"Rack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I pretended to rack my brains. "I believe I do recall something, in a hazy sort of way. You had on a rose-colored gown that was distinctly wonderful, and when we tracked the German to the door of your room, you were wearing an evening coat, bright blue. But the main thing was your hair!" Here I became ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... lakes, rivers, and rivulets of pure water, with which they are so liberally supplied by nature. Agriculture cannot be expected to flourish where the farms are small, the leases short, and the husbandman begins upon a rack rent, without a sufficient stock to answer the purposes of improvement. The granaries of Scotland are the banks of the Tweed, the counties of East and Mid-Lothian, the Carse of Gowrie, in Perthshire, equal in fertility to any part of ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... relate Oswald's unhappy fate, Left to these monsters, whose hate was ablaze? Both on revenge were bent; He for a menace sent, She for the merriment Caused by his lays. "Dungeon and torture-rack, These shall now pay thee back! Minstrel and poet rare, Rave in thy mad despair, And in that fetid lair Finish ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... moving, stumbling a little, toward the door; Lily hesitated, then ran and caught her own coat and hat from the rack in the hall. ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... mouse-trap; but one dark night, you see, he fell down the dog's stairs and broke his neck, and there was an end of him. For a long time nobody lived in his house, and the garden was all going to rack and ruin, when one fine day a gentleman from a neighboring town came to see the old house and took a great fancy to it; and finally he bought it, cat-stairs, dog-stairs, cupboards, garden ...
— Five Mice in a Mouse-trap - by the Man in the Moon. • Laura E. Richards
... we have a discipline, my dear boy. But, all the same, it has fallen to my lot to treat a bayonet-dig or two when our fellows have got at the rack. Well, I am glad you are all right. I thought you looked a little fishy ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... metallic plate, like the teeth of a comb, but at a considerable distance from each other, these pointed wires sustaining the cloth, and answering the purpose of ordinary basting. The metallic plate, from which these wires project, has numerous holes through it, which answer the purpose of rack teeth in enabling the plate to move forward, by means of a pinion, as the stitches are taken. The distance to which the plate is moved, and, consequently, the length of the stitches ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... Blinded by passion, he cannot see any impossibility, and already thoughts of future proceedings begin to flit vaguely through his mind. They are too distant to be dwelt upon now. For this night he has enough to occupy heart and brain—keeping both on the rack and stretch, so tensely as to render prolonged sleep impossible. Only for a few seconds at a time does he know the sweet unconsciousness of slumber; then, suddenly starting awake, to be again the prey of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... HORSE-SHOE RACK. A sweep curving from the bitt-heads abaft the main-mast carrying a set of nine-pin swivel-blocks as the fair leaders of the light running gear, staysail, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the club a couple of hours later, he found a telegram waiting for him in the rack, signed ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... door behind her, with what was almost a bang, and then throwing her coat and hat on the hall rack, she burst into the living-room, where Mrs. Maynard was sitting with Rosy Posy ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... been spoken by the Inquisitors who came to Italy with one of the Spanish princes. Instantly he recalled the scene where first he had listened to them—the dungeon draped in black—the white-hot irons which had seared his flesh; the rack which had maimed his limbs, the masked ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... impossible. Despite the fact that her attention had been focussed so strongly on them, the fringe of her vision had included their surroundings, the costly furniture, the piano against the farther wall, the music rack. Evidently the girl was learning to play. She felt a renewed, intenser bitterness against her own lot: she was aware of something within her better and finer than the girl, than the woman who had been her mother had possessed—that in her, Janet, had lacked ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... be said that no government can render all its subjects happy; without doubt it cannot flatter itself with contenting the capricious humours of some idle citizens who are obliged to rack their imagination, to appease the disgust arising from lassitude: but it can, and it ought to occupy itself with ministering to the real wants of the multitude, with giving a useful activity to the whole body politic. A society enjoys all the happiness of which it is susceptible whenever the greater ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... filled with all kinds of articles used in the chase, and whose walls were dotted with trophies—red deer and roebucks' heads, stuffed game, wild fowl, a golden eagle, and a pair of peregrine falcons. He took a double-barrel from the rack, placed a supply of cartridges in a belt, buckled it on, and then returned to the oak-panelled hall, to pause where his bonnet hang over the hilt of ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... good order, and in the next second the name behind him made a break at me, when I caught him with my big three-pound pistol, splitting his head open; and next I made a lunge for the third man, cutting him over the forehead so that he fell through a rack of glass, and when he raised up I struck him with my head. The conductor and brakeman interfered and took the ruffians out. There was a quart of blood on the floor; and at the first station they sent out and procured sticking-plaster. ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... the Price of Wood was raised in England, by reason of the Executions that were made in Smithfield. These Disputants convince their Adversaries with a Sorites, [9] commonly called a Pile of Faggots. The Rack is also a kind of Syllogism which has been used with good Effect, and has made Multitudes of Converts. Men were formerly disputed out of their Doubts, reconciled to Truth by Force of Reason, and won over ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the poets have repeated it from age to age, and some truth there must be in the saying. Suspicion of self-interest could not but attach to him; that was inherent in the circumstances. He must rely upon the sincerity of his passion, which indeed was beginning to rack and rend him. A woman is sensitive to that, especially a woman of Sidwell's refinement. In matters of the intellect she may be misled, but she cannot mistake quivering ardour for design simulating love. If it were impossible to see her again in private before ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... has made SISSY nervous, JACK," said EDWIN DROOD, hastily concealing his ball and coming forward. "I noticed, myself, that you played more than half the notes in the air, or on the music-rack, without ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... of jealousy, That curse where I had come to bless, That harsh voice of unhappiness. They'll note the curse, but not the pang, Not the torment whence it sprang, They'll note the blow at my friend's back, But not the soul stretched on the rack. They'll note the weak convulsive sting, Not the crushed body and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... untouched, should do the thing genteelly. It's only a couple of nights you know, as you'll sod me the third morning. Considering that I stood two contests for the county, an action for false imprisonment by a gauger, never had a lock on the hall door, kept ten horses at rack and manger, and lived like a gentleman. To the L5,000 for which my poor father dipped the estate I have only after all added L10,000 more, which, as Attorney Rowland said, showed that I was a capital manager. Well, you can pay both ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... was Number 218, in the center of the rack, and, as I approached, I glanced at it involuntarily. To my surprise there was a letter in it; I could see it through the glass of the box door. Lute had, as I knew, got the mail the previous evening and the morning's mail ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... affording the evidence of purity or otherwise. If sugar had been added the taster adhered to the bench; pure malt beer was not considered to yield an adhesive extract. In 1553, the lord mayor of London ordered a jury of five or six vintners to rack and draw off the suspected wine of another vintner, and to ascertain what drugs or ingredients they found in the said wine or cask to sophisticate the same. At another time eight pipes of wine were ordered to be destroyed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... who moved first. He went to the remaining bulkhead, spun a dog, and opened a cabinet. From it he took a rack of spare radar parts and three thick coils of wire. Paresi, startled, turned and saw Hoskins peering owlishly ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... all know the secret of our own wrong-doing. We almost always ascribe to our victims the hateful feelings which must fill them with the hope of revenge; and in spite of every effort of hypocrisy, our tongue or our face makes confession under the rack of some unexpected anguish, as the criminal of old confessed under the hands of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... it, lest haply, before I were aware, some wicked thought might arise in my heart, that might consent thereto; and sometimes the tempter would make me believe I had consented to it; but then I should be, as tortured upon a rack for whole days together. ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... Cr-r-r-r-rack! sounded the machine gun, spitting forth a pelting storm of lead. As the piece continued to disgorge bullets at the rate of six hundred a minute, Dave, a grim smile on his lips, swung the muzzle of the ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... mounted up on the shell-shaped iron seat, white against the blue sky. Colin at the bottom, slender and tall above the big revolving wheel, drove the rake. The tedding machine, driven by a farm hand, went between. Its iron-toothed rack caught the new-mown hay, tossed it and scattered it on the field. Beside the long glistening swaths the cut edge of the hay stood up clean and solid as a wall. Above it the raised plane of the grass-tops, brushed by the wind, quivered and swayed, ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... Christian martyrs, it is abundantly evident, was in part supported by an exaltation which they frankly drew from the sexual impulse. Felicula, we are told in the acts of Achilles and Nereus,[407] preferred imprisonment, torture, and death to marriage or pagan sacrifices. When on the rack she was bidden to deny Christianity, she exclaimed: "Ego non nego amatorem meum!"—I will not deny my lover who for my sake has eaten gall and drunk vinegar, crowned with thorns, and fastened ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... upon the name of the Lord will be saved,' Acts 2, 21. But, they say, one must understand these expressions correctly! That is what we say, too. This disputation however, would be ended if we agreed to eliminate the appendix and rack our brains no further—dass wir den Anhang ausschliessen und nicht ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the hall he kept looking all around as if he expected to see sharpshooters behind all the doors. It was a dandy house, with a nice big wide hall and it had a moose's head for a hat rack. First I guess we were all ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... to get permission first, and also permission to use a couple of the shotguns," answered Jack. The gun rack at Colby Hall boasted a number of these weapons, but none of them could be taken out and used without special permission ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield
... fresh loaf of French bread. Gash the loaf at the ends and pull apart into halves; then cut the halves and pull apart into quarters. Repeat until the pieces are about the thickness of breadsticks. Put on a rack in a dripping-pan, and dry out the moisture in a slow oven; then brown delicately. Keep in a dry place (a tin box is suitable) and reheat in the ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... there by the hundred, packed up separately in those square little wooden boxes, each fitted with a small, red, goblet-shaped pitcher and seed-rack, in which they are imported from Germany; parrots, macaws, cockatoos, and lories; larks, thrushes, blackbirds; starlings, magpies, and such like—down to the common hedge-sparrow and ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... place, for which it was eminently adapted, since the two open doors caused a constant draught of comparatively cool air through the apartment. There were a few good pictures on the walls, as well as a gun-rack, well fitted with sporting guns and rifles; and a hatstand which, in addition to its legitimate use, formed a convenient support for sundry riding-whips and pairs of spurs. Two passages, leading to right and left ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... with that thing between them? She glanced up at the rack overhead. The thing was there, in her dressing-bag, symbolically suspended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now, just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they had entered the train. While the carriage had held ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... any matches in the receivers; when the husband wanted one he was obliged to search the house. The newspaper he had folded and left ready to read at leisure was used to light the fire, although an overfilled waste-basket stood near. The towel-rack was empty just when he wanted his bath, and his bedroom slippers were always kicked so far under the bed that he was obliged to crawl on all fours to ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... "The mare is a rack of bones, limping, weary, sore. But see her foot lift! You can't kill the pride of the Barbary. She falters; her driver lashes her over the head. Trove is running toward her. He climbs a front wheel, and down comes the driver. In a minute Trove ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... in a bowl with half a teaspoonful salt; beat three eggs and stir into the flour; add two cups milk; stir until smooth; turn into a pan with some beef drippings and bake thirty to forty minutes. If beef is placed on a rack put the pudding under the roast. Cut in squares and serve ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... upon his soul From near and far. First came the Accursed encamped On Connact's cloudy hills and watery moors; Old Umbhall's Heads, Iorras, and Arran Isle, And where Tyrawley clasps that sea-girt wood Fochlut, whence earliest rang the Children's Cry, To demons trump of doom. In stormy rack They came, and hung above the invested Mount Expectant. But, their mutterings heeding not, When Patrick still in puissance rose of prayer, O'er all their armies round the realm dispersed There ran prescience of fate; and, north and south, ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intervals between there was nothing but farms, plantations and thinly scattered villages. In the Piedmont, country towns of fairly respectable dimensions rose here and there, though many a Southern county-seat could boast little more than a court house and a hitching rack. Even as regards the seaports, the currents of trade were too thin and divergent to permit of large urban concentration, for the Appalachian water-shed shut off the Atlantic ports from the commerce of the central basin; and even the ambitious ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... was Christmas, and all over the Christian world arose paeans of praise for the birth of the Saviour. The sufferer was conscious of the fact, and a sweet smile played upon her lips, as she thought of Jesus—that he had lived and died for her. Pain, that could rack the bones and triumph over the weak body, was powerless to subdue the loving, trusting spirit, that reposed gently on Him who has invited the weary to a present and an ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... belonged to the Christ. But he did not remember all that. And now there came into his mind—from that look, the bitter thought, 'I have wrung His heart with yet another pang, and at this supreme moment, when there is so much to rack and pain; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to rack his brains. Muffat waited, twirling a teaspoon between his fingers. Then the ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... poetic places? You're pleased, forsooth, full houses to behold? Draw near, and view your patrons' faces! The half are coarse, the half are cold. One, when the play is out, goes home to cards; A wild night on a wench's breast another chooses: Why should you rack, poor, foolish bards, For ends like these, the gracious Muses? I tell you, give but more—more, ever more, they ask: Thus shall you hit the mark of gain and glory. Seek to confound your auditory! To satisfy them is a task.— What ails you ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... not the jerk of the starting train that half awoke me, but the consciousness that some one had flung himself into the compartment when the train was already in motion. I saw a small man putting something in the rack—a large black hand-bag. Through the haze of my sleep I saw him, vaguely resented him. He had no business to have slammed the door like that, no business to have jumped into a moving train, no business ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Esseintes strayed into a large room sustained by iron pillars and lined, on each side of its walls, with tall barrels placed on their ends upon gantries, hooped with iron, their paunches with wooden loopholes imitating a rack of pipes and from whose notches hung tulip-shaped glasses, upside down. The lower sides were bored and hafted with stone cocks. These hogsheads painted with a royal coat of arms displayed the names of their drinks, the contents, and the prices ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... through every fibre of his body till he felt the wings of his soul fluttering madly to be free. This was the very ecstasy of love, to suffer the extreme torment for the beloved! Ah, he was smitten deep enough at last; if poetry were to be won through bloody sweat, the pains of the rack, the crawling anguish of the fire, was not poetry his own? Yes, indeed; what Dante had gained through exile and the death of Monna Beatrice was his for another price, the price of his own blood. He ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... lanterns, made their way to a subterranean dungeon. The bolt of a massive door creaked, and they entered a mephitic in-pace, where the dim light revealed between rings fastened to the wall a bloodstained rack, a brazier, and a jug. On a pile of straw, loaded with fetters and his neck encircled by an iron carcan, sat a haggard man, of uncertain age, ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... sharply. Left to itself it takes wings and flies away. Unused land is overgrown by weeds; unoccupied houses crumble and decay; food left exposed sours and molds; unused tools rust; and machinery left to stand idle gets out of order. Everything goes to rack and ruin, unless we take constant care. Hence the preservation of property is one of the fundamental concerns of life ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... with a latch-key; and to Daisy it seemed as if paradise had been opened—from the carved walnut rack, upon which entering angels might hang their hats and coats, to the carpet upon the stair and the curtains of purple plush that, slightly parted, disclosed glimpses of an inner and more sumptuous paradise upon the right—a grand crayon of Mrs. Holt herself, life-size, upon ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... that salt air the stallion felt, He whimpers gayly, as if still is Upon his sight his native Scheldt, Or Skagger Rack, or Little Belt,— Their waving grass and silver lilies, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... the frame; thus each leaf hangs independently from the stalk; and the racks or frames are so arranged that all the leaves on all the stalks have a separate access to the air. The tobacco houses are frame buildings, 100x60 feet, with usually four rows of racks, and two gangways for working. On the rack the surface moisture dries from the leaf; and at the proper time it is again piled, racked, and so on for three or even four times. The racks are of rough boards, and the floor of the houses is of ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... gentle spirit peacefully winged its way to the bosom of its God, or was hastily driven forth upon the dagger's point, whether some kind friend closed her eyes in death, and decently robed her cold limbs for the grave, or whether torn upon the agonizing rack, whether she is left to moulder away in some dungeon's gloom, or thrown into the quickly consuming fire, we could never know. These, and many other questions that might have been asked, will never be answered until the last great day, when the grave shall give up its dead, and, ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... one matchless Name. To powers of earth, and hell, and torture blind, In death, for Him they love, they rapture find. They joy in agony,—our gain their loss, To die for Christ they count the world but dross: Our rack their crown, our pain their highest pleasure, And in the world's contempt they find their ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... above his boy, dim memories of days long back Came, like stars an instant seen amid the autumn tempest's rack; But as swiftly over his spirit flashed the ruin of his name— Flashed the withering thought that even that child might be ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... bookkeeper reeled on his stool. He laid his pen down, removed the green shade from over his eyes, placed his blotters neatly in the rack, and ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... slender bamboo called bolo, the other a reed. These are split at one end, so they will rattle when struck on the ground, and thus call the attention of the spirit for whom food is placed on the rack. ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... to try his brother Cornelis for his alleged crime. On August 17, to their eternal disgrace, they by a majority vote ordered the prisoner, who was suffering from gout, to be put to the torture. The illustrious victim of their malice endured the rack without flinching, insisting on his absolute innocence of any plot against the prince's life. Nevertheless, early on August 19, sentence was pronounced upon him of banishment and loss of all his offices. Later on the same day Cornelis sent a message to his brother ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... in an oven in a closed pan with a small quantity of water constitutes braizing. This cooking process might be called a combination of stewing and baking, but when it is properly carried out, the meat is placed on a rack so as to be raised above the water, in which may be placed sliced vegetables. In this process the meat actually cooks in the flavored steam that surrounds it in the hot pan. The so-called double roasting pans are in fact braizing pans when they are properly used. A pot roast is ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 1 - Volume 1: Essentials of Cookery; Cereals; Bread; Hot Breads • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... arms, his rosy-tinted neck; Ah! and all the while I thrill With jealous pangs I cannot, cannot check. See, my colour comes and goes, My poor heart flutters, Lydia, and the dew, Down my cheek soft stealing, shows What lingering torments rack me through and through. Oh, 'tis agony to see Those snowwhite shoulders scarr'd in drunken fray, Or those ruby lips, where he Has left strange marks, that show how rough his play! Never, never look to find A faithful heart in him whose ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... prepared Cider, add one-fourth pound Tartaric Acid, four gallons of Spirits, three pounds Loaf Sugar. Let stand ten days, draw it off carefully. Fine it down, and again rack it ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... at the depot, the doors of which were open. Captain Sol entered the waiting room and unlocked the ticket rack and the little safe. Issy, languidly toying with the broom on the front platform, paused in his pretense of sweeping and awaited permission to go home for breakfast. It ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... forks they had carefully sewed this flag with twine, and this part of the canvas I left and made it serve as the blade of my paddle; and so in due time I paddled to the Kansas shore. The river was rapid, and there were in the river heaps of drift-wood, called "rack-heaps," dangerous places into which the water rushed with great violence; but from these I was mercifully saved, and though I could not swim, I landed a few miles below Atchison without harm or accident, and made ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... 'twouldn't be to you, mother. You knaw that, I reckon. I'm hopeful; I'm more; I'm 'bout as certain of fair fortune as a man can be. Venwell rights[6] be mine, and theer's no better moorland grazing than round these paarts. The farm-land looks a bit foul, along o' being let go to rack, but us'll soon have that clean again, an' some gude stuff into it, tu. My awn work'll be staring me in the faace before summer; an' by the time Phoebe do come to be mistress, nobody'll ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... I rack invention to endeavour to account for so strange an incident: my conjectures were all unsatisfactory, all improbable. I looked round to see if I could discover his lordship in the house, but without success: the numbers ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... century. Nor had any writer, official or missionary, anywhere realised the state of India and the needs of the Hindoo and Mohammedan cultivators as flowing from the relation of the people to the soil. India was in truth a land of millions of peasant proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or plundered by powerful middlemen, both squeezed or literally tortured by the Government of the day, and driven to depend on the usurer for even the seed for each crop. War and famine had alternated ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... we have we prize not to the worth While we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost, Why, then we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us While ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... the heart with sympathetic woe, Awake the sigh, and teach the tear to flow; To put on frenzy's wild, distracted glare, And freeze the soul with horror and despair; With just desert enroll'd in endless fame, Conscious of worth superior, Cibber[63] came. When poor Alicia's madd'ning brains are rack'd, And strongly imaged griefs her mind distract, Struck with her grief, I catch the madness too, My brain turns round, the headless trunk I view! 790 The roof cracks, shakes, and falls—new horrors rise, And Reason buried in the ruin lies! Nobly disdainful ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Baltic Sea, sailing sou'-sou'west, until they passed Gotland, and they edged west again, leaving Bornholm to port.... And they sailed past Malmoe into the Sound, heading north for the Cattegat.... They turned the Skaw and swung her into the Skage-Rack.... And ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... and insensible clay! Thou beggar corpse! Stripp'd, 'midst a butcher'd score, or so, of men, Upon a bleak hill-side, beneath the rack Of flying clouds torn by the cannon's boom, If the red, trampled grass were all thy shroud, The scowl of Heaven thy plumed canopy, Thou might'st be any one! How is it with thee? Man! Charles Stuart! King! See, the white, heavy, overhanging lids ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... stood by the old-fashioned coat and hat rack while she went in at the hall door of the back parlor. Soon Roebuck himself came out, his glasses on his nose, a family Bible under his arm. "Glad to see you, Matthew," said he, with saintly kindliness, giving me a friendly hand. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... no pudding. Mr. Arlington, a stout, florid gentleman, had no time for pudding. The rest might sit and enjoy it at their leisure, but not so Mr. Arlington. Somebody had to see to things—that is, if they were not to be allowed to go to rack and ruin. If other people could not be relied upon to do their duty, so that everything inside the house and out of it was thrown upon one pair of shoulders, then it followed as a natural consequence that that pair of shoulders ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... grove, or rather remains of the old Galwegian forest, which lines for some space the banks of the Corriewater, the storm began to abate, the wind sighed milder and milder among the trees, and here and there a star, twinkling momentarily through the sudden rack of the clouds, showed the river raging from bank to brae. As he shook the moisture from his clothes, he was not without a wish that the day would dawn, and that he might be preserved on a road which his imagination ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... he saw the hat-rack where as a boy he had hung his cap. It now held garments over which Lane fumbled. Mel came ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... her to a rope, leads her to the rack, and binds her fast. Then Hans goes to his mother. 'Good evening, mother.' 'Good evening, Hans. Where have you been?' 'With Gretel.' 'What did you take her?' 'I took her nothing.' 'What did Gretel give you?' 'She gave me nothing, ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... argumentum baculinum[Lat][obs3], stick law, rap on the knuckles, box on the ear; blow &c. (impulse) 276; stripe, cuff, kick, buffet, pummel; slap, slap in the face; wipe, douse; coup de grace; torture, rack; picket, picketing; dragonnade[obs3]. capital punishment; execution; lethal injection; the gas chamber; hanging &c.v.; electrocution, rail-riding, scarpines[obs3]; decapitation, decollation[obs3]; garrotte, garrotto[It]; crucifixion, impalement; firing squad; martyrdom; auto-da-fe[Fr]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... front door, hung her hat and coat on the rack, and stopped in the parlor to warm her hands at the stove. Then she went out through the diningroom, where the boys were getting their lessons at the long table; through the sitting-room, where Thor was ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... poker hung from a rack in the hearth, and, his face set like a mask, Paul took the crude weapon in his hand, and slowly raised his head until he was looking up at the oil-painting above the mantelpiece. The sound of a dry and discreet cough close behind him drew his attention to the presence ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... "When Matt gets hold of something new, you can be sure the discovery isn't a new kind of can-opener or patent towel-rack that can be 'stolen.' His ideas are safe for the simple reason that there probably aren't more than four other scientists on earth capable of even dimly comprehending them. All you and I can do—whatever this may turn out to be—is to watch ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... view it. Old Mrs. Carpenter died some thirteen years ago, and according to her will the place had to be left undisturbed, and let furnished. The solicitors placed it in our hands, but the property until the twenty years have elapsed, is quite untenantable. The whole place has now gone to rack and ruin. We have a number of other furnished houses which I will be most delighted to give ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... of losing his temper and throwing away his place, and so, among the consequences which would necessarily follow, leaving the poor lady-teacher without a friend to stand by her ready to lay his hand on the grand-inquisitor before the windlass of his rack had taken one turn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... she was fighting in the dark with an unknown enemy. She became afraid of being left alone, and even when seated quietly with Selina, would suddenly start and look apprehensively towards the door, as if she heard his footstep. Imagination, when uncontrolled, can keep the mind on a mental rack, to which that of the Inquisition was a bed ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... said, as if he were on the rack, speaking hurriedly to get it over with. "I make the sacrifice. You will find my money in an inner vest pocket underneath my vest. It is a life's savings. Take it, and let me go. It is not much—only a little—I ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... his chair, twiddling the letter between his fingers, and looked smilingly out on the grey autumn rack of clouds. There was a pleasant and flattering intimacy in the invitation: pleasant because it came from a pretty woman; flattering because the woman was a princess, widow of a younger son of a Royal Balkan house. She lived at Chetwood. Park, on the other side of Morebury, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... by the commander of the guard to fall out and report, an orderly will give his name, company, and regiment to the sergeant of the guard, and, leaving his rifle in the arm rack in his company quarters, will proceed at once to the officer to whom he is assigned, reporting: "Sir, Private ——, Company ——, ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... rack with the patent locking device, which works loaded or unloaded with equal ease—no friction, no ...
— Sam Lambert and the New Way Store - A Book for Clothiers and Their Clerks • Unknown
... action with a rapidity which disconcerted his adversaries. It is not known what became of Pantaleon, whether he was executed or fled the country, but his friends were tortured to death or had to purchase their pardon dearly. Sadyattes was stretched on a rack and torn with carding combs.* Glaucias, besieged in his fortress of Sidene, opened its gates after a desperate resistance; the king demolished the walls, and pronounced a solemn curse on those who should thereafter rebuild them. Pindarus, summoned to surrender, refused, but as he had not sufficient ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the rack just now. Duckworth went after the French Squadron that I had intelligence of near Teneriffe. I am afraid the Frenchman has duped him, and by throwing false intelligence in his way has sent him to the West Indies—or I ought to have ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... best for me to go! I don't understand anything, and yet I long to understand. I do not even understand myself. On my way to you I knew what to say, and here all is confused. You have put me up on the rack, you have set me on edge. And then you tell me—'I am as ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... compliment, more condensed and boiled-down flattery, more scent of incense than the most fulsome speech. And if one's victim is rather a voluble talker, with a reputation for wit, a man need never rack his brains beforehand, wondering what to say, or how he can keep up with her. Let him listen to her, with his metaphorical mouth open in wrapt admiration, and ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... In the foremost carriage I found him. I tried to persuade him to come out, but he clung to the rack. So I left him. I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... was as it had been when he settled himself to sleep on the departure of the three strangers. There, on the opposite seat, were their rugs, their fur-lined coats, their illustrated papers—all the impedimenta of prosperous travellers; and there, on the rack above them, was his own modest hand-bag without initials or label—a common little bag that might have belonged to some poor Russian clerk or held the possessions of some needy Polish student. The owner's ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... to force from me a confession of the most damnable of all alliances! I remained firm. My hair turned white; my body withered up to a mummy; my feet and hands were paralysed. But there was still the terrible rack left—the cunningest invention of the foul fiend,—and it extorted from me a confession at which I shudder even now. I was to be burnt alive; but when the earthquake shook the foundations of the palaces and of the great prison, the door of the underground ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... had fallen within the hour; but still the sky was dense with a sullen rack, and still the sidewalks ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... Soviet Republic of Russia, I am told, no one can lay claim to the title of worker unless his hands are hardened and roughened by toil, and LENIN and TROTSKY have to take their turns at the rack, like the commonest executioner. In England we are not nearly so particular about the manual test, and, besides feeling quite kindly disposed towards professional footballers, tea-tasters and the men who stand on Cornish ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... into a bashfulness that rendered her almost as unstable of mood as before. But she was one of that mettle—fervid, cordial, and spontaneous—who had not the heart to spoil a passion; and her affairs having gone to rack and ruin by no fault of her own she was left to a painfully narrowed existence which lent even something of rationality to her attachment. Thus it was that her tender and unambitious soul found ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... three-year-old child with a large tag pinned across his little dress played with railroad-owned blocks; the matron, a sort of stout Lachesis, with a string of keys at her belt, gray with years and the rather sweet tiredness of service, sorted towels at a rack. It was to her that Lilly spun out a ready tale, reddening as she talked, but stanch ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... a royal order. According to law, torture, the disgrace of the Roman jurisprudence, could not, in any circumstances, be inflicted on an English subject. Nevertheless, during the troubles of the fifteenth century, a rack was introduced into the Tower, and was occasionally used under the plea of political necessity. But it would be a great error to infer from such irregularities that the English monarchs were, either in theory or in practice, absolute. We ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tribunal, as a fact, was composed of eight members, all known to be fervent haters of Savonarola, whose trial began with the torture. The result was that, feeble in body constitutionally nervous and irritable, he had not been able to endure the rack, and, overcome by agony just at the moment when the executioner had lifted him up by the wrists and then dropped him a distance of two feet to the ground, he had confessed, in order to get some respite, that his prophecies were nothing ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Above a rack, with its array of decanters and glasses; and in the centre, overhead, a swing-lamp, lacquered brass—so constructed as to throw a brilliant glare on the surface of the table, while giving light more subdued to all other parts ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... after many years, in distant lands, Still nourishing in thy bewilder'd brain That wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old-world pain deg.— deg.8 Say, will it never heal? And can this fragrant lawn 10 With its cool trees, and night, And the sweet, tranquil Thames, And moonshine, and the dew, To thy rack'd heart and ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... stall, he could hardly help envying the animal's apparent acquiescence in a life so monotonous. "The stupid brute," he said, "thinks neither of the race-ground or the hunting-field, or his green paddock at Bucklaw, but enjoys himself as comfortably when haltered to the rack in this ruinous vault, as if he had been foaled in it; and, I who have the freedom of a prisoner at large, to range through the dungeons of this wretched old tower, can hardly, betwixt whistling and sleeping, contrive to pass away ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... be given from lack of records. The Thames roared backward on its course, and London and all central England were inundated. A great bore of sea-water swept along the shores of the English Channel, and bursting through the Skager Rack, covered the lower end of Sweden, and rushed up the Gulf of Finland, burying St. Petersburg, and turning all Western Russia, and the plains of Pomerania into a sea. The Netherlands disappeared. The Atlantic poured through the narrow pass of the Strait of Gibraltar, leaving ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... expanse seemed calling to him to come away and do as his fellow heroes were doing. He ought to be lying in a freezing trench, grasping a rifle instead of skulking in a feather bed wrapped in warm blankets. But indeed the bed had become a very rack to poor Gavin, the blankets smothered him. He tossed from side ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... their attention upon Scraggs, who had dodged below like a frightened rabbit and sought shelter in the shaft alley. He had sufficient presence of mind, as he dashed through the engine room, to snatch a large monkey wrench off the tool rack on the wall, and, kneeling just inside the alley entrance he turned at bay and threatened the invaders with this weapon. Thereupon Hicks and Flaherty pelted him with lumps of coal, but the sole result of this assault was to force Scraggs ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... his front door at noon, his first glance was at the rack in the corner of the hall, where, on the left-hand hook, Peter Junior's coat and hat had hung when he was at home, ever since he was a boy. They were not there. The Elder lifted his bushy brows one higher than the other, then drew them down to ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... plane was a private-type ship. Plenty of them flying around. It could've been bought easily enough. All they'd need would be a farm somewhere where it could land and they could strap on a rocket rack and put in a radar. And they'd need information. Probably be a good lead, this business. Only just so many people could know what was coming on this ship, and what course it was flying, and so on. Security will have to check ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... which was now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct As water is ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... any torment ever so cruel, ever so unjustifiable as this! He was asked to put himself, by his own act, into the thumbscrew, on the rack, in order that the executioner might twist his limbs and tear out his vitals! He was to walk into a court of his own accord that he might be torn by the practised skill of a professional tormentor, that he might be forced ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... it here. Take for instance them 1080's, which we are selling Fine Brothers, oder that 2060—that overskirt effect with the gilt net yoke and peacock-feather-design braid, Flaxberg. Them two styles made a big hit, Flaxberg. They are all hanging on that end rack there, Flaxberg, and you could look ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... men in the world; and this was the cause why the martyrs of Jesus did so slight both the promises of their adversaries when they would have overcome them with proffering the great things of this world unto them, and also their threatenings when they told them they would rack them, hang them, burn them. None of these things could prevail upon them ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... was the outward appearance, not so was the inward feelings of our hero. He knew his fate—unless he could effect an escape, of which he had little hope—and he nerved himself to meet and seem to his captors careless of it; but his soul was already on the rack of torture. This was not for himself alone; for Algernon was a brave man, and in reality feared not death; though, like many another brave man, be had no desire to die at his time of life, especially with all the tortures of the stake, which ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... fact that once in twenty-four hours food would be slipped through a hole in the wall by unseen hands; lying here until oftentimes death or the cruel mercy of madness came upon them before the overworked executioner found time to rack their limbs or ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he shook his ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... contained a flask of gunpowder and a pistol. Some way further along the beach they picked up three muskets, which had been jammed into the rack in which they had been fixed, and the whole together had ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... things to Susan Bates with such an increasing frequency and insistency as almost to transfer the rack of them from his own brain to hers. Once or twice, in an interval of semi-delirium, he bewept the ruin not only of his business, but of himself and of his family and of all his belongings. He infected her with his own dread and panic; she saw his property dispersed, his home in others' hands, ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... the great contest of the Curragh. This victim of Saxon tyranny was named John Dunne, and his holding comprised more than thirteen hundred acres. Let us hope the colt did him credit. Let us trust that the evicted quadruped carried off the blue ribbon of Kildare. For under the Lansdowne "Rack-rents" the struggling farmer could barely keep one racehorse, which, like the fabled ewe-lamb of ancient story, was his little all. Perhaps Mr. Dunne's colt was related to that well-bred travelling horse, of which the picture adorned the walls of Limerick and its vicinity, and which gloried ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the construction of a branch salmon hatchery is warranted, owing to the few salmon obtainable. The matter deserves further investigation, however, and will receive due consideration at an early date. It is thought that a satisfactory supply of fish may be secured by constructing a dam or rack which will intercept fish in the main stream and lead practically the entire run into one tributary, ...
— The Salmon Fishery of Penobscot Bay and River in 1895-96 • Hugh M. Smith
... really do wish you well; but if he, who has a hundred eyes, should come, your life will be placed in great peril." In the meanwhile the Master himself comes back from dinner; and having lately seen the Oxen in bad condition, comes up to the rack: "Why," says he, "is there so little fodder? Is litter scarce? What great trouble is it to remove those spiders' webs?"[16] While he is prying into every corner, he perceives too the branching horns of the Stag, and having summoned the household, he orders him to be killed, ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... new and exquisite? She fled into that valley they pass o'er Who go to Corinth from Cenchreas' shore; And rested at the foot of those wild hills, The rugged founts of the Peraean rills, And of that other ridge whose barren back Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack, South-westward to Cleone. There she stood About a young bird's flutter from a wood, Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread, By a clear pool, wherein she passioned To see herself escap'd from so sore ills, While her ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... and get up and offer them your chair, and run errands for them without expecting them to pay you. This place on the back of your head, where there is a bump as big as a hickory nut, is what we call the hat rack bump, because you can hang your hat on it. The barber ought to have cut a couple of slices off that bump with his lawn mower. Here is a bump that shows that you are color blind. Be careful, or you will marry a negro girl by mistake. As a precaution, when you begin to get in love serious, ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... Paloma Springs in its entirety lay there in full view, drowsing in the torrid heat of mid-September. Not a human being was in sight. Only a brindled dog slept in a small patch of shade beside the store; and fastened to the hotel hitching-rack, two burros, motionless save for twitching tails and ears, were almost hidden beneath ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... indwelling goodness swelled up in her like a reviving spring, and she began to be herself again, her old and lovely self. Little Peter, with his beauty and his winsome ways, melted and scattered the last lingering rack of her fog-like ambition for her son. Twenty times in a morning would she drop her work to catch up and caress her grandchild, overwhelming him with endearments; while over the return of his mother, her second Isy, now her daughter indeed, she ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... juice add a pound of anchovies, and boil them slowly till the anchovies are dissolved. Strain it; add half a pint of white wine vinegar, half an ounce of mace, half an ounce of cloves, and forty peppercorns; boil it a quarter of an hour, and, when cold, rack it off and bottle it. A quarter of a pint of vinegar put to the dregs that have been strained off, and well boiled up, makes an excellent seasoning for the cook's use in hashes, ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... a hard task, making one's self a brick without straw," answered Geoffrey. "Think of not having the luxury of being disagreeable—to be always on the rack to perpetrate a joke, ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... who has for a lifetime hidden a sin or a sorrow and suddenly finds the joy of a confessional which relieves the sick heart, takes away the hand of loneliness that clamps it, and gives it freedom again; lifting the poor slave from the rack of secrecy, the cruelest inquisition of life and time. She repeated the words once more, a little louder, a little clearer. She had vindicated herself to God, now she vindicated herself to man—though ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... cruel deadly-lovely maiden, Tell me what great sin have I committed, That thou keep'st me to the rack thus fasten'd, That thou hast thy solemn ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... disc engraved with the stars is rotated automatically behind a fixed grille of wires marking lines of altitude and azimuth. Power for rotating the disc is provided by a float rising in a clepsydra jar and connected, by a rope or chain passing over a pulley to a counterweight or by a rack and pinion, to an axle which supported the rotating disc and communicated ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... we sacrificed it to them, it might be a doubtful benefit. I often thank my stars I wasn't born in the age of martyrs. If J. had been, I'm sure the very sight of the rack or the faggot would have made ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... That care has iron crowns for many brows; That Calvaries are everywhere, whereon Virtue is crucified, and nails and spears Draw guiltless blood; that sorrow sits and drinks At sweetest hearts, till all their life is dry; That gentle spirits on the rack of pain Grow faint or fierce, and pray and curse by turns; That hell's temptations, clad in heavenly guise And armed with might, lie evermore in wait Along life's ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... he led the way to a large shed which stood partly behind the cottage, which he said was his stable; thereupon he dismounted and led his donkey into the shed, which was without stalls, but had a long rack and manger. On one side he tied his donkey, after taking off her caparisons, and I followed his example, tying my horse at the other side with a rope halter which he gave me; he then asked me to come in and taste his mead, but ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... lady's window. Only with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving in its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has neither eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the scourge of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a coup of trente-et-quarante. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes whose calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem as if they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The grandest hours ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... first come there, and had looked shyly about her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings with the outer world. Now she rose and went round the room, searching for its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old. If the room told her anything it told her how ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... wandered on into the smoking-room. "I told them I didn't want to be bothered with little things, but I certainly expected to hear from them once in a while. If I don't look out, they'll reduce me to the status of a rubber stamp! I'll have to stir them up," and he gloomily extracted from the rack the newly-arrived, two-days-old London paper, brought by the little rickety train which struggled through at uncertain and infrequent intervals from Zunderburg to Weet-sur-Mer, lighted a fresh cigar, and sat down to a ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... to death. Nicostratus, Claudius, Castorius, and Victorinus were taken, and after being thrice tortured, were thrown into the sea. Tiburtius, betrayed by a false brother, was beheaded. Castulus, accused by the same wretch, was thrice put on the rack, and afterwards buried alive. Marcus and Marcellianus were nailed by the feet to a post, and having remained in that torment twenty-four hours, were shot to death ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... certain share of the nobler pride of the tyrants themselves in those tombs and dwellings. Some surmise, also, there seems to have been, of the "curse" of gold, with a dim, lurking suspicion of curious facilities for cruelty in the command over those skilful artificers in metal— some ingenious rack or bull "to pinch and peel"—the tradition of which, not unlike the modern Jacques Bonhomme's shudder at the old ruined French donjon or bastille, haunts, generations afterwards, the ruins of those "labyrinths" of stone, where the old tyrants had their pleasures. For it is a mistake ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the carriage door while Ashton stowed his smaller traps on the rack. Presently he ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... Nor could the rack and the persecuting bands of Louis XIV. tame or subdue the spirit of our fathers. Neither Alva nor Richelieu were able to compass the triumph of tyranny over the innate sentiment of Freedom and Independence in our ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... himself was bound to secrecy. No outsider was present. The records of the Inquisition are jealously guarded. That he was technically tortured is certain; that he actually underwent the torment of the rack is doubtful. Much learning has been expended upon the question, especially in Germany. Several eminent scholars have held the fact of actual torture to be indisputable—geometrically certain, one says—and they confirm it by the hernia ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... injury By speaking ill doth ease his heart of pain. But what, shall torture make me wrong her name? No, no, a pris'ner constant thinks it shame, Though he (were) racked his first truth to gainsay. Her true given praise my first confession is; Though her disdain do rack me night and day, This I confessed, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... was 'on the rack of his present agony' that the Sylvander-Clarinda correspondence was begun and continued. That much may be said in excuse for Burns. A man, especially one with the passion and sensitiveness of a poet, cannot be expected to write in all sanity when he is racked by the ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... on before the following gale: And then his rod he takes, wherewith he calleth spirits pale From Orcus, or those others sends sad Tartarus beneath, And giveth sleep and takes away, and openeth eyes to death; The rod that sways the ocean-winds and rules the cloudy rack. Now winging way he comes in sight of peak and steepy back Of flinty Atlas, on whose head all heaven is set adown— Of Atlas with the piny head, and never-failing crown Of mirky cloud, beat on with rain and all the winds that blow: 249 A snow-cloak o'er ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... but the beginning of a petty espionage, a revival of the Spanish inquisition, subjecting to spiritual torture every one who speaks or writes what the other members consider not good for the association. Such disclaimers bring quite as much of martyrdom for our civilization as did the rack and fire in the barbarous ages of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the hall she ate nothing, but drank her wine as though burning with a fever. Sometimes, when the stillness had become portentous, Lapo rolled up his sleeves, inspected his scarred, swarthy arms, and mumbled, with the grin of a man stretched on the rack: ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Gardener. Ah, you may well say that, Sir! Bin allowed to run to rack and ruin, this here pooty bit o' garding has. Want a lot o' clearing, scurryfunging, and topping and lopping, afore it'll look anythink like. But it's got the making of a puffeck parrydise in it, a puffeck parrydise it has—with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... to death at once, as you will hear in the account of the Tower; he was tortured on the rack to make him give up the names of those who had been in the conspiracy with him. Again and again he refused, but at last the awful suffering weakened him so that he hardly knew what he was doing; and when the torturers told him some of his comrades had been taken, which was not true, he believed ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... hard subject to deal with, the gentlemanly conductor packed up the bundles, and tossed them into the rack, heedless of the protest of the indignant owner. I confess that I rather enjoyed the discomfiture of the old lady, who had compelled me to stand for the accommodation of her bundles. She was unreasonable, and utterly ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... contempt in his silky voice, and Kid Wolf flushed under his tan. Hardy pretended to ignore the visitor completely. The faro dealer slid one card and then another from his box; the case keeper moved a button or two on his rack. Then the dealer raked in the winnings from the losers. The game was going on as usual. The gamblers, taking their cue from Jack Hardy, turned to their games again. It was as if Kid Wolf had ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... magical power of the awful conception excited. Not Bourdaloue himself, with that preternatural skill of his to probe the conscience of man to its innermost secret, could have exceeded the heart-searching rigor with which, in the earlier part of the discourse, Massillon had put to the rack the quivering consciences of his hearers. The terrors of the Lord, the shadows of the world to come, were thus already on all hearts. So much as this. Bourdaloue, too, with his incomparable dialectic, could have accomplished. But there immediately ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Queen who rules the tide Now forward thrown, now bridled back, Smile o'er each answering smile, then hide Her grandeur in the transient rack, And yield her power, and veil her pride, And ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... to keep up his spirits; but the other, who was my friend, and Aikane—Hope, was the most dreadful object I had ever seen in my life: his eyes sunken and dead, his cheeks fallen in against his teeth, his hands looking like claws; a dreadful cough, which seemed to rack his whole shattered system, a hollow whispering voice, and an entire inability to move himself. There he lay, upon a mat, on the ground, which was the only floor of the oven, with no medicine, no comforts, and no one to care for, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... in the service. Then, after his first wife (mother of the younger Pokrovski) had died, the widower bethought him of marrying a second time, and took to himself a tradesman's daughter, who soon assumed the reins over everything, and brought the home to rack and ruin, so that the old man was worse off than before. But to the younger Pokrovski, fate proved kinder, for a landowner named Bwikov, who had formerly known the lad's father and been his benefactor, took the boy under his protection, ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... The steering-gear rack (Fig. 165) by which the amount of helm is adjusted is made from a strip of brass cut with lugs which are bent up at right angles as illustrated. This need only be of thin sheet metal, as the strain is ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... room—her rocking-chair at a window, her sewing close by, a book on the table, her bed made up in the corner, her washstand of curly maple—the pitcher full of water and clean towels hanging from the rack. Hale had gotten out the things she had packed away and the room was just as she had always kept it. She rushed to ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes, the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest. There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be forthcoming. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me, pity me, Lenora! In that fatal interview I have suffered all the torments that could rack the heart of a parent; I have drunk the dregs of shame; I have emptied the cup of humiliation; but all, all are nothing in comparison with thy grief! Calm yourself, child of my love; let me see the sweet face I so love to look on; let me regain my lost ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... of March and April rack very low in their rain-fall in comparison with any point situated along the same thermal lines; while May is scarce up to the average, but yet sufficient to supply the seeds and grasses ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... despair, when a heavy lurch of the ship threw most of the things off the table before dinner, mingling cutlery, pickles, and broken glass and china, in one chaotic heap on the floor. As darkness came on, the gale rose higher, the moon was obscured, the rack in heavy masses was driving across the stormy sky, and scuds of sleet and spray made the few venturous persons on deck cower under the nearest ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird |
