"Suffocating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... much fresh air nor sees as many flowers as in winter-time. In cold weather the frost blossoms on her window pane, and the snow falls in wreaths in the alley. God pity the wretchedness that pants and sweats and festers and dies on the hot pavements and in the suffocating cellars of the town! ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... don't understand' was absolutely cut off by an imperative grasp and hush from Miss Hacket the elder; Aunt Jane was suffocating with laughter, Lady Merrifield, between that and a certain shame for womanhood, which made her begin to talk at random about anything or ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... irresponsible competition," he admits "the licentious use of wealth," but he also recognises "the tyranny and the spiritual death of an iron-bound Socialism," that violent and venomous form of Socialism, which Mr. Punch this week has represented under the apt symbol of a clinging, hampering, and suffocating Serpent. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... more carefully. He swung his sight to the foremost, and drove a bullet straight through his chest. The next moment something seemed to have fallen upon him with crushing weight. A red sea rose before his eyes. In it he was submerged; the roar of it filled his ears; it blinded him; and in the suffocating embrace of it he tried to cry out. He fought himself out of it, his eyes cleared, and he could see again. His rifle was no longer in his hands, and he was standing. Twenty feet away men were rushing upon him. His brain recovered itself with the swiftness of lightning. ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... march of ten hours, with cool weather at first, but suffocating heat afterwards, we reached Edree, a town of El-Shaty, in a state of great exhaustion. During the latter part of the march, however, we had been cheered by the sight of the town, which stands on a small mound of yellow clay and rock. The whitewashed marabout ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... in England. The instigator and chief agent in the Hedingham case was the wife of an innkeeper, who was convinced that she had been bewitched by an old wizard of reputation in the neighbourhood: and the mode of punishment was the popular one of drowning or suffocating in the nearest pond. Scraps of written papers found in the hovel of the murdered wizard revealed the numerous applications by lovers, wives, and other anxious inquirers. Amongst other recent revivals of the 'Black Art' in Southern Europe already referred to, the inquisition at Rome ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... snow until they reached the ice itself. It was suffocating, for the wind had blown in the entrance and fresh air was excluded.... Jim felt the body close to him—it was still as death. A great fear swept through him. She was not strong enough for this trial—she was——! He thrust his hand inside the thick ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... to pay me with, and I am going to turn them out immediately, although the lady is in bed in convulsions which are suffocating her." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... station with his detachment early on the previous day; had relieved four outposts between dawn and dusk, covering eighty miles of desert road, with four brief halts for rest; and had spent a night of suffocating wakefulness in a sun-baked windowless room, built out from the base of the last post relieved. It was all in the day's work—as Frontier men understand work. The exposure and long hours in the saddle had little effect upon his whipcord and iron frame: but a sharp ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... roofs, were covered over with the foul deposits of damp vapors that forever hung around; the atmosphere was thick with impure exhalations and poisonous miasma; the dense smoke from the ever-burning torches might have mitigated the noxious gases, but it oppressed the dwellers here with its blinding and suffocating influence. Yet amid all these accumulated horrors the soul of the martyr stood up unconquered. The Roman spirit that endured all this rises up to grander proportions than were ever attained in the proudest days of the old republic. The fortitude of Regulus, the devotion of Curtius, the constancy ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... handfuls on my eyelids—gummed over aching eyes—still blighted by the yolk o' wool—grey, greasy-feeling water from a cut-down kerosene tin which I sneaked from the cook and hid under my bunk and had the foresight to refill from the cask last night, under cover of warm, still, suffocating darkness. Or was it the night before last? Anyhow, it will be sneaked from me to-day, and from the crawler who will collar it to-morrow, and 'touched' and 'lifted' and 'collared' and recovered by the cook, and sneaked back ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... ghastly and motionless face. Having done with the visions of the past, she had not only heard, but had also understood the words uttered by her husband. By their extreme disaccord with her mental condition these words produced on her a slightly suffocating effect. Mrs Verloc's mental condition had the merit of simplicity; but it was not sound. It was governed too much by a fixed idea. Every nook and cranny of her brain was filled with the thought that this man, with whom she had lived ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... night—starlit, clear, and still. Alas! yes, this good girl preferred the black mud of the streets of the capital to the verdure of its flowery meadows; its pavements miry or tortuous, to the fresh and velvet moss of the paths in the woods, perfumed by violets; the suffocating dust at the City gates, or the Boulevards, to the waving of the golden ears of corn, enameled by the scarlet of the wild poppy and the azure of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... by a perfectly healthy married woman that when jealous of her husband she felt a sensation as of some liquid welling up in her throat and suffocating her. Pride came into play in part; she did not want others to think that her husband preferred an ignorant girl to her—a woman of great physical and ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense?[65] A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, 10 Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... well-provided tea-tables and entertained a regularly flowing throng of tea-drinking, scandal-mongering women, accompanied by a circle of men of some interest and distinction. In the evening, Florence did still more. By this time, the salons were suffocating and airless. Yet there were few nights in the week when, somewhere, the sober reception was not heightened to a ball, sometimes impromptu, more often formally prearranged. Morning found the indefatigable leisure world scattered ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... hang'd if this fool hasn't been trying to fill up a house with acorns!' They all came a-swooping down like a blue cloud, and as each fellow lit on the door and took a glance, the whole absurdity of the contract that that first jay had tackled hit him home and he fell over backward suffocating with laughter, and the next jay took his place ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... disease among our continental neighbours. It commences with a certain depression of spirits; a diminution of appetite; a heaviness of the head; a heat of the mouth; an attempt to get something from the throat; an insatiable thirst; an elevated temperature of the body; a dry and painful suffocating cough; and all these circumstances continue twenty to thirty days, until at length the dog droops ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... general. The overmatched Confederates kept up a losing battle for more than an hour, in full view of many thousands of ardent Southerners ashore. The scene, at its height, was appalling. The smoke, belching black from the funnels and white from the guns, made a suffocating pall overhead; while the dark, squat, hideous ironclad hulls seemed to have risen from a submarine inferno to stab each other with livid tongues of flame—so deadly close the two flotillas fought. ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... was owing more to the hot wind than to the sun itself. This wind, coming from the arid plains of the interior, brought with it a dry, suffocating heat. On this occasion it was odious to Harry Heathcote, not so much on account of its own intrinsic abominations, as because it might cause a fire to sweep across his run from its western boundary. Just beyond the boundary there lay Boolabong, and there were collected his enemies. A fire that ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... Pamela, suddenly conscious of a suffocating excitement. 'What's the good of being cross? It's you who ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Harrow? They will see therein, not the melancholy apparent to vulgar eyes, but the forecast of genius, to be revealed sooner or later, and with a further promise, in the antipathy shown for the routine of schools, and especially of the University of Cambridge,—a suffocating atmosphere for genius, equally uncongenial to Milton, Dryden, Gray, and Locke, who all, like Lord Byron, and more bitterly than he, exercised their satiric vein on it. As for the slight attraction he sometimes showed for the world in his youth—in his seventeenth year—and which the excellent ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... slipping into unconsciousness, and tried with all the power of my will to fight above the suffocating blankness and darkness that was rising around me. A little later I heard the stroke of oars, growing nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man. When he was very near I heard him crying, in vexed fashion, "Why in hell don't you sing out?" This meant me, I thought, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... making the least effort to arise and make her escape. At length the earth reaches her lips—covers her head. The rest of the earth is then hastily thrown in, and these children and relations mount the grave, and tread down the earth upon the head of the suffocating widow—the mother!" ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... mocking character. And now, turning around occasionally, by her flaming, splendid eyes, by the vividly and unevenly glowing unhealthy red of her cheeks, by the much bitten parched lips, he felt that her great, long ripening rancour was heavily surging within the girl and suffocating her. And it was then that he thought (and subsequently often recalled this) that he had never yet seen Jennie so radiantly beautiful as on this night. He also noticed, that all the men present in the private cabinet, with the exception of Lichonin, were looking at her—some frankly, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... had nothing to accuse, none to lament against but fortune, who is less than a vapour? But when ourselves are the well that breathes out this exhalation, the oven that spits out this fiery smoke, the mine that spews out this suffocating and strangling damp, who can ever, after this, aggravate his sorrow by this circumstance, that it was his neighbour, his familiar friend, his brother, that destroyed him, and destroyed him with a whispering and a calumniating breath, ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... a moment confronting each other with no word spoken. Then, dropping her glance, and advancing a step, in a faltering, hesitating manner "Monsieur, monsieur," she murmured in a suffocating voice. ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... an importance in the public eye? Here, once again, then, proof met him of the conspiracy of modern government constantly going on to bring about disconnection between the Crown and the real life-needs and aspirations of the people. Suffocating traditions closed him round making a cypher of him—to himself a scorn and a derision, and a monster unto many—just as much, by this denial of petition, a breaker of his Crown oath as those who in the past had paid penalty for ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... they came within sight of Madeira, and at night arrived off the port. They stopped for a day or two to take in provisions. Napoleon was indisposed. A sudden gale arose and the air was filled with small particles of sand and the suffocating exhalations from the deserts of Africa. On the evening of the 24th they got under weigh again, and progressed smoothly and rapidly. The Emperor added to his amusements a game at piquet. He was but an indifferent chess-player, and there was no very good one on board. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... tardy was the dawn. Outside the slanting wall of ice that made my haven the swell swept past in a gurgling, bubbling, drowning sound, dismal and ghastly, as though in truth some such ogre as the monster I had dreamt of lay suffocating there. I welcomed the cold colouring of the east as if it had been a ship, and watched the stars dying and the frozen shore darkening to the dim and sifting dawn behind it, against which the outline of the cliffs ran in a broken streak of ink. The rising of the sun gave me fresh life. The ice ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... temperature of the river close by fell to 32 degrees during the night, and rose to 37 degrees in the day. In my tent, the temperature fluctuated with the state of the fire, from 26 degrees at night to 58 degrees when the sun beat on it; but the only choice was between cold and suffocating smoke. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... fence and walked up the avenue, slipping on the fir needles which lay two inches thick on the ground. It was still, dark, and only here and there in the tops of the trees shimmered a bright gold light casting the colours of the rainbow on a spider's web. The smell of the firs was almost suffocating. Then I turned into an avenue of limes. And here too were desolation and decay; the dead leaves rustled mournfully beneath my feet, and there were lurking shadows among the trees. To the right, in an old orchard, a goldhammer ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... cruel—far from it. They little knew how much pain their sufferings caused me; how earnestly I endeavoured to lessen or neutralise the nuisances which the pursuit of science entailed. But I could not consume my own smoke, or prevent explosions, or convert bad and suffocating odours into ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... all these ladies, and, with angelic devotion, remains shut up for hours in this dark, narrow, suffocating box, through the grating of which two penitents are continually ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "The car is suffocating," she said. "However, the worst is over. We shall not have to spend another such a night. You are still ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... my God!" As if suffocating, she pressed her hand upon her heart, and bowed her head till it rested on the table. And then he heard her murmur in ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... and spent the rest of the day in a state of intense depression. Her attic was so suffocating that she could not stay in it, but there was a general sitting-room downstairs, and she went there and contrived to make herself as wretched as she could over a well-thumbed novel which another girl had left behind her on the ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... questions, he sketched in broad detail his short career, glorifying himself as the prize scholar and the erstwhile Grand Llama of Budge Street, and drawing a dismal picture of the factory. Barney Bill listened comprehendingly. Then, smoking a well-blackened clay, he began to utter maledictions on the suffocating life in towns and to extol his own manner of living. Having an appreciative audience, he grew eloquent over his lonely wanderings the length and breadth of the land; over the joy of country things, the sweetness of the fields, the wayside flowers, the vaulted highways in the leafy summer, the quiet, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... across the floor in imminent fear of dropping through to the wasteway, and overwhelmed at times by the suffocating smoke and fiery sparks. When his courage and endurance were all but spent he reached a broken place in the wall and staggered into the refreshing outer air. How ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... for war contends; Some would exclude their foes, and some admit their friends. The helpless king is hurried in the throng, And, whate'er tide prevails, is borne along. Thus, when the swain, within a hollow rock, Invades the bees with suffocating smoke, They run around, or labor on their wings, Disus'd to flight, and shoot their sleepy stings; To shun the bitter fumes in vain they try; Black vapors, issuing from ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... received a suffocating blow full in the face, not from Mr. Bender's fist but from the solid bundle of books at the end of the strap. Ramsey saw eight or ten objectives instantly: there were Wesley Benders standing full length in the air ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... unharmed, he exclaimed, "Pass her along to the deck; there are more rooms to be searched." In this way did he move about rapidly, but coolly, and did not again return to the deck until he had satisfied himself that not a single woman was in the burning, steaming, suffocating chamber. His intimate friend, Mr Trotman, who had followed him down almost immediately, found the poor lap-dog moaning under a heap of ruins, and was the means of restoring ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... dear Miss Hamelyn," went on Madame Petrucci. "You must excuse me for shouting in your presence, but we have only one little servant, and during this suffocating weather I find that any movement reminds me of approaching age." The old lady smiled, as if that ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... pleasure, like a man newly restored to liberty. He even spoke to his leader, contrary to his custom unless addressed:—"Methinks the air of yonder halls, valorous Captain, carries with it a perfume, which, though it may be well termed sweet, is so suffocating, as to be more suitable to sepulchrous chambers, than to the dwellings of men. Happy I am that I am free, as I ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... corpses lying in the grass were too numerous to count, but at a rough estimate there must have been several thousands. The air of that beautiful valley was suffocating on account of the stench they emitted, and the river was poisoned by the heaps of bodies that ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... evening and called him "a stupid," half in sport and half in earnest; and when he had delivered that excellent woman into the care of her liege lord and had seen them securely packed into the horse-car that was to drag them tediously homeward in company with a great multitude of suffocating fellow-sufferers, he felt it; and all the way out the dark street and up the hill that ran, or seemed to run, into outer darkness—where his home was—he felt as if he had never been the man he was until now, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... lips—hideous, detestable thought—his lips met mine! His whole spirit seemed diffusing itself throughout my frame. I thought my body was destined to be the habitation of some accursed fiend—that I was undergoing the horrid process of demoniacal possession! Though gasping, almost suffocating, for I could not disengage myself from his deadly fangs, I exerted my utmost strength. One cry was to Heaven, but it was the last; the soul seemed to have exhausted herself with the effort. All subsequent and sensible impressions vanished; and I remember nothing save horrible incoherent ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... thus in haste, she was lured aside by the clang of bells and the glare of a fire. No child ever resisted that combination, and Nan was still a good deal of a child. Almost before she knew, it she was wedged fast in a crowd. The pressure was suffocating; and, to her alarm, she found herself surrounded by a rough-looking set of men. They were probably harmless workingmen, but Nan did not know that. She became frightened, and tried to escape, but her strength was not equal to it. Near the verge of panic, she was fairly ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the city is a brazen skillet, whereon mankind, assailed by the sun from above and by the stored-up heat from below, fries on both sides like an egg; when nerves are worn to frazzle-ends; when men and women, suffocating by tedious degrees in the packed and steaming tenements, lie there and curse the day they were born—then comes the annual "crime wave," as the papers love to name it. In truth the papers make it first and then they name it. Misdeeds of great and small degree are ranged together and ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Captain the Hon. Richard Mildare, late of the Grey Hussars—was dead. No hand made murderous by the lust of gold had helped him to his death. Sudden failure of the heart is common in aggravated cases of rheumatic fever, and with one suffocating struggle, one brief final pang, he had gone to join her he loved. But his dead face did not look at rest. There was some reflection in it of the terror that had come upon him in the watches of that ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... a considerable propaganda of disease. A more serious argument for the good of war is that it evokes heroic qualities that it has brought out almost incredible quantities of courage, devotion, and individual romance that did not show in the suffocating peace time that preceded the war. The reckless and beautiful zeal of the women in the British and French munition factories, for example, the gaiety and fearlessness of the common soldiers everywhere; these things have always been there—like champagne sleeping in ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... continuing to chirp for a while like hoarse sparrows. Occasionally there will come out of the darkness of the river a disagreeable sound as if some huge animal were gasping for its last breath before suffocating in the mud. The sound has its effect, even upon animals, coming as it does out of the black mysterious night, warning them not to venture far for fear some uncanny force may drag them to death in the dismal waters. It is the night call ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... Reverend Mother had done I sat motionless and speechless, with an aching and suffocating heart, staring down on the garden over ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... of fare; they have their health miserably impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the close vapor of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense fires, and constant drudgery necessary in refining and managing the products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should we pity the unhappy ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... cannot even writhe under the anguish of shame, wrath, and apprehended bodily torture! The pile is lighted,—the last words of the reckless priest have died upon mine ear, and his figure and countenance, with the myriad forms and faces, of the insulting multitude around me, are lost in suffocating volumes of uprising, dense, white smoke! The blaze enfolds me like a garment! my unspeakable tortures,—my infernal agonies have commenced!—the diabolical shouts and shrieks of the fiendish spectators—the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... unexpectedly helped itself, and in twelve hours time by stool, and vomit, she voided about five gallons of dirty looking water, which greatly relieved her for some days, but gathered again as the swelling returned, and always abounded with a hectic, or suffocating asthma in her stomach, and either a canine appetite or loathing. She has lately voided several extraneous membranes different from the former, and so frequent, that it keeps her very low, some of which ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... the flames of a few poor slender tapers which flicker against the walls in stone arches, a dense crowd of human figures veiled in black, in a place overpowering and suffocating—underground, no doubt—which is filled with the perfume of the incense of Arabia; and a noise of almost wicked movement, which sirs us to alarm and even horror: bleatings of new-born babies, cries of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... scorched the earth that not the smallest drop of dew glittered on any leaf or blade of grass; it was all arid, brown and burned into a dryness as of fever. But Seaton was far too much engrossed with himself and his own business to note the landscape, or to be troubled by the suffocating closeness of the atmosphere,—he stood gazing with the idolatry of a passionate lover at a small, plain metal case, containing a dozen or more small plain metal cylinders, as small as women's thimbles, all neatly ranged side by ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... glass of champagne; she thought she could no longer support the situation. She almost felt she hated Henry and his devotion,—it was paralyzing her, suffocating her—crushing her life. Michael never spoke to her—beyond a casual word—and at length they all went back to the ball-room, where an extra was being played—Michael, for a moment, standing by her side. Then a sudden ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... persons in the community who are really happy in their life's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial ruffians whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances one is swamped by—as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity—in the streets of all our ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... gadding or coquetting. Fond to be seen, she kept a bevy Of powder'd coxcombs at her levy; The 'squire and captain took their stations, 55 And twenty other near relations; Jack suck'd his pipe, and often broke A sigh in suffocating smoke; While all their hours were pass'd between Insulting repartee or ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... face, he knew the hissing serpent and the preserver of his life were one and the same. With horrible hisses the monster encircled him. Its fetid breath was in his face, its deadly fangs ready to strike his death-blow, and, with a suffocating cry, Sir Everard a-woke from his nightmare and ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... sudden the moon, which shone exceeding bright, was overcast, and the clouds appeared of a glowing red, like the fiery heat of a burning furnace; hollow murmurs were heard at a distance, and a putrid and suffocating smell arose; when, in the midst of the fiery clouds, the black form of a haggard and hideously distorted female became visible, furiously riding on an unwieldy monster ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... margins by a chevaux de frise of strong hairs, and surrounded by muscular fibres by which they can be hermetically sealed, effectually prevent the entrance of the fine particles of sand which the suffocating storms of the desert raise in fiery clouds, destructive to the lord of the creation. Erect on those stilt-like legs, the giraffe surveys the wide expanse, and feeds at ease, for those mild, large eyes are so placed that ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... air, clutched strangely in constricting arms; an odor of rotted flesh was in his nostrils, sickening, suffocating! Beyond and almost beneath him a cauldron of green gaped open, and he saw within it a pool of thick liquid that eddied and steamed to give ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... evidently attempting to direct their men away from some grave danger. At last the report came back to us. "They have fired the pits ahead." "We are hemmed in by flames in front and flood behind." "Help, John Carter; we are suffocating," and then there swept back upon us at the rear a wave of dense smoke that sent us, stumbling and ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sight, after a sharp fit as though a demon were going out of him, as he rolled on the turf of the cloister to which he had fled alone from the suffocating church, where the crowd still awaited the Procession of the relics and the Mass De reliquiis quae continentur in Ecclesiis, seemed indeed to have cured the madness of Denys, but certainly did not restore ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... in the sands, nor is it shrunken in its volume. The fire that was kindled on Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes. The rushing of the mighty wind that woke on that morning has not calmed and stilled itself into the stagnancy and suffocating breathlessness of midday heat. The same fulness of the Spirit which filled the believers on that day is available for us all. If, like that waiting Church of old, we abide in prayer and supplication, the gift will be given to us too, and we may repeat and reproduce, if not the miracles ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... board the Spanish ship no sound was to be heard save the roar and crackle of the flames, as Harry, putting out all his strength, lifted the inanimate body of his friend to his shoulder, and plunged along the passage through the blinding and suffocating smoke. ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... shook him as roughly as was safe in his depressed condition, but elicited no resistance or responsive movement. As it seemed very doubtful whether he was capable of swallowing, I dared not take the risk of pouring the liquid into his mouth for fear of suffocating him. A stomach-tube would have solved the difficulty, but, of course, I had not one with me. I had, however, a mouth-speculum which also acted as a gag, and, having propped the patient's mouth open with this, I hastily slipped off one of the rubber tubes from my stethoscope and inserted ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... realize it. Compared with the exquisite tenderness and joy of a St. Francis of Assisi, the courage and determination of a St. Joan of Arc, the intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain, the "brute male" who is wholly male, the "eternal feminine" with her suffocating sexuality seem on the one hand inhuman, on the other subhuman. It is not the absence of the masculine qualities in a man, or of the feminine qualities in a woman which raises them above the mass; it is the presence in power ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... below, where, notwithstanding the wind—sail that was let down close to where his hammock was slung, the heat of the small vessel was suffocating. The large coarse tallow candle in the purser's lantern, that hung beside his shoulder, around which the loathsome cockroaches fluttered like moths in a summer evening, filled the between decks with a rancid oil smell, and with smoke as from a torch, while it ran down and melted like fat before ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... that will not readily absorb and retain water. Speaking of the window, it must be observed that outdoor ventilation, without disturbing privacy, should be made possible. Often a bathroom becomes quite suffocating, and with weakly persons the danger of being overcome in a locked room is not to be ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... while the winches hammered and pulleys screamed as the cases came up and the empty slings went down. The heat got suffocating and the slant of masts and deck made matters worse, because the men must hold the derricks back with guys while the heavy goods cleared the coamings of the hatch. Much judgment was needed to drop them safely in the boats. Men gasped and choked, quarreled with each other, ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... closely. The gourd was filled, and the old woman was hurrying back, her hand still grasping the wrist of the girl, when she was suddenly seized so violently by the throat as to cause her to release her captive, and to prevent her making any other sound than a sort of gurgling, suffocating noise. The Serpent passed his arm round the waist of his mistress and dashed through the bushes with her, on the north side of the point. Here he immediately turned along the beach and ran towards the canoe. A more direct course could ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... there be such a thing when there is a single sick baby dying for lack of nutrition—a single convalescent suffocating for want of country air—a single family without fire or blankets? Suggest to your wife that she give up a dinner gown and use the money to send a tubercular office boy to the Adirondacks—and listen to her excuses! Is there not some charitable organization that does such things? Has not his family ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to the refreshment-room to get ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... failing her. The heat, more and more intense, was suffocating her. They kept the door shut, because Lorilleux caught cold from the least draught. Then as they still did not speak of the marriage, she wanted to go away and gently pulled Coupeau's jacket. He understood. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Varney; "I have seen and smelled enough to spoil my appetite. I broke the window, however, and let in the air; it reeked of sulphur, and such like suffocating steams, as if the very devil had ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... therewith came, full-grown, never wholly to leave him, with the certainty that even children do sometimes die, the physical horror of death, with its wholly selfish recoil from the association of lower forms of life, and the suffocating weight above. No benign, grave figure in beautiful soldier's things any longer abroad in the world for his protection! only a few poor, piteous bones; and above them, possibly, a certain sort of figure he hoped not to see. For sitting one day in the garden below an open window, he heard ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... countenance, and the veins of the neck to swell and become knotted; the voice in speaking acquires a sharp, crowing, or croupy sound, while the inspirations have a harsh, metallic intonation. After a few hours, a quantity of thick, ropy mucus is thrown out, hanging about the mouth, and causing suffocating ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... was met by a rush of cool and fragrant air. It was too late to see the mountain, lights were twinkling everywhere in the dark trees. Cherry got a driver, rattled and jerked up to the house in a surrey, and jumped out, her heart almost suffocating her. ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... describe the horrors of that night, or rather morning, before the day broke—the ship rolling and pitching on before a heavy sea (whither she went no one considered, provided she was kept before the wind)—the suffocating smoke which rose from the depths of the hold—the cries of despair heard on every side—the scenes of cowardly fear and intense selfishness which were exhibited. Still we floated; but I expected every instant ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... river, instead of taking the short cut recommended by the fugitive Snake, whom they now set down for a thorough deceiver. The heat of the weather was oppressive, and their horses were, at times, rendered almost frantic by the stings of the prairie flies. The nights were suffocating, and it was almost impossible to sleep, from the swarms ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... became confusedly conscious of some disturbance around her. She thought at first that it must be Archie noisily entering the neighboring chamber. But soon she heard loud cries and sat upright, listening. Then she became aware of a thick, suffocating atmosphere and the acrid taste of smoke in her mouth. The electric light would not respond to her touch. She knew what it meant—Fire! With one bound she leaped from her bed and ran, just as she was in nightdress, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... found it by instinct. From the first he strove to free French music from the oppression of the foreign tradition that was suffocating it.[79] ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... been on Maggie's name—a name she never thought to hear again on earth, as she was pressed back, sick and suffocating. But suddenly a voice rang out above all confused voices and moaning hungry waves, and above ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... kitchen he perceived the cause of the uproar, although he could see nothing else, for the dense suffocating vapour with which the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... into the seat ahead of Bland. He placed his feet, pulled down his goggles, grasped the wheel and felt himself balanced—poised, with a drumming beat in his throat, a suffocating fulness in his chest. His moment had come, he thought swiftly, as one thinks when facing a sudden, whelming event. The biggest moment in his life—the moment that he had dreamed of—the culmination of all his hopes while he studied and worked—the ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... the northern end of the great S-shaped bend of the Nile, he mounted his dromedary and followed the narrow winding path which has been worn out during thousands of years through the dry hollows of the Nubian desert, over scorched and weathered volcanic knolls and through dunes of suffocating sand. ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... is it? Twelve dollars? For the privilege of suffocating in this compact little Black Hole? By my halidom, Comrade Gooch, that gentleman whose name you are so shortly to tell us has a very fair idea of how to charge! But who am I that I should criticise? Here are the simoleons, as our young friend, Comrade Maloney, would call them. ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... to carry the cinders from the furnace to the deck, and there throw them into the sea. It was very hard work: the baskets were heavy, the ladders narrow, and the change from the pure air above to the stifling atmosphere below absolutely suffocating. On the third trip Jack felt his legs giving way under him. He found it impossible to even lift his basket, and sank into a corner half fainting. One of the stokers, seeing his condition, brought him a large flask ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... suggests the attitude of the newly awakened soul. In freshness and beauty it is turning toward the light. But in human experience something occurs which Sir Joshua has not tried to depict. A clammy hand reaches up from the deeps out of which rise suffocating clouds, and that pure spirit finds itself enveloped in darkness and fastened to the earth. The humiliation is complete. What has occurred? Only what has happened again and again; and what will continue to happen for no one knows how long. The animal has gotten the better of the spirit. The ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... appropriate colours, the horror of mind brought on by thoughts of their future unknown destination, of which they can augur nothing but misery from all that they have yet seen? How shall I make known their situation, while labouring, under painful disease, or while struggling in the suffocating holds of their prisons, like animals enclosed in an exhausted receiver? How shall I describe their feelings as exposed to all the personal indignities, which lawless appetite or brutal passion may suggest? How shall I exhibit their ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... was stretched a cord upon which were hung to dry, huge and manifold strips of salt meat. To my uneducated olfactories it seemed past the turning point and far on the road to utter ruin—the smell was so suffocating and sickening. ...
— Six Days on the Hurricane Deck of a Mule - An account of a journey made on mule back in Honduras, - C.A. in August, 1891 • Almira Stillwell Cole
... said Brandur. Too bad! And he blew out his breath, as though suffocating from strong smoke or ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... shed its yellow rays around, but by no means lighted the dormitory. The plumbing was open, and the odours coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and from the hot air of the stove—windows and doors being tightly closed—made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating. ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... sending the fire in every direction. Our eyes began to smart painfully, and we felt ourselves suffocating and choking in ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... pale. "No," she said in a suffocating voice, "such is the case; but can you wonder that I forebore to mention that fact? My daughter knows nothing of that—nor did ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... room. Fenwick thrust his hands into his pockets, with a muttered exclamation, and walked to the window. He looked out upon a Westmoreland valley in the first flush of spring; but he saw nothing. His blood beat in heart and brain with a suffocating rapidity. So his chance was ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is decidedly the warmest spot I ever inhabited. We all sleep on the floor and keep our clothes in our trunks—except Lilly, who has an armoir without doors. Knives and forks for dinner to-day, though the table still consists of a single plank. The house really has a suffocating effect on me, there is such a close look about it. The front is fully a foot below the level of the street, while quite a flight of steps leads from the back door to the yard. In fact, the whole town consists of abrupt little mounds. It is rather ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... Just then a strange, suffocating odor began to permeate the air—little wreaths of pale smoke made their slow way through the boards of the deck—and a fierce gust of wind, blowing seawards from the mountains, swayed the Valkyrie uneasily to and fro. Slowly, and with evident reluctance, Svensen commenced ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... I thought I heard a shot off beyond the river. But I couldn't be certain. The whine of the wind that comes with a fire, the crackle of the fire itself, the manifold sounds that echoed between the canyon walls and the pungent, suffocating smoke, all conspired against clear thinking or hearing. I listened a moment, but heard no more. Then, with time at a premium, I hastened to straighten out the tangle of pack-animals. Mac loomed up in the general blur ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Masanath, suffocating with wrath and rebellion and overpowered with an exaggerated appreciation of her shame, tumbled down in the shadows of the narrow passage and wrapped her ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... dunnage, tripped on crazy guy-ropes and insanely planted pegs, and fell again and again upon frozen dumps and mounds of hoarded driftwood. At times, when he deemed he had drawn clear, his head dizzy with the painful pounding of his heart and the suffocating intake of his breath, he slackened down; and ever the shadow leaped out of the gloom and forced him on in heart-breaking flight. A swift intuition lashed upon him, leaving in its trail the cold chill of superstition. The persistence of the shadow he invested with his gambler's ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... Roads there were none, and supplies became difficult to secure. The surface of the land melted and spinning wheels churned it; traffic halted, vehicles sank, horses drowned. Between rains the sun dried the mud, the wind whirled it into suffocating clouds. Sandstorms swept over the miserable inhabitants; tornadoes, thick with a burden of cutting particles, harried them until they cursed the fate that had ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... serene at this season. Objects may be clearly distinguished at the distance of several hundred yards, so that one may even shoot by moonlight. The months of June and July offer very little variation in the weather or temperature. In August a suffocating heat reigns throughout the day, and at night it is useless to seek for coolness; a faint zephyr is succeeded by a calm of several hours. The atmosphere is heavy and oppressive, and the body, weakened by perspiration, becomes languid; the appetite fails, and the mosquitos, buzzing ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... into the attic, but the staircase, he found, was full of suffocating smoke, and he dared not venture below the next floor. He took her into a long dormitory, shut the door on those pungent and pervasive fumes, and opened the window to discover the fire escape was now against the house, and all Fishbourne boiling with excitement as an immensely helmeted ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... lived throughout it, and seemed indeed to draw vitality from it, as flowers the most delicate from noxious air; but they collapsed at the searching breath of free inquiry, and could not abide persecution. The torch of Philosophy never kindled the suffocating fagot, under whose smoke Theology was mistaken for Religion. Theology had, until now, been speculative and quiescent: she abandoned to Philosophy these humbler qualities: instead of allaying and dissipating, as Philosophy had always done, she excited and she directed ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... grave across my brow Plays no wind of healing now, And fire and ice within me fight Beneath the suffocating night. ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... arms in illustration)—"then fall, and roll back, and gather, and come rushing on again; and I feel every time—every time—that they are coming right at me!"—she clutched her throat as if she were suffocating; "and if I had stayed I should have shrieked, and then I should have been whipped. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... sad, solitary figure, like a dream of tragic Greece, glides across the scene. The air grows cold and thin, with a sense of the presence of lost antiquity. The feeling of fate, vast, resistless, and terrible, rises like a suffocating vapor; and the hopeless woe of the face, the pathetic dignity of the form, assure you, before she speaks, that this is indeed Rachel. The scenery is poor and hard; but its severe outlines and its conventional character serve to suggest Greece. The ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... malicious spirit still more by writing, under the guise of a "Life of Zoilus," a bitter attack on Dennis—the great object of the poet's fear and mortal abhorrence. For these and other services, Pope rewarded him, after his usual manner, with large offerings of that sweet and suffocating incense, by which he delighted, now to gain his enemies, and now to gratify his friends. With Gay, also, Parnell was intimate; and the latter, himself independent by his fortune, is said to have bestowed on this needy and improvident genius ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... speedily began to make an effort to reissue to the open air. Being thrust back and striving the more to get out, the afterhatch was forced down upon them. Over the other hatchway, in the fore part of the vessel, a wooden grating was fastened. To this, the sole inlet for the air, the suffocating heat of the hold and, perhaps, panic from the strangeness of their situation, made them flock, and thus a great part of the space below was rendered useless. They crowded to the grating and clinging to it ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... there, Tom?" I heard her voice ask in a moment. Her voice, did I say? Nay, not hers, but a voice I had never heard before,—the voice of a woman suffocating with anguish. ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... drop of ten feet, and over this Muskwa shot with a momentum that carried him twice as far out into the pond. He hit with a big splash, and disappeared. Down and down he went, where everything was black and cold and suffocating; then the life-preserver with which nature had endowed him in the form of his fat brought him to the surface. He began to paddle with all four feet. It was his first swim, and when he finally dragged himself ashore ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... the words. He had evidently said his say. As his hand left hers, Sylvia drew a deep hard breath, as of one emerging from a suffocating atmosphere. She had never felt so oppressed, so fettered, with evil in the whole of her life. And yet he had not urged her to any line of action. He had merely somewhat baldly, wholly dispassionately, told her the truth, and the very absence of ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... at the impression the man's information had made upon him. Dismay, anger, and shame struggled for the mastery in his breast. What a suffocating air he breathed in this house! How vile and underhand and insincere were the people by whom he was surrounded! But was this true that Auguste told him? Did he not lie and slander like the rest? Was he not doing the ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... side, that of the iceberg, lying black in the moonlight like a great coal crystal, grimly awaiting our approach, but the reality, as well as the figment, had disappeared when I emerged at sunrise from the suffocating cabin, to the atmosphere of the cool and quiet quarter-deck, which had just ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... recovered in some degree from the shock of finding herself actually on trial, she endeavored to collect her faculties; but the violent palpitation of her heart was almost suffocating, and in her ears the surging as of an ocean tide, drowned the accents of the magistrate. At first the words were as meaningless as some Sanskrit formula, but gradually her attention grasped and comprehended. In ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... impressed us more and more as a strange compound of severity and softness, took pity on Gerbeaux and Stevens, and bringing them forth from that pestilential hole next door, he convoyed them in to stay overnight with us. They told us that by now the air in the improvised prison was absolutely suffocating, what with the closeness, the fouled straw, the stale food and the proximity of so many dirty human bodies all packed into the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... that same afternoon; but when we attempted to land upon the islet we found that although the ashes were black on the surface they were still a dull glowing red in the heart of them, and so hot that they were not yet to be stood upon, leaving out of the question the veil of acrid, suffocating, blue smoke that still wreathed and ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... two shells from the Confederate batteries passed through her cotton armor, one of them setting it on fire near the starboard wheel, while the discharge of her own bow guns produced the same effect forward. The flames spread rapidly, and the dense smoke was suffocating the men in the engine-room. Seeing that, if he delayed longer in order to ram again, he would probably lose his vessel, Ellet turned her head down stream and arrived safely abreast the army below. The fire was subdued ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... (mod. Sorgente Mefita), a small lake in the territory of the Hirpini, IO m. S.E. of Aeclanum, close to the Via Appia. There are now two small pools which exhale carbonic acid gas and sulphuretted hydrogen. Close by was a temple of the goddess Mephitis, with a cave from which suffocating vapours rose, and for this reason the place was brought into connexion with the legends of the infernal regions. Virgil's description (Aeneid, vii. 563) is not, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... took place. First the earth trembled and rose and fell for many miles as if shaken by an earthquake. A smothered roar, swelling into pealing thunder ensued, which appalled every mind. Immense volumes of smoke, thick and suffocating, instantaneously rolled over the city and the beleaguering camp, converting day into night. A horrible melange of timbers, rocks, guns and mutilated bodies of men, women and children were hurled into the air through this storm cloud of war, and fell ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... not propose to weary the reader by detailing at length the progress of Madame's Saturday campaign. Her methods of offence will, by now, have become clear. To the "suffocating gas" of her smiles, and the "liquid fire" of her eyes she had added the devastating "Tank"—her despatch-case. She worked its mysteries unceasingly. When it was not under her own hand it reposed—during meal times, for example—in the steel safe ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... then, late already, had hurled herself into a cab, and observed, half-way to the station, that the horse was on the point of collapse; had changed cabs and had arrived at the station to see her train just going out. 'So there I paced up and down like a caged, suffocating lioness for over an hour, had a loathsome lunch, and read half a dozen papers before my train started, I came third class with a weary mother and two babies, the sun beat in all the way, and I had three changes. I'm hardly fit to be seen, and not fit to speak. But, ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... in it!" said Skippy, who was suffocating. "Snorky, what I said goes! Money isn't everything. No—sentiment's bigger. Fifty-fifty, I said, ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... on an intolerable day peculiar to the Dakota plain. A frightfully hot, withering, and powerful wind was abroad. The thermometer stood nearly a hundred in the shade, and the wind, so far from being a relief, was suffocating because of its heat and the dust it swept ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... sultry, not a cloud in the sky, and not a breath of wind stirring; and I confess I felt sick with a suffocating sense of horror when I reflected on the terrible sight I ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... Miles Canon, therefore, the season was far advanced and both men, without knowing it, were in a condition of mind to welcome any sort of a squall that would serve to freshen the unbearably stagnant atmosphere of amiability in which they were slowly suffocating. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... flung down relentlessly upon this part of the world. Inside this figurative bowl it was chill, yet the air was stirless. It was without refreshment; it became a labor and not an exhilaration to breath it. A pall of suffocating dust rolled above and about the Irrawaddy flotilla boat which, buffeted by the strong irregular current, strained at its cables, now at the bow, now at the stern, not dissimilar to the last rocking of a deserted swing. This sensation was quite perceptible to the girl who leaned ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... were affected, had taken her to spend the winter at Antibes with a wealthy aunt. She despised Chevalier for his gentleness and tranquil manner. But the recollection of that face and that voice disturbed her. She could not eat, she felt as if she were suffocating. In the evening she was attacked by such an excruciating internal pain that she thought she must be dying. She thought this feeling of prostration was due to the fact that it was two days since she had seen Robert. It was only nine o'clock. She hoped that she might ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... Harriet and Richard the delicious, secret game of hide-and- go-seek made everything else in the world insignificant. Harriet opened the boxes of flowers he sent her with a heart suffocating with joy. Richard consented to be absent from the dinner table over which she presided with an agony of renunciation that almost made him feel ill. When he chanced one day to meet her with Nina, in a breezy, awninged summer restaurant, the sight of the slender figure thrilled him as he had never ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... for eight days. The air was like a furnace; the tar melted, the seams of the ship yawned; the salt meat became putrid; the wheat was parched as if with fire; the hoops shrank from the wine and water casks, some of which leaked and others burst, while the heat in the holds of the vessels was so suffocating that no one could remain below a sufficient time to prevent the damage that was taking place. The mariners lost all strength and spirits, and sank under the oppressive heat. It seemed as if the old fable of ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske |
