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You have here enough grotesque specimens of both sexes, to allow of laughing in Flemish fashion, and there are enough of us ugly in countenance to hope for a fine grinning match." Gringoire would have liked to retort; stupefaction, rage, indignation, deprived him of words.
Ellen, although she was not versed in the ways of books, yet had enough of a sense of the fitness of things, and of the ridiculous, to know that the manuscript, with its impossible pen-and-ink birds and flowers heading and finishing every chapter, was grotesque in the extreme. She felt divided between a desire to laugh and a desire to cry whenever she looked at it.
"Won't have you forward!" said Montgomery, in a menacing voice. "But I tell you to go!" He was on the brink of saying something further, then looked up at me suddenly and followed me up the ladder. I had paused half way through the hatchway, looking back, still astonished beyond measure at the grotesque ugliness of this black-faced creature.
Plains limited only by the rim of sky; mountains severe, huge, tragic as fate; deserts for the trying of strong spirits; grotesque volcanic lands dead, utterly ultra-human where athletic souls might struggle with despair; impetuous streams with their rapids terrible as Scylla, where men might go down fighting: thus Nature built the stage and set the scenes.
In the same sense as Christian doctrine was prepared and prophesied by the religions and the philosophies before Christ, in the same sense Christian worship was prepared and prophesied as well. Whenever the Christian spirit is strong the Church is not afraid of worship being strange, and ample, and even grotesque. The weaker the Christian spirit, the greater exclusiveness in worship.
One of these housed the "Poodle Dog" saloon, with gambling rooms above, while a few doors below was a great dance hall, easily converted into a theatre if occasion arose, a grotesque, one-storied monstrosity. Below these was the stage office, built against the three-storied wooden hotel, which boasted of a wide porch on two sides, and was a picture of ugliness.
Here people who did not pay their debts were compelled to undergo the grotesque penalty common in the Italian republics for that offence, of sitting for a stated time on the pavement in puris naturalibus as to the sitting portion of the person: flagstones are to be seen worn to a comfortable concavity by the delinquent convexity.
Primmins looks much too staid and respectable to think of such a thing." She laughed merrily, and Mrs. Spruce for the life of her could not help laughing too. The picture of Primmins condescending to indulge in a game of 'nose and straw' was too grotesque to be considered with gravity. "Well I never, Miss!" she ejaculated "You do put things that funny!"
He broke out laughing afresh, and Ike, abashed and indignant, was about to pass on, when the man gayly balanced himself on one foot, as if he were about to dance a grotesque jig, and held out at arm's length a big silver coin. It was a dollar. That meant a great deal to Ike, for he earned no money he could call his own.
They got to living in a world of fantasy, and were never themselves, but always wild Indians, or arctic explorers, or Robinson Crusoes. Kitty and Roderick, young as they were, found a never-ending source of amusement in these little grotesque dreams and dramas. The fund of money was getting so low that Catherine was obliged to economize even in the necessities.
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