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More "Crabbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cried Mollie. "Our crabbed cousin is having a slight change of heart. She has always been dreadfully bored with Bab and me," Mollie explained to Ruth and Grace, "but she is devoted to mother, and used to want her to live with her. ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane
... to oblige, consented, and plied the ladle actively between the troublesome queries of the little man; but at last, getting confused with some very crabbed questions put to him, Andy became completely bothered, and lifting a brimming ladle of dripping, poured it over the little man's coat instead of ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... through the Nose a Hymn of Love, When sage George Withers and grave William Prin, Himself might for a Poets share put in: Yet then could write with so much art and skill, That Rome might envy his Satyrick Quill; And crabbed Persins his hard lines give ore, And in disdain beat his brown Desk no more. How I admire the Cleaveland! when I weigh Thy close-wrought Sense, and every line survey! They are not like those things which some compose, Who in a maze of Words the Sense do lose. ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... designed him for the law, having bred him first with that famous schoolmaster Mr. Farnaby, and then under the tuition of Dr. Beale, in Jesus College in Cambridge, from whence, being a most excellent Latinist, he was admitted into the Inner Temple; but it seemed so crabbed a study, and disagreeable to his inclinations, that he rather studied to obey his mother than to make any progress in the law. Upon the death of his mother, whom he dearly loved and honoured, he went into France to Paris, where he had three cousins german, Lord Strangford, Sir John Baker ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... retarded by having nothing to listen to except the wind moaning among old chimneys and older ash-trees—nothing to look at except heathery hills, walked over when life had all to hope for and nothing to regret with me—no one to speak to except crabbed old Greeks and Romans who have been dust the last five [sic] thousand years. And yet this quiet life, from its contrast, makes the year passed at Luddendenfoot appear like a nightmare, for I would rather give my hand than undergo again the grovelling carelessness, the malignant, yet cold debauchery, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... pappy was erway from home all th' week, 'cept from Sat'day evenin' tell 'fore day Monday monrin'. Melindy White staid wi' me; she was Zekle's great-aunt, 'n' er ole maid, 'n' people did say she was monst'ous cross 'n' crabbed, but she warn't never cross ter me. I mind me of er Sat'day, 'n' I'd be spectin' of yer pappy home. I'd git up at th' fust cock-crow, 'n' go wake Melindy, 'n' she'd grumble 'n' laff all in er breath, 'n' say: 'Ann Elisabeth Tyler, ye're th' most onreasonablest creeter that I ever seed! ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... "Crabbed and crusty as ever!" said she. "I expected as much: it would not be you if you did not snub one. But now, come, grand-mother, I hope you like coffee as much, and pistolets as little as ever: are you disposed ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... intellectual vigor, integrity of character, and legal ability had secured for him a nomination to the bench of the Supreme Court by President Adams, which, however, the Democratic Senate failed to confirm. Kept in the shade by Henry Clay, he became somewhat crabbed, but his was one of the noblest intellects of his generation. His persuasive eloquence, his sound judgment, his knowledge of the law, his lucid manner of stating facts, and his complete grasp of every case which he examined ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... regard for economy of space and paper. The manuscript sermons of New England divines are models of careful penmanship, and may be examined with interest by a student of chirography. The letters are cramped and crabbed, like the lives of many of the writers, but the penmanship is methodical, clear, and distinct, without ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... these attitudes, ungenerous or radical, generous or conservative (as you will), towards institutions dear to many, have no doubt given impressions unfavorable to Thoreau's thought and personality. One hears him called, by some who ought to know what they say and some who ought not, a crabbed, cold-hearted, sour-faced Yankee—a kind of a visionary sore-head—a cross-grained, egotistic recluse,—even non-hearted. But it is easier to make a statement than prove a reputation. Thoreau may be some of these ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... grown humanized by receiving the care of man, and by contributing to his wants. They have become a part of the family; and their individual characters are as well understood and appreciated as those of the human members. One tree is harsh and crabbed, another mild; one is churlish and illiberal, another exhausts itself with its free-hearted bounties. Even the shapes of apple-trees have great individuality, into such strange postures do they put themselves, and thrust their contorted branches so grotesquely in all directions. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... taken pleasure in a disgusting thing? It is a hard case. If you record your pleasure, distinctly, you seem to exaggerate it and to calumniate your delicacy; and if you record nothing but your displeasure, you feel rather crabbed and stingy. This much I can say, at any rate, that as there had been no bull fights in that part of the country during the Carlist war, the native dilettanti (and every man, woman, and child of them comes under this denomination) returned to their previous pastime with peculiar ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... in and out of the room fitfully as an April sunbeam, sometimes flinging himself on a sofa, and reading for a few minutes one of the volumes of the ancient mystics, in which Sir Philip's library was so rich. I remember it was a volume of Proclus. He read that crabbed and difficult Greek with a fluency that surprised me. "I picked up the ancient Greek," said he, "years ago, in learning the modern." But the book soon tired him; then he would come and disturb us, archly enjoying Strahan's peevishness at interruption; then he would throw open the window and ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a deserter," added the officer in a crabbed tone. "I advise you to arrest him, sergeant. That pass is good ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... thing in this affair is, that I cannot take the comfort of my poor friend Dabbler, by calling you a crabbed fellow, because you write with almost more kindness than ever neither can I (though I try hard) persuade myself that you have not a grain of taste in your whole composition. This, however, seriously I do believe, that when my two daddies put their heads together to concert for me that hissing, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... he might make everybody else as miserable and uncharitable as he was. He was like a wicked and ugly Mrs. Partington, trying to sweep back the Atlantic of holiday merriment with his dirty mop. But this crabbed humor of his, while it made him conspicuous against the broad background of gayety, of course had no effect on the gayety itself. The flood of laughter, jocundity, and semi-boisterous frolic continued to roll up and down the Corso all day long, never attempting to be anything but ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... a cross old man and what do you think, He lived on nothing but victuals and drink; Victuals and drink were his principal diet, Yet this crabbed old ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... she's as crabbed as a mule!" said her teacher approvingly. "D'ye mind the way she soaks the hind legs up into her! We'll give her ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... world; and to this end she married a rich banker of Frankfort, old enough to be her father, not to say her grandfather, hoping, doubtless, that he would soon die; for, if ever a woman wished to be a widow, she is that woman. But the old fellow is tough and won't die. Moreover, he is deaf, and crabbed, and penurious, and half the time bed-ridden. The wife is a model of virtue, notwithstanding her weakness. She nurses the old gentleman as if he were a child. And, to crown all, he hates society, and will not hear of his wife's ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of the ousel migration pleases you. You put a very shrewd question when you ask me how I know that their autumnal migration is southward? Was not candour and openness the very life of natural history, I should pass over this query just as a sly commentator does over a crabbed passage in a classic; but common ingenuousness obliges me to confess, not without some degree of shame, that I only reasoned in that case from analogy. For as all other autumnal birds migrate from the northward to us, to partake of our milder winters, and return to the northward ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... those parts.... The last Patriarch of Ochrida, whose name was likewise Arsenius, spent the remainder of his life in exile at Mt. Athos, and there, in another monastery, was a pale, sickly monk, poring over crabbed MSS. This Paissu, a Bulgar, had entered, like his elder brother, the great Serbian monastery of Hilendar. We know from him that while the various Orthodox monks of Mt. Athos—Greeks, Bulgars, Russians, Serbs and Vlachs—were frequently at loggerheads, yet the others even more frequently ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... about?" Mrs. Mallathorpe moved over to the hearth, and took an envelope from the rack. She handed it to Collingwood, indicating that he could open it. And Collingwood drew out one of old Bartle's memorandum forms, and saw a couple of lines in the familiar crabbed handwriting: ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... are my Gibbons—two editions, if you please, for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could not resist getting a set of Bury's new six-volume presentment of the History. In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped in any way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You are not to read it lightly, but with some earnestness ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to their work as we rode through smiling fields, and we ceased to wonder at Patn looking deserted, for it was evident that all the cheerfully disposed inhabitants had flitted away, unable to bear its depressing influence, and leaving behind them only the crabbed old people at the corners of the streets, and the tattered beggars, who must make a meagre livelihood out of the falling temples and 24,000 rotten houses of the once handsome ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... everything spoke to him of death and decay in that strange, old city, which might veritably be called a city of the dead. He turned aside into the cloisters, and listened mechanically while an old man discoursed to him in crabbed German concerning Fastrada's tomb and the carved face of the minstrel Frauenlob upon the cloister wall. Presently, however, the guide showed him a little door, and led him out into the pleasant grassy space round which the cloisters had been built. He ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the passage. It was evidently the intention of the planter to spring on board as she passed through the channel; for he stood in the bow of his boat with the painter in his hand. One of the rowers in the other boat had "crabbed" his oar and lost it overboard, or the colonel's plan ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... become a naturalized citizen. The wider the range of his information, experience and sympathies, the larger will be the audience he will reach when he comes to talk to them from the concert platform. It is the same as with a public speaker. No one wants to hear a speaker who has led a narrow, crabbed intellectual existence, but the man who has seen and known the world, who has become acquainted with the great masterpieces of art and the wonderful achievements of science, has little difficulty in securing an audience ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... peculiar humour of her husband, took more pains to bring joy to his house than would another to bestow horns upon him. But although she was careful to obey him in all things, and to live at peace would have tried to excrete gold for him, had God permitted it, this man was always surly and crabbed, and no more spared his wife blows, than does a debtor promises to the bailiff's man. This unpleasant treatment continuing in spite of the carefulness and angelic behaviour of the poor woman, she being unable to accustom herself to it, was compelled to inform her ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... only very mediocre writers who could obey such precepts. Every supreme writer has his own style, inalienable and inimitable, which is as much a part of him as his own soul, the look in his eyes, or his tones of voice. Bethink yourselves of Carlyle, how his abrupt, crabbed, but withal sinewy and picturesque, prose compares with the pure crystalline sentences of Cardinal Newman, and how these again compare with the quaintly and pathetically humorous chat, the idealized talk of Charles Lamb. Think how easy it is to ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... garments, whose walking-sticks and umbrellas even, we feel acquainted, and yet whose names, whose business, whose residences, we know nothing about. Some of these books are so formidable in their dimensions, so rusty and crabbed in their aspect, that it takes a considerable amount ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... far over on Avenue D, stood an old and battered timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face. Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club. Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... shall find invaluable help in the study of this character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard, crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow, precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... perfect son in the eyes of Papa. Papa, in hopeful moments, asks himself: "To whom shall we marry him, then; how settle him?" But what the Prince, in his own heart, thought of it all; how he looked, talked, lived, in unofficial times? Here has a crabbed dim Document turned up, which, if it were not nearly undecipherable to the reader and me, would throw light ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... way, he retains the names, in his new book, of butterflies (few of them German) better than I do, however crabbed ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... long. One of the Scorpions receives the full force of the other's poisoned weapon. It is all over: in a few minutes the wounded one succumbs. The victor very calmly proceeds to gnaw the fore-part of the victim's cephalothorax, or, in less crabbed terms, the bit at which we look for a head and find only the entrance to a belly. The mouthfuls are small, but long-drawn-out. For four or five days, almost without a break, the cannibal nibbles at his murdered comrade. To eat the vanquished, that's good warfare, the only sort ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... said I, like the fat boy in Pickwick Papers. And I thanked God for the new energy which had sent me to this lovely city by the lake. I thanked Him that I had not been content to remain a burden to Max and Norah, growing sour and crabbed with the years. Those years of work and buffeting had made of me a broader, finer, truer type of womanhood—had caused me to forget my own little tragedy in contemplating the great human comedy. And so I made a little prayer there in the ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... the Jap," the stranger replied. "He crabbed the game right. Slats and the big fellow put all the stuff into the box, told us to watch it until they get back tonight—they may be late—then went off in Slats' ship to test something—couldn't find out what. Silk tackled the yellow boy, and went up ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... satisfaction of such returns. It was sad to miss Aunt Betsey in the big kitchen, strange to see Uncle Enos sit all day in his arm-chair too helpless now to plod about the farm and carry terror to the souls of those who served him. He was still a crabbed, gruff, old man; but the narrow, hard, old heart was a little softer than it used to be; and he sometimes betrayed the longing for his kindred that the aged often feel when infirmity makes them desire tenderer props ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... between a mushroom, a finch, an oyster, and a thrush,[9] and to have rewarded a worthless writer,[10] Clutorius Priscus, for a poem composed on the death of Germanicus. On the other hand, he seems to have had a sincere love of literature,[11] though he wrote in a crabbed and affected style. He was a purist in language with a taste for archaism,[12] left a brief autobiography[13] and dabbled in poetry, writing epigrams,[14] a lyric conquestio de morte Lucii Caesaris[15] and Greek imitations ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... position in which it was judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this blighting of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion, he turned, as so many other men similarly placed have turned, to seek consolation in his pen. He wrote his singularly crabbed, narrow and superficial History of Lord Henry Goade: his own Times—which is a miracle of injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and eccentric spelling. In the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he filled ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... the power of love in an awkward, crabbed, shiftless, lazy man? He becomes gentle, chaste in language, energetic. Love brings out the poetry in him. It is only an idea, a sentiment, and yet what magic it has wrought. Nothing we can see has touched the man, yet he is ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... itself, Padua is a dead city with an almost deserted air. Its streets, bordered by two rows of low arcades, in nowise recall the elegant and charming architecture of Venice. The heavy, massive structures have a serious, somewhat crabbed aspect, and its somber porticos in the lower stories of the houses resemble black mouths which yawn ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... mean her life with him! In a sudden, swift, pitying gleam of comprehension, I saw why my mother-in-law was so crabbed and disagreeable. Life had embittered her. I wondered miserably if my life with her son would leave similar ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... sight of certain faces made him suffer. He considered the crabbed expressions of some, insulting. He felt a desire to slap the fellow who walked, eyes closed, with such a learned air; the one who minced along, smiling at his image in the window panes; and the one who seemed stimulated by a whole world of thought while devouring, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... cross-grained and crabbed, I presume. I admitted that Paul Patoff, though not graceful in his movements, was a fine-looking fellow, with an undeniable distinction of manner; he had a pleasant voice, an extraordinary command of English, though he was ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... he seemed to think of her eyes and eye-lashes! I am reasonably fearful, had she heard and seen all this—Poll Acton's nails might have possibly drawn blood from the cheeks of Jonathan Floyd. As it was, the little god of love kindly warded from his votaries the coming of so crabbed an antagonist. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... perceive, farther, that this lanky flower-stalk, bending a little in a crabbed, broken way, like an obstinate person tired, pushes itself up out of a still more stubborn, nondescript, hollow angular, dogseared gas-pipe of a stalk, with a section something ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... and sweeter happiness than this, because they do not take their forgiveness as a right, but as a gracious and unexpected boon. And indeed the sights and sounds of this place are the best medicine for crabbed, worldly, conventional souls, who are often brought here when they are drawing ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as by contributing to his wants. There, is so much individuality of character, too, among apple trees, that it gives them all additional claim to be the objects of human interest. One is harsh and crabbed in its manifestations; another gives us fruit as mild as charity. One is churlish and illiberal, evidently grudging the few apples that it bears; another exhausts itself in free-hearted benevolence. The variety of grotesque shapes into which ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... uncomplaisant[obs3], unaccommodating, unneighborly, ungallant; inaffable[obs3]; ungentle, ungainly; rough, rugged, bluff, blunt, gruff; churlish, boorish, bearish; brutal, brusque; stern, harsh, austere; cavalier. taint, sour, crabbed, sharp, short, trenchant, sarcastic, biting, doggish, caustic, virulent, bitter, acrimonious, venomous, contumelious; snarling &c. v.; surly, surly as a bear; perverse; grim, sullen &c. 901a; peevish &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the war. Bof sides was good to me. I've seen many a scout. The captain would say 'By G——, close the ranks.' Captains is right crabbed. I stayed back ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Bach's importance in the history of music cannot be exaggerated. His art, neglected as old-fashioned and crabbed by his younger contemporaries, survived only in certain limited aspects as the subject of a desultory and unintelligent academic study, until its re-discovery by Mendelssohn. And yet, whatever disguise may have been foisted on it by corrupt traditions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... sourness &c adj.; acid, acidity, low pH; acetous fermentation, lactic fermentation. vinegar, verjuice^, crab, alum; acetic acid, lactic acid. V. be sour; sour, turn sour &c adj.; set the teeth on edge. render sour &c adj.; acidify, acidulate. Adj. sour; acid, acidulous, acidulated; tart, crabbed; acetous, acetose^; acerb, acetic; sour as vinegar, sourish, acescent^, subacid [Chem]; styptic, hard, rough. Phr. sour as a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... crabbed old thing, so the inference is fair that she is miserable. In fact, I do not see how ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Pope is brutally taunted with the personal deformities of his "wretched little carcass," which, it seems, are the only cause of his being "unwhipt, unblanketed, unkicked." One verse seems to have stung him more deeply, which says that his "crabbed numbers" are ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... to all his slaves when he was sober, but he was awful crabbed and cross when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of de time. He was hard to please and sometimes he would whip de slaves. I remember seeing Master Wash whup two men once. ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... courage—with such a disreputable fellow as I am, too ... although, perhaps, things are not quite so bad. Ah, if I could only find a human soul, a kind, womanly soul!"—He emphasized the "womanly soul"—"Yes, my dear lady, it was as little meant to be my fate as it was yours to pine away and grow crabbed in such a hole of a town as this. You must not be offended if ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... wealthy clergy (in which their rhetoric found very effective matter for argument) into abstract reasoning on the whole question of the private possession of property. The treatises which they have left in crabbed Latin and involved methods of argument make wearisome and irritating reading. Most are exceedingly prolix. After pages of profound disquisitions, the conclusions reached seem to have advanced the problem no further. Yet the ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... youth, and as he grows older he gets more so. About middle life he sets hard, like plaster of Paris, his senses get obfuscated, and a shell appears to form on the outside of his intellect, so that access to his understanding becomes very difficult. Sometimes his temper also grows crabbed, and noli me tangere writes itself distinctly across the mark of his god on his old brow. A Hamal in this phase is the most impracticable animal in this universe. When found fault with, he never answers back, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... latest encounter with the crabbed fireman on Claremont, grinning appreciatively because the fireman's ill temper had been directed at a tourist who had gone up with Hank. He related a small scandal that was stirring the social pond of Quincy, and at last he swung nearer to the four who had taken ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... obviously surprised to see him,—or, rather, all were but Ena,—and his reception was less crabbed than usual. McGeorge, with what almost approached a flash of humor, said that it was evident they had expected him to come from the realm of spirits. In view of their professed belief in the endless time for junketing at their command, they clung ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Roland. "He's as sullen and crabbed as any old bear. I often say to Jenkins that he is in a temper with himself for having sent you away, and I don't care if he hears me. There's an awful amount to do since you went. I and Jenkins are worked to death. And there'll be the busiest time of all the year coming on soon, ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... him last year, but he never had lungs good for anything. First, my aunt set my father against it, and when he gave in, she had a crabbed decrepit old grandfather, and between them they were the death of her, and almost of him. I never thought he would ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mother much more. Elaine Cot-Mineur was an old-fashioned woman, gentle, reserved, and at the age when her beauty had a rare autumnal quality—the very apex of its perfection; in a few years, in a year, perhaps, the change would come and crabbed winter set in. He particularly admired the oval of her face, her soft brown eyes, and the harmonious contour of her head. He saw her instantly with a painter's imagination—filmy lace must modulate about her head like a dreamy ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... where I found Jack expecting my return. He had bought, in honor of it, some cigars of special quality, over which I was to tell him all the story of Julia's wedding. But a letter was waiting for me, directed in queer, crabbed handwriting, and posted in Jersey a week before. It had been so long on the road in consequence of the bad penmanship of the address. I opened it carelessly as I answered Jack's first inquiries; but the instant I saw the signature I held up my hand to silence him. It was from Tardif. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... She heard crabbed, sour, but courageous old Williams go to the door. She heard the clang of bolts and the rattle of chains, and then a weird cry from Williams. A voice responded that brought Enid, trembling and livid, into the hall. A young man with a dark, exceedingly handsome face and somewhat ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... revolution was, as Bacon most justly observed, [De Augmentis, Lib. i.] to give for a time an undue importance to the mere graces of style. The new breed of scholars, the Aschams and Buchanans, nourished with the finest compositions of the Augustan age, regarded with loathing the dry, crabbed, and barbarous diction of respondents and opponents. They were far less studious about the matter of their writing than about the manner. They succeeded in reforming Latinity; but they never even aspired to effect ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Balaustion, speaking as interpreter for Browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the firmer foothold which he had attained. Perhaps it would have been wiser to admit that Euripides has marred his own work by this grim tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth. But it is true that one who has much to give, like Alkestis, gives freely; and one who has little to give, like Pheres, clutches that little desperately and is starved not only in possessions but in soul. For Browning the significance of the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... there, to know that there are a good many people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America until it was broken in the Civil War. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... sheet of paper she held out to me. It bore these words, written in the crabbed and somewhat uncertain hand which had ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... vainglory, for I am very ambitious, yet 'tis neither for beauty, wit, title, wealth, or power, but as they are Steps to raise me to Fancies Tower, which is to live by remembrance in all ages.... My Disposition is more inclined to Melancholy than Merry, but not crabbed or peevish Melancholy, but soft, melting, and contemplating Melancholy, and I am apt rather to weep than to laugh." Always fearing that she might be mistaken by posterity for her husband's first wife, she gives an elaborate explanation ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... on this," said Guy, picking up the paper which Bax flung down. "It is a crabbed hand, but I think I can make it out:—'Dear Bogue, you will find the tubs down Pegwell Bay, with the sinkers on 'em; the rest of the swag ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... was the simple inscription, "Miss Bissell," written in a crabbed, angular hand. This satisfied her that the message was not from Bud, and with trembling fingers she opened it. Inside was an oblong sheet of paper filled with the same narrow handwriting. Going to the window to catch ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... property, namely, the pony, tent, tinker-tools, etc., on Ursula and her husband, partly because they were poor, and partly on account of the great kindness which I bore to Ursula, from whom I had, on various occasions, experienced all manner of civility, particularly in regard to crabbed words. On hearing this intelligence, Ursula returned many thanks to her gentle brother as she called me, and Sylvester was so overjoyed that, casting aside his usual phlegm, he said I was the best friend he had ever had in the world, and in testimony ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... great influence at Court. As we have seen, the conciliatory efforts of the monarch had hitherto averted a rupture between Pitt and Thurlow. But not even the favour of George III could render the crabbed old Chancellor endurable. His spitefulness had increased since Pitt's nomination of Pepper Arden to the Mastership of the Rolls; and he showed his spleen by obstructing Government measures in the House of Lords. In April 1792 he flouted Pitt's efforts on behalf of the abolition of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... really, mother?" said Donald, his eyes brightening. "Then I'll go on. I'll not 'gang awa back to my mither,' as that old gentleman advised me, who objected to bark himself; a queer, crabbed old fellow he was too, but he was the only one who asked my name and address. The rest of them—well, mother, I've stood a good deal these seven days," Donald added, gulping down something between a "fuff" ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death, Ere I could make thee open thy white hand And clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter 'I am yours ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... these two writers, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearly that free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts. For it is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style. The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... a very skilful elaboration of the Culex, a poem attributed, without reason, to Virgil. The original, which is crabbed and pedantic, where it is not unintelligible from corruption, is here rendered with sufficient fidelity to the sense, but with such perspicuity, elegance, and sweetness, as to make Spenser's performance too good a poem to be ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... his heart, which was soft and underdone. A kind word made a fool of him; and hence most of the scrapes he got into. Two or three wags, aware of his infirmity, used to "draw him out" in conversation whenever the most crabbed and choleric ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... which was a long weather-boarded structure, a story and a half high, with a porch running its entire length. The building was put up, I should judge, before the war of 1812, and not repaired since. A crabbed old man in a grey coat, with horn buttons, and tan-colored pantaloons, looking as if he didn't know what to make exactly of the character of his visitors, was on the porch. Near him, and somewhat in his rear, was a darkie about ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... vital, in his imagination, infusing his thoughts with a roseate glamour of unreality, wherein all things were strangely possible. The iridescent imagery of the Arabian Nights of his boyhood (who has forgotten the fascination of those three fat old volumes of crabbed type, illuminated with their hundreds of cramped old wood-cuts?) had in a scant three hours been recreated for him by Knoblauch's fantastic drama with its splendid investment of scene and costume, its admirable histrionic interpretation, and the robust yet ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... Emperor and by Roman Pope, only a few fragments remain. Possibly they lie mouldering in the scented darkness of an Egyptian tomb, clasped in the withered hands of some long-dead lover. Some Greek monk at Athos may even now be poring over an ancient manuscript, whose crabbed characters conceal lyric or ode by her whom the Greeks spoke of as 'the Poetess' just as they termed Homer 'the Poet,' who was to them the tenth Muse, the flower of the Graces, the child of Eros, and the pride of Hellas—Sappho, with the sweet voice, the bright, beautiful eyes, the dark hyacinth-coloured ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... old Biagio's preface to Dante, which, from its amazing classicality, is almost as difficult as the crabbed old Florentine's own writing. Worked at a rather elaborate sketch tolerably successfully, and was charmingly interrupted by having our landlady's pretty little child brought in to me. She is a beautiful baby, but will be troublesome ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... my fruits of the pear and quince kind, at least eight different sorts; but I found I could make nothing of them, for they were most of them as rough and crabbed after stewing as before, so I laid them all aside. Lastly, I boiled my ram's-horn and cream-cheese, as I called them, together. Upon tasting the latter of these, it was become so watery and insipid, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... traced the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not reconcile his life with his art. Paracelsus was hard, but Sordello was incomprehensible. Mr. Browning has denied that he is ever perversely crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to say things in his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the Gothic builders knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in literature. One is inseparable from the subtlety ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Richelieu loved rallying other people, but could not bear a jest himself, and all men of this humour are always very crabbed and churlish; of which the Cardinal gave an instance, in a public assembly of ladies, to Madame de Guemenee, when he threw out a severe jest, which everybody observed was pointed at me. She was sensibly affronted, ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... learned the business practically. He was taught the details by his father's best workman; and a mighty hard and strict master the best workman proved! Lossing did not dream that the crabbed old tyrant who rarely praised him, who made him go over, for the twentieth time, any imperfect piece of work, who exacted all the artisan virtues to the last inch, was secretly proud of him. Yet, in fact, the thread of romance in Lieders's prosaic life was his idolatry of the Lossing Manufacturing ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... but harm in this world, and to hurt people I was fond of, and be misunderstood by every one, and to live on—if I wasn't lucky enough to meet with a premature and sudden end—into a sour, lonely, crabbed old age, when I would wish to goodness I had married anybody, and might even finish by applying ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... debt, and shows how an humble woman, with a Christian character which gave power to her words, raised the money to pay off a debt which had long been a hindrance to church growth and to Christian benevolence. Why she did it, and how she did it, is told in Pansy's best fashion: her encounters with crabbed folks, and stingy folks, and folks determined not to give to the church debt, are highly amusing, as well as her devices ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... world meet amicably; lay down their weapons and even run riot in their excess of good humor, and this is, the reigns of Elizabeth and James. Here you may praise away at a venture; here it is 'cut and come again,' and the more obscure the author, and the more quaint and crabbed his style, the more your admiration will smack of the real relish of the connoisseur; whose taste, like that of an epicure, is always for game that ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... all to discourage that love affair with Clara. He would have been so delighted to welcome Owen as his brother-in-law. And as he strode along over the ground, and landed himself knowingly over the crabbed fences, he began to think how much pleasanter the country would be for him if he had a downright good fellow and crack sportsman as his fast friend at Castle Richmond. Sir Owen Fitzgerald of Castle Richmond! ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... well-cooked food, your home, friends, neighbors, and you will discover how rich you have been. Your mother's face hinted by some stranger in a foreign land will some day overcome you with the realization of the comfort of her love; and unless you are a crabbed egotist the life of your fellows can furnish you with endless pleasures. It is not necessary to own things to enjoy them; our interests and enjoyments may well overlap and include those of our friends and ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... under obligation to no one. I have money to pay for two years in advance, and during this time I shall be able to earn sufficient to pay for the succeeding two years.' This softened the anger of the crabbed director; he was friendly and kind, and ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... Mr. Ricks, the station master, an old and crabbed individual, who disliked the boys for the jokes they had played on him in times past. He shook ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... speak of men. Jack, I don't mean old folk with balls in their knees. I meant people of our own age that we could make friends of. By the way, that crabbed old doctor had a ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... think of it— If Goulburn junior should be bit By some insane Dissenter, roaming Thro' Granta's halls, at large and foaming, And with that aspect ultra crabbed Which marks Dissenters when they're rabid! God only knows what mischiefs might Result from this one single bite, Or how the venom, once suckt in, Might spread and rage thro' kith and kin. Mad folks of all denominations First turn upon their own relations: So that ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... that his little eyes flashed. "There is something hidden in the fellow," said he. "For all that he is so crabbed and crusty outside, like an everlasting workday, another man is hidden in him, as fine as Sunday, whether you believe me or not. He appreciates everything beautiful. Mean he may be, and thorny and quarrelsome and quick with his fists. For instance, the token that ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... him; yet as the same iceberg when swept into the Gulf Stream finds the surrounding air and water by which it is enveloped will not admit its retaining its frigid isolation, it gradually melts and mixes with the warmer current, so Dickens brought his surly and crabbed man in contact with those who had set themselves to see everything under its brightest aspect, and under these softening influences he gradually thaws out and becomes the merriest amongst the merry, carried away by the joyous influences that are associated with the keeping of Christmas. ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... that of Pomona, the old women who tie cherries upon sticks, for the more convenient portableness of the same. To cultivate well, and choose well, your cherries, is of some importance; but if they can be had in their own wild way of clustering about their crabbed stalk, it is a better connection for them than any other; and, if they cannot, then, so that they be not bruised, it makes to a boy of a practical disposition not much difference whether he gets them by handfuls, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... handful I have of you when you are craked in your temper; but stay there if you like, and let your stirabout grow cowld, and not one o' me'll ax you agin," and with that off she went, and the Waiver, sure enough. was mighty crabbed, and the more the wife spoke to him the worse he got, which, you know, ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... his reign the crabbed old king feared that all his labors and savings would go for naught, for he was supremely disappointed in his son, the crown-prince Frederick. The stern father had no sympathy for the literary, musical, artistic tastes of his son, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... of them as they came back to me, in proof of my statement. I drove at once to your boarding place and found you had not been there for weeks, and your landlady was distinctly crabbed. Then I went to the college, only to find that you had fallen ill and gone to your home. That threw me into torments, and all that keeps me from taking the first train is the thought that perhaps you refused to accept these ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... lonesome, crabbed old chap," he said aloud, "but there's something about that little girl makes me feel young again . . . and it's such a pleasant sensation I'd like to have it repeated ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that he was the pride and hope of his mother and aunt, whose circumstances were of the humblest nature. He attended the village school, where he was the most popular and promising of the threescore pupils under the care of the crabbed Mr. Jenkins. He was as active of body as mind, and took the lead among boys of his own age in athletic sports and feats ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... old burying-ground: they had been the first to be buried there. The old stone was sunk half-way in the earth, and was gray with moss and lichens; but the inscription was still legible, if one looked close, and had patience to decipher the crabbed text. ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... faithful. They were fine-looking men, and they rode one after the other, with most gloomy faces. An old cacique, who headed them, had been, I suppose, more excessively drunk than the rest, for he seemed extremely grave and very crabbed. Shortly before this, two Indians joined us, who were travelling from a distant mission to Valdivia concerning some lawsuit. One was a good-humoured old man, but from his wrinkled beardless face looked more like an old woman ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... "You're a crabbed creature," said the farmer; and he walked out of the room. But his wife, who was lying ill ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... fly! I used to cry about it with hot tears that stung my face like lashes, lying with my head hidden on my arms in the grass by the old Tiber water. For I was not twelve years old, and to be shut up in Orte always, growing gray and wrinkled as the notary had done over the wicked, crabbed, evil-looking skins that set the neighbors at war! The thought broke my heart. Nevertheless, I loved my mother, and I mended my quills, and tried to write my best, and said to the boys of the town, "I cannot bend iron or leap or race any more. I am going to write ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... The presents my crabbed connection spoke of so lightly had been supplemented only an hour before by surely the most magnificent wedding offering from my father-in-law that any man could have—the house in which we were and the whole of the furniture. It was hard to refuse Mr. Bundercombe ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... doctor's shoulders. The form taken by your aunt's delirium—I mean the apparent tendency of the words that escape her in that state—seems to excite some incomprehensible feeling in the mind of her crabbed servant. She wouldn't even let me go into the bedroom, if she could possibly help it. Did Mrs. Ellmother give you a warm welcome when ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... of Doctor Pascal at La Souleiade. He was a retired Professor, sixty-six years of age, who lived in his little house with no other company than his gardener, a man as old and crabbed as himself. His interests were solely centred in himself, and his egotism was a constant subject of irritation with Doctor ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... from a Journal whilst at Abbotsford," to which the following was attached: "Found the great poet in his study, laughing at a collie dog playing with Maida, his favorite old greyhound, given him by Glengarry, and quoting Shakespeare—'Crabbed old age and youth cannot agree.' On the floor was the cover of a proof-sheet, sent for correction by Constable, of the novel then in progress. N. B.—This took place before he was the acknowledged ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... the literary world meet amicably; lay down their weapons and even run riot in their excess of good humor, and this is, the reigns of Elizabeth and James. Here you may praise away at a venture; here it is 'cut and come again,' and the more obscure the author, and the more quaint and crabbed his style, the more your admiration will smack of the real relish of the connoisseur; whose taste, like that of an epicure, is always for game that has an ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... of the war. Bof sides was good to me. I've seen many a scout. The captain would say 'By G——, close the ranks.' Captains is right crabbed. I stayed ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... the gratitude of some future Hermes, had in his manuscripts reduced into a system many scattered theories of others, and many dogmas of his own. Over these, for they were simpler and easier than the crabbed and mystical speculations in the printed books, she more especially pored; and she was not sorry at finding fresh reasons for her untutored adoration of the stars and ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... savings," said he, looking at it; and then, pulling out his knife, he began to clean out the letters. "I said then as I would lie by her. And it'll be a comfort to think you'll see me laid here. I trust no one'll be so crabbed as to take a fancy to this 'ere ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... towards the third century, resided at Rome, and attained the consular dignity. His works are written in prose, intermixed with poetry. His diction has some resemblance to that of Tertullian, but is much more crabbed and obscure: none, but the ablest Latin scholars, can understand him. The Marriage of Mercury and Philology,—or of Speech with Learning, is not uninteresting. His other treatises contain nothing ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... that the Donjon Inn was at least two centuries old—perhaps older. Under its sign-board, over the threshold, a man with a crabbed-looking face was standing, seemingly plunged in unpleasant thought, if the wrinkles on his forehead and the knitting of his brows ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... Trinder was obstinate and had old-fashioned views, and argued the whole thing in his dictatorial masculine way. They sat down to luncheon, and presently sent Dorothy away,—a piece of independence that bitterly offended that crabbed but faithful individual,—and wrangled busily through the ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... are green and tender, as becometh one so young, yet are they those of a thinking brain, and in truth thou dost bring back to my mind certain of those old philosophers with whom in days bygone I have disputed at Athens, and at Becca in Arabia, for thou hast the same crabbed air and dusty look, as though thou hadst passed thy days in reading ill-writ Greek, and been stained dark with the grime of manuscripts. So draw the curtain, and sit here by my side, and we will eat fruit, and talk of pleasant things. See, I will again unveil to thee. Thou hast brought it on thyself, ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... to go a step further,—there the Trinity music is heard and the "merry Christmas" of the bells is flung out to all however poor. Beside Trinity there are but few chimes of bells in the city, neither do poor children there sing Christmas carols in the streets and thus unlatch the doors of even crabbed hearts. ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine. Es mucho hombre. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano, though he is ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... the bog, placed himself in the required position. Stooping down, he groped diligently by his right foot, but was aware of nothing but a crabbed stump, that resisted every attempt they could use for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... troubled season of the Roses, our Poetic literature showed the first signs of a revival, they consisted in a return to the old masters of the fourteenth century. The poetry of Hawes, the learned author of the crabbed "Pastime of Pleasure," exhibits an undeniable continuity with that of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, to which triad he devotes a chapter of panegyric. Hawes, however, presses into the service of his allegory not only all the Virtues and all the Vices, whom from habit we can tolerate in such productions, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... walking-sticks and umbrellas even, we feel acquainted, and yet whose names, whose business, whose residences, we know nothing about. Some of these books are so formidable in their dimensions, so rusty and crabbed in their aspect, that it takes a considerable amount of courage ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... into sharp contact with busy and overworked people, he inevitably appeared self-absorbed and slothful. Certainly no one who had read her paper could again see such an old man in his praying shawl bent over his crabbed book, without a ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... had been taken for a cutpurse and themseeming they had no better occasion[77] of doing him an ill turn,[78] began each on like wise to say that he had cut his purse. The Provost's judge, who was a crabbed, ill-conditioned fellow, hearing this, forthright took him apart and began to examine him of the matter; but Martellino answered jestingly, as if he made light of his arrest; whereat the judge, incensed, caused ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... want'ee very bad, Missus. Here!" And the old coachman, almost as old as his master, gave to Mrs. Harper a note, which was only the second she had ever received from her husband's father. It was a crabbed, ancient hand, blotted and blurred, then steadied resolutely into the preciseness of a school-boy—one of those pathetic fragments of writing that irresistibly remind one of the trembling failing hand—the hand that once wrote ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... indelible impression of him on the reader's mind. An old Lyons commentator finds, indeed, in Marcus Aurelius's Greek, something characteristic, something specially firm and imperial; but I think an ordinary mortal will hardly find this: he will find crabbed Greek, without any great charm of distinct physiognomy. The Greek of Thucydides and Plato has this charm, and he who reads them in a translation, however accurate, loses it, and loses much in losing it; but the Greek of Marcus Aurelius, like the Greek of the New Testament, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... strong men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine. Es mucho hombre. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano, though he ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... probably knew as much about Carthusian convents as is needful for any of their inmates; when I studied Tromby's ponderous work and God knows how many more—ay, and spent two precious weeks of my life in deciphering certain crabbed MSS. of Tutini in the Brancacciana library—ay, and tested the spleenful Perrey's "Ragioni del Regio Fisco, etc.," as to the alleged land-grabbing propensities of this order—ay, and even pilgrimaged to Rome to consult ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... why don't you tell me without all this preamble?" When I pronounced these words with some vehemence, Strap looked at me for same time with a grave countenance, and then went on: "I'm very sorry to see such an alteration in your temper of late; you were always fiery, but now you are grown as crabbed as old Periwinkle the drunken tinker, on whom you and I (God forgive us!) played so many unlucky tricks while we were at school—but I will no longer detain you in suspense, because (doubtless) nothing is more uneasy than doubt—Dubio procul dubio ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... rather crabbed, and had not quite believed Hermione sincere, so she did this to try her, and expected to see her pout and refuse. To her surprize, Hermione only said "Oh thank you, ma'am," with a quite smiling face, and going behind ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... inwardly chafing, felt obliged to restrain impatience; he could not afford to awaken the darky's suspicions, therefore he simulated interest and—"crabbed". He enjoyed a streak of good luck, but his artificial enthusiasm soon waned. He at length suggested trying the other side of the island, whereupon ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... is not happy at the big City day school which he has just left. How should he be? He is dull and crabbed and uncouth, and knows too well that he is an object of general dislike; no one there cares to associate with him, and he makes no attempt to overcome their prejudices, being perfectly aware that they are different from him, and hating ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... bird on some remote and rocky hill-side, where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,—at least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... and fond of being caressed, was crabbed and set in its ways. It would tolerate no whims, no departures from the regular course of things. It understood that there was a fixed hour for rising and for going to bed, and when it was displeased it allowed a shade of annoyance to pass into its eyes, the sense of which ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... tastes, he built fine palaces, he collected paintings, and he discoursed of the fine arts with the skill and eloquence of a practised connoisseur; but the nectared fruits of divine philosophy were but harsh and crabbed to him. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unyielding stone of the ring under the thin bodice of her gown. She recalled the morning when she had gone to get it, before anything had happened and the lure of life had been so exquisite. Now that it had come near—if this indeed were life that she was laboring in—it was steep and crabbed, like the brown hills in summer, far off, like velvet, to ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... conditions, the genuine thing would be what I want; but there would be more likelihood of its being so, and less annoyance in laying it aside us worthless, as I do this, selecting, for a second trial, a piece of what I call crabbed wood, known by a peculiar curl, and its very ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... eyes; but for his part he had never found it so, and what he said was, that everybody should speak as they found. Nobody attempting to controvert this position, he took a small brown-paper parcel out of his hat, and putting on a pair of horn spectacles (the writing being crabbed) read the direction half-a-dozen times over; having done which, he consigned the parcel to its old place, put up his spectacles again, and stared at everybody in turn. After this, he took another blow at the horn ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... is written in very crabbed language: (48) but I learnt to read Calo when very young. My mother was a good Calli, and early taught me both to speak and read it. She too had a gabicote, but not printed like this, and it treated of ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... "you can't fail to observe that the writing in the register, is not the writing of the card pinned on the door of Number 27. They are quite different. The writing of Frank Herman in the register is in thick, stunted strokes; the writing on the card is in thin, angular, what are commonly called crabbed strokes. Yet it is supposed that Herman put that card outside his bedroom door. How is it, then, that Herman's handwriting was thick and stunted when he registered at seven o'clock and slender and ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... faces round the table were plump and well liking. Miss Willoughby, in fact, dwelt in one room, in Bloomsbury, and dined on cocoa and bread and butter. These were for her the rewards of the Higher Education. She lived by copying crabbed manuscripts. ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... oracle of the Riggan coal-pits. Crabbed, wrinkled, sarcastic old fellow, whose self-conceit is immeasurable. "The biggest trouble I ha' is settlin' i' my moind what the world'll do when I turn up my toes to th' daisies, an' how the government'll mak' up their moinds ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... common and special say what they will, the masses count to so many millions of units; made, to all appearance, by God,—whose Earth this is declared to be. Besides, the people are not without ferocity; they have sinews and indignation. Do but look what holiday old Marquis Mirabeau, the crabbed old friend of Men, looked on, in these same years, from his lodging, at the Baths of Mont d'Or: 'The savages descending in torrents from the mountains; our people ordered not to go out. The Curate in surplice and stole; Justice in its peruke; Marechausee ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Dairy. H.H. Hobday. A ticklish village amour: a young fellow importuning a buxom dairy-maid, and apparently on the verge of conquest; in the distant door-way stands a mar-loving, wrinkled old woman, whose crabbed face ought not to be trusted ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... dispatches from Cyprus. In this respect, "the business of the state does him offence."—His versification is no less powerful, sweet, and varied. It has every occasional excellence, of sullen intricacy, crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiest expansion—from the ease and familiarity of measured conversation to the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... last only. Are there not the six thousand verses composed for the use of kings, and containing the whole science? Learn these by heart, and you will be prepared for all emergencies." So then he must set to work to learn all these crabbed rules. He must; according to them, distrust every one, even wife or son. He must rise early, take a very scanty meal, ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... remained faithful. They were fine-looking men, and they rode one after the other, with most gloomy faces. An old cacique, who headed them, had been, I suppose, more excessively drunk than the rest, for he seemed extremely grave and very crabbed. Shortly before this, two Indians joined us, who were travelling from a distant mission to Valdivia concerning some lawsuit. One was a good-humoured old man, but from his wrinkled beardless face looked more like an old woman than a ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... bright, happy faces, their joyous laugh, and their animated movements, they presented a most pleasing sight,—"a sight for sore eyes," as a Scotchman might say. If anybody disputes this, he must be a sour and crabbed fellow. ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... turning to my second childhood, for not only am I filled drunk, or made stupid at least, with one bottle of wine, but I am disabled from writing by chilblains on my fingers—a most babyish complaint. They say that the character is indicated by the handwriting; if so, mine is crabbed enough. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... two came another letter from her mother-in-law herself. The crabbed, trembling characters were even more eloquent than the words ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... to impress some as a crass, crabbed person, who has very little ability, while others regard me as an unhealthy, decadent writer. Then Azorin has said of me that I am a literary aristocrat, a fine and ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the Sheepstealer. Mr. West, whom we have mentioned in Hawbuck, played Old Snarl with great humour, which his audience, and indeed himself, seemed heartily to enjoy. In characters of low humour, particularly crabbed old men, Mr. West would be very pleasing, if he would aim less at raising gallery laughter by spurious means. And all that could be done for Mrs. Scout was ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... more than once, of one of the squire's antiquated retainers, old Christy the huntsman. I find that his crabbed humour is a source of much entertainment among the young men of the family: the Oxonian, particularly, takes a mischievous pleasure now and then in slyly rubbing the old man against the grain, and then smoothing him down again; ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... fourteen years old, Uncle Dan Lincoln, who was then an elderly man, was taken with pneumonia, and died two weeks later. His wife, a crabbed woman, who detested Matt, and was glad when he was out of the house, at once sold out the chandlery, and went to live with her folks in a small village in Vermont. Thus Matt was thrown out upon his own resources with no capital but a ten dollar ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... Colonel Raybone—was near enough to board the Isabel as she dashed through the passage. It was evidently the intention of the planter to spring on board as she passed through the channel; for he stood in the bow of his boat with the painter in his hand. One of the rowers in the other boat had "crabbed" his oar and lost it overboard, or the colonel's plan would ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... discomfiture, as he chose to feel it, in the remembrance of an increase of income, and in the popularity he enjoyed in his new abode. All Hollingford came forward to do the earl's new agent honour. Mr. Sheepshanks had been a crabbed, crusty old bachelor, frequenting inn- parlours on market-days, not unwilling to give dinners to three or four chosen friends and familiars, with whom, in return, he dined from time to time, and with whom, also, he kept up an amicable rivalry in the matter of wines. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... hall had been won by a youth not twenty-three years of age. Mr. Enwright had been almost cross, asserting that the victory was perhaps a fluke, as the design of another competitor was in reality superior to George's. Mr. Enwright had also said, in his crabbed way: "You'll soon cut me out"; and, George protesting, had gone on: "Oh! Yes, you will. I've been through this sort of thing before. I know what I'm talking about. You're no different from the rest." Whereupon George, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... continued, flourishing my hat over my head, "tanner, in this instance, is not an English word." Is it not surprising that the language of Mr. Petulengro and of Tawno Chikno, is continually coming to my assistance whenever I appear to be at a nonplus with respect to the derivation of crabbed words? I have made out crabbed words in AEschylus by means of the speech of Chikno and Petulengro, and even in my Biblical researches I have derived no slight assistance from it. It appears to be a kind of picklock, an open sesame, Tanner—Tawno! the one is but a modification of the other; ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... goes on famously. We have had a paper presented and read lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor "poets," as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the Institute has ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... inspection, they looked rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness. So we went to the Royal Hotel, where we probably fared just as badly at much more expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness because we arrived at the hotel on foot. For my part, I love to see John Bull show himself. I must go again and again and again to Chester, for ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... carriage continued its way, and deposited her at the residence of Mrs. Levison. Mrs. Levison was nearly eighty years of age, and very severe in speech and manner, or, as Mrs. Vane expressed it, "crabbed." She looked the image of impatience when Isabel entered, with her cap pushed all awry, and pulling at the black satin gown, for Mrs. Vane had kept her waiting dinner, and Isabel was keeping her from her tea; and that does not ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... with the grizzled beard Who's gone a-questing for his true wife's lute?" And he made answer: "I had come erenow, But that my father, dying, left a load Of cumbrous duties I had needs perform— Dry, peevish, crabbed business at the best, Impertinences indispensable, Accumulated dulness, if you will, Such as I would not irk your ears withal: Howbeit I came at last, and nigh a week Have tarried in the region hereabouts, Unknown—and yearning for one glimpse ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... thought better of mankind and life in general, arose from his nest, and began preening himself. He had all the correct trappings for the frontier, and his toilet in the shed gave him pleasure. The sun came up, and with a stroke struck the world to crystal. The near sand-hills went into rose, the crabbed yucca and the mesquite turned transparent, with lances and pale films of green, like drapery graciously veiling the desert's face, and distant violet peaks and edges framed the vast enchantment beneath the liquid exhalations of the sky. The smell of bacon ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... it, especially now that M. Olivier Vinet has left Mantes; for between ourselves, good M. Leboeuf was afraid of that crabbed little official. If you will permit me, Madame La Presidente, I will go to Mantes and see M. Leboeuf. No time will be lost, for I cannot be certain of the precise value of the property for two or three days. I do not wish ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... for the more convenient portableness of the same. To cultivate well, and choose well, your cherries, is of some importance; but if they can be had in their own wild way of clustering about their crabbed stalk, it is a better connection for them than any other; and, if they cannot, then, so that they be not bruised, it makes to a boy of a practical disposition not much difference whether he gets them by handfuls, or in beaded symmetry on the exalting stick. I purpose, therefore, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... their work well. The attack never faltered. Their own side quite believed they had won. The method they adopted was this. They assumed the role of examiners, and starting with the Decem Rationes before them, they plied Campion with crabbed texts, and obscure quotations from the Fathers. Then they cut short his answers, and as soon as one had examined for one quarter of an hour, another took his place, for they were anxious above all things to avoid defeat. The number of topics broached and left unsettled ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... Doctor Pascal at La Souleiade. He was a retired Professor, sixty-six years of age, who lived in his little house with no other company than his gardener, a man as old and crabbed as himself. His interests were solely centred in himself, and his egotism was a constant subject of irritation with Doctor Pascal. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... exclaimed Peter the Knook, who, cross and crabbed though he was, might always be depended upon in an emergency. "If we delay, or go back, there will not be time to get the toys to the children before morning; and that would grieve Santa Claus ...
— A Kidnapped Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... had been for a walk on the front with a lady-friend whom she had met in the boarding-house and who had taken such a fancy to baby, she was going to the theatre on Saturday night, and Brighton was filling up. It touched Philip because it was so matter-of-fact. The crabbed style, the formality of the matter, gave him a queer desire to laugh and to take her in his arms and ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Phoenix and the Turtle,' which was published by Edward Blount in an appendix to Robert Chester's 'Love's Martyr, or Rosalins complaint, allegorically shadowing the Truth of Love in the Constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle.' The drift of Chester's crabbed verse is not clear, nor can the praise of perspicuity be allowed to the appendix to which Shakespeare contributed, together with Marston, Chapman, Ben Jonson, and 'Ignoto.' The appendix is introduced by a new title-page running thus: 'Hereafter follow diverse poeticall ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... a captious, caviling, carping, crabbed, contentious, cantankerous chap. Hoot mon! an' why shouldna I drap into Scotch gin I choose? An' I with a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... in the side—the left side," said Anne, gathering up in her agitation the sense of the crabbed writing as best she could. "They have not extracted the bullet, but when they ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he had dismissed the laborers to ask him what was the matter, when he responded by showing her a leaden tube with a cover, somewhat like the tube in which a soldier on furlough keeps his leave, from which he drew a yellow parchment covered with crabbed handwriting, and carefully unrolling ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... believed in Mordecai's learning as something marvellous, and was not sorry that his conversation should be sought by a bookish gentleman, whose visits had twice ended in a purchase. He greeted Deronda with a crabbed good-will, and, putting on large silver spectacles, appeared at once to abstract himself in ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... I heard him calling you down and threatening you, for I slunk up to the shed here to see what he was up to. I'm interested in him, I am, and so are others. When I got back in hiding I spoke out, I told him something—something that made his crabbed old soul wizen up, something that scared the daylights out of him. He had a brother, once. He's dead, now. I said something that made this old rascal think his brother's ghost had come back to ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... Cardinal de Richelieu loved rallying other people, but could not bear a jest himself, and all men of this humour are always very crabbed and churlish; of which the Cardinal gave an instance, in a public assembly of ladies, to Madame de Guemenee, when he threw out a severe jest, which everybody observed was pointed at me. She was sensibly affronted, but I was enraged. For ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... for a man to do, after you're done," she said. But she smiled almost at once; for like the women of that north country, crabbed and twisted as their own apple trees, she loved her husband for the trouble ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... efforts,—"and I can't deny that I've a sort of love, though it be a love without hope, for a very pretty girl, a woman also: now this being the case, I'm not fond of hearing women reflected on; for when they're young, they're the delight of our eyes; and when they're old, they're useful, though a trifle crabbed, but still useful; and a house without a ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... borne the heat and labour of the plough, When Evening came and her sweet cooling hour, Should seek to trespass on a neighbour copse, Where greener herbage waved, or clearer streams Invited him to slake his burning thirst? That Man were crabbed, who should say him Nay: That Man were churlish, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... you so?" answered Rose: "Ay, ay, that is to be my fate, and I only wish I could make the crabbed man a little merrier. Time will pass away terribly slowly with him. But perhaps I shall then be able to go to the town some time or other, see a bit of the world, hear some music and have a dance; for I think at all events an old husband ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method when he ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... that the fear of a prediction being this year fulfilled, which was pronounced by a Saxon fortune-teller whom his majesty was weak enough some time ago to consult, dwells on his mind, and augments the sourness of a disposition naturally crabbed. I should have paid no attention to these reports, which savour so much of the nursery, had I not myself observed him displeased at a mourning coat at his levee, and seen his countenance visibly alter on being informed of any man's dying ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... dined: every three or four hours he munched a manchet, and refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant; and when "he was put into this road of writing," as crabbed Anthony telleth, he fixed on "a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light;" and then hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous pages. Prynne has written a library ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... great esteem by the "very first families," has just struck eleven. The young, pale-faced missionary inquiringly hesitates before a small, two-story building of wood, located on the upper side of Church street, and so crabbed in appearance that you might, without endangering your reputation, have sworn it had incorporated in its framework a portion of that chronic disease for which the State has gained for itself an unenviable reputation. Jutting out of the black, moss-vegetating roof, is an old-maidish ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... lowering his collar Nibet's crabbed visage glowered on the two women: it was the Depot ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... emblem of the manner in which their contents were crowded into Cotton Mather's brain. And in the middle of the room stood table, on which, besides printed volumes, were strewn manuscript sermons, historical tracts, and political pamphlets, all written in such a queer, blind, crabbed, fantastical hand, that a writing-master would have gone raving mad at the sight of them. By this table stood Grandfather's chair, which seemed to have contracted an air of deep erudition, as if its cushion were stuffed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... books—a fact in which I see so much of Henley that I feel as if the stranger to him who to-day takes the volume down from my shelves and reads on the fly-leaf the simple inscription, "To E.R.P. d.d. W.E.H.," in his little crooked and crabbed writing, must see in it the eloquent clue to his personality ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... awake again and staring; insomuch, Sir, that if Joe's father were to rise up from the grave to-morrow, he wouldn't trust the old blade with a penny piece, but would tell him that his son Josh was too old a soldier to be done again, Sir. That he was a suspicious, crabbed, cranky, used-up, J. B. infidel, Sir; and that if it were consistent with the dignity of a rough and tough old Major, of the old school, who had had the honour of being personally known to, and commended by, their late Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Kent and York, to retire to a ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... would imagine that old age ought to think of nothing but death, since it is condemned to give up all enjoyment; and that it is not attended by enough ugliness of its own, but must needs be slovenly and crabbed. ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... writing on this," said Guy, picking up the paper which Bax flung down. "It is a crabbed hand, but I think I can make it out:—'Dear Bogue, you will find the tubs down Pegwell Bay, with the sinkers on 'em; the rest of ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... are evident; his style is harsh, obscure and crabbed; it is sometimes said that he seems wiser than he really is mainly because his language is difficult; that if his thoughts were translated into easier prose our impressions of his greatness would be much modified. Yet ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... the door of the interviewer's room. He stepped in quickly and turned to face the man seated at the transplastic desk, an upset little man with permanent worry wrinkles stamped in his forehead. The little man shoved the papers on the desk around angrily, occasionally making crabbed little notes on the margins. He flashed a birdlike glance ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... us all. The world seems a vast horrible grinding machine, into which what is fresh and bright and pure is pushed at one end, to come out old and crabbed ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... was dissolved by the horse's hoof and I was sore for its dissolution. There was none left now that could remember the old days of the team save Lingo, and he grew crusty and somewhat crabbed. He was still the guardian of the sled, still the insatiable hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial with his mates, and we heard his short, sharp, angry double bark at night more frequently than we used to. He reminded me of the complaining ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... I have given myself a free hand. I may no doubt have misinterpreted the author's meaning in so doing, but without such punctuation, the number of repellantly crabbed sentences would have been even greater than at present. In dealing with the Essay of 1844, I have corrected some obvious slips without indicating such alterations, because the MS. being legible, there is no danger of changing ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... fermentation, lactic fermentation. vinegar, verjuice^, crab, alum; acetic acid, lactic acid. V. be sour; sour, turn sour &c adj.; set the teeth on edge. render sour &c adj.; acidify, acidulate. Adj. sour; acid, acidulous, acidulated; tart, crabbed; acetous, acetose^; acerb, acetic; sour as vinegar, sourish, acescent^, subacid [Chem]; styptic, hard, rough. Phr. sour ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... shake my faith in the seriousness of journalism. I had not done laughing when I opened another letter written in a fine, crabbed hand like the scratching of a diamond on a window-pane, and as I slowly deciphered its contents I could hardly believe what I read. It was from Samuel Bowles the elder, editor of the Springfield Republican, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... receives the full force of the other's poisoned weapon. It is all over: in a few minutes the wounded one succumbs. The victor very calmly proceeds to gnaw the fore-part of the victim's cephalothorax, or, in less crabbed terms, the bit at which we look for a head and find only the entrance to a belly. The mouthfuls are small, but long-drawn-out. For four or five days, almost without a break, the cannibal nibbles at his murdered comrade. To eat the vanquished, that's good warfare, the only sort excusable. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... understand that she was a woman of her word, and that an undrained cabbage would be the signal for the execution of her threat. From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... interest swept back over King as he read; the old excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful labourings, was the "secret" at last—Gus Ingle's message come to him ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... pleasure in a disgusting thing? It is a hard case. If you record your pleasure, distinctly, you seem to exaggerate it and to calumniate your delicacy; and if you record nothing but your displeasure, you feel rather crabbed and stingy. This much I can say, at any rate, that as there had been no bull fights in that part of the country during the Carlist war, the native dilettanti (and every man, woman, and child of them comes under this denomination) returned to their previous pastime ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... those touches of grace and tenderness and kindly humour that somehow accompany the very roughest and most trenchant of the earlier ballads, like the bloom and fragrance that adorn the bristling thickets of the native whin on the slopes of the Eildons or Arthur Seat. The times were harsh and crabbed, and the song they yielded was like unto themselves. There are ballads of the Battle of Pentland, of Bothwell Brig, of Killiecrankie, and, to make a leap into another century, of Sheriffmuir. But they are memorable for the passion of hatred and scorn that is in them, ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... character of such a lovely girl was too exalted to inspire any other feeling than that of quiet reverence. But as lovers will not always be insulted, at all times and under all circumstances, by the frowns and cold looks of crabbed old age, which should continually reflect dignity upon those around, and treat the unfortunate as well as the fortunate with a graceful mien, he continued to use diligence and perseverance. All this lighted a spark ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... round him of Olympian cheer, 180 Like visits of those earthly gods he came; His look, wherever its good-fortune fell, Doubled the feast without a miracle, And on the hearthstone danced a happier flame; Philemon's crabbed vintage grew benign; Amphitryon's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even then reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table contained nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a frantically Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... dull man grown whimsical"—a most characteristical account of Lord Kames as a writer.' Boswelliana, p. 278. Hume wrote of it:—'Some parts of the work are ingenious and curious; but it is too abstruse and crabbed ever to take with the public.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 131. 'Kames,' he says, 'had much provoked Voltaire, who never forgives, and never thinks any enemy below his notice.' Ib, p. 195. Voltaire (Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... tall spear-pointed tower of the "Gate of Salvation." And now, being by this time somewhat fatigued by the exertion of a prolonged tramp in a heavy fur overcoat and felt-lined goloshes, he makes for a doorway above which appears, in crabbed Slavonian characters, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... change of heart. Much of man's self-respect arises from the esteem of others, and the desire to keep that esteem is certainly a powerful agent in social welfare. It was reported that in many communities the advent of the Grange created a marked improvement in the dress and manners of the members. Crabbed men came out of their shells and grew genial; disheartened women became cheerful; repressed children delighted in the chance to play with other boys and girls of ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... of the latest encounter with the crabbed fireman on Claremont, grinning appreciatively because the fireman's ill temper had been directed at a tourist who had gone up with Hank. He related a small scandal that was stirring the social pond of Quincy, and ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... searching his memory. Where had he previously seen those heads, so typical of bourgeois degeneracy, those flattened, crabbed faces reeking of millions earned at the expense of the poor? It was assuredly in some important circumstance of his life. And all at once he remembered; they were the Margaillans, the man was that building contractor whom Dubuche had promenaded through the Salon of the Rejected, and who had ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?' Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... conceived that this Man was never cut out to be a Presbyter, or any Thing that is severe and crabbed. In no Time did he lean to Faction, but did his Business without Offence to any. He put off officious Talk of Government or Politicks, with Jests, and so made his Wit a Catholicon, or Shield, to ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets Where ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... illness. That circumstance, according to my view of it, laid the responsibility on the doctor's shoulders. The form taken by your aunt's delirium—I mean the apparent tendency of the words that escape her in that state—seems to excite some incomprehensible feeling in the mind of her crabbed servant. She wouldn't even let me go into the bedroom, if she could possibly help it. Did Mrs. Ellmother give you a warm welcome ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... don't be cross and crabbed because someone else in the household is not pleasant. Do your part; you will likely thereby cure the frown habit on the face of the unfortunate ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... manner, which was an abrupt challenge to all comers, Lidgerwood acknowledged a growing liking for the chief clerk. Under the crabbed and gloomy crust of the man the superintendent fancied he could discover a certain savage loyalty. But under the loyalty there was a deeper depth—of misery, or tragedy, or both; and to this abysmal part of him there was no key that Lidgerwood ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... had a favorite song, which he used to sing with great glee to a merry, joyous air, the burden of which ran "Chantons l'amour et le plaisir!" I often thought it would have been a good lesson for the crabbed and discontented rich man to have heard this remnant of humanity—poor, blind, and in rags, and dependent upon casual charity for his daily bread, singing in so cheerful a voice the charms of existence, and, as it were, fiddling life away ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... poetic materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense of what is real in feeling and image—as if he had never felt the attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to watch over them, and maintains us here for love of them. We must note that the Indians are not so bad as they seem to us.... It must also be observed that there are many Spaniards, and even ministers, who are melancholy and crabbed, and so ill-conditioned and moody, that everything wounds them, and they are contented with nothing. All the actions of the Indians displease them, and they even believe that the Indians do them purposely to make them impatient and to jest with them. From such ill-conditioned people the Indians suffer ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... explained. A year ago Godfrey Staunton lodged in London for a time, and became passionately attached to his landlady's daughter, whom he married. She was as good as she was beautiful, and as intelligent as she was good. No man need be ashamed of such a wife. But Godfrey was the heir to this crabbed old nobleman, and it was quite certain that the news of his marriage would have been the end of his inheritance. I knew the lad well, and I loved him for his many excellent qualities. I did all I could to help him to keep things straight. We did our very ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was thoroughly interested in the strange boy whose growing musical pinions were ever being clipped by the shears of unsympathetic age and crabbed religion, and the idea of doing something for him to make up for the injustice of his grandmother awoke in her a slight glow of that interest in life which she sought only in doing good. But although ere long she came to love the boy very ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... in a martial hand; be curst and brief] Martial hand, seems to be a careless scrawl, such as shewed the writer to neglect ceremony. Curst, is petulant, crabbed—a curst cur, is a dog that with little provocation snarls and ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... condemned deserved their punishment, he was not sure that it was the best way to put down the heresy. If she was ruler, she continued, in her merry way, she would send all the schemers and ranters, and all the sour, crabbed, busybodies in the churches, off to Rhode Island, where all kinds of folly, in spirituals as well as temporals, were permitted, and one crazy head could not ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... pelief dot boy vos harmed by der men dot hadt idt dis room," declared the crabbed old man. "Dey vos very respectable. Now you pay me for dot door undt ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... ostrich-like digestion of crabbed rules, my dear old Dubbs; why, then," said Kenrick, "we should all ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... Froude and other "critic flies." When Doctor Samuel Johnson was told that Boswell proposed to write his life, he threatened to prevent it by taking that of his would-be biographer. It were curious to consider what "crabbed old Carlyle" would have done had he suspected the danger of falling into the hands of a literary backstairs Mrs. Grundy like Edmund Gosse! In his "Heroes and Hero Worship" he treated his colossi far otherwise than he in turn has been treated by Gosse and Froude. He first recognized ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it, many pictures of it, from all angles, and painted them, and framed them, and hung them, and then, a spectator, looked at them as if for the first time. And I made myself many kinds of spectators, from crabbed old maids and lean pantaloons to girls in boarding school and Greek boys of thousands of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... increase this to something more than a ton per day. Each bushel of fruit will produce from four to five pounds of jelly, fruit ripening late in the season being more productive than earlier varieties. Crab apples produce the finest jelly; sour, crabbed, natural fruit makes the best looking article, and a mixture of all varieties gives most satisfactory results as to flavor ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... do them reverence; For though thine husband armed be in mail, The arrows of thy crabbed eloquence Shall pierce his breast, and eke his aventail; In jealousy I rede* eke thou him bind, *advise And thou shalt make him couch* as doth a quail. ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... its black corner at the bare boards and the oiled fire-irons, and the empty card-racks over the mantelpiece: the cellaret has lurked away behind the carpet: the chairs are turned up heads and tails along the walls: and in the dark corner opposite the statue, is an old-fashioned crabbed knife-box, locked and sitting ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... light-hearted to their work as we rode through smiling fields, and we ceased to wonder at Patn looking deserted, for it was evident that all the cheerfully disposed inhabitants had flitted away, unable to bear its depressing influence, and leaving behind them only the crabbed old people at the corners of the streets, and the tattered beggars, who must make a meagre livelihood out of the falling temples and 24,000 rotten houses of the once handsome capital ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... denunciations of the Pope and the wealthy clergy (in which their rhetoric found very effective matter for argument) into abstract reasoning on the whole question of the private possession of property. The treatises which they have left in crabbed Latin and involved methods of argument make wearisome and irritating reading. Most are exceedingly prolix. After pages of profound disquisitions, the conclusions reached seem to have advanced the problem no further. Yet the gist of the whole is certainly an attempt to deny to any Christian ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... the old man, "that's all right. Don't apologize, Boy, whatever you do. D'yer know what I came over hyar fer?" he asked suddenly reaching out a crabbed hand. "Well, I'll tell ye. I've be'n lookin' f'r years f'r a white man that I c'd swear off to. Not one of these pink-gilled preachers but a man that would shake hands with me on the squar' and hold me to it. Now, Boy, I like you—will ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... and the enthusiasms of Coleridge which nobody was able to bear. Lamb would parade his admiration for some favourite author, Donne, for example, whom the rest of the company probably abhorred. He would select the most crabbed passages to quote and defend; he would stammer out his piquant and masterful half sentences, his scalding jests, his controvertible assertions; he would skilfully hint at the defects which no one ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Christian character which gave power to her words, raised the money to pay off a debt which had long been a hindrance to church growth and to Christian benevolence. Why she did it, and how she did it, is told in Pansy's best fashion: her encounters with crabbed folks, and stingy folks, and folks determined not to give to the church debt, are highly amusing, as well as her devices to get something ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... perhaps, because of his facility for intrigue, his power of bullying, and his great influence at Court. As we have seen, the conciliatory efforts of the monarch had hitherto averted a rupture between Pitt and Thurlow. But not even the favour of George III could render the crabbed old Chancellor endurable. His spitefulness had increased since Pitt's nomination of Pepper Arden to the Mastership of the Rolls; and he showed his spleen by obstructing Government measures in the House ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... had Berintha ever confided the story of her early love. Mr. Dayton was a schoolboy then, and as but little was said of it at the time, it faded entirely from memory; and when Lucy called her a "crabbed old maid," she knew not of the disappointment which had clouded every joy and imbittered ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... from almost insanity to be retarded by having nothing to listen to except the wind moaning among old chimneys and older ash-trees—nothing to look at except heathery hills, walked over when life had all to hope for and nothing to regret with me—no one to speak to except crabbed old Greeks and Romans who have been dust the last five [sic] thousand years. And yet this quiet life, from its contrast, makes the year passed at Luddendenfoot appear like a nightmare, for I would rather give my hand than undergo again the grovelling carelessness, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... Lesbia!) and live we our day, While all stern sayings crabbed sages say, At one doit's value let us price and prize! The Suns can westward sink again to rise But we, extinguished once our tiny light, 5 Perforce shall slumber through one lasting night! Kiss me a thousand times, then hundred more, Then thousand others, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... I got leave to stay at home, because I really had a cold. His sisters were gone to Morton in my stead: I sat reading Schiller; he, deciphering his crabbed Oriental scrolls. As I exchanged a translation for an exercise, I happened to look his way: there I found myself under the influence of the ever-watchful blue eye. How long it had been searching me through and through, and over and over, I cannot tell: so keen ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... her lithe body downward, so that her chin touched the floor; and her whole audience,—the nomads, accustomed to a life of privation and abstinence, the Roman soldiers, expert in debaucheries, the avaricious publicans, and even the crabbed, elderly priests—gazed upon ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... exactly, but which one guesses pretty nearly." "What is it?" "I do not know anything about it. Mascaret leads a very fast life now, after having been a model husband. As long as he remained a good spouse, he had a shocking temper and was crabbed and easily took offense, but since he has been leading his present, rackety life, he has become quite indifferent; but one would guess that he has some trouble, a worm gnawing somewhere, for he ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... blinking. The thought of crabbed Uncle Joe taking on the habiliments of the genial saint was too much for his imagination. It left him without the power to set James straight in the matter, and Uncle Joe was immediately accepted as Santy by the expectant Sykeses, all of whom revealed a tremendous interest in the avuncular ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... with prophetic wisdom. Dry Bottom was trying as best it knew how to wallow in the depths of sin. Unlovely, soiled, desolate of verdure, dumped down upon a flat of sand in a treeless waste, amid cactus, crabbed yucca, scorpions, horned toads, and rattlesnakes. Dry Bottom had forgotten its morals, subverted its principles, and ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... it is indeed possible for the poet to represent nature through the images which words evoke in the mind, and these images may have significance for feeling. Their very evocation in musical language is bound to lend them some warmth of mood. Yet—as Lessing showed in his Laocoon, despite all the crabbed narrowness of his treatment—it is hopeless for the poet to enter into rivalry with the painter or sculptor. The colors and forms of things which the poet paints for the eye of the mind are mere shadows in comparison with those which we really see.[Footnote: ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... age, the Jesuit excelled in any work to which he devoted his attention. He was not only an intrepid missionary, but a most successful teacher. Into the work of education he entered heart and soul. He taught gratuitously, without any crabbed harshness, and with a view to gain the heart. He entered into the feelings of his pupils, and taught them to subdue their tempers, and avoid quarrels and oaths. He excited them to enthusiasm, perceived their merits, and rewarded the successful with presents and favors. Hence the schools of the Jesuits ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... you are a deserter," added the officer in a crabbed tone. "I advise you to arrest him, sergeant. That pass is good ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... the adamant old banker in Paris, crabbed, stern, unrelenting to his debtors—shivered in his boots and ended in signing away half his fortune to her, and moved his family into a permanent chateau in the country, where he keeps himself busy with his ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... rude, but they meant to have it understood that they were prosperous and "not scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One man's as good as another—and a darn sight better." This motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... falsehood, and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool. Neither condition is enviable, for the untrustworthy and ignorant has no friend, and as time advances he becomes known, and lays up in store for himself isolation in crabbed age when life is on the wane: so that, whether his children or friends are alive or not, he is equally solitary.—Worthy of honour is he who does no injustice, and of more than twofold honour, if he not ...
— Laws • Plato
... vehemently, 'I will be under obligation to no one. I have money to pay for two years in advance, and during this time I shall be able to earn sufficient to pay for the succeeding two years.' This softened the anger of the crabbed director; he was friendly and kind, ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... race, and the laws of Ine may be considered as the foundation of modern English law. Many of these laws were probably much older; but they were now first codified and systematically enforced. The language employed is direct, almost crabbed; but occasionally the Anglo-Saxon love of figure shows itself. To illustrate, I quote, after Brooke, from Earle's 'Anglo-Saxon Literature,' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... will give one an idea of the extraordinarily crabbed hand in which the notes are written, but it is worth while to see the original, for here is the first occasion upon which is laid down in clear and unequivocal words that the blood CIRCULATES. The lecture ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... blood and whose malignant tongues aim only at the "defilement of separation." Youth is upright as an Alif, or slender and bending as a branch of the Ban-tree which we should call a willow-wand,[FN307] while Age, crabbed and crooked, bends groundwards vainly seeking in the dust his lost juvenility. As Baron de Slane says of these stock comparisons (Ibn Khall. i. xxxvi.), "The figurative language of Moslem poets is often difficult to be understood. The narcissus ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... know anything about it. Mascaret leads a very fast life now, after being a model husband. As long as he remained a good spouse he had a shocking temper, was crabbed and easily took offence, but since he has been leading his present wild life he has become quite different, But one might surmise that he has some trouble, a worm gnawing somewhere, for he has ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... colonel again rang, and he was about to repeat the summons for a third time, when a faint gleam of light in the court warned him that some one was afoot. Presently a small wicket in the centre of the gate was opened, and the pinched and crabbed features of the lay-sister who acted as portress showed themselves at the aperture. In a voice rendered unusually shrill and querulous by vexation at having her rest broken, she demanded who it was thus disturbing the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
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