"Irritant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exceedingly astringent. The fermented juice of the ripe pulp is used in certain parts of America to prepare a popular drink. The powdered seeds make a useful parasiticide especially when used on the scalp, but it is necessary to avoid getting any of the drug in the eyes on account of its irritant effect. ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... the moment, but it does not moralise, nor abidingly deter. There must be an apparent proportion between the offence and the punishment. A Draconian code, visiting petty offences with the severity due to high misdemeanours, is more of an irritant than a represser of crime, because it ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... mocked her. Her wrath was an effective counter-irritant for her trouble. She was ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... believe one man did think he had discovered a solvent for it in the gastric juice of the beaver, but that view is not widely entertained. So far as it exists in opium it can only act as a foreign substance and a mechanical irritant to the human bowels. Next come two inert, indigestible, and very similar gummy bodies, mucilagin and bassorine. Sugar, a powerfully active volatile principle, and a fixed oil (probably allied to turpentine) are the only other invariable constituents ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... ever," said Priscilla, temporizing, "try him with a little—just a little slap? Only a little one," she added hastily, for the mother looked at her oddly, "only as a sort of counter-irritant. And it needn't ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... few such characters as John, who was not successful even in crime. He may be regarded roughly as the royal poultice who brought matters to a head in England, and who, by means of his treachery, cowardice, and phenomenal villany, acted as a counter-irritant upon the malarial surface of the ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... particle is itself a bit of charcoal, and carries on it, and in it, its little load of irritating vapour. It is this, far more than the particles of carbon themselves, that produces the irritation. Hence two causes of offence are to be removed: the carbon particles which convey the irritant by adhesion and condensation, and the free vapour which accompanies the particles. The cotton-wool moistened with glycerine I knew would arrest the first; fragments of charcoal I hoped would stop the second. In the first fireman's respirator, Mr. Carrick's arrangement of two valves, the one for ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... in equal parts. Warmed and rubbed on the chest, it is a safe, reliable and mild counter irritant and revulsent in ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... Sybarite comprehended in a glance and, comprehending, bristled like a truculent game-cock or the faithful hound in the ghost-story. The aspect of Respectability seemed to have upon him the effect of a violent irritant; his eyes took on a hot, hard look, his lips narrowed to a thin, inflexible crease, and ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... finds himself alone, he sets to work trying to kindle a counter irritant, a congenial flame that will burn in the heart ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... have generally served a long apprenticeship to sharp criticism. If they still care for it (and some do after years of experience much more than the world thinks), they care less for it than at first, and have come to regard it as an unavoidable and incessant irritant, of which they shall never be rid. But a bank director undergoes no similar training and hardening. His functions at the Bank fill a very small part of his time; all the rest of his life (unless he be in Parliament) is spent in retired and mercantile industry. He is not ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... the first week just for some excitement. If you need a rest—and you are rather seedy—forget all about this Patterson business and plunge into something new. The best rest in the world is a counter-irritant." ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... other states, rejects Moroccan administration of Western Sahara; the Polisario Front, exiled in Algeria, represents the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic; Algeria's border with Morocco remains an irritant to bilateral relations, each nation accusing the other of harboring militants and arms smuggling; Algeria remains concerned about armed bandits operating throughout the Sahel who sometimes destabilize ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Spaniard is quite adorably melancholy; there is something calm, severe, manly, and mysterious about him which interests me profoundly. His unvarying solemnity and the silence which envelops him act like an irritant on the mind. His mute dignity is worthy of a fallen king. Griffith and I spend our time over him as though he ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... after a while," said Varney, hastily lighting a pipe as counter-irritant. "So you're the telegraph ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... ante, p. 67), we may infer that he had sought safety in flight. The Bride of Abydos, or Zuleika, as it was first entitled, was written early in November, "in four nights" (Diary, November 16), or in a week (Letter to Gifford, November 12)—the reckoning goes for little—as a counter-irritant to the pain ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... same time it helps to dissipate one ridiculous popular fallacy about Meredith. Meredith, like most all the wits, has been accused of straining after image and epigram. Wit acts as an irritant on many people. They forget the admirable saying of Coleridge: "Exclusive of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms; and the greatest of men is but an aphorism." They might as well denounce a hedge for producing wild ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... plain work; so prim, so square, so geometrically precise, that Clarissa thought the flannel itself looked cold—a hard, fibrous, cruel fabric, that could never be of use to mortal flesh except as an irritant. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... nectocalyx is irritated with a point of a needle or by a vegetable or mineral irritant, the tip of the manubrium will turn toward, and endeavor to touch, the spot irritated. It does not turn at once, as it would were its movements the result of reflex action; it moves deliberately as though actuated ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... difficult to dissolve, so that practically little of it is digested. It serves a mechanical purpose in the digestive tract by helping to fill the organs and dilute the real food. If fibrous, it acts as an irritant and overcomes sluggishness of the intestines known as constipation. The outer coats of cereals are an example of coarse cellulose, as used in brown bread ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Management • Ministry of Education
