United States or Sri Lanka ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Great snails crawled upon the tufts of rank grass wet with the autumnal dews that the sun had failed to dry, and upon the glistening hart's-tongue ferns, and they looked just the kind of snails that witches would collect to make a hell-broth.
The moor, which is broken into humps and hillocks, smokes and boils and babbles like the hell-broth of Macbeth's witches, and across it winds, snake-wise, a steaming brook. Here and there is a stagnant pool, and underneath can be heard a dull roar, as if an imprisoned ocean were beating on a pebble-strewed shore.
It was as if the shameful and ugly shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed. Here, aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift from dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray, like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth.
The light of the policeman's lantern glared over the ghastly scene along the double row of miserable house-backs, which lined the sides of the open tidal ditch over strange rambling jetties, and balconies, and sleeping-sheds, which hung on rotting piles over the black waters, with phosphorescent scraps of rotten fish gleaming and twinkling out of the dark hollows, like devilish grave-lights over bubbles of poisonous gas, and bloated carcases of dogs, and lumps of offal, floating on the stagnant olive-green hell-broth over the slow sullen rows of oily ripple which were dying away into the darkness far beyond, sending up, as they stirred, hot breaths of miasma the only sign that a spark of humanity, after years of foul life, had quenched itself at last in that foul death.
Then he grasped me hard by both hands, and cried out, "Harry, Harry Wingfield, come to thee I must, for, convict though thou be, thou art a man with a head packed with wit, and Ralph Drake is half the time in his cups, and Parson Downs riding his own will at such a hard gallop that 'twill surprise me not if he leave his head behind, and as for Dick and Nick Barry, and Captain Dickson, and and Major Robert Beverly, and all the others, what is it to them about this one matter which is more to me than the whole damned hell-broth?"
Meg in the meanwhile went to a great black cauldron that was boiling on a fire on the floor, and, lifting the lid, an odour was diffused through the vault which, if the vapours of a witch's cauldron could in aught be trusted, promised better things than the hell-broth which such vessels are usually supposed to contain.
He pitched pell-mell into the hell-broth of his criticism any image that assaulted his fecund brain. He forced one to see his picture for he was primarily concerned not with the ear, but the eye.
Wayland saddled horses and mule and wakened the old frontiersman. "Eh, where's this?" He came to himself heavily. "Wayland, is this hell-broth of a sulphur stew doin' me? Has y'r Desert got me, Wayland?" "No, sir, when the Desert gets you, it gets you raving mad with fever. Chains won't hold you! This soggy sleep is all right. Long as you sleep, you'll keep your head!"
Angela put her finger on her lip, and with the other hand drew the silken coverlet over the sick man's shoulders. "You are not to talk," she said, "you are to sleep. Slumber is to be your diet and medicine after that good soup at which you make such a wry face." "I would swallow the stuff were it Locusta's hell-broth, for your sake."
This yellow, sinuous beast with hell-broth slavering from its jaws! This dare-devil boy-god that sauntered along with a town in its pocket, and a steepled church under its arm for a moment's toy! Swim this? For days I marvelled at the magnificence of being a fullgrown man, unafraid of big rivers. But the first sight of the Missouri River was not enough for me.
Word Of The Day