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More "Crabbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one, crabbed and-severe, Lieutenant Lon Lumbago, an arch scrutineer? Call the roll to-day, would he answer—Here! When the Blixum's fellows to quarters mustered How he'd lurch along the lane of gun-crews clustered, Testy as touchwood, to pry and to peer. Jerking ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... the popular expounder in this assembly, and generally occupied the platform (there was a little platform with a table on it, in lieu of a pulpit) first, on a Sunday afternoon. He was by trade a drysalter. Brother Gimblet, an elderly man with a crabbed face, a large dog's-eared shirt-collar, and a spotted blue neckerchief reaching up behind to the crown of his head, was also a drysalter and an expounder. Brother Gimblet professed the greatest admiration for ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... disinterested. But in all our realms I do not think there is a place of simpler and sweeter happiness than this, because they do not take their forgiveness as a right, but as a gracious and unexpected boon. And indeed the sights and sounds of this place are the best medicine for crabbed, worldly, conventional souls, who are often brought here when they are ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... performances—even aids and abets them. I caught them at it yesterday. First May actually declaimed several paragraphs from a speech of Cicero's, and next she got Dora to repeat after her the most crabbed of the Greek verbs. I shall have a couple of blue-stockings, and what is worse, one of them spurious, in the room of the single real production I reckoned upon among my daughters. By all means let May have a howling monster. She ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... about it. Mascaret leads a very fast life now, after being a model husband. As long as he remained a good spouse he had a shocking temper, was crabbed and easily took offence, but since he has been leading his present wild life he has become quite different, But one might surmise that he has some trouble, a worm gnawing somewhere, for he has aged ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... wedding the bridegroom-to-be had run away with another girl. The pathos of Aunt Phoebe's blighted romance struck Hinpoha "amidships" as Sahwah would have expressed it, and she wept over the linens in the cedar chest. Poor Aunt Phoebe! No wonder she was sour and crabbed. Hinpoha forgave her all her crossness and tartness of manner, and thought of her only with pity. Her romantic nature thrilled at the thought of the blighted love affair and her aunt became a sort of heroine in her eyes. She yearned to comfort her and ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... for it, especially now that M. Olivier Vinet has left Mantes; for between ourselves, good M. Leboeuf was afraid of that crabbed little official. If you will permit me, Madame La Presidente, I will go to Mantes and see M. Leboeuf. No time will be lost, for I cannot be certain of the precise value of the property for two or three days. I do not wish that you should know all the ins and outs of this affair; you ought ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... out of here! No tramps allowed in Freeport while Ezra Jenkins is constable! Move along, now, or I'll arrest ye! Here's my badge of authority!" And a crabbed old man, wearing a faded blue suit, with a big shining star of metal on his coat, tapped ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... of the war. Bof sides was good to me. I've seen many a scout. The captain would say 'By G——, close the ranks.' Captains is right crabbed. I stayed ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... humour of her husband, took more pains to bring joy to his house than would another to bestow horns upon him. But although she was careful to obey him in all things, and to live at peace would have tried to excrete gold for him, had God permitted it, this man was always surly and crabbed, and no more spared his wife blows, than does a debtor promises to the bailiff's man. This unpleasant treatment continuing in spite of the carefulness and angelic behaviour of the poor woman, she being unable to accustom herself to it, was compelled to inform ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... "reckon a mortal happy till you have witnessed his end." A most beautiful creature was Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy! Such eyes—such hair—such teeth—such a figure—such manners, too,—and such an irresistible way of tying his neckcloth! When he was about sixteen, a crabbed old uncle represented to his parents the propriety of teaching Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy to read and write. Though not without some difficulty, he convinced them,—for he was exceedingly rich, and riches in an uncle are wonderful arguments respecting the nurture of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... home to breakfast with our friends, and looked at the title-deeds of their house in crabbed Spanish of the sixteenth century, and the great Chinese treasure-chest, still used as the strong-box of the firm, with an immense lock, and a key like the key of Dover castle. Fine old Chinese jars, and other curiosities, are often to be found in Mexico; and they date from the time when ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... long stroke would represent nothing, and the clear delineation too much. They were not mere dots of color which I saw on the hill, but something full of essence of pine; out of which I could gather which were young and which were old, and discern the distorted and crabbed pines from the symmetrical and healthy pines; and feel how the evening sun was sending its searching threads among their dark leaves;—assuredly they were more than dots of color. And yet not one of their boughs or outlines could be distinctly made out, or distinctly ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... correct there. Mr. Holden was naturally crabbed, and fair weather with him was the exception rather than the rule. On the present occasion it did ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... wanderer to return, and assume the burden of management. Instead of names, initials were employed to designate individuals referred to, and it was evident the recipient had been addressed at various places. That they were in the crabbed and peculiar handwriting of the old Judge was beyond all question, and the dates covered several years. I read them through carefully, puzzled ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... of effective superintendence, as is true of model tenements, and everything else in this world. You have got to keep the devil out of everything, yourself included. He will get in if he can, as he got into the Garden of Eden. The play piers have taken a hold of the people which no crabbed old bachelor can loosen with trumped-up charges. Their civilizing influence upon the children is already felt in a reported demand for more soap in the neighborhood where they are, and ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... out on his neck," declared Fraser, swelling with conscious importance, "and I guess he's 'crabbed' ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... caring for his short, sharp interruptions as she went on; and, indeed, to her old, loving heart, his crossest words fell like pearls and diamonds, for he had been the husband of her youth; and even he, rough and crabbed as he was, was secretly soothed by the sound of her voice, although not for worlds, if he could have helped it, would he have shown any of the love that was ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... when I would have dilated lovingly upon this structure—a time when I probably knew as much about Carthusian convents as is needful for any of their inmates; when I studied Tromby's ponderous work and God knows how many more—ay, and spent two precious weeks of my life in deciphering certain crabbed MSS. of Tutini in the Brancacciana library—ay, and tested the spleenful Perrey's "Ragioni del Regio Fisco, etc.," as to the alleged land-grabbing propensities of this order—ay, and even pilgrimaged to Rome to consult the present general of the Carthusians (his predecessor, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... are none beholden, save to me alone. For it is neither the spear of throughly-begotten Pallas, nor the buckler of cloud-gathering Jove, that multiplies and propagates mankind: but my sportive and tickling recreation that proceeded the old crabbed philosophers, and those who now supply their stead, the mortified monks and friars; as also kings, priests, and popes, nay, the whole tribe of poetic gods, who are at last grown so numerous, as in the camp of heaven ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... not only saved his master's flock, but himself escaped with a whole skin. Everyone entertained a profound respect for him, and he might have been a popular pet but for his temper which, never genial, became more and more crabbed. He seemed to like Dorley, and Huldah, Dorley's eldest daughter, a shrewd, handsome, young woman, who, in the capacity of general manager of the house, was Wully's special guardian. The other members of Doricy's family Wully learned to tolerate, but the ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... the pulpit, handed him a note, and sat down again, covering his face with a big horny hand, and swinging one foot nervously. John opened the folded paper, and held it up to one of the tall lamps beside his desk, for the writing was dim and crabbed, and the light poor, and then read a call that the Session should meet immediately after the prayer-meeting. No object for consideration was named, and the paper was signed by Mr. Dean and another elder. John put it down, and, noticing that his four elders sat together on ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... brushing against him. Perhaps he has lost money in a business deal; perhaps he wanted a political position and didn't get it; perhaps a supposed friend has proven untrue; perhaps his disappointment, whatever it is, has made him sour and crabbed. But he passes on, and we meet other faces. Here comes a man who looks something like this: [Draw the happy face, completing Fig. 8.] He doesn't look as if he had a care in all the world, does he? And yet we may find ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... considered as a caste above his own, but who had distinguished himself, as a man, by high civic courage, and as a senator by his determined speeches in behalf of the Union. This was Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a man honest, patriotic, but narrow and crabbed, who turned out to be the most unfortunate choice ever made, with the possible exception of John Tyler, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... window, far over on Avenue D, stood an old and battered timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face. Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club. Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... bring him customers for his woollen cloth; for your buyer and seller never lacks a reason either for his selling or buying. Presently he is buying again; this time, still with striking of legal attitudes, calling together of relations, and accompaniments of crabbed Latin notarial documents, a piece of ground in the suburbs of Genoa, consisting of scrub and undergrowth, which cannot have been of any earthly use to him. But also, according to the documents, there went some old wine-vats with the land. Domenico, taking ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... published in 1585, he caricatures one actor-manager under the name of Valdracko, who is an actor in Venus' Tragedy, one of the tales of the book. Valdracko is described as an old and experienced actor, "stricken in age, melancholick, ruling after the crabbed forwardness of his doting will, impartial, for he loved none but himself, politic because experienced, familiar with none except for his profit, skillful in dissembling, trusting no one, silent, covetous, counting all things honest that ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... babble such mad stuff?" thought the student Anselmus, sitting down at the table to begin the copying of the manuscript, which Archivarius Lindhorst had as usual spread out before him. But on the parchment roll he perceived so many strange crabbed strokes and twirls all twisted together in inexplicable confusion, offering no resting-point for the eye, that it seemed to him well-nigh impossible to copy all this exactly. Nay, in glancing over the whole, you might have thought the parchment was nothing but a piece of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... then raised in Sulaco for the defence of the Five-Year Mandate of regeneration. The petition, like everything else, had found its way into Don Jose's hands. He had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of dirty-greyish rough paper (perhaps looted in some village store), covered with the crabbed, illiterate handwriting of the old padre, carried off from his hut by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamplight of the Gould drawing-room over the document containing the fierce and yet humble appeal of the man against the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... winds of the sea have devoured, bit by bit, the fine sculpture of the doorway and the thin cusps of the window tracery; gray moss creeps caressingly over the worn walls in ineffectual protection; gentle vines, turned crabbed by the harsh beating of the fierce winds, clutch the crumbling buttresses, climb up over the sinking roof, reach in even at the louvres of the belfry, holding the little sanctuary safe in desperate arms against the savage warfare ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... and moving the lamp a little nearer, I began to spell out the crabbed sixteenth-century handwriting. 'To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets.' . . . 'Good heavens!' I cried, 'is this Shakespeare's ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... ha' yo' change it," he said, "but my coat is na o' th' turnin' web. I mun ha' my say about things—gentry or no gentry." And his wrinkled old visage expressed so crabbed a determination that ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... crabbed, ill-conditioned husband, and she was a fine, handsome, lusty woman. He fell ill, and she did not afford him all that care and attention which was requisite in his condition. She went out amusing herself, and left him at home with no one to see to ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... her that I'd find some one, and then I went to the old doctor and we talked and twisted it this way and that, and he went up to The Cedars and called on Madam's heir-at-law, a crabbed old cousin that lived much to himself and saw only the doctor, and the end of it was that I was to pick out what I thought Miss Lisbet would like in the matter of furniture, for he used but a third of the ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... apparently so cold and passionless could sympathize with her. To no one had Berintha ever confided the story of her early love. Mr. Dayton was a schoolboy then, and as but little was said of it at the time, it faded entirely from memory; and when Lucy called her a "crabbed old maid," she knew not of the disappointment which had clouded every joy and imbittered ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... happy in their lot. Milton has said (and surely Milton knows) That after all, philosophy is "not,— Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose;" And some, no doubt, for Love's sake have forgot Much that is needful in this world of prose:— Perchance 'twas so with these. But who shall say? Time has long since swept them and ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... the side—the left side," said Anne, gathering up in her agitation the sense of the crabbed writing as best she could. "They have not extracted the bullet, but when they ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ask Ben Weatherstaff," advised Martha. "He's not half as bad as he looks, for all he's so crabbed. Mr. Craven lets him do what he likes because he was here when Mrs. Craven was alive, an' he used to make her laugh. She liked him. Perhaps he'd find you a corner somewhere out ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... have lived very happily in this worthy family, had it not been for the crabbed cook, who was finding fault and scolding at him from morning till night; and was withal so fond of roasting and basting, that, when the spit was out of her hands, she would be at basting poor Dick's head ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... of Hallock's singular manner, which was an abrupt challenge to all comers, Lidgerwood acknowledged a growing liking for the chief clerk. Under the crabbed and gloomy crust of the man the superintendent fancied he could discover a certain savage loyalty. But under the loyalty there was a deeper depth—of misery, or tragedy, or both; and to this abysmal part of him there was no key that Lidgerwood ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... a tall, crabbed looking man, the dust of the mill seemingly so ground into the lines of his face that it was grey all over and one wondered if it could ever be washed clean again. He only nodded to his niece and her friends, seizing the oars Ben ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... rocky hill-side, where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,—at least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... by the rapidity with which the discredited past was re-created by Bowman's mere presence. He was at the point of refusing to fetch the beer when he saw that there was no explanation possible; they would regard him as merely crabbed, and Bella would indulge her habit of shrill abuse. It wasn't the drink itself that disturbed him but the old position of "rushing the can"—a symbol of so much that he had left forever. Forever; he repeated the word with a silent bitter force. The feel of the kettle in his hand, the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... interest swept back over King as he read; the old excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful labourings, was the "secret" at last—Gus Ingle's message come to him ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... excelled in any work to which he devoted his attention. He was not only an intrepid missionary, but a most successful teacher. Into the work of education he entered heart and soul. He taught gratuitously, without any crabbed harshness, and with a view to gain the heart. He entered into the feelings of his pupils, and taught them to subdue their tempers, and avoid quarrels and oaths. He excited them to enthusiasm, perceived ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... heart fresh, and green, and tender, and loving, by one's own effort; and there is such a thing, too, as letting the heart, by neglect and want of culture, become old before its time, and dry, and tough, and crabbed. You can school your affections. Did you know that? I'll tell you how to dry up all the love and kindness you may have. Shut up your heart, as an oyster does its shell. Shut it up, and be selfish. Do so, and you will soon be ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... de Richelieu loved rallying other people, but could not bear a jest himself, and all men of this humour are always very crabbed and churlish; of which the Cardinal gave an instance, in a public assembly of ladies, to Madame de Guemenee, when he threw out a severe jest, which everybody observed was pointed at me. She was sensibly affronted, but I was enraged. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... went there, to know that there are a good many people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America until it ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... approved— if not altogether appreciated—by Gosse, Froude and other "critic flies." When Doctor Samuel Johnson was told that Boswell proposed to write his life, he threatened to prevent it by taking that of his would-be biographer. It were curious to consider what "crabbed old Carlyle" would have done had he suspected the danger of falling into the hands of a literary backstairs Mrs. Grundy like Edmund Gosse! In his "Heroes and Hero Worship" he treated his colossi far otherwise than he in turn has been treated ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... is," he went on, "that I need your signature to a writing. It is nothing but a form, and one I fear you cannot read, nor in faith can I," and with a somewhat doubtful smile he drew out a crabbed indenture and spread it before ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... meaning of what I pattered. All of which was grossly untrue, for, as none knew better than himself, the fluency of my Latin was above the common wont of students. When I told him so, he delivered himself of his opinion upon the common wont of students with all the sourness of his crabbed nature. ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Onderdonks, the Varra Vangers, the Schermerhorns, the Stoutenburghs, the Brinkerhoffs, the Bontecous, the Knickerbockers, the Hockstrassers, the Ten Breecheses, and the Tough Breecheses, with a host more of worthies whose names are too crabbed to be written, or if they could be written it would be impossible for man to utter—all fortified with a mighty dinner, and, to use the words ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... it. Not "it" indeed, but them; for there were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the course of the season. He also did a father's share of work with the children. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roof above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his wife came out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately around at the bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself, and then crawl dutifully in upon ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... sheet of paper she held out to me. It bore these words, written in the crabbed and somewhat uncertain hand which ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... a crabbed hand, apparently unused to writing in English, though grammatically correct. And this was ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... flourishing my hat over my head, "tanner, in this instance, is not an English word." Is it not surprising that the language of Mr. Petulengro and of Tawno Chikno, is continually coming to my assistance whenever I appear to be at a nonplus with respect to the derivation of crabbed words? I have made out crabbed words in AEschylus by means of the speech of Chikno and Petulengro, and even in my Biblical researches I have derived no slight assistance from it. It appears to be a kind of picklock, an open sesame, Tanner—Tawno! the one is but ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... and you oughtn't. There's too much sacrifice of love these days. Young fellows instead of having homes of their own are supporting two or three grown-up sisters and getting crabbed and bitter. And girls the Lord meant for wives and mothers stay at home because the old folks don't want to spare them. Nine times out of ten it's like Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and there's a he-goat somewhere round in the bushes that would do just ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... as the long-pent sea-mist overflowed the cliff, wallowing and billowing like an oceanic invasion, over the face of the moor. Whitefoot brought back hidden in his collar the simple message, "I shall be there," signed with the well-known crabbed fist of "Adam Ferris," traditional in his family for some hundreds of years, which seemed completely identical with signatures ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... completely under his command, his choice of poetic materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense of what is real in feeling and image—as if he had never felt the attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with a kind of devotion, and showing not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... you so?" answered Rose: "Ay, ay, that is to be my fate, and I only wish I could make the crabbed man a little merrier. Time will pass away terribly slowly with him. But perhaps I shall then be able to go to the town some time or other, see a bit of the world, hear some music and have a dance; for I think at all events an old husband must do something now and then to ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... genius, on the other hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the gong, or the ancient instrument of marrow-bone ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... felt obliged to restrain impatience; he could not afford to awaken the darky's suspicions, therefore he simulated interest and—"crabbed". He enjoyed a streak of good luck, but his artificial enthusiasm soon waned. He at length suggested trying the other side of the ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... been a thousand pities, he had thought, that Owen had been so poor as to make it necessary for them all to discourage that love affair with Clara. He would have been so delighted to welcome Owen as his brother-in-law. And as he strode along over the ground, and landed himself knowingly over the crabbed fences, he began to think how much pleasanter the country would be for him if he had a downright good fellow and crack sportsman as his fast friend at Castle Richmond. Sir Owen Fitzgerald of Castle Richmond! He would be the man ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... restless, but there's peace in grove and wood. No beadle here impounds you, to suit his crabbed mood; No strife profanes our little church, tho' there it rages high, But then we have no little church, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... marble-covered dirty volume, from the Minerva press, or a half-bound, half-guinea's worth of fashionable trash, but a good, honest, heavy-looking, wisdom-implying book, horribly stuffed with epithet of drug; a book in which Latin words were redundant, and here and there were to be observed the crabbed characters of Greek. Altogether, with my book and my look, I cut such a truly medical appearance, that even the most guarded would not have hesitated to allow me the sole conduct of a whitlow, from inflammation to suppuration, and from suppuration to cure, or have refused ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... day or month. He always spoke of his age with reluctance. Once, when pressed about it, he peevishly exclaimed, "How should I know? I was born in February or March—it was some cursed cold month, as you may guess from my diminutive stature and crabbed disposition." He was the son of the painter, John Caspar Fuseli, and the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... fishing and gunning purposes. I saw the owner of the boat hoeing in the garden. Though I was hardly acquainted with him, I went to him and asked if he would lend me his boat for half an hour. I found he was a crabbed fellow, and was not disposed to oblige me. I told him that I was in a great hurry, that my own skiff was broken, and if he would lend me his I would give him a dollar for the use of her. The dollar opened his eyes ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... "Well, you crabbed any chance you might of had, right off the bat!" I says to Alex. "He'll get so sore when he reads that, he won't even ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer
... Elements of Criticism, he said:—"This is the work of a dull man grown whimsical"—a most characteristical account of Lord Kames as a writer.' Boswelliana, p. 278. Hume wrote of it:—'Some parts of the work are ingenious and curious; but it is too abstruse and crabbed ever to take with the public.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 131. 'Kames,' he says, 'had much provoked Voltaire, who never forgives, and never thinks any enemy below his notice.' Ib, p. 195. Voltaire (Works, xliii. 302) thus ridicules ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Tim, surly as crabbed age and incessant banter under a hot sun could make him. "Now—mind, thee's ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... expecting my return. He had bought, in honor of it, some cigars of special quality, over which I was to tell him all the story of Julia's wedding. But a letter was waiting for me, directed in queer, crabbed handwriting, and posted in Jersey a week before. It had been so long on the road in consequence of the bad penmanship of the address. I opened it carelessly as I answered Jack's first inquiries; but the instant I saw the signature I held up my hand to silence him. It was from ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... Riggan coal-pits. Crabbed, wrinkled, sarcastic old fellow, whose self-conceit is immeasurable. "The biggest trouble I ha' is settlin' i' my moind what the world'll do when I turn up my toes to th' daisies, an' how the government'll mak' up their moinds who shall ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... part of Chester County, Pennsylvania, is money, too, but just where nobody knows. A lonely, crabbed man, who died there in a poor hut after the Revolution, owned that he had served the British as a spy, but said that he had spent none of the gold that he had taken from them. He was either too sorry for his deeds, or too mean to do so. He had ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Old Ladies' Home. Verily, verily, as Blossy had avowed from the first, they had been in sore need of the masculine presence. The ancient coat and hat which had hung in the hall so long had perhaps served its purpose in keeping the burglars away, but this lifeless substitute had not prevented the crabbed gnomes of loneliness and discontent from stealing in. Spinster, wife, and widow, they had every one been warped by the testy just-so-ness of ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... the merit of having bent one of the harshest of German dialects to the uses of poetry. We doubt whether the lyre of Apollo was ever fashioned from a wood of rougher grain. Broad, crabbed, guttural, and unpleasant to the ear which is not thoroughly accustomed to its sound, the Alemannic patois was, in truth, a most unpromising material. The stranger, even though he were a good German scholar, would never suspect the racy humor, the naive, childlike ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Balafre, in the hope of obtaining some farther account of that personage; but his uncle's questions had followed fast on each other, and the summons of the great bell of Saint Martin of Tours had broken off their conference rather suddenly. That old man, he thought to himself, was crabbed and dogged in appearance, sharp and scornful in language, but generous and liberal in his actions; and such a stranger is worth ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... The presents my crabbed connection spoke of so lightly had been supplemented only an hour before by surely the most magnificent wedding offering from my father-in-law that any man could have—the house in which we were and the whole of the furniture. It was hard ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lent her some scores of Carlyle letters that have never been published, and crabbed was the writing, but though my mother liked to have our letters read aloud to her, she read every one of these herself, and would quote from them in her talk. Side by side with the Carlyle letters, which show him in his most ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... chiefly, if not exclusively by Lady Mary, in which Pope is brutally taunted with the personal deformities of his "wretched little carcass," which, it seems, are the only cause of his being "unwhipt, unblanketed, unkicked." One verse seems to have stung him more deeply, which says that his "crabbed ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of dining at one of them, but, on inspection, they looked rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness. So we went to the Royal Hotel, where we probably fared just as badly at much more expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness because we arrived at the hotel on foot. For my part, I love to see John Bull show himself. I must go again and again and again to Chester, for I suppose there is not a more ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... is an institution coeval with the capital. We are told that while crabbed old Davy Burns, the owner of the most valuable part of the site of Washington City, was haggling with General Washington over his proportion of lots, his neglected and intemperate brother, Tommy, was an inmate ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... denunciations of the Pope and the wealthy clergy (in which their rhetoric found very effective matter for argument) into abstract reasoning on the whole question of the private possession of property. The treatises which they have left in crabbed Latin and involved methods of argument make wearisome and irritating reading. Most are exceedingly prolix. After pages of profound disquisitions, the conclusions reached seem to have advanced the problem no further. Yet the gist of the whole is certainly an attempt to deny ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... later Coquenil and the commissary and Papa Tignol were standing in the courtyard near two green tubs of foliage plants between which the pistol had fallen. The doorkeeper of the house, a crabbed individual who had only become mildly respectful when he learned that he was dealing with the police, had joined them, ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... is plain and spare to the verge of a gaunt severity, and there is not one single picture-frame on the wide expanse of wall. On the table are a few books and some letters, with foreign postmarks, and addressed in the crabbed handwriting of Continental scholars. Over the table a brazen lamp hangs suspended by a slender chain. In a corner are some fragments of stone mouldings and wood carvings like the panel of an ancient pew. There ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... the execution of her threat. From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora as ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... we shall find invaluable help in the study of this character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard, crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow, precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense of duty only to be paralleled among ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... my Gibbons—two editions, if you please, for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could not resist getting a set of Bury's new six-volume presentment of the History. In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped in any way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You are not to read ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sheet of paper on which were a few lines in a rather crabbed hand; which Fred would once have said was just like the character of the whimsical old maid herself, but which he now knew must be caused ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... was Peel bay, a wide stretch of beach, with a gentle slope to the left, dotted over with grey houses; the little town farther on, with its nooks and corners, its blind alleys and dark lanes, its narrow, crabbed, crooked streets. Behind this the old pier and the herring boats rocking in the harbour, with their brown sails half set, waiting for the top of the tide. In the distance the broad breast of Contrary Head, and, a musket-shot outside of it, the little rocky islet whereon ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... neither for beauty, wit, title, wealth, or power, but as they are Steps to raise me to Fancies Tower, which is to live by remembrance in all ages.... My Disposition is more inclined to Melancholy than Merry, but not crabbed or peevish Melancholy, but soft, melting, and contemplating Melancholy, and I am apt rather to weep than to laugh." Always fearing that she might be mistaken by posterity for her husband's first wife, she gives an elaborate explanation at the end ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... street of the town at some distance, we had heard nothing that I remember about her; but the day had not gone by, before it was made fully known to us by such acquaintances as we saw, that we had taken up our abode in the same house with a person of a very crabbed disposition, whom all the neighborhood looked upon as a witch. This was not very agreeable news, but we tried to make the best of it. Our house was near the river-side, and we were surrounded by the families of those who followed the sea, and we endeavored to flatter ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... Yoky had been much attached to an old gray-headed Chimpanzee, one day found meditating in the woods. Rozoko was his name. He was very grave, and reverend of aspect; much of a philosopher. To him, all gnarled and knotty subjects were familiar; in his day he had cracked many a crabbed nut. And so in love with his Timonean solitude was Rozoko, that it needed many bribes and bland persuasions, to induce him to desert his mossy, hillside, misanthropic cave, for the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... have been here a thousand years a million years and yet they are not stale, but are ever fresh, ever serene, ever here to loosen one's crabbed spirit and make one quietly happy. It seems to me I could not live if it were not possible often to come thus ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... which he collected elemosynary sous. The old fellow had a favorite song, which he used to sing with great glee to a merry, joyous air, the burden of which ran "Chantons l'amour et le plaisir!" I often thought it would have been a good lesson for the crabbed and discontented rich man to have heard this remnant of humanity—poor, blind, and in rags, and dependent upon casual charity for his daily bread, singing in so cheerful a voice the charms of existence, and, as it were, fiddling life away to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... blandness, softness, mildness, and meekness. It is the opposite of harshness, roughness, etc. It is sweetness of disposition, mildness of temper, softness of manner, kindness, tenderness, etc. Those who are of a gentle disposition act and speak without asperity. They are not morose, sour, crabbed, and uneven, but are smooth, mild, and even. Good manners are intimately connected with gentleness, and good manners are no ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... Dock, sour and crabbed, sat down near the rocking-chair of Mr. Fairfield; and Mr. Caesar Augustus Ebenier, cabin steward of The Starry Flag, Sr., was politely invited to take the stand. He appeared in his best clothes, and his name, ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... turn to kindlier themes; it is pleasant to think of the legitimate rejoicings and kindnesses in which the most staid of us may indulge. Far be it from me to emulate the crabbed person who proposed to form a "Society for the Abolition of Christmas." The event to be commemorated is by far the greatest in the history of our planet; all others become hardly worthy of mention when ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?' Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... came running a gentleman and his sister, fetched, and brought in by the maid, who had run down, and having let in a cursed crabbed old wretch, hobbling with his gout, and mumbling with his hoarse broken-toothed voice, who was metamorphosed all at once into a lively, gay young fellow, with a clear accent, and all his teeth, she would have it, that I was neither more nor less than the devil, and could not ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... are evident; his style is harsh, obscure and crabbed; it is sometimes said that he seems wiser than he really is mainly because his language is difficult; that if his thoughts were translated into easier prose our impressions of his greatness would be much modified. Yet it is to be remembered that he, like Lucretius, ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... We have had a paper presented and read lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor "poets," as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... us all. The world seems a vast horrible grinding machine, into which what is fresh and bright and pure is pushed at one end, to come out old and crabbed ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... stone in the Cathedral of Avignon. Whereas we find Bazan still flourishing, and a person of consequence at Court, when Richelieu came to the height of his power. Nevertheless on him there remains no stone; only some sketch of the above, and a crabbed note at the foot of a dusty page ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... not brook, His clenched fist, his crabbed look Betrayed his irritation. 'Twas nuts for Nick's derisive jaw, Who fairly chuckled when he ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... Arthur falling by (or at any rate in battle against) the fruit of his incestuous intercourse—these are not exactly encouragements to vice: while at the same time the earlier history may be admitted to have nothing of a crabbed and jejune virtue. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... responsibilities crowding upon you beyond your power to bear them, or when you realize that your mental attitude is sour, crabbed and pessimistic, then is the time to break forth into song. Nothing will bring about a pleasing change more quickly. Hum a tune. Sing some popular song. Put your soul into your efforts as much as possible, and you will literally be amazed at the value ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... caviling, carping, crabbed, contentious, cantankerous chap. Hoot mon! an' why shouldna I drap into Scotch gin I choose? An' I with ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... down in Devonshire there are young ladies innumerable, who read crabbed manuscripts with the palms of their hands, and newspapers with their ankles, and so forth; and who are, so to speak, literary all over. I begin to understand what a blue-stocking means, and have not the smallest doubt that ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... another letter from her mother-in-law herself. The crabbed, trembling characters were even more eloquent than the words with which ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... him; yet as the same iceberg when swept into the Gulf Stream finds the surrounding air and water by which it is enveloped will not admit its retaining its frigid isolation, it gradually melts and mixes with the warmer current, so Dickens brought his surly and crabbed man in contact with those who had set themselves to see everything under its brightest aspect, and under these softening influences he gradually thaws out and becomes the merriest amongst the merry, carried away by the joyous influences that are associated ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... of the boy's distant parental home. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family relations had made the boy nervous. It was the case of a strict and crabbed father who lived unhappily with his mother, and whose educational methods consisted in threats; of the separation of his father from his tender and delicate mother, and the remarrying of his father, who one day brought home a young woman as his new mamma. ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... fine-looking men, and they rode one after the other, with most gloomy faces. An old cacique, who headed them, had been, I suppose, more excessively drunk than the rest, for he seemed extremely grave and very crabbed. Shortly before this, two Indians joined us, who were travelling from a distant mission to Valdivia concerning some lawsuit. One was a good-humoured old man, but from his wrinkled beardless face looked more like an old woman than a man. I frequently presented both of them with cigars; and though ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... for economy of space and paper. The manuscript sermons of New England divines are models of careful penmanship, and may be examined with interest by a student of chirography. The letters are cramped and crabbed, like the lives of many of the writers, but the penmanship is methodical, clear, and distinct, without wavering ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... trembles in the hollows of her cheeks. To Irving, on the contrary, acting is all that the word literally means; it is an art of sharp, detached, yet always delicate movement; he crosses the stage with intention, as he intentionally adopts a fine, crabbed, personal, highly conventional elocution of his own; he is an actor, and he acts, keeping nature, or the too close resemblance of nature, carefully ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... not been able to repay. I have been able to make up to her what she has spent in money, but a lifetime would not be long enough to cancel my debt to her for all the loving care she has given me. But even if she hadn't been so kind; even if she were crabbed and cross and unreasonable, I couldn't let a son of mine be rude to an old lady under my roof. One never knows what troubles have whitened the hair and made the wrinkles come in the temper as well as the face. Old age must be respected, ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... French and English. His walk in life gives him a singularly catholic outlook. His learning is profound, but he is not overburdened by it, and he preserves his native gaiety of style even when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times discursive, but he is never tedious; and he shows no trace of that philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision which the detailed study of literary history has been known to breed in English ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... "You bet he is! He's crusty as old crust. Don't you go up against my daddy with any little bank-book. It's got to be a fat wad, and, mind you, no cloves on your breath, either. He's crabbed on the drink question; that's why he settled in Colorado Springs. No saloons there, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... crusty, lonesome, crabbed old chap," he said aloud, "but there's something about that little girl makes me feel young again . . . and it's such a pleasant sensation I'd like to have it repeated ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the invalid, in a crabbed tone, "you have asked me if my name was Lacombe and if I was Mariette Moreau's godmother. I have already told you yes. Now what do you want of ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... gallant man does not give over his pursuit for being refused, provided it be a refusal of chastity, and not of choice; we may swear, threaten, and complain to much purpose; we therein do but lie, for we love them all the better: there is no allurement like modesty, if it be not rude and crabbed. 'Tis stupidity and meanness to be obstinate against hatred and disdain; but against a virtuous and constant resolution, mixed with goodwill, 'tis the exercise of a noble and generous soul. They may acknowledge our service to a certain degree, and give us civilly to understand ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... grateful I was to Anubis when he finally consented to trust to my care this marvel of the temple treasures, when the first trial succeeded, and Antony, at my bidding, placed the magnificent wreath which he wore upon the bald brow of that crabbed old follower of Aristoteles, Diomedes, whom he detested in his inmost soul! It was scarcely a year ago, and you know how rarely at first I used the power of the terrible vessel. The man whom I loved obeyed my slightest glance, without its aid. But later—before the battle—I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... kind to all his slaves when he was sober, but he was awful crabbed and cross when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of de time. He was hard to please and sometimes he would whip de slaves. I remember seeing Master Wash whup two men once. He give ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... the critic is hard set; but Balaustion, speaking as interpreter for Browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the firmer foothold which he had attained. Perhaps it would have been wiser to admit that Euripides has marred his own work by this grim tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth. But it is true that one who has much to give, like Alkestis, gives freely; and one who has little to give, like Pheres, clutches that little desperately and is starved not only in possessions but in soul. For Browning the significance of the scene lies in the idea, which if not ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... still more the Tears of the Muses, are full of lamentations over returning barbarism and ignorance, and the slight account made by those in power of the gifts and the arts of the writer, the poet, and the dramatist. Under what was popularly thought the crabbed and parsimonious administration of Burghley, and with the churlishness of the Puritans, whom he was supposed to foster, it seemed as if the poetry of the time was passing away in chill discouragement. ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... themselves like needles on the Duke's face. Through his brain there ran a succession of queries and speculations, and dominating them all one clear question-was he to gain anything by this strange conversation? Who was this great man with a name the same as his own, this crabbed nobleman with skin as yellow as an orange, and body like an orange squeezed dry? He surely meant him no harm, however, for flashes of kindliness had lighted the shrivelled face as he talked. His look was bent in piercing comment upon Philip, who, trying hard to solve the mystery, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... them. Suddenly he sickened and died, and then came the dreadful knowledge that he left nothing for his family; he was deeply in debt to his partner, with whom he had worked a large coal-mine, and this Mr. Moore was what all people called a "hard man," he was old and crabbed, and always wanted and would have every cent coming to him. Bessie was to have been married to his son, Philip, but when poverty came to her, the old man refused to let Philip see her more, and the girl was too proud to go into a family where she was not ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... was obstinate and had old-fashioned views, and argued the whole thing in his dictatorial masculine way. They sat down to luncheon, and presently sent Dorothy away,—a piece of independence that bitterly offended that crabbed but faithful individual,—and wrangled busily through ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... Land, but selected from the vicinity of Paris. Puvis is by no means a virtuoso. His pace is usually andante; but he knows how to evoke a mood, summon the solemn music of mural spaces. His is a theme with variations. The wall or ceiling is ever the theme. His crabbed fugues soon melt into the larger austere music of the wall. His choral walls are true epopees. He is a master harmonist. He sounds oftener the symphonic than the lyric note. He gains his most moving effects without setting in motion the creaking allegorical machinery of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... on the pile in the middle of the table, and soon they all spread out some pictures and dots that were printed on white pasteboard. Then one man reaches out his hand and draws over the beans to his side; and he smiles complacently, and all the others look beat and crabbed. And this they call a little ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... Crabbed' was a grammarian of Alexandria under Hadrian. He wrote largely on Grammar ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... fond of being caressed, was crabbed and set in its ways. It would tolerate no whims, no departures from the regular course of things. It understood that there was a fixed hour for rising and for going to bed, and when it was displeased it allowed a shade of annoyance to pass into ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... Gascoigne Phillida and Corydon Nicholas Breton "Crabbed Age and Youth" William Shakespeare "It Was a Lover and His Lass" William Shakespeare "I Loved a Lass" George Wither To Chloris Charles Sedley Song, "The merchant, to secure his Treasure" Matthew Prior Pious Selinda William Congreve ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... "I'm a crabbed old woman, Pearl," she repeated; "but I am always afraid he'll catch cold and get sick he is so reckless, and never seems to have serious thoughts about himself, or realize what wet feet will do for him if he persists in them; and really, child, it's hard ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... bringing up Rachel to do the same thing, you know," the old lady went on, roused to fresh indignation at the thought of her great-niece, and she pulled her little cloth jacket down, and generally shook herself together. Crabbed age and jackets should not live together. Age should be wrapped in the ample and tolerant cloak, hider of frailties. It was not Aunt Anna's fault, however, if her garments were uncompromising and scanty of outline. Predestination reigns ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... 'Gad, they threaten damnation with such an irresistible air, that they are as much like William the Conqueror as Edward the Confessor. Ha! master Aubrey, have you become amorous of the old Jacobite, that you sigh over his crabbed writing, as if it were ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... three hours till the down train arrived, and with it Hely. He was for ordinary a stolid soul, but I never saw a man in such a fever of excitement. He gripped me by the arm and fairly shook me. 'That old man of yours is a hero,' he cried. 'The Lord forgive me! and I have always crabbed him.' ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... chestnut color. Weary with bondage he came to the conclusion that he had served a master long enough "without privileges." Against his master, Richard Reed, he had no hard things to say, however. He was not a "crabbed, cross man"—had but "little to say," but "didn't believe ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... find some one, and then I went to the old doctor and we talked and twisted it this way and that, and he went up to The Cedars and called on Madam's heir-at-law, a crabbed old cousin that lived much to himself and saw only the doctor, and the end of it was that I was to pick out what I thought Miss Lisbet would like in the matter of furniture, for he used but a third of the rooms, and what linen and stuff his housekeeper thought ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... dry, anti-critical, barren, and petty orthodoxy, of the St. Sulpice type; a hollow and superficial imitation full of affectation and exaggeration, like Neo-Catholicism; and an arid and heartless philosophy, crabbed and disdainful, like the University, make up the sum of French culture. Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found. I have been inclined to think that He would come to us from Germany; not that I suppose He would be an individual, but a spirit. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... dust. It was his Book of Craft. He took it out and carried it to a table. He undid the rough clasp that bound the book and began to turn the dingy pages. At length, he reached the one whereon the spell that he sought was written. The letters were crabbed and dim with age, and the Ash Goblin strained his eyes to see them, following the words with his crooked forefinger. He read the spell through carefully, again and again, until he was certain that he knew it by heart. Then he closed the book and returned ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... There is the crabbed old maiden aunt, always on the defensive, never without the idea that someone is waging war against her. Yet she has to be treated civilly, and humored. Has she not that which some people term "filthy ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... or a bird on some remote and rocky hill-side, where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,—at least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... London. The pages are so old and the edges have worn so thin in the two hundred and fifty years since they were written, that each page has had to be most carefully framed in strong paper to keep it from getting torn. The ink is faded and brown, and the writing is often crabbed and difficult to read. But it can be read, and it is full of stories. In olden times, probably, the book was bound in a brown leather cover, but now, because it is very old and valuable, it has been clothed with beautiful red leather, ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... and had old-fashioned views, and argued the whole thing in his dictatorial masculine way. They sat down to luncheon, and presently sent Dorothy away,—a piece of independence that bitterly offended that crabbed but faithful individual,—and wrangled busily through the whole ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... two was bent forward over a microscope, his big hands adjusting the focus screw. Presently he would break off his work of observation and jot down a few notes in crabbed German characters. His big head, his squat body, his long ungainly arms, his pale face with its little wisp of beard, would have been recognized by Oliva Cresswell, for this was Professor Heyler—"the Herr Professor," as Beale ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... know anything about it. Mascaret leads a very fast life now, after being a model husband. As long as he remained a good spouse he had a shocking temper, was crabbed and easily took offence, but since he has been leading his present wild life he has become quite different, But one might surmise that he has some trouble, a worm gnawing somewhere, for he ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... this there was not the faintest evidence, but it was the only way in which he chose to account for their persistent opposition to the peace-negotiations, and to their reluctance to confer absolute power on himself. "'Tis a crabbed, sullen, proud kind of people," said he, "and bent on establishing a popular government,"—a purpose which seemed somewhat inconsistent with the plot for selling their country to Spain, which he charged in the same ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... echo of those rude blasts? It seemed as though some choir of spirits had caught each tone as it came from the peasant's horn, and had deified it there among the clouds, and had repeated it over and over with divinest variations, to show man how crabbed were the sounds which he produced, and yet how ravishing they might one day become, when to the symphony of silver strings they rang out amid the seraph harps and choral harmonies of heaven. All the party stood still in rapturous attention, and even Cyril forgot for ten ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... grows older he gets more so. About middle life he sets hard, like plaster of Paris, his senses get obfuscated, and a shell appears to form on the outside of his intellect, so that access to his understanding becomes very difficult. Sometimes his temper also grows crabbed, and noli me tangere writes itself distinctly across the mark of his god on his old brow. A Hamal in this phase is the most impracticable animal in this universe. When found fault with, he never answers back, but he enters on a vigorous conversation ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... translating better dost commend; Those youthful hours which, of thy equals most 230 In toys have squander'd, or in vice have lost, Those hours hast thou to nobler use employ'd; And the severe delights of truth enjoy'd. Witness this weighty book, in which appears The crabbed toil of many thoughtful years, Spent by thy author, in the sifting care Of Rabbins' old sophisticated ware From gold divine; which he who well can sort May afterwards make algebra a sport: A treasure, which if country curates buy, 240 They Junius ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... good liquor Will end a contest quicker Than justice, judge, or vicar; So fill a cheerful glass, And let good humour pass. But if more deep the quarrel, Why, sooner drain the barrel Than be the hateful fellow That's crabbed when he's mellow. A bumper, ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... some enthusiastic disciple of the author has added the brief epitaph inscribed by an admirer on the crabbed old poet's ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... condemned deserved their punishment, he was not sure that it was the best way to put down the heresy. If she was ruler, she continued, in her merry way, she would send all the schemers and ranters, and all the sour, crabbed, busybodies in the churches, off to Rhode Island, where all kinds of folly, in spirituals as well as temporals, were permitted, and one crazy ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of them as they came back to me, in proof of my statement. I drove at once to your boarding place and found you had not been there for weeks, and your landlady was distinctly crabbed. Then I went to the college, only to find that you had fallen ill and gone to your home. That threw me into torments, and all that keeps me from taking the first train is the thought that perhaps you refused to accept these letters, for some reason. Shelley, you did not, did you? There is some ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... H.H. Hobday. A ticklish village amour: a young fellow importuning a buxom dairy-maid, and apparently on the verge of conquest; in the distant door-way stands a mar-loving, wrinkled old woman, whose crabbed face ought not to be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... out of window together and gone to join the Witch of Endor. But no, there he sat, and the sword before him, as if they never had stirred since I left. And the old man gave me a bit of parchment covered with crabbed Latin script, and told me I should find therein the sense of my two inscriptions, though there were words even he could not decipher. So I put the parchment in my pouch, and reached my hand to the sword, when ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... can do it if you pay me my price," said the crabbed man, who was a local judge and lawyer, acting ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... it would happen that he had something given him to read to the monks, which interested him very much; some portion of the history of a saint, perhaps, or a curious legend, so that no trouble was too great in deciphering the crabbed writing, provided that he could only get to the end of it, and make out all the sense; and he would carry home the story in his head, and entertain his mother with it over their evening meal. Then all this time, too, was he busy carving with his knife, out of the hardest wood he could ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... journalist. He used his influence in starting Marie Godeschal, usually called Mariette, at the Porte Saint-Martin. The husband of an ugly, vulgar, and crabbed woman, he had by her children that were by no means welcome. He lived in wretched lodgings on the rue Mandar, when Lucien de Rubempre was presented to him. Vernou was a caustic critic on the side of the oppositon. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... she's as crabbed as a mule!" said her teacher approvingly. "D'ye mind the way she soaks the hind legs up into her! We'll give her ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?' Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... even more explicit. She had called him a man of ice. She had taxed him with the narrow limits of his sympathies. "Well," said Reason, "did you not give her cause for all she said and more? Weren't you an odious, crabbed, supercilious cad?" ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... Prussian King as he sat by the piano was anything but prepossessing. A little, crabbed, spare old man, attired with Spartan simplicity, in a faded blue coat, whose red facings were smudged brown with the Spanish snuff he so liberally took; thin lips, prominent jaws, receding forehead, and eyes of supernatural keenness glaring from under shaggy brows; a battered cocked ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... fixedly. "I loved your mother; but she—didn't love me. And after a time she went away with—your father. I did not know until then how much I did—care. The whole world suddenly seemed to turn black under my fingers, and—But, never mind. For long years I have been a cross, crabbed, unlovable, unloved old man—though I'm not nearly sixty, yet, Pollyanna. Then, One day, like one of the prisms that you love so well, little girl, you danced into my life, and flecked my dreary old world with dashes of the purple and gold and scarlet of your own bright cheeriness. ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... before me jealously closed, and the lower windows were shut with shutters, so that all I could do was to cause Jumbo to awake the echoes with a lusty peal on the knocker, which he repeated at intervals, until there hobbled forth to open it a crone as wrinkled and crabbed as one of Macbeth's witches. I demanded whether my Lady Belamour lived there. She croaked forth a negative sound, and had nearly shut the door in my face, but I kept her in parley by protesting that I had often visited my Lady there, and offering ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... what Count Buenau might be thinking of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On the other hand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique, and as it were pagan grandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed Protestantism, which had been the weariness of his youth, he might reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme tradition ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... found by way of illustration no more than the simplest indispensable diagrams, the scribe's hand had strayed here into mazy borders, long spaces of hieroglyph, and as it were veritable pictures of the theoretic elements of his subject. Soft wintry auroras seemed to play behind whole pages of crabbed textual writing, line and figure [145] bending, breathing, flaming, in, to lovely "arrangements" that were like music made visible; till writing and writer changed suddenly, "to one thing constant never," after the known manner of madmen in such work. Finally, the whole matter broke ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... alarm at changes whose far-reaching consequences cannot yet be estimated. Scott, meanwhile, is the incomparable painter of the sturdy race which he loved so well—a race high-spirited, loyal to its principles, surpassingly energetic, full of strong affections and manly spirits, if crabbed, bigoted, and capable of queer perversity and narrow self-conceit. Nor, if we differ from his opinions, can anyone who desires to take a reasonable view of history doubt the interest and value of the conceptions involved. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... by enmities and diversified by duels, Dumas tells with the vigour and wit of his novels. He is his own hero, and loses nothing in the process; but the other characters—Taylor, Nodier, the Duc d'Orleans, the spiteful press-men, the crabbed old officials—all live like the best of the persons in his tales. They call Dumas vain: he had reason to be vain, and no candid or generous reader will be shocked by his pleasant, frank, and artless enjoyment of himself and of his adventures. Oddly enough, they are ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Flavigny. This way of stretching a village all along one street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization. When I was at college I was compelled to read a work by the crabbed Tacitus on the Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is vague and fantastic nonsense and much that is wilful lying, comes this excellent truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... yellow with age. But he descried a dim tracery of words. A crabbed scrawl, written in blood, hard to read! He held it more to the light, and ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... placed himself in the required position. Stooping down, he groped diligently by his right foot, but was aware of nothing but a crabbed stump, that resisted every attempt they could use for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of the Cascades burned away; the inland sea was drained and its bed became a fair and habitable land, and still the waters gushed through the narrow crevices roaring seaward. But the Devil had one sorrow. All his children born before the catastrophe were crabbed, unregenerate, stiff-tailed fiends. After that event every new-born imp wore a flaccid, invertebrate, despondent tail—the very last insignium of ignobility. So runs the legend of The Dalles—a shining lesson ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... Crittenden, a Kentuckian, whose intellectual vigor, integrity of character, and legal ability had secured for him a nomination to the bench of the Supreme Court by President Adams, which, however, the Democratic Senate failed to confirm. Kept in the shade by Henry Clay, he became somewhat crabbed, but his was one of the noblest intellects of his generation. His persuasive eloquence, his sound judgment, his knowledge of the law, his lucid manner of stating facts, and his complete grasp of every case which he examined had made him a power in the Senate and in the Supreme Court, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... she proposed to use afterwards at a dance, and one of the objects of the rubbing they were about to make, was that she might study the details more carefully. At least, that was her object. Godfrey's was to obtain an impression of the crabbed inscription at ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... undrained cabbage would be the signal for the execution of her threat. From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora as ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... been poisoned; which shows the kind of woman she was. Germanicus was given a huge funeral at Rome; he was the darling of the mob, and the funeral was really a demonstration against Tiberius. then Piso was to be tried for the murder: a crabbed but honest old plebeian of good and ancient family, who Tiberius knew well enough was innocent. There were threats of mob violence if he should be acquitted; and the suggestion studiously sown that Piso, guilty, had been set on to the murder by the Princeps. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... piercing and solid, a Wisdom so quick and clear, and a Fortitude so truly Noble, that those Fatigues of State, that wou'd even sink a Spirit of less Magnitude, is by yours accomplish't without Toil, or any Appearance of that harsh and crabbed Austerity, that is usually put on by the buisy Great. You, my Lord, support the Globe, as if you did not feel its Weight; nor so much as seem to bend beneath it: Your Zeal for the Glorious Monarch you love and serve, makes all things a Pleasure that ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... land surveyor, and the town clerk, a close observer of men and their public and private affairs, and kept a careful record of current events in a "crabbed, eccentric but by no means entirely illegible hand" during the long years of his sojourn in ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... turned to face the man seated at the transplastic desk, an upset little man with permanent worry wrinkles stamped in his forehead. The little man shoved the papers on the desk around angrily, occasionally making crabbed little notes on the margins. He flashed a ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... letter was about?" Mrs. Mallathorpe moved over to the hearth, and took an envelope from the rack. She handed it to Collingwood, indicating that he could open it. And Collingwood drew out one of old Bartle's memorandum forms, and saw a couple of lines in the familiar crabbed handwriting: ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... Dolly looked such a picture of innocent delight that a pang shot through the observer's tender heart. For she knew that those "Important" letters concerned the child. They were addressed in Ephraim Cook's familiar, crabbed hand, and the man would never have ventured to disturb the peace of his absent employer except by that employer's command. Also, she knew that the only business of "Importance" the Judge had entrusted to Mr. Cook was that concerning Dorothy C. All law matters were attended to by other, more ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... above his own, but who had distinguished himself, as a man, by high civic courage, and as a senator by his determined speeches in behalf of the Union. This was Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a man honest, patriotic, but narrow and crabbed, who turned out to be the most unfortunate choice ever made, with the possible exception of John Tyler, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... our race, and the laws of Ine may be considered as the foundation of modern English law. Many of these laws were probably much older; but they were now first codified and systematically enforced. The language employed is direct, almost crabbed; but occasionally the Anglo-Saxon love of figure shows itself. To illustrate, I quote, after Brooke, from Earle's 'Anglo-Saxon ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... still one degree of fever," he grumbled, with a wise shake of his bushy head. "No—nobody, Miss MacFarlane,—do you understand? He can see NOBODY—or I won't be responsible," and with this the crabbed old fellow climbed into ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... that was when Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death, Ere I could make thee open thy white hand And clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter 'I am ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... run away with another girl. The pathos of Aunt Phoebe's blighted romance struck Hinpoha "amidships" as Sahwah would have expressed it, and she wept over the linens in the cedar chest. Poor Aunt Phoebe! No wonder she was sour and crabbed. Hinpoha forgave her all her crossness and tartness of manner, and thought of her only with pity. Her romantic nature thrilled at the thought of the blighted love affair and her aunt became a sort of heroine in her ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... might have. Yet he admired her mother much more. Elaine Cot-Mineur was an old-fashioned woman, gentle, reserved, and at the age when her beauty had a rare autumnal quality—the very apex of its perfection; in a few years, in a year, perhaps, the change would come and crabbed winter set in. He particularly admired the oval of her face, her soft brown eyes, and the harmonious contour of her head. He saw her instantly with a painter's imagination—filmy lace must modulate ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... get in, Evy?" The old gentleman managed to disengage the arms without giving the appearance of heartlessness. His voice was crabbed, but sounded as though it might be from the length of the vocal cords rather than the ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... which cannot be sustained; so you must act as you think is for the best. I submit, also, to the advertisements in large letters, but under protest, and with a kind of ostrich-longing for concealment. Most of the third volume is given to the development of the 'crabbed Professor's' character. Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of Fortune, and must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, rich, pretty; he must be made very ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... looking on Nashta, ''Tis a command that the voice of none that are crabbed and hideous be heard in the harem, and I find comfort in it, O Nashta! but speak thou, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the bastinado, breaking in revenge the icon of the Holy Virgin, his father turns him away from home. Complaining not, whimpering not, he goes. And hearing the bulbuls calling in the direction of Najma's house that evening, he repairs thither. But the crabbed, cruel uncle turns him away also, and bolts the door. Whereupon Khalid, who was then in the first of his teens, takes a big scabrous rock and sends it flying against that door. The crabbed uncle rushes out, blustering, cursing; the nephew takes up another of those scabrous missiles and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... its way, and deposited her at the residence of Mrs. Levison. Mrs. Levison was nearly eighty years of age, and very severe in speech and manner, or, as Mrs. Vane expressed it, "crabbed." She looked the image of impatience when Isabel entered, with her cap pushed all awry, and pulling at the black satin gown, for Mrs. Vane had kept her waiting dinner, and Isabel was keeping her from her tea; and that does ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... no particular motive that Brereton now reached out and picked it up, and unsnapping the clasp began idly to turn over the leaves on which the old detective had pasted cuttings from newspapers and made entries in his crabbed handwriting. Brereton believed that he was idly handling what Pett had jocosely described the book to be—a mere scrap-book. It never entered his head that he held in his hands almost the whole solution of the mystery which was ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... afraid, youngling?" said the sergeant, who was old and crabbed, "if that be so, go and tell the Lord: but thou wilt find that he will not have his sport wholly spoiled, but will somehow make a bolt or a shaft ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... humour that somehow accompany the very roughest and most trenchant of the earlier ballads, like the bloom and fragrance that adorn the bristling thickets of the native whin on the slopes of the Eildons or Arthur Seat. The times were harsh and crabbed, and the song they yielded was like unto themselves. There are ballads of the Battle of Pentland, of Bothwell Brig, of Killiecrankie, and, to make a leap into another century, of Sheriffmuir. But they are memorable for the passion of hatred and scorn that is in them, rather ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... felt that the character of such a lovely girl was too exalted to inspire any other feeling than that of quiet reverence. But as lovers will not always be insulted, at all times and under all circumstances, by the frowns and cold looks of crabbed old age, which should continually reflect dignity upon those around, and treat the unfortunate as well as the fortunate with a graceful mien, he continued to use diligence and perseverance. All this lighted a spark in his heart that changed his whole character, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this is very corrupt in the Greek. I have tried to get the best sense I could; but it is very obscure. Certainly Plutarch's style is often very harsh and crabbed. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... not last long. One of the Scorpions receives the full force of the other's poisoned weapon. It is all over: in a few minutes the wounded one succumbs. The victor very calmly proceeds to gnaw the fore-part of the victim's cephalothorax, or, in less crabbed terms, the bit at which we look for a head and find only the entrance to a belly. The mouthfuls are small, but long-drawn-out. For four or five days, almost without a break, the cannibal nibbles at his murdered comrade. To eat the vanquished, that's good ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... wet penstrokes and bade me say if it would serve. 'Twas a most beautiful forgery. My Lord's crabbed handwriting was copied to a nicety, and of the two signatures I doubt if the earl himself could have told which was his own; 'twas the same circle "C," the same printing "r," ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... of King Yoky had been much attached to an old gray-headed Chimpanzee, one day found meditating in the woods. Rozoko was his name. He was very grave, and reverend of aspect; much of a philosopher. To him, all gnarled and knotty subjects were familiar; in his day he had cracked many a crabbed nut. And so in love with his Timonean solitude was Rozoko, that it needed many bribes and bland persuasions, to induce him to desert his mossy, hillside, misanthropic cave, for the distracting ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... sweetened them, and had made them melt like honey and flow beyond their proper margins, either surging out in a milky, frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital, drowning the white violets of the marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... rapidly as the long-pent sea-mist overflowed the cliff, wallowing and billowing like an oceanic invasion, over the face of the moor. Whitefoot brought back hidden in his collar the simple message, "I shall be there," signed with the well-known crabbed fist of "Adam Ferris," traditional in his family for some hundreds of years, which seemed completely identical with signatures ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... begin more and more to show a change in his handwriting. He no longer wrote in his original firm, clear style, but in a crabbed, cramped manner. His words now were often difficult to decipher, and the letters of the words very shaky and undecided, bearing witness very plainly of the trembling hand of Age. After mentioning the immense number of letters which he had to answer, and how the trouble ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... thy hermit's life thou hast had no knowledge of the robbery, the desecration, the pollution which our Holy Mother Church has undergone from these pestilent heretics, who have thought to denude her of her beauty and her glory, whilst striving to retain such things as jump with their crabbed humours, and may be pared down to please their poisoned and vicious minds. Ah! it makes the blood boil in the veins of the true sons of the Church, as thou wilt find, my youthful friend, when thou gettest amongst them. But it will not always last. The day ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... cried Mollie. "Our crabbed cousin is having a slight change of heart. She has always been dreadfully bored with Bab and me," Mollie explained to Ruth and Grace, "but she is devoted to mother, and used to want her to live with her. But she never could make up her mind to endure us ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane
... over on Avenue D, stood an old and battered timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face. Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club. Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime which he had long been building up. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and Mary danced with him—that is to say she danced with him until a freckle-faced apprentice came up from the factory with an envelope addressed in MacPherson's crabbed hand. Mary took one peep ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... reflecting that things would hardly go to that terrible extremity; but it was not reassuring to hear Ligus, the crabbed old cellarer, urge that he be made to confess then and there under the cat. Falto overruled the proposition. "It was late, and Mamercus was the man to extort confession." So Agias found himself thrust into a filthy cell, lighted only by a small chink, near the top of the low stone wall, into ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... is not without some foundation; but youthful readers will not adopt it. For youth is generous, and age is crabbed. And because Saints never become crabbed we are right in concluding that they always remain youthful. And, to draw out our conclusion, the lives of Saints, contrary to the popular belief, are much more interesting to the child than they are to the man. It is a pity that Catholic parents do not ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... a certain Arabian traveller described an Oriental fish that came up out of the sea to catch flies or to get a drink. It was no crabbed crustacean, no compromise of claws; but a fish with fins,—a perch: and, being a perch, it not only came up on dry land, but did, the traveller said, climb trees. There was a climax! No one characterized this story fitly, for all perceived that the Arabian must know its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... nights" find "such a disproportion betweene Aristotles Categories, and their childish capacities, that what together with the sweetnesse of libertie, varietie of companie, and so many kinds of recreation in towne and fields abroad," they give over any attempt to understand "the crabbed grounds of Arts." Whereupon, the parents, "if they perceive any wildnesse or unstayednesse in their children, are presently in despaire, and out of all hope of them for ever prooving Schollers, or fit for anything else; neither consider ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... man to do, after you're done," she said. But she smiled almost at once; for like the women of that north country, crabbed and twisted as their own apple trees, she loved her husband for the trouble ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... manner did Melchitsedek Pinchas approach Hiram Lyons and Simon Gradkoski, the former a poverty-stricken pietist who added day by day to a furlong of crabbed manuscript, embodying a useless commentary on the first chapter of Genesis; the latter the portly fancy-goods dealer in whose warehouse Daniel Hyams was employed. Gradkoski rivalled Reb Shemuel in his knowledge of the exact loci of Talmudical remarks—page this, and line ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... him, and not only saved his master's flock, but himself escaped with a whole skin. Everyone entertained a profound respect for him, and he might have been a popular pet but for his temper which, never genial, became more and more crabbed. He seemed to like Dorley, and Huldah, Dorley's eldest daughter, a shrewd, handsome, young woman, who, in the capacity of general manager of the house, was Wully's special guardian. The other members of Doricy's family Wully ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... to follow those teachings; here and there I warm into a little sympathy, as I catch sight, in his Latin dress, of our old friend Curculio; here and there I sniff a fruit that seems familiar,—as the fraga, or a morum; and here and there comes blushing into the crabbed text the sweet name of some home-flower,—a lily, a narcissus, or a rose. The chief value of the work of Columella, however, lies in its clear showing-forth of the relative importance given to different crops, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... yet as the same iceberg when swept into the Gulf Stream finds the surrounding air and water by which it is enveloped will not admit its retaining its frigid isolation, it gradually melts and mixes with the warmer current, so Dickens brought his surly and crabbed man in contact with those who had set themselves to see everything under its brightest aspect, and under these softening influences he gradually thaws out and becomes the merriest amongst the merry, carried away by ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... in all our realms I do not think there is a place of simpler and sweeter happiness than this, because they do not take their forgiveness as a right, but as a gracious and unexpected boon. And indeed the sights and sounds of this place are the best medicine for crabbed, worldly, conventional souls, who are often brought here when they are drawing ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... famously. We have had a paper presented and read lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor "poets," as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have taken ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... return, and assume the burden of management. Instead of names, initials were employed to designate individuals referred to, and it was evident the recipient had been addressed at various places. That they were in the crabbed and peculiar handwriting of the old Judge was beyond all question, and the dates covered several years. I read them through carefully, puzzled by ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... save to me alone. For it is neither the spear of throughly-begotten Pallas, nor the buckler of cloud-gathering Jove, that multiplies and propagates mankind: but my sportive and tickling recreation that proceeded the old crabbed philosophers, and those who now supply their stead, the mortified monks and friars; as also kings, priests, and popes, nay, the whole tribe of poetic gods, who are at last grown so numerous, as in the camp ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... is rather psychological than purely literary. He never claimed to be more than an amateur, writing to amuse himself. His style is obscure, crabbed, ungrammatical. Expression only finds a smooth and flowing outlet when the man's nature is profoundly stirred by some powerful emotion, as in the sonnets to Cavalieri, or the sonnets on the deaths of Vittoria ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... a reckless, passionate, uncontrollable, unthinking fool without method and moderation, that's what I am—a creature without any sense of right and honour, distrustful, hotheaded, loveless, graceless, crabbed and born crabbed! Yes, yes, I'm everything that I wish some one else was! Is this credible? There's not a viler man alive, a man more unworthy of heaven's kindness, of having a mortal soul love him or come ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... many people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America until ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... to exist through the intervening days, and then the bombshell fell! A letter arrived by an evening post, when Mr and Mrs Garnett were enjoying the one undisturbed hour of the day. It bore the Hayes crest, and was written in Aunt Maria's small, crabbed handwriting— ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the old interest swept back over King as he read; the old excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful labourings, was the "secret" at last—Gus Ingle's message come to ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Twexby seated in the bar, with a decidedly cross face, which argued ill for anyone who held converse with her that day; but as Slivers was quite as crabbed as she was, and, moreover, feared neither God nor man—much less a ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... nor never want," said Anne a little pettishly. "'Twill be time enough when I have the years o' my grandame, I guess, to make me crabbed and gloomsome." ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... lost money in a business deal; perhaps he wanted a political position and didn't get it; perhaps a supposed friend has proven untrue; perhaps his disappointment, whatever it is, has made him sour and crabbed. But he passes on, and we meet other faces. Here comes a man who looks something like this: [Draw the happy face, completing Fig. 8.] He doesn't look as if he had a care in all the world, does he? And yet we may find that he, too, has lost money in a business ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... which their contents were crowded into Cotton Mather's brain. And in the middle of the room stood a table, on which, besides printed volumes, were strewn manuscript sermons, historical tracts, and political pamphlets, all written in such a queer, blind, crabbed, fantastical hand, that a writing-master would have gone raving mad at the sight of them. By this table stood Grandfather's chair, which seemed already to have contracted an air of deep erudition, as if its ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in a little red house in the outskirts of the town of Barnstable. There were two crabbed little windows in front, for it could boast of but one story, and a narrow green door, over which a prairie rose bush clustered, as if to hide its infirmity. A small window, reminding one of a half closed jacknife, and in which ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... it, many pictures of it, from all angles, and painted them, and framed them, and hung them, and then, a spectator, looked at them as if for the first time. And I made myself many kinds of spectators, from crabbed old maids and lean pantaloons to girls in boarding school and Greek boys of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... tattered hat in his hand, in which he collected elemosynary sous. The old fellow had a favorite song, which he used to sing with great glee to a merry, joyous air, the burden of which ran "Chantons l'amour et le plaisir!" I often thought it would have been a good lesson for the crabbed and discontented rich man to have heard this remnant of humanity—poor, blind, and in rags, and dependent upon casual charity for his daily bread, singing in so cheerful a voice the charms of existence, and, as it were, fiddling life away to a ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... regeneration. The petition, like everything else, had found its way into Don Jose's hands. He had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of dirty-greyish rough paper (perhaps looted in some village store), covered with the crabbed, illiterate handwriting of the old padre, carried off from his hut by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamplight of the Gould ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method when he chose to play upon ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... and from whom he has received portions of land or annual grants of money, timing his arrival, if possible, to suit occasions of marriage or other domestic festivals. After he has received the usual courtesies he produces the Wai, a book written in his own crabbed hieroglyphics or in those of his father, which contains the descent of the house from its founder, interspersed with many a verse or ballad, the dark sayings contained in which are chanted forth in musical cadence to a delighted audience, and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... grown as the Wilson, while it is much more palatable. The great trouble with the Wilson, as everybody knows, is its rank acidity. When it first comes, it is difficult to eat it without making faces. It is crabbed and acrimonious. Like some persons, the Wilson will not ripen and sweeten till its old age. Its largest and finest crop, if allowed to remain on the vines, will soften and fail unregenerated, or with ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... rate, don't cry, pretty one! Your grandmamma is worked with hard thoughts. We old folks are twisted and crabbed and full of knots with disappointment and trouble, like the mulberry-trees that they keep for vines to run on. But I'll speak to her; I know her ways; she shall let you go; I'll bring ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... thou art of that sort!" rejoined his uncle. "I know them! A crabbed black and white page is meat and drink to them! There's that Dutch fellow, with a long Latin name, thin and weazen as never was Dutchman before; they say he has read all the books in the world, and can talk in all the tongues, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... they old age." And Mother Mayberry's eyes took on a regretful look and she peered over her glasses at the happy bride. On her buoyant heart she ever carried the welfare of every soul in Providence and the crabbed old couple down the Road was a constant source of ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... rapidly over the good road. It was a magnificent morning, but later in the day, as the sun rose, it became hot. We arrived at three in the afternoon with our carriers close behind. The following morning we forgave the crabbed cochero at Teotitlan sufficiently to take his stage coach for San Antonio, where we arrived in fifty minutes, having two hours to wait before the north-bound train took ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... or four hours he munched a manchet, and refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant; and when "he was put into this road of writing," as crabbed Anthony telleth, he fixed on "a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light;" and then hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous pages. Prynne has written a library amounting, I think, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... objective point was Munich, but as the train did not leave until noon we preferred to spend the time in a pleasant drive, and at the same time make assurance of our escape doubly sure. Around Berlin the country is flat and uninteresting. Our driver was a crabbed old fellow, but we managed to extract some ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... manner that would have done credit to Bucephalus. He pranced on up towards the house, which was a long weather-boarded structure, a story and a half high, with a porch running its entire length. The building was put up, I should judge, before the war of 1812, and not repaired since. A crabbed old man in a grey coat, with horn buttons, and tan-colored pantaloons, looking as if he didn't know what to make exactly of the character of his visitors, was on the porch. Near him, and somewhat in his rear, was a darkie about ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... have an honoured place in my poor Collection whenever the public taste calls for a new edition. But the original, what would I not give to have it in my hands, to touch the very parchment which came from the press of my revered ancestor, and, gloating on the crabbed letters, confute MacCribb to his face ipso visu et tactu of so inestimable a rarity. Exchanges—or "swaps," as the vulgar call them—are not unknown among our fraternity. Ask what you will for this treasure, to the half of my kingdom: my ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... I think the most awful thing is to have somebody one loves keep secrets from one. No wonder folks get crabbed and spiteful ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... "The old woman's fancy for Mr. Conway represents a relation of warm friendship that is of every-day occurrence between youth and age that is not crabbed."—The Examiner, Feb. ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
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