... Norman Kingsley among these human revelers. The only one who seemed rather to enjoy it than otherwise was the prisoner, who was quietly and quickly making off, when the malevolent and irrepressible dwarf espied him, and the one shock acting as a counter-irritant to the other, he bounced fleetly over the table, and grabbed him in ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... dose as to take immediate effect—although this is by no means necessary, as there are numerous substances which accumulate in the system, and when given in small and repeated quantities ultimately prove fatal—notably, antimony. The diagnosis of the effects of irritant poisons is not so difficult as it is in the case of narcotics or other neurotics, where the symptoms are very similar to those produced by apoplexy, epilepsy, tetanus, convulsions, or other forms of disease of the brain. Besides, one of the most ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... used the wrong name. For all business purposes he should be addressed as the Mordaunt Estate, his duly incorporated title. Wagboom is an irritant to ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... fleas, they may be employed for the purpose of absorbing the blood of animals. In the latter case, after the surface of the skin is pierced, a poison is forced down into the wound, for the purpose, it is thought, of making the blood more fluid. But this poison is of a highly irritant nature, and leaves a very painful feeling, accompanied by more or less ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... which made the cheap novel a necessity, destroyed at a blow the literature of the street. Since the highwayman wandered, fur-coated, into the City, the patterer has lost his occupation. Robbery and murder have degenerated into Chinese puzzles, whose solution is a pleasant irritant to the idle brain. The misunderstanding of Poe has produced a vast polyglot literature, for which one would not give in exchange a single chapter of Captain Smith. Vautrin and Bill Sykes are already discredited, and ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... his kind in New York, but the regular staff correspondent of his paper, the Leader, being ill, he had been sent in his place. He was a Harvard graduate and a gentleman with a taste for poetry, but he had a peculiar mind, upon which a murder mystery acted as an irritant—he could not rest until he had solved it—and his paper always put him on the great cases, such as those in which a vast metropolis like New York abounds. Now he was restless and discontented; the tour seemed to him the mere ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... lips of the octogenarian made Barraclough laugh. But the nerves of Nugent Cassis were frayed and laughter was an irritant. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... characteristic also of Merimee himself, a sort of fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at its height in the singular story he has translated from the Russian of Pouchkine. Those raw colours he preferred; Spanish, Oriental, African, perhaps, irritant certainly to cisalpine eyes, he undoubtedly attained the colouring you associate with sun-stroke, only possible under a sun in which ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... that Stafford party doesn't show up before long, I'm going home. I can't stand you fellows without some excitement for a counter-irritant." ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... to five drops. The British Pharmacopoeia contains a watery solution—the Aqua Chloroformi—which is useful in disguising the taste of nauseous drugs; a liniment which consists of equal parts of camphor liniment and chloroform, and is a useful counter-irritant; the Spiritus Chloroformi (erroneously known as "chloric ether"), which is a useful anodyne in doses of from five to forty drops; and the Tinctura Chloroformi et Morphinae Composita, which is the equivalent of a proprietary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... roach poison or in parlor matches, is sometimes eaten by children, and has been wilfully taken for the purpose of suicide. It is a powerful irritant. The first thing to be done is to give freely of magnesia and water; then to give mucilaginous drinks, as flaxseed tea, gum water or sassafras pith and water; and lastly to administer finely-powdered bone-charcoal, either in pill ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... to be unkind. There was of a truth no object to be gained by being brutal to her now. But that wallet, which she held so tightly clutched, acted as an irritant to his nerves. Never of very equable temperament and holding all women in lofty scorn, he chafed against all parleyings with his wife, now that the goal of his ambition was ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... provoke sneezing, and will relieve passive headache in this way. The leaves have been applied as a blister to the wrists in rheumatism, and when infused in boiling water as a poultice over the pit of the stomach as a counter-irritant. For sciatica the tincture of the bulbous ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... these bare silences, These hills that in the sunset melt and burn, This proud stern people, these dead seas and lakes, These sombre cedars, this intense still sky, To me, o'erwearied with life's din and strain, Are grateful as the solemn blank of night After the fierce day's irritant excess; Besides, a deep absorbing interest Detains me here, fills up my mind, and sways My inmost thoughts—has got, as 'twere a gripe Upon my very life, as strange as new. I scarcely know how well to speak of this, Fearing your raillery at best—at ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... Scotty to extreme measures, so here he mercifully interfered in his friend's behalf. He had no mind to defy a trustee, so, being of a diplomatic turn, determined to divert the tide of wrath by the simple expedient of producing a counter-irritant. He slipped out quietly from the line of culprits, and snatching up a well-packed snowball hurled it straight and true at the team standing in the road. The missile was a hard one, and the nervous young colts, their heads erect, their nostrils indignant, ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... ago, on the occasion of sharks appearing on the Atlantic coast of the U.S.A., it was freely intimated at the fashionable watering-places that there was such a thing as being too proud to bathe. Now a new and untimely irritant has turned up off the same shores in the shape of U-boats. Their advent is all the more inconsiderate in view of the impending Presidential Election, at which Mr. Wilson's claim is based on having kept America ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... elbow, would at once deliberately rub the other. She said that she had discovered that it took her mind away from the elbow that hurt, and so stopped its hurting sooner. The use of a counterirritant is not uncommon with good physicians, but the counter-irritant only does what is much more effectually accomplished when the patient uses his will and intelligence to remove the original irritant ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... health of mind was concerned, itself grievously inopportune, the catastrophe could not have happened at a more opportune moment. Trading upon the heels of his encounter with Valerie, it made a terrific counter-irritant to the violent inflammation which that meeting had set up. Yet if the back of the sickness was broken, disorder and corrective, alike so drastic, were bound seriously to lower the patient's tone. His splendid physical condition supported its brother ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... between the curtaining branches, and found its mark high on the bull's fore-shoulder. It penetrated—but not to a depth of more than two or three inches. And Grom, though elated by his good shot, realized that such a wound would be nothing more than an irritant. ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... supernatural powers—witches, in fact, and such was the belief in their power that, "without resistance, all immediately acquiesce in their demands." They also had physicians who used cold water, plasters of herbs, whipping with nettles (doubtless the principle of the counter irritant), the smoke of certain plants, and incantations, with a great deal of general, all-around humbug to produce ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... when Oliver's ideal appeared almost to betray him, and the intellectual limitations of Virginia bored rather than delighted him. Habit, which is a sedative to a phlegmatic nature, acts not infrequently as a positive irritant upon the temperament of the artist; and since he had turned from his work in a passion of disgust at the dramatic obtuseness of his generation, he had felt more than ever the need of some intellectual outlet for the torrent of his imagination. As a wife, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... am rightly informed, came into philosophy through the gateway of mathematics. The old antinomies of the infinite were, I imagine, the irritant that first woke his faculties from their dogmatic slumber. You all remember Zeno's famous paradox, or sophism, as many of our logic books still call it, of Achilles and the tortoise. Give that reptile ever so small an advance and the swift runner Achilles can ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... which had preceded the soldier's return; but how different in her appreciation of them! Her narrow miss of the recovered respectability they had hoped for from that tardy event worked upon her parents as an irritant, and after the first week or two of her mourning her life with them grew almost insupportable. She had impulsively taken to herself the weeds of a widow, for such she seemed to herself to be, and clothed little Johnny in sables likewise. This assumption of a moral relationship to the ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... tea to Henchard, left it, and went away. Reflecting, she endeavoured to assure herself that the movement was an idle eccentricity, and no more. Yet, on the other hand, his subordinate position in an establishment where he once had been master might be acting on him like an irritant poison; and she finally ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... food eaten beyond what your system requires for its energy, growth, and repair, is fattening, or is an irritant, or both. ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... had no home people of her own, and she pressed her nearest friends to make her "one of the family." "If," she would say, "you would let me share in any disappointments or troubles, I would feel more worthy of your love—I will tell you some of mine as a counter-irritant!" Many followed her behest with good result. "I'm cross this morning," wrote a young missionary at the beginning of a long letter, "and I know it is all my own fault, but I am sure that writing to you will put me in a better temper. When things ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... For mental anxiety there is a remedy more effectual than opium or digitalis—prosaic work. Whoever has plenty to do, finds no time to dwell on love troubles. Merchants seldom commit suicide for love. Cares of business are a wholesome counter-irritant to draw the blood ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... floor, but that the aches and pains which went through her in all directions held her body together like ties and rivets. She had never before known what weariness was, and now she knew it for all her life. But like an irritant, her worn body clung about her soul and dulled it to its own grief, thus helping it to a pitiful kind of repose. How long she sat thus she could not tell—she had no means of knowing, but it seemed hours on ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... new irritant—and everything seemed to annoy her now—had begun to tell on our beautiful Kate, or whether the gayety of the winter both at home and in Washington, where she had spent some weeks during the season, had ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... mouth is to mix them with the food or water. This can be done when the medicine is in the form of a powder or fluid, if but a small quantity is to be given, if it does not have a taste that is disagreeable to the animal and is not so irritant as to injure the lining membranes ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... those weeks I will not weary you further than by remarking that the "thinking," was done entirely by Raffles, who did not always trouble to communicate his thoughts to me. His reticence, however, was no longer an irritant. I began to accept it as a necessary convention of these little enterprises. And, after our last adventure of the kind, more especially after its denouement, my trust in Raffles was much too solid to be shaken by a want of trust in me, which I still believe to have been more ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... Robert Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American." Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to the other. One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one else discovered, it was ill to play—Walter Savage Landor. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... social outlets. Instruction out of proportion with and superior to condition works differently with different nations. For the German adult it is rather soothing and a derivative; with the adult Frenchman it is especially an irritant ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... asked Raphael, throwing on his pelisse. 'Because, if it has really come to a practical joke of that kind, I shall have the greatest pleasure in employing a counter-irritant. Here, boy! My ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... to this challenge or to some other irritant, the animal slowly opened one eye and ponderously let it fall shut again in what, to the heated imagination of the Maestro, seemed a patronizing wink. Its head slid quietly along the water; puffs of ooze rose from below and spread on the surface. Then, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... creeks!" Hour by hour, day by day, against almost continual head winds and with the lowest water in years, that discouraging prophecy invaded me and was repulsed. And that is why we have pessimists in the world. A pessimist is merely a counter-irritant. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... no marks, of course, and it seems altogether impossible, yet it acts precisely as I have seen snake bites affect people. I am that desperate that I would try the Noguchi antivenene, but it would have no more effect than the antitoxin. No; I can only conclude that there is some narcotic irritant which especially ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... the evil. There is some evidence to show that the poorer class of workmen do not consume a very large quantity of strong drink. But the vile character of the liquor sold to them acts on an ill- fed, unwholesome body as a poisonous irritant. We are told that "the East End dram-drinker has developed a new taste; it is for fusil-oil. It has even been said that ripe old whisky ten years old, drank in equal quantities, would probably import a tone of sobriety to the densely- populated ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... as seen in (a) corrosive poisons; (b) irritant poisons, causing congestion and inflammation of the mucous membranes—e.g., metallic and vegetable irritants; (c) stimulants or sedatives to the nerve endings, as ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... awkwardness. He really did not like it: giving up Dorothea was very painful to him; but there was something in the resolve to make this visit forthwith and conquer all show of feeling, which was a sort of file-biting and counter-irritant. And without his distinctly recognizing the impulse, there certainly was present in him the sense that Celia would be there, and that he should pay her more attention than he ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... sick that he is unconscious of his pain and suffering. We had to describe to women their own position, to explain to them the burdens that rested so heavily upon them, and through these means, as a wholesome irritant, we roused public opinion on the subject, and through public opinion, we acted upon the Legislature, and in 1848-49, they gave us the great boon for which we asked, by enacting that a woman who possessed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... her. She was finding a species of salve for her own disappointment in this irritant applied to another. "What does make you wear that ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... motionless since breakfast with her elbows on the table, and her hands locked under her chin. It was evident that something was wrong, and Myrtella became so concerned that she at last decided to take action. The panacea she applied to all ailments, moral or physical, was a counter-irritant. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... once about securing some thugs to act as a counter-irritant against Stone, but I have neglected it. How long will it take to get hold ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... He set his teeth. Had he gained on her at all? "Monkey on a gridiron!" yelped a small boy. Hoopdriver redoubled his efforts. His breath became audible, his steering unsteady, his pedalling positively ferocious. A drop of perspiration ran into his eye, irritant as acid. The road really was uphill beyond dispute. All his physiology began to cry out at him. A last tremendous effort brought him to the corner and showed yet another extent of shady roadway, empty save for a baker's van. His front wheel suddenly shrieked ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... many other entertainments were given in our honour. But the conviction grew upon me that Maude had no real liking for the social side of life, that she acquiesced in it only on my account. Thus, at the very outset of our married career, an irritant developed: signs of it, indeed, were apparent from the first, when we were preparing the house we had rented for occupancy. Hurrying away from my office at odd times to furniture and department stores to help decide such momentous ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... buttocks. If very large they are known as carbuncles, and if they occur on the fingers or toes they are described as whitlows. It is often the friction of a frayed-out collar or cuff, of tight waist clothing, or, in the case of whitlows, the introduction of some irritant or poison between the nail and the skin that determines the precise site at which ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... D—— K——, magnificent creature, was (when we lived with him) so potently hypnoidal that, even erect and determined as his bookcase and urgently bent upon Brann's Iconoclast or some other literary irritant, sleep would seep through his pores and he would fall with a crash, lying there in unconscious bliss until someone came in and prodded him up, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... shall need no other argument to justify my choice in this imitation. One advantage the drama has above the other, namely, that it represents to view what the poem only does relate; and, Segnius irritant animum demissa per aures, quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus, as Horace ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... came, full of optimism and self-confidence, to retire after a brief interval, shattered by the boy's stodgy resistance to education in any form or shape. To Mr. Pett, never at his ease with boys, Ogden Ford was a constant irritant. He disliked his stepson's personality, and he more than suspected him of stealing his cigarettes. It was an additional annoyance that he was fully aware of the impossibility of ever catching him ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... that she had some biscuits in her bag she took one out and ate it. The dry crumbs choked her, and she hastily swallowed a little brandy from her husband's flask. The burning sensation in her throat acted as a counter-irritant, momentarily relieving the dull ache of her nerves. Then she felt a gently-stealing warmth, as though a soft air fanned her, and the swarming fears relaxed their clutch, receding through the stillness that enclosed her, a stillness soothing as the spacious quietude of ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... what she thinks and feels in her own language. But the class whence Mrs. Tufton proceeded is out of my social ken. She was stale-drunk; she had, doubtless, a vile headache; probably she felt twinges of remorse and apprehension of possible police interference. As a counter-irritant to this, she had worked herself into an astounding temper. She would give up none of her husband's belongings. She would have the law on them if they tried. Bad enough it was for her husband to come home after ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... that!" said Carrie, working herself up into a defiant rage because she wanted to feel a counter-irritant to a secret uneasiness which lurked at the bottom of her mind. "But spare food and old clothes ought not to buy a girl, body and soul. Anyway, I price myself higher than that. I'm not going to sacrifice a job I fancy, and thirty shillings ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... Reckitt's. Blue does not belong to Reckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about the iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury; a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special irony in these starving streets to see such a great deal ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... On the other hand, the soft, yellow, cheesy, tubercular matter, which is totally destitute of any vitality, is too often deposited in large quantities, acts on the adjacent lung tissue as an active irritant, causes inflammation, undergoes softening, forms cavities, defies treatment, and rapidly hurries the sufferers to a premature grave. These facts, taken in connection with the immunity from lung diseases enjoyed by those whose respiratory capacity is well developed and properly used, as well ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... gamecock, who may have fancied that he was being rocked in the branches of a pine-tree, bore the motion with greater fortitude than Latimer was able to command. A series of slaps directed at the pig's body were accepted more as an additional and pleasing irritant than as a criticism of conduct or a hint to desist; evidently something more than a man's firm hand was needed to deal with the case. Latimer slipped out of bed in search of a weapon of dissuasion. There was sufficient light in the room to enable the pig to detect this manoeuvre, ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... of public immorality. We all feel, as indeed has been said in other nations, that the poor abuses of the time want countenance, and this moreover in the interests of the uses themselves, for the presence of a small modicum of sincerity acts as a wholesome stimulant and irritant to the prevailing spirit of academicism; moreover, we hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent them from saying, or indeed even thinking, anything ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... another as a ghost or a were-wolf in order to frighten the sleepers, but he always ended by slipping into the room of Mademoiselle Jeanne de Lespoisse. The good seigneur of Montragoux was not overlooked in these games. The two sons of Madame de Lespoisse put irritant powder in his bed, and burnt in his room substances which emitted a disgusting smell. Or they would arrange a jug of water over his door so that the worthy seigneur could not open the door without the ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... amblyopia, a form of neuritis, is not an uncommon affection among smokers. There is also often an irritant effect on the mucous membranes of eyes from the direct effect ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... from which cajuputene having a hyacinthine odour can be obtained by distillation with phosphorus pentoxide. The drug is a typical volatile oil, and is used internally in doses of 1/2 to 3 minims, for the same purposes as, say, clove oil. It is frequently employed externally as a counter-irritant. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... unchanged. Dr. Max Kassowitz, professor in the University of Vienna, said, after Dr. Atwater's statement had been published: "For the animal and human organism, alcohol is not both a food and a poison, but a poison only, which like other poisons is an irritant when taken in small doses while in larger ones it produces paralysis." In connection with the fact that alcohol is simply a poison, it may be worth stating, that the original meaning of the word "intoxicated" was "poisoned." After reading Dr. Atwater, ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... admirable auxiliary in epilepsy connected with distemper; it is a counter-irritant and a derivative, and its effects are a salutary discharge, under the influence of which inflammation elsewhere ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... pleasant-odored terpene ketone, C10H16O, obtained from the camphor tree. Used in medicine as a counter-irritant for infections and to ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... Mercutians; faint sounds came to them of the clumsy thrashing of enemy patrols as they beat the woods for the fugitives. The Mercutians were putting forth all their resources to seek out and destroy these irritant foci ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... declined, and that was eating that vile mortadella. He was a strong man; but that was stronger. Wait a moment, till I fill a pipe with caporal, and have a smoke; for if I meet another man with that delicacy, I shall have to give up the Grotto—unless I have a pipe under my nose, as counter-irritant.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... or superior in her tone, but the curiosity with which she regarded her companion was in itself an irritant. ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... softly to work, as he always ways did when actually hand in hand with war. Warfare was an art to him, neither a sport nor a counter-irritant; he was never impetuous over it. For a week he satisfied himself with a close investiture of the town on all sides. No supplies could get in nor fugitives out. Then, when everything was according to his liking, he ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... one of the London regiments has translated two hundred and fifty lines of Paradise Lost into Latin verse during a sixteen-day spell in the trenches. The introduction of some counter-irritant into our public school curriculum is now thought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... fraternise, and enjoy a day of rest and idleness. At night they are attacked by a host of small black-beetles, one of which gets into Speke's ear and causes him fearful pain, biting its way in, and by no means can he extract it. It, however, acts as a counter-irritant, and draws away the inflammation from ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... thoroughly familiar with extravagance of action as the symptom of intense religious conviction. And its influence on social development had been such that the susceptibility of the public mind to suggestions was as a raw wound in the presence of a powerful irritant. Such an institution as the Inquisition could only have maintained itself among a people thoroughly familiar with supernaturalism, and to whom its preservation was the first and most sacred ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... do well to consider the probable result of the constant association with mental inferiors entailed by his work, and also to consider what counter-irritant is to be applied to balance, in his character, this ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... four courses, you should not insist on a salad and a dessert, for probably it is not hunger which is occasioning the outcry. Perhaps it is a pin, in which case you should at once bend every effort to the discovery and removal of the irritant. The most generally accepted modern way of effecting this consists in passing a large electro-magnet over every portion of the child's anatomy and the pin (if pin there be) will of course at once come to light. Then, too, many small children cry merely because they have swallowed ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... transmitted by vaccination. In some infants, whose skin