The first section, indeed, may possibly have had some foundation in truth, as the Zenos may have navigated about the close of the fourteenth century to the Orkneys, and some imperfect and disfigured narrative of their voyage may have fallen into the hands of Marcolini, the author or editor of these strangely distorted and exaggerated or pretended voyages.

The Vicar's face, which she discerned half hidden between the bending head of Rowcliffe and his arms, was purple and horribly distorted.

Duchemin caught glimpses of a face like a Chinese devil-mask, hideously distorted with working features and disfigured with smears of soot through which insane eyeballs rolled and glared in the moonlight.

"'Why, surely, it's Mr. Cohen from No. 30!' "The mention of a name familiar down the length of the street had caused two or three other men to come forward and to look more closely into the horribly distorted mask of the murdered man.

The officer of the company who had entered stood staring as Azuma-zi caught the naked terminals in his hands, gave one horrible convulsion, and then hung motionless from the machine, his face violently distorted.

There was neither wound, bruise, nor dislocation in his whole frame; but his skin was of a livid color, and his features terribly distorted.

Many of the best poetical pieces of Lord Byron, having the least amatory feeling, have been strangely distorted by his calumniators, as if applicable to the lamented circumstances of his latter life.

Then, when the prime minister saw the third son, Randwer, paying innocent attentions to his fair young stepmother, Swanhild, daughter of Siegfried and Kriemhild, he so maliciously distorted the affair that Ermenrich ordered this son to be hung, and his young wife to be trampled to death under the hoofs of wild horses.

To us, my friend, the ages that are pass'd A book with seven seals, close-fasten'd, are; And what the spirit of the times men call, Is merely their own spirit after all, Wherein, distorted oft, the times are glass'd.

It bore the date of May 25, and at the bottom was a signature in Turkish characters, which could be readily distorted by the imagination into a rude and scrawling Y. A series of events occurring immediately after Nagy left for Constantinople resulted in my own unexpected departure in a civil capacity for the seat of war in the Russian lines.

They are comely, and dress well, and scarce any of them have distorted shapes.

Since the Chinese consider small feet "the chief charm of women," it might be supposed, he says, that the women would at least have the pleasure of fascinating men by a "beauty" to acquire which they have to undergo such horrible torture; "but Dr. Strieker assures us that in China a woman is considered immodest if she shows her artificially distorted feet to a man.

Even if his mother sometimes suspected that his accounts were a trifle distorted, she forbore to question their accuracy.

One recognized in it, vaguely, some of 'Wagner's themes and some of Straus', distorted and grown monstrous.

They lay in the street about as numerous as gunners who fall round their carriage, at intervals of five to ten feet, the majorityas was the case also in Norway, and on the shipsin poses of distraction, with spread arms, or wildly distorted limbs, like men who, the instant before death, called upon the rocks and hills to cover them.

Sometimes his readiness to aid meritorious young authors into profitable publicity was shamefully abused,as in the case of Maitland, an Englishman, who deliberately forged an absurdly distorted paraphrase of a note of Mr. Irving's, besides other disreputable use of the signature which he had enticed from him in answer to urgent appeals.

The delicately distorted rail of a spiral staircase winds up from below.

I could have made the terms of it even more alluring, but the signorina, with that extraordinarily distorted morality distinctive of her sex, refused to swear to anything literally untrue in a letter which was itself from beginning to end a monumental falsehood; though not a student of ethics, she was keenly alive to the distinction between the expressio falsi and the suppressio veri.

" I roused myself from my reverie with a laugh at Thorndyke's quaint conceit and a glance at the grotesquely distorted reflection of my face in the polished silver.

As a matter of fact character, as the chief end of man and the sole guaranty of a decent society, has been neglected; it was not disregarded by any conscious process, but the headlong events that have followed since the fifteenth century have steadily distorted our judgment and confused our standards of value even to reversal.

So, too, his naïve explanation that Hannibal's "more than Punic perfidy" consisted mainly of ambushes and similar military strategies goes to show, as I have said, that whatever is unjust in our author's estimate was rather the result of the prejudiced deductions of national egotism than of facts wilfully or carelessly distorted by partisan spite.

See, I shall sit here," and I drew a low seat of a dreadfully distorted Louis XV. and early Victorian mixed style that the upholsterer, when bringing the things, had described to me as a "sweet, pretty lady's-chair.

Or that any of his words could be so foully distorted as to lend the least excuse to such a principle of action?

She fell back against her parent's shoulder, her face frankly distorted.

If you look at your own image in the shining surface of a teapot, or the back of a silver spoon, all things therein appear grotesquely distorted, and all distances strangely altered.