|
|
|
More "Cranky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to-night, no matter what comes, make your mind up to that. And, win or lose, it's my last. Get that? But I've got a definite reason for it. You see I haven't been as idle as you think. I've been hunting around on the trail of Peter Blunt. Folks all think him a fool, and cranky some. I never did. He's been a gold prospector most of his life. And it's not likely he don't know. Well, I'm not giving you a long yarn, and to cut it short, I'm right on to a big find. At least ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... cranky an' foul, she was stubborn an' slow (Let 'er go—let 'er go), An' she shipped it green when it come on to blow; 'Er crews was starved an' their wage was low, An 'er bloomin' owners was ready to faint At a scrape ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... on her way, bounding over the low, gentle swell of the calm ocean. Tom shivered whenever he thought of the possibility of the motors becoming cranky. With such important human freight aboard any mishap to the machinery would be ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... up something or other on the side of a hill. She might be gathering flowers, but he could not see any. He stopped and watched her for a while and then went nearer. She did not take any notice of him, so he thought the poor thing had been lost in the bush, and had gone cranky. ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... affair known as a "flat." It was long and narrow, with square ends and sides, and from its cranky motion evidently ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... want me to support you enny longer? I am your godfather and you are my godchild and it is a legal afare, dad sez, and if ennybody sez ennything about it they will have to deel with me, see? Ennyway mebbe I was kinder cranky about it, and you kinder fibbd, so lets say we had a scrap and shake on it and let it go at that. Lots of the fellers hear have scraps with the girls, and last weak Dinky Odell who is Carl Odells yungist brother had one with Heloise because he hollerd, ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... child," observed Pike, "you'll turn man hater if you keep on working your imagination. Luz tells me you are cranky against Kit, and that the ranches are tied up in business knots tighter than I had any notion of, so you had better unload the worst you can think of on me; that's what I'm here for. What difference do the Perez favorites make ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... business-like. The wives made pleasant homes and the husbands came and went at will. In their spare time the wives developed their personal interests and "lived their own lives," as critic number two advises. When the husbands took cranky streaks the wives simply made light of it to themselves, and forgot it as soon as possible. They lived on as comfortable terms as if the wives were simply first-class hired house-keepers; little crankisms were all in the bargain. Eventually every one ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... rude little fort and small garrison of Beluch soldiers, and a Wali, or governor. Starting the following morning, we put to sea again, and in three days—sailing against a strong southerly current, aggravated by a stiff north-easterly breeze, almost too much for our cranky little vessel, and which frightened the crew and our little timid Sheikh so much that they all lost presence of mind, and with the greatest difficulty were repressed from "'bouting ship," and wrecking themselves, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... carrying a little boy, and conducting two uncommon pretty women to their coach, and he told me afterwards that he had never in his life seen one of the three before, but that he was so taken with them on looking in at the toyshop while they were buying the child a cranky Noah's Ark, very much down by the head, that he had gone in and asked the ladies' permission to treat him to a tolerably correct Cutter there was in the window, in order that such a handsome boy might not grow up with a ...
— The Wreck of the Golden Mary • Charles Dickens
... despise—even to anti-Semitism.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} As a matter of fact, it was then high time to bid him farewell: but the proof of this came only too soon. Richard Wagner, ostensibly the most triumphant creature alive; as a matter of fact, though, a cranky and desperate decadent, suddenly fell helpless and broken on his knees before the Christian cross.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Was there no German at that time who had the eyes to see, and the sympathy in his soul to feel, the ghastly nature of this ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... again have to pay the bill largely; and it would be very wise on your part to study him: Sancho Panza may escape a good many sad experiences by knowing his master's weaknesses. But as Nietzsche no longer belongs to the Quixotic class, as Germany seems to emerge with him from her youthful and cranky nebulosity, you will not even have the pleasure of being thrashed in the company of your Master: no, you will be thrashed all alone, which is an abominable thing for any right-minded human being. ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... little dried up man of forty-five, was crabbed, cranky, sour and mean. He had the eyes, nose and brain of a fox, while perhaps the rest of him, heart and soul, came close to being just plain hog. He was stingy and suspicious, and people were no more in the habit of speaking well of him than they were of riding out of their way to ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... asking yourself all this while just what a fat run is, here is your answer: Tips; a fine train filled with fine ladies and fine gentlemen, not all of them so cranky as X, of Cleveland—thank heaven for that!—though a good many of them have their peculiarities and are willing to pay generously for the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... his hair out at the roots & he wares meny a horrible scar upon his body, inflicted with mop-handles, broom-sticks, and sich. Occashunly they git mad & scald him with bilin hot water. When he got eny waze cranky thay'd shut him up in a dark closit, previsly whippin him arter the stile of muthers when thare orfsprings git onruly. Sumptimes when he went in swimmin thay'd go to the banks of the Lake & steal all his close, thereby ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... known which follow in the pathway of woman's ballot. No one can look upon the face of that venerated, noble woman, who has grown gray in her life-work, and not be impressed that there has been something more than sentiment, more than a cranky idea, impelling her in ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of setting up your cranky opinions against the hard facts? The plain truth is that everybody who ever heard of Stanhope is going to give you the cold shoulder for a dog; we can depend ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... as if considering the matter, "folk that are cranky, often take more to them as shows 'em love, than to them as is clever and gifted. Happen yo'd rather have this'n," opening a cage-door, and calling to a dull-coloured bird, sitting moped up in a corner, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... the end of that time she promised to take the first opportunity of having another chat. In a similar manner, once the ice had been broken at the C. & E.I., Mitchell learned that the purchasing agent was at West Baden on his vacation; that he had stomach trouble and was cranky; that the speaker loved music, particularly Chaminade and George Cohan, although Beethoven had written some good stuff; that she'd been to Grand Haven on Sunday with her cousin, who sold hats out of Cleveland and was a prince with his money, but drank; and ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... of flame-swept paper. Others pitched forward in the bottom of their crafts, while still others stood for a minute swaying from left to right like drunken men, to finally crash over the sides like fallen trees, taking their cranky crafts over with them in ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... weeks later. It struck me, namely, that they might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things—one who, moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for certain labours—once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all that, was ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... to New Orleans I so telegraphed General Grant, and he, thinking General Caravajal (then in Washington seeking aid for the Republic) would answer the purpose, persuaded him to report to me in New Orleans. Caravajal promptly appeared, but he did not impress me very favorably. He was old and cranky, yet, as he seemed anxious to do his best, I sent him over to Brownsville, with credentials, authorizing him to cross into Mexico, and followed him myself by the next boat. When I arrived in Brownsville, matters in Matamoras had already reached a crisis. General Mejia, feeling ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... I don't want a husband. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... ever went to, and it was taught by old Miss Deborah Timberlake, the sister of William Timberlake who shot all those stags' heads you've got hanging in your hall. Nobody ever knew why she taught school. Plenty to eat and drink. William gave her everything that she wanted, but she got cranky when she'd turned sixty, and insisted on being independent. Independent, she said! Pish! Tush. Never learned a word from her. Taught us English history, then Virginia history. As for the rest of America, she ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... canoe turns over it does not sink. Some experts can right a capsized canoe and clamber in over the side even while swimming in deep water. The seaworthiness of a canoe depends largely upon its lines. Some canoes are very cranky and others can stand a lot of careless usage without capsizing. One thing is true of all, that accidents occur far more often in getting in and out of a canoe than in the act of sailing it. It is always unsafe to stand in a canoe ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... play in that first scenario was "The Fault-Finder," but my cranky Conan broke from that narrowness. If the play has a moral it is given in the words of the Mother, "It's best make changes little by little, the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child." The ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... sad little heart lying as heavy as a plummet in her breast, was just as bright and useful and entertaining to her cranky old friend as if life was a boon instead of a bane to her. You know from her letter how bitter life was to her; and I think if you have ever known sorrow and a great disappointment, you will comprehend how it was possible ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... in a mortal fright, not knowing whether we might find a precipice at the bottom, and be shot over, perhaps into the sea. Very soon, too, we reached some steps, down which we went, of course faster than ever, with terrific bounds, till the cranky old vehicle could no longer stand ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... seven canoes, all of them dugouts. One was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky. The other three were good. The two old canoes were lashed together, and the cranky one was lashed to one of the others. Kermit with two paddlers went in the smallest of the good canoes; Colonel Rondon and Lyra with three other paddlers in the next largest; ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... legs, and with a deck-load of lumber she's cranky and topheavy. I'm warning you, Joey. Remember he is a poor ship owner who ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... entirely satisfied me as to weight and model. I bought the smallest birches I could find; procured a tiny Chippewa dugout from North Michigan and once owned a kayak. They were all too heavy and they were cranky to a degree. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... river, more or less, till ye git to Chartham, that's sitooated to the mouth. Well, these fellers has been in the habit o' gittin' together and goin' deown river and hirin' once in a spell, some sort of old, cranky craft and goin' skylarking reound to Eastport and Portland. Arter a while they'd cum back and smuggle in a cargo o' somethin' or 'nother from the States, and sheirk the dooties. Well, 'beout a week ago, there was a confounded ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... comicality of his vein could be restrained by good taste." Reynolds, the dramatist, relates that on one occasion he was sitting in the front row of the balcony-box at the Haymarket, during the performance of O'Keeffe's farce of "The Son-in-Law," Parsons being the Cranky and Edwin the Bowkitt of the night. In the scene of Cranky's refusal to bestow his daughter upon Bowkitt, on the ground of his being such an ugly fellow, Edwin coolly advanced to the foot-lights, and ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... surprise of Isabel, who saw the red spark on the lawn. She thought her brother must be tired, and perhaps it really was the long day without food that made him so restless in mind and so uneasy. Bernard Clowes had been more than usually cranky that afternoon. Even the patient Val had had thoughts of throwing up his job when the cripple made him go through his week's accounts, scrutinizing every entry and cross-examining him on every transaction ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... folk-people who believe is doing right without telling everybody about it, in obliging you without pulling a face over it; and there are also individuals in the rank and file of worshippers who are very Pecksniffian and dismal, cranky, windy, authoritative, who would look sour if eating sugar, would call a "church meeting" if you wore a lively suit of clothes, and would tell you that they were entitled to more grace than anybody else, and had got more. The better washed and more respectably ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... said; "but I want to go home. I should have taken a fly at Wil'sbro'. Cranky will see to me without bothering anybody else. If you ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... out of any new problem which presented itself. But soft-hearted as he was, he repented of his irritation a moment later and soothed the waiter's wounded feelings by a rich tip. The boy ran out to open the cab door for his strange customer and looked after him, wondering whether the man was a cranky millionaire or merely a poet. For Joseph Muller, by name and by reputation one of the best known men in Vienna, was by sight unknown to all except the few with whom he had to do on the police force. His appearance, in every way inconspicuous, and the fact that he never sought acquaintance with ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... at full efficiency. Then all three went out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a torpedo bearing the stubby wings and the ludicrous tail-surfaces, the multifarious driving-, braking-, side-, top-, and under-jets so characteristic of the tricky, cranky, but ultra-maneuverable breed. But this one had something that the ordinary speedster or flitter did not carry; spaced around the needle beak there yawned the open muzzles of a ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... them and kiss them and have them throw their arms about me, before going to bed. I get the best nurse I can for them—the present one is a Swede, the last one, Irish—but they seem to be such stupid, cranky things! However, one thing I insist upon—they are not to slap the children, and are to let them have their own way, as far as possible. And I make it equally plain to the children that if they have any grievance, they needn't mind about their father—all they have to do is come to me, and ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... toss of her head, "the on'y differ there is in it is that I am the same as ever I was, an' you have turned crabby an' cranky." ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... lord Martin, his eyes glistening with triumph, "with all submission, Corbulo I believe had been assassinated, before Arria so gloriously put an end to her existence." "Thou thing," cried Miss Cranky, "and hast thou escaped the torrent of my invective! Thou eternal blot to the list, in which are inserted the names of a Faulkland, a Shaftesbury, a Somers, and above all, that Leicester, who so bravely threw the lie in the face of his sovereign!" "He! he!" cried ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... all. There were a few who stood at his back, sich as the Bentons, an' me an' Empty. Nellie Strong, God bless her, an' Nan, her sister, didn't go agin 'em, but they were in a difficult persition with that cranky father ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... now," she said on this occasion. "She is more cranky than you think. She is, really, ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... Good joke on Post. Big day. Pelican goes from here to York, stopping at Ungava on way out and comes back again. Brings supplies. Captain Gray came on shore. Has been with company thirty years, in northern waters fifty years. Jolly, cranky, old fellow. "You'll never get back" he says to us. "If you are at Ungava when I get there I'll bring you back." Calder, lumberman on Grand River and Sandwich Bay, here says we can't do it. Big Salmon ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... Rousseau a retreat in her little house, the Hermitage. There it was that he began the tale of La Nouvelle Heloise, which was finished at Marshal de Montmorency's, when the susceptible and cranky temper of the philosopher had justified the malevolent predictions of Grimm. The latter had but lately said to Madame d'Epinay "I see in Rousseau nothing but pride concealed everywhere about him; you will ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... by the horror of the thing they had done, and the cranky dugout, tipped far over by the recoil of the gun, took water steadily across its gunwale; and now there was a sudden stroke from below upon its careening bottom and it went over and they were in the lake. But shore was only twenty feet away, the trunk of the uprooted tree only five. Joel, still ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... chattering over a checker-board for the pleasure of the silvery, tinkling music of their voices. But woe is me for the voices, male and female, that you so often hear in New England,—the harsh, strident voices, the monotonous, cranky, yanky, filing, rasping voices, without modulation, all rise and no fall, a monotonous discord, no soul, no feeling, and no counterfeit of it, loud, positive, angular, and awful. Indeed, I do not see how we New-Englanders are ever to rid ourselves of the reproach of our voices. ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... the floor a minute and then was silent. He had been given only a mild shock, but it had been enough for his fluttery, cranky heart. ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... that they seem almost strange to us. Nor do they express the characters. There is an expression, but it seems not the one to which we are accustomed. Mr. Pickwick is generally shown as a rather "cranky" and testy old gentleman in his expressions, whereas the note of all "Phiz's" faces is a good softness and unctuousness even. Now this somewhat philosophical analysis points to a principle in art illustration which accounts in a great measure ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... girl is making me as hysterical as a cranky old maid!" growled Mr. Walraven. "If she doesn't appear in half an hour, I'll go up to her room and carry ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... is running for Judge again: really, Laura, I hope he'll win. George says he will. George says Henry Fenn is the only trouble Mr. Van Dorn will have, though I don't see as Henry could do much. Though George says he will. George says Henry is cranky and mean about the Judge someway and George says Henry is drinking like a fish this spring and his legs is hollow, he holds so much; though he must have been joking for I have heard of hollow horn in cattle, but I never ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... made of finer stuff than that stolid sponge inside your pia mater, that can take in quantum sufficit of beer, fog, and tobacco-smoke, unharmed. He can't stand it, and he's too rare and delicate a machine to go cranky thus soon. You've got the child under your thumb,—bring him out o' that. Make him take a dose of Verulam, get him back into the world again, and order him four hours per diem ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... the sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need of is elementary and industrial. They should be instructed for the work to be done. Many a colored farmer boy or mechanic has been spoiled to make a foppish gambler or loafer, a swaggering pedagogue or a cranky homiletician. Men may be spoiled by education, even as they are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation for a future work; hence men should be educated with special ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... Bert Lloyd could hardly fail to be a happy boy, and no one that knew him would ever have thought of him as being anything else. He had his dull times, of course. What boy with all his faculties has not? And he had his cranky spells, too. But neither the one nor the other lasted very long, and the sunshine soon not only broke through the clouds, but scattered them altogether. Happy are those natures not given to brooding over real or fancied troubles. Gloom ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... caverns, not taverns: a mummy in a tavern would frighten all the idlers and ragamuffins out of it. I don't know but what it would be a good plan, but you two dear little twisters and turners of the king's English would frighten that cranky old fellow, Dr. Johnson, into a long sickness, if he was only alive and could hear you. I love to hear you talk; it does me good. Don't go out of the room, but take that pack of cards I gave you to play with, and sit down on the floor ...
— Little Mittens for The Little Darlings - Being the Second Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... Mother: I hope you are coming home soon. I really think you should. Aunt Lizzie is here and she brought two friends, and, mother, I feel so responsible for them! Aunt Lizzie is sane enough, if somewhat cranky; but Miss Tish is almost more than I can manage—I never know what she is going to do next—and I am worn out with chaperoning her. And Miss Aggie, although she is very sweet, is always smoking cubeb cigarettes for hay ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... thy deceased grandfather used to call us double-lived; but the Lord only knew how much longer thou wouldst ramble about abroad. Well, but thou art a dashing fine fellow, a fine fellow; thou canst still lift ten puds in one hand as of yore, I suppose? Thy deceased father, excuse me, was cranky in some respects, but he did well when he hired a Swiss for thee; thou rememberest, how thou and he had fistfights; that's called gymnastics, isn't it?—But why have I been cackling thus? I have only been keeping Mr. Panshin" (she never called him Panshin, as she ought) "from arguing. ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... the gutter, to splash in the sink about the hydrant, and to dance to the hand-organ that came regularly into the block, even though they sadly missed the monkey that was its chief attraction till the aldermen banished it in a cranky fit. Dancing came naturally to them, too; certainly no one took the trouble to teach them. It was a pretty sight to see them stepping to the time on the broad flags at the mouth of the alley. Not rarely they had for an appreciative audience the ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... this very cross and cranky young man!" she exclaimed, sitting up and winking her eyes in the rushing brilliancy of the blaze. "He is neither a very gracious host, nor a very reasonable one; nor yet particularly nice to a girl who left a perfectly good party for an ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Too old and cranky or something like that?" teased Jane. Her hair was bursting from her cap like an over-ripe thistle, and her cheeks were velvety in a rich glow of early winter tints. She hardly looked too old even for skipping ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... Mr. D'Eyncourt and Mr. Hawes, who makes soap yellow and mottled! And hasn't Sir Benjamin Hall, and the gallant Commodore Napier, Made such a cabal with Cabbell and Hamilton as would make any chap queer? Whilst Sankey, who was backed by a Cleave-r for Marrowbone looks cranky, Acos the electors, like lisping babbies, cried out "No Sankee?" Then South'ark has sent Alderman Humphrey and Mr. B. Wood, Who has promised, that if ever a member of parliament did his duty—he would! Then for the Tower Hamlets, Robinson, Hutchinson, and Thompson, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... a good enough kind of a fellow if you know how to take him," was the reply. "He's a bit cranky if he's had a glass too much, but that don't ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer
... who really caused the trouble. He spent a good deal of time in the spring-house trying to fool his stomach by keeping it filled up all the time with water. He had got past the cranky stage, being too weak for it; his face was folded up in wrinkles like an accordion and his double chin was so flabby you could have tucked ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that section in the Legislature. It was entirely characteristic of him to vote against the adoption of the Federal Constitution, on the ground that it authorized other people to tax Carolinians; which he said was taxation without' representation. That was just like a narrow, cranky, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... you call them (and you are very rude to a lot of good, nice women, Edna), are not necessarily cross and cranky; the unmarried women I know are all busy, cheerful creatures, full of life and energy, and very useful in their generation. Father says he always enjoys a talk with an unmarried lady; so many of them keep their freshness and youth, even ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... over the welfare of distinguished visitors, American and foreign. They had seen the help come and go; she was still the "girl of the parlor floor." Discreet, silent, honest, they might well allow her a share of caprice. "Cranky" they called her, yet no one found fault. She neglected no duty. The lady manager of the interior was not always the same. She changed from time to time; Treesa was always the same, and always there. At length there came a dainty little woman, full of native pluck, ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... me, and the place in which we stood was lighted up—feebly, but enough to show me a cell-like sort of room, stone-walled, of course, and destitute of everything in the furnishing way but a bit of a cranky old table and a couple of three-legged stools on either side of it. With the released hand he had snapped the catch of an electric pocket-lamp, and in its blue glare he drew the revolver away from my head, and stepping aside, but always covering me with his weapon, motioned me to the further ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... as to how a nice, large, juicy steak would go about now. This is no place for jokes, yet his jokes are cheering and make us all feel more light-hearted. He is the "life of the funeral" and by his cheerfulness has kept our spirits from sinking to a dead level, and when the Esquimos commenced to get cranky, by his diplomacy he brought them to think of other subjects than going ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... Yanks! Knowed we didn't see dat ghos' fer nothin' las' night!" Wagon masters shouted, guards and sentries looked townward with anxious eyes. The aide got a flag from the quartermaster's tent; found moreover a very few artillery reserves and an old cranky howitzer. With all of these he returned to the head of the main street, and about the moment the cavalry at the bridge divided, succeeded in getting his forces admirably placed in a strong defensive position: Coffin and Billy Maydew joined just as an outpost brought a statement ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Grey to be a jolly, cranky old seadog of the old school. He has been with the Hudson's Bay Company for thirty years, and has sailed the northern seas for fifty. He shook his head pessimistically when he heard about our expedition. "You'll ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... variety of bright-coloured shirts and caps, flashing up and down a double paddle, the ends of which were painted in gay colours, or emblazoned with the owner's crest. But Mr. Verdant Green, with a due regard for his own preservation from drowning, was content with looking at these cranky canoes, as they flitted, like gaudy dragon-flies, over ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... float at Coombs's landing, looking at a sailboat that lay at its berth alongside. It was not exactly a handsome craft; with too great length for its beam, and its lines drawn out so fine astern that it bade fair to be somewhat cranky. It had no cabin, and there was seating room for a large party—a design calculated ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... "I haven't enough trouble trying to keep a cranky man like her pa in good humour, without being plagued by Julia Elizabeth"—she paused, for there was a knock at the door.—"If," said she to the door, "you are a woman with ferns in a pot I don't want you, and I don't want Dublin Bay herrings, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... four cork-trees, a cranky canoe, the landing-place of a bush-road, a banana-plantation, and a dwarf clearing, where sat a family boiling down palm-nuts for oil, proved that here and there the lowland did not lack lowlanders. The people stared at us without surprise, although this was only the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... of his cranky moods, fretful at circumstances, and at her father who kept him there on the shore, and had no word of another ship to take the place of the Jean. Of late he had been worse than usual, for he had ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... impotent &c 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c v.; sapless, strengthless^, powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic^, asthenic^; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate^, womanly. frail, fragile, shattery^; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy^; drooping, tottering &c v.. broken, lame, withered, shattered, shaken, crazy, shaky; palsied &c 158; decrepit. languid, poor, infirm; faint, faintish^; sickly &c (disease) 655; dull, slack, evanid^, spent, short-winded, effete; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... he fingered the horrible ridged cicatrice, he could see the boundless ocean and the boundless blue sky from a wretched cranky canoe-shaped boat, in which certain Arab, Somali, Negro, and other gentlemen were proceeding all the way from near Berbera to near Aden with large trustfulness in Allah and with certain less creditable ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... sir—thanking you kindly; it ain't many suvrings as comes my way—though I hate the sight on it, I do. I'd like to stave a hole in the bottom of that there cranky concern; it ain't safe, and that's the fact. There'll be another accent out of it one of these fine days and no coming to next time. But, Lord bless you, it's her way of pleasuring herself. She's a queer un is Miss Beatrice, and she gets queerer and queerer, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... conveniently to hand. The wind freshened perceptibly while I was thus engaged, veering into the southeast, so that all the cloth I dare spread was the jib and a closely reefed mainsail. The boat acted a bit cranky, but, confident she would stand up under this canvas, I crawled back to the tiller, eased off the sheet a trifle more, and waited results. We shipped a bucket full of water, and then settled into a good pace, a cream of surge along our port gunwale, and a white wake astern. The woman kept on bailing ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... to the house, leapt on to the sill of the unused back-kitchen, some five feet from the ground, pushed with his paw at the cranky old hatchment, which was its only covering; and, in a second, the boy, straining out of the window the better to see, heard the rattle of the boards as the ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... things. He wants me to give up buying him the fur-trimmed overcoat and get a coat and shoes for Goodman's children, as they were praying so hard for them, but I have enough to do without clothing other people's children. If Goodman would quit his cranky notions and use his talents for people who could understand him, instead of preaching to those ragamuffins he might now be receiving a magnificent salary and ...
— Children's Edition of Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer • S. B. Shaw
... raft, I was not long in discovering it to be a very cranky thing, so that I had to keep my hold of the rope in order to maintain my balance. But in a short time I was able to defeat the raft's attempts to turn turtle, and then, kneeling on it, still gripping the rope, I looked anxiously for signs that the attention of ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... mid-summer he can take me right into the interior, in that cranky red car. And I don't know but what I am ready to risk it; there are places I'd like to see—where he was caught his first winter in a blizzard, and where he picked up the nuggets for my necklace. You remember it—don't you?—Mrs. Daniels. I wore it that night ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... here just yet. The person I should wish for is not easy to find. I myself know a great deal more than you do, and I have my own ideas with regard to instruction. I may as well tell you at once that I am a very severe teacher, and somewhat cranky, too. A girl who does not know her lessons is apt to find herself seated at my left side. Now, my right side is sunshiny and pleasant; but my left side faces due northeast. I think that will explain everything to you. We will meet in the schoolroom to-morrow ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... do," said Moriarty to me—"better hang your socks on Nosey Alf's crook to-night. His place is fifteen mile from here, and very little out of your way. Ill-natured, cranky beggar, Alf is—been on the pea—but there's no end of grass in his paddock. And I say—get him to give you a tune or two on his fiddle. Something splendid I believe. He's always getting music by ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... at her desk when he came out, and something about her appearance caused the old warrior to look twice. He was exactly on time, but the judge could wait. He was a cranky old scoundrel anyhow, was Judge Halloran, and it would do him good to cool his heels for a few minutes. Tom paused with his hand upon ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... bulb grower; that's why he won't make the profit he might; he comes of generations of growers, and they venerate their bulbs. He has cranky notions of how things ought to be done, and no other way will ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... to know what things look like, old Pam, so I'll try and tell you. In the first place, it's just a glorious spring day. At the back of the cranky bit of a ruined farm where we have our diggings (by the way, you may always go back at night and find half your bedroom shot away—that happened to me the other night—there was a tunic of mine still hanging on the door, and when you opened the door, nothing but a hole ten feet deep full ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cross and cranky, Nelly. At any rate I've no business to be here this minute. I started for Annapolis, but my wits got wool-gathering, I reckon, and I let Shashai turn in here without noticing where he was going. Aunt Katherine will reach Annapolis before I do and—then—" and Peggy stopped and wagged her head ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... wild hunting expedition. This first excursion was not to be a very formidable one; it was only a canoe trip several miles up the coast, to a place where the wild ducks and geese were numerous. Like all white people, on their first introduction to the birch canoe, they thought it a frail, cranky boat, and were quite disgusted with it, and some of the tricks it played upon them, on some of their first attempts to manage it. For example, Frank, who prided himself on his ability in pulling an oar, and in managing ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... wo'th a cent," he whined, as they took their places in the cranky pirogue; "but I might jes' happen to kill a squir'l or ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... with compassion. How little romance there was in a Japanese girl's life! O'Kami San, so young and pretty and charming, too, was about to enter into years of drudgery perhaps; the wife of a cranky old man, and here she was accepting her fate as calmly as a novitiate about to take the vows for life ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... to do to that—man," cried Betty, trying to think of something bad enough to call the cranky farmer, who still urged his team along squarely in the middle of the road and refused to give an inch. "Only I'd like to scare him to death. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... a strand of gray hair will be invited. As for the lame, the halt and the blind, they can come next week. I've just been looking you over, Peter; you are getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age"—I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—"is no better. You are both of you getting into a ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... but if it wasn't for their goin's on, trying to snatch a kiss now and then, life would seem awful tame for us poor, patient women. And even the worst of 'em's better'n none at all. Look at me! I had the luck to get a cross-grained, cranky one, as you know. Poor Seth!" She drew a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her eyes. "But you got to admit, Sadie, that even he was white enough to up and die before I got too old for other gentlemen to take ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... motor over, first of all. Perhaps it's a small matter, and I can fix it up. Sometimes these new machines act a bit cranky. Want of oil will even bring about trouble. Jerry, you take a look with me. Two heads are often better than ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... and Hella and Verbenowitsch because we shan't see Frau Doktor M. any more for nearly 3 months. I only had 2 in History and Natural History, but 1 in everything else. Franke says: Anyone who is not in Professor Igel-Nigl's good books can find out that he's cranky and stupid and he could never get a one. Father is quite pleased. Of course Dora has got only ones and Hella has three twos. Lizzi, I think, has 3 or 4. Father has given each of us a 2 crown piece, we can blow it, he says and Mother has given ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... satisfaction, the prescribed toll of unexacting labour, a little sensual pleasure, a little rational conversation, a cool argument, a judicious appreciation of all that the intellect can apprehend. Into this existence burst suddenly a cranky fanatic, with a religion. To the Greek it seemed that the breath of life had blown through the grave, imperial streets. Yet nothing in Rome was changed, save one immortal, or mortal, soul. The same waking eyes opened on the same objects; yet all was changed; all was charged with meaning. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... without slipping away for good; and finally, the foot-warmers are miserable wrecks, hingeless, charred, broken away about the holes. It would be impossible to give an idea of the old, rotten, shaky, cranky, worm-eaten, halt, maimed, one-eyed, rickety, and ramshackle condition of the furniture without an exhaustive description, which would delay the progress of the story to an extent that impatient people would not pardon. The red tiles of the ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... here already, sir," returned the ferryman, rising. "Most of my boats have gone into winter quarters, your Honor. The Mayflower went into dry dock last week to be calked up; the Pinta and the Santa Maria are slow and cranky; the Monitor and the Merrimac I haven't really had time to patch up; and the Valkyrie is two months overdue. I cannot make up my mind whether she is lost or kept back by excursion steamers. Hence I really don't know ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... you he wouldn't do any harm," the man repeated in irritated tones; "he will be with me most of the time, and not around the house. You're getting too cranky for living, Lettice." He set the dog upon his feet. "What I'll call him I don't know; he's as gritty as—why, yes, I do, I'll call him General Jackson. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the salt scent of the sea mingling with the pungent fragrance of the yellow gorse, hot with the sun ... surely the Cornish coast was a very favoured spot, and the Scilly Isles, to which passage could be taken in a queer, cranky boat, were indeed the Fortunate Isles, cradled by the bluest, most magical, most romantic waters ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... and be just as I was before I married. There are some of my clothes still hanging up in my old room, I shall put them on, and grub in the garden, rake, weed, and mow. Our poor machine was dreadfully cranky before I left; I should think it has fallen to pieces by now, but I mean to have a try. Mother's bit of front lawn is the pride of her heart. Black Bess will meet me at the station, and Rover—dear affectionate dog. I shall swing on the gate and ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... very nearly so—and all that is left to the luckless wanderer in search of the beautiful, is to ogle the beauties of Dame-street, who are shopkeepers in Grafton-street, or the beauties of Grafton-street, who are shopkeepers in Dame-street. But, confound it, how cranky I am getting—I must be tremendously hungry. True, it's past six. So now for my suit of sable, and ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... of a gregarious temperament, and missed his fellow-lodger. The cranky little man, with all his soured outlook, must still have had some power of evoking sympathy, some attractive element in his composition. He concealed it under sharp words and moody bitterness, but it must still have been there, for Westray felt his loss more than he had thought possible. ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... always distinguish the back of Marie-Joseph from the others. To-day she brought me a present of milk and potatoes, and we sat down to chat over a cup of coffee—nay, four cups of coffee, for Marie-Joseph has no cranky ideas about abstinence from food and drink, and I must, perforce, pretend I have none. I love her and her ways, though she always manages to disturb me when I wish to work or think. Writing and thinking are not work to Marie-Joseph. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... "It makes me cranky," observed Whitney, "to see the way a lot of the girls seem to notice just such fellows as Prescott, Darrin, Reade, Dalzell—-fellows who, by rights, ought to be through with their schooling and earning wages as respectful grocery clerks or ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... There was a cranky Governor— His name it wasn't Waterman. For office he was hotter than The love of any lover, nor Was Boruck's threat of aiding him Effective in dissuading him— This pig-headed, big-headed, singularly ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... in reeds, and at a loss which way to go, the soft ripple of breaking waves struck my ear like sweet music. The sea was telling me of its proximity. Carefully balancing myself, I stood up in the cranky canoe, and peering over the grassy thickets, saw before me the broad waters of Helena Sound. The fresh salt breeze from the ocean struck upon my forehead, and nerved me to a renewal of my efforts to get within a region of higher land, and to a ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... in dreamland?" she demanded. "When you're just irritable, short-tempered, cranky Matthew Pole. What's she going to ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... bitterness in the tone with which he gave this advice; he threw out his hands impatiently, and then flung himself back, so that the cranky chair creaked and tottered. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... picture-collecting; the railroad wrecker gathers rare editions of the Bible; and tens of thousands of humbler Americans carry their inherited idealism into the necessarily sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly organized country, suppress it for fear of being thought "cranky" or "soft," and then, in their imagination and all that feeds their imagination, give it vent. You may watch the process any evening at the "movies" or the melodrama, on the trolley-car or in the easy chair ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... turned with a dignified drawing-together of his dressing- gown and moved back. Apparently, the renovation of a cranky lamp was the whole content of the Captain's summons ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... my own days of captivity I had discovered a little passage along the gutter into Bows and Costigan's window, and I sent Jack Alias along this covered way, not without terror of his life, for it had grown very cranky; and then, after a parley, let in Mons. Morgan ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... excellent for wear in wet boats. When, in order to change my uncomfortable position, I placed both legs on one side, the edge of the prahu nearly touched the water and the Dayaks would cry out in warning. I have not on other rivers in Borneo met with prahus quite as cranky as these. At the Bugis settlement I bought fifty delicious pineapples at a very moderate price ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... he's so awfully important just because he's making a fool of himself. Most boys attract more attention the first time they kick over the traces than they ever did in all their lives before. 'Tisn't any wonder to me that the elder brother gets a little cranky when he sees the fuss made over the prodigal, first because he's gone wrong and then because he's going right, same as decent folks have been doing all ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... that no man may thoroughly understand a ship—after all. I will say that new ships are cranky and unsteady; that old and seasoned ships have their little crochets, their little fussinesses that their skippers must learn and humour if they are to get anything out of them; that even the best ships ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... which (man and tackle included) we were to pay two dollars per diem. It was a canoe of the smallest, built to hold one person besides the man at the small oars. It was impossible to stand up in such a cranky craft, and your seat was about 6 in. from the bottom boards. No wonder all the fishing was done by hand-lines. The local method was simplicity itself. To fifty yards of line of the thickness of sash-cord was attached a large Colorado spoon, armed with one big triangle, and mounted ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... knowed what his poor, cranky system needed, an' I knowed how to get it into him, especially as he'd never tasted meat in all his life. From that time on, he never saw no meat on our table, nor no chickens, nor sea scavengers, nor ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... limited enough, either way," Mr. Valentin retorted easily. He had no hankering for the East and no grudge against fate for making him a Western man malgre lui. "I've known kickers who didn't appear to grow much, except to grow cranky," he said. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... standing around to bear, and then he ran for the train, which had just come in. Soon he and his brothers were on board and off, leaving poor Ricks to be heartily laughed at by those who had observed his sudden terror. It was many a day before the cranky station master heard the last ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... making arrangements for the transport of our safari, when it should arrive, we entrusted ourselves to a small boy and a cranky boat. An hour later, clad in tropical white, with cool drinks at our elbows, we sat in easy-chairs on the veranda ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... deal better than that—and so do we, too!—you're only cranky! a little cranky, Frank, and given to defending any folly you commit without either rhyme or reason—as when you tried to persuade me that it is the safest thing in nature to pour gunpowder out of a canister into a pound flask, with a lighted cigar between your teeth; to demonstrate which ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... know she'd give it up if she knew I wanted it! She's an unselfish little thing. She took it because it was all that was left when Laura disposed of the 'soulful poet' part," Ivy said. Then after a silence, "I wonder why bad health makes me cranky and selfish and envious, instead of patient and meek, like the little ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... few words as to Tom the hunter? Was ever a keener, a more patient, a more self-possessed, and consequently a more successful, sportsman? He it was who, from a cranky punt (no white man would venture out to sea in such a craft,) at three o'clock one windy afternoon, harpooned an immense bull-turtle, which towed him towards the Barrier Reef, into the track of the big steamers ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... States. Our Anglo-Saxon element think normally; and the vast majority of our German citizens have always been on the sensible and morally right side of national questions—there's nothing long-haired or cranky about them. I like the Germans because they don't hanker after the unknown. I believe that most reading Americans—that is to say three-fourths of all—feel toward England as Irving and Hawthorne did.—But, from your description, that must be ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... started his first day with a superior manner of knowing all about leather and the ways of cranky customers. He ended it with a depressed feeling that he knew nothing about anything, that he couldn't keep up the holiday pace of the younger clerks—and that the assistant buyer of the department had been watching him. He walked home with strained, weary shoulders, but as he turned ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... course I know next to nothing of it myself. Ann says it's that makes it so dangerous for women folks to worry at their brains too much, for she's taken notice, she says, that mostly they're sickly or cranky that works too much that way. Hard to get on with, she says they are, the best ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... "the faithful Mike, who has been in charge here ever since Mr. Butterwood took to travelling about for the good of his rheumatisms? Why, my dear young lady, the whole country looks upon Mike as a pattern man-of-all-work. He may be getting a little cranky and independent in his notions, for he has been pretty much his own master for years, but I am sure you could find no one to take his place who would be more ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... motherless baby over here; and he said: 'Peter, this is what you need in the house.' Those were his very words: 'Peter, this is what you need in the house.' And, sure enough, the very first time I carried her up those stairs over there, all my fine, cranky, crotchety bachelor notions flew out of my head. I knew then, in a flash, that all my knowledge and all my queer ideas of life were just humbug! I had missed the Child in the House. Yes,"—his voice dropped ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the gang lived in apartment buildings with back yards only designed for clothes-drying apparatus, and that the other half lived in houses built upon so cramped an acreage that the yards were no fun to play in. But grown-ups were in the habit of committing such oversights—especially the skinny, cranky ones. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... vehemently championed was away on detached service, and Canker really did not know just what to do, and was too proud and sensitive to seek advice. He was a gallant soldier in the field, but a man of singularly unfortunate disposition,—crabbed, cranky, and suspicious; and thus it resulted that he, too, joined the little band of Ray haters, despite the fact that he felt ashamed of himself for ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... crank, and Jakie's a waxed angel," she surrendered with a little grimace. "You think so now, but that's because you are being led astray by your appetites, like all men. You just wait: You'll be homesick for a sight of that fat, bald-headed, cranky old Patsy bouncing along on the mess-wagon and swearing in Dutch at his horses, before you're through. If you're not so completely gone over to Jakie that you will eat nothing but what he has cooked, come on up to the house. The Countess is making a twogallon freezer of ice-cream for ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... will be a handsome bridegroom. Is anybody but you going to stand up with him? Well, then it will be a handsome wedding party." She made a droll face at Emil, who flushed. "Frank," Marie continued, flicking her horse, "is cranky at me because I loaned his saddle to Jan Smirka, and I'm terribly afraid he won't take me to the dance in the evening. Maybe the supper will tempt him. All Angelique's folks are baking for it, and all Amedee's ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... I began removing every tree, bush, vine, and plant of medicinal value from the woods around to my land; I set and sowed acres in ginseng, knowing I must nurse, tend, and cultivate seven years. If my neighbours had understood what I was attempting, what do you think they would have said? Cranky and lazy would have become adjectives too mild. Lunatic would have expressed it better. That's close the general opinion, anyway. Because I will not fell my trees, and the woods hide the work I do, it is generally ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... hobbies, and was a well-read man and superior to those around him; and perhaps this was the cause of his holding himself aloof from most of the villagers. They termed him "cranky and cracked," but his goods were always acceptable, and he was thoroughly successful in his business. When his shop was closed he would go out on the hills, and there spend his time studying geology and botany. He knew the name of every plant and insect, and the strata of the ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... platform below. It was in this oak that we decided to build our house. It was a very inaccessible spot, and to reach it we had to make a wide detour around the back of the hill, and through the fields of a cranky farmer, who more than once threatened to fill us with bird shot for trespassing on his property. How were we to carry all our building materials up to this great height? One would think that the difficulties would be enough ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... in her face, which touched Pitt again curiously. Somehow, the contrast between his own strong, varied, rich, and active life, with its abundance of resources and enjoyments, careless and satisfied,—and this little girl alone at home with her cranky father, and no variety or change or outlook or help, struck him painfully. It would hardly have struck most young men; but Pitt, with all his rollicking waywardness and self-pleasing, had a fine fibre in him which could feel things. Then Esther's nature, he knew, was one rich in possibilities; ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... the trials of the young soul going through it, a suffering so great that suicide is often seriously contemplated as the only solution. And all this turmoil is kept within the heart of the sufferer. To the outsider the boy, the girl, is merely "cranky" or "contrary." If not constantly nagged at and reproved for his awkwardness at home, he is sure to have it ridiculed by his schoolmates, particularly by those of the opposite sex. He cannot help being ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... were all ashore and looking around, before Bandy-legs managed to jump out of his cranky cedar canoe. He acted as though glad at least to have arrived safe and sound, ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... haven't enough trouble trying to keep a cranky man like her pa in good humour, without being plagued by Julia Elizabeth"—she paused, for there was a knock at the door.—"If," said she to the door, "you are a woman with ferns in a pot I don't want you, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... setting up your cranky opinions against the hard facts? The plain truth is that everybody who ever heard of Stanhope is going to give you the cold shoulder for a dog; we can ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... old crank, and Jakie's a waxed angel," she surrendered with a little grimace. "You think so now, but that's because you are being led astray by your appetites, like all men. You just wait: You'll be homesick for a sight of that fat, bald-headed, cranky old Patsy bouncing along on the mess-wagon and swearing in Dutch at his horses, before you're through. If you're not so completely gone over to Jakie that you will eat nothing but what he has cooked, come on up to the house. The ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... the windpipe. Its very life-breath would be at our disposal. Ha! What about revolution, then? What about popular discontent, and stiff-necked legislators, and cranky editors? What about commercial and financial rivals? What about these damned Socialists, with their brass-lunged bazoo, howling about monopoly and capitalism and all the rest of it? Eh, what? Just one squeeze," here Flint ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... already on two or three occasions encountered sufficiently rough seas to give me great confidence in the seaworthiness of my canoe, which, though I had ribbed and decked fore and aft, every Indian who saw it thought unfit for the expedition, being, they said, too small, weak and cranky. I wished they could have seen her ride the great seas which come rolling in like mountains, before we reached land again. Ben Melin, a sailor of thirteen years experience on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... it's mainly because I don't want a husband. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... of them dugouts. One was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky. The other three were good. The two old canoes were lashed together, and the cranky one was lashed to one of the others. Kermit with two paddlers went in the smallest of the good canoes; Colonel Rondon and Lyra with three other paddlers in the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... plainly," he said. "'What's the matter with you, Dora?' I asked her. 'Don't you like me any more?' And she got wild and said she hated me like poison. She never talked to me like that before. It was a different Dora. She was always downhearted, cranky. The slightest thing made her yell or cry with tears. It got worse and worse. Oh, it was terrible! We quarreled twenty times a day and the children cried and I thought I ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... repented of his irritation a moment later and soothed the waiter's wounded feelings by a rich tip. The boy ran out to open the cab door for his strange customer and looked after him, wondering whether the man was a cranky millionaire or merely a poet. For Joseph Muller, by name and by reputation one of the best known men in Vienna, was by sight unknown to all except the few with whom he had to do on the police force. His appearance, in every way inconspicuous, and the fact that ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... library was a book-case which my father had recently purchased of some cranky inventor and had not filled. It was in shape and size something like the old-fashioned "wardrobes" which one sees in bed-rooms without closets, but opened all the way down, like a woman's night-dress. It had glass doors. I had recently laid out my parents and they ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... said the Squire. He felt that the vagaries of the affections was too deep a subject for him. "Anyhow, Looizy, I don't want no old maids and bachelors potterin' round this farm getting cranky notions in their heads. Look at the professor. Why, a good woman would have taken the nonsense out ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... nearly so—and all that is left to the luckless wanderer in search of the beautiful, is to ogle the beauties of Dame-street, who are shopkeepers in Grafton-street, or the beauties of Grafton-street, who are shopkeepers in Dame-street. But, confound it, how cranky I am getting—I must be tremendously hungry. True, it's past six. So now for my suit of sable, and then ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... a garden full of rosebuds; nobody with a strand of gray hair will be invited. As for the lame, the halt and the blind, they can come next week. I've just been looking you over, Peter; you are getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age"—I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—"is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... up to the house, leapt on to the sill of the unused back-kitchen, some five feet from the ground, pushed with his paw at the cranky old hatchment, which was its only covering; and, in a second, the boy, straining out of the window the better to see, heard the rattle of the boards as the ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... you're home," Kenny wrote to Garry in September. "What about the car? Come up for a while and drive it home. We can do some sketching. Brian's full of Irish melancholy and waiting for word from Whitaker. He may go any time. Joan's tired and busy with clothes. Don's cranky and I'm rather at a loose end, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... on the floor a minute and then was silent. He had been given only a mild shock, but it had been enough for his fluttery, cranky heart. ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... little best, and put him away forever in the coral. Rosie took on about it terrible—so terrible that I think something must have broken in her brain. She was never the same afterwards; not that she was always mourning, I don't mean that—but she grew cranky and queer and changed in every way. She would start into a fury at a word, and throw things about, and scream. She would tell the most awful lies about how I had treated her, and invent things that never took ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... efficiency. Then all three went out to the flitter. A tiny speedster, really; a torpedo bearing the stubby wings and the ludicrous tail-surfaces, the multifarious driving-, braking-, side-, top-, and under-jets so characteristic of the tricky, cranky, but ultra-maneuverable breed. But this one had something that the ordinary speedster or flitter did not carry; spaced around the needle beak there yawned the open ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... a cranky cuss with side-whiskers. He used to wear a stove-pipe hat. I think he was a chemist. Whenever he showed up he would run us kids out of the building. I ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Caravajal (then in Washington seeking aid for the Republic) would answer the purpose, persuaded him to report to me in New Orleans. Caravajal promptly appeared, but he did not impress me very favorably. He was old and cranky, yet, as he seemed anxious to do his best, I sent him over to Brownsville, with credentials, authorizing him to cross into Mexico, and followed him myself by the next boat. When I arrived in Brownsville, matters in Matamoras ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... just as I inhale the health and odour of fir woods. I love their men, those genuine mariners, the right diviners of sky, coast, and tides, who know exactly what their craft will do in any combination of circumstances as well as you know the pockets of your old coat; men who can handle a stiff and cranky lump of patched timbers and antique gear as artfully as others would the clever length of hollow steel ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... hair out at the roots & he wares meny a horrible scar upon his body, inflicted with mop-handles, broom-sticks, and sich. Occashunly they git mad & scald him with bilin hot water. When he got eny waze cranky thay'd shut him up in a dark closit, previsly whippin him arter the stile of muthers when thare orfsprings git onruly. Sumptimes when he went in swimmin thay'd go to the banks of the Lake & steal all his close, thereby ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... and with a deck-load of lumber she's cranky and topheavy. I'm warning you, Joey. Remember he is a poor ship owner who ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... chance, sometimes he'd hurry through as quick as he could, and sometimes he'd loiter and listen very intently. I rather joked about this at first, till I found it really distressed him; then, of course, I pretended not to notice. We're all cranky somewhere, and for that matter, I can't ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... Joyce explained as they hurried away. "But it wouldn't do any good, I guess, if we knew. We couldn't go and question them, for it's plain from what the agent said that they don't want to talk about it. My, but that man was cranky, wasn't he!" ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... Wilkie objected to keeping a cranky old body like Mysy in his house Cree came back to Thrums and took a single room with a hand-loom in it. The flooring was only lumpy earth, with sacks spread over it to protect Mysy's feet. The room contained two dilapidated old coffin-beds, ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... not in the racing class, Frank was well satisfied with her, for he had discovered that she possessed many good qualities. She could be held pretty near to the wind without yawing and she was not at all cranky, nor did she require much weather helm. Of course, she could not run as near to the wind as a cutter-rigged yacht of the racing class, but she could do ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... our school about the best going, and we aren't going to let anyone else think differently, if we can help it; are we, Ruth? So, if a girl takes it into her head to be rude and cranky to the teachers, or other girls, she finds herself in a corner pretty quick, I ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... thrust his head in at the door and began the subject of the carriage all over again. I repeated my orders. He said, "Kharasho" (Good), and disappeared. We dallied over our tea. We watched the wharfinger's boys trying to drown themselves in a cranky boat, like the young male animals of all lands; we listened to their shrill little songs; we counted the ducks, gazed at the peasants assembled on the brow of the steep hill above us, on which the town ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... section in the Legislature. It was entirely characteristic of him to vote against the adoption of the Federal Constitution, on the ground that it authorized other people to tax Carolinians; which he said was taxation without' representation. That was just like a narrow, cranky, opinionative, unmanageable Calhoun. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... stubbed her toe, plunging forward and tilting the litter so that it turned turtle, like a cranky hammock. With a little scream of alarm Hazel Holland pitched out headfirst and took a graceful, curving dive into the top of a tree just below them. The others saw her feet disappear in the foliage, heard a muffled cry for ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... since the Beauty died she's never touched a drop o' gin. But she's turned quite cranky. She's got it into her head that the relations of the Beauty are going to send her to prison for kidnapping; and she thinks that every one that comes near her is a policeman in plain clothes. She's just lying in bed to keep herself out of the way ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... title bear a few words as to Tom the hunter? Was ever a keener, a more patient, a more self-possessed, and consequently a more successful, sportsman? He it was who, from a cranky punt (no white man would venture out to sea in such a craft,) at three o'clock one windy afternoon, harpooned an immense bull-turtle, which towed him towards the Barrier Reef, into the track of the big steamers 4 miles to the east. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... be limited enough, either way," Mr. Valentin retorted easily. He had no hankering for the East and no grudge against fate for making him a Western man malgre lui. "I've known kickers who didn't appear to grow much, except to grow cranky," ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... were situated at the extreme end of a dingy, depressing looking street which ran from the Adelphi to the Embankment Gardens. It was a street of private hotels which no one had ever heard of, and where apparently no one ever stayed. A few cranky institutions, existing under the excuse of charity, had their offices there, and a firm of publishers, whose glory was of the past, still dragged out their uncomfortable and profitless existence in a building whose dusty windows and smoke-stained walls ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the weather looked ugly; if the wind should rise, the cranky launch would not be a safe cradle for the night. Damon and I preferred the canoes, for they at least would float if they were capsized. So we stepped into the frail, buoyant shells of bark once more, and danced over the big waves toward the shore. ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... laughter, and in his horrible falsetto squeaked, 'See here, my sweet Signor barber, my excellent Signor surgeon, my honoured Annibal Caracci, my beloved Guido Reni, be off to the devil, and don't ever show yourself here again, if you don't want your legs broken.' Therewith the cranky, knock-kneed old fool laid hold of me with no less an intention than to kick me out of the room, and hurl me down the stairs. But that, you know, was past everything. With ungovernable fury I seized the old fellow and tripped him up, so that ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... of my adventoor. It emejetly sot her into one of her cranky tantrums. Says she, "HIRAM, you've an old fool. Why don't you stay home, where you belong, and not go pokin about the country like a great ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... education than any other American. He has that rarest of educational gifts,—the ability to throw light brilliantly, and yet softly, making his paragraphs both bright and mellow, all without "preaching," without pedantry, and without being cranky.—Journal ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... man had to be able to ride any kind of a log in any water; to propel that log by jumping on it, by rolling it squirrel fashion with the feet, by punting it as one would a canoe; to be skillful in pushing, prying, and poling other logs from the quarter deck of the same cranky craft; as he must be prepared at any and all times to jump waist deep into the river, to work in ice-water hours at a stretch; as he was called upon to break the most dangerous jams on the river, representing, as they did, the accumulation which the jam crew ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... impetuously, "I can shoot better than Allen right now. You ask him if I can't. You ask him what I did with that cranky twenty- two last Sunday up ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... but, anyway, she seemed to take no notice of us and steamed slowly on. We quite expected to fall in with her when we came to the islands, but the actual sight of her has excited us a good deal. She is an ugly, cranky little vessel, painted grey, with one funnel. Davis is contemptuous about her low freeboard forward; says he would rather go to sea in the Dulce. He has her dimensions and armament (learnt from Brassey) at his fingers' ends: one hundred and forty feet by twenty-five, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... in the morning, with his foot on the native heath of his farm, Holcroft's hopefulness and courage always returned. He was half angry with himself at his nervous irritation of the evening before. "If she becomes so cranky that I can't stand her, I'll pay the three months' wages and clear her out," he had concluded, and he went about his morning work with a grim purpose to submit to ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... he proceeded to confute by experience: he had repeatedly been called in to cases of mania described as sudden, and almost invariably found the patient had been cranky for years; which he condensed thus: "His conduct and behaviour for many years previously to any symptom of mental aberration being noticed, had been characterised by actions quite irreconcilable with the supposition of the existence ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... psychological interest in this rowdy corner of a peaceful park. It is typical of England, for one thing. I don't mean to say that tub-thumping is typical of England, but England is certainly the harbour of refuge of the crank. You can see there the crankiest of cranks being as cranky as they know how to be; and you can see also the utterly good-humoured indifference with which the crowds who listen to them regard their crankiness—which also has its meaning. The other evening a middle aged woman of untidy locks was ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... "That I am getting cranky and diffident. I am beginning to get nervous about people's opinion and sensitive to my own eccentricity. It is a sad case for a man who never used to care a straw ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... toyshop! He was carrying a little boy, and conducting two uncommon pretty women to their coach, and he told me afterwards that he had never in his life seen one of the three before, but that he was so taken with them on looking in at the toyshop while they were buying the child a cranky Noah's Ark, very much down by the head, that he had gone in and asked the ladies' permission to treat him to a tolerably correct Cutter there was in the window, in order that such a handsome boy might not grow up with a lubberly ...
— The Wreck of the Golden Mary • Charles Dickens
... another puzzle received from my friend Don Manuel Rodriguez, the cranky miser of New Castile. On New Year's Eve in 1879 he showed me nine treasure boxes, and after informing me that every box contained a square number of golden doubloons, and that the difference between the contents of A and B was the ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... some crumpled up where they had stood like bits of flame-swept paper. Others pitched forward in the bottom of their crafts, while still others stood for a minute swaying from left to right like drunken men, to finally crash over the sides like fallen trees, taking their cranky crafts over with them in their ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... You did well, and next winter you can look up another sour spinster and cranky old lady and make them happy," said Anna, with the approving smile all ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... have been asking yourself all this while just what a fat run is, here is your answer: Tips; a fine train filled with fine ladies and fine gentlemen, not all of them so cranky as X, of Cleveland—thank heaven for that!—though a good many of them have their peculiarities and are willing to pay generously for the privilege ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... Now, sir, in my own days of captivity I had discovered a little passage along the gutter into Bows and Costigan's window, and I sent Jack Alias along this covered way, not without terror of his life, for it had grown very cranky; and then, after a parley, let in Mons. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fairy-land, with its lights, its banners, its lovely girls, uniformed laddies and music "which would make a wooden image dance," she confided to Mrs. Harold, and added: "And do you know, I used to rebel and be so cranky when Miss Arnaud came to give me dancing-lessons when I was a little thing. I just HATED it, and how she ever made me learn I just don't know. But I had to do as she said, and maybe I'm not glad that I DID. Why, Little Mother, suppose I HADN'T learned. ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... or "cranky! cranky!" sounded from all the furniture; there was so much of it, that each article stood in the other's way, to get a look ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... plantation because they were sold and their children were sold. Sometimes their masters were mean and cranky. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... thought, "that cranky Little Johnny should wander over to this end of the garbage and find me in the hole; he will at once set up a squall, and his mother, of course, will think I am hurting him, and, without giving ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... on 'em gets no more, and is not so bad off,—leastways does not show it as he does. But father won't let 'em want, now he knows. Yo' see, Boucher's been pulled down wi' his childer,—and her being so cranky, and a' they could pawn has gone this last twelvemonth. Yo're not to think we'd ha' letten 'em clem, for all we're a bit pressed oursel'; if neighbours doesn't see after neighbours, I dunno who will.' Bessy seemed almost afraid lest Margaret should think they ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a toss of her head, "the on'y differ there is in it is that I am the same as ever I was, an' you have turned crabby an' cranky." ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... mountain-tops to the pastures and plots below, I can always distinguish the back of Marie-Joseph from the others. To-day she brought me a present of milk and potatoes, and we sat down to chat over a cup of coffee—nay, four cups of coffee, for Marie-Joseph has no cranky ideas about abstinence from food and drink, and I must, perforce, pretend I have none. I love her and her ways, though she always manages to disturb me when I wish to work or think. Writing and thinking are not work to Marie-Joseph. She is wholly ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the Lord only knew how much longer thou wouldst ramble about abroad. Well, but thou art a dashing fine fellow, a fine fellow; thou canst still lift ten puds in one hand as of yore, I suppose? Thy deceased father, excuse me, was cranky in some respects, but he did well when he hired a Swiss for thee; thou rememberest, how thou and he had fistfights; that's called gymnastics, isn't it?—But why have I been cackling thus? I have only been keeping Mr. Panshin" (she never called him Panshin, as she ought) ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... rude affair known as a "flat." It was long and narrow, with square ends and sides, and from its cranky motion evidently ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... but what I'd do it myself if I had his salary. He got a scoop last year, and you couldn't speak to him for a month after. Mrs. Foster,—she's one of the biggest guns, you know, a regular cannon,—refurnished her house last summer, and all the New York papers wanted photographs. She went cranky, and said they shouldn't have them. Wouldn't even listen to Lancaster's pleadings. But he hadn't jollied the butler for nothing. She didn't stop here last summer—only came down every two weeks and rearranged every ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... and neglected are the streets of this once wealthy and important city! How degraded its monuments, how faded its glory! In the hot, dusty afternoon, as the cranky old omnibus rattles along the narrow High Street, it appears to awaken echoes in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... support you enny longer? I am your godfather and you are my godchild and it is a legal afare, dad sez, and if ennybody sez ennything about it they will have to deel with me, see? Ennyway mebbe I was kinder cranky about it, and you kinder fibbd, so lets say we had a scrap and shake on it and let it go at that. Lots of the fellers hear have scraps with the girls, and last weak Dinky Odell who is Carl Odells yungist brother had one with Heloise ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... school I ever went to, and it was taught by old Miss Deborah Timberlake, the sister of William Timberlake who shot all those stags' heads you've got hanging in your hall. Nobody ever knew why she taught school. Plenty to eat and drink. William gave her everything that she wanted, but she got cranky when she'd turned sixty, and insisted on being independent. Independent, she said! Pish! Tush. Never learned a word from her. Taught us English history, then Virginia history. As for the rest of America, she used to say it didn't have a history, merely a past. Mentioned the Boston tea party ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... had no home and neither touched tobacco nor strong drink, he should at least be given a trial, and then finished his appeal by telling the superintendent that a young, live and accommodating trainman was preferred by the patrons of every railroad to a cranky one. ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... give it up if she knew I wanted it! She's an unselfish little thing. She took it because it was all that was left when Laura disposed of the 'soulful poet' part," Ivy said. Then after a silence, "I wonder why bad health makes me cranky and selfish and envious, instead of patient and meek, like the little girls in ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... off? Like a cadet doin' solo—afraid to lift her. And they say he's one of the best aces in the R.F.C. Huh! I think he's got the pip! Ever since he first touched his wheels to this 'drome he's been yellin' about his motor bein' cranky. And it's all jake. She takes gas like a race ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... the Ranger's crew, with a top-heavy, cranky ship under their feet, and a Commander who day and night insisted on every rag she could stagger ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... the cranky nature of a canoe at its best, what journeys can be made in them. My skilled canoeman and I used to run wild rapids, and cross over storm swept lakes of large dimensions. We lived on the game we could shoot as we hurried along, ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... right. Your tellin' about sendin' flowe's to that little girl reminds me of the time when I once sent some flowe's, but instead of sending them to a girl, I sent them to a big crusty old man. This man was, to a great extent, an exception to the rule that I have just laid down. That is, he was cranky and ha'd to get next to for nearly ever'body, and sometimes he was pretty rough with me. But I handled him fairly well and always got business out of him, although sometimes I had to use a little jiu jitsu ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... this cranky wretch of a mare had been sideling and fidgeting when Mr. Falkland and his daughter started for their ride; but had gone pretty fairly—Miss Falkland, like my sister Aileen, could ride anything in reason—when ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... wake up and want some water, and begin to talk about Miss Minnie. Oh dear! It's far worse than mutiny—to go to sleep when you are on sentry; and it would be ten times worse to begin to snooze now, with that poor, half-cranky chap in such a state. So I'll have one or two of them finger-stall fruit things and a good drink of water, and then lean back against the side and see how many Malay words I can remember; and if that don't keep a poor ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... sea voyage in an open boat.] At Guiuan I embarked on board an inconveniently cranky, open boat, which was provided with an awning only three feet square, for Tacloban, the chief town of Leyte. After first experiencing an uninterrupted calm, we incurred great danger in a sudden tempest, so that we ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... ran upon the dusty path, On the grass, all wet with dew, And the old goose turned round quickly, She wished an interview. And Kitty said,—"Oh, open your mouth As much as ever you please; I'm going to take your gosling, Because I love to tease Such a cranky, impudent squawker as you." And she laughed right out, and stooped To take the toddling little thing, When down upon her swooped, The angry goose with hisses fierce, And wildly flapping wing, And gave her a nip ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... to the stables. When he was out of sight I jammed Little Nell with the spurs and tore down the drive lickety-cut. I was going over to Harrisbridge to see Nate Golden, but I didn't want to tell Twigg because he was so cranky; always trying to keep me at home. It was Sunday morning, and kind of cloudy and sultry. When I got to the road I turned Nell to the right before I remembered that I'd be in sight of the house for a quarter of a mile. But I wasn't going to ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... was cranky an' foul, she was stubborn an' slow (Let 'er go—let 'er go), An' she shipped it green when it come on to blow; 'Er crews was starved an' their wage was low, An 'er bloomin' owners was ready to faint At a scrape o' pitch or a penn'orth o' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... to the stable yard and swore at the boy for being slow. And he tightened the surcingle himself with such a jerk that the mare plunged and he struck her. He is usually pretty cranky about the way horses is treated, ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... My mood was that known as cranky. We were in the drawing-room, after what we were compelled to call dinner. It had consisted of steak burned to cinders, potatoes soaked to a pulp, and a rice pudding that looked like a poultice the morning after, and possibly tasted like ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... people have struck a rapid pace these days and are growing bold and impudent. The law appears to allow them too much liberty. After our experience of this morning I shall not be surprised at anything that happens—especially in this cranky state of California." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... at home on Zan because he was not contented with the humdrum and monotonous life of a member of a space-pirate community. Piracy was a matter of dangerous take-offs in cranky rocket-ships, to be followed by weeks or months of tedious and uncomfortable boredom in highly unhealthy re-breathed air. No voyage ever contained more than ten seconds of satisfactory action—and all space-fighting took place just out of the atmosphere of ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... in puerile talk with the owner of the canoes at the ferry. The final demand for ferriage across was eight yards of cloth and four fundo* of sami-sami, or red beads; which was at once paid. Four men, with their loads, were permitted to cross in the small, unshapely, and cranky canoes. When the boatmen had discharged their canoes of their passengers and cargoes, they were ordered to halt on the other side, and, to my astonishment, another demand was made. The ferrymen had ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... had a great dignity, the fearlessness of her eyes gave her that. And Mrs. Baynes, too, shrewdly recognized that behind the uncompromising frankness of June's manner there was much of the Forsyte. If the girl had been merely frank and courageous, Mrs. Baynes would have thought her 'cranky,' and despised her; if she had been merely a Forsyte, like Francie—let us say—she would have patronized her from sheer weight of metal; but June, small though she was—Mrs. Baynes habitually admired quantity—gave ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... time that he fingered the horrible ridged cicatrice, he could see the boundless ocean and the boundless blue sky from a wretched cranky canoe-shaped boat, in which certain Arab, Somali, Negro, and other gentlemen were proceeding all the way from near Berbera to near Aden with large trustfulness in Allah and with certain less creditable goods. It was a long, unwieldy ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... old and cranky or something like that?" teased Jane. Her hair was bursting from her cap like an over-ripe thistle, and her cheeks were velvety in a rich glow of early winter tints. She hardly looked too old even for ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... majority of the cooking animals, they behave much more "naturally." They are a merry crowd, ever anticipating a good time, ever jolly, eager, greedy. Or, they are cranky, hungry, starved, miserable, and they turn savage now and then. Some are gluttonous. Many contract indigestion—nature's ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... to think it over good and hard. Remember the fate of Darius Green. It needs a mighty active fellow to manage one of those tipsy, cranky machines. And if you ever should fall out I bet you there'd be an awful ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... was not greatly hampered, as everything had been stored away in shipshape manner, and came conveniently to hand. The wind freshened perceptibly while I was thus engaged, veering into the southeast, so that all the cloth I dare spread was the jib and a closely reefed mainsail. The boat acted a bit cranky, but, confident she would stand up under this canvas, I crawled back to the tiller, eased off the sheet a trifle more, and waited results. We shipped a bucket full of water, and then settled into a good pace, a cream of surge along our port gunwale, and a white wake astern. ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... hearn, on the spot where a temple once stood where they worshipped Diana; not Diana Henzy, Deacon Henzy's sister. Josiah thought I meant her when I spoke on't, and said the idee of anybody worshippin' that cranky old maid, but as I told him it wuz another old maid or bachelor maid, as I spoze she ort to be called, some years older than Diana Henzy. Sez I, "This Diana wuz a great case to live out-doors in groves and mountains." Sez I, "Some say she ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... person I should wish for is not easy to find. I myself know a great deal more than you do, and I have my own ideas with regard to instruction. I may as well tell you at once that I am a very severe teacher, and somewhat cranky, too. A girl who does not know her lessons is apt to find herself seated at my left side. Now, my right side is sunshiny and pleasant; but my left side faces due northeast. I think that will explain everything to you. We will meet in the schoolroom to-morrow at nine o'clock ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... doctor fumed in the conference that he had with Ewbert apart, "he doesn't really need any medicine. There's nothing the matter with him, and I only wanted to give him something to put an edge to his appetite. He's got cranky living here alone; but there is such a thing as starving to death, and that's the only thing Hilbrook's in danger of. If you're going to stay with him—he oughtn't ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... was enveloped in reeds, and at a loss which way to go, the soft ripple of breaking waves struck my ear like sweet music. The sea was telling me of its proximity. Carefully balancing myself, I stood up in the cranky canoe, and peering over the grassy thickets, saw before me the broad waters of Helena Sound. The fresh salt breeze from the ocean struck upon my forehead, and nerved me to a renewal of my efforts to get within a region of higher land, and to ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... right!" turning again to the baseball-captain. "These things are cranky at times. I've had some ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... worry over such things. He wants me to give up buying him the fur-trimmed overcoat and get a coat and shoes for Goodman's children, as they were praying so hard for them, but I have enough to do without clothing other people's children. If Goodman would quit his cranky notions and use his talents for people who could understand him, instead of preaching to those ragamuffins he might now be receiving a magnificent salary and ...
— Children's Edition of Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer • S. B. Shaw
... "No, merely cranky like all the Vallincourts. He's in a community, joined a brotherhood, you know, and proposes to spend the rest of his days repenting his sins and making his peace with heaven. I've no patience with the fool!" continued the old lady irascibly. "He marries to please himself and then ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... were his associates, Kid Blaney, Stormy Longton, Holy Dick, and Cranky Herefer. Where were Pete Clancy and Nick Devereux, Kate Seton's hired men? They were all absent. So was Kate herself. Ah, yes, he had heard she had gone to Myrtle. Anyway, her sister, Helen, was there—with Mrs. John Day. Where was her beau—Charlie ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... just four civilised houses in the whole place, counting this," said he. "There's the laird's—and saving the dear doctor's presence I must say his cousin is a damned queer fish, besides being as poor as he's cranky, and there are the two ministers, only one's away and the other's as dry as my own throat's getting. What do you say to a ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... all canoes have, I understand," Bristles chuckled. "They just watch till you're not lookin', and then chuck you overboard. Some of 'em are worse than a bucking bronco at throwing a feller. But looky here, Billy, how does it come you're in this cranky boat? I'd 'a thought your dad would have told you to leave Buck's ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... a canoe turns over it does not sink. Some experts can right a capsized canoe and clamber in over the side even while swimming in deep water. The seaworthiness of a canoe depends largely upon its lines. Some canoes are very cranky and others can stand a lot of careless usage without capsizing. One thing is true of all, that accidents occur far more often in getting in and out of a canoe than in the act of sailing it. It is always ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... of the patient stated that she was like other girls, and very good at school. At 16 she became quieter, less energetic. She came to America at 17. After arriving here she has seemed low spirited, cranky and faultfinding. She often complained of indefinite stomach trouble and headaches; when at home she often had a cloth around her head. The informant recalled that she said, "I wish I could get sick for a long time and get either cured or die." However, she worked. For one and a half years prior ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... medicatrix naturae. There'll never be another war between England and the United States. Our Anglo-Saxon element think normally; and the vast majority of our German citizens have always been on the sensible and morally right side of national questions—there's nothing long-haired or cranky about them. I like the Germans because they don't hanker after the unknown. I believe that most reading Americans—that is to say three-fourths of all—feel toward England as Irving and Hawthorne did.—But, from your description, that must be ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the scale of the work the cheaper the power will work out. But the Khedive's holding back. It may be just a temporary whim—may be all right again to-morrow. But you never know. And if you think Ferdinand's the man to give in to a cranky Khedive, you're much mistaken. His idea now is to raise all the capital he can lay hands on, and buy him out! What do you say to that? Buy the Khedive clean out of the company. It's a large order. And if I were you, old man, as soon as the shares go up again a bit, I'd sell out some of ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... Stanley and Livingstone agreed to make a voyage on Lake Tanganyika, one of the chief objects of which was to settle the long mooted point as to whether the Rusizi river is an effluent or an influent. They embarked in a somewhat cranky canoe, hollowed-out of a mvule-tree, which carried sixteen rowers, Selim, Ferajji, the cook, and two ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... tip I have received from a passenger during my service was 2 cents. This amount I received from a rather cranky individual, who when I went to brush him off handed me two copper cents and followed them up with the remark that some of us porters needed calling down and some needed knocking down. My opinion ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... charge here ever since Mr. Butterwood took to travelling about for the good of his rheumatisms? Why, my dear young lady, the whole country looks upon Mike as a pattern man-of-all-work. He may be getting a little cranky and independent in his notions, for he has been pretty much his own master for years, but I am sure you could find no one to take his place who would be more trustworthy or ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... unexacting labour, a little sensual pleasure, a little rational conversation, a cool argument, a judicious appreciation of all that the intellect can apprehend. Into this existence burst suddenly a cranky fanatic, with a religion. To the Greek it seemed that the breath of life had blown through the grave, imperial streets. Yet nothing in Rome was changed, save one immortal, or mortal, soul. The same waking eyes opened on the same objects; ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... shirt with collar attached, and blucher boots. He gave out a hymn in his quiet, natural way, said a prayer, gave out another hymn, read a chapter from the Bible, and then gave out another hymn. They liked to sing, out in those places. The Southwicks used to bring a cranky little harmonium in the back of their old dog-cart, and Clara Southwick used to accompany the hymns. She was a very pretty girl, fair, and could play and sing well. I used to think she had the sweetest voice ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... salt scent of the sea mingling with the pungent fragrance of the yellow gorse, hot with the sun ... surely the Cornish coast was a very favoured spot, and the Scilly Isles, to which passage could be taken in a queer, cranky boat, were indeed the Fortunate Isles, cradled by the bluest, most magical, most romantic ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... namely, that they might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things—one who, moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for certain labours—once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all that, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... and will pay in the end. I am old and lonesome, and want somebody to speak to besides the cat—somebody to sit at table and say good-morning to me. In short, I want you for my son, or grandson, if you like that better. I shall be queer, and cranky, and hard to get along with at times, but I shall mean well always. I shall give you a thousand dollars a year to manage my affairs, and when I die I shall divide with you and Bessie. I have made a new will to that effect this very morning, so you see I ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... think," said Jinny dramatically, "of marrying some man you've never seen—the way that lovely girl is doing. Suppose she doesn't like him? Suppose he's dull and cranky and mean and greedy? Suppose he bores her? Suppose she actually hates him? Why, Jack, it's horrible! And yet ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... is elementary and industrial. They should be instructed for the work to be done. Many a colored farmer boy or mechanic has been spoiled to make a foppish gambler or loafer, a swaggering pedagogue or a cranky homiletician. Men may be spoiled by education, even as they are spoiled by illiteracy. Education is the preparation for a future work; hence men should be educated with special reference to ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... ten girls in the store had little pork-chop-and-fried-onion dreams every night of becoming Mrs. Ramsay. For, next year old Bachman was going to take him in for a partner. And each one of them knew that if she should catch him she would knock those cranky health notions of his sky high before the wedding ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... her enthusiasm, caught the girl again in her arms. "You dear, sweet thing! I wish I had made a big party for you; you're too fine to be wasted on three cranky old scientists." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... your sarvice," replied the urchin, giving me a familiar nod. "'Ope your leg ain't so cranky as it wos, sir. ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... and not a thing have I found stowed away anywhere. It isn't often that he's left to himself, for when I get my midday sleep Mrs. Wendover sits with him; or, if he's cranky, and wants to be alone, she stays in the next room, with the door ajar between them; and Robert, the groom, is on duty in the passage, in case ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... be too English in your ways, Henry, he wrote to his son, and I want you at home for a while. There's a young fellow called Marsh who can tutor you until you go to the University. I met him in Dublin a while since, and I like him. He's a bit cranky, but he's clever and he'll teach you a lot about Ireland. He's up to his neck in Irish things, and speaks Gaelic and wears an Irish kilt. At least he used to wear one, but he's left it off now, partly because he ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... large caverns, not taverns: a mummy in a tavern would frighten all the idlers and ragamuffins out of it. I don't know but what it would be a good plan, but you two dear little twisters and turners of the king's English would frighten that cranky old fellow, Dr. Johnson, into a long sickness, if he was only alive and could hear you. I love to hear you talk; it does me good. Don't go out of the room, but take that pack of cards I gave you to play with, and sit down on the floor and ...
— Little Mittens for The Little Darlings - Being the Second Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... to one window after the other, with the cranky mien and action of a thwarted child, and slammed the shutters together, barring out the sinister sight of his guards. Gavin did not try to prevent him from this act of boyish spite. The master-mind's reaction, in its hour of brokenness, ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... silence. Then, I grieve to say, shame and its twin brother rage took possession of their weak humanity. Oh, yes! It was all of a piece! Why in the name of Folly hadn't he sent for an able-bodied man. Were they to be drowned through his cranky obstinacy? ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... Hester's mother respectfully, "though of course I know next to nothing of it myself. Ann says it's that makes it so dangerous for women folks to worry at their brains too much, for she's taken notice, she says, that mostly they're sickly or cranky that works too much that way. Hard to get on with, she says they are, ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... important just because he's making a fool of himself. Most boys attract more attention the first time they kick over the traces than they ever did in all their lives before. 'Tisn't any wonder to me that the elder brother gets a little cranky when he sees the fuss made over the prodigal, first because he's gone wrong and then because he's going right, same as decent folks have been doing all ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... cases where women wall be thinking it a fine thing to stay at work and support themselves. A lassie that's earned her siller in the works won't feel like going back to washing dishes and taking orders about the sweeping and the polishing frae a cranky mistress. I grant ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... of a restive horse, a cranky boat, or even a trolley-car on rails is difficult enough for the inexperienced, and there are many who would quail before making the attempt; but to the novice in charge of an automobile, some serious damage is likely ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... girl's power of endurance was almost exhausted when her friends turned the kayak violently up. This was well, and Adolay drew a long gasping breath; but now the inexperience of the rescuers came into play, for, being ignorant of the cranky nature of a birch-bark canoe, they acted without the necessary caution, the canoe overturned and they all found themselves in the water. This time Adolay managed to wriggle out of her position, but being unable to swim she could only ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Why how cranky you are, man! If you hate me, hate me in God's name, but don't be so absurd as to forget you're a man, and to act like a child. I listened to you—and why ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... was well known to be what the others called "cranky" in his temper; and when he considered, as he generally did, that he was right, and every one else wrong, there was nothing for it ...
— Archie's Mistake • G. E. Wyatt
... equipment was old and cranky, much of it haywired together, much of it invented from scratch. But Rakkan the Martian, for all his lack of formal education, was unbelievably clever where it came to making apparatus and making it behave, and Friedrichs was a top-flight designer. ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... Dutch lubbers, though I fought three wars wi' them, and they carried off one of my spars, and be hanged to them! If I've let daylight into a few of them, d'ye see, it's all in good part and by way of duty. I've drunk my share—enough to sweeten my bilge-water—but there are few that have seen me cranky in the upper rigging or refusing to answer to my helm. I never drew pay or prize-money that my mate in distress was not welcome to the half of it. As to the Polls, the less said the better. I've been a true ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and others to haul the engine back to the work-shops. It was constantly getting out of order; its plugs, pumps, or cranks, got wrong; it was under repair as often as at work; at length it became so cranky that the horses were usually sent out after it to drag it when it gave up; and the workmen generally declared it to be a "perfect plague." Mr. Blackett did not obtain credit amongst his neighbours ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... would be very wise on your part to study him: Sancho Panza may escape a good many sad experiences by knowing his master's weaknesses. But as Nietzsche no longer belongs to the Quixotic class, as Germany seems to emerge with him from her youthful and cranky nebulosity, you will not even have the pleasure of being thrashed in the company of your Master: no, you will be thrashed all alone, which is an abominable thing for any right-minded human being. "Solamen miseris ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... he laughed, "don't be cranky, Phoebe. Here comes Phares and he'll tell you that your eyes are black when you're cross. Won't ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... ornamented the hearth with bunches of lilacs in a broken pitcher. Twelve yellow chairs, a mahogany stand, a dark rag-carpet, some speckled Pacific sea-shells on the shelf, among which stood a whale's tooth with a drawing of a cranky ship thereon, and an ostrich's egg that hung by a string from the ceiling, were the adornments of the room. When we were dressed for church, we looked out of the window till the bell tolled, and the chaise of the Baxters and Sawyers had driven to the gate; then we went ourselves. Grand'ther ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... for seeing sights? Anybody could see sights—any dreary and dried-up fossil, any crabbed and cranky old maid—the Tower and Westminster Abbey were for those who had nothing better to do. As for herself, her horizon just now was bounded by primrose wreaths and fragrant boxes, and the promise ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... I started paddling down. A little water came through a couple of deep cracks, but not much and I sopped it up with my hat. But oh, jingoes, I never had to sit up so straight in school (not even when the principal came through the class-room) as I did in that cranky old log with a hole in it. And oh, you would have chucked a couple of chuckles if you'd seen me guiding my Indian bark with a bunch of reeds. Honest, they looked like, a ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... poor, cranky system needed, an' I knowed how to get it into him, especially as he'd never tasted meat in all his life. From that time on, he never saw no meat on our table, nor no chickens, nor sea scavengers, nor nothin', but all day, while ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... and cranky bachelor (well impersonated by Spottiswoode Aitken) brings up his orphan nephew with an awkward affection. The nephew is impersonated by Henry B. Walthall. The uncle has an ambition that the boy will become a man of letters. In his attempts at literature the youth is influenced by Poe. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... got cats round his place by the hundred. Spends all his time in hunting meat and catching fish for 'em. Well, most everybody is cranky about some notion or others, whether it's in the city or in the woods, and I reckon that Josh has a right to keep cats if he wants to. No one ever sees him out in civilization now. Cynthy's in the asylum. Most people think ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... mused aloud. "Given ten boys: if nine of them all like each other, and the tenth doesn't like any of them, where does the trouble lie? Allyn you are getting cranky." ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... Judge Van Dorn is running for Judge again: really, Laura, I hope he'll win. George says he will. George says Henry Fenn is the only trouble Mr. Van Dorn will have, though I don't see as Henry could do much. Though George says he will. George says Henry is cranky and mean about the Judge someway and George says Henry is drinking like a fish this spring and his legs is hollow, he holds so much; though he must have been joking for I have heard of hollow horn in cattle, but I never heard of ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... good dancers, diet. That is, they are careful to eat what is best for them, and not everything that may tickle the palate yet raise a rumpus inside one and upset the whole system, and make them cross and cranky and homely ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... real capacity than one would at first suspect; John Macdonald, a Scotsman, whose record was that he had never solved a puzzle himself since the club was formed, though frequently he had put others on the track of a deep solution; Tim Churton, a bank clerk, full of cranky, unorthodox ideas as to perpetual motion; also Harold Tomkins, a prosperous accountant, remarkably familiar with the elegant branch of ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... with an invalid," replied Mrs. Van, easily. "She was one of the cranky kind—middle-aged and none of her family could live with her. You've seen that kind? They wanted she should have a trained nurse and the trained nurse never was born that she could get along with. Trained ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
