"Crabbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... 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
... 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 effeminate ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... 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
... a Parisian journalist. He used his influence in starting Marie Godeschal, usually called Mariette, at the Porte Saint-Martin. The husband of an ugly, vulgar, and crabbed woman, he had by her children that were by no means welcome. He lived in wretched lodgings on the rue Mandar, when Lucien de Rubempre was presented to him. Vernou was a caustic critic on the side of the oppositon. The uncongeniality of his domestic life embittered his character and his genius. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... 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
... 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 letters, for some ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... 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
... 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 ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... 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 |
