"Fretful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... always treat each other lovingly, politely, kindly, unselfishly. It is continually urged upon them, that they must learn to obey the nurse or teacher, without delay, without a murmur; that they must not cry or be fretful; that in these things, they must always strive to imitate the good acts of older comrades or playmates. In this way, the moral unfoldment and education of the child, keeps pace with the intellectual and the physical. Altogether, the effect is most excellent! Thousands ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... bestowed in the boot, I followed my cousin into the car, and a few minutes later we were at the mouth of the Adour. Here we left Ping beside Pong, and proceeded to join three figures on the horizon, apparently absorbed in the temper of a fretful sea. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porcupine: But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. Hamlet, Act i. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... the extreme of disarray. The littered room was as unlovely as the careless costume, and Kathryn's personal grooming matched them both. It really was not her fault, she explained in fretful apology. She had not expected to see a soul, that morning; but the maid had given warning all at once, really apropos of nothing, and was up-stairs, packing. They were such selfish creatures. It was up and out, at a minute's notice, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... began to assert its needs. For the first time her bloom showed as impaired—something of her radiance had fled. Ishmael saw it, and knew that her affection for him would prevent her telling him as long as flesh could bear it. A Vassie grown fretful was the last thing he wanted, and her marred bloom hurt him; he always, in some odd way, looked on Vassie as a superior being even when he saw her little faults in style—so much more devastating than faults ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... alone—to meet that crisis most fatal to wedded happiness, the discovery of the first deceit Captain Rothesay sat silent, with averted face; Sybilla was weeping—not that repentant shower which rains softness into a man's heart, but those fretful tears which chafe him ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... figure in a long dust-coat. He had pushed up his motor-goggles and was wiping his forehead with a limp handkerchief. His round, fat face, with pursed-up lips and wide-open light-blue eyes, bore the expression of a fretful child. On his left was a lean, thin-faced fellow with a black mustache who looked scared and nervous. There was no sign of the third person who had been in the car, and even at this crucial moment Buck found time to observe the absence of his horse, ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... working in the corn-field at a little distance, and ordered him to bring his spade with him. The Dooty then told him to dig a hole in the ground, pointing to a spot at no great distance. The slave with his spade began to dig in the earth, and the Dooty, who appeared to be a man of very fretful disposition, kept muttering to himself until the pit was almost finished, when he repeatedly pronounced the word ankatod (good for nothing), jankra lemen (a regular plague), which expressions I thought applied to myself. As the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... who spent her evenings at functions. She suffered greatly from colds, yet felt obliged to wear large, chilly collars of diamonds, and to sit in an open opera box unprotected from drafts. Although fretful and unhappy, she nevertheless objected most strongly to trying a life without money; so our district visitors had to devise ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... up the baby, whose black eyes fixed themselves on her mother in a momentary contentment; but, at the first movement, she began again her fretful plaint. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... me uneasy, and almost fretful. Dr. Johnson was calm. I said, he was so from vanity. JOHNSON. 'No, Sir, it is from philosophy.' It pleased me to see that the Rambler could practise so ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... is weak and fretful, and does not like to exert himself, though he ought to be out a great deal, and kept from thinking of his little troubles. He cannot walk much yet, so I have a wheeled chair to push him in, and the ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... recommendation, rendering their milk fitter for younger children than it would otherwise have been. It produces, however, quite a contrary effect; it much impairs the milk, which will be found to disagree with the child, rendering it at first fretful,—after a time being vomited up, and productive of frequent watery dark ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... Ethel made a fretful contortion, and obeyed. So it went on all the morning, Ethel's eagerness checked by Miss Winter's dry manner, producing pettishness, till Ethel, in a state between self-reproach and a sense of injustice, went up to prepare for dinner, and to visit Margaret ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... first he saw St. Mark's, he threw up his arms in wonder, and then, clasping them round Wilson's neck (she was carrying him), he kissed her in an ecstasy of joy. And that was after a long day's journey, when most other children would have been tired and fretful. But the sense of the beautiful is certainly very strong in him, little darling. He can't say the word 'church' yet, but when he sees one he begins to chant. Oh, he's a true ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Some fretful tempers wince at every touch, You always do too little or too much; He shakes with cold; you stir the fire and strive To make a blaze; that's roasting him alive. Serve him with venison, and he chooses fish; With ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... Charles gave little evidence of any change in his feelings. No sorrow was expressed for anything in his past conduct. He was still fretful, still obstinate. He appeared like ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos
... pan. Then the ships come to those lonely harbors north of Newfoundland—Griguet and Quirpon and Ha-Ha-Bay, rock girt, treeless, always windy, desolate, with an eternal moaning of the tide over the fretful reefs. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... to tell miladi of her tryst and beg her to come out and see the star, but when she found her not only indifferent, but fretful, she refrained and was glad presently that she had this delicious secret to herself. But there was a great mystery. Sometimes the star was different. Instead of being golden, it was a pale blue, and then almost red. Was it that way ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... sea-gull resting on my breast, I launched on a madder flight: And I lashed the waves to a wild unrest, And howled with a fierce delight Till the daylight slept; and I wailed and wept Like a fretful ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... first part of her enterprise. Now brother Will was a brave young officer, who had fought stoutly and done his duty like a man. But when lying weak and wounded at home, the cheerful courage which had led him safely through many dangers seemed to have deserted him, and he was often gloomy, sad, or fretful, because he longed to be at his post again, and time passed very slowly. This troubled his mother, and made Nelly wonder why he found lying in a pleasant room so much harder than fighting battles or making weary marches. Anything that interested and amused him was very welcome, and when ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... of constitution and his ailments made him passionate and fretful, though to the multitude he preserved ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... asked. "You said to my mother the other day that Arga (the fretful child of Esmo's ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... "A night of fretful passion may consume All that thou hast of beauty's gentle bloom; And one distempered hour of sordid fear Prints on thy brow the ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... delivered the speech in an injured tone and shuffled off. The atmosphere of tenseness was unmistakable now. Sally could feel it. The world of the theatre is simply a large nursery and its inhabitants children who readily become fretful if anything goes wrong. The waiting and the uncertainty, the loafing about in strange hotels in a strange city, the dreary rehearsing of lines which had been polished to the last syllable more than a week ago—these things had sapped the nerve of the Primrose ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... still possible to be happy in this goodly world, though the bank account may be small, or there be no bank account in the case. The Ways and Means Committee of which Mrs. Hawthorne was chairman in her day could impart a world of wisdom to the fretful and ambitious wives of a generation of young men now upon the stage of action, who strive so hard to live like the people who have wealth at their command that they spoil the beautiful homes they might enjoy by an unceasing strife ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... nor proscription, nor neglect had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern; but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or fretful. Such as it was when, on the eve of great events, he returned from his travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions, and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it continued to be when, after having experienced every calamity ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... time to go in with the others; but gradually he fell into his former ways, and by the time the school broke up at Christmas was able to mix with the boys and take part in their games. At home he did his best to make things bright, but it was uphill work. Mrs. Sankey was fretful and complaining. Their income was reduced by the loss of Captain Sankey's half pay, and they had now only the interest of the fortune of four thousand pounds which Mrs. Sankey had brought to her husband ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... voyagers turned their eyes a new creation seemed to bloom around. No signs of human thrift appeared to check the delicious wildness of Nature, who here reveled in all her luxuriant variety. Those hills, now bristled, like the fretful porcupine, with rows of poplars (vain upstart plants! minions of wealth and fashion!), were then adorned with the vigorous natives of the soil—the hardy oak, the generous chestnut, the graceful elm—while here and there the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... out a gloved hand for the reins of the fretful Blaze. Young Keith advanced with the proffer of a palm of her mounting. She shook ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... that a man's opinions change with his business, because the point of view's just everything. What be good to you is what you want to happen and think ought to happen; and if it don't happen, then you'm a bit fretful about it, and reckon there's a screw loose somewhere in the order of things. For instance, I be a gamekeeper to-day, and I take a view of fish and birds according; but once on a time I was a fly-by-night young rip of a poacher, and had a very different idea ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... knew that you could outrun him, for you will have to let him stop of his own accord after all. But he will not try to break away unless you attempt to force him into measures. If he does not see the way at once, and is a little fretful about going in, do not undertake to drive him, but give him a little less room outside, by gently closing in around him. Do not raise your arms, but let them hang at your side, for you might as well raise a club: the horse has never studied anatomy, and does ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... completely changed, had become the resentful and fretful appeal of the victim of plot and circumstance. All the savage brutality had been eliminated; the sneer, the truculent attempts to browbeat, the pitiful swagger, the cynical justification, all were ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... ship, Master Conisby, you eat the food my money hath paid for! Doth this suffice your foolish, stubborn pride?" Here, finding nought to say, I scowled at my fetters and held my peace, whereat she sighed a little, as I had been some fretful, peevish child: "Why are you here in my ship?" she questioned patiently. "Was it for vengeance? Tell me," she demanded, "is it that you came yet seeking your ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... finding himself unable to escape to America, surrendered to the British admiral, and was taken on board the war-ship Bellerophon. Louis XVIII. was brought back to Paris. Napoleon, by the agreement of the allies, was conveyed to the island of St. Helena, where he remained, a fretful captive, until his death (May 5, 1821). Ney escaped, but was captured, condemned, and shot (Dec. 7, 1815). France engaged to pay a war indemnity of seven hundred million francs. Its boundaries were ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... here has passed very delightfully in spite of my regret and anxiety for this interesting family. I should like to stay longer, were it not that they have given up to me their straw bed, and Mrs. H. and her baby, a wizened, fretful child, sleep on the floor in my room, and Dr. H. on the floor downstairs, and the nights are frosty and chill. Work is the order of their day, and of mine, and at night, when the children are in bed, we three ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... his weapon as against an enemy. It was the Scar-Cheek who offered the first welcome in a jovial shout. "The hawk escaped from the cage! Well done, champion! Did you batter a way out with your mighty fists? Did you get fretful and slay the Englishman? Leave off your bashfulness and tell us your deeds of valor!" A score of hands were stretched forth to draw the boy into the circle; a score of horns were held ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... cordiality was all for the man of letters, who did not contest his family rank with him, and the polite formality all for the man of title, who did—you discovered where and how he was proud in an instant. Here lay his fretful point. The aristocracy of rank, as separate from the aristocracy of ancestry, was no aristocracy for him. He was jealous of it; he hated it. Commoner though he was, he considered himself the social superior of any man, from a baronet up to a duke, ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... o'clock the babies were fretful; children of Bubby's age complained that their shoes and clothes were too tight; somebody suggested going home. In vain the young people protested—an hour from that time the grounds were deserted; the lumber of the stage, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... brother and me. And grant as the favor we are asking of Thee! I want a wax dolly, a tea-set and ring, And an ebony work-box that shuts with a spring. Bless papa, dear Jesus, and cause him to see That Santa Claus loves us far better than he; Don't let him get fretful and angry again At dear brother Willie, and Annie, Amen!" "Peas Desus 'et Santa Taus tum down to-night, And bing us some pesents before it is 'ight; I want he should div me a nice ittle sed, With bight, shiny unners, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... battle," said Ganelon in fretful tones. "Thou art grown old and fearful. Thou talkest as a frightened child. Well thou knowest the pride of Roland, the strong, bold, great and boastful Roland, that God hath suffered so long upon His earth. For one hare Roland would sound his horn all day long. Doubtless ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... of her diet, and lengthened her daily walks, but he became fretful, and at last, early in December, she found on weighing him that he had made no gain for a week. Terrified, she telephoned for Dr. Hillyard, and received her at the door with a white face. It was a Sunday morning, and McEwan had just dropped in with some chrysanthemums from ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... observations, Hawthorne's Note Book. It was to be the story of a man who found life dull and his circumstances altogether mediocre. He had loved his wife, but now after all she seemed to be a very ordinary human being. He had begun life with high hopes—and life was commonplace. He was to grow fretful and restless. His discontent was to lead to some action, some irrevocable action; but upon the nature of that action I do not think the Note Book was very clear. It was to carry him in such a manner that he was to forget his wife. Then, when it was too late, he was to see her at an upper window, ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... on this particular evening when Sarah had been instructed to put a hot-water bottle in his bed, Henry's tone, in greeting his aunt, had been curt, fretful, peevish, nearly cantankerous. 'Don't worry me!' he had irascibly protested, well knowing that his good aunt was guiltless of the slightest intention to worry him. Here was a problem, an apparent ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... of green silk, with lace and gold ornaments. She was very decolletee and had a fretful air. Her husband was small and stooped, with a long moustache and shiny eyes; on his cheek-bones were the red spots frequent in consumptives, and he spoke in ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... up the ravine came the murmuring I had heard below—a sobbing sound which at first affrighted and then soothed, for it could be nothing but the echo of the sea on the curving beach below; and in its comfort that lulled all ineffectual clamour, and eventually to fretful but frightful sleep. Always I awoke panting with thirst, stiff and strained, and with unmanly cries of fear and pain on my lips, while the chaste stars danced across the narrow slit as I strove to stem ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... child. Where the milk agrees with it it has a good color and gains regularly in weight; it cries but little, and is good natured, and thoroughly contented. Should it, on the other hand, lose weight, appear fretful and listless, and sleep badly, there is something wrong, and the mother should at once have her milk examined by ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... right, she said, 'and I am glad now he was not here. I am afraid I was very fretful; but oh! you don't know what it is to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned upon the prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like Bardolph's) "all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been prepared for grief. Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat and fretful at the interruption, whom neither ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tale unfold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood; Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres; Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful Porcupine. ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... was a pastoral letter of the Episcopal Bishops against Church fairs. So many churches were holding fairs then, they were a recognised social attribute of the Church family. This letter aroused the question as to whether it was right or wrong to have Church fairs, and the newspapers became very fretful about it. I defended the Church fairs, because I felt that if they were conducted on Christian principles they were the means of an universal sociality and spiritual strength. So far as I had been acquainted with ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... half an hour they would have been the best friends in England."[11] He appeared to have great command of temper; for, though no man could have had greater trials than fell to his lot during the time he remained on board the Bellerophon, he never, in my presence, or as far as I know, allowed a fretful or captious expression to escape him: even the day he received the notification from Sir Henry Bunbury, that it was determined to send him to St Helena, he chatted and conversed with the same cheerfulness as usual. It has been asserted that he was acting a part all the time he was on board the ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... show herself abroad, and incapable of being contented at home. She had not the friendship of a husband, or the affection of children, to afford her consolation and support. Her eldest child was a boy of about five years old, her youngest four. They were as fretful and troublesome as children usually are, whose education has been totally neglected; and the quarrels between them and Jack the footboy were endless, for Jack was alternately their ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the guests to look toward the garden, and in a moment Miss Celia appeared, pushing a wheeled chair in which sat her brother. A gay afghan covered the long legs, a broad-brimmed hat half hid the big eyes, and a discontented expression made the thin face as unattractive as the fretful ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... impress us as the outcome of chance? If we saw a faultlessly executed mathematical diagram illustrating a proposition in Euclid, should we really be satisfied with the statement that it represented the random pencil-strokes made by a blindfolded child ignorant of geometry? On the other hand, if a fretful baby is allowed to divert himself by hammering the piano keys, is the result ever remotely akin to a tune? We know perfectly well that we never get harmony, order, beauty, rationality by accident; and there is only one ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of letting it carry them are trying to carry it; until, with burdens of one kind or another, we are like a string of Swiss pack-horses, such as one may sometimes see, toiling and straining up some steep Alpine pass under a blazing July sun. Poor Martha, with her sad, tired face, and nervous, fretful ways, "anxious and troubled about many things," is everywhere to-day. Nor is it the poor only whose lives are full of care. It was not a poor man amid his poverty, but a rich man amid his riches, who, in Christ's parable, put to himself the question, "What shall I do?" The birds of care build ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... the habit of associating with nervous, irritable people, quit it until you grow strong in the power of concentration, because irritable, angry, fretful, dogmatic and disagreeable people will weaken what powers of resistance ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... Aunt. [She does so mechanically.] And do stop crying. [He sits down in front of table. ESTHER goes to couch where she is joined by EMILY. MARK goes over and stands in back of them. DICK and JOHN sit at rear of table. LILY comes down front and walks about nervously. She seems in a particularly fretful, upset mood.] ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... slightly-stooping girl, with her flat figure, her plain shabby serge frock, her tired white face, and the sinister glance of the idealist in her great, fretful eyes, seemed to stand there and accuse the whole of Leonora's existence. Utterly absorbed in the imminent examination, her brain a welter of sterile facts, Rose found all the seriousness of life in dates, irregular participles, algebraic symbols, chemical ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... board right up, my child; and remember from this time never to play checkers, or any other game, when you feel yourself growing fretful! As you sometimes say, ...
— Captain Horace • Sophie May
... of adventure to relate. Even the old travelers, who saw the phoenix expire in her odoriferous nest, whence the chick soon flew forth regenerated, or who found dead lions slain by the quills of some "fretful porcupine," or who knew that the stare of the basilisk was death—even those who saw unicorns graze and who heard mermaids sing—were veracious when compared with the explorers of railroad routes across the continent. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... did not come, and in consequence I began to think that my wound was hot and fretful; and this brought up the fight on that eventful day about which I had lost count, save that it must be going on for three weeks since it occurred; and all that time I had been lying there, a miserable, ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... motion. At first we took them to be Yankees moving about with lights. Whenever we could get a shot we would blaze away. At last one got up very close, and passed right between Tom and I. I don't think I was ever more scared in my life. My hair stood on end like the quills of the fretful porcupine; I could not imagine what on earth it was. I took it to be some hellish machination of a Yankee trick. I did not know whether to run or stand, until I heard Tom laugh and say, "Well, ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... that "he feels equally indifferent, Mr. Gilchrist, for what your malice can invent, or your impudence utter." This is indubitable; for it rests not only on Mr. Bowles's assurance, but on that of Sir Fretful Plagiary, and nearly in the same words,—"and I shall treat it with exactly the same calm indifference and philosophical contempt, and so ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... flowers, and from the rear window one had a marvelous view of the water. She seldom failed to walk into the back room and feast her eyes on that marine panorama before she returned to listen to her mother's fretful maunderings over ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... sick sister, she was soft and bright to nobody else. She did not complain, but she thought that things had been very hard with her; and when people repine their troubles do not make them kinder, but the brave grow stern and the soft grow fretful. ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... got into me to-day—I feel cross, without the least bit of reason for so feeling. I guess I'm not well, for I'm sure I've felt like one great long sunbeam, I don't know how many months, and it doesn't come natural to be fretful. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... incapable of managing his slaves either by force, fear, or fraud. We seldom called him "master;" we generally called him "Captain Auld," and were hardly disposed to title him at all. I doubt not that our conduct had much to do with making him appear awkward, and of consequence fretful. Our want of reverence for him must have perplexed him greatly. He wished to have us call him master, but lacked the firmness necessary to command us to do so. His wife used to insist upon our calling him so, but to no purpose. In ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... when the wind gathered the dumpers and pans in one broad mass and jammed it against the coast. The sea, where it had lain black and fretful all winter long, was now covered and hidden. The ice stretched unbroken from the rocks of Ruddy Cove to the limit of vision in the east. And Bagg marvelled. There seemed to be a solid path from Ruddy Cove straight ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... Las Palmas were black, the house silent, when they arrived at their journey's end; Dolores was fretful, and her mistress ached in every bone. When Jose had helped his countrywoman into the ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... hanging down before him, and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Why was the child thus carried? Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch and had his limbs supported by an iron frame! Patient little Tim,—never was he heard to utter a fretful or complaining word. No wonder they cherished him ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... us at this time—my little self; Bobbie, a boy of four years old, boasting of the fattest, rosiest cheeks in the world; and wee Willie, the white-faced, fretful baby of six months. Oh, how well I remember the old house, with its great lamp hanging out over the lonely road, and shining among the trees, to show the villagers the way up to their good, kind friend the doctor. Many were the blessings we little ones used to get as we passed down the village street, ...
— My Young Days • Anonymous
... old nurse, "don't go yet. Our young master is fretful and there may be, I fancy, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... make so much unhappiness, half the folly lies in expecting the other person to be always at high-water mark, and in being fretful and ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... the very grasp of death, did this faith fail him. He kept, in the midst of a fretful, slothful, wailing world, where prophets like Carlyle and Ruskin were as impatient and bewildered, as lamenting and despondent, as the decadents they despised, the temper of his Herakles in Balaustion. He left us that temper as his last ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... upon his couch, chafing in fretful apprehension, when daylight breaks into his bedroom, and shows its shine upon the floor. It is the soft blue light of a southern morn, which usually enters accompanied by bird music—the songs of the ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... more stamina. A sort of numbness, the lethargy of great weakness, was creeping over him; his heart was sagging with a dull despair. He believed that he must be lost, yet he was past cursing or complaining aloud. Only an occasional gasp or a fretful, inarticulate sound came when his ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... fretful wind awakes; I hear him girding at the trees; He strikes the bending boughs, and shakes The quiet clusters of the bees To powdery drift; He tosses them away, He drives them like spray; He makes them ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... He became fretful, and Alice, for the first time in her life, became unhappy. She had never before heard any but the voice of kindness; and now, from him she loved best in the world she received sometimes sharp and disagreeable words. He was very sorry afterwards, and ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... the East, there is practically no reference to the kind of worry that is the bane and curse of our Occidental world. In conversation with the learned men of the Orient I find this same delightful fact. Indeed they have no word in their languages to express our idea of fretful worry. Worry is a purely Western product, the outgrowth of our materialism, our eager striving after place and position, power and wealth, our determination to be housed, clothed, and jeweled as well as our neighbors, and a little better ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... on Mr. Lyle. For years he had been an invalid, nervous, fretful and impatient. No one but Constance could suit him. Not even his wife. Her gentle hand, only, could soothe his suffering. Her soft, loving tones alone would quiet ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... for a box, but all the best were taken: it was rather a grand performance, and he had to be content with stalls. Harriet was fretful and insular. Miss Abbott was pleasant, and insisted on praising everything: her only regret was that she had ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... there shaking with ill-concealed merriment. Every pore poured forth perspiration, and my hair seemed to stand on end like quills upon the back of the fretful porcupine. I thought of the experience of the first sermon by a theological student which I had recently read in a comic paper, and I trembled lest history ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... murderer came to proof by the ordinary process of law rather than by any supernatural revelation. Before this I have gratefully owed to Mrs. LOWNDES the raising of my remaining hairs like quills upon the fretful porcupine, but the ca'-canny bogies of her present story are too perfunctory to excuse even a shiver in any but the most ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... pair to a fretful halt under the newest electric lights on River Street. "The La Boheme" read the dazzling sign. And Winona passed into her new life. She was feeling strangely young as she relinquished her cloak to a uniformed maid. She stood amid exotic splendour, and was no longer herself but some regal ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... more ineffectual than ever, and yawns became painfully frequent. Every one's temper fell into an uncomfortable state of annoyance and irritation; Miss Morley, instead of her usual quiet, piteous way of reproving, was fretful; Caroline was sharp; Clara sometimes rude like the boys, sometimes cross with them; even Marian was now and then tormented into a loss of temper, when there was no obtaining the quiet which she, more than the others, needed in order to learn a lesson properly. Each day Lionel ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... early, to toss for hours and at last to drop into fretful, torturing dreams. The scream of ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... composition of any length, either in verse or prose. However, his conversation still remained the same, lively and severe; but his memory gradually grew worse and worse, and as that decreased he grew every day more fretful and impatient. From the year 1739 to the year 1744 his passions grew so violent and ungovernable, his memory so decayed, and his reason so depraved, that the utmost precautions were taken to prevent all strangers from approaching him, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the boy was so hungry that he cried aloud. His grandmother told him to be quiet, but he cried the harder. She became vexed with him and cried out, "Ho, Kalopaling, come and take this fretful boy away!" ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... from Heaven across the flood Of ether, as a bridge. Beneath, the tides of day and night With flame and blackness ridge The void, as low as where this earth Spins like a fretful midge. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the bay was glistening in the sunshine, and the sea-gulls, like flecks of snow, flew about the rocks; the soft waves plashing gently between the boulders, a little cloud arose on her horizon. Her baby was fretful and feverish, and Nance had ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... more or less dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, "fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin"; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... keener than any insect sting. One might sleep, for the lapping of the wind wears one to the point of exhaustion very soon, but there is dread, in open sand stretches sometimes justified, of being over blown by the drift. It is hot, dry, fretful work, but by going along the ground with the wind behind, one may come upon strange things in its tumultuous privacy. I like these truces of wind and heat that the desert makes, otherwise I do not know how I should come by so many acquaintances with ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... Big Medicine attested, grinning mirthlessly. "This here sheep business is plumb wearin' on a man. 'Specially," he added with a fretful note, "when you've got to handle 'em gentle. The things I'd like to do to them Dots is all ruled outa the game, seems like. Honest to grandma, a little gore would look better to me right now than a Dutch picnic before the foam's all blowed off the refreshments. ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... beans. He was a wonderful man! Kept his senses plumb to the end. I remember his very las' words. I was settin' by him, waitin' fer the doctor to git there, an' I kep' saying 'Oh, Mr. Wiggs! You don't think you are dying do you?' an' he answered up jes' as natural an' fretful-like, 'Good lan', Nancy! How do I know? I ain't never died before.' An' them was the very ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... sir," he replied, caressing a weather-beaten chin with thumb and finger, "the Whim's been tugging at her cable mighty fretful this parst fortnight! The crew hoped you'd be coming aboard at once, sir. Fact is, we're wanting to be told how you and Mr. Thomas, here, licked ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the time and amused if not contemptuous. He was but a farmer—little more, indeed, than a shepherd, yet something in his air and all his speech showed him superior to his circumstances. He was a god-send to her dreariness in this place Edinburgh and the noisy world had made her fretful of, and she was in ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... building, unlike any other of which I had knowledge in Mexico, saving only the temple that we had found upon the lonely mountain-top, was pervaded by a distinctly Egyptian sentiment. Its walls sloped inward from their bases, and no trivial nor fretful lines weakened the effect of their massive dignity; for the whole of the decoration upon them was a broad panelling that was gained by a combination of heavy pilasters and a heavy cornice; and with the exception of a central entrance, the front was unbroken by openings of any kind. Possessing ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... bleak prairie. She's about as much like the people she has to associate with as an old-fashioned single rose is like a cabbage. Even her mother, who is the only relative she has, is nothing but a fretful porcupine of a woman. I've been to see them a few times and the situation seems to me almost intolerable. If ever a girl needed a friend or two, it's she—not for charity, you understand, but just for real contact with people of her own kind. Now a man's not much use ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter |
