"Nuisance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nuisance you are, In this land of your birth, Held down by his hand, And crushed to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... out of the question, the Aztecs had excellent reasons for choosing this peculiar site for their city; but these reasons were not equally valid in the case of the new invaders. For them the surrounding salt-water was not needed as a protection, and was merely a nuisance. Every year, when the lake rose, the place was flooded, with enormous damage to the property of the inhabitants; and sometimes an inundation of greater depth than usual threatened as complete a destruction as Cortes and the Tlascalans had made. At the best of ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... ready, just on the chance that I might pass; and you cannot very well refuse a cripple who adores you and is not able to play with the other brats. You get instead into a kind of habit of calling every day and trying to make her laugh, because she is such a helpless little nuisance. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... too near the temple for comfort. The tomtom has to be beaten five times each day, and as one of these is at sunrise, I had occasion to wish the priest and tooth both far enough away. I wonder the Europeans don't indict this tomtoming at unseasonable hours as a nuisance. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... me! Am I undone? I must have forgotten to ask Amy to fix me. These blouses that fasten in the back are such a nuisance!" ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... him bother you to see everything, Polly," called Grandpapa. "Take my advice—it's a nuisance to try to compass the whole place on the first visit." But Polly laughed back, and the advice went over her head, as he very ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... swearing and committing a nuisance in a horrible profane manner against the church wall, sir, as if 'twere no more than a ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... bewildered at this interruption of his lonely and quiet life. Since she didn't want him to speak he would hold his tongue. If she hadn't looked so dreadfully unhappy he would have deemed her an infernal nuisance and hurried her departure. But in this case how could a fellow be brutal to a poor thing that wailed like a child, that seemed weaker than one and more in ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... leaned out of the window and said in a sharp tone—"Can't you keep that child still? She's an awful nuisance." ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... unless a visitor happened to be there, who would have a better opportunity of seeing her as she walked across the hearth. Hetty did not understand how anybody could be very fond of middle-aged people. And as for those tiresome children, Marty and Tommy and Totty, they had been the very nuisance of her life—as bad as buzzing insects that will come teasing you on a hot day when you want to be quiet. Marty, the eldest, was a baby when she first came to the farm, for the children born before him had died, and so Hetty had had them all three, one after ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... interpreted by a juvenile performer, are not especially enthralling to the ear of the ordinary listener. I read my books or papers, or stroll upon the lawn, while the lesson is going on, and every now and then I hear Margaret's—I really must write of her as Margaret; it is such a nuisance to write Miss Wentworth—pretty voice explaining the importance of a steady position of the wrist, or the dexterous turning over or under of a thumb, or something equally interesting. And then, when the lesson is concluded, my mother rouses herself from her after-dinner ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... have to wade through dust? We have enough of that intolerable nuisance here in Egypt—or am I to be delighted at the prospect of hurting my feet on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... don't need 'em. And they are a great nuisance sometimes," admitted Frank, laughing. "But just the same, we'll have lots more fun with ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... while to leave St. Ignace, but I know who ought to go, to be sent to the right about pretty quickly too, and that is—this man, Edmund Crabbe. What do you think of helping me to get him away? He's a public nuisance in spite of his education, and we should ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... good as an old cow mooing with her neck stretched over a stone wall. You know what I think. I've had plenty of time for reflection, walking up and down the floor in there in the dark; and long before you finally got home I'd made up my mind not to be an idiot and make myself a nuisance trying to influence you. It's your funeral. What you choose to do is none of my business. What I said when you came in just escaped me.—Stand off and ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... he sent on his window-plants, calceolarias and geraniums, to that which he intended to occupy several days before he went himself, and immediately found that he was pestered with flies, whereas previously he had enjoyed perfect immunity from the nuisance. A more agreeable remedy cannot be conceived. Next autumn let our windows be a blaze of brilliancy, so that all visitors to the Centennial may say, at all events, "There are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I have committed my self-respect by talking with such a person. I should like to commit him, but cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of geological convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah's ark; also, whether the Deluge was not a deal huger ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I could forget we are in trouble at home," said Dicksie, taking the badinage gracefully. "Worrying people are such a nuisance. Don't protest, for ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... I have told you, was mighty near supplied: that is, if deportation would suit your view: the ship was actually sought to be hired. Yes, it would have been an advertisement, and rather a lark, and yet a blooming nuisance. For my part, I shall try ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... place, there is no vice of necessity in gossip. This must be clearly understood. It is proximity in time and place that makes it intolerable. A gossip next door may be a nuisance. A gossip in history may be delightful. No doubt if I had lived in Auchinleck in the days when Boswell lived at home, I would have thought him a nasty little "skike." But let him get to London and far off in the revolving years, and I admit ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... bothered by a troublesome chronic cough. He did not mind it very much when at home, but at church he felt it to be a nuisance both to himself and his neighbours. To ease it somewhat he always carried to church with him a number of black currant lozenges, a supply of which he kept in his big mahogany desk at home. Occasionally, either as encouragement ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... find dear Betty very ill with scarlet-fever caught from some poor children mother nursed when they fell sick, living over a cellar where pigs had been kept. The landlord (a deacon) would not clean the place till mother threatened to sue him for allowing a nuisance. Too late to save two of the poor babies or Lizzie and May ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... a Mysian or a Phrygian have been heard at Athens, when even Demosthenes himself was reproached as a nuisance? But should the former have begun his whining sing-song, after the manner of the Asiatics, who would have endured it? or rather, who would not have ordered him to be instantly torn from the Rostrum? Those, ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... dejection of his parents, forces from them the secret of the pact. After equipping himself for the struggle, he sets out for hell to recover the contract. In hell he frightens or annoys the devils in various ways, and becomes such a nuisance that finally the arch-fiend is glad to get rid of him ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... that Lite was there. It would be much more comfortable if he were near instead of away over to the Bar Nothing, sound asleep in the bunk-house. As a self-appointed guardian, Jean considered Lite something of a nuisance, when he wasn't funny. But as a big, steady-nerved friend and comrade, he certainly was ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... He's a nuisance, of course. But to see only that side of him is to think, as the shepherd boy piped, 'as though' you will 'never grow old.' Does he never appeal to you with any more human significance, a significance tearful and uncomfortably symbolic? Or are you so entirely that tailor's fraction of manhood, ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... How, when shall we get past This nuisance, these unending ant-like swarms? Yet, Ptolemy, we owe thee thanks for much Since heaven received thy sire! No miscreant now Creeps Thug-like up, to maul the passer-by. What games men played erewhile—men ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... organization. But there was the mysterious, unmentioned map, whose accuracy, by the way, he found exact. Gradually he came to the conclusion that the delays were not entirely accidental. The conclusion became a conviction that the Leopard Woman was making as much of a drag and as big a nuisance of herself ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... greater ultimate importance was enacted by the council, intended "to restrict the increase of dogs." A heavy tax was imposed on the keepers of this indispensable protector of house and fold. The multitude running about the streets was felt to be a nuisance, and the destruction of flocks required some check; but the frame-work of the bill was objectionable, and the charge excessive. It will be seen hereafter that the tax occasioned the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... dispense, Would be a rake, but wanted sense; Would strictly after Truth inquire, Because he dreaded to come nigh her. For Liberty no champion bolder, He hated bailiffs at his shoulder. To half the world a standing jest, A perfect nuisance to the rest; From many (and we may believe him) Had the best wishes they could give him. To all mankind a constant friend, Provided they had cash to lend. One thing he did before he went hence, He left us a laconic sentence, By cutting of his phrase, and ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... and no mistake," cried our generous countryman, standing between the bully and Fred, for fear that the former should do him some harm. "The fellow is a nuisance, and ought to be kicked from the mines, for he makes his living by sponging ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... be a nuisance, because she doesn't like dogs; so that Mrs. Gisborne can only take the old one, which she could never part with. So she wanted to give Mab to some one who would be kind to her; and she has come to the right shop; ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the other side of Tahiti above the fantastic peak of Maiauo, it had not shed a beam upon the ferns and mosses. The guava was a dense growth. Like the lantana of Hawaii and Ceylon, imported to Tahiti to fill a want, it had abused hospitality, and become a nuisance without apparent remedy. How often man works but in circles! Everywhere in the world plants and insects, birds and animals, had been pointed out to me that had been acquired for a beneficent purpose, and had ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Theodosia said to me that men were a great nuisance as a rule, but that she had a pet friend, a "dear docile creature, so useful with the dogs," and he was coming back by the 6.30 train. You would have laughed, if you could have seen him when he did arrive! A fair humble thing, with a squeaky voice and obsequious manners. ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... was retarded, could not be checked. The motor-car triumphed. It grew rapidly more reliable, more silent, more pleasing to the eye; and to-day it glides in thousands along our roads, a pleasure to those who occupy it, a nuisance neither to pedestrians nor to other wheeled traffic; more under control when it is well driven, and more ready to stop quickly when required, than any horsed vehicle which it may have replaced. At one time the papers were full of such headlines as: "Another Motor-car Accident." Each small ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... rifle barrel must have been pretty badly choked with sand and coral pebbles... Now lie still, and don't worry like an old maid who has lost her cat. You can do nothing, and will only be a damned nuisance if you do try to do anything. The brigantine will be here presently, and you'll get your head attended to, and have 'pretty-pretty' plasters stuck on your nose and other ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... would mean that I should have to go up to London to choose them. You know, that's rather a nuisance. ...
— Mr. Pim Passes By • Alan Alexander Milne
... "discharged their arrows" (which they called "In-Vites", and each of which was branded with the mystic letters, R.S.V.P.) at me in swarms, and though they rather tickled than hurt, yet after a time their minute but multiplied prickings became no end of a nuisance. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... of the old German physiologist that "Health comes in through the muscles and flows out through the nerves." The nervous system was created for good and wise ends, but in many people it has become a nuisance. Its use is to insure that every stimulus from the external world shall call forth a response suited to the emergency. A fly lights upon my face; I wave my hand and drive him away. The fly has tickled ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... olden times lay outside the city walls, and was used as a place of recreation and of executions; the scene of William Wallace's execution and the death of Wat Tyler; gradually surrounded by the encroaching city, the cattle-market became a nuisance, and was abolished in 1855; is partly ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... her complain that she had not one of those permits which would save her the trouble of waiting at doors and standing in crowds, and say how useful it would be to them at first-nights, and gala performances at the Opera, and what a nuisance it had been, not having one, on the day of Gambetta's funeral. Swann never spoke of his distinguished friends, but only of such as might be regarded as detrimental, whom, therefore, he thought it snobbish, and in not very good taste to conceal; while ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... "You have heard the noises from the surrounding apartments to-day, and you have admitted that they were extraordinary. I declare them not to be borne. If then, you cannot mitigate the nuisance, this apartment will be at your disposal from the first ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... was a native of a far-off, anonymous island to the westward: whence, when quite young, she had been carried by the commander of a ship, touching there on a passage from Macao to Valparaiso. At Valparaiso her protector put her ashore; most probably, as I afterward had reason to think, for a nuisance. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... "What a nuisance things are!" said Lucy. "But now I am absolutely determined to punish Irene and Rosamund in the only way in which I can punish them. Rosamund is conceited enough to believe that she has made a reformation in Irene's character. I know better. I know that Irene is a perfectly horrid girl. ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Rand corrected. "On the sharp end of a Mauser bayonet, sometime last night. I found the body this morning, when I went to see him, and notified the State Police. They call it murder, but of course, they're just prejudiced. I'd call it a nuisance-abatement project." ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... and women. Sometimes you see a man who is fiery, cross, ill-tempered and surly. Again you will find one who is fawning, over-polite, subservient and altogether wearisome because, in trying to make himself agreeable he becomes a bore and a nuisance. Both of these kinds of men have failed to reach the right goal of manhood. We must have backbone, firmness and stamina, but we must be willing to bend sometimes or we are apt to get some pretty hard bumps when we hold our heads too high. ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... had it all their own way; the women were on the look-out for them, instead of being themselves looked out for. They talked about "gentlemen," and being "companionable to gen-tlemen," and "who was fascinating to gen-tlemen," till the "grand old name" became a nuisance. There was an under-current of unsated coquetry. I don't suppose they were any sillier than the rest of us; but when our silliness is mixed in with housekeeping and sewing and teaching and returning visits, it passes off harmless. When it is stripped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a thud. He began to upbraid her. He had endured too much. He had still his bill to pay. He told her that she was a good-for-nothin' nuisance and he wished he had left her home. He'd never take her anywheres again, you bet. Kedzie lost her reason entirely. She was shattered with spasms of grief aggravated by her mother's ferocity and her father's. She could not give up this splendor. She would not go to a cheap place to live. She would ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... the sweet briar, thinking it would form an ornament and fill the air with its perfume. Instead of being ornamental, it has become an impenetrable bush, which neither man nor cattle can go through. It has become a nuisance, spreading over the ground and destroying pasturage, and we heartily wish that not a twig of it ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... on Watergate street, and known as "God's Providence House;" and "Bishop Lloyd's Palace," which is ornamented with quaint wood-carvings. The "Old Lamb Row," where Randall Holme, the Chester antiquary, lived, stood by itself, obeying no rule of regularity, and was regarded as a nuisance two hundred years ago, though later it was highly prized. The city corporation in 1670 ordered that "the nuisance erected by Randall Holme in his new building in Bridge street be taken down, as it annoys his neighbors, and hinders their prospect from their houses." ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... sorely to leave our good tents, beds, and equipment behind, yet all we could take was the blankets and one gladstone bag packed with clothes for us all. Kettles and pots and pans were a noisy nuisance, yet we had to have them, and blankets for all those porters, who would escape from jail practically naked, were an essential; but fortunately we had a sixty-pound bale of trade-blankets among ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Poor multiplication table! and now, oh, how I would like to cry, "Don't let us say anything more about the masher, and then we'll all be quite happy;" but to calm the needless fears of many, let me say at once, the creature is a nuisance, but not a danger. The stealthy, crafty, determined pursuer of the young and honest actress is a product of the imagination. These "Johnnies" who hang about stage doors and send foolish and impertinent notes to the girlhood ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... cents. The second aid is a 24-inch office stool at 85 cents, for use while washing dishes, preparing vegetables, etc. This sort of a stool is light, easily moved about, and means a great saving in strength. Though it has sometimes been dubbed a "nuisance" by the uninitiated, the woman who has learned its value finds it a very present help and wonders how she ever did ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... forgot myself. But Sam is so like his father I just couldn't help taking a whack at him. The little bully knocked over his brother's house just to hear it fall. When he grows up he'll be just as much of a nuisance as Jake and he'll call it syndicalism or internationalism or something, just ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... upon cornices or monuments or on the prows or sterns of ships, or to put anywhere before the human eye indoors or out, that which distorts honest shapes, or which creates unearthly beings or places or contingencies, is a nuisance and revolt. Of the human form especially, it is so great it must never be made ridiculous. Of ornaments to a work, nothing outre can be allowed; but those ornaments can be allowed that conform to the perfect facts of the open air, and that flow out of the nature ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... originate entirely in the head; the heart knows nothing of them; they are the creators of intrigues. Very well, sir, go ahead with your explanation. But confine yourself to plain Yes and No. Anything outside of that is a nuisance. The Buts and Ifs are a nuisance. Mr. Stein intends to rob me of my honor; he intends to reward my fidelity and my honesty with disgrace; in my sixty-fifth year I am to stand before the world as a scoundrel. Now, Sir, Yes or No—is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... to go to the front, but I say she'd be only a nuisance until she knows more about nursing. Someone told me the other day, a propos of untrained women going to the front and hindering instead of helping, that during the last war a poor dear in one of the hospitals had his hair parted fifty times in an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... Market proved that they were, every night, alarmed by firing off guns, cries of "Fire," clashing of swords, the most boisterous ranting and shrieks from the voices of the ladies of the corps dramatique, and the place was a perfect nuisance to the neighbourhood. ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... while a son would have been an undoubted blessing, a daughter was something actively worse than a disappointment. When Clarice timidly inquired what name he wished the child to bear, Vivian distinctly intimated that the child and all her belongings were totally beneath his notice. She could call the nuisance what she liked. ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... all. But then Marston had never met him when the Wild Dog was drunk—and when sober, I took it that the one act of kindness from the engineer always stayed his hand. But the Police Guard at the Gap saw him quite often—and to it he was a fearful and elusive nuisance. He seemed to be staying somewhere within a radius of ten miles, for every night or two he would circle about the town, yelling and firing his pistol, and when we chased him, escaping through the Gap or up the valley or down in Lee. Many plans were laid to catch him, but ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... to abate the nuisance of which I complain," said Confucius. "Can't we adopt a house rule that poets must not be inspired between the hours of 11 A.M. and 5 P.M., or in the evening after eight; that any poet discovered ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... getting to be a real nuisance." Suddenly two forms loomed large in the left doorway, and the stolid sentry of whom I have spoken limped in on the arm of an infirmier. Voices murmured in the obscurity, "Who is wounded?"—"Somebody wounded?" And dreamy-eyed ones sat up ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... mysteries of fried chicken and fresh rolls. The men of the party were equally busy cleaning guns and routing out all sorts of hunting toggery. The girls tried to help everybody impartially, succeeding for the most part in making a general nuisance of themselves. ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... out to be very good, even abundant; only the wine was not quite up to the mark; it was almost black sherry, bought by Timofeitch in the town at a well-known merchant's, and had a faint coppery, resinous taste, and the flies were a great nuisance. On ordinary days a serf-boy used to keep driving them away with a large green branch; but on this occasion Vassily Ivanovitch had sent him away through dread of the criticism of the younger generation. Arina Vlasyevna had had time to dress: she had put on a high cap ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... As they drew near to San Diego, their Indian allies began to desert, evidently in fear of the Dieguenos, whom they began to meet in numbers and who proved a rascally lot. They thronged the camp and became a perfect nuisance with their begging and stealing. They begged from Junipero his robe and from the governor his cuera, waistcoat, breeches, and all he had on. One of them succeeding in inducing Junipero to take off his spectacles to show them to him and as soon as he got them in his hands made off ...
— The March of Portola • Zoeth S. Eldredge
... said Bertrand d'Aiguerra, "to any god of luck who will send that caitiff where he gets himself killed. If he were not one of us he would not be such a nuisance. His mercenaries will be the ruin of us. The people were touchy enough before, but now they begin to think we are all birds of the same ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... public nuisance and a common enemy.—He gets his living out of other people. Whatever wealth he gets, some honest man who has earned it is compelled to go without. Dishonesty is the perversion of exchange from its noble function as a civilizing agent and a public ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... "provide four hundred birds" whenever a king was crowned, "and an equal number when the queen made her first entry into her good town of Paris." The goldsmiths and money-changers, however, finding that this became a nuisance, and that it injured their trade, tried to get it abolished. They applied to the authorities to protect their rights, urging that the approaches to their shops, the rents of which they paid regularly, were continually obstructed ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... convention and I could see by the way they all looked at me that they were passing resolutions inviting me to break up the bob cat business. The manager of the menagerie told pa he wished the confounded bob cat would escape, 'cause he was a blooming nuisance, so I thought I would help get rid of the beast, and save the show from disgrace. So when we got to Oberlin I thought that was a pious community that could stand a wild bob cat, so I put several sheets of sticky tanglefoot fly ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... himself subjected to such a nuisance. Ladies hitherto, when they had consulted him on religious subjects, had listened to what he might choose to say with some deference, and had differed, if they differed, in silence. But Mrs. Proudie interrogated him and then lectured. "Neither thou, nor thy ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... common nuisance, and as great a grievance to those that come near him as a pewterer is to his neighbours. His discourse is like the braying of a mortar, the more impertinent the more voluble and loud, as a pestle makes more noise when it is rung on the sides of a mortar ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... her father was by no means an absorbing affection. The Captain had never cared to conceal his indifference for his only child, or pretended to think her anything but a nuisance and an encumbrance—a superfluous piece of luggage more difficult to dispose of than any other luggage, and altogether a stumbling-block in the stony path of a man who has to live by his wits. So perhaps it is scarcely ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... of the fact that I find my hair a terrible nuisance, with no Hortense to struggle with it every morning. As you know, it's as thick as a rope and as long as my arm. I begrudge the time it takes to look after it, and such a thing as a good shampoo is ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... that limit. The huge signs which some advertisers, both in England and the United States, have placed in such positions as to mar the landscape, have so far aroused public antagonism that there is reason to hope that this form of nuisance will not ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... leaves, moving camp from time to time. They vary their labours and supplement their food-supply by hunting and trapping. Such an expedition is generally regarded as highly enjoyable as well as profitable. As in camping-parties in other parts of the world, the cooking is generally regarded as a nuisance to be shirked if possible. The Sea Dayaks indulge in these expeditions more frequently than others, and such parties of them may often be found at great distances from their homes. In the course of such ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... extraordinarily rapid. The next thing we know is that the institution of waits is a rather annoying survival which at once deprives us of sleep and takes money out of our pockets. And then Christmas is gluttony and indigestion and expensiveness and quarter-day, and Christmas cards are a tax and a nuisance, and present-giving is a heavier tax and a nuisance. And we feel self-conscious and foolish as we sing "Auld Lang Syne." And what a blessing it will be when the "festivities" (as they are misleadingly called) are over, and we can ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... one naturally reflects that it is dangerous to live, so loaded with disease seems the very air. These descriptions carry fears to many minds, to be depicted in some future time upon [20] the body. A periodical of our own will counteract to some extent this public nuisance; for through our paper, at the price at which we shall issue it, we shall be able to reach many homes with healing, purifying thought. A great work already has been done, and a greater work [25] yet remains to be done. Oftentimes we are denied the results of our labors ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... coming in. "You two never have an out and out row, but you're always bickering. Thorpe, you ought to mend your ways—it is a confounded nuisance to have ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... was wondering what would become of Franklin West, he suddenly disappeared, and no one could form an idea of what had become of him. People thought it was no great matter. He was only a nuisance to himself and his family. Mrs. West was shocked by this sudden and mysterious disappearance. He was her husband, and the father of her children, and it was not strange that she wept, and even hoped that he would come back. The neighbors ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... is free from the universally admitted nuisance of morning calls. The hours are simple—eight o'clock breakfasts, one o'clock dinners, six o'clock suppers. If people want anything with you, they come at any hour of the day, but if they only wish to be sociable, the early evening is the recognized time for ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... and, lastly, Cassio has a daily beauty in his life which makes Iago ugly. In addition to these annoyances he wants Cassio's place. As for Roderigo, he calls him a snipe, and who can hate a snipe? But Roderigo knows too much; and he is becoming a nuisance, getting angry, and asking for the gold and jewels he handed to Iago to give to Desdemona. So Iago kills Roderigo. Then for Desdemona: a fig's-end for her virtue! but he has no ill-will to her. In fact he 'loves' her, though he is good enough to explain, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... I am the second man in all the realm. Of course, he must not suffer, and if there is famine in his country—and I hear there is—I will send him some provisions; but I can't take a man from Padan-aram and introduce him into this polite Egyptian court. What a nuisance it is ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... certain buckets filled with a solution of lime in water, there is no time for hesitation. He immediately locks up the apartment or closet where his papers and private property are kept, and, putting the key into his pocket, betakes himself to flight. A husband, however beloved, becomes a perfect nuisance during this season of female rage. His authority is superseded, his commission suspended, and the very scullion who cleans the brasses in the kitchen becomes of more importance than he. He has nothing for it but to abdicate for a time, and run from an evil which ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Charleston Neck marshes, wherein breeds the malaria-mosquito, drained. Since then the death rate from malaria, which was nothing less than scandalous, has dwindled to proportions that are almost respectable—if, indeed, it were respectable to permit any deaths from an easily destructible nuisance like the mosquito. Nearly all our cities, by the way, are curiously indifferent to the depredations of this man-eater. Suppose, for an example, that Trenton, New Jersey, were suddenly beset by a brood of copperhead snakes, which killed, let us say, two or three people a week ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... bicycle in the stable, the other two had lived enough in the country-town atmosphere to be foolishly disgusted at being obliged to dine early. That they had always been used to it made them only think it beneath their age as well as their dignity, and, "What a horrid nuisance!" had been on their tongues ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... of his eminent success. When he bought his farm, "near Geneva," over fifty years ago, there was a pile of manure in the yard that had lain there year after year, until it was, as he said, "as black as my hat." The former owner regarded it as a nuisance, and a few months before young Johnston bought the farm, had given some darkies a cow on condition that they would draw out this manure. They drew out six loads, took the cow—and that was the last seen ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... fellow-members, in constant and envenomed battle with them, and more than a match for them all. He fought single-handed for the right of petition as an indefeasible right, not hesitating to submit a petition from citizens of Virginia praying for his own expulsion from Congress as a nuisance. In 1836 he presented a petition from one hundred and fifty-eight ladies, citizens of Massachusetts, "for, I said, I had not yet brought myself to doubt whether females were citizens." After eight years of persistent struggle against ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... attending this style of mining which Larry had not foreseen when he adopted it, and which caused the tent of our adventurers to become a sort of public nuisance. Larry had frequently to go down the stream for provisions, and Ah-wow being given to sleep when no one watched him, took advantage of those opportunities to retire to his own tent; the consequence was, that strangers who chanced to look ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... by France would at once become an act of violent usurpation. (For let me tell you, my friends—the sufferings of a people count as nothing in diplomacy against the least trivial act against a crown.) The nuisance was, the two Paolis, Giafferi and Hyacinth, had no notion whatever of making themselves kings; nor would their devoted followers have tolerated it. Yet—as sometimes happens—there was a third man, of greater descent than they, to whom at a pinch the crown might be offered, and with a far ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... going to try for a seat in the Legislature," said Abe. "I reckon it's rather bold. Old Samuel Legg was a good deal of a nuisance down in Hardin County. He was always talking about going to ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... course the snoring told its own tale with brazen-tongued clamour, and the whole tenement trembled all night long from top to bottom. Nothing but the regardless nature of the surrounding population prevented the Captain from being indicted as a nuisance; but there were other sounds that were ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... about its former (imaginary) inmates. But as they grew older and more absorbed in outside affairs, their interest in it ceased, till at length it came to be only a source of irritation to them, since it separated their homes by a wide space that they considered rather a nuisance to have ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... in the last half some of the Metropolitan constituencies. To one of the latter a reply is before me in which he says: "I declare that as to all matters on the face of this teeming earth, it appears to me that the House of Commons and Parliament altogether is become just the dreariest failure and nuisance that ever bothered this much-bothered world." To a private enquiry of apparently about the same date he replied: "I have thoroughly satisfied myself, having often had occasion to consider the question, that I can be far more usefully ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... road diverged, and we had mountains on either side; another turn, and on a tree was a signboard, "Durkee's Scotch Whiskey." Instantly the "supreme moment" vanished, and I was again in my home city, and one of a band of women battling "the bill-board nuisance." I was rebellious at thus being despoiled of my poetic mood and tried to regain lost ground, but erelong another turn and Durkee's Scotch Whiskey again appeared! Sadly I resigned myself to fate and awaited our arrival ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... the business is, with precious few exceptions, dogs are a nuisance, whatever Col. Bill Porter of the "Spirit," and his thousand and one dog-fancying and inquiring friends, may think to the contrary; and the man that will invest fifty real dollars in a dog-skin, has got a tender place in his head, not healed up as ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... I seem to attract women like a magnet. I'm strictly the masculine type of male and I approve of this but it can be a blasted nuisance when you're an ensign going up fast and your commander finds one of your blondes stowed away ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... and another, and there came a time of little rain. The bananas were few, and the breadfruit were not plentiful. One evening, therefore, the old men met in conference, and this was their decision: 'Rats are becoming a nuisance, and we will ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... conclusive, wasn't it?" laughed Hilary. "As to the poor old pater, he won't keep it up for ever, bless his simple heart, that did want its daughter to be a viscountess. So while the fit lasts I propose to judiciously absent my erring self. It's a nuisance to have to miss all the fun this season; but with the pater in the sulks it wouldn't be worth it. So I'm off to-morrow to join Bertie and the house-boat at Riverton. As Dick has taken a bungalow close by, we shall ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... It was the dress nuisance which caused nuns to have the preference in so many cases; but I could not see or hear that they ever did anything but make converts to the church and take ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Talking), a ring given by Tartaro, the Basque Cyclops, to a girl whom he wished to marry. Immediately she put it on, it kept incessantly saying, "You there, and I here;" so, to get rid of the nuisance, she cut off her finger and threw both ring and finger into a pond.—Rev. W. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Roman, the Cicero, was to-day urged by several abolitionists from Boston to expose the mischief of both the foreign and the domestic policy of Seward. The Senator replied that he is more certain to succeed against that public nuisance and public enemy by not attacking him openly. I vainly ransack my recollection of my classic reading for the name of any Roman who ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... his nerves if he had nerves. The man, at any rate, was becoming an intolerable nuisance. The colonel marked him down as one of the problems calling for ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... of labor in handling both coal and ashes, the waiting for fires to come up, the banking of fires and the dirt and nuisance generally. The continuous operation possible with oil adds ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... England no more. How women have to suffer for a political cause! Not merely the mothers and wives and sisters who have to see their loved ones go to the prison or the scaffold for some political question which they regard, from their domestic point of view, as a pure nuisance and curse because it takes the loved one from them. Oh! but there is more than that, worse than that, when a woman is willing to be devoted to the cause, but finds her heart torn with agony by the thought that her lover cares more for the cause than he cares for her—that for the sake ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... a divided authority, which brings him into conflict with the senior instructor before experience suggests the remedy. While the principal is compelled to punish the students for their misconduct in "hazing" the obnoxious professor, he also finds it necessary to abate the nuisance of a conceited, overbearing, and tyrannical pedagogue. Boys cannot be expected to be angels in school, until their instructors have soared to ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... silly man, and if you grow up into a man hating me, you'll grow up a bitter, twisted sort of man—no good to anybody. A man with a grievance is only a nuisance to his neighbours; and seeing what your grievance is, and that I am ready and willing to do everything in a father's power to lessen that grievance and retrieve the mistakes of the past—remembering, too, that everybody knows my good intentions—you'll ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... things that had been doing on this side of the globe while he had been on the other. No more was said about Marian, or Gilbert's plans for the future. In his own mind that one subject reigned supreme, shutting out every other thought; but h did not want to make himself a nuisance to John Saltram, and he knew that there are bounds to the endurance of ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... were her special delight. But then Bobby didn't like the idea of drowning four helpless little cats in the icy cold water of the pond, either. He started after Charlie Black, and Meg went after him and really wished she didn't have a new dress for a moment because she found the box a nuisance to carry. ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... often a nuisance to my friends in those years; but there were sacrifices I declined to make, and I never passed the hat to George Gravener. I never forgot our little discussion in Ebury Street, and I think it stuck in my throat to have to treat him to the avowal I had found so easy to Mss Anvoy. It ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... attempt to convict him of having been one of the most cruel masters—that would not be true—his prevailing temper was kind, but he was a perpetualist. He was opposed to emancipation; thought free negroes a great nuisance, and was, as respects discipline, a thorough slaveholder. He would not tolerate a look or a word from a slave like insubordination. He would suppress it at once, and at any risk. When he thought it necessary to secure unqualified obedience, ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... half in length, and planted on both sides with ranges of elms apparently almost as ancient as the town. The magistrates are so careful of this ornament of their town, that they suffer no one to walk there after rain, and penalties are imposed on every species of nuisance ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... pleasant little adornments, no diversions such as a mother places in the room where her darlings pass many of their baby hours. It was a motherless, blank, nursery, where the only nurse was the maid, who came and went, and looked upon Hetty as a nuisance; an extra trouble for which she had not been prepared when she engaged to live ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... nodded at him. "You think marriage a nuisance. So it is. So is everything. By Gad, sir, I wish I were well out of it. I go nowhere—not even to church. I have grown thin through the sheer nuisance of things. But if nothing happens over there and you don't ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... certainly better than being adored," he answered, toying with some fruits. "Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as Humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... and activity in battle; and religious, to accompany the sacred songs at pious festivals. To the last class belongs the dance which Theseus is said to have instituted on his return from Crete, after having abated the Minotaur nuisance. At the head of a noble band of youth, this public spirited reformer of abuses himself executed his dance. Theseus as a dancing-master does not much fire the imagination, it is true, but the incident has its value and purpose in this dissertation. Theseus called his dance Geranos, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... eyes open and it's their own affair. But look at Gustavo; he can scarcely carry a dish without breaking it when you are watching him. And Giuseppe—that confounded Farfalla with its yellow sails floats back and forth in front of the terrace till I am on the point of having it scuttled as a public nuisance; and those three washer-women and the post-office clerk and the boy who brings milk, and Luigi and—every man, woman and child in the village ...
— Jerry Junior • Jean Webster
... possibilities of eternal life in this world. They at once snatch their pens and write to say that they are specially deserving of this boon, and wish to live for ever—will I tell them how? And these are the very creatures I will not tell how—because their perpetual existence would be a mistake and a nuisance! The individuals whose lives are really valuable never ask anyone how to ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... parish of Lowestoft, Suffolk, in the forties the parish clerk's name was Newson (would-be wits called him "Nuisance"). He was arrayed in a velvet-trimmed robe and bore himself bravely. The way in which he mouthed "Let us sing to the glory of God" was wonderful. But the chief amusement he afforded was the habit of hiding his face in his hands during each prayer, then ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... with many things that irritated or estranged Indian feeling. It bored him; there it was, a danger, and there was no denying it, and yet he believed firmly that it was a mine that would never be fired, an avalanche that would never fall. It was a nuisance, a stupidity, that kept Europe drilling and wasted enormous sums on unavoidable preparations; it hung up everything like a noisy argument in a drawing-room, but that human weakness and folly would ever let the mine ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... black hut, full of men, whose garments were generally covered with vermin, and rarely if ever cleaned, and who made it a common practice to sit on the mat where the two Landers slept, rather than undergo such a nuisance, they stepped into their canoes, and having pushed off from the land, they waited the arrival of the king of the dark water under the branches of a large tree, at a little ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... where there are corpses to be wailed over every night, it has been found so objectionable to the expanding intellects of the more enlightened Turks that it has been prohibited as a public nuisance, and these days it is only in such conservative interior towns as Bey Bazaar that the custom still obtains. When about starting early on the following morning the khanjee begs me to be seated, and then several men who ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... This or Mrs. That to have made up her mind to give a ball, where will she give it? At home, no doubt, in the great majority of cases; but if her rooms happen to be small, or she wishes to avoid the nuisance of having her own house turned upside down (as it must be for a couple of days at the least if a ball is to be held in it), she may prefer—I am assuming expense to be no object—to hire some public rooms, like Willis's, or an empty house for the occasion; of which alternatives ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... Haydon, feeling utterly disgusted with his attempt at the heroic in the form and action of Dentatus, obliterated what he calls 'the abominable mass,' and breathed as if relieved of a nuisance. Through Lord Mulgrave he obtained an order to draw from the Marbles, and devoted the next three months to mastering their secrets, and bringing his hand and mind into subjection to the principles that they displayed. 'I rose with the sun,' he ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... three belts of mosquito country the Barren Grounds, where they are worst and endure for 2 1/2 months; the spruce forest, where they are bad and continue for 2 months, and the great arable region of wheat, that takes in Athabaska and Saskatchewan, where the flies are a nuisance for 6 or 7 weeks, but no more so than they were in Ontario, Michigan, Manitoba, and formerly England; and where the cultivation of the land will soon reduce them to insignificance, as it has invariably done in other similar regions. It is quite remarkable in the north-west that ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... industriously brushing away as if his life depended on it. They would follow you on to a tram-car, and whether you got a seat or not there would be somebody working on your boots two seconds after boarding it. Another nuisance were the sellers of swagger-sticks, and I have frequently bought one just for the pleasure of laying it across the back of its previous owner. They soon picked up our language and its choicest words, but one word they never understood was "No!" The first Egyptian word we learned ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... first payment Mother used immediately to pay the mortgage, but the second payment has not been made yet, as Mother's sister, Aunt Clay, living on the adjoining place, has got out an injunction against the Oil Trust as a public nuisance, and all work in the oil land has had to be stopped for the time being. The lawyer for the Trust told my brother, Paul, that Aunt Clay has not a leg to stand on, but of course the law has to take its ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... designated. Some say it is a nuisance and should be abolished. Some call it an outrage and ask for legislative interference. Some say it is an extortion and refuse to pay it. Some say it is a necessary evil and suffer it. The wise ones look at it a little differently. Possibly it is best explained or excused, whichever way ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... Birmingham;[892] it appears that all the rest of these 'Chapels of Ease' unblushingly gave the lie, so far as in them lay, to the declaration of our Lord that the poor have the Gospel preached unto them. Some time had yet to elapse before improved feeling could do much towards abating the unchristian nuisance. But energetic protests were occasionally heard. 'I would reprobate,' wrote Mrs. Barbauld (1790) 'those little gloomy solitary cells, planned by the spirit of aristocracy, which deform the building no less to the eye of taste than to the eye of benevolence, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... allowed to pollute the waters. The whole is deodorised by an exceedingly simple process, and, whether in town or country, carried away daily and applied to its natural use in fertilising the soil. Our practice of throwing away, where it is an obvious and often dangerous nuisance, material so valuable in its proper place, seemed to my Martial friends an inexplicable and ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... from old Frog, you may as well shut up,' said Lance. 'There's been no peace at Marshlands since he took that cottage—a regular old nuisance and mischief-maker, spiting the Captain because one of the dogs killed his old cock, and bothering Charlie to no ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... farther on," said Mr Marston; "but as the tide will soon be going down I shall wait. It is a great nuisance, but I suppose I must ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... with noble Spanish chestnuts. The descent was steep and slippery, the horse had tender feet, and, after stumbling badly, eventually came down, and I went over his head, to the great distress of the kindly female mago. The straw shoes tied with wisps round the pasterns are a great nuisance. The "shoe strings" are always coming untied, and the shoes only wear about two ri on soft ground, and less than one on hard. They keep the feet so soft and spongy that the horses can't walk without them at all, and as soon as they get thin your horse begins to ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Back of a wooded area to the rear of his holding, was a combination hog farm and refuse dump. The owner of it got little or no rental from the tenant farmer who carried on his noisome business but he was well aware of its nuisance value to his new neighbor. Here indeed was a situation requiring the services of that middle man, the real estate broker. The latter was a good business man and by using all his guile, he eventually acquired the hog farm for his client at a fair price. But even at that, ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... developed a secret taste for spirituous liquors which he had no wish to share with others. With the assistance of a bad cook and a constant spleen caused by resentment against the intervention of his priest, good Father Roche, he finished his career with great haste and without either becoming a nuisance to his neighbours or ruining his property. The property was clear of mortgage or debt when he set out ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the preliminary situation of things are another nuisance. They generally consist of choicely turned disclosures to the confidants, delivered in a happy moment of leisure. That very public whose impatience keeps the poets and players under such strict discipline, has, however, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... abstained from joy and have received the greater damnation. My children are mostly writings, poor weakly creatures dying inarticulate and unchristened, tenderly remembered by myself only, but at least no nuisance to the world. I loved them at their birth, I hold them in remembrance, though they were ever of a hectic ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... nuisance! Turn the whole place upside down and inside out, for a few dollars! Let's get the money by subscription. Everybody would be glad to give ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... beastly nuisance that this is my wedding day," he began. "Yes, I mean it," as Robb looked up in horrified astonishment. "I don't mean anything derogatory to anybody. I just state an obvious fact. You would understand if you ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum |
