"Rasping" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knew perfectly well there was not, but she reached for a small pile of letters in a pigeonhole on her right and glanced over them rapidly. Her sour visage and rasping voice softened perceptibly as she smiled on the ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... which was sedate and formal in the extreme. The favourite dance was a fast, hopping waltz, in which the swain seized his partner firmly in both hands under the arms and put her through a vigorous test of wind and agility. The floor was rough and sanded, and the rasping of feet almost drowned the music. There were long Virginia reels, led with peremptory dash by a master of ceremonies, full of grace and importance. Swarthy faces were bedewed with sweat and dark eyes glowed with excitement, but ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... was entitled, "To a Friend, who had declared his intention of writing no more Poetry." In reading the Poem immediately after it was written, the rasping force which Mr. C. gave to the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... his singing; and for twenty years the fibre ached. Nothing, again, was more notable than the formal chivalry of this unmannered man to the person on earth with whom he was the most familiar. He was conscious of his own innate and often rasping vivacity and roughness and he was never forgetful of his first visit to the Austins and the vow he had registered on his return. There was thus an artificial element in his punctilio that at times might ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... might,—Patrasche in his heart was very grateful to his fate, and thought it the fairest and the kindliest the world could hold. Though he was often very hungry indeed when he lay down at night; though he had to work in the heats of summer noons and the rasping chills of winter dawns; though his feet were often tender with wounds from the sharp edges of the jagged pavement; though he had to perform tasks beyond his strength and against his nature,—yet he was grateful and content: he did his duty with each day, and the eyes that he loved ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... 'Oh, Henrietta, I hope not. No, no, I'm not going to believe that, 'and, temporarily united, the third person left behind though following closely, they returned to the lighted house. As they stood in the hall they could hear the rasping sound of Caroline's breathing. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... abruptly serious when Miss Gabus, his regular stenographer, entered and stared at the interloper with amazement, comma, suspicion, comma, and hostility, period. She murmured a very rasping "I beg your pardon," and stepped out, as Marie Louise rose from the writing-machine and brought him an extraordinarily accurate ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed In the vole's empty house, still drove afield To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees And build their young ones their hutched nurseries; Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison Nor had the whisper through the tansies run Nor weather-wisest bird gone home. How then Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken Lightning coming? troubled up they stole To the deep-shadowed ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... their attention was the ships themselves. These, being lashed together by means of the grapnels, were grinding and rasping each other's sides so alarmingly, as they rolled and plunged in the sea that was running, that they had already inflicted upon each other an appreciable amount of damage, and threatened to do a great deal more if prompt preventive measures ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... type of woman to lose herself or betray astonishment. She pushed her spectacles sharply above her eyes, looked at me sternly, and said in a rasping voice. ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... cried the general in a rasping voice, getting up suddenly from the desk on which he had been sitting. "I will not ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... to watch the moonlit scenery, and to muse on—mamma, wondering if she missed her child, and felt as lonely and depressed as I did. So I fell asleep in my chair, and was awakened suddenly by the touch of an icy hand, and a rasping cough in my ear. I started up. Oh, heavens! I was not alone! Beside me stood the figure of an old monk with a ghastly white ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... me you were going to camp in the middle of the morning?" Stott demanded in his rasping voice ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... but the authorities, as represented by the sentries, were not disposed to let us enjoy what they were denied. The guard was constantly changing and the clattering and rasping of orders and commands repeatedly woke us up. Then again, at frequent intervals, the sentry would enter. Seeing me asleep he would either give me a prod with his bayonet or a smart rap with the butt-end of his rifle to ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... intervals, sounded through the house. Morel, in his room, slept on. Paul and Annie sat crouched, huddled, motionless. The great snoring sound began again—there was a painful pause while the breath was held—back came the rasping breath. Minute after minute passed. Paul looked at her again, bending low ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... A rasping sound, as of metal scraping against the hull, came from one point in the circumference, and here the portholes were obscured by a dark mass that blotted out ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... floating aslant in the air. Having supped, the Cossacks lay down to sleep, after hobbling their horses and turning them out to graze. They lay down in their gaberdines. The stars of night gazed directly down upon them. They could hear the countless myriads of insects which filled the grass; their rasping, whistling, and chirping, softened by the fresh air, resounded clearly through the night, and lulled the drowsy ear. If one of them rose and stood for a time, the steppe presented itself to him strewn with the sparks of glow-worms. At times the ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... disreputable ancestor. He is drinking up their happiness, their prospects for this life, and, perhaps, for the life to come. Sometimes an appreciation of what he is doing comes upon him. His nervous system is all a tangle. From crown of head to sole of foot he is one aching, rasping, crucifying, damning torture. Where is he? In hell on ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... down my book and listened. It was only the choking gurgle of a broken rain-pipe outside: then it was the ripple and swish of a meadow stream. To make out the voices of redwings and marsh-wrens in the rasping notes of the city sparrows behind the shutter required much more imagination. But I did it. I wanted to hear, and the splash of ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... against each other, were still for a long moment, and then my gasping, rasping voice ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... denied to the despairing seamen, from the fact that two enormous bergs, the vanguard of the fleet, had already reached the edge of the floe, on opposite sides of the bay, to windward of the entrapped barque, and were rapidly rasping their way down toward the apex of the triangle where the whaler was already shooting into stays for what must evidently be her last tack. This would be so short that she could scarcely fail to miss stays on her next attempt, when she would drift helplessly down into the corner ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... yawn, and rides on. A mile or so along we crossed a trickle of water coming from Wild Burro Springs, so named because the burros common to this region come there to drink. Just as we drew rein to allow our horses to quench their thirst, the sultry silence was shattered beyond repair. Such a rasping, choking, jarring sound rolled and echoed back and forth from crag to crag! "What's that?" I gasped, after I had swallowed my heart two or three times. The Chief pointed to a rock lying a few feet away. Over the top of this an enormous pair of ears ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... Presently they heard the rasping sound of Sally's door as it was drawn open, and then they saw her go through the passage and step down into the yard. Rising quickly, Mrs. Dawson went to the door and looked out. She descried her daughter making her way hastily towards ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... they drew near the house where the blue paper curtains were hanging before the windows and Eunice Plympton's face was pressed against the pane. The daisies and violets and summer grass were withered and dead, and the naked branches of the lilac bush brushed against the house with a mournful, rasping sound, which reminded her of the tall sign-post in Chicopee, which used to creak so in the winter wind, and keep her Aunt Barbara awake. To the right of the house, and a little in the rear, were several large, square corn-cribs, and behind these an inclosure in which numerous ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... any party, and see merits and excuses in all; should do it (if I did) very slackly and easily, as if half in conversation. History for Children? This flows from my lessons to Austin; no book is any good. The best I have seen is Freeman's Old English History; but his style is so rasping, and a child can learn more, if he's clever. I found my sketch of general Aryan history, given in conversation, to have been practically correct—at least what I mean is, Freeman had very much the same stuff in his early chapters, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... names by the magic power of mere names usually suffice to satisfy the curiosity of most people and to allay their misgivings if any. Mr. Prohack now saw (when he looked downwards) a revolving disc which was grating against a stationary needle and thereby producing unpleasant rasping sounds. But it was also producing a quite different order of sounds. He did not in the least understand, and he did not suppose that anybody in the dance-studio understood, the delicate secret mechanism by ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... this hyar stranger calls hisself, Peanuts?" he demanded, bluntly, and when the other had told him he repeated the name thoughtfully. Then he shot out another question with the sharp peremptoriness of a prosecuting attorney, and in the high, rasping voice of his affliction. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... liquid inside generally sets them into a perspiration. Nothing but loaf sugar is used, and there is a very common practice of holding a lump in one hand and following a sip of the unsweetened tea with a nibble at the sugar. When several persons are engaged in this rasping process a curious ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... squalid dance-hall in the first place and submit to the test he had subjected her to! How must the dressing-room conversation of her colleagues in the chorus have revolted and sickened her? What must it mean to her to take his orders—sharp rasping orders, with the sting of ridicule in the tail of them when they had to be repeated;—to be addressed by her last name like a servant? Why, this very afternoon, how must she have felt, standing there like a manikin, ordered to put ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... while in the methodic unvarying note of her voice there was a rasping reiteration that began to affect the company. A slight gasping breath, uncontrollable, almost on the verge of hysterics, was heard, and a man nervously ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... terrible work to help run in and out of the porthole that amazing mass of metal, especially as the thing must be clone in a trice. Then, at the summons of a horrid, rasping rattle, swayed by the Captain in person, we were made to rush from our guns, seize pikes and pistols, and repel an imaginary army of boarders, who, by a fiction of the officers, were supposed to be assailing all sides ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... two fellers' daddy died in the penitentiary last spring." The Hon. Sam whistled mournfully, but he looked game enough when his opponent rose to speak—Uncle Josh Barton, who had short, thick, upright hair, little sharp eyes, and a rasping voice. Uncle Josh wasted ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... by detectives just as if for all the world he were an ordinary person—an obscure private citizen, say, or an ex-convict! The judge himself was very indignant, and his friends on the local press were rasping in their comments. In a long editorial entitled "The Shadow of the Spy," one Atlanta paper denounced the proceedings root and branch. It affirmed that the governmental spy system had assumed such proportions during the past few years as to threaten one ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... a rasping, mean, cold, starving, bony, freezing, busy-bodying side,' was the reply, delivered energetically; whereat Waring concluded the little man had had his own page of history back somewhere among the decorous ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but the odious and fleshy figure, as though seen for the first time ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... lost in the rasping of his throat, and, though he shrieked into my ear to make sure that I understood him above the howling of the wind, I could only make out that it was an endless ballad telling the fortune of a young man who went to ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... Concha had outwitted him. The sala of the Commandante's house was very large. The furniture had been removed and the walls hung with flags, those of Spain on three sides, the Russian, borrowed by Santiago from the ship, at the head of the room. Concha laughed gaily as Luis stormed about the sala rasping his ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... her husband. A temper naturally shrewish was soured till she grew positively terrible. She was not old, but she had aged; she deliberately set herself to extort by fear all that the world was inclined to refuse her, and was harsh and rasping as a file. Caustic to excess she had few friends among women; she surrounded herself with prim, elderly matrons of her own stamp, who lent each other mutual support, and people stood in awe of her. As for poor Pons, his relations with this fiend in petticoats were very much those ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... against his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established the fact that McGuire was ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... anchored submarine became more acute. A weird grating sound—the noise made by the hull rasping over the bed of the ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... A very loud rasping noise, like a vicious menace, sounded from the street, shivering instantaneously the delicate placidity of Mrs. Maldon's home. ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... speech of the afternoon. The most amusing was that of Mr. GINNELL, who kept the House in fits of laughter for ten minutes while in his most rasping tones he jerked out epigrams against "this thing calling itself a Government." The Coalition was described as "two poisons blended, which could not make a wholesome drink." Never before has he had such ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... uplifting of the smoke had been prearranged, the discovered troops burst into a rasping yell, and a hundred flames jetted toward the retreating band. A rolling gray cloud again interposed as the regiment doggedly replied. The youth had to depend again upon his misused ears, which were trembling and buzzing from the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... softly. The man in the wide bed seemed to be asleep. Tony and I sat down on the bench by the wall and leaned our arms on the table in front of us. The firelight flickered on the hewn logs that supported the thatch overhead. Pavel made a rasping sound when he breathed, and he kept moaning. We waited. The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... a grinding, rasping crash as if some great object were brushing resistlessly past a smaller one, and then ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... him, wooes him imperceptibly onwards. Now he is far from shore, and the multitudinous feet of the current are hurrying him away. The slow-moving boat is much nearer than it was a minute ago,—seems to be rasping towards him, in spite of the laziness of the impelling breeze. The boy, as yet unconscious of his peril, now glances shorewards, and sees the banks wheel past. The crowd of bathers is already far beyond hearing yet, frightened and tired, he wastes his ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... too, was another La Fontaine in simplicity, preparing for his grandest predications by sorrily rasping on an execrable fiddle. So, if the devil had lifted him up to a high mountain, showing him all he would give him, he would have simply invited him to his lonely cell, to have a jig to the tune of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... your article ("Some disputed Points in Music."—'Fortnightly Review,' July, 1876.) with much interest, except the latter part, which soared above my ken. I am greatly pleased that you uphold my views to a certain extent. Your criticism of the rasping noise made by insects being necessarily rhythmical is very good; but though not made intentionally, it may be pleasing to the females from the nerve cells being nearly similar in function throughout the animal kingdom. With respect to your letter, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... losing his friends as a result of his speech are at variance with the facts. Cautious Northerners naturally hesitated to support him and face both the popular convictions on fugitive slaves and the rasping vituperation that exhausted sacred and profane history in the epithets current in that "era of warm journalistic manners"; Abolitionists and Free Soilers congratulated one another that they had "killed Webster". In Congress no Northern man save Ashmun of Massachusetts supported him in ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... said in a hoarse, rasping voice, "I'm in a hurry. Guess natur' don't wait fer nuthin' when she gits busy on matters wot interest her; an' seein' Barnriff needs all the population that's comin' to it with so energetic a funeral maker as our friend, Angel Gay, ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... is known by various names: "Brant Bird," "Bead-bird," "Horse-foot-Snipe," "Sand-runner," "Calico-back," "Chicaric" and "Chickling." The two latter names have reference to its rasping notes, "Calico-back," to the variegated plumage of ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... cell there was a crack low down by the floor, through which she could see the light from Wolfe's. She had discovered it days before. She hurried in now, and, kneeling down by it, listened, hoping to hear some sound. Nothing but the rasping of the tin on the bars. He was at his old amusement again. Something in the noise jarred on her ear, for she shivered as she heard it. Hugh rasped away at the bars. A dull old bit of tin, not fit to cut ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... that our landlady, who has good sense and experience, thinks G. will not get well. Sometimes, in awful moments, I think so too; but then I cheer up and get quite elated. Last night as I lay awake, too weary to sleep, I heard a harsh, rasping sound like a large saw. I thought some animal unknown to me must be making it, it was so regular and frequent. But after a time I found it was a dying young soldier who lives farther from this house than Miss H. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... of too tight or too heavy clothing, or the failure properly to wash, cleanse, and ventilate the skin. Some of the lesser disturbances come from the chafing of collars, wristlets, and belts, and are, of course, relieved by loosening the clothing or substituting soft, comfortable cotton for rasping flannels. Others come from the use of too strong soaps, or the too frequent use of hot water, or too vigorous scrubbing of the skin, and these can be relieved by the avoidance of ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... few days ago Emile had stormed at her in his rasping French, because she had, with the vehemence of youth, denounced the Anarchist ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... their eyes ahead, there came a wild cry from the look-out forward of: "Port your helm, sir; port your helm!" followed, before Murray could spring to the assistance of the quartermaster at the wheel, by a splintering crash, the rending sound of steel rasping through steel. Then the little craft heeled over to starboard, until Murray felt himself sliding bodily down the steeply inclined deck towards the sea; while above, right over his head, as it seemed, he could dimly perceive the outline of a great, towering metal stem that still surged and sawed ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... out of the Grubstake Saloon I was in a peculiar state of exaltation. No longer was I conscious of the rasping cold, and it seemed to me I could have couched me in the deep snow as cosily as in a bed of down. Surpassingly brilliant were the lights. They seemed to convey to me a portentous wink. They twinkled ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... him. His face was thin, pale, and haggard, his eyes were more sombre, and beneath them there were heavy, dark stains of sleeplessness and care, his very voice, when presently he spoke, seemed to have lost the musical timbre that had earlier distinguished it; it was grown harsh and rasping. Disappointment after disappointment, set down to ill-luck, but in reality the fruit of incompetence, had served to sour him. The climax had been reached in the serious desertions after the Philips ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... appeal there was much creaking of locks and rasping of bolts, which ended in the door swinging slowly open, and disclosing the person who ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sand intermixed with plashy pools to seaward, and a desert of sand-hillocks on the land side. But now the brown, weather-hardened donkey-women haunt people that stray along the reaches, and delicate persons face the cold, rasping, ill-tempered blast on the promenade, and children dig in the sands; and, for want of something better, it seems to be determined that ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... more impatience than the Adjutant, Forbes, had seen him exhibit through many vexatious, worrying months. His voice took on a rasping note. He tapped the papers on the desk with ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... on the United States Supreme bench), called Lincoln to him. The Judge never could whisper, but in this instance he probably did his best. At all events, in attempting to whisper to Lincoln he trumpeted his rebuke in about these words, and in rasping tones that could be heard all over the court-room: 'Lincoln, I have been watching you and Lamon. You are impoverishing this bar by your picayune charges of fees, and the lawyers have reason to complain of you. You are now almost as poor as Lazarus, and if you don't make ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... was earnest, he was even a bit peremptory; but she felt perfectly certain that he was not treating her as a subject and a subject merely. His black eyes looked at her with a sort of sharp severity across the leg of the easel, and his rasping crayon promptly scratched down his impressions upon the promising blank of his canvas. Preciosa was slightly puzzled, but on the whole pleased. She knew she was worth looking at, and felt herself fit to stand the keenest scrutiny. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... there was a faint rasping sound as of wood passing over wood, making Denis turn sharply and put out his hand towards his sword, for it seemed to him that there was a tremulous motion in one of the panels of the wall behind where the King ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... was glad of the talk about obligation. It set him at a distance, immediately. He ceased to look lovingly, to indulge in the nerve-rasping little caresses. He became carefully formal. He was evidently eager to prove the sincerity of his protestations—too eager perhaps, her perverse mind suggested. Still, sincere or not, he held to ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... sage. He wore a blue flannel shirt, with loose trousers belted round his waist, and he crushed a soft felt hat between his hands; his hair was clipped close to his skull, and as he rubbed it now and then it gave out a pleasant rasping sound. ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... was being eyed in curiosity and impatience by the eager folk behind. He heard Mrs. Tutts's rasping whisper as ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... sounded again; there came a noise of clattering chains and the rattle of the key in the lock, and the rasping of the bolts dragged back. Then the gate swung slowly open, and Baron Conrad rode into the shelter of the White Cross, and as the hoofs of his war-horse clashed upon the stones of the courtyard within, the wooden gate ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... are so lonely, father and I. We silently accuse each other. He thinks my reckless truth-telling destroyed her timid spirit; I think his twenty-five years of tyranny did it. We both know how she hated our rasping, and we hate it ourselves. Yet, even at that hour when we stood beside her bed and knew the end was coming, he and I were at sword's points. What a hackneyed expression, but how terrible! Yes, the hateful swords of our spirits, my point toward his breast and his toward mine, gleamed ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... of people here to dinner tonight, and that made me miserable to begin with. I had to dress up in a stiff white dress with a sash, and Jen tied two big white fly-away bows on my hair that kept rasping my neck and tickling my ears in a most exasperating way. Then an old lady whom I detest tried to make me talk before everybody, and all I could do was to turn as red as a beet and stammer: "Yes, ma'am," "no, ma'am." It made Mother furious, because it is so old-fashioned to say "ma'am." Our ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... see snakes in all withered twigs, and am ready to flee at "the sound of a shaken leaf." And besides snakes, the earth and air are alive and noisy with forms of insect life, large and small, stinging, humming, buzzing, striking, rasping, devouring! ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... the most offensive type—more offensive even than a professional politician of unsavory record. At last victory was to reward the tactics of Victor Dorn, the slow, patient building which for several years now had been rasping the nerves of ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... of venomous, ironic phrases, then the dispute ceased and silence was restored. Petra, thus kept awake, sank into her own thoughts; again footfalls were heard in the corridor, this time light and rapid. Then came the rasping of the shutter-bolt of a balcony that was being ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... plenty of rooms, but they were too choice for every-day use. They were always tightly closed, with green paper shades down, lest the blessed sunshine should get a peep at her gaudy red and green carpets, and put the least mellowing touch an their crude and rasping colors. Nimpo thought of the best parlor with a sort of awe which she never felt toward any room ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... Ricardo. The others followed upon his heels. He flung himself at Celia's door and opened it He burst into the room, stood for a second, then ran to the window. He hid behind the curtain, looking out. With his hand he waved to his companions to keep back. The sound of wheels creaking and rasping rose to their ears. The cab had just come out into the road. Durette upon the box turned and looked towards the house. Just for a moment Hanaud leaned from the window, as Besnard, the Commissaire, had done, and, like Besnard again, he waved his hand. ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... Rasping groans of birchen cones Re-answering from shore to shore; Through the hush the snapping brush— Then silence, ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... had been a busy, happy winter, filled with work. Now that it was finished, there came upon Emma and Buck that unconscious and quite natural irritation which follows a long winter spent together by two people, no matter how much in harmony. Emma pulled herself up now and then, horrified to find a rasping note of impatience in her voice. Buck found himself, once or twice, fairly caught in a little whirlpool of ill temper of his own making. These conditions they discovered almost simultaneously. And like the comrades ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... withheld—some voice, in huge monotonous rage, of freedom-lover pent, Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing in those breakers, By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath, And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves, And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter, And undertones of distant lion roar, (Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear—but now, rapport for once, A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,) The first and last confession of the globe, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the Acme Film Company cleared his throat with a rasping noise that sounded very loud, coming as it did after fifteen minutes of complete silence. Luck, smoking a cigarette absent-mindedly by the window while he stared out across two vacant lots to a tawdry apartment house,—and saw a sage-covered plain instead of ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... rasping tongue on Mr. Alcott, Cynthia and the Rector's sister conferred in low tones about various urgent matters—furniture for the nurse's room, sheets, pillows, and the rest. The Alcotts were very poor, and the ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had expected that realization of the facts would produce these symptoms in him, but now that they had presented themselves she was finding them rasping to the nerves. "I should have thought ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... complained of the word "captious." Mr. Adams retaliated by reciting offensive language used by Mr. Canning, who in turn replied that he had been speaking only in self-defence. Mr. Canning found occasion to make again his peculiarly rasping remark that he should always strive to show towards Mr. Adams the deference due to his "more advanced years." After another very uncomfortable passage, Mr. Adams said that the behavior of Mr. Canning in making the observations of members ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... they'll get so stirred up that they'll put an independent ticket into the field. You'll have to fight 'em all over again at the polls. You're rasping them too hard." ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... wear his sackcloth, and rarely change it, though it caked into knots which chafed him fiercely. But, though the rule allowed, he would not go soft to his end, however much his friends might entreat him to put off the rasping hair. "No, no, God forbid that I should. This raiment does not scrape, but soothe; does not hurt, but help," he answered sternly. He gave exact details of how he was to be laid on ashes on the bare earth at the last with no extra sackcloth. No bishops or abbots being at hand ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... There were the thud of hammers, the rasping of a saw, and the clatter of wood from the other ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rasping, and repeating the blows, till the woods echoed the sonorous concussions, they became convinced that this plan would not serve their purpose, ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... With a rasping scream that set the Earthmen's teeth on edge, it charged for the wall on Dex's side. Dex just managed to swerve it with a blast from the tube so prolonged that half its great ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... but for those who regard a correct intonation as a thing of primal importance, it could not have been pleasing. Wieniawski belongs to that school of which Ole Bull is a prominent member, whose first article of belief is that genuine passion and fervour is signified by rasping the strings." ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... all about us a colony of long-armed wah-wah monkeys whistled and chattered, and farther away the sharp, rasping note of a cicada kept up a continuous protest ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... er lie," he repeated with a rasping voice, as he dashed the blood and dirt from his lips. "We war fightin' ter kill, an' I reckon yo' kin guess what hit war erbout," he added, flinging the last words up at ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... who with mien austere, Neglected dress, and loud insistent tones, More rasping than the wrongs which she bemoans, Walks through the land and wearies all who hear, While yet we know the need of such reform; So comes unlovely March, with wind and storm, To break the spell of winter, and set free The poisoned ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the audience for coming late. He scolded them for leaving early. Once he scolded them for coughing. They continued the rasping noise. After the intermission, on Stoky's orders, the 100-odd men of the orchestra walked out on the stage barking as if in the last stages of ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... naked Christ thundering with His empty hand among them; the voices moving up and down, round and round in endless unended cadences, become strange instruments (all sense of register and vocal cords departing), unearthly harps and bugles and double basses, rasping often and groaning like a broken-down organ, above which warbles the hautboy quaver of the sopranos. And the huge things on the ceiling, with their prodigious thighs and toes and arms and jowls crouch and cower and scowl, ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... were those of an ox. His face was marked more by weather than age, and his narrow brow was bald and smooth. He had instantaneously formed an opinion of Jules St.-Ange, and the multitude of words, most of them lingual curiosities, with which he was rasping the wide-open ears of his listeners, signified, in short, that, as sure as his name was Parson Jones, the little Creole was a ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... every sound about the house. He heard the butler unlock the storm doors and the servants prepare for the morning work. An occasional delivery wagon ground through the gravel walk, the grating noise of the wheels rasping his quivering nerves. ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... no detail was the place so marked as by an indefinable oppressive atmosphere. The strong musk and edged perfumes, the races, distinct and subtly antagonistic or mingled and spoiled, the rasping instruments, combined in an unnatural irritating pressure; they produced an actual sensation of cold and staleness like that from the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... spheres, And this may be the song to make, at last, amends For many sighs and boons in vain long sought! Now, careless, let us stray, or stop To see the partridge from the covey drop, Or, while the evening air's like yellow wine, From the pure stream take out The playful trout, That jerks with rasping check the struggled line; Or to the Farm, where, high on trampled stacks, The labourers stir themselves amain To feed with hasty sheaves of grain The deaf'ning engine's boisterous maw, And snatch again, From to-and-fro tormenting ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... and of modern revolutionary literature. They were vague and tumultuous ideas, which had very little relation to a definite theory of government, but he was very much in earnest with them, especially after his rasping experience with the Duke of Wuerttemberg. No one can mistake the autobiographic note in the speech of Bourgognino which closes the first act: 'I have long felt in my breast something that would not be satisfied. Now of a sudden I know what it was. (Springing up ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... frowned at Morse, rasping his unshaven chin with his hand. "Ce'tainly, honey. Glad ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... genus have a habit of fluttering out over the water, and then gliding back to their perch on the grass, on set wings, meanwhile uttering a strange rasping song. The nesting habits and eggs of all the subspecies are precisely like those of this variety, and they all occasionally arch their nests over, leaving ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... Gov'nor," Dollops added as he looked down on the whirling waters, "what an egg-beater it would make, wouldn't it, sir? Ain't got such a thing as a biscuit about yer, have you? Me spine's a rasping holes in me necktie, and I'm so flat you could slip me into a pillar box and they'd take me home for ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Lucy's father just speaking, and his name of William Hapgood had been shortened to Bill among the villagers, who seemed to have little use for family cognomens where family pride was not a failing. He was a small man with a rasping voice and sharp nose, while the bristling growth about his chin was red and his hair brown. All this denoted temper, but not the deep and lasting kind; rather the flash-in-the-pan sort, common enough among shrewish women, and only common in men of this type. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... reviles The almost whispered warble from the hedge, And takes a locust's rasping voice and files The ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... a better speaker than Mr. Grimsby, but his voice had a hard, rasping quality that smote ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... the young face, so pathetic in its youth, with the ravages of disease visible in the hectic cheek, and harsh, rasping cough, touched the strong young officer. He stooped down and put his hand on the young lad's forehead; it was cold and clammy. ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... what is stronger than steam? I know nothing. Steam it is which has lifted up the mountains from the sea into the clouds. Steam it is which tears to pieces the bowels of the earth with earthquakes and volcanoes, shaking down cities, rasping the solid rocks into powder, and scattering them far and wide in dust over the face ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the low brush rasping harshly on their stirrups—as loud as a bugle-call, it seemed to Frances—when a dash of hoofs from ahead told that a detachment was coming to investigate. Now there came a hail. Frances stopped; Banjo behind her whispered to know ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... for a season yet," answered the other, with loud, rasping voice; "but the day of a rising is at hand, and shows with a laughing face how those whom she will destroy are rushing ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... and it rustled as he opened it. There was no other sound in the prison cell except the rasping noise of his ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... the malady of the age, or rather was it that girl herself; and it was she who, with her pale, halfmocking features and rasping voice, came and sat with me at the end ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... with calcified beads, but with the horny star-headed spines not yet developed, whilst on the old outer coat these latter had been worn down quite smooth, and the calcified beads worn entirely away. Here, then, we have an excellent rasping surface. With respect to the power of movement necessary for the boring action, the peduncle is amply furnished with transverse, oblique, and longitudinal striae-less muscles,—the latter attached to the basal disc. In all the pedunculata, I have reason to believe ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... of the year. Although not by any means a rare bird, with us jays are shy and wary. In Florida their southern cousins are as familiar as robins, without a trace of fear of mankind. What curious notes our blue jays have—a creaking, wheedling, rasping medley of sounds coming through the leafless branches. At this time of year they love acorns and nuts, but in the spring "their fancy turns to thoughts of" eggs and young nestlings, and they are accordingly hated by the small birds. Nevertheless no bird is quicker ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... have been dusting that heavy shelf high up on the wall with all the china on it, and the whole thing has given way. She must be badly hurt! But why doesn't her mistress come rushing upstairs? and what was that rasping noise ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... for half the distance, and I'm making no pretences When I tell you I was feeling very nervous-like and queer, For those jockeys rode like demons; you would think they'd lost their senses If you saw them rush their horses at those rasping five foot fences — And in place of making running I ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... man threw back his head, and gave vent to a long, gasping, rasping sort of taunting cry, intolerable as that of a high-pressure engine jeering off steam; and that done, with ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... utmost importance to stop the grinding, rasping process in the brain at night and to keep from wearing life away and wasting ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... to live with him, and when the two, the long and the short, went out together, it was like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza setting forth in quest of adventures in the land of Strand. The short man indulged in none of the loud, rasping affectation of humour that was so maddening in the long; he was dry, hard, and sterile, and when he did join in the conversation it was like an empty nut between the teeth—dusty and bitter. He kept ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... sesterces the amphora. It is the common drink of the carters at every wine-house on the country roads. I longed for a glass of my own rich Falernian or the mellow Coan that was bottled in the year that Titus took Jerusalem. Is it even now too late? Could we not wash this rasping stuff from our palates?" ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ladder, and made out the figure of a man, crouched down and feeling his way along the passage. He stumbled up the ladder, and then I heard Petrak close behind him, panting and cursing, and the broken chains on his hands rasping along ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... was treated to a sight that made him rub his eyes in amazement. The accident was repeated—it had been no accident. Now only a hundred feet up, directly above him, the big machine seemed to quiver with a sudden increase or change of power. A rasping, ear- racking sound—a spurt of blue vapor—and the aeroplane did what no other flying machine had ever done before; it stopped ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... church festival one Christmas Eve," responded Aunt Saidie, in a high-pitched, rasping voice. "The same evening that I got this pink crocheted nuby." She touched a small pointed shawl about her shoulders. "Miss Belinda Beale worked it and it was raffled off for ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... and of structures whose height has been moderated by experience of earthquakes. There is a great deal of marshy land, and rice fields, and the jungles, so thick and thorny, and the grasses so tall, fibrous, and rasping, that the marching of columns of soldiers is excessively fatiguing. It was a terrible task that was cut out for our men, by the delay in the Senate, mischievously elongated, the insurgents having fortified themselves ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... robes of heavy golden rope, were ranged about; they formed a guard and escort ten deep about the living sacrifice. At that the drums increased their volume, and to this was added a nerve-racking, discordant and rasping jangle, when sheets of copper, paper-thin, were struck with a heavy hand. The pulsing, throbbing pandemonium was terrific as the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Dana,' said the Printer, in a rasping humour. 'By the gods of war! here's two columns about that performance at the Academy and only two sticks of the speech of Seward at St Paul. I'll have to get someone if go an' burn that theatre an' ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... breaking, her hat was of nondescript sort, of small pretensions—yet Mary Warren's attitude, less of weariness than of resistance, had something of the ivory-fine gentlewoman about it, even here at the end of a rasping ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough |
