"Rack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... haste, and enjoined him to take in no other passengers, and I would pay his demands. He promised compliance with my wishes, but soon afterwards appeared with a gentleman, two ladies, and several children, whom he crowded into the carriage with me, and, placing their trunks on the baggage-rack, started off. I thought there was no use in grumbling, and consoled myself with the reflection that the Revere House was not far away. He drove up one street and down another for what seemed to me a very long time, but I was wedged in so closely ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... be kept. Two or more sizes of note paper, unruled, with envelopes to match, for the elders of the household; writing tablets and commercial note, together with plain envelopes, for the school-children and everyday uses; a good dictionary, a tray with pen rack and inkstand thereon, and a goodly supply of pens, will complete a corner that will do more toward the family education in good breeding and culture than any other expenditure that can be made, and will render letter-writing the ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... but the woodhouse was spacious and easy of access, so we stowed there important portions of three chamber sets, a gem of a sideboard, the Turkish chair, which had been ordered for the parlor, and the hat-rack, which the hall was too small to hold. We also deposited in the woodhouse all the pictures, in ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... life out of human sinews because he ought. The grand inquisitor's devotion and conscience told him that he ought to advance the holy faith by every engine in his power, and therefore, as he considered that the rack, the thumbscrews, the rope, the fire and the faggot were the best possible engines, he used the same to the utmost of his ability; and thought, alas for humanity! that he was ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... fatherly friendliness that took away half her awe of the ugly magnificence of the interior. But still she admired that Bartley could be so much at his ease. He pointed to a stick at the foot of the hat-rack, and said, "How much that looks like Halleck!" which made the old man laugh, and clap him on the shoulder, and cry: "So it does! so it does! Recognized it, did you? Well, we shall soon have him with us again, now. Seems a long time to us ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... door he saw the hat-rack where as a boy he had hung his cap. It now held garments over which Lane fumbled. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... his life be so faint and so dim? And his heart be rack'd by a useless pain? While I'm always trying to comfort him, And always ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... still groaning along the docks; cabs roll through the streets. But inside the hidden offices one old business chief after another has finished his accounts and his planning; the grey-headed gentlemen close their ledgers, take their hats from the rack, put out the ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... to call a meeting of the club," Helen took up the story, "so Roger and I came over and talked with Grandfather, and he lent us a hay rack and we dressed it up with boughs and got the carpenters to make some very large cut out letters—U. S. C.—two sets of them, so they could be read on both sides. They were painted white and stood up high among ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... was clean, almost dainty. Two smaller cabins opened from it, one evidently for Chang and the other for his second in command. Raft in his hurried look round saw a lot of things including a rack containing six rifles and two heavy revolvers resting on an ammunition box filled with hundreds of cartridges. He opened the lazarette beneath the cabin flooring; it seemed well-stored, and on a shelf in ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... starboard side of the vessel, some little way abaft the engine-room. It was evidently an officer's cabin, for there, over the head of the bed, was the picture of a young lady he adored, and also some neatly fitted shelves of books, a rack of telescopes, ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... had suffered by the war with France. If a great many fell, much greater were the number of those who felt a sensible ebb of their fortunes, and with difficulty bore up under the loss of great part of their estates. These, prompted by necessity, rack their wits for new contrivances, new inventions, new trades, stocks, projects, and anything to retrieve the desperate credit of their fortunes. That this is probable to be the cause will appear further thus. France (though I do not believe all the great outcries we make of their misery and ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... average civilian manifests in any soldier obviously just released from service and homeward bound. Farrel's glance met hers for an instant with equal interest; then he turned to stow his impedimenta in the brass rack over his seat. He was granted an equally swift but more direct appraisal of her as he walked down the observation-car to the rear platform, where he selected a chair in a corner that offered him sanctuary from the cold, fog-laden ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... that died on the scaffold in defence of the liberty of the people. It's the cursed system of Castle Government and the tyranny of the landlords, and the way the people is driven off their farms by the rack-renting flunkeys of the rent office. How is the country to prosper, and how is statues to be erected to them that deserve statues, so long as the people isn't able to call their souls their own? But, glory be to God, it won't be so for long! We ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... the designs of Wyat. These were assiduously plied on one hand with offers of liberty and reward, and subjected on the other to the most rigorous treatment, the closest interrogatories, and one of them even to the rack, in the hope of eliciting from them some evidence which might reconcile to Mary's conscience, or color to the nation, the death or perpetual imprisonment of a sister ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... observation is applicable to the territorial tax. The land proprietors, in order to reimburse themselves, will rack-rent their tenants: the farmer, of course, will transfer the obligation to the miller, by enhancing the price of grain; the miller to the baker, by increasing the price of flour; and the baker to the consumer, by raising the price of bread. The territorial tax, therefore, though ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace: Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all-triumphant splendor on my brow; But ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... journey, and disappointment at seeing the old man's resolution, has excited Romescos' ire. "He's an old rack-not worth much, but he doesn't seem like Kemp's old saw-horse," Romescos remarks to Bengal, as his hawk eye scans the old man perched among the cedar branches. They are not more than forty yards apart, and within speaking ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... here; Manny lies buried in the Charterhouse; Oliver Clisson turn'd these years agone; The Captal died in prison; and, over all, Edward the prince lies underneath the ground, Edward the king is dead, at Westminster The carvers smooth the curls of his long beard. Everything goes to rack—eh! and we too. Now, Curzon, listen; if they come, these French, Whom have I got to lean on here, but you? A man can die but once, will you die then, Your brave sword in your hand, thoughts in your heart Of all the deeds we have done here in France— ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... fancy rack on which three sharp razors were displayed, and a large bandanna handkerchief, in which there were several pockets of the size to hold a razor, the three dull razors being loaded in this. After testing the ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... full of it, and half a dozen Grub Street papers already. The Secretary and I dined at Brigadier Britton's, but I left them at six, upon an appointment with some sober company of men and ladies, to drink punch at Sir Andrew Fountaine's. We were not very merry; and I don't love rack punch, I love it better with brandy; are you of my opinion? Why then, twelvepenny weather; sirrahs, why don't you play at shuttlecock? I have thought of it a hundred times; faith, Presto will come over after Christmas, and will play with Stella before the cold weather ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... sank as in death. Dead weary he was. It seemed that the sea had soaked through his heart, and the pains he felt in all his veins were little less than those which one feels that has endured the torture of the rack. But when his spirits came a little to themselves, and his recollection by degrees began to return, he rose up, and unloosing from his waist the girdle or charm which that divine bird had given him, and remembering the charge which he had received with it, he flung it far from him into the river. ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the rack in the companion and, slinging it over his shoulder, mounted the ratlines to ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... to leave the library until Sir Lionel had made her a present of himself, his books, and his castle. Probably my sub-conscious self or astral body was there, hearing every word they said. Anyhow, I knew. And I could do nothing. A thumb-screw or a rack would ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... guns and ammunition in beautiful order, arranged on a rack in the cabin. On the left-hand side were the shotguns, i.e., two breechloading No. 12; four muzzleloading No. 10. On the right, the rifles: the little "Dutchman," two breechloading Reilly No. 8, two muzzleloading Holland half-pounders, that carried ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... explained by words like "chivalry," "conscience," "social compassion." Magazines that will condone a thousand cruelties to women gladly publish series of articles on the girl who goes wrong; merchants who sweat and rack their women employees serve gallantly on these commissions. These men are not conscious hypocrites. Perhaps like the rest of us they are impelled by forces they are not eager to examine. I do not press the point. It belongs to the analyst ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... take these things." Martie carried away the overcoat and hat, and hung them on the hat rack ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... cup-towel on the rack, and, taking off her blue checked apron, went along the little platform to the main part of the house and into the old lady's parlour, where the morning sunshine fell across the faces of generations ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... exceeded, the horrors of the persecution under Diocletian. Churches were destroyed, bishops banished, and their flocks forbidden to elect their successors: nay, sometimes, in the fierce quest after hidden treasure, eminent ecclesiastics were stretched on the rack, their mouths were filled with noisome dirt, or cords were twisted round their foreheads or their shins. In Gaul, under the Visigothic King Euric, the persecution was less savage, but it was stubborn and severe. Here, too, the congregations were forbidden ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... towards St. Petersburg, Russia, from Stockholm, we cross the Baltic,—that Mediterranean of the North, but which is in reality a remote branch of the Atlantic Ocean, with which it is connected by two gulfs, the Kattegat and the Skagger Rack. It reaches from the southern extremity of the Danish Archipelago up to the latitude of Stockholm, where it extends a right and left arm,—each of great size,—the former being the Gulf of Finland, and the latter the Gulf of Bothnia, the whole forming the most remarkable basin of ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... certain extent, knowing that if he attempts to draw the purse-strings too closely an open rupture will be the result, and then some steward will come in who has no taste for saving, and who will let everything go to rack and ruin. He was the first of the long line of English ministers who professed to regard economy as one of the great objects of statesmanship. He established securely the principle that to make the two ends meet ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... rack with a bilious attack, And your senses with toothache you're losing, And you're mopy and flat - they don't fine you for that If you're properly quaint and amusing! Though your wife ran away with a soldier that day, And took with her your trifle of money; ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... nations. Kings have always been uncertain pay. Not many loaned money to them willingly and only in small amounts and at usurious rates of interest. To float a "patriotic loan," it was often necessary to make use of the prison or the rack. With the advent of parliaments and chambers of deputies, the credit of nations improved and it became easy to borrow money. There was developed a special class of financiers, the Rothschilds at their head, pawnbrokers rather than bankers, men able and willing to take a whole nation into pawn. And ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... to withstand the final rush of ten big-jawed and active animals. Even if he could keep them off in that open space, he could not stay there another day; and if they tackled him in the reeds, he would have no chance. He began to rack his brain for a scheme; but while he thought, the circle closed in until quite plainly he could distinguish the staring eyes all centered upon him. He piled on more fuel, and as the flames sprang up they fell back. As the flames died down, they ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... put in greased pans, grease lightly over the top, and set to rise, in gentle heat. When risen bake with steady quick heat. Take from pans hot, and cool between folds of clean cloth, spread upon a rack, or else turn the loaves edgewise upon a clean board, and cover ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... himself. One had only to look at Mr. Chamberlain throughout the speech to see how palpable, how painful this discovery was—especially to a man to whom politics is nothing but a mere conflict between contending rivalries and malignities. Mr. Asquith—calm, self-possessed, measured—put Joe on the rack with a deliberation that was sometimes almost cruel in its effectiveness and relentlessness; and Joe was foolish enough to point the severity and success of the attack by losing his self-control. When Mr. Asquith said that Joe could find ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from the higher tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon? Do we think of anything but of the crime which he commits, and the rack which he deserves? That is all which we really think about him. Whereas in corresponding characters in Shakspeare, so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... and wish to put any of them in the rack over your head, you will be less likely to forget them, if you put all together, than you will if you keep a part in ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... nerve and muscle braced, talked only to the engineer, and that professionally. I recalled the time when I, too, had enjoyed the rack on which he voluntarily ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... laughed, too, in so alarming a manner as to lead her to fear he would fall over backwards. But Mr. Cuthbert, who did not appear to perceive the humour in this conversation, extracted some keys and several pasteboard slips from a rack in the corner. Suddenly Mr. Shorter jerked himself upright again, and became ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the edge of a great hay-rack, and we followed the farmer's man through a door into the dark interior of one of the oast-houses, where we looked up to see the light coming in through the opening at the side of the cowl, and then followed Jem up some steps into a broad loft, at one corner ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... Nor could the rack and the persecuting bands of Louis XIV. tame or subdue the spirit of our fathers. Neither Alva nor Richelieu were able to compass the triumph of tyranny over the innate sentiment of Freedom and Independence in our forefathers. Nor will a Chamberlain be more ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes, the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest. There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gently that the line of shore and sea was indistinguishable. But above, the cloud-procession passed on, shattered by its contact with the mountain, and transfigured as it neared the setting sun into long upward streaming lines of rack, purple and primrose against a saffron sky, while Venus lingered low between cloud and sea, a spark of fire glittering through dull ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... in a winding sheet, came forth, attended by the municipal officers, and proceeded with the funereal sound of trumpets to the dreadful spot where the two executioners, with their arms and throats bare, lifted a covering from the rack, and took their stations beside it, holding the handspikes, for turning the rending wheels, like muskets, on their shoulders. The moment that Mavrovitch mounted the scaffold, the trumpets and the tolling bells ceased; all was silent, and he walked with a firm tread towards the engine of torture. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... becomingly upon her. Her mood was in a measure contagious, and he talked gently and gaily about herself, and the day when the world would listen to her with delight and approbation. But while he talked, he was like a man on the rack. He was dragged from different sides, and the questioner was ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... me to myself in short order. "I know—but not so loud—they'll hear you!" Aye, his first words, and he smiled into my face. This man on the rack smiled, and thought clearly, whilst I babbled. "Be quick," he bade ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... old lady replied. "He would make the best possible husband for you." She smiled like a grand inquisitor at prospect of a pleasant day with rack and screw. "He needs a firm ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... extraordinary. What a dismal change from pleasant suppers at the Mule, where he sat in triumph with expert operators and great wits! He is at the lees of life, poor rogue; and those fingers which once transcribed improper romances are now agonisingly stretched upon the rack. We have no sure knowledge, but we may have a shrewd guess of the conclusion. Tabary, the admirer, would go the same way as those ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "You girls can talk if you don't make too much noise. Loud talking always keeps me awake. You may call me when we get to Overton." With these words she bent over her bag, opened it, and drew out a small down cushion. She rose in her seat, removed her hat, and, poking it into the rack above her head, sat down. Arranging her pillow to her complete satisfaction, she rested her head against it, closed her eyes and within five minutes was ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Samson shot a deer which had waded into the rapids. Fortunately, it made the opposite shore before it fell. All hands spent that evening dressing the deer and jerking the best of the meat. This they did by cutting the meat into strips about the size of a man's hand and salting and laying it on a rack, some two feet above a slow fire, and covering it with green boughs. The heat and smoke dried the meat in the course of two or three hours and gave it a fine flavor. Delicious beyond any kind of meat is venison treated ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... of Sailor Ben's abode was not less striking than the outside. The cottage contained two rooms; the one opening on the wharf he called his cabin; here he ate and slept. His few tumblers and a frugal collection of crockery were set in a rack suspended over the table, which had a cleat of wood nailed round the edge to prevent the dishes from sliding off in case of a heavy sea. Hanging against the walls were three or four highly colored prints of celebrated ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... rider. Brown's greeting was cordial and hearty; Mr. Hamlin's somewhat restrained. But, at Brown's urgent request, he followed him up the back stairs to a narrow corridor, and thence to a small room looking out upon the stable-yard. It was plainly furnished with a bed, a table, a few chairs, and a rack for guns and whips. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... door behind her, with what was almost a bang, and then throwing her coat and hat on the hall rack, she burst into the living-room, where Mrs. Maynard was sitting with Rosy ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... relate Oswald's unhappy fate, Left to these monsters, whose hate was ablaze? Both on revenge were bent; He for a menace sent, She for the merriment Caused by his lays. "Dungeon and torture-rack, These shall now pay thee back! Minstrel and poet rare, Rave in thy mad despair, And in that fetid lair Finish ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... From a rack in the wall he lifted down a Winchester rifle and a belt of cartridges. "Get into the corner and lie down," ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... madam, must be less irksome than that which I quitted: to write by rule, to compose by necessity, to make the understanding, nature's first gift, subservient to interest, that meanest offspring of art!—when weary, listless, spiritless, to rack the head for invention, the memory for images, and the fancy for ornament and illusion; and when the mind is wholly occupied by its own affections and affairs, to call forth all its faculties for foreign subjects, uninteresting discussions, or fictitious incidents!—Heavens! ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... box was Number 218, in the center of the rack, and, as I approached, I glanced at it involuntarily. To my surprise there was a letter in it; I could see it through the glass of the box door. Lute had, as I knew, got the mail the previous evening and the morning's mail had not ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... he said as he laid his gun back in its rack. "I'll get into my hip-boots and get them before the water-rats steal what we've earned. They are skilled enough to get a decoy now and then. The marsh is alive with ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... friends— Yet smiles, perchance, to think when envious Time O'er Bust and Urn shall bid his ivies climb, When Palaces and Pyramids shall fall— HIS PAGE SHALL TRIUMPH—still surviving all— 'Till Earth itself, "like breath upon the wind," Shall melt away, "nor leave a rack behind!" ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... hung a time-piece and a framed copy of signal regulations. There was a diminutive stove in one corner, and a chest in another. In front of the box facing the clock were two telegraphic instruments, and a row of eight or ten long iron levers, which very much resembled a row of muskets in a rack. These levers were formidable instruments in aspect and in fact, for they not only cost Sam a pretty strong effort to move them, but they moved points and signals, on the correct and prompt movements of which depended the safety of the line, and the ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... statistics to show that modern industrialism is going to rack and ruin. Maybe it is. But pessimism is more a matter of temperament than statistics. An optimist can assemble a most cheerful array of figures to show that everything is on the up. Temperament again. Industry is what industry does. If you are feeling gloomy to-day, you can visit factories where ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... with claw of wily question, probing him on this side and that, turning him inside out,—the row of victims opposite, pale or flushed, of anxious or careless mien, according to temperament, but one and all on the rack as they bend over the allotted paper, or read from the well-thumbed book—the scarcely-less-to-be-pitied row behind of future victims, "sitting for the schools" as it is called, ruthlessly brought hither by statutes, to watch the sufferings they must hereafter undergo—should ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... suppose that a person of my size could swallow it all." The executioner said not a word, but began taking off her cloak and all her other garments, until she was completely naked. He then led her up to the wall and made her sit on the rack of the ordinary question, two feet from the ground. There she was again asked to give the names of her accomplices, the composition of the poison and its antidote; but she made the same reply as to the doctor, only adding, "If you do not ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... hear the "Conquering 'Ero" a-crashing on Godfrey's band, And my hopes fell sudden to zero, just there, with the race in hand— In sight of the Turf's Blue Ribbon, in sight of the umpire's tape, As I felt the tack of her spinnaker c-rack! as I ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... them, and smiled stupidly as I labored with my coat off fixing their primitive machinery. Yet they did not know, and now, within a few months, not a sheet has been printed, and the whole plant is going to rack and ruin. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... "make-believe" blow would have implied a "make- believe" hammer and a "make-believe" curtain. No!—hammer away, like Charles Martel; "fillip me with a three-man beetle;" be to me a malleus hreticorum; come like Spenser's Talus—an iron man with an iron flail, and thresh out the straw of my logic; rack me; put me to the question; get me down; jump upon me; kick me; throttle me; put an end to me in any ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters. We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish: sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain winds; straws, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two home-made boot-jacks, signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed respectively "Funnel No. 1," and "Funnel No. 2," but with the tails torn ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which threatened us if her father persisted in his present determination. At last, just as eight bells was striking (twelve o'clock), I went below to my cabin. My fellow-passenger was fast asleep—a fact which I was grateful for when I discovered propped against my bottle-rack a tiny envelope with my name upon it. Tearing it open I ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... lips dumb. She walked to and fro in the garden, alone in the sweet early darkness, for an hour. Then she went indoors, and tried to amuse herself at the piano. Suddenly her face twisted, she laid her arm along the rack, and her face on her arm; but it was only for a moment; then she straightened up resolutely, piled the music, closed the piano, ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... ashamed of their flight. They came back to their small flats or attic room rejoicing to find all safe under a layer of dust—shedding tears, some of them, when they saw the children's toys, which had been left in a litter on the floor, and the open piano with a song on the music-rack, which a girl had left as she rose in the middle of a bar, wavering off into a cry of fear, and all the domestic treasures which had been gathered through a life of toil and abandoned—for ever it seemed—when the enemy was reported ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... sorter wipe his mustach en study. He 'low ter hisse'f, 'De pot rack know what gwine up de chimbley, de rafters know who's in de loft, de bed-cord know who und' de bed. I ain't no pot-rack, I ain't no rafter, en I ain't no bed-cord, but, please gracious! I'm gwine ter fin' who's in dat house, en I ain't gwine in dar nudder. Dey mo' ways ter fin' ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... to his arms with an irrepressible cry. For some minutes he saw nothing and cared for nothing but the girl clasped to his breast; but as she began to sob, he looked at Janet—who had purposely gone to the china rack that she might have her back to him—and then at Andrew who stood white and stern, with both hands ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... accommodation of two prisoners. A new cell house is being built, which, when completed, will afford sufficient additional room so that each prisoner can have a cell. In these small rooms there are two bunks or beds when two convicts occupy the same cell. The bed-rack is made of iron or wood slats, and the bed-tick is filled with corn-husks; the pillow is also filled with the latter material, and when packed down becomes as hard as a board. When the beds are not in use they are fastened to the side of the wall ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... declared the old lady. "But I allus told Peter this old place was bound to go to rack and ruin ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... into the room with the coffee, and this made a break—and he immediately asked her to play to him, and settled himself in one of the big chairs. He was too much on the rack to continue any more love-making then; "what might have been" ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... he was wearing the costumes of the Queen's Court now. Instead, he was dressed in a tailor-proud suit of dark blue, a white- on-white shirt and no tie. He selected one of a gorgeous peacock pattern from his closet rack. ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... book (Travels, &c.) is ill and pedantically written; but the account of his own sufferings on the rack at ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... got no use for Tam'rack Spicer," said the boy, succinctly, "but I don't 'low ter let him lay in no jail-house, unlessen he's got a right ter be ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... you, then, think that it can befall a wise man to be oppressed with grief, that is to say, with misery? for, as all perturbation is misery, grief is the rack itself. Lust is attended with heat, exulting joy with levity, fear with meanness, but grief with something greater than these; it consumes, torments, afflicts, and disgraces a man; it tears him, preys upon his mind, and utterly destroys him: if we do not so divest ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... are two things you and I talk about; but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I!—What is that great bucket of water for? said the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.—For you to drink,—said the torturer to the little woman.—She could not think that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so keep her alive for her confession. The torturer knew ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... antics. Tiptoeing in to awaken her father to the tickle of a broom straw. Spreading his breakfast piping hot, and then concealing herself behind a screen, that he might marvel at the magic of it. And once she put salt in his coffee, a fresh cup concealed behind the toast rack, and knee to knee they rocked in ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... my dearest Madam, when I answer your card on the rack of my present agony. Your friendship, Madam! By heavens, I was never proud before. Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry; mine were indeed partly fiction and partly a friendship, which, had I been ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... on pain of death, Drury-Lane play-house was soon after converted into a barrack for soldiers, which it has continued to be ever since. Sheridan was arrested, and, it was imagined, would have suffered the rack, if he had not escaped from his guard by a stratagem, and gone over to Ireland in a balloon with which his friend Fox furnished him. Immediately on his arrival in Ireland, he put himself at the head of a party of the most violent Reformers, commanded a regiment ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... flashed a glance at the gun-rack. The rifle was gone. The patent-clasp which held the weapon in place had been wrenched free. Her eyes traveled to the empty provision-locker, which stood open. Close by it lay a small monkey-wrench with which some one had battered ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... Tennessee. She took me down to see the cabin locks where she was born. They had rotted down and somebody lived in the big house. It had gone to rack then pretty bad. My father's master was George Harris. He was Governor of Tennessee. My mother's mistress at Oaks was Miss Ann LaGuion (or maybe Gwion). I never heard her husband's name. They had several farms and on each farm was the cabin locks (little ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... has taken the opposite side of the fireplace and is deep in the latest five columns of Gladstone, who is his Carlyle. He is to see that she does not slip away fired by a conviction, which suddenly overrides her pages, that the kitchen is going to rack and ruin for want of her, and she is to recall him to himself should he put his foot in the fire and keep it there, forgetful of all save his hero's eloquence. (We were a family who needed a deal of watching.) ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... her; when in the heat of their quarrel, there came in a witness, suborned by some of Mariamne's enemies, who accused her to the king of a design to poison him. Herod was now prepared to hear any thing in her prejudice, and immediately ordered her servant to be stretched upon the rack; who in the extremity of his tortures confest, that his mistresses aversion to the king arose from something Sohemus had told her; but as for any design of poisoning, he utterly disowned the least ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... scarcely humorous. I'd be dead or insane without an automobile. You see, I'm nothing but a rack of bones strung together with quivering nerves—always been so, and I'm getting worse. I keep four French cars in my garage, all specially built as to spring-suspension and upholstery, and I spend nearly every night in one or the other of them. It's seldom I do less than a hundred miles between ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... blasphemed, in a language of his own, made up of all the dialects spoken from the Baltic to the Atlantic. He would raze the city to the ground: he would spare no living thing; no, not the young girls; not the babies at the breast. As to the leaders, death was too light a punishment for them: he would rack them: he would roast them alive. In his rage he ordered a shell to be flung into the town with a letter containing a horrible menace. He would, he said, gather into one body all the Protestants who had remained at their homes between Charlemont and the sea, old men, women, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on the music-stool before the clavichord turning over the pages of a volume that rested on the rack. ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... temper, I undressed myself, went to bed with stupid composure, and felt like a wretch that had been stretched on the rack, and, having just been taken off, was suffered to sink into lifeless languor, because he could endure no more. I was mistaken. My sleeping sensations soon became turbulent, oppressive, fevered, terrific, yet cumbrous, and impossible to awake ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... executioner's axe, who for three years have been stretched upon the rack of your aversion? So I make sure that he has gone before me—so I have the sweet revenge of sending him to Tartarus, what care I how soon ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... before the action of the 20th, and the result of course made it impossible for them to return. The sultan's light cavalry harassed their communications by land. On the 25th, the general commanding wrote that his "mind was on the rack without a moment's rest since the departure of the fleet, considering the character of M. de Suffren, and the infinite superiority on the part of the French now that we are left to ourselves." From this anxiety he was ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... set controls for launching," guessed Phillips, leaning back against a rack of emergency spacesuits. "That intercom screen on the bulkhead is probably plugged in to the control room. Looks as if the torpedoes themselves are stored under that hatch ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... Sissy's voice that deceived her sister. In the perennial game of "bluff" these two played, each was alert to detect a weakness in the other; and Irene thought she had found one now. Ignoring her professor, she placed "In Sweet Dreams" on the rack before her, and gaily and loudly, and very ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... tobacco, in Indian fashion, to better acquaintance (I forgot to say that the poet had two dozen clay pipes ranged in a small wooden rack), we went forth for a seven miles' walk on the Downs. And at last, from the summit of one, I pointed down to a ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a world of contempt in his silky voice, and Kid Wolf flushed under his tan. Hardy pretended to ignore the visitor completely. The faro dealer slid one card and then another from his box; the case keeper moved a button or two on his rack. Then the dealer raked in the winnings from the losers. The game was going on as usual. The gamblers, taking their cue from Jack Hardy, turned to their games again. It was as if Kid ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... Ulysses, our Gascon could not console himself for not having guessed why Aramis had asked Percerin to show him the king's new costumes. "There is not a doubt," he said to himself, "that my friend the bishop of Vannes had some motive in that;" and then he began to rack his brains most uselessly. D'Artagnan, so intimately acquainted with all the court intrigues, who knew the position of Fouquet better even than Fouquet himself did, had conceived the strangest fancies and suspicions at ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... is black, And the wail of the South wings forth; Will ye cringe to the hot tornado's rack, And the vampires of the North? Strike! ye can win a martyr's goal, Strike! with a ruthless hand— Strike! with the vengeance of the soul, For your bright, beleaguered land! To arms! to arms! for the South needs help, And a craven is he who flees— For ye have the sword of the Lion's ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... trying to help Bobby lift the heavy umbrella rack. He was elated that he had thought of it, and not for worlds would he have admitted that it ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... from the rack and threw them into a pigeon hole. "Look here," he said, pointedly, "I wouldn't hurry you ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... long and clean and pleasant. Simple white curtains draped the windows, many rush-bottomed big rocking chairs were scattered about, a long desk or table ran along one side of the room with writing materials, a piano stood open with music on its rack, and shelves of books and magazines filled ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... he shucked off his jacket, kicked off his shoes and shuffled into Moroccan slippers. He went over to his current reading rack and scowled at the paperbacks there. His culture status books were upstairs where they could be seen. He pulled out a western, tossed it over to the cocktail table that sat next to his chair, and then went over ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... his pipe, and talking, and trying to keep up his spirits; but the other, who was my friend, and Aikane—Hope, was the most dreadful object I had ever seen in my life: his eyes sunken and dead, his cheeks fallen in against his teeth, his hands looking like claws; a dreadful cough, which seemed to rack his whole shattered system, a hollow whispering voice, and an entire inability to move himself. There he lay, upon a mat, on the ground, which was the only floor of the oven, with no medicine, no comforts, and no one to care for, or help him, but ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... to stand by the wheel or the rack while some poor body is tortured to death; who can stand by while a human heart is breaking with the extremity of anguish? When such a grief comes to any one as to Leone, one stands by in silence; it is as though a funeral is passing, and one is ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... impression of dust and disorder, as though no housemaid had been allowed to touch them for weeks—with one exception. A table, smaller than the rest, but arranged with scrupulous neatness, stood at one side of the room, with a typewriter upon it, certain books, and a rack for stationery. A folded duster lay at one corner. Pens, pencils, a box of clips, and a gum-pot stood where a careful hand had placed them. And at a corner corresponding to the duster was a small vase of flowers—autumnal roses—the ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... consistent with itself, and needs nothing to help it out. It is always near at hand, and sits upon our lips, and is ready to drop out before we are aware; whereas a lie is troublesome, and sets a man's invention upon the rack; and one trick needs a great many more to ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... excellent Husband, and joyn Farm to Farm, Suffer no Lordship, that in a clear day Falls in the prospect of your covetous eye To be anothers; forget you are a Grandee; Take use upon use, and cut the throats of Heirs With cozening Mortgages: rack your poor Tenants, Till they look like so many Skeletons For want of Food; and when that Widows curses, The ruines of ancient Families, tears of Orphans Have hurried you to the Devil, ever remember All was rak'd up for me (your thankful Brother) That will dance merrily upon your Grave, And perhaps ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... she. Lo, now was he veiled: Over sea stood a swelled cloud-rack: The fishing-boat heavenward sailed, Bent abeam, with a whitened track, Surprised, fast hauling the net, As it flew: sea dashed, earth shook. She said: Is it night? O not yet! With a travail of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as to who and what they may be. Such queer specimens of humanity! But not long does he ponder upon it. Up all the night preceding and through all that day, with his mind constantly on the rack, his tired frame at length ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor minister's interior world. He could play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was forever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine;—and the physician knew it well! Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician's wand, uprose a grisly phantom,—uprose a thousand ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... changed. "They can put me on the rack if they choose, but never one word would I ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... and taking a cue from the rack, bent over the board and practiced one or two favourite shots. "The only other subject I can talk about just at present is my own financial affairs," he said slowly, as he walked ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... falls out, that, What we have we prize, not to the worth, While we enjoy it; but being lack'd and lost, Why, then, we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... came a tall, handsome, young naval officer. Hearing his lady refer to the servant, he hardly looked at him, but held his gilded cap carelessly toward him, and the stranger placed it carefully on the rack. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the rack. Wild horses should not tear it out of my heart; boiling lead, falling on me drop by drop, should not extort it ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... at the depot, the doors of which were open. Captain Sol entered the waiting room and unlocked the ticket rack and the little safe. Issy, languidly toying with the broom on the front platform, paused in his pretense of sweeping and awaited permission to go home for breakfast. ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... his horse stood, Morgan halted the six men. He took the remainder of his new rope from the saddle, laced it through the bonds on the Texans' wrists, backed them up to the horizontal pole of the hitching rack, and tied them there in a line, facing inward upon the square. As he moved about his business with deliberate, yet swift and sure hand of vengeance well plotted in advance, Morgan kept his rifle leaning near, watching the crowd for any outbreak of friends who might rise in defense ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... to take a hand in this," he said, finding his favourite gun and noiselessly disengaging it from the rack, pitch ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is the hour when experimenters need their accustomed refreshment, and we note a long interval during which there were no observations. The victim lies stretched upon the rack. After nearly two hours the pastime began again, or, we may say, "the young ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... I pretended to rack my brains. "I believe I do recall something, in a hazy sort of way. You had on a rose-colored gown that was distinctly wonderful, and when we tracked the German to the door of your room, you were wearing an evening coat, bright blue. But the main ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... and stately ecclesiastic of the mediaeval type, broad-chested, deep-voiced, martial of bearing. I could picture him charging mace in hand at the head of his vassals, or delivering over a dissenter of the period to the rack and thumbscrew, but not pottering among rare editions, tall copies and Grolier bindings, nor condescending to a quiet cigar among the tree ferns and orchids. Leta must and should be obeyed, I swore, nevertheless, even if I were driven to lock the door in the fearless old fashion ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... imagination doth start and stare like a man by fears bereft of wits, and doth exercise itself, or rather is exercised by the hand of revenging justice, so about the breadth and depth of present and future punishments, as to lay the soul as on a burning rack. Now also the judgment, as with a mighty maul, driveth down the soul in the sense and pangs of everlasting misery into that pit that has no bottom; yea, it turneth again, and, as with a hammer, it riveteth every fearful thought and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... he said, shaking his head sadly; "but when they get you to London they will find means to make you open your mouth. They have done away with the thumb screws and the rack, but there are other ways of making a prisoner speak, and it would be far better for you to make a clean breast of it at once. Janet is grieving for you as if you were her own son, and I cannot myself attend to my business. Who ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... These were tame pleasures; she would often climb The steepest ladder of the crudded rack Up to some beaked cape of cloud sublime, And like Arion on the dolphin's back Ride singing through the shoreless air;—oft-time 485 Following the serpent lightning's winding track, She ran upon the platforms of the wind, And laughed to hear the ...
— The Witch of Atlas • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... jealousies high-treason, And fix 'm whomsoe'er they please on? Cannot the learned counsel there Make laws in any shape appear? 330 Mould 'em as witches do their clay, When they make pictures to destroy And vex 'em into any form That fits their purpose to do harm? Rack 'em until they do confess, 335 Impeach of treason whom they please, And most perfidiously condemn Those that engag'd their lives for them? And yet do nothing in their own sense, But what they ought by oath and conscience? 340 Can they not juggle, and, with slight ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... odious ought writers to be who thus employ the talents they have from their maker most traitorously against himself, by endeavouring to corrupt and disfigure his creatures! If the comedies of Congreve did not rack him with remorse in his last moments, he must have been lost ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... shrouds the night, and rack; Hear, in the woods, what an awful crack! Wildly the owls are flitting, Hark to the pillars splitting Of palaces verdant ever, The branches quiver and sever, The mighty stems are creaking, The poor roots breaking and shrieking, In wild mixt ruin ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... here, are you going to stretch me on the rack and delve for my opinions on all sorts of subjects? is Miss Susan there going to take them down in shorthand on her cuff and you make a report to Dartrey when he comes ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on her errand, was gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour face, glowering black eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the hall-way. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of the linoleum pattern on ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... near Eastleigh a man wearing a highly pleased expression on his face entered the smoking-carriage in which I was travelling to London. Putting his bag on the rack, he pulled out his pipe and threw himself back in his seat with a satisfied air; then, looking at me and catching my eye, he at once started talking. I had my newspaper, but seeing him in that overflowing ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Colonel usually sat evenings with his wife and the neighbors who dropped in, was exactly as it had been in the old days,—even the same row of novels and books of travel in a rack on the polished table. Only the magazines had ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... "I'll get one of those thirty-thirties out of the rack and slip her into the boat. Maybe we won't use it, and maybe we will. We might meet that ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... setting the example of taking his double gun from the rack and slinging his cartridge-bag ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... see SCORES of devils in your dreams! Merely out of Christian charity he had come to you to say, 'I perceive a poor widow going to rack and ruin, and likely soon to stand in danger of want.' Well, go to rack and ruin—yes, you and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol |
