"Rasping" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... though it be but a chance one seen in a crowd. A voice markedly individual, not merely because it was somewhat high-pitched for a man's, but rather for a quality not easily defined, which gave to it a certain vibrant, unpleasant harshness, sounding metallic almost, rasping, as though with the hiss of steel surfaces rubbing. Altogether impossible to describe adequately, yet, as Judith ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... widowed mother. The house Mrs. Meadowsweet lived in fitted her requirements to perfection. In short, she was fat and comfortable, both in mind and body; she never fretted, she never worried; she was not rasping and disagreeable; she was not fault-finding. If her nature lacked depth, it certainly did not lack affection, generosity, and a true spirit of kindliness. If she were a little too well pleased with herself, she was ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... away, there was a rasping and creaking as of keys and bolts, followed by the clang of an opening door and the clatter of hurrying feet. From my window I saw my father and Corporal Rufus Smith rush frantically out of the house hatless and unkempt, ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that chalk made! He searched about with his fingers around the big boulder. Yes, there it was; the wind, no doubt, had blown it off. He pulled it toward him. The pebble was drawn across the boulder with another and louder rasping that sounded fearfully in the night. Then at once a gasp, a scuffle, a rush, a splash of something in mud, or water—horrible sounds of a being choking, strangling or trying to speak. For a moment Yan sank down in terror. His lips refused to move. But the remembrance of the cow came to help ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... close against each other, were still for a long moment, and then my gasping, rasping voice came back ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... fast furled. In the night, what of the roll and the absence of wind, it had made life too hideous to be permitted to go on rasping at the mast, smashing at the tackles, and buffeting the empty air into hollow outbursts of sound. But the big mainsail is still on, and the staysail, jib, and flying-jib are snapping and slashing at their sheets with every roll. Every star is out. Just for luck I put the wheel hard ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... have been lying down under cover for some time, and are required to advance, there is a little hesitation, each looking to see whether the others are going forward. As I rode down the line, calling to the troopers to go forward, and rasping brief directions to the captains and lieutenants, I came upon a man lying behind a little bush, and I ordered him to jump up. I do not think he understood that we were making a forward move, and he looked up at me for a moment with hesitation, and I again bade him rise, ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... to whistle, but his musical efforts were abortive. There was no music in him. A moment before his heart had been full of harmony; but when he found a man instead of his sweetheart, the harmony quickly turned to rasping discord. ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... he had a right to expect, for the leaden pellet bored its way through the skull of the wolf, who, with a rasping yelp, made a sidelong plunge, as if diving off a bank into the water, and, striking on the side of his head, rolled over on his back, with his legs vaguely kicking at the moon, and as powerless to do harm as a ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the bun-experiment as a part ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... it, Admiral Bruix,' cried the Emperor, in the same terrible rasping voice, 'that you did not obey my commands ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... have been dusting that heavy shelf high up on the wall with all the china on it, and the whole thing has given way. She must be badly hurt! But why doesn't her mistress come rushing upstairs? and what was that rasping ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... real, rasping fun! Mighty hull, monster gun, all are mine ere all's done; and the millions madly spent On a lollopping wolloping kettle, with ten thousand tons of metal sink as the Titans settle, turtle-turned, or wrenched and rent, To my rocks and my ooze. I seem little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... dark concerning each other's movements as Danglar himself was. Therefore Danglar, and logically enough from his viewpoint, had jumped to the conclusion that, since they had not come together, only one of them, the Adventurer, was acting in the affair to-night, and—Danglar's voice was rasping in her ears. ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... unbared to view on his hairy skin the tattooed form of a naked mermaid. A table stood in the center of the uncarpeted room, with a lawyer on either side—Purdy, the goaty-haired, messy, elderly man, half-blind, sharp-voiced, rasping out his case; opposite him, Thacher, a slinky, mean-looking young man, who was reputed to have left New Zealand under a cloud. He looked what he was, a cheap lawyer's clerk, of the pinched, hungry variety one sees in ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... And there the wasps, that lodge them ill-concealed In the vole's empty house, still drove afield To plunder touchwood from old crippled trees And build their young ones their hutched nurseries; Still creaked the grasshoppers' rasping unison Nor had the whisper through the tansies run Nor weather-wisest bird gone home. How then Should wry eels in the pebbled shallows ken Lightning coming? troubled up they stole To the deep-shadowed sullen water-hole, Among whose warty snags the quaint perch lair. As cunning stole the boy ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... both as nothing else could have done. As he read now, his countenance cleared, and his imaginary cares fell from him; while his wife's very real ones were forgotten as she listened, and there was a blessed truce to trouble for a time. Unfortunately, however, as the reading proceeded, he came to a rasping bit of the story, which began to grate upon his nerves. The first part had been pleasurably exciting, but when he found the sensation slipping from him, he thought to stay it with a stimulant, and went to the sideboard for the purpose. Mrs. Caldwell's heart sank; the whisky ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Mexico, the Tarahumares are fond of music and have a good ear for it. When the Spaniards first came, they found no musical instruments among the Tarahumares except the short reed flute, so common to many Mexican tribes, the shaman's rattle, and the rasping stick. But they soon introduced the violin and even the guitar, and throughout Mexico the Indians now make these instruments themselves, using pine wood and other indigenous material in their construction, sometimes with remarkable skill and ingenuity, and for glue the juice of a certain lily ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... say so, and act accordingly. Are the superficial amenities, the soothing fictions, the smotherings of the burning heart,... really paramount in this world, and never to give way? and when a soul of power, unable to refrain, rubs off, though it be with rasping words, all the varnish from rottenness and lies, is he to be tried in our courts of compliment for a misdemeanor? Is there never a higher duty than that of either pitying or converting guilty men,—the duty of publicly exposing them? of awakening ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... his energies in a saucepan, and making a Saint Lawrence of himself by wasting his life on a series of gridirons. Ah, if I were only a man, I would do something better than that, and prove that heroes are not all dead yet. But, instead of that, I'm only a woman, and must sit rasping my temper with absurdities like this." And Di wrestled with her knitting as if it were Fate, and she were paying off the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... this?' broke in the somewhat rasping voice of the Sheriff, who had followed Mr. Matthews, unobserved by the young people; 'it seems that half-a-dozen boys cannot be together without ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... gittin' ahead of 'im. Don't ye breathe now, no more!" And raising the long bark, he called through it again, this time more softly, more enticingly, but always with that indescribable wildness, shyness and roughness rasping strangely through the note. The hurried approach of the bull could be followed clearly around the head of the lake. It stopped, and Jabe called again. In a minute or two there came a brief, explosive, grunting reply—this time from ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... suddenly, with a queer, rasping catch, as she seized his arm in a frantic clutch and as quickly went limp. He stared at her sharply, and understood instantly the message written in her eyes—eyes now enlarged, staring hard, brilliant, and full of soul-searing terror as she slumped down, helpless but for his support. In the ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... locked for the night. Only a gruesome green light was blazing in a little drug-store just opposite, while at our left, as we turned the corner, a tumble- down saloon sent out on the night a mingled sound of clicking billiard-balls, discordant voices, the harsher rasping of a violin, together with the ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... was shame and humiliation, and all because of the look on the face of the girl at the edge of the crowd. He sat in the shadow of the big box and fought his fight. The coffee and the excitement no longer kept him up; he was faint, and his breath came short. Above him he heard Ricks's rasping voice still talking to the few customers who were left. He knew, without glancing up, just how Ricks looked when he said the words; he knew how his teeth pushed his lips back, and how his restless little eyes watched everything at once. A sudden fierce repulsion ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... A French architect, who had a room hard by, met Brock in the hall, hollow-eyed and haggard, on the morning after their first night. He shouted lugubrious congratulations in Brock's ear, just as if Brock's ear had not been harassed a whole night long by shrieking wheels and rasping cables. ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the talk about obligation. It set him at a distance, immediately. He ceased to look lovingly, to indulge in the nerve-rasping little caresses. He became carefully formal. He was evidently eager to prove the sincerity of his protestations—too eager perhaps, her perverse mind suggested. Still, sincere or not, he held to ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... his feet to find that his muscles still were reluctant to respond to orders; he helped the professor to arise. And from the group that drew back further into the far end of the room came a subdued and rasping tumult of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... calcified beads, but with the horny star-headed spines not yet developed, whilst on the old outer coat these latter had been worn down quite smooth, and the calcified beads worn entirely away. Here, then, we have an excellent rasping surface. With respect to the power of movement necessary for the boring action, the peduncle is amply furnished with transverse, oblique, and longitudinal striae-less muscles,—the latter attached to the basal disc. ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... little hopes of bringing off anything in the nature of a bluff; but he said, in a rasping tone: "We've discovered that the signature of Lord Loudwater's letter of instructions to his bankers to pay that cheque for twelve thousand pounds into your wife's account ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... his hand for the other file, and Jim selected a fellow of herculean proportions to take first turn with him. In a few seconds the low rasping sound of the rapidly moving files broke the stillness of the night, and seemed preternaturally loud by comparison with that stillness. The remaining members of the crew concentrated all their powers in the act of listening, so that they might give ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... with all the old French names, the L'Homme-Dieus and Des Isles and Beaulieus; the air, or the granite, or one knows not what, caused an ossification of the consonants, a drying up of the vowels, till these names, once soft and melodious, became more angular, more rasping in utterance, than ever ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... sound they heard. A flock of white cockatoos were roosting on the tree, and favored the party with their dissonant cries. They are described as having "most sharp and rasping voices." ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... olive-coloured girl from a land where it is always spring. Her whole being translated into music, with hair dishevelled and feet hardly touching the ground, the girl suggested an orange-leaf dancing on a sunbeam. The rasping street-organ, perchance, brought to her melodious reminiscences of some flute-playing Savoyard boy, brown-limbed ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... stagger no farther. Looking back at the cruiser, I saw that LeConte, still on the gangway, had stopped also. Captain Crane and Koto were making weak, despairing signs at me from the entrance to the control room. Both of them looked as sick as cats. I heard a laugh, a shrill, rasping sort of laugh, from the forward end of the bright cruiser, and I looked ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... loaf sugar is used, and there is a very common practice of holding a lump in one hand and following a sip of the unsweetened tea with a nibble at the sugar. When several persons are engaged in this rasping process a curious ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... understanding me," she went on warmly. He interrupted her with a certain effect of roughness. I didn't like him speaking to this frank creature so much from under the brim of his hat, as it were. And he produced a faint, rasping voice quite like a man with ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... yielding, more frail and vanishing, than steam? And what is stronger than steam? I know nothing. Steam it is which has lifted up the mountains from the sea into the clouds. Steam it is which tears to pieces the bowels of the earth with earthquakes and volcanoes, shaking down cities, rasping the solid rocks into powder, and scattering them far and wide in dust over ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... more by weather than age, and his narrow brow was bald and smooth. He had instantaneously formed an opinion of Jules St.-Ange, and the multitude of words, most of them lingual curiosities, with which he was rasping the wide-open ears of his listeners, signified, in short, that, as sure as his name was Parson Jones, the little Creole ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... upon our feet, staggering after him with our stiffened limbs, while he ran swiftly across the bridge and rang violently at the bell. There was the rasping of bolts from the other side, and the amazed Ames stood in the entrance. Holmes brushed him aside without a word and, followed by all of us, rushed into the room which had been occupied by the man whom we had ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the road, the low brush rasping harshly on their stirrups—as loud as a bugle-call, it seemed to Frances—when a dash of hoofs from ahead told that a detachment was coming to investigate. Now there came a hail. Frances stopped; Banjo behind her whispered to know what ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... the nostrils. The odour was as interminable as the half-accomplished tune, and Breezy Bill writhed. He was not new to the game, but bad luck had been the portion of the ship from the start, and small things irritated him, rasping ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... blast of heat was rising over the land and the rasping cries of the cicala fretted their talk; and Caterina bade him follow her down into the voto—the vast, cool, underground chambers which, for the patricians of Cyprus, made life possible during this heated term, between the freshness ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... takes keer of it," explained old Judd, and again, with shame, June felt the hurt of her lover's thoughtfulness. When she entered the cabin, the same old rasping petulant voice called her from a bed in one corner, and when June took the shrivelled old hand that was limply thrust from the bed-clothes, the old hag's keen eyes swept her from ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... down on my head, and as I looked up, there sat, on a limb not ten feet above me, an impudent rogue of a gray squirrel, half as big as a rabbit, erect upon his haunches, working away at the twin brother of the acorn he had dropped upon my hat to break my reverie, rasping it audibly with his chisel-shaped teeth, and grinning at me just as coolly as though I ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... Henrietta, I hope not. No, no, I'm not going to believe that, 'and, temporarily united, the third person left behind though following closely, they returned to the lighted house. As they stood in the hall they could hear the rasping sound ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... ye say this hyar stranger calls hisself, Peanuts?" he demanded, bluntly, and when the other had told him he repeated the name thoughtfully. Then he shot out another question with the sharp peremptoriness of a prosecuting attorney, and in the high, rasping voice ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... himself nor even set one to rights when it is damaged. Reckless of the remonstrances of the scandalized professor, he seizes a file, and in a few moments utterly destroys the fragments of the sword by rasping them into a heap of steel filings. Then he puts the filings into a crucible; buries it in the coals; and sets to at the bellows with the shouting exultation of the anarchist who destroys only to clear the ground for creation. When the steel is melted ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... on gittin' to see 'em agin—an buyin 'em some little Chrismus fixin's," the father wheezed. Hopelessness was coming into his rasping whisper. "I reckon it ain't no use to—to be ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the clutch. There was a moment of silence aboard the Adventurer. Then: "Over with it, Han," directed Steve. There was a splash, followed by the rasping of the cable through the chock and then a cheerful whistle from the crew as he made fast. "About eighteen feet, Steve, ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... haggard, moulded with the hunched shoulders and heavy arms of a gorilla. His face seemed to be unconsciously twisted into a snarl. His greeting, which came only after he had stared at us intently, for nearly a minute, was curt and rasping. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his poems, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... temporal condition of the people,—at their apologies for and defences of slavery, war, and capital punishment,—Rogers turned Protestant, in the full sense of the term. He spoke of priests and "pulpit wizards" as freely as John Milton did two centuries ago, although with far less bitterness and rasping satire. He could not endure to see Christianity and Humanity divorced. He longed to see the beautiful life of Jesus—his sweet humanities, his brotherly love, his abounding sympathies—made the example ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... popular. But this Arnold Forster—with his dry, self-complacent, self-sufficient fanaticism—is intolerable and hateful. He never gets up without making one angry. There is no man whose genius would entitle him to half the arrogant self-conceit of this young member. Acrid, venomous, rasping, he injures his own cause by the very excess of his gall and by the exuberance of his pretension. He also saw that the riots would do no good, and he hinted darkly of what he called "ordered resistance," whatever that means. But, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... fool enough to turn his back on me; and, first jumping upon my chair, I sprang upon him like any leopard, and brought him down with my ten fingers in his neck, and such a crack on the parquet with his skull as left it a deadweight on my hands. I remember the rasping of his bristles as I disengaged my fingers and let the leaden head fall back; it fell sideways now, and if it had but looked less dead I believe I should have stamped the life out of the ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... venomous, ironic phrases, then the dispute ceased and silence was restored. Petra, thus kept awake, sank into her own thoughts; again footfalls were heard in the corridor, this time light and rapid. Then came the rasping of the shutter-bolt of a balcony that ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... his own volume, a treatise on the calorific power of fuels—a brain-rasping subject which had been absorbing him since the coal fields were in prospect—he led the way into that spacious, mellow room, walled from floor to ceiling with shelves upon shelves of books. Dale stood transfixed. ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... was unanswerable. There was a lapse in their talk, Presley drumming on the arm of the seat, meditating on this injustice; Dyke looking off over the fields beyond the town, his frown lowering, his teeth rasping upon his pipestem. The station agent came to the door of the depot, stretching and yawning. On ahead of the engine, the empty rails of the track, reaching out toward the horizon, threw off visible layers of heat. The telegraph ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... character. But with some acquired savage instinct he, too, remained silent, null, passive; one might have thought him absent. Perhaps his quiescence, indeed, fostered some doubt of his presence here, for suddenly there sounded the rasping of flint on steel, the spunk was aglow, and then in the timorous flame of the kindling candle, taken from his own stores above, Varney recognized the face and figure of the stately and imperious old chief Colannah. The next moment he remembered something far more pertinent. He called ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... began with a manner and tone intended to be placating, but instead was rasping and irritating, "don't you fellers know that the best thing you can do with me is to take me back to our people, and trade me off for one of ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... to which could drown the other's instrument, and the snapping time grew faster, until the dancers gasped, and men who wore long boots encouraged them with cries and stamped a staccato accompaniment upon the benches or on the floor. It was savage, rasping music, but one player infused into it the ebullient nerve of France, and the other was from the misty land where the fiddler learns the witchery of the clanging reel and the swing of the Strathspey. It is doubtless ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... a child deserves mention. A young child, confronted with a rabbit, showed no fear, but on the contrary reached out his hand to take the rabbit. At this instant a loud rasping noise was produced just behind the child, who quickly withdrew his hand with {304} signs of fear. After this had been repeated a few times, the child shrank from the rabbit and was evidently afraid of it. Probably it is in this way that many ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... lackey he had been made to turn into in the last week. Then he looked up and tried to take interest in the quaint gateway through which he was passing and on up to the unique town and the square where is the ancient Podesta's palace, now the hotel. But he was in a mood of rasping cynicism—even the exquisite evening sunlight seemed to ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... at last, in a harsh and rasping voice. And they all moved automatically into the parlour, he ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... fingers together and the palms of his hands gave out dry, rasping sounds. His attitude seemed inconsistent with the immobility of his face, but Dick surmised that he was trying to regain control of his emotions. He had a keen desire to know more of the particulars of the tragedy, but sensed from the storekeeper's appearance that he was scarcely able ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... "clean" young reformer and opposing him with an unpopular regular of the most offensive type—more offensive even than a professional politician of unsavory record. At last victory was to reward the tactics of Victor Dorn, the slow, patient building which for several years now had been rasping the nerves ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... tried to speak, but his tongue was stiff, his throat dry; he could have caressed the man's slimy sleeve that touched his cheek, he was so glad to live. The boatman was in no humor for caresses; he drew his labored breath sharply, fighting the waves, rasping out a sullen oath when they baffled him. The little surgeon had tact enough to keep silent; he did not care to talk, either. Life rose before him a splendid possibility, as never before. From the silent figure at the helm came ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... pieces on his way home to this country, and put together again badly, for his joints were all wrong. Certainly his head was, and he was over wound up. His tongue never ceased, and the worst of it was he had a rasping, penetrating voice, with the strongest Scotch accent. One afternoon in the House this accent led to one of those frequent outbursts of merriment and protest combined—so common when Sir George bored the House, as he was always doing. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... suddenly as it had begun. Johnny's chest heaved, drawing in breath with great, rasping near-sobs. Slowly they died away. He extended the wheel toward ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... problem of reconstruction be thus settled to the satisfaction of all. Example is more powerful than precept in all cases. Were our constitutions free from all class distinctions, with what power our representatives could now press their example on the Southern States. Is there anything more rasping to a proud spirit than to be rebuked for shortcomings by those who are themselves guilty of the grossest violations of law and justice? Does the North think it absurd for its women to vote and hold office, the South thinks the same ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... we struck the river, and found it rasping and crackling over rocks as an Androscoggin should. We passed the last hamlet, then the last house but one, and finally drew up at the last and northernmost house, near the lumbermen's dam below Lake Umbagog. The damster, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... was thin, pale, and haggard, his eyes were more sombre, and beneath them there were heavy, dark stains of sleeplessness and care, his very voice, when presently he spoke, seemed to have lost the musical timbre that had earlier distinguished it; it was grown harsh and rasping. Disappointment after disappointment, set down to ill-luck, but in reality the fruit of incompetence, had served to sour him. The climax had been reached in the serious desertions after the Philips Norton fight, and the flight of Paymaster Goodenough with the funds for the campaign. ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... resentment, a fierce, passionate hatred, swept over her as he shouted in her ear. A hundred times she had informed him politely that she was not deaf when she wore her ear-'phone, and a hundred times he had listened impatiently and gone on in his sharp, rasping snarl. She drew away shuddering as he looked over some papers and cleared his throat for a fresh start; and then, without reason that he could ever divine, she ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... lie," he repeated with a rasping voice, as he dashed the blood and dirt from his lips. "We war fightin' ter kill, an' I reckon yo' kin guess what hit war erbout," he added, flinging the last ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... bark, the wild, flashing dreams of Boecklin, the raucous heroism of Hodler, the serene vision and humor of Gottfried Keller, the living tradition of the great popular festivals, and the sap of springtime swelling the trees,—the still young art, sometimes rasping to the palate, like the hard fruits of wild pear-trees, sometimes with the sweetish insipidity of myrtles black and blue, but at least something smacking of the earth, is the work of self-taught men not cut off from the people by an archaic culture, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the situation. He bore it stolidly till, in a rasping whisper, she concluded with the information forced from Ann. She told him of the low whistle in the moonlight at their daughter's window, of Dolly's cautious exit from the house, of the tender embrace on the lawn. Drake ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... a brooding curlew, a faint sigh from a plover, and the wild rasping cry of a lapwing greeted them overhead. Yet there was a silence, a silence broken for a moment by the cries of the birds, but a silence thick and heavy. Between the calls of the birds Mysie could almost hear her heart's quickened ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... and grating were the sounds to be heard around me! Lack, nay, not lack, but utter freedom from the first instincts of cultivation, was to be heard even in the great heavy footfalls and the rasping sharp voices which fell on my ears. So different had I been listening in a room at Caddagat to my grannie's brisk pleasant voice, or to my aunt Helen's low refined accents; and I am such a one to ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... all at himself. He longed to kick Arthur Elterton! Confounded impertinence!—And what tommyrot—dancing like this, in the afternoon with boots on! And when they all stopped and greeted the shooters, and crowded round the fire, he said, in a tone of rasping sarcasm—in reply to Jimmy Danvers' announcement that they were back in the real life of a castle ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... a grinding, rasping crash as if some great object were brushing resistlessly past a smaller one, and then the whistle boomed ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the roomy threshing hall The hammer strokes ring cheery, The plane gives forth a crunching drawl, The rasping ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... had expected that realization of the facts would produce these symptoms in him, but now that they had presented themselves she was finding them rasping to the nerves. "I should have ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... at times, and often when it was least expected, a mellowness of temper quite foreign to him in his early days. The admiration awakened by his fine appearance on the bench was never marred now by those quick and rasping tones of an easily disturbed temper which had given edge to his invective when he stood as pleader in the very court where he now presided as judge. But away from the bench, once quit of the courthouse and the town, the man who attempted ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... manoeuvre his brigade in the crisis of the battle of Omdurman speak of it as the one great memory which they carried back from the engagement. On the field of battle he turns to the speech of his childhood, the jagged, rasping, homely words which brace the nerves of the northern soldier. This was the man who had come from India to take the place of poor Wauchope, and to put fresh heart into the gallant ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... August night she came home late from the store. The stars were thick in the sky; the katydids made the night oppressive with their rasping questionings, and a hoarse revel of frogs kept the ponds from falling asleep in the ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... views, whose recently published book upon the prophet Daniel had been painfully exercising the minds of the editor and readers of the Church Times; and it was then that the curate's friend, without moving a muscle of his face, suddenly leaned forward and said, in a rasping voice: ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... had drawn him into its crucible. The desert had multiplied weeks into years. Heat, thirst, hunger, loneliness, toil, fear, ferocity, pain—he knew them all. He had felt them all—the white sun, with its glazed, coalescing, lurid fire; the caked split lips and rasping, dry-puffed tongue; the sickening ache in the pit of his stomach; the insupportable silence, the empty space, the utter desolation, the contempt of life; the weary ride, the long climb, the plod in sand, the search, search, search for water; ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... than two hours I sat perfectly still, alert and waiting, behind the little blind of ferns and grass. There was nothing to break the silence other than the incessant bleating of the goats and the unpleasant rasping call of the mountain jay. I had about given up hope of a shot when suddenly the huge head of the man-eater emerged from the bush, exactly where I had expected he would appear and within fifteen feet of the kids. The back, ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... dear, we'll see it through between us; you and I-and Clarissa," he said with his rasping laugh, rising to follow her. He caught her hand and gave it a short pressure as they re-entered the drawing-room, where Ellie was saying plaintively to Fred Gillow: "I can never hear that thing sung without wanting to ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... cool,' Lady Charlotte said, after reading out the orderly array of items, in a tone of rasping irony, to convince her brother he was well rid of a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bunk-house," commanded Tom, "and tell Jimmy Doolan, with my regards, to take particler care of yer. I'll speak to him later." Then, as Dennis was moving off, he added, in a rasping voice: "You an' my wife is acquainted, eh? Wal, when you've dropped your blankets, come up to the house and ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Wren, the housekeeper, opening the windows in the upper rooms of the mansion to let in the night air, which was stirring over the valley with a delicious mountain chill on its wings. All around in the trees and shrubbery the katydids were rasping away in immelodious statement and ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... makes a sort of webbing. In the centre of this is a horny beak, usually of a brownish colour. It is just like a parrot's beak, only of thinner and lighter stuff. There are two parts to it, the top one curving down over the lower one. Behind this beaked mouth is a hard, rasping tongue. On each side of the head is a big, staring eye; and behind the ugly head is the ugly body, ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... ministering neighbors gathered there and, as never before, the unrelieved and almost biblical antiquity of this life impressed itself on his realization. Here was no undertaker, treading softly with skilled and considerately silent helpers. No mourning wreath hung on the door. The rasping whine of the saw and clatter of the hammer were in no wise muted as men who lived nearby fashioned from undressed boards the box which was to be old Aaron's casket. Noisy sympathy ran in a high tide where doubtless the bereaved ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... gentleman was wounded himself, and lay in one of the ambulances which he had often led towards adventure, with a jagged piece of steel in his leg, and two bones rasping together at every jolt. But when he was lifted up, he stifled a groan and gave his old cheerful cry ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... tell the tale. He had the advantage of the knowledge of the enemy's approach, and he raised the gun and covered the door in readiness. A flash clipped the dark for an instant. Then a hand groped along the wall seeking the switch. Archie could hear its soft rasping over the wall. As the switch snapped the room flooded with light. The bewildering glare leaping out of the darkness held the man in the doorway and he raised his arm and passed his hand over his eyes to shield ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... chimed in with expletives that came splutteringly from their lips, so that altogether it was a scene of confusion and excitement which was taking place in front of the old building. One particularly rasping voice Jack fancied must belong to the general himself. He pitied those two wretched chauffeurs, who would be apt to feel the displeasure of their superiors in ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... dil. Put ten drops in a glass half full of water, and give two teaspoonfuls every fifteen minutes in alteration with Spongia 3X trit. (tablet form) one at a dose. If there is no fever the Spongia can be used alone. Cough is hard, rasping, barking, sawing. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... got a lot more of those infernal skeletons hanging on the poles by the fire?" he concluded in a rasping whisper. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... youth," quoth the stranger, rasping a hand across his grizzled chin, "my duty? Ha, 'tis well said, so needs must I now ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... wheeled with more impatience than the Adjutant, Forbes, had seen him exhibit through many vexatious, worrying months. His voice took on a rasping note. He tapped the papers on the ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... conscious that he was being eyed in curiosity and impatience by the eager folk behind. He heard Mrs. Tutts's rasping whisper as ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... marvelously trenchant piece of writing, and from the literary point of view delightful; but it must have hurt a good many people's feelings at the time it was published, and even now shows the author on his harsh side only. We may agree with all he says, and yet wish he had uttered it in a less rasping tone. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... you compare it with the dining-room which adjoins, you will find the sitting-room as elegant and as perfumed as a lady's boudoir. There misery reigns without a redeeming touch of poesie—poverty, penetrating, concentrated, rasping. This room appears at its best when at seven in the morning Madame Vauquer, preceded by her cat, enters it from her sleeping chamber. She wears a tulle cap, under which hangs awry a front of false hair; her gaping slippers flop as she walks across ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... it whistle through the air, and the next instant it had descended on his back with a dull thump, rasping away a red line of flesh. Now Eric knew for the first time the awful reality of intense pain; he had determined to utter no sound, to give no sign; but when the horrible rope fell on him, griding across his back, and making his body literally creak under ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... the prison doors one by one, and the jailer of the Wolfsberg went coughing and rasping by to another part of ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... crow had been perched on one of the cherry-trees in the garden. He rose with a shaking of branches and a flapping of broad black wings. He crossed the lake, croaking as he flew with a note more harsh, rasping and cynical than the consequential caw of English rooks. His was a malevolent presence "from the night's Plutonian shore," the symbol of something unclean and sinister lurking behind this dainty beauty ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Concha had outwitted him. The sala of the Commandante's house was very large. The furniture had been removed and the walls hung with flags, those of Spain on three sides, the Russian, borrowed by Santiago from the ship, at the head of the room. Concha laughed gaily as Luis stormed about the sala rasping his spurs ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... tea, good quality—yours is generally atrocious, Mrs. Oswald—that's the next thing on the list,' said poor trembling, shaky Miss Luttrell, the Squire's sister, a palsied old lady with a quavering, querulous, rasping voice. 'Two pounds of best black tea, and mind you don't send it all dust, as you usually do. No good tea to be got nowadays, since they took the duties off and ruined the country. And I see a tall young man lounging about ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... observed. Twice he had driven to Echo since her father had been hurt, and each time he had stopped at the corral on his way to the house. So she closed the screen door behind her, careful that it should not slam, and ran down the path in the heavy dusk wherein crickets were rasping a strident chorus. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... for him and he accepted me as a pupil. I am free to admit that my tone, which people seem to be pleased to praise especially, I owe entirely to Leonard, for when I came to him I had the so-called 'German tone' (son allemand), of a harsh, rasping quality, which I tried to abandon absolutely. Leonard often would point to his ears while teaching and say: 'Ouvrez vos oreilles: ecoutez la beaute du son!' ('Open your ears, listen for beauty of sound!'). Most Joachim ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... the iron railings cut her shoulders. She stretched the forefinger of her extended arm; at great peril of slipping forward and rasping her nose along the rails effected to scratch the ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... reviles The almost whispered warble from the hedge, And takes a locust's rasping voice and files The ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... incident is given in the words of Lamon: "The judge never could whisper, but in this case he probably did his best. At all events, in attempting to whisper to Mr. Lincoln he trumpeted his rebuke in about these words, and in rasping tones that could be heard all over the court room: 'Lincoln, I have been watching you and Lamon. You are impoverishing this bar by your picayune charges of fees, and the lawyers have reason to complain ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... door to. It shut with a rasping snap; and at the same moment a great body from without thundered against it with terrific violence, and a deep voice roared like the sea ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... said, in a disagreeable, rasping voice. "Everybody knows that I'd won that same race only for trouble with my engine. Frank was lucky, just like he generally is when he goes in for anything. Look at him today, being called in to pitch in the tenth! We had 'em badly rattled, and they were on the toboggan ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... sleep, after hobbling their horses and turning them out to graze. They lay down in their gaberdines. The stars of night gazed directly down upon them. They could hear the countless myriads of insects which filled the grass; their rasping, whistling, and chirping, softened by the fresh air, resounded clearly through the night, and lulled the drowsy ear. If one of them rose and stood for a time, the steppe presented itself to him strewn with the sparks of glow-worms. At times the night sky was illumined in spots by the glare ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... little to one side of me, with eyes on the old hag's and my hand held between her two, Maga began chanting in English. The fact that her voice was musical and low where the bag's had been high-pitched and rasping heightened ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Rasping groans of birchen cones Re-answering from shore to shore; Through the hush the snapping brush— Then silence, and ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... into service, and was stoning raisins, or eating them, a close observer would have found it difficult to discover which. She was certainly rasping the nerves of her sister in a variety of those endless ways by which a thoughtless, restless, questioning child can almost distract a troubled brain. Ester endured with what patience she could the ceaseless drafts upon her, and worked at the interminable ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... was you, Sir, as soon as I saw you. But of course I wasn't going to say anything till you did." It was not the ingratiating voice now, but that rasping half-whisper he always used for nocturnal conferences in the front line. "Never heard anything of you, Sir, since you went down with a Blighty after Guillemont. Beg your pardon, Sir, but you looked a bit windy as you came in just now, so I thought I'd keep in support.... ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... my fault! Jimmie turned to glare at me, and the treacherous barrel-head gave way, letting him down most ungently into its middle, and rasping his shins in the descent in a manner which must have been particularly trying to one of ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... young man," said the adjutant, laying a mighty hand on the junior's square shoulder. "Stand not upon the order of your going, but git! Never you mind about the colonel. He won't be here until after he's been there, and he's in for a rasping over this morning's inspection. Just look at the report. Sergeant-major, send me Colonel Colt's report!" he called aloud, tossing his head back as he spoke, "Come in, Parson; come out of the wet." And, eager enough to read a famous inspector's ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King |
