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More "Fractious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her room. You will find her very poorly and fractious this afternoon. Will you tell her that you are coming to ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... and more than once while I was talking to her, I saw the tears well up to her eyes. I, at first, thought that her mother had been bothering her, for that Venus was in one of her most exacting and fractious moods, but I soon came to the conclusion that that was not the root of the trouble. Fortunately, Marcia and I were alone for a short time before I left and I endeavored to find out what was weighing ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the lane first. They will be easier to manage on a straight road than in among the trees, if they are fractious." ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... with a woman's? And what rights has he as against hers? No: between man and man all that can be needed is plain speech and manly frankness—aided by a little diplomacy. I'll break you to pieces, James H., if you are fractious; and I've got the weapons to do it with. It is all for your good, and you'll bless me the rest of your life. One thing must be understood: I can't have you coming to my place and practising your wild backwoods manners on my family, and then sneaking off in the ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... something up more than you think, sir; there is indeed. He was that fractious that he wouldn't hold the hosses for me, not for a minute, till I could go ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... the story of the fray had reached Bristol, for birds of the air do carry a matter even from the loneliness of the upward path to the table-land of the Mendips. But the day dragged wearily on to evening, and still no news. Mrs Lambert was very fractious and fault-finding, and complained that a hole in a bit of lace had been so ill mended that she must have every thread unpicked. Then the water for the tea was smoked, and the 'muffin' too much buttered, with a dozen more grievances of a like character, which were simple ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... on the other hand, had gone singing about the house. And really the child had done her best. But how could any one expect her to manage her father and the house, especially on the scraps of time left her by her V.A.D. work? The Squire had been like a fractious child over the compulsory rations. Nobody was less of a glutton—he pecked like a bird; but the proper food to peck at must be always there, or his temper was unbearable. Pamela made various blunders; the household knew hunger for the first time; and the servants began ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... led her classes, but had spent two winters in a State Normal School. She was a trim body, compactly built, had black hair and eyes, and a fresh, rosy complexion that is so characteristic of her class. She could ride a fractious horse, milk, sew, knit and cook, and had followed the plow more than one day; while during harvest and corn-husking she had many a time "made a hand." From this cause she was strong and well knit in all her frame, a perfect picture of young ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... their manes entwined with roses, and necks enchained with garlands, fractious at the shouts that ran along the line, increasing from the clapping of children clothed in white, standing on the steps of the Capitol, to the tumultuous vociferation of hundreds of thousands of enraptured ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... growing, robust patient whose vis vitae is active is amenable to treatment which one with a waning constitution and past mature energies would be unable to endure, and a docile, quiet disposition will act cooperatively with remedial measures which would be neutralized by the fractious opposition of a ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... he "has the intention of asking this young lady to become his wife." During the engagement, however, he contrives to disturb her tranquillity by insisting prematurely on the right divine of husbands, and, as she proves fractious, announces to her, that, much as he loves her, he sees no prospect of future happiness in their union, and that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... cast-iron habit. We abandon ourselves easily to careless acquiescence. We make much of external laws, and, like a mother bemused with torpid beer when she overlays her child, we stifle the law of the soul because its crying is such a nuisance. Like a new baby, a new thought is fractious, restless, and incalculable. It saps our strength; it gives us no peace; it exposes a wider surface to pain. There is something indecent, uncontrolled, and unconscionable about it. Our friends like it best when it is asleep, and they like us ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... we ain't forgot—de time when Miss Lucy lay on her las' bed. She sent for Uncle Bushrod, and she say: 'Uncle Bushrod, when I die, I want you to take good care of Mr. Robert. Seem like'—so Miss Lucy say—'he listen to you mo' dan to anybody else. He apt to be mighty fractious sometimes, and maybe he cuss you when you try to 'suade him but he need somebody what understand him to be 'round wid him. He am like a little child sometimes'—so Miss Lucy say, wid her eyes shinin' in her po', thin face—'but he always been'—dem was her words—'my knight, ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... height of the pass. One foaming stream they forded eight times in three hours, driven from side to side by precipice and windfall; and in places they could advance only by ascending the stream bed. This was risky work on a fractious pony, and some of the riders preferred wading to riding. At noon on the 22nd of August the riders crossed a small stream and set up their tents on the border of a sedgy lake. Then {70} somebody noticed that the lake emptied ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... by the arm, and would have assisted her, but she shook herself free. She felt, and conducted herself, like a fractious child. ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... self-denying kindness of the ladies, and he lightened their hands by giving occupation to the boys. Then came out the result of training at the Refuge. Those who had been some time there showed themselves amenable to discipline; but the late arrivals were more fractious, and difficult to manage. These were the lads "upon whom," as Miss Macpherson says, "the street life had left sore marks." Even when only nearing the American coast, this indomitable lady's spirit is planning ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... flight to London. Lensky, the little, thin man, had got all his life locked into a resistance and could not relax again. He lived in a sort of insane irritability, touchy, haughty to the last degree, fractious, so that as assistant doctor in one of the hospitals he soon became impossible. They were almost beggars. But he kept still his great ideas of himself, he seemed to live in a complete hallucination, where he himself figured ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... get me something.... Some Bovril ... or ... something." Gaga was like a wasted child, not fractious, but fretful and wanting to be petted. Sally shuddered as she took steps to gratify him; and was glad to have some occupation that carried her out of the room and gave her something to do. She was momentarily diverted from thought of Toby; but ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... trying conclusions with her mount. Whether dissatisfaction with the latter or some fear of her own had caused her to cry out might have been less certain, had it not been sure that her eye was at the moment fastened, not upon the fractious steed, but upon the cause ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... happiness was to be out in the open air, away from my mother's presence, and this was only to be obtained when I was ordered out with my little brother Pierre, whom I had to carry as soon as I had done the household work. If Pierre was fractious, my mother would order me out of the house with him immediately. This I knew, and I used to pinch the poor child to make him cry, that I might gain my object, and be sent away; so that to duplicity I added cruelty. Six months ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... rose to meet the doctor with an alacrity that made Edmonson bite his under lip hard. She thought that dressing the wound took a long time that evening, that the physician had never been so slow before, nor the patient so fractious. But to Edmonson it seemed as if she vanished ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... up with a fractious convalescent nearly the whole day, dear Daddy, and I am sure it will be a pleasant change to go and chat with Mr. Radford, who is always serene," she said urgently; and so, more to please her than himself, her father said ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... at the surly gentleman. At this moment he exchanged glances with his brother, the King. The look of each was eloquent. The King's said, "I hate you for being a disloyal brother and a fractious subject; for conspiring to take away part of my kingdom; and who knows but that you are secretly aiming at my throne and my life?" The younger brother's look conveyed this much: "I hate you for ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... "I should prefer not to take the responsibility of advising you," nor "Pray do as you think best"; she simply said, in a tone she might have used to a fractious boy: ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... this fine young German Emperor, who aims to lead the dance, Has a very trying vis-a-vis, that fractious dame, La France, To keep step with that lady, without treading on her train, Would tax Terpsichore herself; he finds the effort vain; Does this fine ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... let you down easy. You know it's the dovery for the Pass-up-the-fists of this section, and what the Arizona papers would do would be comic if they ever got hold of the fact that Singleton picked a new bird for the dove cage, and the dratted thing changed before their eyes to a fractious game rooster swinging a right like the hind leg of a mule! No, Bub, we're orderly, peaceable folks around here, so for the sake of our reputation Singleton has prevailed on his manager to be merciful to you, and Conrad has in true ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... plenty. In manners he could be perfect, when he so chose. Courage and strength he had none. Ellis had seen this fellow, who boasted of his descent from a line of cavaliers, turn pale with fright and spring from a buggy to which was harnessed a fractious horse, which a negro stable-boy drove fearlessly. A valiant carpet-knight, skilled in all parlor exercises, great at whist or euchre, a dream of a dancer, unexcelled in Cakewalk or "coon" impersonations, for which he was in large social demand, Ellis had seen ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... until all the girls began to grow apprehensive. They started away along a country road a gay party, indeed, but Harriet noted that horse and driver were not well matched. The horse she could plainly see was young and fractious, and she wondered what the old man would do should the animal prove unmanageable. Their driver, however, appeared to have perfect control over the animal, so Harriet dismissed the disturbing thought from her mind and prepared ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... as from another world on that unkempt fractious Marcie of Cliff House, the Marcella of the present saw with a mixture of amusement and self-pity that one great aggravation of that child's daily miseries had been a certain injured, irritable sense of social difference between herself and her ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... probably no psychosis in which the patients exhibit such infantile reactions as in stupor. Except for the stature and obvious age of these patients, one could easily imagine that he was dealing with a spoiled and fractious infant. One thinks at once of the negativism which is so like that of a perverse child and of the unconventional, personal habits to which these patients cling so stubbornly. Masturbation, for instance, is quite frequent, while willful wetting ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... it is made for me, but I can come away early and make up lost sleep. I do hate to be so fractious," and Rose rubbed the forehead that ached with ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... renders me delightfully insensible to one fruitful source of provocation among inanimate things. I am so dull as to regard all distinctions between "rights" and "lefts" as invidious; but I have witnessed the agonized struggles of many a victim of fractious boots, and been thankful that "I am not as other men are," in ability to comprehend the difference between my right and left foot. Still, as already intimated, I have seen wise men driven mad by a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... a few dozen more or less impersonal objects, took his departure, his fractious horse having quieted down in the meanwhile, and Tom was ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... a moment afterward, when I went into the schoolroom and found Dot fractious and weary, and Jack vainly trying to amuse him. Allan was busy, and the two children had ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... alias Robert King. Samuel was a representative of Revel's Neck, Somerset Co., Md. His master he regarded as a "very fractious man, hard to please." The cause of the trouble or unpleasantness, which resulted in Samuel's Underground adventure, was traceable to his master's refusal to allow him to visit his wife. Not only was Samuel denied this privilege, but he was equally denied all privileges. His master ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the table, as well as the two Endicotts, had listened to this colloquy with varying feelings. Segrave was burning with impatience, Lord Walterton was getting more and more fractious, whilst Sir Michael Isherwood viewed the young secretary with marked hauteur. At the last words spoken by Lambert there came from all these gentlemen sundry ejaculations, expressive of contempt or annoyance, which caused an ugly frown to appear between de Chavasse's ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... yearling calf had not yet felt the searing-iron. Into the very midst of the seething mass would a vaquero dart, single out his victim without a moment's halt, drive the animal to the open space, and throw his lasso with unerring aim. If a steer proved fractious two of the centaurs would divide the labor, and while one dexterously threw the rope around his horns, the other's lasso had quickly caught the hind foot, and together they brought him ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... seated on the floor, his back against a stanchion, his hands lashed behind him by bonds which confined him to the upright support. But the most uncomfortable feature of his predicament was a marlinespike which was stuck into his mouth like a bit provided for a fractious horse, and was secured by lashings behind his head. He was effectually gagged. Furthermore, the back of his head ached in most acute fashion. He rolled his eyes about and discovered that he had a companion in misery. A very pretty young woman was ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... stability of India as Wressley of the Foreign Office. There might be other good men, but the known, honored and trusted man among men was Wressley of the Foreign Office. We had a Viceroy in those days who knew exactly when to "gentle" a fractious big man, and to hearten-up a collar-galled little one, and so keep all his team level. He conveyed to Wressley the impression which I have just set down; and even tough men are apt to be disorganized by a Viceroy's praise. There was a case ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... more fractious patient than Du Meresq as he lay listlessly on the sofa, while the bone reunited. He had speculated on many a stolen walk with Bluebell in that unfrequented wood, where they would be far less liable to interruption than at ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... glad as anybody when the sun disappeared. It had been a hard day. Her step-mother had spent it in making soap. Soap-making is ill-smelling, uncomfortable work at all times, and especially in August. Mrs. Davis had been cross and fractious, had scolded a great deal, and found many little jobs for Mell to do in addition to her usual tasks of dish-washing, table-setting, and looking after the children. Mell was tired of the heat; tired of the smell of soap, of being lectured; and when ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... Suddenly a fractious horse jerked away from the man who had been standing at its head holding it, and whirling short about, half-overturned the wagon to which it was hitched and raced wildly down the street. People scattered in every direction, ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... a sort of brotherly admiration. At such moments, the most crabbed and peevish person seemed to be transfigured, to be acting a delightful part for the pleasure of a spectator, and an inner benevolence, a desire to contribute zest and amusement to the banquet of life, seemed to underlie the most fractious gestures or irritable speech. On such days, one seemed to have an affectionate understanding with even slight acquaintances, an understanding which seemed to say, "We are all comrades in heart, and nothing but circumstance and bodily ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... against enemy a blockade as effective as possible. In one of his comprehensive, quietly delivered and powerful speeches EDWARD GREY showed that situation is not so easily managed as amateur diplomatists below the Gangway believe, or as fractious newspapers, bent on damaging the Government even if the Empire falls, assert. Explained in detail steps taken by Foreign Office to deal with it. House listened critically but approvingly. Took note of fact that FIRST LORD OF ADMIRALTY emphatically cheered denial of one of the malicious rumours ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... not augur well of it; but if so, she held her peace, though I was not so sparing. For many things contributed to make me less good-humoured now than my real nature was; and the very least of all these things would have been enough to make some people cross, and rude, and fractious. I mean the red and painful chapping of my face and hands, from working in the snow all day, and lying in the frost all night. For being of a fair complexion, and a ruddy nature, and pretty plump withal, and fed on plenty of hot victuals, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... a glum an' fractious wean Has sat an' sullened by his lane Till, wi' a rowstin' skelp, he's ta'en An' shoo'd to bed—— The ither bairns a' fa' to play'n', As gleg's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this, strange as it may seem to those of my readers who may have admired the general good qualities of this singularly faithful animal, so disturbed old Battle's equanimity that he made several attempts to bring his master to the ground: indeed he became so fractious that the general again found it necessary to resign the honor of fighting this great battle to Don Perez Goneti, since the management of his horse was quite enough for the head of any one general. The reserve of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... to him in much the same tone which she would have made use of to soothe a fractious child. But her instinct as a woman guided her truly: in venturing on that little reference to "Mary," she had not ventured in vain. It quieted him, and turned aside the current of his thoughts into the better and smoother direction. "Didn't she never ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... the north and unite with Rosecrans, and that then the combined force should attack Bragg promptly. But Rosecrans lay still for about six weeks, to repair losses and fatigue, and again played the part of the restive steed, responding to the President's spur only with fractious kickings. It was August 16 when he moved, but then he showed his usual ability in action. The march was difficult; yet, on September 6, he had his whole force across the Tennessee and in the mountains south of Chattanooga. Burnside, meanwhile, had advanced to Knoxville, but had stopped there, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... pleased to see me again. Shall I go away? Are you busy, or tired, or is there anything the matter?' asked Lady Betty, in an extremely fractious voice. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... you been doing?" she asked, when I got into her room, where her maid was settling her veil before the glass, and trembling over it. Lady Ver is sometimes fractious with her—worse than I ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... wee fractious and self-willed at the off-go, an' wud be wantin' this an' that for his denner, but he sune learned tae tak' what wes pit afore him; an' as for gaein' oot withoot tellin' me, he wud as sune hae thocht o' fleein'; ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... imperatively necessary to the stability of India as Wressley of the Foreign Office. There might be other good men, but the known, honored and trusted man among men was Wressley of the Foreign Office. We had a Viceroy in those days who knew exactly when to "gentle" a fractious big man and to hearten up a collar-galled little one, and so keep all his team level. He conveyed to Wressley the impression which I have just set down; and even tough men are apt to be disorganized by a Viceroy's praise. There was a case ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... been a little fractious," replies Bobby, leniently—"a little disposed to quarrel with our bread-and-butter; but, as you may remember, my dear, from your experience of our humble roof, Christmas ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... crippled victims of disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital, nor poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not minister to the needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all alike were clothed in tatters, lacking even sufficient covering for the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... cut up in the Champion—is it not so? this day so am I—even to shocking the editor. The critic writes well; and as, at present, poesy is not my passion predominant, and my snake of Aaron has swallowed up all the other serpents, I don't feel fractious. I send you the paper, which I mean to take in for the future. We go to M.'s together. Perhaps I shall see you before, but don't let me ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... it all day, whereas his morning had been spent amid books, rare prints, statuettes, soft carpets, all the delicate luxuries of Master Blanchminster's library. Yet he could not help feeling the contrast; and the children were always at their most fractious on Mondays, chafed by a morning in school after ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of five Dan made as elaborate a toilet as the washroom permitted. He consumed both time and soap on the fractious forelock, and spent precious moments trying to induce a limp string tie to assume the same correct set that ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... has learned this art of equilibrium, and learned it so thoroughly that its skill is not apparent to our sight. We only learn to appreciate it when we try to imitate it. Now, there are two ways of learning how to ride a fractious horse: one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... excuse for deferring my promised lecture. The month of May had arrived. My father delicately broached the subject of the announcement. Being a little fractious, perhaps from some ebb in my strength, I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... work in a field not far away, often paused to listen, the former never failing to catch Amy's clear notes as she sat on a rock, the gentle power behind the throne, that had maintained peace and good-will among all the little fractious subjects. ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... I go?" he asked himself, trying to think of a spot he liked which would agree with his frame of mind. He could not think of one, for being alone made him feel fractious, yet he could not bear to meet any one. As he came out on the Grand Quay he hesitated once more; then he turned toward the pier; ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... sure, Miss Elliott. I have grown so fractious and contrary lately that maybe my sister winna care to have me. And as to ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... the king as they would to any other man, and his majesty touched his cocked hat in return. Then came the prize-cattle, many of them led by women, who are as interested as their husbands in all farm matters. Everything goes off smoothly, except there is a momentary panic over a fractious bull, who plunges into the crowd; but the six white jackets are about him in an instant, and entangle him ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Will Shag by name, who was a persistent runaway, and who whipped the overseer and was obstreperous generally. Another slave committed so serious an offense that he was tried under state law and >vas executed. When a bondman became particularly fractious he was threatened with being sent to the West Indies, a place held in as much dread as was "down the river" in later years. In 1766 Washington sent such a fellow off and to the captain of the ship that carried the slave ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... Gregory was a little fractious for a while, considering it an indignity to be sleeping in the caravan instead of with the men; but he was no sooner tucked into his berth than he fell asleep and forgot the insult. The girls were also very soon on their little shelves, either sleeping ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... her brother had reached an age when it was convenient, if possible, to throw the blame of all nursery differences on Polly. In families where domestic discipline is rather fractious than firm, there comes a stage when the girls almost invariably go to the wall, because they will stand snubbing, and the boys will not. Domestic authority, like some other powers, is apt to be magnified on the ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... good woman," said the doctor, as he rode away, "though she wears her womanhood so ungraciously—as a rough husk rather than a flower. All the same, she's laying up misery for herself in her devotion to this fractious child; I wish I'd had no ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... the happier a man is, the better and kinder he will be. The greater part of unamiability, ill-temper, impatience, bitterness, and uncharitableness comes out of unhappiness. It is because a man is so miserable that he is such a sour, suspicious, fractious, petted creature. I was amused, this morning, to read in the newspaper an account of a very small incident which befell the new Primate of England on his journey back to London, after being enthroned at Canterbury. The reporter of that small incident takes occasion to record that the Archbishop ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... godmother. It cheers me to hear you say so. But you see it is so hard to bring up a child well, when you work, work, work, all day. When he was out of employment, I couldn't always keep him near me. He got fractious and nervous, and I was obliged to let him go into the streets. And he never did well in the streets, he never did well out of sight. How often it happens with children! How can I say what I might have turned out myself, but for my back having been so bad and my legs so ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... the cows, to drive the plow, to ride the most fractious horses, and to break the fiery young colts; he knew precisely how to look after the horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, fowls, and everything at ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... the green Jeddak were formally presented to each other. Then Thuvia was lifted to the least fractious thoat, Xodar and Carthoris mounted two others, and we set out at a rapid pace toward the east. At the far extremity of the city we circled toward the north, and under the glorious rays of the two moons we sped noiselessly across the dead sea bottom, away from the Warhoons ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Glazier discovered—a disagreeable habit of running away every time he saw a train of cars. Perhaps the horse couldn't help it; it was no doubt an inherited disposition, descended to him through long lines of fractious ancestors, and therefore it need not be set down against him in the catalogue of wilful sins. But whether so or otherwise, this little unpleasantness in his disposition was an established fact, and unfortunately there were two railroads to cross between ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... and I am here, not with you—and my 'fractious' headache at the very worst got suddenly better just now, and is leaving me every minute—as if to make me aware, with an undivided attention, that at this present you are waiting for me, and soon will be wondering—and it would be so easy now to dress myself ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... family, who is supposed to have run off with another woman's husband. It is the day of the village bazaar, and amid a lot of hustle and bustle Catherine enters—the prodigal daughter most inopportunely returned! As the day progresses Old Mrs. Deveral becomes fractious, the Fete entertainment falls through and Judy decides to run away with the unpleasant Rodney. Things are going from bad to worse when Catherine steps in. She pacifies her mother, gives a talk on her experiences to the Village audience, and convinces Judy that Bobbie is nicer than Rodney. ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... the rule of unanimity, beings with souls so dead that never to themselves had said, "This is my own, my native land," and who yet looked upon the Boer as an object of commiseration. But these were, first, men linked either by birth or family ties with the Afrikander cause; second, fractious Irishmen and political obstructionists who posed for notoriety at any price; and, third, eccentrics and originals, whose sense of opposition forbade them from floating at any time with the tide of public opinion. Every one else cried aloud for a chance to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... he did not know what to say. Mrs. Jernyngham had, he gathered, been unusually fractious for the last week or two, and Cyril was invariably forbearing. Indeed, Prescott sometimes wondered at his patience, for he imagined that his comrade had outgrown what love he had borne her. The man had ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... the Arpan sub-base like a fractious child. Kincaide and I endeavored to cheer him up, and Hendricks, the Ertak's young third officer, tried in vain to induce Correy to ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... to Russia, falling from a fractious horse. Left a sweetheart, too, they tell me. Married, ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... good spirits nor in good temper during the next few days. My mother and Julia appeared astonished at this, for I was not ordinarily as touchy and fractious as I showed myself immediately after ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... to make her burro follow after Noddy, but he was fractious and would not go near the cliff. He made a detour, however, about a small group of trees and just as he came opposite them, something upon the snow-drift at the base of the largest tree, caused him to ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... resign himself; and so exceedingly fractious was he, that Clara had been feeling quite dispirited, when her brother called her to tell her joyously that Lord Ormersfield and Louis were coming home, and would call in on their way the next evening. Those wretched children must not take her for ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... into a chair. In her secret heart Eunice knew that when her sister was tired out she was fractious; she loved her too well ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... His voice had a fractious tone, as if he combated an unseen tyrant. Amelia dared not speak. At a word, she felt, he might say too much. Now Jared was looking at her in a bright appeal, as if, sure as he was of her sympathy, he besought the ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... the country; but Ellangowan! that had been a name amang them since the Mirk Monanday, and lang before—HIM to be grinding the puir at that rate! They ca'd his grandfather the Wicked Laird; but, though he was whiles fractious aneuch, when he got into roving company and had ta'en the drap drink, he would have scorned to gang on at this gate. Na, na, the muckle chumlay in the Auld Place reeked like a killogie in his time, and there were as mony puir folk riving at the banes in the court, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... with Isaac Bumps; he'll charge you twenty-five cents, and tell you it's a mile and a half from the station to my house, but it's only a mile, and don't you hear to him, for your Cousin Abijah can't come until after the milking, and if the cows are fractious, it may ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... pass without an outbreak of this sort. It occurred about tea-time. Perhaps the infants were fractious because there was no tea. Esther had to economize her resources and a repast at seven would serve for both tea and supper. Among the poor, combination meals are as common as combination beds and chests. Esther had quieted Sarah by slapping Isaac, but as this made Isaac howl the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... state became increasingly oppressive and draconian through the 1980s. CEAUSESCU was overthrown and executed in late 1989. Former communists dominated the government until 1996 when they were swept from power by a fractious coalition of center-right parties. Today the Communist Party, renamed the Party of Social Democracy, rules in cooperation with the ethnic Hungarian minority rights party. Much economic restructuring remains to be carried out before Romania can achieve its ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... stay in bed next morning, a thing that Mrs. Brandeis took to most ungracefully. After the holiday rush and strain she invariably had a severe cold, the protest of the body she had over-driven and under-nourished for two or three weeks. As a patient she was as trying and fractious as a man, tossing about, threatening to get up, demanding hot-water bags, cold compresses, alcohol rubs. She fretted about the business, and imagined that things were at a stand-still ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... don't work so very hard. But don't tell him I said so: he's real fractious on that subject, caused, I think, by rheumatiz, and mebby ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... niece of Mrs Pipchin did not expect to find that exemplary dragon prostrate on the hearth-rug when she went downstairs, she was relieved to find her unusually fractious and severe, and with every present appearance of intending to live a long time to be a comfort to all who knew her. Nor had she any symptoms of declining, in the course of the ensuing week, when the constitutional viands ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... be expected to show. Solvents such as benzene, ethylacetate and chloroform fail to effect a separation of active from inactive material. In all fractioning operations the vitamine tends to distribute itself between the fractious rather than to become concentrated in one or ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... the discipline of the tan-bark. If a cadet falls from a horse and has no bones broken, or no other desperate injury, he must wait until his horse comes around, catch it and mount again. If the horse be excited and fractious, all the more reason why the cadet should capture the beast and mount instantly. A horse must always be taught that ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... house from its foundations. He took her by the shoulders and put her back in her chair. His inexorable eyes looked her into submission; and his lean forefinger shook at her warningly, as if he was quieting a fractious child. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... sold, and Faye has bought another, a sorrel, that seems to be a very satisfactory animal. He is not as handsome as Ben, nor as fractious, either. Bettie is behaving very well, but is still nervous, and keeps her forefeet down just long enough to get herself over the ground. She is beautiful, and Kelly simply adores her and keeps her bright-red coat like satin. Faye can seldom ride with me because of his numerous duties, and ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... the spirit is supposed to be particularly present in its old home. In all the other cases, I should remark, the spirit does not leave the home until its devil is made and if this is delayed too long he naturally becomes fractious. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... pugnacious &c. (bellicose) 720; cantankerous, exceptious[obs3]; restiff &c. (perverse) 901a[obs3]; churlish &c. (discourteous) 895. cross, cross as crabs, cross as two sticks, cross as a cat, cross as a dog, cross as the tongs; fractious, peevish, acaritre[obs3]. in a bad temper; sulky &c. 901a; angry &c. 900. resentful, resentive[obs3]; vindictive &c. 919. Int. pish! Phr. a vieux comptes nouvelles disputes[Fr]; quamvis tegatur proditur vultu furor [Lat][Seneca]; vino tortus et ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... was the fractious reply. "That's where we are being over-careful. She can hear our ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cattle, bellowing in a chorus of fear, rage, and pain. And still the work of sorting, branding, cutting-out, went steadily on. Though an outsider would not have perceived it, the work was as crisp-cut and exact in its methods as the work in a counting-house. One of the cow-boys, in hot pursuit of a fractious heifer, encountered a gopher-hole, and horse and rider were down in a heap. In a second a dozen helping hands were dragging him from under the horse. He limped painfully, but stooped to examine his horse. The beast had broken ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... him Andy, in the family. Somewhat fractious at first—colic and things. I suppose it is right, or it would n't be so; but the usefulness of measles, mumps, croup, whooping-cough, scarlatina, and fits is not clear to the parental eye. I wish Andy would be a model infant, and dodge the ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of a revolt. Though the uprising lasted but twenty days, the diplomatic corps at the capital proffered its mediation between the contestants, in order to avoid any further bloodshed. The result was that the fractious Governor withdrew his candidacy and a radical change was effected in the relations of Buenos Aires, city and province, to the country at large. The city, together with its environs, was converted into a federal district and became solely and distinctively the national capital. Its public ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... was Joseph. He was to blame for some things,—I never saw an Ashby that wasn't,—and I dare say he was aggravating. They were clearing a piece of woodland that winter, and the old man was laid up in the house with the rheumatism, off and on, and that made him fractious, and he and John connived together, till one day Joseph and Susan Ellen had taken the sleigh and gone to Freeport Four Corners to get some flour and one thing and another, and to have the horse shod beside, so they ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... secondary importance by the surrender of Vicksburg, it was certain that Grant would be called to conduct one of the great armies which must still make war upon the rebellion. In a visit to New Orleans to consult with Banks, he had been lamed by a fractious horse and was disabled for some days. As soon as he was able to ride in an ambulance he was on duty, and was assured by General Halleck that plenty of work would be cut out for him as soon as he was fully recovered. [Footnote: Official ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... time, and heating themselves in fractious disputations about doctrinal points drawn from the Bible, these men ought to know, and if they do not it is civility to inform them, that the first thing to be understood is, whether there is sufficient authority for believing ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... an old cousin in Kendal, the widow of a grocer, said to be richly left, who had once in his boyhood given him five shillings. With much distaste he wrote the letter and walked to Elterwater in the rain to post it. Then he tried to work; but little Carrie, fractious from confinement indoors, was troublesome and disturbed him. Phoebe, too, would make remarks on his drawing which seemed to him inept. In old days he would have laughed at her for pretending to know, and ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... believe he is driving a skittish team all alone. Jean believed that she was acting alone in this, as in everything else. She had yet to learn that Lite had for three years been always at hand, ready to take the lines if the team proved too fractious for her. ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... good. On Wednesdays and Friday nights he would make the slaves come up to the Big House and he would read the Bible to them and he would pray. He was a doctor and very fractious and exact. He didn't allow the slaves to claim they forgot to do thus and so nor did he allow them to make the expression, "I thought so and so." He would say to them if they did: "Who ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... little Bella was unusually fractious with some slight childish indisposition, and Sylvia was obliged to have recourse to a never-failing piece of amusement; namely, to take the child into the shop, when the number of new, bright-coloured articles was sure to beguile the little girl out of her fretfulness. She was walking ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... they could not go out. She found pictures, and got everything ready for them good-naturedly, and then they sat themselves down at a little table opposite each other; but the weather affected their spirits, and made them both fractious. They wanted the same picture to begin with, and only settled the question by demolishing it in their attempts to snatch it from each other. Then there was only one left between them, but happily they remembered that ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of the Hampshire Coopers, and the first earl. He was a sort of English Voltaire: small and thin, nervous and fractious, with a great cold brain, no affections and no illusions; he had faith in organizations, but none in man; was destitute of compunctions, careless of conventions and appearances, cynical, penetrating, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... was well started, patrolled the length of the drive in his light buckboard. He had a first-class team of young horses—high-spirited, somewhat fractious, but capable on a pinch of their hundred miles in a day. He handled them well over the rough corduroys and swamp roads. From jam to rear and back again he travelled, pausing on the river banks to converse earnestly with one of the foremen, surveying the situation ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... doubt you are a general favorite among the fair sex." "Any man," he replied, "that understands horses has a pretty considerable fair knowledge of women, for they are jist alike in temper, and require the very identical same treatment. Encourage the timid ones, be gentle and steady with the fractious, but lather the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... lips twisted in a smile of cool irony—"you have come as the guardians of conservatism to admonish me, the fractious child of the Dollar family. It is delightful, gentlemen, to encounter in actual life so humorous a situation." Then the mouth line grew set again and the voice hardened. "Well, I make you no pledges. I say to you, to hell with ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... lived; he spoke; he opened his dark eyes and smiled upon us; he demanded a battered "boy stout" doll, and hugged it to his pneumonia jacket; he drank his milk, and said "More!" he grew cross and fractious—oh, welcome, gladdening sign!—and said, "Doe away! No more daddies! No more nursies! Don't want nobodies! Boo-hoo-hoo!" and we went ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a graft on the family stock, in temperament, at least. Born into a genial, jovial, healthy family, his was the only moody nature there. His brother and sisters might be mischievous or even fractious; but they were never prone to have black half-hours. It was reserved for the youngest one of them all, Allyn McAlister, aged fifteen, to spell his moods with a capital M. His father was wont to say that Allyn was a mixture of two people, of two nameless, far-off ancestors. For days at a time, ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... hot and red, and thoroughly exasperated. His brown eyes were disproportionately angry, considering the slight importance of his enterprise. He was evidently a man of keen, quick temper, easily aroused and nervous. His handsome, well-groomed horse was fractious, and difficult for so impatient a rider to control. His equestrian outfit once more attracted the covert glance of Con Hite, whose experience and observation could duplicate no such attire. He was tall, somewhat heavily ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... assumed the manner of a man placing at my disposal plenty of rope with which I might entangle myself. He appeared to think me excitable, and used soothing expressions as if I were a fractious child to be calmed, rather than a sane equal to be reasoned with. On many occasions I had the facts at my finger ends, while he remained in a state of most complacent ignorance, and though this attitude of lowering himself to deal gently with one whom he evidently looked upon as an ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... by speaking to him in much the same tone which she would have made use of to soothe a fractious child. But her instinct as a woman guided her truly: in venturing on that little reference to "Mary," she had not ventured in vain. It quieted him, and turned aside the current of his thoughts into the better and smoother direction. "Didn't she never talk to ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... decades-long rule of dictator Nicolae CEAUSESCU and his Securitate police state became increasingly oppressive and draconian through the 1980s. CEAUSESCU was overthrown and executed in late 1989. Former communists dominated the government until 1996 when they were swept from power by a fractious coalition of center-right parties. Today the Communist Party, renamed the Party of Social Democracy, rules in cooperation with the ethnic Hungarian minority rights party. Much economic restructuring ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... he missed the physical feeling of the north—even in his sleep. This strange bereavement drew him and Leah even more closely together, if that were possible; and she was well content to reign alone in the heart of her fractious, unreasonable but most affectionate, humorous, and irresistible great man. Although her rival had been but a name and an idea, a mere abstraction in which she had never really believed, she did not find it altogether displeasing to herself that the lively ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... candidate resorted to the timeworn expedient of a revolt. Though the uprising lasted but twenty days, the diplomatic corps at the capital proffered its mediation between the contestants, in order to avoid any further bloodshed. The result was that the fractious Governor withdrew his candidacy and a radical change was effected in the relations of Buenos Aires, city and province, to the country at large. The city, together with its environs, was converted into a federal district and became solely and distinctively the national capital. ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... he became judge of the Sheriff's Court in London, and was enjoying, according to Campbell, 'a considerable but obscure practice'; had, according to Clarendon, 'a good practice in his chamber, and [was] much employed by the fractious'; and became, according to Milton, 'a profound lawyer, an eloquent advocate.' He defended Lilburne successfully in 1645. He was made President of the High Court for the purpose of this trial, after the position had been declined by Whitelock, Rolle, St. John, and ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... a tone of soft wheedling that he might have employed to a fractious child. "It'll do you good, you know, Muriel. Won't you try? ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... delightfully insensible to one fruitful source of provocation among inanimate things. I am so dull as to regard all distinctions between "rights" and "lefts" as invidious; but I have witnessed the agonized struggles of many a victim of fractious boots, and been thankful that "I am not as other men are," in ability to comprehend the difference between my right and left foot. Still, as already intimated, I have seen wise men driven mad by a thing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... great caravans were accustomed to traverse. There were men on foot, running hither and thither, talking shrilly and in all the tongues of Syria; men on horseback screaming to men on camels; men struggling doubtfully with fractious cows and frightened sheep; men peddling bread and wine; and among the mass a herd of boys apparently in chase of a herd of dogs. Everybody and everything seemed to be in motion at the same time. Possibly the fair spectator was too weary to be long attracted by the scene; in ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... by the druids, but it was not successful. He went to the courts of the kings, and converted them; and to say you had baptized a king, was as good as to say you had his whole clan captured; for it was a fractious unnatural clansman who would not go where his chieftain led. We are in an atmosphere altogether different from the rancor and fanaticism of the continent. Patrick,—there must have been something very winning ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... whole afternoon with her children. They tried her a good deal, for Arthur was fractious, and Oliver went into one of his storms of passion, which upon him, as once upon his elder brother, were increasing day by day. It was impossible it should be otherwise under ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... his white fingers through his "fractious" hair. "The fact is, Cora, I am quite as anxious to see Clip as to go in on the case. Haven't ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... wanted to. I never encountered a heroine like her in all my life before, and the one object of my future career will be to catch her finally in the meshes of a romance. Romance will come into her life some time. She is not at all of an unsentimental nature—only fractious—new-womanish, perhaps; but none the less lovable, and Cupid will have a shot at her when she least expects it; and when it does come, I'll be on hand to report the attempted assassination for the delectation of the Herring, Beemer, ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... speed and pedigree, yet displaying at times a most malevolent temper, accompanied by Will, who, though only seven years of age, yet sat his pony with the ease and grace that distinguished the veteran rider of the future. Presently Betsy Baker became fractious, and sought to throw her rider. In vain did she rear and plunge; he kept his saddle. Then, seemingly, she gave up the fight, and Samuel cried, ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... rights—they wuz jealous of each other, and greedy, as children will be; and they had their perplexities, and their deep troubles, and their vexations, as children must have in this world, and some wuz fractious, and some wuz balky, and some wuz good dispositioned, and some wuz cross and mean, and had to ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... to his team by the usual horse-language that we should be glad to go. The horse did not even agitate his left ear—a phenomenon which I associate with a horse in that moment when he is quietly making up his mind to be fractious. "Go, my brother," said the driver in a mellifluous and really fraternal tone of voice. The horse disdained to acknowledge the tie: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... not think so. You will perhaps let your boat. We will talk to my mother," Robert answered, as one soothes a fractious child. Then, before I had breath to answer, he swept us away from the beach, and drew up before an aggressively comfortable villa on a terrace opening ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... our imprudent countrymen, I insert the following anecdote. The Bellecean, (or Bellauxcean) prison ship, lay next to us. She was filled with Norwegians, and were detained in England, while Norway adhered to a king of their own choice. The commander of her was a nettlesome, fractious, foolish old fellow, who was continually overlooking us, and hailing our commander, to inform him if any one smuggled a bottle of rum from the market boats. His Norwegians gave him no trouble; they were a peaceable, subservient people, with no ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... obliged to resign himself; and so exceedingly fractious was he, that Clara had been feeling quite dispirited, when her brother called her to tell her joyously that Lord Ormersfield and Louis were coming home, and would call in on their way the next evening. Those wretched children must not take ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dear, your fractious disposition kept us upon half breath; there wasn't time to yawn. I meant to have eased my breast by laughing afterwards, ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... slavery, or intemperance, or any other public wrong or popular vice, and been fiercely and persistently opposed by any portion of his charge, he will betray the sore under his collar on all occasions, and very possibly become so fractious and violent that his flock will be obliged to turn him out to pasture. A minister who gets sore under the friction of any particular collar seems to feel that it is necessary for him to wear that particular collar all the time; and he fails to remember that the reason why he has so much feeling ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... delayed us considerably, but it was very amusing to see the methods employed to coax or coerce them. A groom held in his hand a piece of bamboo about two feet in length, at the extremity of which was fastened a strong looped horsehair cord, which was twisted around the ear of a fractious beast, and a very little power applied a few paces in advance generally removed all scruples as to its progress. Horses who would not back into the shafts were assisted by a rope secured round a hind leg, and one who would not start forward was suddenly persuaded to change its ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... to experience, however, the cares of command. I discovered that there were cabals breaking out in the company, headed by the clown, who you may recollect was a terribly peevish, fractious fellow, and always in ill-humor. I had a great mind to turn him off at once, but I could not do without him, for there was not a droller scoundrel on the stage. His very shape was comic, for he had to turn his back upon the audience and all the ladies were ready to die with laughing. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... material possess the appearance or character which a pure product would be expected to show. Solvents such as benzene, ethylacetate and chloroform fail to effect a separation of active from inactive material. In all fractioning operations the vitamine tends to distribute itself between the fractious rather than to become concentrated in one or ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... John came out on Monday, he looked like a different boy; he had lost his fractious, rebellious look; he spoke as civilly as could be expected of a small Merrifield, and showed no signs of being set against his lessons. To be sure it was a bad way of spending a Sunday, to be laid up with ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... well started, patrolled the length of the drive in his light buckboard. He had a first-class team of young horses—high-spirited, somewhat fractious, but capable on a pinch of their hundred miles in a day. He handled them well over the rough corduroys and swamp roads. From jam to rear and back again he travelled, pausing on the river banks to converse earnestly with one of the foremen, ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... was not lost upon her. She began to fight with herself, to watch her faults and try to conquer them. It was hard work; often she felt discouraged, but she kept on. Week after week and month after month she grew less selfish, kinder, more obliging than she used to be. When she failed and her old fractious temper got the better of her, she was sorry and begged every one's pardon so humbly that they could not but forgive. The mother began to think that the elves really had bewitched her child. As for the children they learned to love Toinette as never before, and came to her with all their pains ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... man's lips twisted in a smile of cool irony—"you have come as the guardians of conservatism to admonish me, the fractious child of the Dollar family. It is delightful, gentlemen, to encounter in actual life so humorous a situation." Then the mouth line grew set again and the voice hardened. "Well, I make you no pledges. I say to you, to hell with ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Adams suggested sending a pointed reply, agreeing to meet the British Commissioners "at any place other than their own lodgings;" but Mr. Gallatin, whose valuable function was destined to be the keeping of the peace among his fractious colleagues, as well as (p. 078) betwixt them and the Englishmen, substituted the milder phrase, "at any place which may be mutually agreed upon." The first meeting accordingly took place at the Hotel des Pays Bas, where ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... presence, that he "has the intention of asking this young lady to become his wife." During the engagement, however, he contrives to disturb her tranquillity by insisting prematurely on the right divine of husbands, and, as she proves fractious, announces to her, that, much as he loves her, he sees no prospect of future happiness in their union, and that they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... a poor old crittur like me, don't 'ee think it? But if we're no to help oursells i' this world, what for have He gied us the trouble o' tha thrid to spin? and why no han't He made tha shirts, an' tha sheets, an' tha hose grow theersells? And ta passon niver answered her that, he only said she was fractious and blas-phe-mous. Now she warn't, she spoke i' all innocence, and she mint what she said—she mint it. Passons niver can answer ye plain, right-down, nataral questions like this'n, and that's why I wunna ga ta ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... also good. On Wednesdays and Friday nights he would make the slaves come up to the Big House and he would read the Bible to them and he would pray. He was a doctor and very fractious and exact. He didn't allow the slaves to claim they forgot to do thus and so nor did he allow them to make the expression, "I thought so and so." He would say to them if they did: "Who told you, ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his long unused spud. The two had wandered far afield; perhaps the elder man had found the unwonted length of exercise too much for him, for, as he approached the house, on his return, he became what nurses call in children 'fractious,' and ready to turn on his companion for every remark he made. Roger understood the case by instinct, as it were, and bore it all with his usual sweetness of temper. They entered the house by the front door; it lay straight on their line ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... milkin' or no," she observed, half to herself, half to Emory, who, chewing a straw, somewhat surlily had followed her out for a word apart. "The dusk 'pears slow ter-night, but Spot's mighty late comin' home, an' old Sue air fractious an' contrairy-minded, and feels mighty anxious an' oneasy 'boutn her calf, that's ez tall ez she is nowadays, an' don't keer no mo' 'bout her mammy 'n a half-grown human does. I tell her she oughtn't ter be mad ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... wouldn't have taken it upon herself to call it a remarkably suitable alliance had she been asked; but then she hadn't been asked, and Peter was such a sweet-natured, loving, lovable dear that he would get on with anyone, and Rhoda, though sometimes a silly and sometimes fractious, was a dear little girl too. The two facts that would have occurred to some sisters-in-law, that they had extremely few pennies between them, and that Rhoda wasn't precisely of Peter's gentle extraction, didn't bother Peggy ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... farmer's life in this country is no sinecure,'" A third Virginian, endorsing Olmsted's observations, wrote that a planter's cares and troubles were endless; the slaves, men, women and children, infirm and aged, had wants innumerable; some were indolent, some obstinate, some fractious, and each class required different treatment. With the daily wants of food, clothing and the like, "the poor man's time and thoughts, indeed every faculty of mind, must be exercised on behalf of those who have no minds of ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... we shall see. I'm not a pauper, you know. My trustees pay Lord Buntingford whatever I cost him, and I shall have a good deal to spend. I shall have a horse—and perhaps a little motor. The chauffeur here is a fractious idiot. He has done that Rolls-Royce car of Cousin Philip's balmy, and cut up quite rough when I spoke to him ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... This, however, is untrue, for the scar will give way much more easily than the uncut gum. If the tooth does not come through after two or three days, the lancing may be repeated; and this is more especially needed if the child be very fractious, and seems in much pain. Lancing the gums is further advantageous, because it empties the inflamed part of its blood, and so relieves the pain and inflammation. The relief children experience in the course of two or three hours from the operation is often ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... mascot. "Hooray!" cries the man. His confidence returns. He hears the boy paddling the water. The rebellious oars are seized with hope, but Corkey feels as if he were high on a fractious horse, ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... been sold, and Faye has bought another, a sorrel, that seems to be a very satisfactory animal. He is not as handsome as Ben, nor as fractious, either. Bettie is behaving very well, but is still nervous, and keeps her forefeet down just long enough to get herself over the ground. She is beautiful, and Kelly simply adores her and keeps her bright-red ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... 6. Samuel Miles, alias Robert King. Samuel was a representative of Revel's Neck, Somerset Co., Md. His master he regarded as a "very fractious man, hard to please." The cause of the trouble or unpleasantness, which resulted in Samuel's Underground adventure, was traceable to his master's refusal to allow him to visit his wife. Not only was Samuel denied this privilege, but he was ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... feelings anyway, compared with a woman's? And what rights has he as against hers? No: between man and man all that can be needed is plain speech and manly frankness—aided by a little diplomacy. I'll break you to pieces, James H., if you are fractious; and I've got the weapons to do it with. It is all for your good, and you'll bless me the rest of your life. One thing must be understood: I can't have you coming to my place and practising your wild backwoods manners on my family, and then sneaking off ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... spoke out repeatedly, protesting and forbidding you to sacrifice Thermopylae and the Phocians: {30} and the men to whom I refer were those who then said that a water-drinker[n] like myself was naturally a fractious and ill-tempered fellow; while Philip, if only he crossed the Pass, would fulfil your fondest prayers; for he would fortify Thespiae and Plataeae; he would put an end to the insolence of the Thebans; he would cut a canal through the ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... fever were exceeding troublesome, fairly overtasking the strength of Agnes in attending to them. Shortly after noon, also, the baby began to exhibit symptoms of being ill. It steadily grew worse, and became exceedingly fractious. The only way in which Agnes could pacify it, was to keep walking with it in her arms constantly. The moment she would attempt to sit down to rest herself or lay it in its crib, so that she might do something for the others, it would scream dreadfully till she began ...
— Angel Agnes - The Heroine of the Yellow Fever Plague in Shreveport • Wesley Bradshaw
... later he learned of the death of his uncle, who had been thrown from a fractious horse, not far from Mink Run, and had broken his neck in the fall. A hasty search of the premises did not disclose the concealed treasure. The secret lay in the mind of the stricken woman. As soon as Dudley learned that Viney had eaten and drunk and was apparently conscious, he went ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... twigs behind the house. It was little enough time they had, though, for the cattle were new to each other and to the country, and they were hard to manage. It was generally conceded that Waite had a genius for herding, and he could take the "mad" out of a fractious animal in a way that the others looked on as little less than superhuman. Thus it was that one day, when the clay had been well turned, and the seeds arranged on the kitchen table, and all things prepared for an afternoon of busy planting, that Waite and Henderson, who were ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... said the doctor, as he rode away, "though she wears her womanhood so ungraciously—as a rough husk rather than a flower. All the same, she's laying up misery for herself in her devotion to this fractious child; I wish I'd had no hand ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... better. We do not wish a young king who may be fractious. An old man tempered by misfortune ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... have some of them and go off on her good time. It wouldn't be housekeeping and spinning and looking after fractious children. But those evenings out on the stoop, and the timid invitations to take a walk, the pressure of the hand, the smile ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... aimlessly about, outside. Without, of course, being able to analyze it, he felt as if some rare source of entertainment had been withdrawn from him, leaving life flat and tasteless. He felt like being, what his mother called, "fractious," but—he remembered, as in a flash, "you never catch a thorerbred whinin'," and he snapped his jaws together ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... and he lightened their hands by giving occupation to the boys. Then came out the result of training at the Refuge. Those who had been some time there showed themselves amenable to discipline; but the late arrivals were more fractious, and difficult to manage. These were the lads "upon whom," as Miss Macpherson says, "the street life had left sore marks." Even when only nearing the American coast, this indomitable lady's spirit is planning a second expedition. "As ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... humour, like a fractious child, and she did more than bear with it. She ignored it altogether. As they drove out of London, the business of threading the maze of traffic kept him from talking even if he would, but when they had run into silence and the peace of the country, he was still ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... been his other deficiencies as an escort, Whiskey Dick was a good horseman, and, in spite of his fractious brute, exhibited such skill and confidence as to at once satisfy the young girls of his value to them in the management of their own horses, to whom side-saddles were still an alarming novelty. Jessie, who had probably already learned from her sister the purport of Dick's confidences, ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... psychosis in which the patients exhibit such infantile reactions as in stupor. Except for the stature and obvious age of these patients, one could easily imagine that he was dealing with a spoiled and fractious infant. One thinks at once of the negativism which is so like that of a perverse child and of the unconventional, personal habits to which these patients cling so stubbornly. Masturbation, for instance, is quite frequent, while willful ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... to prove the rule of unanimity, beings with souls so dead that never to themselves had said, "This is my own, my native land," and who yet looked upon the Boer as an object of commiseration. But these were, first, men linked either by birth or family ties with the Afrikander cause; second, fractious Irishmen and political obstructionists who posed for notoriety at any price; and, third, eccentrics and originals, whose sense of opposition forbade them from floating at any time with the tide of public opinion. Every one else cried aloud ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... not pass without an outbreak of this sort. It occurred about tea-time. Perhaps the infants were fractious because there was no tea. Esther had to economize her resources and a repast at seven would serve for both tea and supper. Among the poor, combination meals are as common as combination beds and chests. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... saw from the height of the pass. One foaming stream they forded eight times in three hours, driven from side to side by precipice and windfall; and in places they could advance only by ascending the stream bed. This was risky work on a fractious pony, and some of the riders preferred wading to riding. At noon on the 22nd of August the riders crossed a small stream and set up their tents on the border of a sedgy lake. Then {70} somebody noticed ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... commenced kissing me, by way of expressing her gratitude for my intercession: she was instantly stowed away into a corner on the other side of him. She then peeped round to where I sat; so stern a neighbour was too restrictive to him, in his present fractious mood, she dared whisper no observations, nor ask of ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... king as they would to any other man, and his majesty touched his cocked hat in return. Then came the prize-cattle, many of them led by women, who are as interested as their husbands in all farm matters. Everything goes off smoothly, except there is a momentary panic over a fractious bull, who plunges into the crowd; but the six white jackets are about him in an instant, and entangle him ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to conjure up a more melancholy picture than that presented by these plodders, whose work is rendered trebly hard by being performed against the grain. They suffer more under the system than the dull, the lazy, and the fractious, who escape its worst evils, either because some active power of resistance comes to their rescue, or because the mind itself is so formed as to be incapable of receiving instruction imparted on ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... so very hard. But don't tell him I said so: he's real fractious on that subject, caused, I think, by rheumatiz, and ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... living in it all day, whereas his morning had been spent amid books, rare prints, statuettes, soft carpets, all the delicate luxuries of Master Blanchminster's library. Yet he could not help feeling the contrast; and the children were always at their most fractious on Mondays, chafed by a morning in school ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... said, "the young colt's a bit fractious. Ye'll take him in hand. Fasten his hands behind him ready. Two of ye go round to the pen there and pick out the most likely horse, saddle and bridle him, and bring him here. Ye've got some green-leather thongs. Then put him upon the horse ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... enforce against enemy a blockade as effective as possible. In one of his comprehensive, quietly delivered and powerful speeches EDWARD GREY showed that situation is not so easily managed as amateur diplomatists below the Gangway believe, or as fractious newspapers, bent on damaging the Government even if the Empire falls, assert. Explained in detail steps taken by Foreign Office to deal with it. House listened critically but approvingly. Took note ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... consequences, I was on my knees, engaged in prayer. My first conscious thought of my surroundings was awakened by the wrestling of my horse, as my right hand held him firmly by the lines. Then came the suggestion, "This is a very unpropitious time to settle a matter of this importance. With a fractious horse by the rein, a terrible storm sweeping over the prairie, and an already blind snow-path, you had better defer the matter for the present." My reply was, "It is time these questions were settled, ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... race at Ranelham next Friday is expected to prove an exciting event, especially as Stella, Lady Killaloo, has entered her large crocodile, Horace—called after her late husband—who is known to prove rather fractious at times. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... hazard-table? In a word, I joined my gallant friends, and entrusted myself to their guidance. Since then, we have cruised around the country, regaled ourselves cheerily, frightened the timid, silenced the fractious, and by the help of your fate, or my devil, have found ourselves by accident, brought to exhibit our valour in this very district, honoured by the dwelling-place of my learned ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ride a fractious horse, not because he was fond of riding, but because nobody in the stables could cope with this animal. Steel tamed it in ten minutes. But a groom remarked upon the shortness of his stirrups, in Rachel's ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... with their manes entwined with roses, and necks enchained with garlands, fractious at the shouts that ran along the line, increasing from the clapping of children clothed in white, standing on the steps of the Capitol, to the tumultuous vociferation of hundreds of thousands of enraptured multitudes, crying "Huzza! Huzza!" Gleaming ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... in a fractious state. The situation was perhaps perilous. But she could not allow her conduct to be influenced by danger or difficulty, which indeed nearly always had the effect of confirming her purpose. If something had to ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... fractious, and not so easy to manage. Don't you know, it makes a dog savage to feed him on raw meat! I suppose cooked meat has the same ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... its hook and into the middle of the floor,—and seven for that very looking-glass which my father used to shave by, and which I, sparring at my image in it, to amuse my little brother, knocked into smithareens with my fractious fist. Why, man, it was not only awful, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... Lord Bracondale, with feeling; "but couldn't you stuff these in the hiatus," and he tenderly lifted a bunch of nut-brown curls from the dressing-table. "They would fill up the gap and keep the fractious thing steady." ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... was unusually fractious with some slight childish indisposition, and Sylvia was obliged to have recourse to a never-failing piece of amusement; namely, to take the child into the shop, when the number of new, bright-coloured articles was sure to beguile the little girl out of her fretfulness. She was walking along the ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... discipline has never made me an enemy of the rod for children. My own experience as child and parent convinces me that an inexorable, though mild, physical punishment is the only remedy for the obstinacy of certain fractious child natures, in the years before reason operates, and for the assurance of necessary discipline ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Belmont, soothingly, as if he were speaking to a fractious child. "I am quite sure that the Colonel will express his regret at what has happened, and will acknowledge that he was in ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... rather a peculiar state, to alternate from a mood of excitement to one of depression, and more than once while I was talking to her, I saw the tears well up to her eyes. I, at first, thought that her mother had been bothering her, for that Venus was in one of her most exacting and fractious moods, but I soon came to the conclusion that that was not the root of the trouble. Fortunately, Marcia and I were alone for a short time before I left and I endeavored to find out what was weighing on her mind. Not from curiosity, believe ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... last of the lights had gone out, and the house stood out a mere black outline in the moonlight, then he disappeared within the barn again, and presently reappeared leading his fractious mare. A few moments later he rode quietly off. And the manner of his going brought a grim smile to his lips, for he thought of the ghostly movements of the night-riders as he had witnessed them. His ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... great a scandal to her sex that the most abandoned of that low crew with whom he conversed, hated and despised her. With her Lewis went to live after his usual manner, and was very fond of her after his way, for about a fortnight; at the end of which he grew fractious, and in about nine weeks' time more he beat her. Moll wept and took on at a sad rate for his unkindness and told him that if would but promise faithfully never to live with any other woman, she should fairly present him with a brace of hundred pounds, which she had lodged in the hands of an ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... is made for me, but I can come away early and make up lost sleep. I do hate to be so fractious," and Rose rubbed the forehead that ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... to be put to bed. But, therein, he proved fractious. He was anxious about his linen. Mr. Sachs telephoned from the bedside, and a laundry-maid came. He was anxious about his best lounge-suit. Mr. Sachs telephoned, and a valet came. Then he wanted ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... before the States-General soon afterwards with a prepared oration, wearisome as a fast-day sermon after the third turn of the hour-glass, pragmatical as a schoolmaster's harangue to fractious little boys. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... position, and for my dismissal of her; that I ought to allow him in consequence full freedom of action. I cannot see matters in the same light. But, as I tell him, the change will be all to his advantage. He exchanges a fractious old woman, always ready to tell him unpleasant truths, for one who has made flattery her metier. If he wants quantity she will give it him. Quality he can dispense with—as I have seen for ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... will have enough for her and Aunt Alice; but you must let her talk to you of me; and show her that (whatever others may do) you think I died innocent. I don't reckon she'll stay long behind when we are all gone. Be tender with her, Job, for my sake; and if she is a bit fractious at times, remember what she has gone through. I know mother will never ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... green Jeddak were formally presented to each other. Then Thuvia was lifted to the least fractious thoat, Xodar and Carthoris mounted two others, and we set out at a rapid pace toward the east. At the far extremity of the city we circled toward the north, and under the glorious rays of the two moons we sped noiselessly across the dead sea bottom, away from ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... taking a boy like him when she'd turned up her nose at better men. And I didn't want her for a daughter-in-law anyhow. I can't bear her. So I put my foot down in time. Lawrence sulked for a spell, of course—boy-fashion—and he's been as fractious as a ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... home to Russia, falling from a fractious horse. Left a sweetheart, too, they tell me. ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... the kind of work at hand I had full confidence in my mount. Whenever Custer was not looking I slyly spurred the mule ahead, and when he would start forward I would rein him in and pat him by way of restraint, bidding him not to be too fractious, as we hadn't yet reached the sandhills. In this way I set a good lively pace—something like nine ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... men, started that morning for Sleepy Cat with a bunch of cattle. He rode a fractious horse, as he always did, and this time the horse, infuriated as his horses frequently were by his brutal treatment, bolted in a moment unguarded by his master, and flung Duke on his back in a strip of ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... lashed behind him by bonds which confined him to the upright support. But the most uncomfortable feature of his predicament was a marlinespike which was stuck into his mouth like a bit provided for a fractious horse, and was secured by lashings behind his head. He was effectually gagged. Furthermore, the back of his head ached in most acute fashion. He rolled his eyes about and discovered that he had a companion in misery. A very pretty young woman was seated on a ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... pleasant, though I do not know that it will be so for you; for I own the majority of us are rather sour-tempered, at present. Though we may be glad enough to go, one does not care to be sent off at a moment's notice, just as fractious children are turned out of a room, when their elders want a private chat. However, for myself, I am not inclined to grumble. I want to go, and therefore I do not stand ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... half million of soul is decreasing apace, The demand, too, for bishop will also fall off, Till the tithe of one, taken in kind be enough. But, as fractions imply that we'd have to dissect, And to cutting up Bishops I strongly object. We've a small, fractious prelate whom well we could spare, Who has just the same decimal worth, to a hair, And, not to leave Ireland too much in the lurch. We'll let her have Exeter, sole, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... this time, drunk out, and the little Kenwigses (who had for some time previously held their little eyes open with their little forefingers) becoming fractious, and requesting rather urgently to be put to bed, the collector made a move by pulling out his watch, and acquainting the company that it was nigh two o'clock; whereat some of the guests were surprised and others shocked, and hats and bonnets being groped for under the tables, and ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... said, "the prince has had a slight accident, and has sent me to tell you that he is unhurt, in case you should hear any report to the contrary. He was unable to avoid a fractious horse, and was knocked down. Mr. Deulin is with him, and they have gone to ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... valley were reduced to secondary importance by the surrender of Vicksburg, it was certain that Grant would be called to conduct one of the great armies which must still make war upon the rebellion. In a visit to New Orleans to consult with Banks, he had been lamed by a fractious horse and was disabled for some days. As soon as he was able to ride in an ambulance he was on duty, and was assured by General Halleck that plenty of work would be cut out for him as soon as he was fully recovered. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxx. pt. iv. p. 274.] At the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... admired the general good qualities of this singularly faithful animal, so disturbed old Battle's equanimity that he made several attempts to bring his master to the ground: indeed he became so fractious that the general again found it necessary to resign the honor of fighting this great battle to Don Perez Goneti, since the management of his horse was quite enough for the head of any one general. The reserve of the Kaloramas now appeared in the distance, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... sub-base like a fractious child. Kincaide and I endeavored to cheer him up, and Hendricks, the Ertak's young third officer, tried in vain to induce Correy to take in ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... in a similar school, in a neighboring district, where she had always led her classes, but had spent two winters in a State Normal School. She was a trim body, compactly built, had black hair and eyes, and a fresh, rosy complexion that is so characteristic of her class. She could ride a fractious horse, milk, sew, knit and cook, and had followed the plow more than one day; while during harvest and corn-husking she had many a time "made a hand." From this cause she was strong and well knit in all her frame, a perfect picture of young womanly health and rustic ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... chair. In her secret heart Eunice knew that when her sister was tired out she was fractious; she loved her too well ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... one of the Hampshire Coopers, and the first earl. He was a sort of English Voltaire: small and thin, nervous and fractious, with a great cold brain, no affections and no illusions; he had faith in organizations, but none in man; was destitute of compunctions, careless of conventions and appearances, cynical, penetrating, and frivolous. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... was a huge tub full of water, and the officer (spurs, boots, and all) was sitting in it with his legs out of one end and his head groaning and bellowing from the other. This was his specific for sea-sickness, and for three days he behaved about as well as a fractious child who sadly wants a good whipping. It is no discredit to a man to be sea-sick. Nelson, we are told, was so far human. But it is somewhat unmanly for an officer to whine and blubber like a baby, and yet we have several times seen this phenomenon abroad. When we came into Naples this lachrymose ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... amused by this procedure. Their humorously cynical outlook at the Boche temper renders them impervious to anything the Germans can ever do or think of. Their outlook towards a venomous German attempt to do something "frightfully" nasty, is very similar to a large and powerful nurse dealing with a fractious child—sort of: "Now, then, Master Frankie, you mustn't kick ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... speak him fair, my bonny man—speak him fair Hobbie; the like o' him will no bear thrawing. They converse sae muckle wi' thae fractious ghaists and evil spirits, that it clean ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... which we sometimes quarrell'd; for, when a little intoxicated, he was very fractious. Once, in a boat on the Delaware with some other young men, he refused to row in his turn. "I will be row'd home," says he. "We will not row you," says I. "You must, or stay all night on the water," says he, "just as you please." The others said, "Let ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... noisily, and then settled over the crowd. Gofredo went on talking to them: "Take it easy, now; easy." He might have been speaking to a frightened dog or a fractious horse. "Nobody's going to hurt you. This is nothing but the great noise-magic ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... players at the table, as well as the two Endicotts, had listened to this colloquy with varying feelings. Segrave was burning with impatience, Lord Walterton was getting more and more fractious, whilst Sir Michael Isherwood viewed the young secretary with marked hauteur. At the last words spoken by Lambert there came from all these gentlemen sundry ejaculations, expressive of contempt or annoyance, which caused an ugly frown to appear ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... remarked, easily. "It isn't that. I'd never cook if I were poor, anyway; that would be the last thing I'd ever dream of doing. It's fun to go to the domestic-science class as long as all my set go. Well—will you be a nice angel-man and stay home to amuse your fractious wife?" ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... years ago in Chambers' Journal. In the Etwah district, near the banks of the river Jumna, a boy was captured from the wolves. After a time this child was restored to his parents, who, however, "found him very difficult to manage, for he was most fractious and troublesome—in fact, just a caged wild beast. Often during the night for hours together he would give vent to most unearthly yells and moans, destroying the rest and irritating the tempers of his neighbors ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... girl than with the gentle, courteous Hope; yet she realized that her own course was by no means open before her, that it would be long before Theodora would accept her sway in the home. It would be necessary to proceed slowly, but firmly. Little Allyn and fractious Phebe would be less difficult for her to manage than their older sister. She lingered for half an hour longer, talking with Theodora until she heard Dr. McAlister's step upon the stairs; and when at last she left the room, ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... far deeper. Had he been fretful, fractious, disagreeable, she would still have been very sorry for him and very kind to him. But now, to see him as he was—cheerful, patient; so ready with his interest in others, so utterly without envying and complaining regarding himself—changed what ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... accompaniment. Webb and Leonard, at work in a field not far away, often paused to listen, the former never failing to catch Amy's clear notes as she sat on a rock, the gentle power behind the throne, that had maintained peace and good-will among all the little fractious subjects. ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... time when Miss Lucy lay on her las' bed. She sent for Uncle Bushrod, and she say: 'Uncle Bushrod, when I die, I want you to take good care of Mr. Robert. Seem like'—so Miss Lucy say—'he listen to you mo' dan to anybody else. He apt to be mighty fractious sometimes, and maybe he cuss you when you try to 'suade him but he need somebody what understand him to be 'round wid him. He am like a little child sometimes'—so Miss Lucy say, wid her eyes shinin' in her po', thin face—'but he always been'—dem was her words—'my ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... woman who had cried out, herself mounted, and now upon the point of trying conclusions with her mount. Whether dissatisfaction with the latter or some fear of her own had caused her to cry out might have been less certain, had it not been sure that her eye was at the moment fastened, not upon the fractious steed, but upon the cause of his ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... wedded life, the Empress Dowager made herself a kind of foster-mother to the Princess and banished her husband to Mongolia, an incident which reveals to us another phase of the great Dowager's character—that of dealing with fractious husbands. ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... rest underneath my vest Gets up and begins to paw, And my hot tongue strains at its bridle-reins, Then I tackle the real outlaw; When I get plumb riled and my sense goes wild, And my temper has fractious growed, If he'll hump his neck just a triflin' speck, Then it's dollars to dimes ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... he planned to mass his forces and to challenge an attack. He went by way of Prairie Springs[820] and lingered there a little while, then moved on to Honey Springs, where was better grazing.[821] He felt obliged thus to make his stand in the Creek country; for the Creeks were getting fractious and it was essential for his purposes that they be mollified and held in check. Furthermore, it was incumbent upon him not to expose his "depots ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... and others, after getting over safely, would slip back from the sandy bank, and take an involuntary immersion. Some clung to the rear of the wagons, but in the middle of the stream the mules would become fractious, or the wagon would get jammed against a stone, and the unfortunate passengers were compelled to drop off and wade ashore, greeted by roars of derisive laughter. On such occasions soldiers give full play to their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... chose to paint in Evadne's room because they could not go out. She found pictures, and got everything ready for them good-naturedly, and then they sat themselves down at a little table opposite each other; but the weather affected their spirits, and made them both fractious. They wanted the same picture to begin with, and only settled the question by demolishing it in their attempts to snatch it from each other. Then there was only one left between them, but happily they remembered that artists sometimes work at the same picture, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... ungracefully. After the holiday rush and strain she invariably had a severe cold, the protest of the body she had over-driven and under-nourished for two or three weeks. As a patient she was as trying and fractious as a man, tossing about, threatening to get up, demanding hot-water bags, cold compresses, alcohol rubs. She fretted about the business, and imagined that things were at a stand-still during ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Robby was very fractious. The mutton-bone—no cooking was done—was harder than ever to carve with decency; and poor Mrs. Shepherd, for sheer fidgetiness, could hardly ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... "of a suit when yer can't wear it? As I telled you wot you wa—No, the's no sorter use your making fyces at me. And you keep your ——y legs in, or I'll—" The propositions that followed were murmured in a hoarse but crooning tone such as a mother might have used to soothe a fractious child. She went away, carrying the clothes with her, and turned out the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... and his Securitate police state became increasingly oppressive and draconian through the 1980s. CEAUSESCU was overthrown and executed in late 1989. Former Communists dominated the government until 1996, when they were swept from power by a fractious coalition of centrist parties. In 2000, the center-left Social Democratic Party (PSD) became Romania's leading party, governing with the support of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR). The opposition center-right alliance ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and so they are kept in that state of hope and anxiety, which produces irritation, and tempts to insubordination. The children of very indulgent parents, and of those who are undecided and unsteady in government, are very apt to become fretful, irritable, and fractious. ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... Pamela, on the other hand, had gone singing about the house. And really the child had done her best. But how could any one expect her to manage her father and the house, especially on the scraps of time left her by her V.A.D. work? The Squire had been like a fractious child over the compulsory rations. Nobody was less of a glutton—he pecked like a bird; but the proper food to peck at must be always there, or his temper was unbearable. Pamela made various blunders; the household knew hunger for the first time; and the servants ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Albinia was very much the creature of health. Never having been ill before, the depression had been so new that it broke her completely down; convalescence made her fractious. ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... them, the crippled victims of disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital, nor poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not minister to the needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all alike were clothed in tatters, lacking even sufficient covering ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... with the views of men who wrote as if Almighty God had committed Beauty to their charge ... he had never been able to understand or agree with their arguments against great engines and the instruments of power and energy ... and it seemed to him that many of these writers were querulous, fractious people who had not the capacity to make themselves at ease in a striving world. That poet fellow ... what was his name? ... whom he had met at Hampstead ... Palfrey, that was the man's name ... had sneered at Commerce! John had not been able to make ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... sergeant—by name Aloysius O'Grady; a squat, rosy little Irishman. He hated violent arrests and all that sort of thing, and had a faculty of persuading drunks and disorderlies and other fractious persons to "go quietly along wid him," that was little short of marvellous. Excited revellers, who were being carried by their mates, struggling violently, would break away to prance gaily along to the lock-up with the sergeant. Obstinate drunks who had done nothing but ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... do grow a little fractious at times," quoth he, "as is but natural, methinks. Yonder you shall hear Orson and Jenkyn, who having saved each other's life in battle and loving like brothers, do oft contend together with tongues most ungentle; go you, my son, and quiet ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... a bit green yet, but he'll mend of that," his father answered. "Now, get away, all of you." He put Norah up and watched, with a silent look of approval, the way Jim handled his impatient steed, taking him quietly, as one treats a fractious baby, and mounting gently. Then he stood under the tree to see them ride down the paddock, valises containing necessaries for the "asinine picnic" strapped on Nan and Betty's saddles. Norah, as the lady of the party, was exempt from carrying burdens, and Monarch brooked no load ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... see me again. Shall I go away? Are you busy, or tired, or is there anything the matter?' asked Lady Betty, in an extremely fractious voice. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... only want to say this, we must take our punishment like men, and not whine like fractious children who want the moon—the moon is no nearer for all that." He sighed a little bitterly, for he was tired and depressed; and after that Cedric was more reasonable, and Malcolm regained some of ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... discovered—a disagreeable habit of running away every time he saw a train of cars. Perhaps the horse couldn't help it; it was no doubt an inherited disposition, descended to him through long lines of fractious ancestors, and therefore it need not be set down against him in the catalogue of wilful sins. But whether so or otherwise, this little unpleasantness in his disposition was an established fact, and unfortunately there were two railroads ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... chronometer watch in such a solid silver case that you may knock at the door with it when you come home late from a social meeting, and rouse your wife and family, and save up your knocker for the postman; and here's half-a-dozen dinner plates that you may play the cymbals with to charm baby when it's fractious. Stop! I'll throw in another article, and I'll give you that, and it's a rolling-pin; and if the baby can only get it well into its mouth when its teeth is coming and rub the gums once with it, they'll come through double, in a fit of laughter equal to being tickled. Stop again! I'll ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens
... opposition of the barons, who rebelled in 1173, and of disputes with his fractious children which embittered his closing years, Henry II had laid the foundations of national monarchy. But in completing one part of the Norman Conquest, namely, the establishment of royal supremacy over disorderly feudatories, he had modified ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... a second when I entertained a wild notion of getting fractious. A fellow hates to make a bungle of the first decent trust he's had in a long time; but I was in a tight place, and I couldn't figure where I'd delay giving up beyond the length of time it would take the gentleman with the Winchester to ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
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