedar-wood piled up close by, and she found it curiously refreshing. The drowsy roar of the river mingled with the panting of the locomotive pump, but there was ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... love, and especially woman," she began, "as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... minutes before the hour, stopping with a muttering complaint, and you ran the rest of the way. There was the Dominion Hotel, with a tar pavement in front that became semi-liquid on hot days; no resident of that town ever forgot the pungent smell compounded of tar, stale beer, sawdust, and cabbage that greeted you in passing. And the candy-store was next door; the butterscotch ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... fragrance seemed to blow with her shifting senses. The dry, sweet, tangy canyon smells returned to her—of fresh-cut timber, of wood smoke, of the cabin fire with its steaming pots, of flowers and earth, and of the wet stones, of the redolent pines and the pungent cedars. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... was at its height, she had burst upon John as he went to his work in the morning, with a storm of far-reaching and comprehensive epithets. She gave him the history of the Watson family, past, present, and future—especially the future; every Watson that ever left Ireland came in for a brief but pungent notice. ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... Syrian galbanum; Then tamarisk and costum, Eastern herbs, Strong panacea mixt with centaury From Thrace, and leaves of fennel feed the flames, And thapsus brought from Eryx: and they burn Larch, southern-wood and antlers of a deer Which lived afar. From these in densest fumes, Deadly to snakes, a pungent smoke arose; And thus in safety passed the night away. But should some victim feel the fatal fang Upon the march, then of this magic race Were seen the wonders, for a mighty strife Rose 'twixt the Psyllian and the poison germ. First with saliva they ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... soldiers streamed, foul with fight, their hot guns spitting viciously back into the rolling, pungent grey fog that followed them malignantly. Confusion reigned, and in that confusion a perfect riot of death. On all sides the soldiers fell, blighted by the Dragon's breath. The coolies crouched in the heaped-up ruins of their newly dug ditches, knowing not ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... oblique rays through the beech trees by the side of the ditch and athwart the apple trees outside, and was making the cocks crow on the dunghill, and the pigeons coo on the roof. The smell of the cow stable came through the open door, and blended in the fresh morning air with the pungent odor of the stable, where the horses were neighing, with their heads turned ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... leaves had turned red and brown and the mornings grown chilly and pungent, a crowd of people, strangers to Comet, came to the big house at Oak Hill. With them were automobiles, trunks, horses. All this was tremendously exciting, and with noses pressed against the chicken wire of their yard Comet and his brothers ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... that all distant sounds seemed near: the rumble of a returning cart in the High Street, the voices on board ship, the closing of shutters and barring of doors in the new town to which they were bound. But the sharp air was filled, as it were, with saline particles in a freezing state; little pungent crystals of sea salt burning lips and cheeks with their cold keenness. It would not do to linger here in the very centre of the valley up which passed the current of atmosphere coming straight with the rushing tide from the ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... single other difference was that instead of irritating silence, these men unwittingly soothed him with their talk and swift exchange of jokes. Thus the hours passed, until noon came, when, with his bridle and saddle removed, and pungent odors of savory cooking tickling his nostrils, he received the privilege of grazing over the whole desert unhobbled and untethered. But this, liberal as it seemed, brought him nothing of the nourishment his soul craved. After an hour ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... stood at the door of the shed, grouped closely together so as to render his escape apparently impossible. In the meantime Boone carefully gathered his arms full of the long, dry tobacco leaves, filled with pungent dust, which would be blinding and stifling as the most powerful snuff, and then with a leap from his station twelve feet high, came directly upon their heads, filling their eyes and nostrils, and so bewildering and disabling them ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... door closed, Joris perceived that he was in an unusual house. The scents and odours of strange countries floated about it. The hall contained many tall jars, full of pungent gums and roots; and upon its walls the weapons of savage nations were crossed in idle and harmless fashion. They went slowly up the highly polished stairway into a large, low parlour, facing the vivid, everyday business drama of Broadway; but the room ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... that his intention was to rescue the soul of his father. At the end of a moment or two he asked the priest if the soul of his father was now drawn out of purgatory, and on being answered by the oracle in the affirmative, very quietly re-took possession of his coin, with this pungent observation, "Very well then, my father is not such a fool as to return to purgatory after having succeeded in entering heaven." Ridiculous and irreverent as this incident may appear, it cannot be denied that the logic ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... behind our cottage, I found a tree covered with blossoms as white as snow, and which had a delicious smell. We gathered a great quantity of them, which we carried home; but these flowers, as we afterwards found by sad experience, contained a deleterious poison. Their strong and pungent odour caused violent pains in the head, forerunners of a malignant fever, which brought us within two steps of the grave. Two days after my young brothers were seized; fortunately my father arrived on the following day, ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... in the consciousness, so insupportable to some minds, that his whole life was a cheat upon the world, and that, so far as he was concerned with the public, his little cunning had the upper hand of its united wisdom. Every day would furnish him with a succession of minute and pungent triumphs: as when, for instance, his importunity wrung a pittance out of the heart of a miser, or when my silly good-nature transferred a part of my slender purse to his plump leather bag; or when some ostentatious ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a very beautiful garden, but years and neglect had made of it a half-formal wilderness, fascinating in its over-grown beauty and its hint of earlier glory. For Kirk, it was an enchanted land of close-pressing leafy alleys, pungent with the smell of box; of brick-paved paths chanced on unexpectedly—followed cautiously to the rim of empty, stone-coped pools. He and Felicia, or he and Ken, went there when cookery or carpentry left an elder free. For when they had discovered that the tall old ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... saying which seemed to apply to this particular case. His arm hooked into Chip's, he led the way through the kitchen and down the hill to the hay corral. Once safe from observation, he threw himself into the sweetly pungent "blue- ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... This latter I have tasted, as well as the English Blue-Ruin, and the Scotch Whisky, analogous fluids used by the Sect in those countries: it evidently contains some form of alcohol, in the highest state of concentration, though disguised with acrid oils; and is, on the whole, the most pungent substance known to me,—indeed, a perfect liquid fire. In all their Religious Solemnities, Potheen is said to be an indispensable requisite, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... recognise in Him the moral ideal, a perfect man, but He has been educating it for nineteen hundred years to get it up to that point, and the educational process is very far from complete. The real desire of most men is for something much more pungent and dashing than Jesus' meek wisdom and stainless purity, which breed in them ennui rather than longing. 'Not this man but Barabbas,' was the approximate realisation of the Jewish ideal then; not this man but—some type or other of a less oppressive perfection, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... are vital with dramatic power; inspires useful thought upon a theme of psychological importance; cheers the mind with a fresh breeze of satirical humour; and delights the instinct of taste by its crisp and pungent style. Alike by his choice of a comparatively original subject and his deft method in the treatment of it Henry Arthur Jones has shown a fine dramatic instinct; and equally in the evolution of character and the expression ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... discourses; but, whereas they had once been elegant and somewhat scholarly productions, they were now earnest and even pungent. If the sentences were less carefully compiled, more rough-hewn, and deficient in polish, there was matter in them that roused people and ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... their somewhat pungent taste, watercresses are used in many parts of the world as ingredients of salads, but they are, of all vegetables, the ones that are most liable to transmit disease to man, for in addition to the possibility of contracting in this way typhoid fever, dysentery, ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... The pungent odor of the aromatic herbs with which the island is overgrown seemed to make the air heavy. The road ascended gradually amid the long curves of the mountains. The red or blue granite peaks gave an appearance of fairyland to the wild landscape, and on the foothills immense forests ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... both collapsed in heaps on the floor, while the farm woman's shrieks filled the air. At the same instant, a pungent, sinister ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... minute the doctor had half emptied a bottle into the water, which gave forth a peculiar, pungent odour on Sam wringing out a handkerchief; and this was spread across the poor fellow's ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... Egyptian darkness of the tenement owned by Abadallah Shanin Khaldi issued curious smothered sounds, together with an unmistakable, pungent, circuslike odor. ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... said Brace huskily, and his heart sank low and the chill of dread increased, for as he sucked the wound where the arrow had entered he was conscious of a strange pungent acid taste, which clung to his lips and caused a stinging sensation at ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... while. Providence lay at her feet like a great bouquet of lilacs, locust and fruit blossoms. The early mist was shot through with long spears of gold and the pale smoke curled up from the brick chimneys and mingled its pungent wood-odor with the perfume laden air. She drank in great drafts of exhilaration and delighted her eyes with the picture for a number of minutes, until an intoxicating breakfast aroma began to steal up from Cindy's domain. Then, spurred by a positive agony of hunger, it took ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... his poems to appear in a separate form was La Lata, in 1860. In 1862 he left Coimbra for Beja, where he was appointed editor of O Bejense, the chief newspaper in the province of Alemtejo, and four years later he edited the Folha do Sul. As the pungent satirical verses entitled Eleicoes prove, he was not an ardent politician, and, though he was returned as Liberal deputy for the constituency of Silves in 1869, he acted independently of all political parties ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... duties of the young wife to her insane husband; but, with this exception, little is said of him in the story. It would seem that Tasma regards broadly humorous exaggeration to be scarcely compatible with her somewhat grave style, for in all the later stories her satire, if not less pungent, is of a ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... incisors entire, or rarely so much as the trace of a serrated upper edge;" between these and the first cutting molar four teeth as follows: large, small, middling, very small; teeth wholly white; tail thick and tapering, with a few scattered hairs, some with glands secreting a pungent musky ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... were wines of well-known vintages and as the meal progressed Dartrey unbent. Eating scarcely anything and drinking less, the purely intellectual stimulus of conversation seemed to unloose his tongue and give to his pronouncements a more pungent tone. Naturally, politics remained the subject of discussion and Dartrey disclosed a little the reason for the ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the child thrived. Perhaps the invigorating climate of the mountain camp was compensation for maternal deficiencies. Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. In that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foot-hills—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating—he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted asses' milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing, "Me and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... their way along a shady fragrant trail, tall, straight, noble pines about them seeming to be vieing with each other in their efforts to reach the blue sky. The wind now bore a new fragrance, and the air was heavily pungent with ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... from Bourdaloue with an extract from a sermon of his on "A Perverted Conscience." The whole discourse is one well worth the study of any reader. It is a piece of searching psychological analysis, and pungent application to conscience. Bourdaloue, in his sermons, has always the air of a man seriously intent on producing practical results. There are no false motions. Every swaying of the preacher's weapon is a blow, and every blow is a hit. There is hardly another example ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... already on the outhouse, which blazed higher and higher every moment; the back-door was in the centre of a red-hot bonfire; the eaves, we could see, as we looked upward, were already smouldering, for the roof overhung, and was supported by considerable beams of wood. At the same time, hot, pungent, and choking volumes of smoke began to fill the house. There was not a human being to be seen to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sighed, "there is power in that. What lovely summer weather! It makes me dream. Don't you love the time of nasturtiums? Their pungent scent, and their colours? They seem to penetrate and glow through everything, and make the ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... pungent liquid almost strangled me, I opened my eyes to find that the physician's arm was supporting my shoulder and his hand holding the ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... of the cook and asked him, quite humbly, what was good to take the soreness from one's muscles; afterward he had crept painfully up the stairs, clasping to his bosom a beer bottle filled with pungent, home-made liniment which the cook had gravely declared "out ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... Hale's style. He is fresh, frank, pungent, straightforward, and pointed. The first story is the one that gives the book its title, and it is related in a dignified manner, showing peculiar genius and humorous talent. The contents are, 'His Level Best,' 'The Brick ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... together in the wildest of dances, during the first days of their meeting. Ivan's mind whirled in a chaos of regimental introductions and instruction, wearying hunts for suitable bachelor quarters, long afternoon hours filled with the pungent smell of tanbark and the careerings of a horse with whom he never came to be on terms of absolute equality; evenings spent in the glamour of strange restaurants, the discussion of French entrees, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... some of whom were tolerably good-looking. As the pipe passed round among the men, a lively conversation went forward, more merry than delicate, and at length two or three of the elder women (for the girls were somewhat diffident and bashful) began to assail Raymond with various pungent witticisms. Some of the men took part and an old squaw concluded by bestowing on him a ludicrous nick name, at which a general laugh followed at his expense. Raymond grinned and giggled, and made several futile attempts at repartee. Knowing the impolicy ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... no little excitement over the arrival of the mail-boat. They were all eager to see what the Times had to say. There was a column or more on the first page, subheaded. Warrington's career was rather accurately portrayed, but there were some pungent references to cabbages. In the leader, on the editorial ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... forgot all the dictates of reason and prudence, and was carried away by a current of passion which ended in rebellion. His journal, The Colonial Advocate, showed in its articles and its very make-up the erratic character of the man. He was a pungent writer, who attacked adversaries with great recklessness of epithet and accusation. So obnoxious did he become to the governing class that a number of young men, connected with the best families, wrecked his office, but the damages he recovered in a court of law enabled him to give it a new lease ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... human excrement burnt and calcined and made into lees, and dried by a slow fire, and all dung in like manner yields salt, and these salts when distilled are very pungent. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... of iron filings and brimstone, is exceedingly noxious to animals, and I have not perceived that it grows any better by keeping in water. The smell of it is very pungent ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... truth, we fancied the Morando much. A nutty, pungent flavor it had; like some kinds of arrack distilled in the Philippine isles. And a marvelous effect did it have, in dissolving the crystalization of the brain; leaving nothing but precious little drops of good humor, beading round the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... flowing crimson evening dress, as if he were proceeding to a dinner-party; he piled a dozen odd rings upon his fingers, and laughingly asked Semiramis to arrange his hair for him in the most fashionable style, and anoint it heavily with Valeria's most pungent perfumes. At the same time, Arsinoe was quite transforming Artemisia. Valeria's cosmetic vials were for once put into play for a purpose, and when Artemisia reappeared from the dressing-room after her treatment, Agias saw before him no longer a fair-skinned little Greek, but ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... easy as a cloak, And left the loser blubbering from his fall, And for his vanish'd mutton. Nymph divine! I cannot wait describing how she came; My glance first lighted on her nimble feet; Her feet resembled those long shells explored By him who, to befriend his steed's dim sight, Would blow the pungent powder ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... chosen people was ransacked for precedents. Was Eglon's a settled government when Ehud stabbed him? Was Joram's a settled government when Jehe shot him? But the leading case was that of Athaliah. It was indeed a case which furnished the malecontents with many happy and pungent allusions; a kingdom treacherously seized by an usurper near in blood to the throne; the rightful prince long dispossessed; a part of the sacerdotal order true, through many disastrous years, to the Royal House; a counterrevolution at length effected by the High Priest at the head of the Levites. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wonder what on earth they can find to eat, until Gerome points out a large hole in the centre of the apartment. This affords an excellent view of the stables, ten or twelve feet below, admitting, at the same time, a pungent and overpowering odour of manure and ammonia. A smaller room, a kind of ante-chamber, leads out of this. As it is partly roofless, I seek, but in vain, for a door to shut out the icy cold blast. Further search in the guest-room reveals six large windows, or rather holes, ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... proposal he made one sultry June evening to "knock her up" a mint-julep, "the most refreshing beverage on earth, madam, in hot weather, I can assure you." Judge Ashburton Todhunter, of Fauquier County, had taught him to prepare this pungent elixir from a private receipt for which the judge had once refused the sum of fifty dollars, offered to him by Colonel Stanley Bluegrass, of Chattanooga, and this was at a moment, too, when the judge had been losing ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... domestic duties. (Like other Scottish housewives, she carried out much of her rougher and dirtier housework in the open.) At night, when work was over, the bright lamp and fire of glowing peat and blazing logs kept the house warm and snug; the pungent "reek" from the peat, too, acted ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... fervent spirit of Decorative Art, and the floor was covered with the oldest and oddest of Persian rugs. There were cabinets of antique medallions, cameos, and enamels; low brass book-cases, filled with volumes bound in Russian leather, whose pungent odor filled the room; a varied collection of pipes; a case of valuable ceramics, one of the collection having a pedigree which no uncelestial mind had ever pretended to grasp, and which had been presented to Lord Cardingham, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... say that we saw anything at our first entrance beyond an atmosphere of tobacco smoke, so thick as to be palpable to the touch, would be out of the question. After opening and closing my eyes twice or three times, and, wiping away the tears which the pungent tobacco smoke excited, I began to ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... it any argument of considerable ability in him that haps to please this way: a slender faculty will serve the turn. The sharpness of his speech cometh not from wit so much as from choler, which furnisheth the lowest inventions with a kind of pungent expression, and giveth an edge to every spiteful word: so that any dull wretch doth seem to scold eloquently and ingeniously. Commonly also satirical taunts do owe their seeming piquancy, not to the speaker or his words, but to the subject, ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... the surgeons were applying pungent salts to his nostrils, Wulf opened his eyes. Osgod was standing beside him holding ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... we said and did in that bawling encounter matter nothing at all in this story. I can't now estimate how near we came to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder of benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to stay another hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he, with ironical civility, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... wading through the limpid brook, stepping from stone to stone, and sometimes plashing over. Was that the dried sweetness of balsam,—the pungent odor of pennyroyal and water-mint,—the clean, resinous fragrance of the pines? Out there were lily-pads,—great golden-hearted chalices, with long, sinuous greenish-pink stems under the shady, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... Kendi produced a bundle of twigs tied with banana fibre, which he unbound and cast into the fire. The herbs smouldered and sent up a pungent smoke forming a heavy cloud like some strange blue tree sheltering the form of the idol against the green sky. Save for the faint wailing of the distant women there was silence, in which an owl screeched harshly, a good ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... mamma; she was good, very simple, and not very happy. I dreamed of a destiny different from hers. Why? I felt around me the insipid taste of life, and seemed to inhale the future like a salt and pungent aroma. Why? What did I want, and what did I expect? Was I not warned enough of the sadness ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... bathed the sick man's temples with some pungent decoction of herbs which he prepared with hot water; and after giving him a small quantity of soup, told Humphrey that he would probably sleep quietly all night, and might very likely awake without any fever, though as ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the Indian women; they wade into the water and loosen the root with their feet, which then floats, and is picked up and thrown into a canoe. It is of an oblong shape, of a whitish yellow, with four black rings around it, of a slightly pungent taste, and not disagreeable when eaten with salt ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... his hands loudly for the waiter. He was pleasantly at ease. The breakfast was to his liking, the orange trees shielded him from the sun, and the wind from the sea stirred the flowering shrubs and filled the air with spicy, pungent odors. ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... has been known for centuries, but the explanation only since chemistry came to be applied to matters of common life. The onion belongs to the genus Allium, all the species of which possess a peculiar, pungent, acrid juice, with a powerful odour. The garlic has a stronger smell than the onion, but the onion has more of the volatile oil which all the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor |
