"Rack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knew that he could walk backward without obstruction, and find the door without error. Should the monster follow, the taste which had plastered the walls with paintings had consistently supplied a rack of murderous Oriental weapons from which he could snatch one to suit the occasion. In the meantime the snake's eyes burned with a ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... which flowed over from the Germany of Luther's way of thinking to mingle with the growing religious sects in Bohemia. This was not done without torture and bloodshed, so the Hrad[vs]any witnessed the sufferings, under the rack, of Augusta, the Bishop of the Unity of Bohemian Brethren, and the execution of several prominent citizens of Prague for defying royal authority in matters of conscience. Ferdinand, on the abdication of his father, succeeded him as Emperor, and left his son Maximilian to rule his turbulent ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... very full," said he; "I suppose many of them are up for the Hauconberg wedding. There's old Cliddesdon—just look at him. Did you ever see such an infernal ass? Hullo! I thought that Millie Warfield wouldn't be far off. She's a perfect rack of bones. Lady Michelmarsh is getting rather pretty—it's wonderful how these dowdy girls can work up their profiles after a month or two in town. She was a lump as a bride—a regular lump. You never met anything ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... the mate, smiling in a peculiar way; and he went to the arms rack and took down two rifles and ammunition-belts for the second mate ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... now firm upon his feet once more, took a step forward, the German commander turned and ran toward a rack of rifles. Alexis did not take time to reverse the weapon he still held by the point. Raising it high above his head, he carefully gauged the distance, and let fly. The sword went hurtling through the air, turning ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... she was waited for in the street below. So Nelly Lebrun went down in her riding costume, the corduroy swishing at each step, and tapping her shining boots with the riding crop. Her own horse she found at the hitching rack, and beside it Donnegan was on his chestnut horse. It was a tall horse, and he looked more diminutive than ever before, pitched so ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... extraordinary, if we suppose the conspirators were actuated by the councils of the Jesuits, who have been ever famous for finesse and dexterity. Besides, the discovery of all the particulars was founded upon confession extorted by the rack, which at best is a suspicious evidence. Be that as it will, the Portuguese government, without waiting for a bull from the pope, sequestered all the estates and effects of the Jesuits in that kingdom, which amounted ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... later, she realized the truth of his words when Bobby came striding into the room, with the family doctor at his heels. For the past forty-eight hours, Beatrix had watched convulsion after convulsion rack the tiny frame, wear itself out and die away, only to be followed by another and yet another. Under this new sorrow, the grandparents had given way entirely. They were powerless to help, and Beatrix, pitying their misery which she knew was more ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... have preceded it. When the proper number of sheets is in the accumulator (4 or 5 being the number most employed for afterward facilitating the separation into packets on the receiving table), the two small rollers, a a', advance over the rack, N, and the sheets, instead of continuing to roll over into the accumulator, fall on the rack and are deposited by it upon the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... much in turtle Bristol's sons delight, 388 Too much o'er bowls of Rack prolong the night. Your turtle-feeder's verse must needs be flat, 393 Though Bristol bloat him with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... for me to think," he muttered. "The more I rack my brain, the more confused it becomes. There is nothing to be done but gain time, and wait for ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... for a while. But the armor-bearer was glad for himself and for her words. For he said to himself: "At least it shall not be said that she has been fed with ingratitude." He also began to rack his brains for something more of the same nature to tell her; and after a ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... up de face er de yeth wid 'im. You better b'leeve dat w'en Mr. Dog got a chance to make hisse'f skase he tuck it, en w'at der wuz lef' un him went skaddlin' thoo de woods like hit wuz shot outen a muskit. En Brer Coon, he sorter lick his cloze inter shape en rack off, en Brer Possum, he lay dar like he wuz dead, twel bimeby he raise up sorter keerful like, en w'en he fine de coas' cle'r he scramble up en scamper off like sumpin' ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... piano stands near the open window, a few comfortable chairs, a desk with a hanging lamp above it, and an arm-chair in front of it, a quaint old fireplace, a Dutch wall clock with weights, a sofa, a hat-rack, and mahogany flower-pot holders, are set about the room; but the most treasured possession is a large family Bible lying on a table. A door leads to a small office occupied ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... place he intended to visit before going to the Marais. I acted upon this suggestion and went to Madame Fontanieu, whom I found alone. I was forced to talk to her of the suit of Monsieur and Madame de Lauzun, which I pretended was the business I came upon, and cruelly did I rack my brains to say enough to keep up the conversation. When Fontanieu arrived, for he was soon found, fortunately, I was thrown into another embarrassment, for I had all the pains in the world to get away from ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... she intend to try to soothe? When they were together she gave him a feeling that she was strangely near and soft and warm. He had felt it on the moor. It was actually as if she wanted to be quieting to him—almost as if she had realised that he had been stretched upon a mental rack with maddening tumult all around him. It was part of her pretty thought of him in the matter of the waiting chair and ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... order to escape from this double difficulty it is not necessary to put to the rack either the words or the thoughts of the parable. The path out of the difficulty is broad and straight; it is the path into it that is crooked ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... the local management, you have Mr. McVickar's confidence. If you don't feel competent to handle the thing on your own responsibility, of course it's your privilege to pass it up to those who have the authority. In that case, I wish to make one point clear: you're the man I'm going to hold up to the rack. I can't afford to spread myself over the entire management, and I don't mean to try. I'm going to look to you, Dick, for the backing of the clean sheet, and I warn you in all soberness that there must be no blots on it; ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... old paternal parent made me work many hours each night, and though he knew nothing of the subjects he could read English and would hear all my lessons and other brothers', and we had to say Skagger Rack, Cattegat, Scaw Fell and Helvellyn, and such things to him, and he would abuse us if we mis-arranged the figures and letters in CaH2O2 and H2SO4 and all those things in bottles. Before the Matriculation ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... on the spot, and kill or torture every member of his family. And so too, in England, most people believe, without a shadow of reason, that if men and women were allowed to manage their own personal relations, free from tribal interference, all life and order would go to rack and ruin; the world would become one vast, horrible orgy; and society would dissolve in some incredible fashion. To prevent this imaginary and impossible result, they insist upon regulating one another's lives from outside with the strictest taboos, like those which hem ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... a flask of gunpowder and a pistol. Some way further along the beach they picked up three muskets, which had been jammed into the rack in which they had been fixed, and the whole together ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... prisoners loafed in their stockade, the blacks in theirs. In a corner on the white side, where the thin and skimpy winter sunshine slanted over the stockade wall, Anse Dugmore was squatted; merely a rack of bones enclosed in a shapeless covering of black-and-white stripes. On his close-cropped head and over his cheekbones the skin was stretched so tight it seemed nearly ready to split. His eyes, glassy and bleared with pain, stared ahead ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... should." Aunt Susy had the tragic and resolute expression of an inquisitor. She might have been proposing the rack. "I think it ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... from the fourth member of the party. The mule bearing the trail pack was in ludicrous contrast to his own aristocratic companions. His long head, with one entirely limp and flopping ear, was grotesquely ugly, the carcass beneath the pack a bone rack, all sharp angles and dusty hide. Looks, however, as his master ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... Immediately behind it was a steel grating, firmly embedded in the sides of the tunnel, and on one of the bars the muzzle of the sniper's rifle was laid, its stock resting on an ingenious wooden fork, which could be raised or lowered by a rack ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... 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 ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... 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 knowledge of it. This confession quickly proved fatal to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the west was dark, and inky black The level ruffled water underneath, And up the wind-cloud tossed, a ghostly rack, In ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... hotel. He had not yet received the expected letter from his father—the cruel letter which might recall him to Ireland. It was then the hour of delivery by our second post; he went to look at the letter-rack in the hall. Helena saw that I was anxious. She was as kind again as ever; she consented to wait with me for ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea all that it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... good paintings, including portraits of the various presidents of the club, which adorn the entrance hall. After books, perhaps the most distinctive feature of the club is our collection of pipes. In a large rack in the smoking-room—really a superfluity, since smoking is permitted all over the house—is as complete an assortment of pipes as perhaps exists in the civilized world. Indeed, it is an unwritten rule of the club that no one is eligible for membership who cannot ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... wines of this country, particularly those of Kaskaskias; it may be proper here to give a description of the mode in which these wines are racked, which will be found simple, effectual, and expeditious; I mean for the lower or ground tiers. The upper, or more elevated ones, rack themselves, without coercion of any kind. When you are about to rack a hogshead of wine upon the ground tier, you place your empty hogshead close to the full one, in which you then put your brass racking cock; on the nozzle of which cock you tie on a leather hose, which is generally ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... hall door he saw the hat-rack where as a boy he had hung his cap. It now held garments over which Lane fumbled. Mel came into ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... pitied her as a coward. The girl meant to be loyal, yet somehow, in the end, to save her own happiness. But she could not plan for the future. She felt dazed, broken, as if she had been on the rack and was now ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... range, filling half the space of one of the side-walls, its steel framings glittering like polished silver; the high plate-rack full of shining crockery at one end by the door, and the low, comfortable couch at the other; two lines of linen hung on cords stretched under the ceiling airing above the range, and the solid deal table in the middle of the room ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... on top of the rack at the end of the weir. He took a position at the narrow entrance, over which might have been written: "All who enter here leave hope behind," if indeed the unfortunate fish would know how to read and understand it, for a fish who enters never gets out except to die. The rack is almost ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... the colours of nature, being life-size. At the end of the room opposite the dais was an engine or machine which even those who had never seen such a thing before might easily have identified as a rack; and there were four chairs, two on either side of the room, of such elaborate and sinister construction that there could be no question as to their being designed for the purpose of inflicting various kinds of ingenious and exquisite agony upon the unhappy occupants; while, in addition to ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... really, such a beast as that? Even if the choice had lain, innocently, between her own torture and the Kiddy's, could she have endured to see the little tender thing stretched out, in her place, on the rack? Of course ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... you comprehend the anguish of my feelings. To be disjointed and torn piecemeal by the rack was a torment inexpressibly inferior to this. Nothing excites my wonder but that I did not expire before the ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... hid? No, Master Prestwitch, this and much more did, His friendship did command and freely gave All before writ, and more than I durst crave. But leaving him a little, I must tell, How men of Manchester did use me well, Their loves they on the tenter-hooks did rack, Roast, boiled, baked, too—too—much, white, claret, sack, Nothing they thought too heavy or too hot, Can followed can, and pot succeeded pot, That what they could do, all they thought too little, Striving in love the traveller ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... [65] "Nay, rack your brain—'tis all in vain, I'll tell you every thing I know; But to the Thorn, and to the Pond Which is a little step beyond, I wish that you would go: Perhaps, when you are at the place, You something of her tale ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Lord's answer seems to me to mean substantially this: Roman legions shall suffer defeat, rout, and extermination; and Roman power shall cease to terrify. All its might must decay. But "everyone that is of the truth" shall attach himself to me with a love which will brave rack and stake. All your power cannot give a grain of new life. I can and will infuse my own divine life, my own divine self, into men. And this new life is invincible, immortal, all-conquering. I have infused myself into a few fishermen, and they will infuse ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... rack! Ye riders, bronze your airy motion! Still skim the seas, so snowy craft,— Forever sail to meet the ocean! There bid the tide refuse to slide, Glassing, below, thy drooping pinion,— Forever cease its wild caprice, Fallen at the feet of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... of the two nobles to whom his Eminence had thus addressed himself fortunately passed unobserved amid the chorus of assenting admiration which burst forth on all sides; and with this final strain of the moral rack the Cardinal took his leave of the two foredoomed victims of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... some of the fellows now," said Hooker, as two or three boys were seen coming down Lake Street. "Practice is over. Let's sift along, Rack. I don't care to see them. So long, ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... district, but he can carry it with him wherever he goes. If he stays, it will sap his strength and pull him to pieces; if he moves to a better climate, the malady moves with him, leaving him by degrees, and coming back at regular intervals to rack, shake, burn, and sweat its victim. Gradually it wears itself out, often wearing its patient out at the same time. M'Gregor had been through the experience, and there was a slight change in his voice as he went ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... about you; no," he added, as his clenched fist fell upon the table, and his face flushed up deeply at his rising feeling—"no, not even if it were still the fashion to employ torture; not even the rack could extort from me one syllable that could implicate you. After all that I have said, I swear that by ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... morning as the one that would find him most free from his numerous engagements. The coolness of this reply was exasperating to the bishop, and he thought he divined in the delay a deliberate intention to keep him on the rack of uncertainty. Being a man of ample leisure, he had found plenty of time to formulate the position he meant to take. He and his daughter had threshed out the subject, and now avoided it by mutual consent. Their relationship became unnatural and constrained. They met only ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... something the very next morning; but even then, to quote from Jack, who was very much disgusted when he said it, they "didn't get the straight of the story." Young Allison did not come out to greet them when they drew up their horses at the hitching-rack (he objected to being called a stay-at-home blow-hard), but Colonel Shelby and his intimate friend, Dillon, were standing close by, and the boys noticed ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... go. And loike the baseless fabric o' a vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself—Yea, I say, all which it inherit shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial payjent faded, leave not a rack behind." ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... head between his hands. "You make me see that there are two sides to the question, Selma. It is true that I was not myself when Elton got my promise to sign the bill. My mind had been on the rack for weeks, and I was unfit to form a correct estimate of a complicated public measure. But ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... hard, and you'll be too easy, too," said Hilda savagely. "You'll lose the good tenants and you'll keep the bad ones, and the houses will all go to rack and ruin, and then you'll sell all the property at a loss. That's how it will be. And what shall you do if you're not feeling well, and if ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... heads break off easily. The fork used in lifting it, whether with iron or with wooden prongs, should have these long and so numerous that in lifting the tines would go under rather than down through the bunch to be lifted. The wagon rack should also be covered with canvas, if all the seed is to be saved. If stored in stacks much care should be used in making these, as the seed crop in the stack is even more easily injured by rain than the hay crop. The covering of old hay of some kind that ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... almost unexampled grandeur, are unfortunately of no interest to us, except as illustrating the character of the priest who wrote them, and the king to whom they were written. The hand of the persecutor was not stayed. The rack and the lash and the stake continued to claim their victims. So far it was labour in vain. But the letter remains, to speak for ever for the courage of Latimer; and to speak something, too, for a prince that could respect the ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... filling auditorium after auditorium. I attended his first concert in New York, and was amazed to see a comparatively small gathering of musical zealots. His command of the audience was at once imperial. The critics, some of whom would have found Paderewski's hirsute crown a delightful rack upon which to hang their ridicule, went into ecstasies instead. His art and his striking personality, entirely apart from his appearance, soon made him the greatest concert attraction in the musical ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Cr-r-r-r-rack! sounded the machine gun, spitting forth a pelting storm of lead. As the piece continued to disgorge bullets at the rate of six hundred a minute, Dave, a grim smile on his lips, swung the muzzle of the piece so as to spread the fire along ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... we shudder. They were driven to absolute desperation, and the world has forgiven them their one quick blow, struck for freedom, for woman's honour and for life itself in the dim castle of Petrella. Tormented with rack and cord they all confessed the deed, save Beatrice, whom no bodily pain could move; and if Paolo Santacroce had not murdered his mother for her money before their death was determined, Clement the Eighth would have pardoned them. But the times were ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... plantations and thinly scattered villages. In the Piedmont, country towns of fairly respectable dimensions rose here and there, though many a Southern county-seat could boast little more than a court house and a hitching rack. Even as regards the seaports, the currents of trade were too thin and divergent to permit of large urban concentration, for the Appalachian water-shed shut off the Atlantic ports from the commerce of the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... himself to anarchy has forgotten modesty as much as he has forgotten pride (cheers). I am not a man at all. I am a cause (renewed cheers). I set myself against Comrade Gregory as impersonally and as calmly as I should choose one pistol rather than another out of that rack upon the wall; and I say that rather than have Gregory and his milk-and-water methods on the Supreme Council, I would offer myself ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... great outer door and pulled it open. A cold wind stung her face, and caused her to shut the door quickly. Back and forth she began to pace the floor again; but in five minutes she had run to the door once more. This time she wore a heavy coat of Bertram's which she caught up as she passed the hall-rack. ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... 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 splendour on my brow; But out, alack! he was but one hour mine; The region cloud ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... down with bloodhounds, and when she is taken I shall hew her limb from limb. I shall stretch her on the rack till her pale white body is twisted and curled like paper in ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... in, stepped across him, and made for the farther corner. A young fellow swung his golf clubs into the rack and sat down opposite. The train gave a gentle lurch, they were off. William glanced up and saw the hot, bright station slipping away. A red-faced girl raced along by the carriages, there was something strained ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... La Mancha, there lived one of those old-fashioned gentlemen who keep a lance in the rack, an ancient target, a lean horse, and a greyhound for coursing. His family consisted of a housekeeper turned forty, a niece not twenty, and a man who could saddle a horse, handle the pruning-hook, and also serve in the house. The master himself was nigh fifty years ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Elizabeth with authority to declare herself paramount not only in political but also in religious matters? And, because she was called queen, can it be considered treason for an Irishman to believe in the spiritual supremacy of the Pope? Yet, unless we look upon as martyrs those who died on the rack and the gibbet in Ireland during her reign, because they refused to admit in a woman the title of Vicar of Christ, to such ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of fiends, calling themselves men, are from day to day meditating torment and torture for his heroic widow; On whom, with all their power and malice, and with every page, footman, and chambermaid of hers In their reach, and with the rack in their hands, they have not been able to fix a speck. Nay, do they not talk of the inutility of evidence? What other virtue ever sustained such an ordeal? But who can wonder, when the Almighty himself is called by one of those wretches, the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... laughter, Sudden and shrill that followed after, Died off into a dismal tone, Like a parting spirit's painful moan. "I wish," said Rudolph, as he stood On foot in the deep and silent wood; "I wish, good Roland, rack and stable May be kinder to-night than ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Merry Wives" been produced under ordinary conditions, one would have had to rack one's brains to account for its feebleness. Not only is the genial Lord of Humour degraded in it into a buffoon, but the amusement of it is chiefly in situation; it is almost as much a farce as a comedy. For these and other reasons I believe in ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... himself, however, as an impersonation, was, in look, voice, manner, Mr. Skimpin, the junior barrister, under whose cheerful but ruthless interrogations that unfortunate gentleman was stretched upon the rack of examination. His (Mr. Skimpin's) cheery echoing—upon every occasion when it was at last extorted from his victim—of the latter's answer (followed instantly by his own taunts and insinuations), remains as vividly as anything at all about this Reading ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... contrivance. A square rod of iron, 26, 27, Pl. VIII. Fig. 1. is raised perpendicular to the middle of the beam DE. This rod passes through a hollow box of brass 28, which opens, and may be filled with lead; and this box is made to slide alongst the rod, by means of a toothed pinion playing in a rack, so as to raise or lower the box, and to fix it at such ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... cushioned ledge such as is seen in the box of a theatre. On the platform, which now was bare planks, the King and Queen on a great reception day would sit on gorgeous carpets. The entrance was through gilded doors from a staircase in the ante-room beyond. There was a rack of muskets round the foot of the throne, and just outside the rails a half-naked soldier lay snoring. Our Burman companion assured us that seeing the throne-room now in its condition of dismantled tawdriness, I could form no ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... the relief which a man would feel on leaving the rack, and said, smilingly, "Your enthusiasm is contagious. Any man would soon be on his mettle ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... our lives. So, my friends, when Pilate would have hesitated, it was the people who shouted "Christ to the cross!" But we bind you not to our safety—no! Betray us to the crowd—impeach, calumniate, malign us if you will—we are above death, we should walk cheerfully to the den of the lion, or the rack of the torturer—we can trample down the darkness of the grave, and what is death to a criminal ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... I first awoke, and the sun was low in the sky before I slept—slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, too worn ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... She saw that without revealing her entire scheme—hers and Ruth's—she could make no headway with George. And if she did reveal it he would sternly veto it. So she gave up that direction. She went upstairs; George took his hat from the front hall rack and pushed open the screen door. As he appeared on the veranda Susan was picking dead leaves from one of the hanging baskets; Ruth, seated in the hammock, hands in lap, her whole attitude intensely still, was ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... warm whey, when you have any, wipe it once a month, and keep it on a rack. If you want to ripen it, a damp cellar will bring it forward. When a whole cheese is cut, the larger quantity should be spread with butter inside, and the outside wiped to preserve it. To keep those in daily use moist, let a clean cloth be wrung out from cold water, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... 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 ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... later, as he sat at lookout duty in a gleaming white tower on a high peak of the Sierras. Not that the job of lookout was part of O'Rourke's duty, now that he was back in the U. S. A., but a cylinder of scarlet rested on a great rack at the base of the tower, and Danny had no wish to hear the roar of that cylinder's ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... three months there were reports from committees appointed to interview the councilmen; reports of committees to interview the county commissioners—who were obdurate; reports of committees to lease new ground for the hitching rack stands; reports of the legal committee; reports of the sanitary committee, and through it all Mrs. Worthington rose at every meeting and declared that the hitching racks must be destroyed. And as she was rated in Bradstreet's report at nearly half a million ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... force (3,371 officers and men, with 44 guns) which she maintained. In her excessive expenditure on a superfluous army, in her niggardly provision for civil administration, and in her merciless rack-renting, she followed the evil example of the ordinary native prince, and was superior only in the unusual ability with which she worked an unsound and oppressive System. She left L700,000. The population of Sardhana town has risen ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... pain is produced by a little further extension of the muscular fibres: a similar pain is caused in the muscles, when a limb is much extended for the reduction of dislocated bones; and in the punishment of the rack: and in the painful cramps of the calf of the leg, or of other muscles, for a greater degree of contraction of a muscle, than the movement of the two bones, to which its ends are affixed, will admit of, must give similar pain to that, which is produced by extending it ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... youngsters picking up the fleece enjoy the merry din, They throw the classer up the fleece, he throws it to the bin; The pressers standing by the rack are waiting for the wool, There's room for just a couple more, the press is nearly full; Now jump upon the lever, lads, and heave and heave away, Another bale of golden fleece ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... true, and the living darkness of the blood of man is purpling with violets, if the violets are coming out from under the rack of men, winter-rotten and fallen we shall have spring. Pray not to die on this Pisgah blossoming with violets. Pray to ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... renouncing the authority or jurisdiction of any foreign prince or prelate. For refusing to take this oath, many Catholics during Elizabeth's reign suffered death, and many more endured within the Tower the worse horrors of the rack. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... to have become chaste. It may be so—and, on the other hand, it may be that the old sly earth-gods will hold their indelible sway over us until the "baseless fabric" of this vision leaves "not a rack behind"! In any case, for our present purpose, the reading of Emily Bronte strengthens us in our recognition that the only wisdom of life consists in leaving all the doors of the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... is burning on the hearth—small, for the mid-day-meal is not yet on its way. Everything is tidy; the hearth is swept up, and the dishes are washed: the barefooted girl is reaching the last of them to its place on the rack hehind the dresser. She is a red-haired, blue-eyed Celt, with a pretty face, and a refinement of motion and speech ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... you lie. Such a disaster is impossible. No nation is capable of such a sacrifice. If you have lied, you shall expiate your crime on the rack." ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... visiting-card which the man produced from a letter rack, and read the lines hastily scribbled on ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... only yourself," he smiled, and suddenly he put his hand over mine as it rested beside the music rack. I met his steady eyes. Just for an instant. Abruptly he took his hand away, went over to the fireplace, and began poking the logs. When he spoke next he ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... of esprit who are excessively exhausting to some people. They are the talkers who have what may be called JERKY minds. Their thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence. They say bright things on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death. After a jolting half-hour with one of these jerky companions, talking with a dull friend affords great relief. It is like taking the cat in your lap ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... screamed out Miss Guinea-fowl, "to see the care our mistress takes of that homely bird. It don't seem to be able to sing a note. I can make more music than that myself. Indeed, my voice is quite operatic. Pot-rack! pot-rack! pot-rack!" and the empty-headed Miss Guinea-fowl nearly cracked her own throat, and the ears of everybody else, with her screams. And the great vain peacock spread his sparkling tail-feathers in the sun, and looked with annihilating scorn on the dull plumage of ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... in? I hope you don't 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 believe me, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... two shillings, certifies to the elegance and innocence of the entertainment, and though Mr. Osborne and Miss Amelia walked unharmed in its groves and glades, and it was not Rebecca Sharp's fault that Jos. Sedley got drunk on the bowl of rack punch, still Vauxhall, like Ranelagh and Cremorne, has come down to us with tainted reputation. It died in the odour of brimstone, and only in the magical ink-pool of literature can we still behold the heralded gallants in the boxes junketing ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... you lead her up to the hitching-rack while you were there? Somebody else is likely to pick your ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... dogs, cats—with now and then a country horse or mule, hitched to the town rack—with these, and a small vial of Gypsy Juice, Archie B., as he expressed it, "had mo' fun to the square inch than ole Barnum's show ever hilt in all ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... bad posture. Sitting thus three hours a day must soon produce round shoulders. Various devices have been proposed to help the pupil out of this difficulty. Our booksellers furnish a simple rack, which is shown in Fig. 9. It holds one or two books. In Fig. 10 two books are seen resting upon it. Fig. 11 shows the position of the pupil while using the book-rack. An eminent professor in a New-England college said to the assembled ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... nerves well-nigh on the rack, he nevertheless crossed the guard-room with a firm step and entered the cell where the prisoner was still lying upon the palliasse, as he had been all along, and still presenting that naked piece of shoulder through the ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... rows of books still lined the walls of the morning room. The long mahogany table in the center was still littered with maps and papers. There were the same rusted muskets and small swords in the rack by the fireplace, and in front of the fire in a great, high-backed armchair my father was sitting. I paused with a curious feeling of doubt, surprise and diffidence. Somehow I had pictured a different meeting and a different ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... bestowal of an estate in jagheer, or farm, ought not to interfere with the rights of the proprietors of the lands comprised in it, as the sovereign transfers merely his own territorial rights, not theirs; but Dursun Sing, before the year 1820, had, by rack-renting, lending on mortgage, and other fraudulent or violent means, deprived all the Syud proprietors of their lands in the other five villages. They were, however, still left in possession of Bhudursa. He pursued the same system, as far as possible, in the other districts, which were, from time ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... appears, While Jonathan's threaten'd with loss of his ears; For who would not think it a much better choice, By your knife to be mangled than rack'd with your voice. If truly you [would] be revenged on the parson, Command his attendance while you act your farce on; Instead of your maiming, your shooting, or banging, Bid Povey[1] secure him while you ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... disappeared on the instant, and as I moved toward the door, I stumbled over something soft that mewed miserably. In a second I had it in my arms,—a rack of bones covered with muddy, tangled gray fur,—and rushed down ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... that he could not go to sleep unless he knew he had a great flaskful tied to his bed-post. All day long he drank till he was too stupid to attend to his business, and everything in the kingdom went to rack and ruin. But one day an accident happened to him, and he was struck on the head by a falling bough, so that he fell from his horse and lay dead upon ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... to avoid laughing anew at the smug little Harry, the sanctimonious tutor, or the naughty Tommy, as Mr. Sambourne has realised them. The "Anecdotes of the Crocodile" and "The Presumptuous Dentist" are no less good. The way he has turned a prosaic hat-rack into an instrument of torture would alone mark Mr. Sambourne as a comic draughtsman of the highest type. Nothing he has done in political cartoons seems so likely to live as these burlesques. A little known book, "The Royal Umbrella" (1888), which ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... on his visitor's face. "Nada!" cried Dan Anderson. "Me go back there and work on a salary for you? Me check my immortal soul on your hat-rack? Me live scared of my life, like all the rest of the slaves in that infernal system of living, that hell? If I should do that, I'd be giving you some license for the opinion of me you once expressed, before ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... another as the waves of the sea sweep over the head of a straggling swimmer. Every now and then they were interrupted by sharp cries of exquisite anguish, such as might be wrung out by the sudden twist of a rack, and then would come a low, shrill crooning sound, almost musical, beyond which it seemed grief could ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... government were frequently imprisoned without any other authority than a royal order. According to law, torture, the disgrace of the Roman jurisprudence, could not, in any circumstances, be inflicted on an English subject. Nevertheless, during the troubles of the fifteenth century, a rack was introduced into the Tower, and was occasionally used under the plea of political necessity. But it would be a great error to infer from such irregularities that the English monarchs were, either in theory or in practice, absolute. We live in a highly civilised ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... evidently broad awake, under the lee of the boat. We noticed that each man had his cutlass buckled round his waist—that the boarding-pikes had been cut loose from the main boom, round which they had been stopped, and that about thirty muskets were ranged along a fixed rack that ran athwart ships near the ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... thief, a bloody bandage about his head, an exalted light in his pain-stricken eyes. His one-time captor lay stark and cold in the gruesome line in the bow of the boat. It was "Soapy" Shay who staggered out of the rack and smoke with the burly, stricken detective in his arms, and it was "Soapy" Shay who wept when the last breath of life cased out through his tortured lips. For of all the company on board the Doraine, there was but one whom "Soapy" knew, but one who called him ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... asked me whether I had bound my sword. I answered that a man on horseback about to take a journey ought not to bind his sword. He said that the custom was so in Florence, since a certain Ser Maurizio then held office, who was capable of putting S. John the Baptist to the rack for any trifling peccadillo. [4] Accordingly one had to carry one's sword bound till the gates were passed. I laughed at this, and so we set off, joining the courier to Venice, who was nicknamed Il Lamentone. In his company we travelled ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... flesh-pots, it was still alive to the extent that it needed only his present state to resuscitate it in all its peculiar force. The Protestant Flagellant, who whipped his soul rather than his body, who made self-denial the rack and the boot, who believed that on Sunday it was sacrilegious to smile, blasphemous to laugh! Spurlock had gone back spiritually three hundred years. In the matter of his conscience he was primitive; and for an educated man to become ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... there lies the Laughing Lass, a little weather-worn, but sound as a dollar, and not a living being aboard of her. Her boats are all there. Everything's in good condition, though none too orderly. Pitcher half full of fresh water in the rack. Sails all O. K. Ashes of the galley fire still warm. I tell you, gentlemen, that ship hasn't been deserted more than a couple of days ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... bent above his boy, dim memories of days long back Came, like stars an instant seen amid the autumn tempest's rack; But as swiftly over his spirit flashed the ruin of his name— Flashed the withering thought that even that child might be ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... rack of clouds that makes the sunset lovely. The bosomy vapours of Dove's soul are the palette upon which the decumbent sun of his spirit casts its vivid orange and scarlet colours. His joy is the more perfect to behold because it bursts ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... that day exceeded in his lecture by twenty minutes—"a bad practice," (Dr. Bower was himself notoriously unpunctual,) and took not the slightest notice of any event of greater importance, until Leslie's suspense had been so long on the rack that it began to subside into dismay, when glancing up for a moment, he observed parenthetically, as he turned a page—"Child! you have my approval of a union with Hector Garret—an odd fancy, but that is no business of ours,"—dropped his eyes again on his volume, and made no further allusion ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... receiver as he tossed the phone forward over Harry Quong's shoulder; Quong caught it and began speaking rapidly and urgently into it while he steered with the other hand. Von Schlichten took one of the five-pound spiked riot-maces out of the rack in front of him. Themistocles M'zangwe had already drawn his pistol; he shifted it to his left hand and took a mace in his right. The Nipponese-Irish colonel, looking like a homicidally infuriated pixie, had an automatic in one hand and a long ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... to the rack at the back of the wagon, because he wished for quiet in which to write a poem to celebrate the occasion, and the others forgot all about him until they drew under the shade of a grove of trees for the noonday ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... the unknown! Drawing forth his leg he stood up again, and glanced round the room. There was a small dressing-table opposite the bed; beside it was the large glass which had given him such a surprise. Further on a washhand-stand with a towel-rack beside it, but there was no spot on which he could stretch his bulky frame save the middle of the floor. Calmly he lay down on that, having previously pulled off all the bedclothes in a heap and selected therefrom a single blanket. Pillowing ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... with a steady pull. Yet he did not proceed far. Though he did not stop through rebellion. It was simply to renew his attentions to the old mare. He began to caress her as if he really recognized in this rack of an animal his own lost mother. But recognition, of course, was impossible. Long before, the only source of recognition, appeal made through digestive organs, had disappeared. Nevertheless, he lavished upon her unwonted affection until Felipe gently but firmly urged him ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... were ranged in it: two 12-bore shot-guns, an air-gun, and a little 20-bore. Another rack was empty; no doubt it had held the Mannlicher rifle, which the police had carried away to use as evidence in their case for the prosecution. The door was locked and there was no ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... left by Uncle Jake near the horse-rack had attracted the attention of a young man as he came through the front gate. After looking at it for a few minutes, idle curiosity prompted him to turn it over with his foot, and as he did so ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... acid-stained, deal-topped table. There upon a shelf was the row of formidable scrap-books and books of reference which many of our fellow-citizens would have been so glad to burn. The diagrams, the violin-case, and the pipe-rack—even the Persian slipper which contained the tobacco—all met my eyes as I glanced round me. There were two occupants of the room—one Mrs. Hudson, who beamed upon us both as we entered; the other the strange dummy which had played so important a part in the evening's adventures. It was a wax-coloured ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not hurt at all," he said stoutly, although his arms and legs and every portion of his body ached as though he had been upon the rack. ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... "Yes; he was. But you must remember Lord Heyton is very much upset; when one's nerves are on the rack, the least thing, trifling though ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... Fairview. With the odours of the flowers in the tall silver vases on the piano—her piano!—the spirit of desire which had so long possessed him, waking and sleeping, returned,—returned to torture him now with greater skill amidst these her possessions; her volume of Chopin on the rack, bound in red leather and stamped with her initials, which compelled his glance as he passed, and brought vivid to his memory the night he had stood in the snow and heard her playing. So, he told himself, it must always be, for him to stand in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... before any of the children had gone to bed, and they all came running to meet us most joyfully. This morning I am restless and can not set about anything. It distresses me to think how little human friendship can do for such a sorrow as yours. When a sufferer is on the rack he cares little for what is said to him though he may feel grateful for sympathy. I found it hard to tear myself away from you so soon, but all I could do for you there I could do all along the way home and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss |
