"Distressingly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nearly forgotten to point out a very genteel-looking young man in black, who wears a distressingly long frock coat and a white neckcloth, who escorts Mrs. Meeker to her carriage, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... Grace Burmington who now became the romantic friend of Miss Marks, and a sort of second benevolence to me. She must have been under thirty years of age; she wax very small, and she was distressingly deformed in the spine, but she had an animated, almost a sparkling countenance. When we first arrived in the village, Mary Grace was only just recovering from a gastric fever which had taken her close to the grave. I remember hearing that the vicar, a stout and pompous man at ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... cures, quite unsuspicious that at each fresh recommendation he was in my eyes depreciating his own wares. Did he hope that among such a handsome choice of diseases I might at least have one! I was very near to beating a hasty retreat on the spot. For the accommodation in Japanese inns is of a distressingly communistic character at best, and although at present there were few patients in the place, the germs were presumably still there on the lookout ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... want education for themselves nor for their children. These people swell the death lists in Southern cities' health offices to such distressingly large numbers. They are often cared for and buried by funds from the city treasury. Would it not pay to try compulsory education? To try teaching them to help ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... that salary was less an object to him than opportunity. Opportunity had not sufficed to meet Field's bills in Denver, and the promised salary, that seemed temptingly sufficient at the distance of a thousand miles, proved distressingly inadequate to feed and clothe three lusty boys and one growing girl in the bracing atmosphere of Chicago. So it was not surprising that when Trotty asked her father to give her an appropriate text to recite in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... innumerable opportunities for intimacies which may or may not fall short of actual sexual relations. Attention has been called to this situation by social workers among wage-earning girls. It has been a distressingly frequent experience in my special practice to find that the young man, overwrought by the excitement of wooing, has exposed himself elsewhere to infection and unwittingly punished the trustfulness of ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... was the only one in the room who was not keenly alert or distressingly tense. Even in her waxy whiteness and unnatural emaciation, her face was good. The forehead was high and, with the symmetrical black eyebrows and long, dark lashes, suggested at a glance the good quality of her breeding. The aquiline nose was pinched by suffering, the finely curving ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... in the land the Lord our God had given to him who most honored his father and mother, no life insurance company in all America would have hesitated in Percy Davies's case, had the policy been millions and the premium unity. A gentle woman was Mrs. Davies, but a distressingly helpless and dependent one, and it was an old saying in Urbana that Davies had married poor Salome Percy because if he didn't nobody would; not because he stood in need of her, but because she was much in need of him. And when, not long after his father's death, Percy appealed to a well-to-do ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... serpent bit Jack, our dog, above the eye, the upper eyelid swelled very much, but no other symptoms appeared, and next day all swelling was gone; the serpent was either harmless, or the quantity of poison injected very small. The pace of the camels is distressingly slow, and it suits the sepoys to make it still slower than natural by sitting down to smoke and eat. The grass is high and ground under ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... sent to market on horses' backs,*[18] manure was carried to the fields in panniers, and fuel was conveyed from the moss or the forest in the same way. During the winter months, the markets were inaccessible; and while in some localities the supplies of food were distressingly deficient, in others the superabundance actually rotted from the impossibility of consuming it or of transporting it to places where it was needed. The little coal used in the southern counties was principally sea-borne, though pack-horses occasionally carried ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... toward all this time is this: the first critic that ever had occasion to describe my personal appearance littered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose aggregate furnished the result that I was distinctly and distressingly unhandsome. That description floated around the country in the papers, and was in constant use and wear for a quarter of a century. It seems strange to me that apparently no critic in the country ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... see, whether I liked it or not. It became impossible for me to remain an idle spectator any longer. Now that the Radicals have become so distressingly powerful, it was high time. And that is also why I have induced our little circle of friends in the town to bind themselves more definitely together. It was high ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... law, of newer origin, to prohibit the taking of children under a certain age into a public house. On the passage of this act there at once sprang up a congenial and lucrative employment for those horrible old-women drunkards who are so distressingly numerous in the poorer quarters of the town. Regardless of the weather one of these bedrabbled creatures stations herself just outside the door of a pub. Along comes a mother with a thirst and a child. Surrendering her offspring to the temporary care of the hag the mother goes ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Meanwhile the youthful nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present precocity affords against her future possibilities, pursues her sports with intermittent attention to her charge, whose poor little head lolls about, now on one side and now on the other, in a most distressingly loose manner, an uninterested ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... I found that I was still very shaky, with a tendency to giddiness, added to which my head was aching most distressingly; but I thought it possible that these disagreeable symptoms would perhaps pass off as soon as I found myself in the open air; I therefore dressed as quickly as possible, and made my ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... and gradual loss of strength.' About this time there appears to have been some uterine lesion, for a well-known gynaecologist went down to the country to see her. Eventually 'she became unable to do anything almost for herself, for the nervous irritability had distressingly increased. To touch her bed, the ringing of a bell, sometimes the sound of a voice, sunlight, &c., affected her so as to make her almost cry out.' 'If she stood up, or even raised her hands to dress her ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... hiding-place into the still larger woods of the Walkham Valley, the odds were all in favour of my ultimate capture. No escaped prisoner had ever yet succeeded in retaining his liberty for more than a few days, and where so many gentlemen of experience had tried and failed it seemed distressingly unlikely that I should be ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... that he must go no farther, but every night as Eve and he parted, to sleep with only a canvas partition between them, he cursed the presence of the show chaperon, and of the two bandsmen, always distressingly awake and talking ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... troubles especially common among women, where the weight of the internal organs becomes distressingly felt. These are usually supported without our being conscious of their weight at all. But in weakness, or after long fatigue and standing, it becomes felt as a severe downward pressure. This is often caused by the pressure of corset and skirts upon the waist. In cases where ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... angel unawares; and I have not the slightest doubt that on the frequent occasions when his application for food and lodging was received with a volley of curses, he honestly admired the noble fluency of his enemy. When he was harvesting, the singing stacker became increasingly and distressingly pornographic; instead of rebuking him for foulness, which would only have bewildered the stacker, Mr. Lindsay taught him the first stanza of Swinburne's chorus. "The next morning when my friend climbed into our barge to ride ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... habit of “slouch”; yet if you think of it, this universal hurry is the cause of it. Our cities are left unsightly, because we cannot spare time to beautify them. Nervous diseases are distressingly prevalent; still we hurry! hurry!! hurry!!! until, as a diplomatist recently remarked to me, the whole nation seemed to him to be but five minutes ahead of ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... women onboard, and Cecily found herself the only woman allotted to the jolly-boat. She climbed in with the assistance of the very young and distressingly susceptible Fourth Officer. For a moment she found herself reflecting that his life must be one long martyrdom of unrequited affections. The stout American followed her with a number of other passengers. ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... fastidious in dress, and stood firmly and with dignity. I noted particularly his hair and his smile, the former black in color, plentiful, fine in quality, and parted distressingly straight; ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... roads were very soft, and the columns cut them up terribly, the mud being thrown by the sets of fours across the road in ridges as much as two feet high, making it most difficult to get our wagons along, and distressingly wearing on the animals toward the middle and rear of the columns. Consequently I concluded to rest at Charlottesville for a couple of days and recuperate a little, intending at the same time to destroy, with small parties, the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... would silently but imperiously demand a halt; and as the Jail was neared, a light pair of heels was frequently put in requisition without the slightest ceremony. As might be supposed, the number that finally reached their destination, was distressingly out of proportion to the work to be done; and the Sheriff, after detaining them for a time, was reported to have dismissed them with but ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... distressingly calm now," said the extra strong frames—they were called web-frames—in the engine-room. "There's an upward thrust that we don't understand, and there's a twist that is very bad for our brackets and diamond-plates, and there's a sort of west-northwesterly ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... occasion I had paused, and thought much: on this I did not. The path was plain before me, but dreadfully painful to pursue. A hundred pounds just then would have been more to me than a thousand at another time; and private feeling was most distressingly involved, both as regarded myself and others. It was in an agony of prayer, and after many bitter tears, that I brought myself to do what, nevertheless, I had not a wish to leave undone. I wrote a faithful ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... relief, after looking upon the distressingly stiff figures of the old German school, to view these fresh, natural countenances. One little black-eyed boy has just cut a slice out of a melon, and turns with a full mouth to his companion, who is busy eating a bunch of grapes. The simple, contented expression on the faces ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... old miner, distressingly filthy, who hobbled to his meals on feet that had been frozen into clubs. He had a little gold loaned at interest, and on this he lived in tragic parsimony. He and the old scout sat much together, usually without ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... the "necessary preparations" for Madeline's appearance in this new role could not be made in Hendrik. Miss Wimple was distressingly sensitive for the safety of her protegee from scandalous discovery. Even she herself could not expend any considerable portion of Mr. Osgood's advance without arousing surmise and provoking dangerous prying. Besides, how should she get the money for the check?—to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... With my distressingly sceptical nature I believe little that I do not see. I started next morning to observe for myself. My bearings were roughly North-West. Seeing me determined, several of the Kutial Shokas changed their mind and volunteered to follow me. They were of considerable help in many dangerous places. ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... stalks abroad the "observed of all observers." I could undervalue this species of writing if I thought proper, affect a contempt for idiomatic humour, or hint at the employment being inconsistent with the grave discharge of important official duties, which are so distressingly onerous, as not to leave me a moment for recreation; but these airs, though dignified, will unfortunately not avail me. I shall put my dignity into my pocket, therefore, and disclose the real ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... water, A channel which was more than ankle-deep, She slipped and fell ere either could have caught her; Her sisters shrieked and, bending, they besought her, To say if any hurt she had sustained, And Flora, much alarmed, at once bethought her "What if she has?"—for Dora there remained, And most distressingly she moaned ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... best-family faces knew this was the fact. The word "Irish" conveyed to most of them only the red-armed minions in their kitchens; the boys who ran noisily up alleyways with butchers' parcels; the short-tempered dames in battered hats who came—or distressingly did not come—to them on Monday mornings, and who frequently bore away with them bars of perfectly new soap; and the chuckles and sobs and moonlit whimsies of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory did not, in their minds, connect ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... and their hundreds of others, scampering away with the public money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly affected in their heels with a species of "running itch"? It seems that this malady of their heels operates on these sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures very much like the cork leg in the comic song did on its owner: ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... to the right, through a small thicket of hazel-bushes, over some rocks, and on up the bleak fell-side. The sun had disappeared, and the little golden angels' wings had given place to sombre, grey clouds. It was growing distressingly dark. A spot or two of rain began to fall. The path, degenerated into a mere sheep track, was increasingly difficult to trace. Though neither would admit it, both the girls felt uneasy. They could not recognize any familiar landmarks ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Melingue rather disappointed the public as Don Cesar de Bazan, and the public was in the wrong. The role of Don Cesar de Bazan is a treacherously good role, which always tempts artists by the brilliancy of the first act; but the fourth act, which belongs entirely to him, is distressingly heavy and useless. It might be taken out of the piece just like a periwinkle out of its shell, and the piece would be none the ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... took a slow one, telegraphing his approach from different stations along the road. Young Langdon concluded to go down the line as far as Waverly to meet him. When the New York train reached there the young man found his guest in the smoking-car, travel-stained and distressingly clad. Mark Twain was always scrupulously neat and correct of dress in later years, but in that earlier day neatness and style had not become habitual and did not give him comfort. Langdon greeted him warmly but with doubt. Finally he summoned courage to ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... real obstacle. But we contended that the business of a statesman who declared himself to be a friend of a measure was to remove even real obstacles to the success of that measure. Perhaps our standard was too high. It must be confessed that people in general are distressingly patient, easily content with pronouncements, and shockingly inert about seeing to it that political leaders act as ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... chosen to illustrate that capacity of the human orb—which had disturbed his peace. He was very much dissatisfied with the part he had played at luncheon the day before. What he ought to have said and done was now distressingly clear to him; and he craved an opportunity to put it into practice. He had spent the whole middle part of this day at Papps's, loitering in the entrance to make sure the blue eyes should not be swallowed ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... after-life, and to have resisted the allurements of dissipation by which, in those days especially, the youthful student was tempted to wander from the paths of virtuous industry. His circumstances were, however, distressingly narrow; and not only was he forced to forego the means of professional improvement open only to the more opulent student; but in order to meet the expenses of the winter-sessions, he was obliged to employ the summer, not in the study ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... uncongenial occupations because they lack confidence in themselves. This is distressingly common. Everywhere we find men and women occupying humble positions, doing some obscure work, perhaps actually frittering away their time upon trifles and mere details, doing something which does not require accuracy, care, responsibility, or talent, merely for fear they may not be ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... and look out of my window there are always anywhere from one to twenty reporters decorating my lawn! That young man over there is the worst and most persistent offender!"—scowling at a good-looking youth in white flannels, who immediately blushed distressingly. "Yes, you are, young man! I'm amazed that you have the decency to blush! Your insolent sheet, the Evening Star, refers to my Trust Company as a Green Mouse Trap and a Mouseleum. It also publishes preposterous pictures of myself and family. Dammit, ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... in the lee of the bran-new artillery target, and they were just commencing practice, on this fine bright afternoon, by pitching thirty-two-pound shot into and about it, at intervals—as I pretty well knew—of distressingly uncertain duration. With frantic strength I grasped the Indian by the neck, and, plunging madly through the snow, dragged him after me a few paces in the direction of our former track; but, hampered as he was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... and turning, gliding into nooks that seemed each more charming than the other, and having a constant succession of delightful surprises, interrupted only by the mill-dams, which were distressingly frequent. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Chama's arrows, as his foolish brother cannot use them against us now; there are 215 in the bundle. Passed the Lopopussi running west to the Lofubu about seven yards wide, it flows fast over rocks with heavy aquatic plants. The people are not afraid of us here as they were so distressingly elsewhere: we hope to ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... I understand that profanity is sometimes distressingly prevalent aboard ship— but nevertheless he allowed the Lieutenant to lead him like a lamb to the slaughter. Well, not being powerful enough to throw him overboard when I realized the state of the case, I did the next best thing. I became cloyingly sweet to him. I smiled upon ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... red-fisted garcon, without waiting for orders, set up before me, like ten-pins, a castor in wood with two enormous bottles, and a litre of that rinsing of the vats which, under the name "wine of the country," is so distressingly similar in every neighborhood. Resigned to anything, I was about drawing out my slice of ham, the chicken seeming to me just there somewhat too proud a bird and out of harmony with the local color, when my glance met two gray eyes regarding my own in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... remained distressingly European through it all. The White Hussars were "My dear true friends," "Fellow-soldiers glorious," and "Brothers inseparable." He would unburden himself by the hour on the glorious future that awaited ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... last chance of a real concord. No such event occurred. They conversed with the same false cordiality as had marked their relations since the evening of the dog-bite. On that evening Nellie had suddenly transformed herself into a distressingly perfect angel, and not once had she descended from her high estate. At least daily she had kissed him—what kisses! Kisses that were not kisses! Tasteless mockeries, like non-alcoholic ale! He could have killed her, ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... looked distressingly awkward in his new articles of attire. Had he stolen them, he could not have appeared more guilty in presence ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... carrying on an impersonal triangular conversation; as if there were two of him present, one being occupied in the approved teacup manner while the other sat by speculating with a touch of moroseness upon distressingly important potentialities. This duality persisted in functioning even when Betty looked at her watch ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... cure, sitting at piquet with Madame de Sevenie, after dinner, would cough distressingly and, reminded that he had a bed to reach somehow through all this welter, anathematise the elements, help himself to a pinch of snuff, and proceed ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... distressingly matter-of-fact. We were both supplied with the usual complement of parents, brothers, and sisters, and, barring the melancholy condition that none of them, of course, understood our complex natures, we had nothing unusual to chronicle. But Katrina's recital was ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... he fell into the fatal error of supposing that his own preeminent endowments and the services which they might enable him to render justified him in the use of unworthy means; that his sense of real as distinguished from apparent personal dignity was distressingly inadequate; and that, in general, like many men of great intellect, he was deficient in greatness of character, emotion, fine feeling, sympathy, and even in comprehension of the highest spiritual principles. He certainly shared to ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... words as these[2] are often inconveniently and even distressingly ambiguous, they are not homophones, and are therefore excluded from my list: they exhibit different meanings of one word, not the same sound of different words: they are of necessity present, I suppose, in all ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... hunch back and a large, dark, melancholy face covered profusely with black hair. He wore corduroy trousers and clumsy boots—his feet and hands were enormous—together with a green coat and a red handkerchief which was carelessly twisted round his hairy throat. On his tangled locks—distressingly shaggy and unkempt—he wore no hat, and he looked like a brownie, grotesque, though somewhat sad. But even more did he resemble an ape—or say the missing link—and only his eyes seemed human. These were large, dark and brilliant, sparkling like jewels under his elf-locks. ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... about and vainly tried to impress people who came in and asked questions which invariably had to be referred to his repair boy, the precocious expert stripped the wheel down to something that looked to Claire distressingly like an empty milk-pan. Then the boy didn't seem to know exactly what to do. He scratched his ear a good deal, and thought deeply. The older ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... This aspect has been the least fully presented during the war. What the Teuton military and political chieftains, clergymen, professors, captains of industry, editors and other men of position have said, how they have conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity, is notoriously and distressingly familiar. But what the ordinary, educated German of peaceful pursuits, staying by his hearthstone far behind and safe from the battle line, thought and wished to say, has been beyond our ken. There has been no way to ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... House with its dependencies; and diligently helped the Kaiser,—Friedrich III., rather a weakish, but an eager and greedy Kaiser,—through most of them. That inextricable Hungarian-Bohemian-Polish DONNYBROOK (so we may call it) which Austria had on hand, one of Sigismund's bequests to Austria; distressingly tumultuous Donnybrook, which goes from 1440 to 1471, fighting in a fierce confused manner;—the Anti-Turk Hunniades, the Anti-Austrian Corvinus, the royal Majesties George Podiebrad, Ladislaus POSTHUMUS, Ludwig OHNE HAUT (Ludwig NO-SKIN), ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... to his equanimity, soon, lost effect. The man evidently remained unconscious, in fact had barely moved; while the moan that Kirkwood heard, had been distressingly faint. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... unkind; but we must remember that there were six posts a day in London, that "each post brought its batch of letters," and that nine tenths of these letters—so Carlyle says—were from strangers, demanding autographs, and seeking or proffering advice. One man wrote that he was distressingly ugly, and asked what should he do about it. "So profitable have my epistolary fellow creatures grown to me in these years," notes the historian in his journal, "that when the postman leaves nothing, it may well be felt ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... him take off his muddy shoes in the woodshed. Woe to him if he ever brought a splinter of whittling, or a fragment of nutshell, into the distressingly neat kitchen! ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... a new misery began to oppress her. She was hungry,—seriously, distressingly hungry. She had been too happy to eat the day before! Though she had sipped and tasted many delicious beverages and viands, which the Prince had pressed upon her, she had not taken any substantial food, and now she began to feel faint for the ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... oil was distressingly scanty, the whale being what is technically known as a "dry skin." The blubber was so hard and tough that we could hardly cut it up for boiling, and altogether it was one of the most disappointing affairs we had yet dealt with. This poorness of ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... beachcombers who nauseated him; the white sands, the blue waters, the smells, the sounds, the routine of existence with one day precisely like another—the whole thing of it. We may picture him as a humid duck-legged little man, most terribly homesick, most tremendously lonely, most distressingly alien. We may go further and picture him as a sort of combination of Job with his afflictions, Robinson Crusoe with no man Friday to cheer him in his solitude, and Peter the Hermit with no dream of a crusade to uplift him. In these four years his hair had turned almost ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the individual, sometimes capricious and harsh, and carrying out the public award by means of legs that ranged through all gradations of weight and agility. One kick differed exceedingly from another kick in dynamic value; and, in some cases, this difference was so distressingly conspicuous as to imply special malice, unworthy, I conceive, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... to talk in a very quick and confused way. Any sane hearer would have known that she was talking by mistake, that she was possessed by some distressingly Anti-Ford spirit, and that nothing she might say in parenthesis like this ought to be remembered ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... the trying moment when his charger's tail was in a tobacconist's shop, and his head anywhere about town, this cavalier was joined by two similar portents, who, likewise stumbling and sliding, caused him to stumble and slide the more distressingly. At length this Gilpinian triumvirate effected a halt, and, looking northward, waved their three right hands as commanding unseen troops, to 'Up, guards! and at 'em.' Hereupon a brazen band burst forth, which ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... got up, gathering together his hat and gloves, buttoning his coat, projecting hungrily all over the place the big transparency of his mask. It seemed to flare over Fleet Street and somehow made the actual spot distressingly humble: there was so little for it to feed on unless he counted the blisters of our stucco or saw his way to do something with the roses. Even the poor roses were common kinds. Presently his eyes fell on the manuscript from which Paraday ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... succession of new impressions. With an only child, whose existence is the single preoccupation of the nurse and mother, and, often enough, of the father as well, it is difficult to avoid this fault. Yet, if wisdom is not learnt, the damage to the child may be distressingly serious. He rapidly grows incapable of supporting life without this excessive stimulation. Without the constant society and attention of a grown person, he feels himself lost. He cannot be left alone, and yet cannot enjoy the society he craves. He grows more and more restless, dominating ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... appeared to Richard protracted to the point of agitation. He became almost distressingly conscious of the man's still, bronzed, resolute face on the one hand, of the woman's mobile, vivid, yet equally resolute face on the other, divining far more to be at stake than he had clear knowledge of. Tired and excited, his ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... out of the town, up a very steep hill over a mile long, with many sharp turns that made the ascent all the more difficult. We were speedily lost in a network of unmarked byways running through a distressingly poor-looking and apparently quite thinly inhabited country. After a deal of studying the map and the infrequent sign-boards we brought up in a desolate-looking little village, merely a row of gray stone, slate-roofed houses on either side of the way, and devoid of a single touch of the ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged, and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Here is one of them now,—a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare. This distressingly new board house is his, and he has just moved out of yonder moss-grown cabin with its ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Saville's hand for a quadrille, though I saw, or fancied I saw, the scowl on Mr. Vernor's sour countenance grow deeper as I led her away. My perseverance was not rewarded by any very interesting results, for my partner, who was either distressingly shy, or acting under constraint of some kind, made monosyllabic replies to every remark I addressed to her, and appeared relieved when the termination of the set enabled her to rejoin ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Grand Basin that the writer began to be seriously affected by the altitude, to be disturbed by a shortness of breath that with each advance grew more distressingly acute. While at rest he was not troubled; mere existence imposed no unusual burden, but even a slight exertion would be followed by a spell of panting, and climbing with a pack was interrupted at every dozen or score of steps by the necessity of stopping to regain breath. There was no ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... exhausted from the horse at the very doorstep of the ranch, one arm, pinged by a dastardly rifle-bullet, dangling helplessly by his side. (It is, by the way, always the arm or shoulder; the cinema never allows him to get it distressingly in the leg or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... simple, merely the securing of a blanket over the roan's distressingly bony spine, and putting a bit in his refractory mouth. As I anticipated, there had been a crisis over my lack of a saddle at the last moment, various officers and N.C.O.'s laying the blame, first on me (of all people), and then ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... required to perform military service, and for the next two years at least—or for a longer time, should war break out—was doomed to be a soldier. He did not think the doom particularly hard, and we jogged on together in a cheerful mood until his knowledge of the ground became distressingly familiar, and he illustrated portions of the scenery with tales of robbery and murder. The scenery of the road became at every turn more picturesque. Instead of passing between swampy fields, it ran along a hollow, and the ground was on each side broken into deep holes with rugged edges; ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... Society admitting Miller Arnold's claim to redress, much less defending that onslaught on Furst and the wigs. [Herr Preuss himself inclines that way, rather condemnatory of Friedrich; but his Account, as usual, is exact and authentic,—though distressingly confused, and scattered about into different corners (Preuss, iii. 381-413; then again, ibid. 520 &c.). On the other hand, there is one Segebusch, too, a learned Doctor, of Altona, who takes the King's side,—and really is rather ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... you were such dear little girls then, and now you are growing distressingly tall; I do not half like it." Miss Brown shook her head disapprovingly as she ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... Croesus at this time the reporter's disappointment was excusable. The Gobelin tapestries, the Raphael paintings, the Turkish divans, and the gold and silver trappings of a throne room were missing in my study. The reporter found the floor distressingly "hard, but polished wood." The walls were painfully plain—"all white." My table, which the reporter kindly signified as a "big one," was drawn up to a large window. Of course, like all tables of the kind, it was "littered." I never read of a library table in a newspaper that ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... minute he was assuring himself that this was merely some devil's trick of his apprehensive imagination. There must be a great deal of air left.... But he was distressingly ignorant of the contents of air, and his calculations were lamentably unsupported by any sound ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... nothing definite was decided. Now that they had come into money they did not feel so inclined to move their residence, though both felt that they might increase their scale of living, which had lately been at a distressingly low ebb. They spoke, too, about the advisability of a small car. Ralph knew of one—a second-hand Ford—to be had for a song. They ought not—he thought—to miss the chance. He would take occasion to meet the owner casually and throw out a feeler. ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... the socket of the right hip-bone. When I had finished my measurements I went over the entire series of bones in detail, examining each with the closest attention for any of those signs which Thorndyke had indicated, and eliciting nothing but a monotonously reiterated negative. They were distressingly and disappointingly normal. ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... himself. As for the time- honoured phrase, "unfit for publication," without being cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a precaution more or less commercial; and we may think, without being sordid, that when we purchase six huge and distressingly expensive volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children. But Mr. Bright may rest assured: while we complain, we are still grateful. Mr. Wheatley, to divide our obligation, brings together, clearly and with no lost words, a body of illustrative ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Philip in the way which had formerly had the power of making him feel incredibly narrow. It seemed to point out that what he was thinking was distressingly obvious; and when you have agreed with the obvious what more is there to ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Bird Woman began smoothing out wrinkles and sewing in pins. It fitted very well with a little lapping in the back. Next, from among the Angel's clothing she caught up a white silk waist with low neck and elbow sleeves, and Elnora put it on. It was large enough, but distressingly short in the waist, for the Angel had worn it at a party when she was sixteen. The Bird Woman loosened the sleeves and pushed them to a puff on the shoulders, catching them in places with pins. She began on the wide draping of the yoke, fastening it front, back and at each shoulder. She ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... cuffs, and put on this distressingly big apron of yours, which hangs behind the door; then ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... explain him. It may be that the appetite for thorough good talks with people grows upon one, but at any rate it did occur to Mr. Brumley on his way to talk to Lady Harman, it occurred to him as a thing distressingly irrevocable that he could now never have a thorough good talk with Euphemia about certain neglected things between them. It would have helped ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... home he was glad to have escaped the great mystery of life, then distressingly angry at the waitress, and desolate in the desert stillness ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... fat, Count Selim Malagaski, Governor-General of Morovenia, was very unhappy. He had two daughters. One was fat; one was thin. To be more explicit, one was gloriously fat and the other was distressingly thin. ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... unstinted appreciation of the house. The girls had the unvarying pink-and-white surfaces of their profession, but under it they obviously differed much, and the age and emaciation and ugliness among them had its common emphasis in the contrast of their smart masculine attire with the distressingly feminine outlines of their figures. "I should have thought it impossible to make a woman absolutely hideous by a dress that revealed her form," said Kendal to himself, as the jingling and the dancing and the music went on in the glare before ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... had hardly entered his mind, before he saw also how it was possible to turn it to account. His motive power was the stream from the Prior's Well, and the means of using it for his purpose stood on a shelf in the ruins, in the shape of the toy water-wheel which he had laid aside as distressingly useless. He set ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... desired. But, happily, in our great numbers enough were found to do even the stupendous work at hand, and to do it well. In spite of moral lapses, not a few, in spite of instances of mental incompetence, far too many, and in spite of physical handicaps, distressingly large—in spite of all this, I say, the United States surprised the world with the quickness with which we pulled ourselves together, and with the marvelous efficiency with which we mobilized all our resources. Many losses of course there were—losses of men, losses ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... strikes the mind, on reading the speech of Mr. Sumner, is the strange logical incoherency of its structure. Its parts are so loosely hung together, and appear so distressingly disjointed, that one is frequently at a loss to perceive the design of the oration. Its avowed object is to procure a repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; but no one would ever imagine or suspect such a thing from the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... about which he often made fun of me was my Talmud gesticulations, a habit that worried me like a physical defect. It was so distressingly un-American. I struggled hard against it. I had made efforts to speak with my hands in my pockets; I had devised other means for keeping them from participating in my speech. All of no avail. I still gesticulate a great deal, though much less than I ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... disorganization of his stomach, was an abscess, from which, though distressingly situated, he does not appear to have suffered much pain. In the spring of this year, however, he was obliged to confine himself, almost entirely, to his bed. Being expected to attend the St. Patrick's Dinner, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... whose antiquity and picturesqueness are more popular than the attractions of Whitby, the railway deposits one in some distressingly ugly modern excrescence, from which it may even be necessary for a stranger to ask his way to the old-world features he has come to see. But at Whitby the railway, without doing any harm to the appearance of the town, at once gives a visitor as typical ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... his first meeting with Elizabeth, Carlos is distressingly mawkish. She pictures him, in pitying indignation, as succeeding to the throne, undoing his father's work and at last marrying herself. Then he ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... whenever he lifted his eyes from his plate he looked at Pauline, who was next to her. When she caught him he blushed and stirred in his chair so uneasily that it creaked and crackled; and his normal difficulties with his large hands and the small knife and fork were distressingly increased. ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... alone in the world she thought that she could have looked forward to her destiny with complacency; but she was afraid of her father and mother. Lady Pomona was distressingly old-fashioned, and had so often spoken with horror even of the approach of a Jew,—and had been so loud in denouncing the iniquity of Christians who allowed such people into their houses! Unfortunately, too, Georgiana in her earlier days had re-echoed all her mother's ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the idea of confessing it to her, as of easing his own mind. And now, again, he let her see into his real self, and, unlike the previous occasion, it was here more than a glimpse that she caught. He was distressingly frank with her. She heard now, for the first time, of the foolish ambitions with which he had begun his studies in Leipzig; heard of their gradual subsidence, and his humble acceptance of his inferiority, as well as of his present fear that, when his time came to an end, he would have ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Problem. It would make many a house the dwelling of peace, many a business-place an abode of honour. If we could get back to Richard Rolle's simplicity and to his unmovable faith, then, his goal, even the acquisition of perfect love, might seem to all of us less distressingly remote. ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... that converge at La Muette (it is almost immoral to take a taxi these days); and I often amused myself watching the women conductors. They are quick, keen, and competent, but, whether it was owing to the dingy black uniforms and distressingly unbecoming Scotch military cap or not, it never did occur to me that there would be any mad scramble for them when the men of France once more found the leisure for ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... counter-signs,—their range of proper names is so distressingly limited, and they make such amazing work of every new one. At first, to be sure, they did not quite recognize the need of any variation: one night some officer asked a sentinel whether he had the countersign ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... A distressingly large percentage of native-born infants died before reaching one year of age on account of infection at birth, insufficient clothing, or improper food. I have many times seen a native mother thrust boiled rice into the mouth of a child only a few days old, and I have seen babies taught ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... passers. They wore bright kirtles, and red shawls fell from their heads over their plump brown cheeks and down their comfortable persons. A little girl with them was attired in like gayety of color. "What is her name?" asked Isabel, paying for a bead pincushion. "Daisy Smith," said her mother, in distressingly good English. "But her Indian name?" "She has none," answered the woman, who told Basil that her village numbered five hundred people, and that they were Protestants. While they talked they were joined by an Indian, whom the women saluted musically in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... handsome, scholarly son, not only with amazement, but with pride and satisfaction. His three sisters, all grown into womanhood, the youngest being sixteen, were at first rather shy of him. They had not forgotten how he used to annoy and vex them. They early perceived the change, and became distressingly fond of him. It would be so nice to have an elder brother to go with them everywhere. And such a brother! so fine-looking, who had an air so distinguished, a face so poetical and classical! O, wouldn't all ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... the world do anything to hurt her feelings," continued Lottie with the self-complacent righteousness of a deacon telling the congregation how good "grace" has made him. Her prominent commonplace brown eyes were gazing up the walk, an expression distressingly like envious anger in them. She had a thick, pudgy face, an oily skin, an outcropping of dull red pimples on the chin. Many women can indulge their passion for sweets at meals and sweets between meals without serious ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... if perhaps when the great occasion (whatever it might be) should arrive, one button should chance to be ever so little short of its first glittering freshness, and for days and days that thought remained with him distressingly. And when next his mother let him wear his suit, he was tempted and nearly gave way to the temptation just to fumble off one little bit of tissue paper and see if indeed the buttons were ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... a visit," answered Miss Prince, trying to smile as she handed him the little sheet of paper which she had unconsciously crumpled together; but she did not give even one glance at his face as he read it, though she thought it a distressingly long ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... excused her for setting the well-meant advice in my letter at defiance, I was conscious of expecting to see her in tears; eager, distressingly eager, to hear what hope there might be of Philip's recovery. I saw no tears, I heard no inquiries. She was pale, and quiet, and silent. Not a word fell from her when we met, not a word when she kissed me, not a word when she led the way into the nearest room—the dining-room. It was ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... necessary breath in uttering wild threats of what might be expected to happen when—if ever—they succeeded in yarding the enemy. Not one had a hat; they had long ago been used as missiles in checking a rush, and now lay in the dust, trampled under the racing feet of the poddies. Moreover, it was distressingly evident that they were becoming tired, whilst the calves remained fresh and in most excellent spirits. The chances, as Norah arrived, were distinctly in favour of ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... those of battle. The cruelty of those feudal ages finds one of its innumerable records in the treatment of the miserable lepers at Albi. Having taken the disease which the Crusaders brought back from the East, they were favoured with a religious ceremony distressingly similar to the office for the dead. A black pall was thrown over them while they knelt at the altar steps. At the close of the service a priest sprinkled some earth on the condemned wretches, and then they were led to the leper-house, where each was shut up in a cell from which he never came ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... during the close of the fourteenth century, throughout the fifteenth, and at the commencement of the sixteenth, books purporting to be of their writing were constantly being recovered, it was invariably under distressingly suspicious circumstances; exactly the Roman author that was wanted turned up; and always for a certainty that Roman author for whom the highest price had been offered; the monastery was rarely famous, seldom in Italy, but obscure and situated in a barbarous country; the discoverer, too, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... endure the offerings of the present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease. It has ceased to be what it once was, what its name implies. If the old school inclined toward the rough too much, then certainly the new inclines distressingly toward the refined—the stage that once was so full of knockabout is now so full of stand-still; variety that was once a joy is now a bore. Just some uninteresting songs at the piano before a giddy drop is not enough these days; and there are too many of ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Beebe's house and knocked upon that. There was not even a light in the house. The Beebes had gone—as most of East Wellmouth had gone—to the baked beans and brown-bread supper and sociable at the church. Galusha Bangs was not aware of this, of course. What he was aware of—painfully, distressingly aware—was the fact that he was alone and supperless, very, very weak and ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of art the personal flavor or perfume of the artist himself were predisposed to place Little Eyolf very high among his writings. Nowhere is he more independent of all other influences, nowhere more intensely, it may even be said more distressingly, himself. From many points of view this play may fairly be considered in the light of a tour de force. Ibsen—one would conjecture—is trying to see to what extremities of agile independence he can force his genius. The word "force" has escaped ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... ocean service, sailing-ships as well as steamers. The situation had become acute. Through the great loss of tonnage in the Civil War, and through the steadily advancing change from wood to iron in ship construction and from sail to steam propulsion, the American merchant marine had been brought distressingly low. From 1861, when the United States was standing second in rank among the nations in the extent of her ocean tonnage, to 1866, this tonnage had declined from 2,642,648 to 1,492,926 tons: a loss of more than forty-three per cent; while England, the first in rank and chief competitor, ...
— Manual of Ship Subsidies • Edwin M. Bacon
... calmly corrected Miriam. "We are early, but you and Grace are distressingly early. I suppose you found ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... the integuement, fearfully enlarged, varicose, and almost appearing as if it were bursting. The trachea is pressed upon on either side, and the oesophagus by the left gland, and there is difficulty of swallowing. The poor animal pants distressingly after the least exertion, and I have known absolute suffocation ensue. In a few cases ulceration has followed, and the sloughing has been dreadful, yet the gland has still preserved its characteristic structure. Although numerous abscesses have been formed in the lower part ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreaties which displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr. Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubtful whether Coleridge's "great work" made much additional progress during the last dozen years of his life. The weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... eventually, proved of much greater service than any sponge or any battledore; for, the friction of the brush caused an irritation on the surface of the skin, which, more than anything else, has gradually diminished the once continual misery of unrelenting frost; although even yet it renews itself most distressingly ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... round the little girl, a tiny weight for thirteen years old, and took her into the room where she had last seen her father. She was sobbing violently, not without passion, and the more distressingly because she carefully stifled every sound, and the poor little frame seemed as if it would be rent to pieces. 'Cherry, dear child, don't,' said Constance, sitting down and gathering her into her arms; 'do try and ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "His name." Your recital of the church sewing-bee, where all the good Christian women described their diseases and the different operations they and their friends had undergone, is as amusing as it is distressingly realistic. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the manger while she is standing, and on her flank when she is lying down—hemorrhage frequently comes on from the uterus, or when this is not the case the mouth of that organ is spasmodically contracted. The throes come on, are distressingly violent, and continue until the womb is ruptured. If all these circumstances be not observed, still the labor is protracted ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... cold,—laid out in state upon the spotless linen apron, around which a fluted ruffle ran crisp and smooth. One tiny waxen hand held a broken lily, and the other was vainly pressed upon the lids of the rabbit's eyes, trying to close lovingly the pink orbs that now stared so distressingly through glazing film. The first passionate burst of grief had spent its force in the tears that left the velvety cheeks and chin as dewy as rain-washed rose leaves, while not a trace of moisture dimmed the large eyes that wore a proud, defiant, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... not easy to mention all the uses of such a manual. One who has been accustomed to speaking, but fears he is getting into a rut, can turn to this text-book and find something which is not so distressingly his own, that his friends expect him to parade it ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... on distressingly slow. The girls were hoisted on the men's shoulders; the men were half submerged. Then there was a painful pause; then a crumbling crash. Another cheer went up ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... nougat; all this is like a very material kind of pleasure, in which the senses for a moment forget the soul. For a moment only, for is it not the soul, a kind of discontented crying out against pleasure and pain, which comes back distressingly into this after all pathetic music? All modern music is pathetic; discontent (so much idealism as that!) has come into all modern music, that it may be sharpened and disturbed enough to fix our attention. And Tschaikowsky speaks straight to the nerves, with that touch of unmanliness which ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... what good could be done thereby, and feared harm. But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get through his first serious practical trouble his own way. She saw that he felt himself distressingly young and inexperienced, and would not for the world have harassed ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... looked across the river, where groups of other girls were quitting a large building. They could be seen but dimly, but even at that distance something in the prevalent droop suggested that they, too, had found the day "distressingly warm." ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... extremely salubrious, the heat never exceeding 97 deg. F., while the nights are deliciously cool. Lung diseases are here unknown. When I asked an old American doctor in Guadalupe y Calvo about his experience in regard to the health of the people, he said, "Well, here in the mountains they are distressingly healthy. Despite a complete defiance of every sanitary arrangement, with the graveyards, the sewers, and a tannery at the river's edge, no diseases originate here. When cholera reached the mountains some years ago, nobody died ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... entreaty: the horse was hardly broken for even a man's riding yet; the saints alone could tell what the nervous creature might do with a woman's skirt flipping at her side! We begged for delay, for reflection, for at least time to change the saddle—but with no avail! Consuelo was determined, indignant, distressingly reproachful! Ah, well! if Don Pancho (an ingenious diminutive of my Christian name) valued his horse so highly—if he were jealous of the evident devotion of the animal to herself, he would—but here I succumbed! ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... as an orator, however, was not immediate. He tasted all the bitterness of failure on more than one occasion; but after temporary discouragement he redoubled his efforts to correct the faults that were made so distressingly plain to him by the unsparing but salutary criticism of his audience. Without doubt, these conflicts and rebuffs of his earlier years served to strengthen and deepen the moral character of Demosthenes, as ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... all—that he never saw her little affairs; she supposed him perfectly satisfied with his home and children and club and business, and incidentally with his beautiful figurehead of a wife. They had quarrelled distressingly, several years ago, when he had bored her with references to her "duty," and her influence over Nina, and her obligations to her true self. But that had all stopped long since, and now Isabelle was free to sleep late, to dress ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... you here—" she began, defending him involuntarily. "But, Baldos, you forget that I am the princess!" She drew away in sudden shyness, her cheeks rosy once more, her eyes filling with the most distressingly unreasonable tears. He did not move for what seemed hours to her. She heard the sharp catch of his breath and felt the repression that was mastering ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Allied army in Macedonia, always difficult, had become distressingly precarious with its own growth and the growth of the enemy's submarine activity. Were the Allies to go on transporting food and fodder from distant lands across dangerous seas, with the rich cornfields of Thessaly ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... done, but screw your courage to the sticking point, and do it. She is, indeed, a lucky woman who can start from the beginning or has only beautiful heritages from the past, for the majority of people have some distressingly strong pieces of ugly furniture which, for one reason or another, must be kept. One sensible woman furnished a room with all her pieces of this kind, called it the Chamber of Horrors, and used it only ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... to the room that had once been Mr Sharnall's, but was now distressingly empty and forlorn, and there finding writing materials, sat down to compose an answer to Westray's letter. She knew its contents thoroughly well, she knew its expressions almost by heart, yet she spread it out on the table before her, and read and re-read it as many times as if it were the most ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... board Le Geographe were as excited about the ship sailing eastward, as were the Investigator's men when the reported white rock ahead proved to be the sails of another vessel. The French crew were in a distressingly sick condition. Scurvy had played havoc among them, much of the ship's meat was worm-eaten and stinking, and a large number of the crew were incapacitated. On the morning of April 8th some of Baudin's people had been engaged in harpooning dolphins. They were desperately in need of ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... was rare, and noticeable when it came. The shipping agents wore black alpaca coats, white trousers, and modern hats of straw. A few ship's officers in blue, with official caps gold-braided, passed in and out like men without a wedding garment, as distressingly out of the picture as tourists in check knickerbockers and nailed boots moving through some dim cathedral aisle. O'Malley recognized one or two from his own steamer, and turned his head the other way. It hurt. He caught himself thinking, as he saw them, of Stock Exchanges, two-penny-tubes, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... at this time, also, that the military families of the Kwanto in general and of Kamakura in particular began to find their incomes distressingly inadequate to meet the greatly increased and constantly increasing outlays that resulted from following the costly customs of Kyoto as reflected at the shogun's palace. Advantage was taken of this condition by professional money-lenders, by ambitious nobles, and even by wealthy farmers, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... me they were both very ill: Gracie especially—her head aching badly, her throat distressingly sore, and her fever very high; but that she was ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... for me is that it has aged my poor, dear, old mother by ten years! What a change! She can no longer walk alone, and is distressingly weak! How sad it is to see those whom one loves deteriorate ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... lonely night. When he went to the roost where the whole Robin family had been sleeping for several weeks, he found it distressingly silent, after the gay chatter that he had grown accustomed to hearing there. And try as he would, he could not keep just a hint of sadness out ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Reading, it always seemed to us, that "David Copperfield" was cut down rather distressingly. That, nevertheless, was unavoidable. Turning in off Yarmouth sands, we went straight at once through the "delightful door" cut in its side, into the old black barge or boat, high and dry there on the sea-beach, and which was known to us nearly as familiarly as to David himself, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... oppressed me during the silent hours that followed the events related in the preceding chapter. Toby, wearied with the fatigues of the day, slumbered heavily by my side; but the pain under which I was suffering effectually prevented my sleeping, and I remained distressingly alive to all the fearful circumstances of our present situation. Was it possible that, after all our vicissitudes, we were really in the terrible valley of Typee, and at the mercy of its inmates, a fierce and unrelenting tribe of savages? Typee or Happar? I shuddered when I reflected ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... hoofs of his horse. Nothing could have galled and humiliated him more than to realize how Kate Doubleday regarded him. Plainly she looked on him as no better than one of the ordinary rustlers of the Falling Wall country. This was distressingly clear; yet he knew in his own heart that hers was the only opinion among her people that he cared anything about. Furious waves of resentment alternated with the realization that such an issue was inevitable—how could it be otherwise? She had heard the loose talk of men about her—Stone, ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... suppose he is laughing at me, but never mind." He suffers from sea-sickness and toothache, and "none of them care a damn about my sufferings," and so on. These misdirected outbursts of feverish antipathy to poor Troubridge were frequent, and always inconceivably comical as well as distressingly peevish. But behind it all there was a consciousness of unequalled power which every one who knew him recognized, and they therefore patiently bore with his weaknesses, trying as ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... was kept threading these necklaces and bracelets all the wakeful hours of the day—for every one fell asleep about noon—though still so jealous a watch was kept on her that she was hardly allowed to shift her position so as to get out of the sun, which even at that season was distressingly scorching in the middle of ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 'Trovatore,' and looking as wholesomely fresh and clean and dainty as the most honest gentleman in England. He gave his brother a good-humoured nod, and wished him good morning. "I am glad to see you don't keep distressingly early hours," he said, between the bars of the air he was humming. He was a man of perfect digestion, like all the Wentworths, and got up accordingly, in a good temper, not disposed to make too much of any little incivility that might have taken place. On the contrary, he helped ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... "She is distressingly brisk and healthy, and I should say, my dear, not of a sympathetic nature, which is always a pity in ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... same distressingly nervous manner, and closed the door behind him. The schoolmistress found herself in a dark little parlour, which smelt even more of drugs than the shop itself. The window looked out into a dirty ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... to be literally accepted, and we may hope that it is overstated, there has been a distressingly unfavorable change within five months in the Admiral. His trouble is said to be with his liver. There is no question the strain upon him has been more wearing than the public have realized. Last summer his anxieties afflicted him with insomnia at night, and he has not for a day ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... or wink his eyes, his face all blanched with the despair of a captive awaiting, in agonizing suspense, the hour of final and terrible doom—all as dismal apprehension had been picturing it for the last eighteen hours to the distressingly ingenious fancy of Burlman Reynolds? O by no means! True it was, our little master was there, and a captive. True, that since our last glimpse of him, where perched he sat on the topmost rail of the corn-field fence back yonder, he had taken many a pitiful, heart-broken ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... German and the English political systems blinded the astute agents. In England nothing really important is a secret, and the amount of privileged political information to be gleaned in barbers' shops, even when they are patronized by Civil servants, is distressingly small. Two hours of sympathetic conversation with an ordinary Englishman would have told the German Chancellor more about English politics than ever he heard in his life. For some reason or other he was unable to make use of this source of intelligence, ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... farewell to the New York public at a notable performance of "Tristan und Isolde," the last of the season, on February 7, 1887. I doubt if the history of opera in New York discloses anything like a parallel to the occasion. Out of doors the night was distressingly dismal. A cold rain fell intermittently; the streets were deep with slush, and the soft ice made walking on the pavements uncomfortable, and even dangerous. But these things were not permitted to interfere ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... be, it soon becomes distressingly apparent that propelling a bicycle has now to be considered in connection with the overpowering heat. Half the distance to Amritza is hardly covered, and the riding time scarcely two hours, yet it finds me reclining beneath the shade of a roadside tree ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens |
