"Stifling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that soon I must have fainted from sheer excitement and terror, for I remember nothing more till I felt myself deposited on a hard floor, propped against the wall, and the stifling piece of sacking taken ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Sacramento on August 5th, a day of intense, almost stifling heat, we went at once to Mrs. Van Every, who kept the most elegant boarding house in the city, whose spacious apartments seemed filled with the breath of Paradise, which added a grateful welcome to our travel-tired bodies. Mrs. Van Every's mien of pure and native ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... cruelly unjust! The thought of it was stifling the breath in his nostrils, it was pressing the blood out of his heart! They were waiting for the answer, and why should he not speak? What profit was there in silence when it would be ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... troubled dreams of terror and bewilderment, enacted in blind passages and stifling glooms, with crowds of unknown figures passing rapidly to and fro, I seemed to grow suddenly light-hearted and joyful. I next appeared to myself to be sitting or reclining on the grassy top of a cliff, in bright ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... reads this doubts the discomfort of bonds let him try them for himself. Let him be bound foot and hand and left alone, and in half an hour he will be screaming for release. The sense of impotence is stifling, and I felt as if I were buried in some landslip instead of lying under the open sky, with the night wind fanning my face. I was in the second stage of panic, which is next door to collapse. I tried to cry, but could only raise ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... hesitation, knowing whither it led. It was damp and stifling. Her candle burned dimmer and dimmer in the impure air of the long shut-up passage. There were, however, no other obstacles in her way. The passage was unincumbered; but the low arch, scarcely over her ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of little Polly, Mahony obeyed, stifling the near retort that she was not too young to earn her living among strangers. The two men faced each other on opposite sides of the table. John Turnham had the same dark eyes and hair, the same short, straight nose as his brother and ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... to her room, Miss Selah; she's busy and can't come down," said the negro maid, rolling her eyes and stifling either a snigger or a sob by slapping her ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... rails. Wide chinks between the metal sheets gave admission to light and air, and earthen drain-pipes made ventilators in the walls. But the sunlight penetrated like spears of burning flame, and the air was stifling hot. The paraffin stove that heated irons for Sister Tobias smelled clamorously, and the droning of myriads of flies, not the least of the seven plagues of Gueldersdorp, kept up a persistent bass to the shrill singing of the little tin kettle. Later, when the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... hawthorn which my aunt Leonie wished to visit was on common ground) to correct my statements, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his own accord: "No, no, the business belonged to Swann's father, that hedge is part of Swann's park." And then I would be obliged to pause for breath; so stifling was the pressure, upon that part of me where it was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment when I heard it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other name, because it was burdened with the weight of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... seemed to sweep from my mind everything in the world but her. Everything broke abruptly that had been checking me, stifling me, holding me gagged and bound since the night when our lives had come together again after those five long years. I forgot Cynthia, my ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... for his men, had been displayed in a hundred instances, and had gained him the enthusiastic affection of all who served under his command. During the passage from America, under the tropics, he would go down into the stifling air of the hold, with a lemon, a cup of tea, and, better and more efficacious than all, a kind word for the sick. While encamped before Vera Cruz, he gave up his own tent to a sick comrade, and went himself to lodge in the pestilential city. On the march, and even on the battle-field, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of a thunderstorm on a stifling day is proverbial, as is the relief of finding one's handkerchief just before one sneezes; but what are these compared with the flooding joy that comes with release from an embarrassing situation with a young lady? The effect upon Tom was to make him excited; more so, perhaps, than he had ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... poor wretch in more woeful plight for, 'prisoned in the stifling hold where no ray of kindly sun might ever penetrate, and void of all human fellowship, I became a prey to wild, unholy fancies and a mind-sickness bred of my brooding humours; my evil thoughts seemed to take on stealthy shapes that haunted the fetid gloom about me, shapes ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... sin that gains upon him at each stride, Antony fled from the place, and sought the moors. The moon was near its setting, and soon the dawn would throw open the eastern doors of the sky. He walked on and on, waiting, praying for, stifling for the light; and, at last, with a freshening of the air, and faint sounds of returning consciousness from ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... of the court-martial was in keeping with that prelude. No effort was spared in stifling all the evidence on Lord Cochrane's side, and in adducing false testimony against him. Logbooks and witnesses alike were tampered with. In support of his scheme for annihilating the whole French fleet, Lord Cochrane produced in court a chart showing the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... of his love in those simple words. Felt it but half-consciously, though, for her own soul was stifling ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... The arroyo grew stifling hot. They had no water, and saved their horse-beef for an emergency. They had been tired when they started—already had fought one whole day through, on slim rations. But they dared not move on. When they ventured to peep over the edge of the arroyo, ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... suffer no idle prying into her mystic operations, and as if the grand transmutation and projection from juice to wine had in it something of a secret and solemn and awful nature—fenced round, as it were, and protected from vulgar curiosity by the invisible halo of stifling gas?' ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... surprising answers, Bob's heart seemed to come up in his throat, stifling his speech. But noticing that his questions had aroused the clerk's curiosity, he hurriedly left ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... and shouted themselves hoarse—even these exhilarating circumstances failed to reawaken the land baron's concern in the scene around him. His efforts at indifference were chafing his inmost being; the cloak of insouciance was stifling him; the primeval man was struggling for expression, that brute-like rage whose only limits are ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... lighter with the spread of canal irrigation in the western Panjab. The rains ought to break at Delhi in the end of June and at Lahore ten days or a fortnight later. There is often a long break when the climate is particularly trying. The nights are terribly hot. The outer air is then less stifling than that of the house, and there is the chance of a little comparative coolness shortly before dawn. Many therefore prefer to sleep on the roof or in the verandah. September, when the rains slacken, is ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... four o'clock. But as the hour approached he grew restless, and sought the schoolroom, which overlooked the drive. The sun-blinds were down, and Holly was there with Mademoiselle Beauce, sheltered from the heat of a stifling July day, attending to their silkworms. Old Jolyon had a natural antipathy to these methodical creatures, whose heads and colour reminded him of elephants; who nibbled such quantities of holes in nice green leaves; and smelled, as he thought, horrid. He ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... race superiority. Her admiration of Rose was tinged with pity. Poor garden flower, confined for life to the dull walks and prim parterres of a fixed enclosure, when she might roam the wild paths of the forest; condemned to sleep in a close room, on stifling feathers, and bathe in an elongated tub, when she might feel the elasticity of hemlock boughs beneath her, inhale the perfumed breath of myriad trees, and plunge at sunrise into the gleaming waters of the lake. It was ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... arcades, where it was possible to sleep. Monnica sat down on the ground under her heap of veils among other poor people and travellers, who were come like her to try to find a little cool air on this stifling night near the relics of the blessed Cyprian. She prayed for her child, offering to God "the blood of her heart," begging God not to let him go, "for she loved to keep me with her" says Augustin, "as mothers are wont, yes, far more than most mothers." And like ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... passed the night amid the accumulated horrors of sighs and groans; of foul vapor; a nauseous and putrid atmosphere, in a stifling and almost suffocating heat. * * * Little sleep could be enjoyed, for the vermin were so horribly abundant that all the personal cleanliness we could practice would not protect us ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... on the continent. The melancholy squares of water, divided by little paths of white salt crust, along which the salt-makers pass (dressed in white) to rake up and gather the salt into mulons; a space which the saline exhalations prevent all birds from crossing, stifling thus the efforts of botanic nature; those sands where the eye is soothed only by one little hardy persistent plant bearing rosy flowers and the Chartreux pansy; that lake of salt water, the sandy dunes, the view of Croisic, a miniature town afloat like Venice on the sea; and, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... wore japanned boots and moustaches: he lisped, drawled, and left the 'r's' out of his words: he was always flourishing about, and smoothing his lacquered whiskers with a huge flaming bandanna, that filled the room with an odour of musk so stifling that I determined to do battle with that Snob, and that either he or I should quit the Inn. I first began harmless conversations with him; frightening him exceedingly, for he did not know what to do ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... perhaps, puts his finger upon one of the weak places in our school procedure. He convicts us of stifling and repressing the imagination of our pupils. For it is a matter of common knowledge that every normal child is endowed with a vivid imagination when he enters school. No one will challenge this statement who has entered into the heart of childhood ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... up her offering and regarded it a moment in silence, while my aesthetic nature shook to its foundations. Stifling the moan of horror that had risen to my lips, I faced her with a smile. Balaclava heroes ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... girls that I might make them a present of a few beads.... [A girl having been allowed to come out] I then went to inspect the inside of the cage out of which she had come, but could scarcely put my head inside of it, the atmosphere was so hot and stifling. It was clean and contained nothing but a few short lengths of bamboo for holding water. There was only room for the girl to sit or lie down in a crouched position on the bamboo platform, and when the doors are shut it must be nearly or quite dark inside. ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... which was already rolling in volumes over the boat and the terrible uproar and confusion of nature, Herbert and the trapper kept steadily to their task. But every moment the line of fire gained on them. The smoke was already at intervals stifling and the heat of the coming conflagration getting unbearable. Brands began to fall hissing into the water. Twice had Herbert flung a blazing fragment out of the boat. And so, in a race literally for life, with the flames chasing them and their lives in jeopardy, they ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... the force upon the lower muscles of his neck. The wave of pain was as the lash to a mettlesome horse. Before the Prince could swing the candlestick again Armitage had him by the throat and bore him to the floor, half stifling his shriek ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... soft, mild day in December. Mr. Selby's study seemed close and stifling to the boys as they sat up at the long table with books and slates before them, and a blazing ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... toward the rear of the camp. Tarzan followed and in the shadows of a clump of bushes overtook his quarry. There was no sound as the man beast sprang upon the back of his prey and bore it to the ground for steel fingers closed simultaneously upon the soldier's throat, effectually stifling any outcry. By the neck Tarzan dragged his victim well into the concealment ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... each other's company pleasant to enjoy it without much interference. It rather made up for the loss of the staircase and the window-seats, or balconies, dear to English dancers. The rooms are generally kept in a stifling state of heat, a thick curtain always hanging over the door, and never an open window or any kind of ventilation; this, however, does not inconvenience the Spaniard in the least. It is usual to smoke during the intervals of the dances—cigarettes as a rule; but ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... Craig, stifling the remark that that was not in itself a new thing in this or any other ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... woke from first sleep and could not recover it. He found Bernardo Nunez's small, small cabin stifling, and at last he got up, put on garments, and slipped forth and through great cabin to outer air. He might have found the Admiral there before him, for he slept little and was about the ship at all hours, but to-night he ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... upper room, where the air seemed so stifling that he had to open the window wide in order to breathe, Gottlieb was very miserable too. He was fleeing into Tarshish, this temporarily wicked baker; and just as fell out in the case of that other one who fled to Tarshish, his flight was a failure: for this little world of ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... few places, Average Jones held, where human nature in the rough can be studied to better advantage than in the stifling tunnels of the subway or the close-packed sardine boxes of the metropolitan surface lines. It was in pursuance of this theory that he encountered the Westerner, on Third avenue car. By custom, Average Jones picked out ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... open air, breathing freely once more. I have at last been hauled out of that stifling box and taken on deck. I gaze around me in every direction and see no sign of land. On every hand is that circular line which defines earth and sky. No, there is not even a speck of land to be seen to the ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... The introduction of proxies was no doubt intended to give absent creditors an opportunity of expressing their opinions upon any question which might arise. But the system was too often used for the purpose of stifling the views of those who took an independent part in the proceedings. The form of proxy prescribed by the rules contained no limitation of the powers of the proxy-holder and no impression of the opinion of the creditor. It simply appointed the person named in it as "my proxy," and these magic words ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... unaccustomed weakness the doctor sat, a convalescent in his own hospital in Toul, one stifling July day. To his physical debility was added the dragging distress of mind which comes at times to those who are far away and receive no word from home. No letters had reached him for weeks. Removed from the sphere ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... not spoil, Some were made to starve and toil, Some to share the wine and oil, We are told: Devil's theories are these, Stifling hope and love and peace, Framed your hideous lusts ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... train to it of four ells in length, which was supported by three princesses. A platform had been raised, some height from the ground, which led from the Bishop's palace to the Church of Notre-Dame. It was hung with cloth of gold; and below it stood the people in throngs to view the procession, stifling with heat. We were received at the church door by the Cardinal de Bourbon, who officiated for that day, and pronounced the nuptial benediction. After this we proceeded on the same platform to the tribune which separates ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... degrees north of the equinoctial line. But although there was not a breath of wind, the powerful equatorial current was quietly driving the ships, much faster than the Admiral could have suspected, to the northwest and toward land. By the end of that stifling week they were in latitude 7 deg. N., and caught the trade-wind on the starboard quarter. Thence after a brisk run of ten days, in sorry plight, with ugly leaks and scarcely a cask of fresh water left, they arrived within sight of land. Three mountain ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... strikes, a thin, sudden note like the sob of a child. Clock, buhl clock that ticked out the tortuous hours of my birth, Clock, evil, wizened dwarf of a clock, how many years of agony have you relentlessly measured, Yardstick of my stifling shroud? ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... only pressed closer and closer to one another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling atmosphere, to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown, uncomprehended, and terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those standing in front, who had seen and heard what had taken place before them, all stood with wide open eyes and mouths, straining with all their strength, and held ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... my father, stifling a yawn behind his hand, "positively you frighten me. It is an old sensation and tires me. Surely you can ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... banter of the younger women, the duenna's lachrymose confidences, the incessant interchange of theatrical jargon and coarse pleasantry—there remained to Odo but a confused image, obscured by the smoke of guttering candles, the fumes of wine and the stifling air of the low-ceilinged tavern. Even the face of the pretty girl who had dragged him from his concealment, and who now sat at his side, plying him with sweets from her own plate, began to fade into ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... tact she found out the subjects that were interesting to him, and reviving his faith in his own intelligence, led his mind through sunny, breezy ranges of thought that made the time he spent with her like an escape from the narrow walls and stifling air ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... sweep, and sunshine to sweeten and dry and vivify; and I would warn all good souls who begin life by setting out two little evergreen-trees within a foot of each of their front-windows, that these trees will grow and increase till their front-rooms will be brooded over by a sombre, stifling shadow fit only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... A stifling Southern September sun beat down upon the mountains and valleys. The thrush and the mocking-bird had been driven to cool places, and their songs were not heard in the trees. The hotel was crowded with refugees ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... small parlour pungent at all times with the odour of liquor,—but used only on rare occasions, most of The Palmetto's patrons preferring the even more stifling atmosphere of the bar-room,—the Wells Fargo Agent had been watching and waiting ever since he had left The Polka Saloon. On a table in front of him was a bottle, for it was a part of Ashby's scheme of things to solace thus all such ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... every evening, sitting in the stifling, ugly house, and poured out his soul as if it were a libation to a goddess. She sometimes answered by telegraph, sometimes by a perfumed note. He schooled himself not to feel hurt. Why should Babette write? Does a goldfinch indict epistles; or a humming-bird ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... really more poetical than the old figment of the childish imagination. The first great discovery of the real nature of the stars did, in fact, logically or not, break up more effectually than perhaps any other cause, the old narrow and stifling conception of the universe represented by Dante's superlative power; and made incredible the systems based on the conception that man can be the centre of all things and the universe created for the sake of this place. It is enough ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... like yours are the only hope of a future millennium. I am in revolt against the educational systems of our time, severed from nature and stifling of all individuality. I am with you heart and soul in ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... was brilliant, but it is right to add that it required an African body and mind fully to appreciate the pleasures of it. The sun's rays were blistering, the heat was intense, and the air was stifling. Harold lay down and gasped, Disco followed his example, and sighed. After a few minutes spent in a species of imbecile contemplation of things in general, the latter raised himself to a sitting posture, and proceeded slowly to fill and light ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... nothing in comparison with the anguish of my soul, a sense of oppression, of stifling, and of pain so keen, accompanied by so hopeless and cruel an infliction, that I know not how to speak of it. If I said that the soul is continually being torn from the body, it would be nothing, for that implies the destruction of life by the hands of another ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... choking! closer round me crowds convention's stifling vault— Every meanness's called a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... succeeded his rage; he had the feeling of being hopelessly trapped, stifling in his passion. He followed her. "Ludowika, this is horrible, so soon. I am willing to think that I am to blame; stupid; no experience. You will have to be patient with me. Naturally everything, now—" he broke ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... free. HE WAS SPENDING THEIR LEISURE.... Not once but many times with Prothero had he used the phrase RICHESSE OBLIGE. Now he remembered it. He began to remember a mass of ideas that had been overlaid and stifling within him. This was what Merkle and the club servants and the entertainments and engagements and his mother and the artistic touts and the theatrical touts and the hunting and the elaboration of games and—Mrs. Skelmersdale and all that had clustered thickly round ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... excited as Tom, and together we stepped slowly on through the dense brake, parting the heavy growth with the barrels of our guns as we trod lightly over the swampy ground, which sent up a hot, stifling, ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... he should be rewarded with a peerage, of which he had long been desirous. He undertook on his side to obtain, by fair or foul means, a vote in favor of the peace. In consequence of this arrangement, he became leader of the House of Commons; and Grenville, stifling his vexation as well as he could, sullenly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he tried to write some letters. Worse and worse. The place was stifling, and the pen ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... he took to the trees. With the first dizzy swing from tree to tree all the old joy of living swept over him. Vain regrets and dull heartache were forgotten. Now was he living. Now, indeed, was the true happiness of perfect freedom his. Who would go back to the stifling, wicked cities of civilized man when the mighty reaches of the great jungle offered peace ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... purpose, as there were no other combustibles to be had. Of this they were already aware. He had tied these handkerchiefs together in such a way that they would burn, and after setting fire to them, had burled the blazing mass into the house. There it emitted its stifling fumes till they confused, suffocated, frightened, and confounded the lurking wild boar. Then, in the midst of this, the heroic youth, armed with his gun, rushed forward and poured the deadly contents of his piece into the body ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... momentary vision of unrelated hardships by the way, and she wondered how the man could laugh and his wife smile over it. She knew the stifling heat of narrow streets in mid-summer, and the hungry longing for cool, green shade. She had seen something of a city's poverty. But she knew also the privations of the trail. Two thousand miles in a wagon! And at the journey's end only ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... later. August, hot and sunny, is reigning with quite a mad merriment, making the most of the days that be, knowing full well that the end of the summer is nigh. The air is stifling; up from the warm earth comes the almost overpowering perfume of the late flowers. Perpetua moving amongst the carnations and hollyhocks in her soft white cambric frock, gathers a few of the former in a languid manner to place in the ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... with the academic suburb. It hardly seemed direct to poor Verena, perhaps, who, in the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time, it never would have occurred ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... hands of the two fiances. Mlle. Frahender and Genevieve kissed Esperance tenderly. The Baron thundered in his military voice, "There has been no battle, and yet here is the breath of victory. That is very good, but a little stifling. Let us have ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... there. The young ladies of Pontoise, and the cream of Creil, had come to the fete, bent on not losing such an opportunity of enjoying themselves. Under the watchful eyes of their mothers, who, decked out in grand array, were seated along the walls, they were gamboling, in spite of the stifling heat, with all the impetuosity of young provincials habitually deprived of the pleasures of the ballroom. Crossing the room, Micheline and Serge reached ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... for the past week had of necessity been confined within the stifling atmosphere of a crowded court-room, their present surroundings appealed as especially restful and exhilarating. During their absence their horses had been enjoying the luxury of a turn-out in the fenced pasture ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... yoke of the three, and most disastrous in its effects both upon women directly and indirectly upon mankind through the degradation of the mothers of the race. Upon the woman herself the effect was so soul-stifling and mind-stunting as to be made a plausible excuse for treating her as a natural inferior by men not philosophical enough to see that what they would make an excuse for her subjection was itself the result of that subjection. ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... doubt we were very daft, And our sports, like the stakes, were trifling; While the air of the room where we talked and laughed Was often unpleasantly stifling. ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... had set the little brook free to run through the garden, and the sun was setting huge and red, with the promise of another glowing day to-morrow, and the air was stifling, and not a breath of wind stirring, so that the flowers hung their heads oppressed, and the leaves and little buttons of fruit on the trees looked ready to shrivel up and drop from the boughs, the thought came to him ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... notice it," she said, "and yet, somehow or other the whole atmosphere seemed stifling. Naudheim is great," she went on. "Oh, he is a great man, of course. He said wonderful things in a convincing way. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in sitting down on the ground round a scanty fire made of dry reeds and some wood that had been brought with us. However, we made the best we could of it, and smoked and ate with such appetite as the smell of damp, stifling heat would allow, for it was very hot on this low land, and yet, oddly enough, chilly at times. But, however hot it was, we were glad enough to keep near the fire, because we found that the mosquitoes did not like the smoke. Presently we rolled ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... to vise Weyler's order. So at five the following morning a box car, with wooden planks stretched across it for seats, carried me along the line of the trocha from Jucaro to Ciego, the chief military port on the fortifications, and consumed five hot and stifling hours in covering ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... stunted bullock is standing in such shade as their trees afford. At about every ten miles a station is reached, each exactly like the previous one and the next following.... Gradually the sun went down, the wind and dust subsided, and another stifling night succeeded, with uneasy slumbers, broken by the ever-recurring hubbub of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... helping to make history—a combination of freight, passenger, and "cattle." It had averaged eight miles an hour on its climb toward Yellowhead Pass and the end of steel. The "cattle" had already surged from their stifling and foul-smelling cars in a noisy inundation of curiously mixed humanity. They were of a dozen different nationalities, and as the girl looked at them it was not with revulsion or scorn but with a sudden quickening ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... her room in the west wing she rushed, stumbling over hose lines, battling against the stifling clouds of smoke which rolled down the corridor. The room was gained, the picture secured, and she turned to make good her escape, all other valuables forgotten. But even in that brief moment the ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... her of child slavery, and brought before her eyes the pictures he himself had seen, of the pale, stunted little victims of Mammon's greed, toiling by day and night in stifling, dangerous mines; in the Hell-glare of the glass-factories; in the hand-bruising, soul-obliterating Inferno of the coal-breakers; in the hot, linty, sickening atmosphere of the southern cotton-mills. And as he talked, she saw for the first time the figures of these bowed and bloodless little boys ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... whetting my appetite by these preparatives, they tire and pall it. Will the licence of the time excuse my sacrilegious boldness if I censure the dialogism of Plato himself as also dull and heavy, too much stifling the matter, and lament so much time lost by a man, who had so many better things to say, in so many long and needless preliminary interlocutions? My ignorance will better excuse me in that I understand not Greek so well as to discern the beauty of his language. I generally choose ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... and weakness—Daddy alone had made her amply acquainted with both at one portion or another of his career. But just this particular temper of Louie's, with its apparent lack both of passion and of moral sense, was totally new to her, and produced at times a stifling impression upon her, without her being able to explain to herself with any clearness what was ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fire at each end, the smoke of which, unable to find its way through the imperfect chimneys in the roof, rolled in cloudy billows above the heads of the revellers, who sat on low seats, purposely to avoid its stifling fumes. [Footnote: The Welsh houses, like those of the cognate tribes in Ireland and in the Highlands of Scotland, were very imperfectly supplied with chimneys. Hence, in the History of the Gwydir Family, the striking expression ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... sportsmen enough enjoying life throughout the country villages of Merrie England, but in my humble opinion the best sportsmen must be sought in stifling offices in London, or serving "their country and their Queen" under the burning sun of a far country, or maybe in the reeking atmosphere of the East End, or as missionaries in that howling wilderness the inhospitable land ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... sea, the time passed quickly away until eight bells (four o'clock) terminated my watch. I must pass rapidly over the condition of things in the fo'lk'sle, where all the greenies that were allowed below, were groaning in misery from the stifling atmosphere which made their sickness so much worse, while even that dreadful place was preferable to what awaited them on deck. There was a rainbow-coloured halo round the flame of the lamp, showing how very bad the air was; but in spite of that I turned in and ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... then, with a sudden thought, I nodded to Mr. Goodfellow, who was replacing his pipe in his pocket. "You go. Hand me up a plate and a fistful of ship biscuit, and leave me to deal with 'em. I'm not for stifling down there under hatches, whatever your taste ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... sexagenarian, that at any age one may inspire love, was not unreasonable! The contrast between the world of ideas in which he moved and the atmosphere of the literary shop in which for the last few months I had been stifling was too strong. The dreams of my youth were realized in this man whose gifts remained unimpaired after the production of thirty volumes and whose face, growing old, was a living illustration of the beautiful saying: "Since we must wear out, let us wear out nobly." His slender figure bespoke the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... Birmingham by omnibus after dark the same evening, and passing through the heart of the Black Country, made my first acquaintance with that dingy region—its lurid light, its flashing tongues of intercessant flame, and its clouds of stifling, sulphurous smoke. ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... to sail, and there was no conceivable reason why she was not ready. She was promised on November first, on November fifteenth, on December first; and yet she was never ready. On December first Charmian and I left the sweet, clean Sonoma country and came down to live in the stifling city—but not for long, oh, no, only for two weeks, for we would sail on December fifteenth. And I guess we ought to know, for Roscoe said so, and it was on his advice that we came to the city to stay two weeks. Alas, the two weeks went by, four weeks ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... him, and this gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure that he had now found rest for his soul. But here, too, he was mistaken; after about two years he rebelled against the stifling of all free inquiry; on this rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and he was soon battling with unbelief. He then fell in with one who was a pure Deist, and was shorn of every shred of dogma which he had ever held, except a belief in the personality ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... plunder, 'mid rain and thunder That burst with the lull of our cannonade, We vamped the streets in the stifling air - Our hunger unsoothed, our thirst unstayed - ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... absent on that day from religious ceremonies. We do not know which to admire most in such an attitude, whether the piety of the prelate or his submission to the superior of the seminary, since he would have been resigned if he had been forbidden to go to church, or, finally, his energy in stifling the groans which suffering wrenched from his physical nature. Few saints carried mortification and renunciation of terrestrial good as far as he. "He is certainly the most austere man in the world and the most indifferent to worldly advantage," wrote Mother Mary of the Incarnation. "He gives away ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... moan of a giant insect, the shrill whine came through the air, rising to an overwhelming scream. There was a deafening crash—a great hole was torn in the wall just by the window with the jagged pane, and the room filled with stifling black fumes. A sudden agonising stab, and the man, looking up, saw Molly in front of him. She was ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... volleys through their serried ranks, Mowing great swaths of death; yet on and on, Closing the gaps and yelling like the fiends That Dante heard along the gulf of hell, Still came our furious foes. A cloud of smoke— Dense, sulphurous, stifling—covered all our ranks. Our steady, deadly rifles crackled still, And still their crashing volleys rolled and roared. Our rifles blazed upon the blaze below; The blaze below upon the blaze above, And in the blaze the buzz of myriad bees Whose ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... other life in which he had no part. And then his loneliness was like a black sea. He leant against the railings, weak with weariness and hunger, fighting his boy's tears, until she came. He did not speak to her. She never knew that he was there. He hid, his heart stifling him, until the door closed on her. Then, since she had come back to him, belonged to him again, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... have taken it up; but this occupation being to my taste, and the only one which, without personal attendance, could procure me daily bread, I adopted it. Thinking I had no longer need of foresight, and, stifling the vanity of cash-keeper to a financier, I made myself a copyist of music. I thought I had made an advantageous choice, and of this I so little repented, that I never quitted my new profession until I was forced to do it, after taking a fixed resolution to return ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... held under her arm as if ready for battle, for she spun all day long, and did not stop even to eat her chestnuts. A glance, as she passed, at the stable, still dark, where the horses were sluggishly moving about, at the stifling cow-shed, filled with heads impatiently stretched toward the door; and the first rays of dawn, stealing over the courses of stone that supported the embankment of the park, fell upon the old woman running through the dew with the agility of a girl, despite her seventy ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... warehouses. The architecture of some of these caravanserais is very fine. The cool, quiet halls, their domed roofs, embellished with delicate stone carving, and blue, white, and yellow tiles, dimly reflected in the inevitable marble tank of clear water below, are a pleasant retreat from the stifling alleys and sun-baked streets. Talking of tanks, there seems to be no lack of water in Teheran. I was surprised at this, for there are few countries so deficient in this essential commodity as Persia. It is, I found, artificially ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... he could comprehend what had happened. He was not a father, and when at length he came to his senses, he, with brutal indifference abused his companion for disturbing him. As I stood over the skylight which had been got off to give air to the little stifling cabin, I heard him growl out, "Jim's gone, has he? his own fault then, not to keep a better look-out. It's he, then, who's brought us into this scrape; and I don't see why you should make such a jaw for what can't be helped. There now, old man, just belay all that, and ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... be born to erstwhile rural parents and may come to adult years with only a scant sense of the peace and beauty that can be found a few miles away, and often with little sense of anything else but the crumbling, teeming, stifling, noisy, sooty slums where they live—the other side of the monumental splendor along the Federal riverfront. Not all urban frustration is an outgrowth of the physical environment by any means, but much is. And this frustration, plus the pattern of exodus for some ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... of sneezing or a tickling in the throat; better die at once than be the recipient of all the inward curses that are hurled at you! The first act generally lasts an hour, and the people emerge from the stifling auditorium into the fresh air with a sigh of relief. The Germans make dashes of kangaroo leaps toward the casks of beer, and then rush for the tents where they get something to eat at ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... set, and brought back the same intelligence, adding the description of his disguise: on which the worthy magistrate put on his mask and bauta, and went out himself; when his eyes confirming the report of his informants, and the reflection on his duty stifling all remorse, he sent publicly for Foscarini in the morning, whom the populace attended all weeping to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... the other's self. Before the human—that bush which, however trodden and peeled, yet burns with the divine presence—the man who thinks of the homage due to him, and not of the homage owing by him, is essentially rude. Mammon is slowly stifling and desiccating Rank; both are miserable deities, but the one is yet meaner than the other. Unrefined families with money are received with open arms and honours paid, in circles where a better breeding than theirs has hitherto prevailed: this, working along with the natural law of corruption ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... there was not the faintest movement in his whole body, and his brows were still contracted in the same forbidding frown. If Varvara Petrovna had remained another three minutes she could not have endured the stifling sensation that this motionless lethargy roused in her, and would have waked him. But he suddenly opened his eyes, and sat for ten minutes as immovable as before, staring persistently and curiously, as though at some object in the corner ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... come the sudden change, and the gloom, that brought with it the shadow of death, fell like a pall upon the post, stifling its life, and bringing with it a grief that those who lived there ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... length, his transient respite past, His comrades, who before Had heard his voice in every blast, Could catch the sound no more: For then by toil subdued, he drank The stifling ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... graciously accorded a free hand to the Devil to do his worst. As a matter of fact, it was simply a phrase adopted by the French economists of the eighteenth century to summarize the conclusion of their arguments against the antiquated restrictions which were then stifling the trade and commerce of France (see G. Weuleresse, Le Mouvement Physiocratique en France, 1910, Vol. II, p. 17). Properly understood, it is not a maxim which any party need ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... grasp, and dashed away into the thick of the smoke. Tongues of flame were licking their cruel way through it, and as Bim emerged, his hair was scorched in yellow patches. He dragged out a dead puppy, laid it at his master's feet, and before he could be restrained had once more dashed back into the stifling smoke. Again he appeared, this time weak and staggering, every trace of his white coat gone. He was singed and blackened beyond recognition; but he was a four-footed hero, who had nobly performed a self-imposed duty. As he feebly ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... De la Verendrye as chaplain. The trip was made at terrible speed, in the hottest season, through stifling forest fires. Behind, at slower pace, came the provisions. De la Verendrye reached the Lake of the Woods in September. Fearing the delay of the goods for trade, and dreading the danger of famine with so many men in one place, De la Verendrye despatched Jemmeraie to winter with part of the ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... more than sufficient, or, if that failed to wake her, he might grabble at the counterpane with palsy- twitching fingers. As for the twins, he was quite determined to teach them a lesson. The first thing to be done was, of course, to sit upon their chests, so as to produce the stifling sensation of nightmare. Then, as their beds were quite close to each other, to stand between them in the form of a green, icy-cold corpse, till they became paralysed with fear, and finally, to throw off the winding-sheet, and crawl round the room, ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... heart pressed and the lock, which in spite of its age seemed to have been recently oiled, probably by Barr, responded. The next instant with a click, the lock slid open and Billy walked out of the stifling air of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... with that woman he had felt beneath his throat a coil of snakes stifling him, but in his brain certain memories were sounding, as it were voices, the echo of something distant. This echo issued from that woman's features, changed and faded, though the same in which on a time he had fixed his eyes with rapture, from the sound of her voice, which, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... of the appliances used by the skilled masons of Rhodes in transporting and lifting heavy stones. Gradually his own position improved: he was treated as an overseer, and was permitted to sleep under an arcade that ran along one side of the yard, instead of being confined in the close and stifling cell. His dye had long ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... slippery walls of gloom, And dares not look beneath, lest Fate should come; He enters now the stifling clouds that creep Around the causeway, while its shadows sleep Upon the stream ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... opened by a venerable Chinaman in the flowing robes of a priest. He looked at them doubtfully. Baskinelli spoke three words that his companions did not hear. The priest vanished. Quickly the door was reopened and they stepped into the dim, smoky, stifling ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... injures them, is only of a piece with all that has been said of drinking, and especially of dram-drinking, with which latter debauch, the debauch of cigar-smoking has the closest possible alliance. We never pass one of those stifling rendezvous in the metropolis—a cigar-shop, open till the latest hours—without mentally classing it with the gin-shops, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... courses the Cabinet chose the latter, those of its members whom we must suppose, from the language they now hold, to have then hesitated, either stifling their fears or not apprehending the consequences of their boldness. It might have been expected, and indeed was generally expected, that the Tory party would refuse to follow. They talked largely about the ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... badly constructed palaces, the whole sleeping under a canopy of sickly smoke. Everything wore a sombre, heavy air—even the men seemed born to methodize on some one object. Show-shops, beer-shops, and gin-palaces, made the very air reek with their stifling fumes. Above all, there were great palaces for very faint-hearted people, who thought well of themselves, and in their prayers thanked Uncle John, at whose great cost they lived in sumptuous idleness. As this last specimen of human nature, when dressed in full shine, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... his native country, Ischia, to order to discharge the painful duty of filial affection, and receive the last sighs of his dying mother. Her death ensued, full of hope, and calm, in the presence of her beloved; and, stifling the swelling emotions of sensible grief, this incomparable son followed her remains to the church, and offered up for her soul the sacrifice of propitiation. Who shall adequately conceive his feelings during the celebration ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... luxurious, but the girl's eyes grew thoughtful as they wandered round the room, for that evening the suggestion of wealth in all she saw jarred upon her mood. The great city lay not very far away, sweltering with its crowded tenement houses under stifling heat; and she could picture the toilers who herded there, gasping for air. Then her fancy fled further, following the long emigrant train as it crawled west from side-track to side-track, close packed with humanity that was much less cared for than her ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... panting crowd of victors and vanquished on the bloody deck, when the red ball of the setting sun glared through a crimson haze and filled the motionless sea with liquid fire. For the first time that day I became sensible of personal sufferings. A stifling sensation made me gasp for air as I sat down on the taffrail of my captured schooner, and felt that I ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... had been hot and stifling in London—one of those blazing days when the tar on the roadway perfumes the air, the dry pavements reflect back the heat into one's face, and the straw-hatted Metropolis—or the portion of it that is still in town—gasps and longs for the country ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... the rising wind wailed about the palace and died away; dull thunder reverberated in the distance. The air grew stifling, and the night flowers paid their perfumes out like threatened debtors. Another rush of wind, then silence broken only by a peal of thunder nearer than before. The splash of heavy drops was heard on the flagstones of the courtyard below. The lightning ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... roof, Amram going first, Nehushta following him, and Rachel bringing up the rear. On it, projecting inward from the parapet, was a sloping shelter once made use of by the look-out sentry in bad or hot weather. The change from the stifling store below with its stench of ill-cured hides, to this lofty, shaded spot, where the air moved freely, was so pleasant to Rachel, outworn as she was with all she had gone through, that presently she fell asleep, not to wake again till evening. Nehushta, however, who did ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... a crowding of relatives and friends into the hut, which rendered the meal of breakfast not quite so pleasant as it might have been, for the Indian, having been accustomed all his life to the comparatively open wigwam, did not relish the stifling atmosphere of the densely crowded snow-hut. However, he belonged to a race of Stoics, and, restraining his feelings, ate his meal with moderate appetite and ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... doubt respecting the particular amusement in which these heedless spirits were indulging, for even in the close and stifling atmosphere of the vault, the noise sounded like distant thunder. It certainly appeared, at first sight, a singular spot to choose, for that or any other purpose of relaxation, if the other cellars answered to the one in which ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... hadn't been for Esther's quiet determination I might have crawled back to Edith any one of those hot stifling nights and begged for admittance to the cool chamber with the spinet desk. My head ached half the time; my feet pained me; food was unattractive. The dead air of the New York subway made me feel ill. In three minutes it could sap me of the little ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... Stifling my indignation at his rudeness, which by this time I found was my only plan, I replied that that was not so good a place for the shavings as that which I myself had selected, and asked him to tell me why ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... and ran down into the saloon, which by this time was full of the stifling odours of smoke and whisky. Mr. Harland was there, drinking and talking somewhat excitedly with Dr. Brayle, while his secretary listened and looked on. I explained why I had ventured to interrupt their conversation, and they accompanied me up on deck. The strange yacht looked ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... very verge of the precipice, where he lay on his belly, with his right arm and leg over it, while with the other leg and arm he was with difficulty holding on, to keep himself from being dashed to pieces below. His dreadful situation was instantly perceived by Captain Lewis, who, stifling his alarm, calmly told him that he was in no danger; that he should take his knife out of his belt with his right hand, and dig a hole in the side of the bluff to receive his right foot. With great presence of mind he did this, and then raised himself on his knees. Captain Lewis then told him ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... your departure. We have had for some days stifling heat; we literally suffocate. You need to spend a fortnight longer amid the shade of the pine-trees, and four thousand feet above the level ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... literature. The perversion of taste which, at the beginning of that age, reigned in Italy, and thence spread over Europe, reached Poland; and for nearly a hundred and fifty years the country, under the influence of the Jesuits, was the victim of a stifling intolerance, and of a general mental paralysis. But in the reign of Stanislaus Augustus (1762-1795), Poland began to revive, and the national literature received a new impulse. Though the French language and manners prevailed, and the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the neck of his shirt—he was stifling, yet feeling relief as the past dreams of his lonely ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... no clouds visible. Only there was a deepening grey in the hard blueness above them, and the breathless heat, even at this time of day, was stifling. ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... dry sand they leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I assure ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... the next dance Jack and his friends remained in their seats. Then Hal, stifling a yawn behind ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... church where the meeting had been held. It was just over; the crowded room was stifling with the smoke of tobacco and tallow-candles; there was an American flag hanging over the pulpit, a man pounding on a drum at the door, and a swarm of loafers on the steps, cheering for the Union, for Jeff Davis, etc. Palmer dismounted, and made his way to the pulpit, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... of children reached him now and again from a cottage garden, the mellow light smiled unending benediction, and yet his subconsciousness let go for never an instant of the long elm box six feet below ground, and of its contents lying there in the stifling dark, in the long-grassed churchyard on the hill ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... quick and comprehending mind saw and suffered things that formerly never affected him. The hard and sometimes cruel discipline, toil from sunrise to sunset, scant food, the stifling of ambitions—all these began now to be perceived and felt, and the impression they left sank into the soul of this rebellious boy. He saw a slave killed by an overseer, on no other charge than that of being "impudent." "Crimes" of this nature were committed, as ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... to show that the house is strictly taboo. The interior of these houses is divided into cells or cages in each of which a girl is confined. No light and little or no air enters, and the atmosphere is hot and stifling. ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... the deck of the unfortunate Genoese tartane, but far worse below, where eight persons were shut into the stifling atmosphere of the cabin, deprived of the knowledge of what was going on above, except from the terrific sounds they heard. Estelle, on being shut into the cabin, announced that the Phoenician ship ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I'm stifling for a blow. My lungs are sore for want of exercise. I was longing, longing to get out. Robert, do you realise it? We have won the prize! Can you believe it? It is almost too good to be true. It's the best present of all. Now you can buy your ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... the surly admission. "But it's stifling here. If I have to live long in this hole I'll dry up from want of air. It's near the shop or I wouldn't stay out the week." Twice this day he had seen Brotherson's tall figure stop before the window of this shop and look in at him at his ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... advance. They recognized me because I did not put on my mask, and as they passed they shook hands with me and I wished them "good luck in the name of the Lord." Such cheery souls they were, going forth in their stifling helmets to the unknown ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... chamber, Mr. Vincent had felt that its hot and stifling atmosphere must augment the fever of his patient; and before he attempted to disturb him from the temporary rest of insensibility, he opened the window-shutters and also the room-door wide enough to admit the air from the adjoining apartment. Pulling the heavy ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... of fire by night along the distant valleys. Some of the nearer crests were etched against the midnight sky by dull red creeping lines like a dying firework. The great hotel itself creaked and crackled and warped though all its painted, blistered, and veneered expanse, and was filled with the stifling breath of desiccation. The stucco cracked and crumbled away from the cornices; there were yawning gaps in the boarded floors beneath the Turkey carpets. Plate-glass windows became hopelessly fixed ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... little town often lay shimmering in the heat, the yellow road glaring in it, the red bricks of the high school reflecting it in waves, the very pine knots in the sidewalks gummy and resinous with heat, and sending up a pungent smell that was of the woods, and yet stifling. She must have felt an almost irresistible temptation to sit for a moment on the cool, shady front porch, with its green-painted flower boxes, its hanging fern baskets and the catalpa tree ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... earning the merest subsistence is not so enticing, not so ideal that one can expect woman to sacrifice everything for it. Our highly praised independence is, after all, but a slow process of dulling and stifling woman's nature, her love instinct and ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... and steamed up the latter a few miles before anchoring; Dom Joao the younger had accompanied us in his launch. The little river steamer was of very open build, as is necessary in such a hot climate; and to keep things dry necessitated also keeping the atmosphere stifling. The German taxidermist who was with Colonel Rondon's party, Reinisch, a very good fellow from Vienna, sat on a stool, alternately drenched with rain and sweltering with heat, and muttered to himself: ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... candle—leading the way down a long passage about five feet high. At length the passage widened out, and we were in the tomb-chamber: I think the hottest and most silent place that I ever entered. It was simply stifling. This chamber is a square room cut in the rock and totally devoid of paintings or sculpture. I held up the candles and looked round. About the place were strewn the coffin lids and the mummied remains of the two bodies ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... head with delight; to see that child rolling over in the grass and clutching at the daisies would do any heart good. Eh! but they all did have a blessed day. The sin and shame of it is to bring them back to their stifling homes to-night." ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... moment Israel turned full upon him, face to face, and the threat that he was about to utter seemed to die in his stifling throat. If only he could have provoked Israel to anger he might have had his will of him. But that slow, impassive manner, and that worn countenance so noble in sadness and suffering, was like a rebuke of his passion, and a ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... possibility of anything like a quiet talk. The weather had hitherto been so fine and the wind so light that the vessels had glided over the sea almost without motion, and very few indeed of those on board had experienced anything of the usual seasickness; but now, in the stifling atmosphere between decks, with the vessel rolling and plunging heavily, the greater part were soon prostrate with seasickness, and even Jack, accustomed to the sea as he was, succumbed to the unpleasantness of ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... opened the door of one of the little staterooms. The light which shone through the dirty and tightly closed "bull's-eye" window showed a tumbled bunk, the blankets soiled and streaked. The smell was stifling. ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... dodge the missile, while Rollo exercised great forbearance in stifling a bark, "Greek is not quite so severe to some folks ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are compatible with the service of God?" At length he answered, with a reserve not usual to him, "It is not every man whose way of life is, or can be, chosen by himself." Then, crossing himself earnestly, as if stifling the thought, and trampling down the tempting devil within him, he exclaimed, "I must believe that my instant recovery from deadly sickness as soon as I was devoted to St. Francis, proves that he has chosen me for ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen |
