"Crabbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... creature, that he came near dropping a plate of biscuit the first time she spoke, and almost upset the coffee the next time. I have often noticed that the anchorites of the frontier belong to two classes—those who have left humanity and civilization from sheer antagonism to men, a selfish, crabbed love of solitude, and those who have fled from their fellows from a morbid sensitiveness. The Inhabitant ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... to do it, sir, and I be here to see this pretty contradiction of the song that "youth and age cannot live together"!' answered Laurie, smiling at the pair. '"Crabbed age", papa; that makes all the difference in the world,' said Bess quickly; for she loved poetry, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... no perception whatsoever of the poetry of farm-life: he considers a woodman's work crabbed prose. The idea of making poetry out of any part of it, or out of a herder's work either, is to him stark idiocy. Sheep-washing, for instance, is simply working a whole spring day in very chilly water, and sheep-shearing is a task at which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... find invaluable help in the study of this character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard, crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow, precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... nature with even stronger genius, on the other hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method when he ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... spaniel sneaking with his tail between his legs, you would see, in his stead, a white man doing the very same mean act of cowardice, with his back upon his enemy. A hoity-toity little she-puppy would become in a twinkling a very pretty girl; and an ugly old snarling she-wolf, a crabbed and sour old squaw. But, when the sun arose, the handsome hunter became again the wolf-dog; and the very wise powwow, the old cur; and the white man running from his enemy, the spaniel sneaking off with his tail between his legs; and the very pretty girl, the hoity-toity ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... was rather crabbed, and had not quite believed Hermione sincere, so she did this to try her, and expected to see her pout and refuse. To her surprize, Hermione only said "Oh thank you, ma'am," with a quite smiling face, and going behind the chair, sat down on the floor to her worsted. For a few moments the old lady ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... the "Gate of Salvation." And now, being by this time somewhat fatigued by the exertion of a prolonged tramp in a heavy fur overcoat and felt-lined goloshes, he makes for a doorway above which appears, in crabbed Slavonian characters, the familiar word ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... forty-one—because the youth felt that the character of such a lovely girl was too exalted to inspire any other feeling than that of quiet reverence. But as lovers will not always be insulted, at all times and under all circumstances, by the frowns and cold looks of crabbed old age, which should continually reflect dignity upon those around, and treat the unfortunate as well as the fortunate with a graceful mien, he continued to use diligence and perseverance. All this lighted a ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... hours which, of thy equals most 230 In toys have squander'd, or in vice have lost, Those hours hast thou to nobler use employ'd; And the severe delights of truth enjoy'd. Witness this weighty book, in which appears The crabbed toil of many thoughtful years, Spent by thy author, in the sifting care Of Rabbins' old sophisticated ware From gold divine; which he who well can sort May afterwards make algebra a sport: A treasure, which if country curates buy, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... that his little eyes flashed. "There is something hidden in the fellow," said he. "For all that he is so crabbed and crusty outside, like an everlasting workday, another man is hidden in him, as fine as Sunday, whether you believe me or not. He appreciates everything beautiful. Mean he may be, and thorny and quarrelsome and quick with his fists. For ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Manchester brought a wooden box, "which had come all the way from London by Antony's waggon." Suspecting that there was something mysterious connected with this package, for the direction was "a quaint, crabbed hand," she opened it in secret, when, to her amazement and horror, this writing attracted ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... spoken with prophetic wisdom. Dry Bottom was trying as best it knew how to wallow in the depths of sin. Unlovely, soiled, desolate of verdure, dumped down upon a flat of sand in a treeless waste, amid cactus, crabbed yucca, scorpions, horned toads, and rattlesnakes. Dry Bottom had forgotten its morals, subverted its principles, and ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... cross-grained and crabbed, I presume. I admitted that Paul Patoff, though not graceful in his movements, was a fine-looking fellow, with an undeniable distinction of manner; he had a pleasant voice, an extraordinary command of English, though he was but half an Englishman, ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... seems to do. Their influence is always benign and serene, and we may always have recourse to it, while the secrets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann lie hidden between leaves, in the keeping of crabbed little hieroglyphs, and a voice, an instrument, or perhaps an orchestra, is needed to reveal them. The picture, the statue, has no secrets but open secrets. You stand before it, and the very soul and essence of it comes softly forth and breathes upon yours. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... "I'll tell you a secret. When I grow savage in mood—" his clear-eyed smile belied that state of mind—"I just run in here for a bit of bear-baiting—rather good sport—bear-baiting. This is a den of bears you know. Oh, yes, rather! They are all elderly bears, very crabbed and self-absorbed and very smart and immaculate—but bears none the less. Each has his particular chair, which to his own self-centered mind is his private pedestal. They sit here with their manicured hands resting idly on their robust, waistcoated tummies and stare out on ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... ought to be listening to the sermon; who puts the black-snake on a clerk's hide when he sends a letter to Oshkosh that ought to go to Kalamazoo, and begs him off when the old man wants to have him fired for it. Altogether he's a hard, crabbed, generous, soft-hearted, loyal, bully old boy, who's been with the house since we took down the shutters for the first time, and who's going to stay with it till we put them up ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... smiled. Then the smile faded as he remembered how Josiah Crabtree once told Captain Putnam that he did not believe in letting chums room together. "Place each boy among strangers," Crabtree had said. "It will make him more reliant." But Captain Putnam had not listened to the crabbed old fellow, and Strong ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... That's a headline all right. Good old Svensen. Here, I'm going down to hear more. Mustn't let Jefferson get ahead of us. Come along, Beechtree, and nose things out. This will be nuts for our readers. Even your crabbed paper will have to give a column to Svensen Not Sleeping in his Bed. Can't you see all the little ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... very deaf face, not very anxious though; not even showing very much hope, but faithful only. The blind one is coming up behind him with a crutch in his right hand, and led by a dog; the face was either in its first estate, very ugly and crabbed, or by the action of the weather or some such thing, ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... d'Arthenays was still to be seen in the old burying-ground: they had been the first to be buried there. The old stone was sunk half-way in the earth, and was gray with moss and lichens; but the inscription was still legible, if one looked close, and had patience to decipher the crabbed text. ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... Through his brain there ran a succession of queries and speculations, and dominating them all one clear question-was he to gain anything by this strange conversation? Who was this great man with a name the same as his own, this crabbed nobleman with skin as yellow as an orange, and body like an orange squeezed dry? He surely meant him no harm, however, for flashes of kindliness had lighted the shrivelled face as he talked. His look was bent in piercing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hill-side, where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,—at least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... hinted then to Huggermugger, that he feared Kobboltozo was his enemy. But Huggermugger laughed, and said he knew the dwarf was crabbed and spiteful, but that he did not fear him. Huggermugger was not suspicious by nature, and it never came into his thoughts that Kobboltozo, or any other dwarf could have the least idea of ...
— The Last of the Huggermuggers • Christopher Pierce Cranch
... letter from her mother-in-law herself. The crabbed, trembling characters were even more eloquent than the words with which ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... there is a breeze to cool one, besides it is so jolly having nothing to do but watch the waves and the wind and learn to mind the helm. I have made great friends with all the sailors, and they are very nice fellows, all but one crabbed old Scotchman, who says, when he sees us on deck, 'ladies should always stay down stairs.' I crawled up stairs in the Bay of Biscay, because they said it was such a glorious sea, and, at first, I thought ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... She heard crabbed, sour, but courageous old Williams go to the door. She heard the clang of bolts and the rattle of chains, and then a weird cry from Williams. A voice responded that brought Enid, trembling and livid, into the hall. A young man with ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... Mollie. "Our crabbed cousin is having a slight change of heart. She has always been dreadfully bored with Bab and me," Mollie explained to Ruth and Grace, "but she is devoted to mother, and used to want her to live with her. But she never could make up her mind to endure ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane
... crabbed fellow who will show us no favors; and he will say that our running away is evidence ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... this time scarcely forty, her natural ugliness, combined with hard work and a certain crabbed look (caused as much by the conformation of her features as by her cares), made her seem like a woman of fifty. At thirty-eight Jerome Rogron presented to the eyes of his customers the silliest face that ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... able to bear, and the enthusiasms of Coleridge which nobody was able to bear. Lamb would parade his admiration for some favourite author, Donne, for example, whom the rest of the company probably abhorred. He would select the most crabbed passages to quote and defend; he would stammer out his piquant and masterful half sentences, his scalding jests, his controvertible assertions; he would skilfully hint at the defects which no one else was ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not reconcile his life with his art. Paracelsus was hard, but Sordello was incomprehensible. Mr. Browning has denied that he is ever perversely crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to say things in his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the Gothic builders knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in literature. One is inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... two writers, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearly that free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts. For it is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style. The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... true that he is not happy at the big City day school which he has just left. How should he be? He is dull and crabbed and uncouth, and knows too well that he is an object of general dislike; no one there cares to associate with him, and he makes no attempt to overcome their prejudices, being perfectly aware that they are ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... period would teach you. In proportion as you understand the man, and only so, will you begin to understand the elements in which he worked. And not only to understand, but to remember. Names, dates, genealogies, geographical details, costumes, fashions, manners, crabbed scraps of old law, which you used, perhaps, to read up and forget again, because they were not rooted, but stuck into your brain, as pins are into a pincushion, to fall out at the first shake—all these ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... certain: if any member of a family conceives it his duty to sit continually in the censor's chair, and weigh in the scales of justice all that happens in the domestic commonwealth, domestic happiness is out of the question. It is manly to extenuate and forgive, but a crabbed and censorious ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... though he knew not why. He had had an agreeable day. In the morning Jack Bendish had appeared on horseback and Lawrence had ridden over with him to lunch at Wharton, a sufficiently amusing experience, what with the crabbed high-spirited whims of Jack's grandfather and the old-fashioned courtesy of Lord Grantchester, and Yvonne's romantic toilette: later Laura had joined them and they had played bowls on the famous ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... what Count Buenau might be thinking of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On the other hand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique, and as it were pagan grandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed Protestantism, which had been the weariness of his youth, he might reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme tradition ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Bingle, blinking. The thought of crabbed Uncle Joe taking on the habiliments of the genial saint was too much for his imagination. It left him without the power to set James straight in the matter, and Uncle Joe was immediately accepted as Santy by the expectant Sykeses, all of whom ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... plain and spare to the verge of a gaunt severity, and there is not one single picture-frame on the wide expanse of wall. On the table are a few books and some letters, with foreign postmarks, and addressed in the crabbed handwriting of Continental scholars. Over the table a brazen lamp hangs suspended by a slender chain. In a corner are some fragments of stone mouldings and wood carvings like the panel of an ancient pew. There are no shelves and no bookcase. Besides those on the table, one volume lies on the ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious, but 5 The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, And makes my labours pleasures: O, she is Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed. And he's composed of harshness. I must remove Some thousands of these logs, and pile them up, 10 Upon a sore injunction: my sweet mistress Weeps when she sees me work, and says, such baseness Had never ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... the Dairy. H.H. Hobday. A ticklish village amour: a young fellow importuning a buxom dairy-maid, and apparently on the verge of conquest; in the distant door-way stands a mar-loving, wrinkled old woman, whose crabbed face ought not to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... distance, we had heard nothing that I remember about her; but the day had not gone by, before it was made fully known to us by such acquaintances as we saw, that we had taken up our abode in the same house with a person of a very crabbed disposition, whom all the neighborhood looked upon as a witch. This was not very agreeable news, but we tried to make the best of it. Our house was near the river-side, and we were surrounded by the families of those who followed the sea, and we endeavored to flatter ourselves ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... Cardinal de Richelieu loved rallying other people, but could not bear a jest himself, and all men of this humour are always very crabbed and churlish; of which the Cardinal gave an instance, in a public assembly of ladies, to Madame de Guemenee, when he threw out a severe jest, which everybody observed was pointed at me. She was sensibly affronted, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons—two editions, if you please, for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could not resist getting a set of Bury's new six-volume presentment of the History. In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped in any way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... every respect as unlike each other as possible. My father was a poor man, and Miss Fairlie's father was a rich man. I have got nothing, and she has a fortune. I am dark and ugly, and she is fair and pretty. Everybody thinks me crabbed and odd (with perfect justice); and everybody thinks her sweet-tempered and charming (with more justice still). In short, she is an angel; and I am—— Try some of that marmalade, Mr. Hartright, and finish the sentence, in ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... somewhat aloof, but who had never done anything in their lives, put on more side than usual and endeavoured to carry matters off that way, oblivious, as ever, of the laughter round the corner. Lastly, there was that other class, the crabbed and the crusty, who would, had they belonged to Us, have retired behind their papers in the Club windows, but as it was, and being dogs, merely made off out of earshot, with their ruffs up, grumbling to themselves and ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... over on Avenue D, stood an old and battered timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face. Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club. Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... really old, well grown wood. But mind, it does not follow that, given these conditions, the genuine thing would be what I want; but there would be more likelihood of its being so, and less annoyance in laying it aside us worthless, as I do this, selecting, for a second trial, a piece of what I call crabbed wood, known by a peculiar curl, and its ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... intervals of his more serious studies when Prior Edward had permitted him to browse in the greener pastures of the Gesta Romanorum and the Disciplina Clericalis of the monastery library, and Gascoyne was never weary of hearing him tell those marvellous stories culled from the crabbed Latin ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... and scrawled a short letter in a crabbed hand, in which he insisted on the right of transit free of search, and denounced vengeance on any custom-house officer who should lay his unhallowed hand on any convoy protected by the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... from Grylls. It was scribbled in a small, crabbed hand on the back of a business letter. On the other side Garth had a glimpse of the time-honoured formula: "Dear Sir: Yours of the first instant to hand, and contents noted. In reply we beg to say——" It gave him a queer, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... to me alone. For it is neither the spear of throughly-begotten Pallas, nor the buckler of cloud-gathering Jove, that multiplies and propagates mankind: but my sportive and tickling recreation that proceeded the old crabbed philosophers, and those who now supply their stead, the mortified monks and friars; as also kings, priests, and popes, nay, the whole tribe of poetic gods, who are at last grown so numerous, as in the camp of heaven (though ne'er so spacious), to jostle for elbow room. But it is not sufficient ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... Lib. i.] to give for a time an undue importance to the mere graces of style. The new breed of scholars, the Aschams and Buchanans, nourished with the finest compositions of the Augustan age, regarded with loathing the dry, crabbed, and barbarous diction of respondents and opponents. They were far less studious about the matter of their writing than about the manner. They succeeded in reforming Latinity; but they never even aspired to effect a reform ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Five-Year Mandate of regeneration. The petition, like everything else, had found its way into Don Jose's hands. He had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of dirty-greyish rough paper (perhaps looted in some village store), covered with the crabbed, illiterate handwriting of the old padre, carried off from his hut by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamplight of the Gould drawing-room over the document containing the fierce and yet humble ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... and with it Hely. He was for ordinary a stolid soul, but I never saw a man in such a fever of excitement. He gripped me by the arm and fairly shook me. 'That old man of yours is a hero,' he cried. 'The Lord forgive me! and I have always crabbed him.' ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... bumper of good liquor Will end a contest quicker Than justice, judge, or vicar; So fill a cheerful glass, And let good humour pass. But if more deep the quarrel, Why, sooner drain the barrel Than be the hateful fellow That's crabbed when he's ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... hectoring, incorrigible, mischievous, negligent, offensive, pettish, roaring, sharp, sluggish, snapping, snarling, sneaking, sour, testy, tiresome, tormenting, touchy, arrogant, austere, awkward, boorish, brawling, brutal, bullying, churlish, clamorous, crabbed, cross, currish, dismal, dull, dry, drowsy, grumbling, horrid, huffish, insolent, intractable, irascible, ireful, morose, murmuring, opinionated, oppressive, outrageous, overbearing, petulant, plaguy, rough, rude, rugged, spiteful, splenetic, stern, stubborn, stupid, sulky, sullen, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... in the parlour hovering over a gas stove. She has false hair, false teeth, false jewelry, and the dry, crabbed, inquisitive manner of the idle who are entrusted with authority. She is there to direct others and do nothing herself, to be cross and make herself dreaded. In the distance I can hear a shrill, nasal orchestra of children's voices. I am cold and hungry. I have as yet no job. The noise, the sordidness, ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... the Lady Juana, which gives Columbus's own statement of the indignities put upon him in San Domingo, is written in his most crabbed Spanish. He never wrote the Spanish language accurately, and the letter, as printed from his own manuscript, is even curious in its infelicities. It is so striking an illustration of the character of the man that we print here an abstract of it, with some passages translated directly ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... was bent forward over a microscope, his big hands adjusting the focus screw. Presently he would break off his work of observation and jot down a few notes in crabbed German characters. His big head, his squat body, his long ungainly arms, his pale face with its little wisp of beard, would have been recognized by Oliva Cresswell, for this was Professor Heyler—"the Herr Professor," as Beale ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... as dread of invasion, was over the land. Twice down the columns of panic newspaper correspondence Lord Ormont saw his name cited, with the effect on him that such signs of national repentance approaching lodged a crabbed sourness in his consulting-room, whether of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... market. Still Vance cheered himself with the thought that his troubles were about to end. He was now near the home of the Crushed Strawberry Wizard; so he pressed on till mid-afternoon, only stopping once when he came upon some pears growing upon a stunted tree by the roadside. They were small, crabbed, and stony; but the hungry Prince was glad enough to gather a number and eat them seated in the pear-tree's scanty shade. As to the Court, it was quite a relief to Vance to remember that the peasants at the fair had provided the baby-house ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... Mr. Foswick to do carpentry, and the rather crabbed and cross old man did not want to offend a ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Christmas Tree Cove • Laura Lee Hope
... at the cabin. I've been there and looked about a bit. They had need of sleep. You go back to your bunk, and I'll take mine, and we'll talk the thing over before we see them again. As for your taking yourself off, that remains to be seen. I'm not crabbed, that's not the secret of my life alone,—though you might think it. I—ahem—ahem." The big man cleared his throat and stretched his spare frame full length on the fodder where he had slept. With his elbow ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... brilliancy of her primitive freshness had been converted into a blotched and pimpled complexion which affected above all her nose and cheek-bones, but whose ardor had been dimmed only a trifle by age. There was something about the whole face as crabbed, sour, and unkind as if she had daily bathed it in vinegar. One could read old maid in every feature! Besides, a slight observation of her ways would have destroyed all lingering ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... answer for it, especially now that M. Olivier Vinet has left Mantes; for between ourselves, good M. Leboeuf was afraid of that crabbed little official. If you will permit me, Madame La Presidente, I will go to Mantes and see M. Leboeuf. No time will be lost, for I cannot be certain of the precise value of the property for two or three days. I do not wish that you should know all ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... speaks no less warmly: "We can hardly give too much appreciation to that subtile alchemy of the brain which has enabled him to produce out of dull, crabbed, and often illegible state papers, the vivid, graphic, and sparkling narrative which he has given to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been killed yet," was Ruth's mild observation, pinching Helen's arm to warn her that she was not to quarrel with the rather caustic lame girl. Mercy's affliction, which still somewhat troubled her, had never improved her naturally crabbed disposition, and few of her girl friends had ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... no grudge at all against you. I am not huffy and crabbed like yourself to go taking offence. Sure Kings and big people of the sort are used to see their dead-notices made ready from the hour of their birth out. And it is not anything printed on papers or any flight of words on the Tribune could give me any concern at all. See now will I be put out. ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... gunning purposes. I saw the owner of the boat hoeing in the garden. Though I was hardly acquainted with him, I went to him and asked if he would lend me his boat for half an hour. I found he was a crabbed fellow, and was not disposed to oblige me. I told him that I was in a great hurry, that my own skiff was broken, and if he would lend me his I would give him a dollar for the use of her. The dollar opened his eyes and his heart, if he had any. He consented to ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... can make a slavering tongue speak plain. If he that loves thee be deform'd and rich, Accept his love: gold hides deformity. Gold can make limping Vulcan walk upright; Make squint eyes straight, a crabbed face look smooth, Gilds copper noses, makes them look like gold; Fills age's wrinkles up, and makes a face, As old as Nestor's, look as young as Cupid's. If thou wilt arm thyself against all shifts, Regard all men according to their gifts. This if thou ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... seen by a tool of the sort, Rather hitching than etching, and making, in short, Such stiff, crabbed, and angular scratches, That the figures seem'd statues or mummies from tombs, While the trees were as rigid as bundles of brooms, And the herbage like ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... moments later Coquenil and the commissary and Papa Tignol were standing in the courtyard near two green tubs of foliage plants between which the pistol had fallen. The doorkeeper of the house, a crabbed individual who had only become mildly respectful when he learned that he was dealing with the police, had joined them, ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... in clusters, As great and gracious a' as sisters; But hear their absent thoughts o' ither, They're a' run de'ils and jades thegither. [downright] Whyles, owre the wee bit cup and platie, They sip the scandal-potion pretty; Or lee-lang nights, wi' crabbit leuks, [live-long, crabbed looks] Pore owre the devil's picture beuks; [playing-cards] Stake on a chance a farmer's stack-yard, And cheat like ony unhang'd blackguard. There's some exception, man and woman; But this ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Rachel to do the same thing, you know," the old lady went on, roused to fresh indignation at the thought of her great-niece, and she pulled her little cloth jacket down, and generally shook herself together. Crabbed age and jackets should not live together. Age should be wrapped in the ample and tolerant cloak, hider of frailties. It was not Aunt Anna's fault, however, if her garments were uncompromising and scanty of outline. Predestination reigns nowhere more strongly than in clothes, and ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... farther, that this lanky flower-stalk, bending a little in a crabbed, broken way, like an obstinate person tired, pushes itself up out of a still more stubborn, nondescript, hollow angular, dogseared gas-pipe of a stalk, with a section something ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... to me, 'You'd better throw the letter behind the fire, and there'll be an end of all bother;' but I couldn't do that, though I've never had the courage yet to give it you. But here it is;" and he took from his pocket a discoloured envelope, and handed it to Bradly. It was directed in a crabbed hand, with the writing sloping down to the corner—"Miss ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... The English hand was the running hand of the old black letter, and was a very crabbed and tedious piece of work. The Italian hand, which came in about this time, has lasted until the present day, though its latest variety has lost much of the old clearness and beauty. It was at its best in the reign of James the First, ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... She must mean her life with him! In a sudden, swift, pitying gleam of comprehension, I saw why my mother-in-law was so crabbed and disagreeable. Life had embittered her. I wondered miserably if my life with her son would leave similar marks ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... and groaned a good deal, but perhaps Father Romuald pressed the duty on him in confession, for in his great relief at his lady's going off unplighted from London, he consented to indite, in the chamber Father Romuald shared with two of the Cardinal's chaplains, in a crooked and crabbed calligraphy and language much more resembling Anglo-Saxon than modern English, a letter to the most high and mighty, the Yerl of ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns. 1331 MILTON: ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... want'ee very bad, Missus. Here!" And the old coachman, almost as old as his master, gave to Mrs. Harper a note, which was only the second she had ever received from her husband's father. It was a crabbed, ancient hand, blotted and blurred, then steadied resolutely into the preciseness of a school-boy—one of those pathetic fragments of writing that irresistibly remind one of the trembling failing hand—the hand ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... got guardians—one of them is quite an old woman. Her name is Lady Bridget Woodstone. They don't care very much for her. I think she must be very crabbed.' ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... I speak of men. Jack, I don't mean old folk with balls in their knees. I meant people of our own age that we could make friends of. By the way, that crabbed old doctor had a son, ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... has lost money in a business deal; perhaps he wanted a political position and didn't get it; perhaps a supposed friend has proven untrue; perhaps his disappointment, whatever it is, has made him sour and crabbed. But he passes on, and we meet other faces. Here comes a man who looks something like this: [Draw the happy face, completing Fig. 8.] He doesn't look as if he had a care in all the world, does he? And yet ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... interest swept back over King as he read; the old excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful labourings, was the "secret" at last—Gus Ingle's message come to him ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Irritable, crabbed, and low-spirited, his campaign had proved a disastrous failure. Instead of planning battles, he had planned pillaging and foraging expeditions, and his hungry and disaffected army had converted the rich fields of Bohemia into a gloomy and desolate waste. At last succoring winter came to the help ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... face away. Captain's wife! That girl covered with rugs in a long chair. Captain's . . . ! He gasped mentally. It had never occurred to him that a captain's wife could be anything but a woman to be described as stout or thin, as jolly or crabbed, but always mature, and even, in comparison with his own years, frankly old. But this! It was a sort of moral upset as though he had discovered a case of abduction or something as surprising as that. You understand that nothing ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... they would not go, I must go. The old ladies insisted on my getting into the boat, and, being now assisted by the few men we met in the canoe, I thought it better to comply. Long after we left the beach we heard those old cracked, crabbed voices anathematizing the younger members of that community. I suppose I was the first white mortal to land on that sacred shore, and I must have been to ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... growing yellow with age. But he descried a dim tracery of words. A crabbed scrawl, written in blood, hard to read! He held it more to the light, and slowly ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... follow that of the coach. At last, bethinking me that he was tolerably glib at the tongue, as most people are who are addicted to the turf, also a great master of slang, remembering also that he had a crabbed old uncle, who had some borough interest, I proposed that he should get into the House, promising in one fortnight to qualify him to make a figure in it, by certain lessons which I would give him. He consented; and during the next ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... felt obliged to restrain impatience; he could not afford to awaken the darky's suspicions, therefore he simulated interest and—"crabbed". He enjoyed a streak of good luck, but his artificial enthusiasm soon waned. He at length suggested trying the other side of the island, whereupon his ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... them as they came back to me, in proof of my statement. I drove at once to your boarding place and found you had not been there for weeks, and your landlady was distinctly crabbed. Then I went to the college, only to find that you had fallen ill and gone to your home. That threw me into torments, and all that keeps me from taking the first train is the thought that perhaps you refused to accept these letters, for some reason. Shelley, you did not, ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... far-reaching consequences cannot yet be estimated. Scott, meanwhile, is the incomparable painter of the sturdy race which he loved so well—a race high-spirited, loyal to its principles, surpassingly energetic, full of strong affections and manly spirits, if crabbed, bigoted, and capable of queer perversity and narrow self-conceit. Nor, if we differ from his opinions, can anyone who desires to take a reasonable view of history doubt the interest and value of the conceptions ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... hostile clan of Badawin whose blades are ever thirsting for the lover's blood and whose malignant tongues aim only at the "defilement of separation." Youth is upright as an Alif, or slender and bending as a branch of the Ban-tree which we should call a willow-wand,[FN307] while Age, crabbed and crooked, bends groundwards vainly seeking in the dust his lost juvenility. As Baron de Slane says of these stock comparisons (Ibn Khall. i. xxxvi.), "The figurative language of Moslem poets is often difficult to be understood. The narcissus is the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... three or four hours he munched a manchet, and refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant; and when "he was put into this road of writing," as crabbed Anthony telleth, he fixed on "a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light;" and then hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous pages. Prynne has written a library ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Jane declared. "Of course your aunt's an old woman, an' 'tain't surprisin' she should harbor a grudge against us. But Martin's younger, an' had oughter be more forgivin'. It's nonsensical feelin' you've got to be just as sour an' crabbed as your grandfather was. I don't humor him in it—at least not more'n I have to to keep the peace. But Mary an' 'Liza hang on to every word Martin utters. If he was to say blue was green, they'd say so too. They'd no more do a thing he wouldn't like 'em to than they'd cut off their ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... his claim to the throne of Grub-street has served as a model to his numerous successors—it was an ambidextrous trick! Green sold his "Orlando Furioso" to two different theatres, and is among the first authors in English literary history who wrote as a trader;[49] or as crabbed Anthony Wood phrases it, in the language of celibacy and cynicism, "he wrote to maintain his wife, and that high and loose course of living which poets generally follow." With a drop still sweeter, old Anthony describes Gayton, another worthy; "he came up to London to live in a shirking ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... high merit it is that he never loses sight, either in theory or in practice, of the fundamental conditions proper to the craft of letters. Robert Louis Stevenson, pondering words long and lovingly, was impressed by their crabbed individuality, and sought to elucidate the laws of their arrangement by a reference to the principles of architecture. "The sister arts," he says, "enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... concluded, "I am convinced that now my Vajramukut knows every corner of his little Padmavati's heart, he will never expect her to do anything but love, admire, adore and kiss him!'' Then suiting the action to the word, she convinced him that the young minister had for once been too crabbed and ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... satisfaction. Old Sassi worshipped Sabina, and was already fully persuaded that whatever could be found under the palace should belong to her, as also that she had a right to see what was discovered before Volterra did, and before anything was moved. He was at least as quixotic in his crabbed fashion as Malipieri himself; and besides, he really could not see that there was the least harm or danger in the scheme. It certainly would have been improper for Malipieri to go and fetch the young lady himself, but it was absurd to suppose that a man over sixty could be blamed for accompanying ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... brought him to that point that he could no longer keep the secrets of the nuptial couch. A confidant became as necessary to him as to the prince of a modern tragedy. He did not proceed, you may feel assured, to fix his choice upon some crabbed philosopher of frowning mien, with a flood of gray-and-white beard rolling down over a mantle in proud tatters; nor a warrior who could talk of nothing save ballista, catapults, and scythed chariots; nor a sententious ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... you are a mean, hard-hearted old man, even if you are my uncle! Oh, you don't know how often I've wanted to tell you so too,—always prying into this, asking questions about that, finding fault, forever cross and snappish and suspicious. A waspish, crabbed old wretch, that's what you are! I just ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... dispose of. It was a loathsome sight to behold these miserable wretches gathering together with no thought in their beast-like brains but of the ample food and drink which they intended should fall to their share. Crabbed old age seeking rejuvenation in ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... another. It downright grieves me to have 'em so spited here in they old age." And Mother Mayberry's eyes took on a regretful look and she peered over her glasses at the happy bride. On her buoyant heart she ever carried the welfare of every soul in Providence and the crabbed old couple down the Road was a constant source ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Peel bay, a wide stretch of beach, with a gentle slope to the left, dotted over with grey houses; the little town farther on, with its nooks and corners, its blind alleys and dark lanes, its narrow, crabbed, crooked streets. Behind this the old pier and the herring boats rocking in the harbour, with their brown sails half set, waiting for the top of the tide. In the distance the broad breast of Contrary Head, and, a musket-shot outside of it, the little rocky ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... a time she went away with—your father. I did not know until then how much I did—care. The whole world suddenly seemed to turn black under my fingers, and—But, never mind. For long years I have been a cross, crabbed, unlovable, unloved old man—though I'm not nearly sixty, yet, Pollyanna. Then, One day, like one of the prisms that you love so well, little girl, you danced into my life, and flecked my dreary old world with ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... he was going to bow to me. With (as it seemed to me) all the blood in my veins rushing to my face, my head swimming, my heart beating, I dropped my eyes to the play-bill upon my lap, and stared at the crabbed German characters—the names of the players, the characters they took. "Elsa—Lohengrin." I read them again and again, while my ears were singing, my heart beating so, and I thought every one in the theater knew and ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... invalid, in a crabbed tone, "you have asked me if my name was Lacombe and if I was Mariette Moreau's godmother. I have already told you yes. Now what do you want ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... Dragon, and such names. We thought of dining at one of them, but, on inspection, they looked rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness. So we went to the Royal Hotel, where we probably fared just as badly at much more expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness because we arrived at the hotel on foot. For my part, I love to see John Bull show himself. I must go again and again and again to Chester, for I suppose ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... climbed out with the stick, the park-keeper arrived—a crabbed gentleman, in a long blue cloak and the deuce ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... saying, never gets too old—never gets too crabbed, for what my friend Amos's friend Emerson calls 'a ruddy drop of manly blood'—eh? So, when that 'ruddy drop of manly blood' comes a surging up in me, I says I'll just about have a party for that drop of manly blood! I'm going to ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... everything else in this world. You have got to keep the devil out of everything, yourself included. He will get in if he can, as he got into the Garden of Eden. The play piers have taken a hold of the people which no crabbed old bachelor can loosen with trumped-up charges. Their civilizing influence upon the children is already felt in a reported demand for more soap in the neighborhood where they are, and even the grocer ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... allowed the installation of electric light, there was no such concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even then reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table contained nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a frantically Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing on the ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... of one of its servants, and therefore was surprised when the venerable playwright prepared the unexpected denouement. In pursuance of this end, it was decreed by the imperious and incontrovertible dramatist of the human family that this crabbed, vicious, antiquated marionette should wend his way to the St. Charles on a particular evening. Since the day at the races, the eccentric nobleman had been ill and confined to his room, but now he was beginning to hobble ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... short and thin, and by no means reassuring of aspect. With his low, narrow forehead, sunken nose, and hard mouth, he looked like a Kalmuck Tartar; a pair of small, wide-awake black eyes, the crabbed irregular outline of his countenance, a voice like a cracked bell—the man's whole appearance, in fact, combined to give the impression that this was a consummate rascal. A honeyed tongue compensated for these disadvantages, and he gained his ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... acceptance of this new theory instead of the apparent one of suicide embraced by Hibbard and about to be promulgated at police headquarters. If so, what a triumph would be mine; and what a debt I should owe to the crabbed old gentleman whose seemingly fantastic fears had first ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... pursuit for being refused, provided it be a refusal of chastity, and not of choice; we may swear, threaten, and complain to much purpose; we therein do but lie, for we love them all the better: there is no allurement like modesty, if it be not rude and crabbed. 'Tis stupidity and meanness to be obstinate against hatred and disdain; but against a virtuous and constant resolution, mixed with goodwill, 'tis the exercise of a noble and generous soul. They may acknowledge our ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... marriage of youth with crabbed age resulted in any unhappiness the neighbours saw little of it. Though it was rumoured that for her old and rich husband Euphemie had given up a young man of her fancy in Tarbes, her conduct during the two years she lived with Lacoste seemed to be irreproachable. ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... Nachrichten), i. 848. Lloyd, UT SUPRA, i. 2-11 (who has solid information at first hand, having been an actor in these Wars. A man of great natural sagacity and insight; decidedly luminous and original, though of somewhat crabbed temper now and then; a man well worth hearing on this and on whatever else he handles). Tempelhof, GESCHICHTE DES SIEBENJAHRIGEN KRIEGES (which is at first a mere Translation of Lloyd, nothing new in it but certain notes and criticisms on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?' Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... father's small estate, and went into settlement work. He was called home to the uncle's death-bed, but the uncle, contrary to the best literary precedents, hadn't softened to any extent worth mentioning, and died as crabbed as he had lived, greatly annoyed, no doubt, to realize that his demise released certain decent little incomes from the main family estate to the stubborn nephew, but immensely pleased with himself for making his fortune over to outsiders. So, my other-worldly spouse ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... considerable portion of the Evangelical Clergy, and, we think, a majority of the Wesleyan Methodists. It evidently includes the great body of the piety, Christian enterprise, and sterling virtue of the nation. It is, in time of party excitement, alike hated and denounced by the ultra Tory, the crabbed Whig, and the Radical leveller. Such was our impression of the true character of what, by the periodical press in England, is termed a moderate Tory. From his theories we in some respects dissent; but his integrity, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... John. We flew two hawks on the same heron. They crabbed, and the bird got free. But ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stepping with elaborate quiet to the pulpit, handed him a note, and sat down again, covering his face with a big horny hand, and swinging one foot nervously. John opened the folded paper, and held it up to one of the tall lamps beside his desk, for the writing was dim and crabbed, and the light poor, and then read a call that the Session should meet immediately after the prayer-meeting. No object for consideration was named, and the paper was signed by Mr. Dean and another elder. John put it down, and, noticing that his four elders sat together on one of the bare ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... itself, for thy good deeds, thy foe; And it is right; for among crabbed sorbs It ill befits the sweet ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... interchanged on a lovely summer evening in the year seventeen hundred and eighty-nine, before the back door of a small house which stood on the banks of the Seine, about three miles westward of the city of Rouen. The one speaker was lean, old, crabbed and slovenly; the other was plump, young, oily-mannered and dressed in the most gorgeous livery costume of the period. The last days of genuine dandyism were then rapidly approaching all over the civilized world; and Monsieur Justin was, in his own way, dressed ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... for the execution of her threat. From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora as ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... why cross people are called 'crabbed,'" said Cap'n Bill. "They've got dispositions jes' ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... crusty, lonesome, crabbed old chap," he said aloud, "but there's something about that little girl makes me feel young again . . . and it's such a pleasant sensation I'd like to have it repeated once ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Thucydides are evident; his style is harsh, obscure and crabbed; it is sometimes said that he seems wiser than he really is mainly because his language is difficult; that if his thoughts were translated into easier prose our impressions of his greatness would be much modified. Yet it is to be remembered that he, ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... rapidly as the long-pent sea-mist overflowed the cliff, wallowing and billowing like an oceanic invasion, over the face of the moor. Whitefoot brought back hidden in his collar the simple message, "I shall be there," signed with the well-known crabbed fist of "Adam Ferris," traditional in his family for some hundreds of years, which seemed completely identical with signatures in the ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... devoured, bit by bit, the fine sculpture of the doorway and the thin cusps of the window tracery; gray moss creeps caressingly over the worn walls in ineffectual protection; gentle vines, turned crabbed by the harsh beating of the fierce winds, clutch the crumbling buttresses, climb up over the sinking roof, reach in even at the louvres of the belfry, holding the little sanctuary safe in desperate arms against the savage warfare ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... religion of the civilized world, hardly excites curiosity enough in them to take it up and read a single verse! I have often offered it to them to read, but they have refused to open the book. A great disadvantage is the crabbed, miserable language into which it is translated. After the bold, impudent, and sublime language of the Koran, they cannot relish the tame and stunted language of the Arabic New Testament. As for the simple and grand truths of the New Testament, these ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson |
