Groaning

“ The wicked shade may be sentenced to kneel for long periods on iron shot, or to be placed up to the neck in filth, or pounded till the blood runs out, or to have the mouth forced open with iron pincers and filled with needles, or to be bitten by rats, or nipped by locusts while in a net of thorns, or have the heart scratched, or be chopped in two at the waist, or have the skin of the body torn off and rolled up into spills for lighting pipes, etc. ”

“ With the breaking of the silent dawn, shadowed in a lonely archway or on an abandoned doorstep the wet, bedraggled body of a hapless moth is sometimes found, her iridescent wings flattened in the mud. Then for a brief moment a cry of protest, or scorn, or pity goes up. The passers-by raise their hands in anger, draw their skirts aside in horror, or kneel in tenderness. ”

“ She rose and searched vainly through the bushes of the hillside where the rock ran out from the woods. She lifted her skirts and splashed her bare feet in the shallow creek water, wading persistently up and down. Her shyness was forgotten. The groan was a groan of a human creature in distress, and she must find and succor the person from whom it came.
Certain sounds are baffling as to direction. A voice from overhead or broken by echoing obstacles does not readily betray its source. ”

“ Here are dust-heaps in which pigs with long snouts are ever routing—here are lean curs, wrangling with each other for leaner bones—here are ditches and puddles, and heaps of oyster-shells, and broken crockery, and cabbage-stalks, and fragments of hats and shoes. Here are torn notices on the walls offering rewards for the apprehension of thieves and murderers, painfully suggestive of dark deeds. A little further are lumber-yards and wharfs, and mud and sawdust, and dealers in old nails and rags and bones, and rotten posts and rails, and attempts at grass. ”

“ Little louse has burned herself to death. Little flea is crying. Little door is creaking. Little broom is sweeping. Little cart is running. Little manure pile is burning." Then the girl said, "Then I will break my little water pitcher." ”

“ Of young girls with the fear of worse than death, stoned by low men. Again, we see untellable things—a wretched woman thrown, by the drunken men who have preyed upon her, forth into the gutter. There, when day has come, the children of the neighbourhood crowd about her like scavengers about their dead prey, shouting and laughing at the sight of this wreck of womanhood, kicking her bruised and filthy body as it lies in the mud of the gutter! ”

“ The people shaved their heads, knocked out a tooth or two, plucked out an eye sometimes, cut, bruised, mutilated or burned their flesh, got drunk, burned each other's huts, maimed or murdered one another according to the caprice of the moment, and both sexes gave themselves up to brutal and unbridled licentiousness. ”

“ Brooding, in the dangerous disproportion that enforced continence brings to certain natures, loading the brain with violence till the storm bursts and there leap out the lurid, dark insanities of crime. Brooding, while in the air flies chased each other, insects crawled together in the grass, and the first principle of nature worked everywhere its sane fulfilment. ”

“ The river gathers foam as it goes surging along, and while flinging up dense masses of spray, which descend again in silvery showers, roars and rages with terrific violence, sending forth wrathful sounds like the angry messages of some incensed deity, which tell of impending ruin. ”

“ Wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue do thus expell:
2 Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede,
Griefe is a flood, and loue a monster fell;
4 The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede,
The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede:
6 But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay;
The sparks soone quench, the springing seed +outweed+
8 The drops dry vp, and filth wipe cleane away:
So shall wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue dye and decay. ”

“ He thinks indignation will lend him strength to resist those who throw themselves upon him. But he is grasped by the iron grip of jailers' hands; he is dragged down; and in the midst of the regular counting of the strokes by the leader of the execution, a deep groan is heard—a groan not arising from mere physical pain, but from the soul's grief of a down-trodden, outraged man. ”

“ The other night that we met here, a man was concealed where he heard every word we said, and when we parted, he followed me, beat me down, stripped off my bear-skin and put it on himself, threw me into a gorge, where I lay, more dead than alive, several days. ”

“ In other parts of France it is thought that if a person kills a wren or harries its nest, his house will be struck by lightning, or that the fingers with which he did the deed will shrivel up and drop off, or at least be maimed, or that his cattle will suffer in their feet. ”

“ He grinned to himself. This was the summary of his domestic life—a broken, coarse comb, a child crying because her hair was lugged, a wife who had let the hair go till now, when she had got into a temper to see the job through; and then the teddy-bear, pathetically cocking a black worsted nose, and lifting absurd arms to him. ”

“ Persons who have visited their haunts after a severe winter, have found the ground around these family ovens strewn with the unburied bodies of the dead, and others crawling among them, who had various degrees of strength, from a bare sufficiency to gasp in death, to those that crawled upon their hands and feet, {11} eating grass like cattle. ”

“ If the soft dew of Heaven falls upon him, it turns to gore—he dips his hands into a pure streamlet, and the limpid waters turn to blood—his drink is blood, when it touches his lips—spots of thick clotted gore fall on him wheresoever he goes—it is the ancient curse of the Egyptians that is upon him! ”

“ I am pretty sure I was twenty minutes groping for my lady in the dark; and if it had not been for the unkindly services of the bog, into which I once more stumbled, I might have still been groping for her at the dawn. My next business was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was cold as well as boisterous. ”

“ It goes mad, cuts capers, leaps and bounds, runs around the walls of the pot, crawls and gallops over the roan's flesh, which it first tickles and then tears with its nails, and bites with its sharp teeth, seeking an exit through the torn and bleeding skin. ”

“ Two of the youngest children of the family, divested of all superfluous clothing, were giving full play to their ill-fed limbs in the muddy gutter, dividing their time between personal assaults on each other, and splashings on the by-standers from the liquid soil in which they were revelling, being occasionally startled into a momentary silence by a violent cuff from their mother when they became more than ordinarily uproarious. ”

“ Some [were] standing upon their waist; being burnt off by the thighs. And some no more but the very top of the brain taken off with fire; whiles the rest of the body did abide unspeakable torments.
I set not down the ugly and filthy polluting of every street with the gore and carcases of horses; neither do I complain that the one lacked burial, and the other flaying, until the air, corrupted with their carion, infected all that yet remained alive in the town. ”

“ Heavy and heartbroken he plods along under a burthen to which his strength is quite inadequate; and the groan escapes from his lips as the bitter thoughts enter his soul of the disgraceful lash of the task-master, that perhaps awaits his return, and he remembers the lost wife and little ones whom he has for ever left on the distant savannahs of the Háwash. ”

“ To every appearance it was apparently a corpse they handled, except for their tenderness, and a single groan to which the white lips gave utterance, when one of the bearers slipped, wrenching the wounded body with a sharp pang of pain. ”

“ The seamed and riven sides of the crumbling gorge assume the most ghastly hues. All the potent agencies of nature in her most wrathful mood, have seemingly been exerted here to produce a chaos of wild, weird desolation. ”

“ The Pain of the Swelling was in particular very violent, and to some intollerable, the Physicians and Surgeons may be said to have tortured many poor Creatures, even to Death. The Swelllings in some grew hard, and they apply’d violent drawing Plasters, or Pultices, to break them ”

“ Then heavy blows are struck, pieces of swinging sticks go flying, people are knocked down and trampled under foot, every one gets spattered with blood and dirt; screams groans, and brutal cries of all sorts produce a tumult beyond description. ”

“ Doubtless it is to this earthward kinship and compliance with Nature in the savage that we are to ascribe his utter unconsciousness of and indifference to what we call offensive and revolting to the senses, — foul odors, uncleanliness, filth, vermin, parasites, etc. Regarding himself as akin to the elements, the soil, and the creatures around him, the savage did not recognize what we call dirt. Dirt has been well defined as valuable matter out of place. ”

“ Grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, bulled alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron pincers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire: these are among the mildest subjects. ”

“ Gasping thro' straiten'd throats: the victor steed,
Lost to his former fame, forgets to feed,
Loaths the clear springs, with wild hoof beats the ground;
His ears fall; starting there by fits is found
A sweat, of clammy coldness when they die: 595
His rough skin to the touch feels hard and dry.
Such are the symptoms of the pest's first stage;
But when progressive it begins to rage,
Then their eyes redden with a fiery glare,
With many a far-fetcht groan they pant for air ”

“ This curious expression is ascertained to have the meaning here 124 assigned to it by observing (1) that grim and gore must be substantives, and (2) that they must be of like signification; but chiefly by comparing the line with others similar to it. Now the context, in the couplet following, repeats that “men might hear him roar, that foul vile wretch, a mile off;” and in l. 682, Godard calls Grim “a foul dirt, a thrall, and a churl.” The author clearly uses dirt and churl as synonyms. The word grim is the Danish grim, soot, lampblack, smut, dirt, answering to the English grime ”

“ The heads are darted out and back as quick as a flash; their hoarse roaring and shrill, piping whistle never ceases, while their fat bodies writhe and swell with exertion and rage; furious lights gleam in their eyes, their hair flies in the air, and their blood streams down,—all combined makes a picture so fierce and so strange that, from its unexpected position and its novelty, it is perhaps one of the most extraordinary brutal contests which a man can witness. ”

“ A cry follows, something between a grunt, a squeak, and a yell, and the wounded animal falls, rolls over, jumps up, with unexpected agility for such a sluggish, unwieldy creature, and rumbles, rushes, rolls, and stumbles back into the river, where his relatives take to flight in mortal terror. ”

“ Notice how many gores there are. Do you know what a skirt gore is? Look at your pieces. A gore is always wider at the bottom than at the top. Can you tell why? Gores are of different shapes. Style sometimes regulates the width, for some seasons skirts are very narrow and at other times very full. The gores help to reduce the fullness around the waist. Do you understand? Notice how many gores your pattern has. The front panel is counted as one gore, and the back panel a gore. There are skirt patterns with three, four, or even eleven or more gores. ”

“ Men leaped to their feet with words that showed they were no gentlemen, making frantic efforts to wipe away the scalding liquids trickling over them. The ladies shrieked and were tearful over the ruin of their pretty gowns. ”

“ Why, the grass would all be trampled down; and these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,—a fire, for instance, or a brawl,—might easily bring infectious diseases on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters and their like run about, playing their innocent games. ”

“ When he does, when he throws mud and stones and shows us the side of him which the gutter developed, we are shocked and marvel much what our boys are coming to, as if we had any right to expect better treatment of them. ”

“ As soon as the herd had withdrawn, the hares assembled, some halting, some dripping with blood, some bearing the corpses of their cherished infants, some with piteous tales of ruination in their houses, all with tears streaming from their eyes, and wailing forth, “Alas, we are lost! ”

“ Let his nose and ears be cut off! Let him be flayed alive, or burnt at a slow fire and his ashes scattered to the winds! Oh, I shall die of shame and despair!’
Her women ran at the sound of her screams, and tried to wrench off the horns, but it was of no use, and they only gave her a violent headache. ”

“ More gruesome meals are credited to them by those who have witnessed their proceedings on a wreck strewn shore where loss of life had been involved. A terror also on the grouse moors, they devour both eggs and young, and even the sitting grouse herself is not safe from him. ”

“ At the turn of the alley, we passed a litter carried by two men, on which there stirred a bundle of bleeding flesh; a sort of human being, whose skin, cut in strips, trailed on the ground like rags. Although it was impossible to recognize the slightest vestige of humanity in that hideous wound which, moreover, once had been a man. ”

“ And before the pitiless rush of the flood, what difference between man and beast? All of them rats alike, poor creeping folk, flooded out of their holes. The same wind and rain tore the crow’s nest from the tree and the roof from the native’s hut ”

“ Aimlessly they wander hither and thither, sniff at every blade of grass on the way, but scarcely crop any, lift their heads expectantly and joyously, let them droop again in disappointed sadness, bleat, and bleat again. The restlessness increases almost to frenzy, the bleating becomes a perfect bellowing. ”