is very delicate, and especially in those, some members of whose family have been liable to eruptions on the skin, vaccination has seemed to act as an irritant, and to give occasion to an eruption, or aggravate an eruption already existing. Such cases, however, are not frequent, and the eruption is not more troublesome than those which often appear in teething children. The occurrence of actual erysipelas around the puncture, while very ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... would have cared to come in contact. He wondered, indeed, that so puissant a star as Beulah Baxter should not be able to choose her own director, for surely the presence of this unlovely, waspishly tempered being could be nothing but an irritant in the daily life of the wonder-woman. Perhaps she had tolerated him merely for one picture. Perhaps he was ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... body and mind. His fall had hurt him. She knew that by the way he moved his right arm. The unaccustomed exercise had made him stiff. Probably the physical discomfort he was silently enduring had acted as an irritant to the mind. She remembered that it was caused by his determination to be her companion, and the ice in her melted away. She longed to make him calmer, happier. Secretly she touched the little cross that lay under her habit. He had thrown it away in a passion. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him completely, all that we need do is a simple and easy surgical operation—namely, to remove these irritant bodies." ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... penetrating principle, pricking the thin transparent membrane of the eyelids; and all are very similar in their properties. In the whole of them the bulb is the most active part, and any one of them may supply the place of the other; for they are all irritant, excitant, and vesicant. With many, the onion is a very great favourite, and is considered an extremely nutritive vegetable. The Spanish kind is frequently taken for supper, it being simply boiled, and then seasoned with salt, pepper, and butter. Some dredge on a little ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... non-conducting property at will. Under a particular molecular disposition the experimental frog perceived and responded to stimulus which had hitherto been below its threshold of perception. Under the opposite disposition violent tetanic spasm caused by the irritant salt applied to the nerve became at once quelled. The normal property of the nerve was at once restored on the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Compulsory Arbitration, or that any belated suppression of discussion and strike organisations by the law, will avert this gathering storm? The Spectacle of Pleasure, the parade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury and vanity in the sight of the workers is the culminating irritant of Labour. So long as that goes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombre resolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue patiently at work, will gather strength. It does not ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... said Brown, "I went down with pneumonia. They painted my chest yellow, and, when I asked the Sister why, she said it was a counter-irritant. That's what you want to use now, my lad. Stand up to your little friend and beat him at his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... he was, at this time a conservative, a worshiper of the Greek, and it would seem that I became his counter-irritant, for my demand for "A native art" kept him wholesomely stirred up. One by one as the years passed he yielded esthetic positions which at first he most stoutly held. He conceded that the Modern could not be entirely expressed by the Ancient, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... res In scenis, aut acta refertur: Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem, Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus, et quae Ipse sibi tradit spectator: non tamen intus Digna geri promes in scenam: multaque tolles Ex oculis, quae mox narret facundia praesens: Ill-humour'd, querulous; yet loud in praise Of all the mighty ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... a fresh group of girls are handling a black powder for another part of the detonator, and because of the irritant nature of the powder, are wearing white bandages round the nose and mouth. There is great competition for these rooms, the Superintendent says! The girls in them work on two shifts of ten and one-half hours ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what Kate had conceived for him; it wasn't in the least doing—and that had been his notion of his life—anything he himself had conceived. The difference, accordingly, renewed, sharp, sore, was the irritant under which he had quitted the palace and under which he was to make the best of the business of again dining there. He said to himself that he must make the best of everything; that was in his mind, at the traghetto, even ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... the sensibilities of that delicate creature. I was a man of as much will as was naturally good for me; and my training had made it abnormal like a prize-fighter's bicepital muscle. People of my profession need some counter-irritant, which they seldom get, to the habit of command. To be the ultimate control for a clientele of a thousand people, to enforce the personal opinion in every matter from a broken constitution to a broken heart, deprives a man of the ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... case of the oyster the radical home cure for the living irritant or insoluble substance which had gained entrance between its valves is an encasement of pearl-film. If this encasement is globular or pear-shaped, or takes the form of a button and is lucid, lustrous, flawless, and of large size, it may ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... was "dying," as she expressed it, to push on with Arabic so as to be able to talk to the natives and understand things Mohammedan, but the very fact that Arabic was not going to help her to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, or understand anything at all about ancient Egypt, acted as an irritant to her brain, ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... habitual smoker, and therefore cannot speak about its effects; I find it an irritant rather than a sedative. But I am quite sensible of the virtue of an occasional glass of good wine, and am certain I can work ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... homilies of the editor himself. Not only are they deeply interesting to the hoi polloi, but invaluable from a therapeutical standpoint, being successfully employed in cases of itch, smallpox, etc. as a counter irritant. I opine that one of these read in a loud voice to an Egyptian mummy would result in its immediate resurrection. If it had the faintest conception of humor it would wake up long enough to laugh, and if it hadn't it would come to life for the express purpose of hitting Jay Jay Lawrence, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the fact that the movements are in the nature of defensive and protective movements of expression and mimicry and originally in reaction to some external irritant or as the result of some idea, and he proposed the name "mimische Krampfneurose" for them. This is somewhat allied to Breuer and Freud's ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... them interesting. I did not, but I 'learned about women from them,' as the lynx-eyed schoolboy does learn. I divided them into three classes, sugary, vinegary, peppery; to-day I should be more professional; let us say saccharine, acidulated, irritant. These classes still seem to me to include the greater part of young womankind. Sorry to displease, but sich am de facts. And—yes, I still sing 'aber hierathen ist nie mein Sinn!' Business? oh, so so! A country doctor doesn't make a fortune, ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... listening to Mr. Herbert as he dwelt feelingly on the arrogance of puritan encroachment, and the grossness of presbyterian insolence both to kingly prerogative and episcopal authority, and drew a touching picture of the irritant thwartings and pitiful insults to which the gentle monarch was exposed in his attempts to support the dignity of his divine office, and to cast its protecting skirt over the defenceless church; and if it was with less sympathy that he spoke of the fears which haunted the captive metropolitan, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... of iodoform (iodoform dermatitis) in some individuals is that of a decided irritant, bringing about a dermatitis, which often spreads much beyond the parts of application, and which in those eczematously inclined may result in a veritable and ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... to digest all of it. A part of the milk spoils in the digestive tract. This fermented material is partly absorbed and irritates the whole system. A part of it remains in the alimentary tract where it acts as a direct local irritant to the intestines. When these are irritated, the blood-vessels begin to pour out their serum to soothe the bowels and the result is diarrhea. The sick child is fed often. Digestive power is practically absent. The additional food given ferments and more serum has to be thrown ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... of opium fiends and drunkards, so with habitual cathartic drug-users, should they be suddenly deprived of the accustomed artificial stimulus and irritant they become absolutely miserable, mentally and physically. It is a well-known physiological fact that every artificial stimulation of the intestines is followed by a corresponding loss of vitality and reaction. Now that the almost universal cause ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... more upon the subject. When I went back to Gwen I was in no better frame of mind than when I left her. Here were two people so determined to be miserable in spite of everything and everybody that I sought Jeannette by way of counter-irritant for my wounded sympathy. ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... into his arms and kissed her several times. Possibly she would have been really angered, deeply angered, had she realized that these cyclones were due, as a rule, not so much to appreciation of her as to the necessity of a strong counter-irritant to a sudden attack of awe of her as a fine lady and doubt of his own ability to cope with her. "Good-by, Rita," cried he, releasing her as suddenly as he had seized her and rushing toward the landing. "If I don't get back till ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... cloves, nutmegs, cinnamon, caraway seeds, mint, sage and other spices. Onions contain a notable quantity. When extracted the essential oils become powerful drugs. In moderate quantities they are stomachic and carminative, in larger quantities irritant and emetic. Condiments and spices not only add flavour to food, but stimulate the secretion of gastric juice ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... the death life feeds on). Robin, pray Come away, come away To the cultus of night. Abandon the day. Have more to think and have less to say. And CANNOT you walk now? Bah! don't hop! Stop! Look at the owl, scarce seen, scarce heard, O irritant, iterant, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... hammers, swords, clubs, &c., of which treatment the defenders of this extraordinary sect relate the most astonishing examples in proof that severe pain is imperatively demanded by nature in this disorder as an effectual counter-irritant. The Secourists used wooden clubs in the same manner as paviors use their mallets, and it is stated that some Convulsionnaires have borne daily from six to eight thousand blows thus inflicted without ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... for surgical use must be free of caustic alkali; it must only contain 0.45% to 0.50 of hypochlorite. Under 0.45% it is not active enough and above 0.50 it is irritant. With chloride of lime (bleaching powder) having 25% of active chlorine, the quantities of necessary substances to prepare ten litres of solution ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... even seen hobnobbing with the guardians of public immorality. Indeed it is not in the public interest that straightforwardness should be extirpated root and branch, for the presence of a small modicum of sincerity acts as a wholesome irritant to the academicism of the greatest number, stimulating it to consciousness of its own happy state, and giving it something to look down upon. Moreover, we hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... Crown at the age of forty, get Mr. HUGH F. SPENDER'S new and, as it seems to me, rather ingenuous novel. Love is not neglected, for a peer's son, deaf and dumb through shell-shock, so responds to the counter-irritant of seeing this modern JOAN riding through Piccadilly that he recovers both speech and hearing and promptly uses them to put her a leading question and understand her version of "But this is so sudden. However——" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... held up the dress to be slipped on. She felt it was undoubtedly the moment, the moment sometimes called psychological, at which to introduce a counter-irritant. ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... has been said of the stitch in the side; but it is nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the pleasures of the matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving, like the hammer of a note in the piano. This constitutes an irritant, which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife's timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every season ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... impatience Graham and Jack may have felt over the further postponement of their tramp, they concealed the feeling with remarkable tact. There was little danger however, that the unusual attentions showered on Ruth would turn her head, as she had a counter-irritant in the shape of a firm conviction that she did not deserve any of this ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... hundred or more. At this great age the pulse is so slow that the heat is not generated by the nerves, whose motor velocity is not great enough to bring electricity to the stage of heat. All heat, high and low, surely is the effect of active electricity—plus to fever; minus to coldness. When an irritant enters the body by lung, skin or any other way, a change appears in the heart's action from its effects on the brain, to the high electric action and that burning heat called fever. If plus violent type (yellow fever), if minus, low grades (typhus, ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... scientists at the German Headquarters Staff had experimented with sulphur, chlorine and bromine fumes. They reported on sulphur gas: "This gas thus produced acts as an irritant on the lungs and eyes, and thence it is adapted to render the enemy incapable of resistance, but is not poisonous, and in that way its use in war is not contrary to international right." They had in view Article 23 of the ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... more bushy size; C. baccatum has a globular fruit, and furnishes cherry or berry capsicum. They are all of the simplest culture, and may even be grown with very little care in England. Culture appears to increase the size, but to diminish the pungency of the fruit. In capsicums irritant properties prevail so as to obscure the narcotic action. Their acridity is owing to an oleaginous substance called capsicin. Cayenne pepper is used in medicine chiefly in the form of tincture, as a rubefacient and stimulant, especially in cases of ulcerated sore throat. It acts on ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... outlines of this biographical sketch, every one will cry at once, "Why! this is the happiest man on earth, in spite of his ugliness!" And, in truth, no spleen, no dullness can resist the counter-irritant supplied by a "craze," the intellectual moxa of a hobby. You who can no longer drink of "the cup of pleasure," as it has been called through all ages, try to collect something, no matter what (people have been known to collect placards), ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Africa, to attend the Imperial Conference and to remain a comparatively short time. So great was the need of him that he did not go home until after the Peace had been signed. He signed the Treaty under protest because he believed it was uneconomic and it has developed into the irritant that he ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... killed the joy of art. He could not, however, altogether blot out the shadows of the sorrowful dream in which he had been cradled. He would not look behind him, but he well knew that the shadow was there. He was too healthy to seek a counter-irritant to his uneasiness in the lazy skepticism of the preceding epoch: he detested the dilettantism of men like Renan and Anatole France, with their degradation of the free intellect, their joyless mirth, their irony without ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... diagnosis of gastritis used to be very common. The ending itis means inflammation,—gastritis, enteritis, colitis, each meaning inflammation of the corresponding organ. An inflammation implies an irritant. There can be no kind of itis without the presence of something which irritates the membrane of the affected part. If we get unusual and irritating bacteria in some spoiled food, we are likely to have an acute inflammation until the offending bacteria are expelled. But an inflammation of this ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... physicians should bow before the facts which he excels in discovering" (7/19.), he has also been able to make direct application of the marvels of entomology to some of the problems of hygiene and medicine. He has shown that the irritant poison secreted by certain caterpillars, "which sets the fingers which handle them on fire," is nothing but a waste product of the organism, a derivative of uric acid; he does not hesitate to perform painful experiments on himself in order to furnish the proof of his theory; and he ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... never dreamed that the world held so many different kinds of stone or half so many saints. As they started off for the hotel he declared that he would be willing to give ten dollars for a good twenty-round fight, as a counter-irritant. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... "Horse and dray lost here," "Take sounding," "Storage room, inquire below," "Good fishing for teal," and the like. As for the government, the less said about that the better. Responsibility was still in embryo; but politics and the law, as an irritant, were highly esteemed. The elections of the times were a farce and a holiday; nobody knew whom he was voting for nor what he was shouting for, but he voted as often and shouted as loud as he could. Every American ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... an irritant poison, and that daily indulgence in its use originates dyspepsia, or indigestion, and many other serious complaints. Of all kinds of spirits the best as a ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... painfully cold. Heating for a time is then effective, and cooling can again be given after the heating. Soapy lather on an inflamed part will do delightful service for a while, then it may become painful. Warm oil may then be used instead. When this becomes irritant, a return to the soap will cure. Or the hot bathing of a sore knee may be most effective for a while, and then may give rise to sore pain. In such a case, cease the bathing, and for a time apply the soapy lather. Do not despair because a thing "loses ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... conviction, which he never concealed, that the missionary enterprise encumbered and impeded the geographical. He had a special objection to an Episcopal mission, holding that the planting of a Bishop and staff on territory dominated by the Portuguese was an additional irritant, rousing ecclesiastical jealousy, and bringing it to the aid of commercial and political apprehensions as to the tendency of the English enterprise. Neither mission nor colony could succeed in the present state of the country; ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... nearly invisible gnats that breed in alkali bogs sighted the Major and promptly rose in swarms to settle upon his ears and in the edges of his hair. He fanned them away automatically and without audible comment. Perhaps they served as a counter-irritant; at any rate, the sting of the indignity put upon him by what he termed a "hobo lunch" was finally forgotten ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... bombardment on both sides was heavy. We had not fired during the night but began at seven in the morning and went on throughout the day. A message came in that the enemy would probably shell Batteries for four hours with gas shell, starting with irritant gas and going on to poison. He had already employed these tactics up north, as we learned later. Gas alert was on all night and we were listening strainedly for soft bursts. Heavy rain came down steadily all day, and everything was drenched and dripping. The spaces between ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton |
