United States or Tuvalu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On the contrary, the speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all the time; they were continually inventing new devices to crowd the work on it was for all the world like the thumbscrew of the medieval torture chamber.
Think of nateral gas for us fellows, and cute little stoves and grates; where you can jest turn it on and off with a thumbscrew. No wood splittin' and sawin', no luggin' baskets of coal, no dust, no smoke, no charges. My! Bill, it's 'most too good to b'lieve." "Look out we don't crow too soon, Nate. It's less'n a month sense we've had it that way, and you don't know; they may tuck it onto us "
"Nom de dieu!" he shouted, springing up. I shut my eyes and waited. Had he slain me then and there it were no more than my deserts. "Monsieur," said Vigo, immovably, "shall I go for the boot?" I opened my eyes then. Monsieur stood quite still, his brow knotted, his hands clenched as if to keep them off me. "Monsieur," I said, "send for the boot, the thumbscrew, whatever you please.
I read it, but it did not burn itself into my soul, I did not really appreciate the infamies that have been committed in the name of religion, until I saw the iron arguments that christians used. I saw the Thumbscrew two little pieces of iron, armed on the inner surfaces with protuberances, to prevent their slipping; through each end a screw uniting the two pieces.
Far better that I crawl away from haunts of men where I need never be tormented by such contrasts." The Jester looked down on Aldebaran's wan face. It was as white and drawn as if he had been tortured by the rack and thumbscrew, so he made no answer for the moment. But when the fire was kindled, and they had supped the broth set out in steaming bowls upon the table, he ventured on a word of cheer.
A man would rather be tortured with a thumbscrew until he chose to see reason than tortured with a vivisecting knife until the vivisector chose to see reason. Yet that is the real difference between the two types of legal enforcement. If I gave in to the Inquisitors, I should at least know what creed to profess.
From the level of the Bridge of Sighs we tramped down flights of stone stairs, one flight after another, until we had passed the hole through which the bodies of state prisoners, secretly killed at night, were shoved out into waiting gondolas and had passed also the room where pincers and thumbscrew once did their hideous work, until we came to a cellar of innermost, deepermost cells, fashioned out of the solid rock and stretching along a corridor that was almost as dark as the cells themselves.
Ettore, who lately escaped from the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew. They say that he was to have been burned in the Grand Square the next morning; but between ourselves, my dear Colonel, I mistrust these stories of converts and martyrs.
For hours the elder brother had been seated at a table in the headquarters of the political police, a thumbscrew on one hand and pen in the other, while before him was a confession which would implicate José Rizal in the Katipunan uprising. The paper remained unsigned, though Paciano was hung up by the elbows till he was insensible, and then cut down that the fall might revive him.
Wilson offered us a war in which, of course, we sought nothing and found, at the end of it, not the customary few trifles of territory, but the whole embarrassing, beggarly world adhering to us. The thumbscrew and the rack could not wring from Mr. Hughes the admission that we are after anything more lofty than our interests.
Word Of The Day