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More "Fretful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... broken-hearted at the death of her son, and pining away, she fell into a slow decline. Her sufferings were greatly aggravated by Richard's harsh and cruel treatment of her. He was continually uttering expressions of impatience against her on account of her sickness and uselessness, and making fretful complaints of her various disagreeable qualities. Some of these sayings were reported to Anne, and also a rumor came to her ears one day, while she was at her toilet, that Richard was intending to put her to death. She was dreadfully alarmed at hearing this, and she immediately ran, half dressed ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... expecting to go on working for him as long as we can get along together all right, which it seems like from appearances that ought to be always. But after he gives up being circuit judge on account of him getting along so in age he gets sort of fretful by reasons of him not having much to do any more and most of his own friends having died off on him. When the State begins going Republican about once in so often, he says to me, kind of half joking, he's a great mind to pull up stakes ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... she grew worse; for she never tried to grow better. She became more and more peevish and fretful every day—dissatisfied not only with what she had, but with all that was around her, and constantly wishing things in general to be different. She found fault with every thing and everybody, and all that happened, and grew more and more ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... deal of trouble," continued Susan, after a pause, in a slightly fretful key. "It was really nothing but a joke, and I don't see why such a fuss should have been made. I know I lost a great deal of sleep trying to manage that twine business round my foot. I don't think I shall trouble myself playing any more tricks upon ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... representatives of his own country, treated with almost universal coldness and neglect, cut off from all communication with America, without money, without occupation, and without any reasonable hope of a termination of his troubles, uniformly composed, firm, and cheerful. Not a discontented or fretful expression is to be found in his ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... heart—"oh, my dear, I hope it will not be a long engagement. People change so—at least men do. You don't know what misery comes out of long engagements!" And, lowering her voice, she turned her dull grey eyes, swimming with motherly tears, towards the corner sofa where the pale, fretful, old-maidish ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Nay, but why should he be so fretful now? and knows I dote on him? to leave a poor dear so long without him, and then come home in an angry ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool (occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Kassel. The fairest of these is Cassel. For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will give you rest." For upon the hill of Cassel the air is sweet and fresh, the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the wind plays among the birches and the poplars, ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... her chief attendant, knew all her whims and ways to perfection. According to Rebecca's idea, "she was a peevish, fretful, ill-natured, but kind-hearted creature." Being very tired of her old mistress and heartily sick of bondage, and withal desiring to save her daughter, she ascertained the doings of the Underground Rail Road,—was told about Canada, &c. She therefore resolved to make a bold adventure. Mrs. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... look so big, or bridges so narrow, except in nightmares. And—and you can't make your horn heard much, can you, over the noise on the stones? Oh, there was a close shave with that wagon, wasn't it? I felt bristling like a fretful porcupine—oh, but a stark, staring ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... again to be so naughty. The good tempered Julia readily forgave her, and for a few days after this misfortune Fanny behaved much better than usual. However, as ill habits are very difficult to be overcome, she soon relapsed into her former fretful and passionate ways; indeed, she made the family so uncomfortable that her mother determined to send her from home, and for that purpose wrote to a relation, entreating her to take the care of Fanny for some time, and try if ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... She has a high, correct standard for everything in the world, from the regulation of the thoughts down to the spreading of a sheet or the hemming of a towel; and to this exact standard she feels it her duty to bring every one in her household. She does not often scold, she is not actually fretful, but she exercises over her household a calm, inflexible severity, rebuking every fault; she overlooks nothing, she excuses nothing, she will accept of nothing in any part of her domain but absolute perfection; and her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... for kindling-wood without his hat. It had been their wont to bundle the child up and turn him out to play; and one very cold day he had stood a long time under the woodshed, and had got chilled. So that night his head was hot, and he was fretful; and in the morning he would not eat, and apparently had a fever. They sent off in haste for the doctor; and the doctor came and examined him, and shook his head and looked very grave. It was pneumonia, he ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Constantinople, Southern Russia, the Caucasus, and Persia, was employed by Livingstone in fruitful discoveries west of the Tanganika. Again, consider that I arrived at Unyanyembe in the latter part of June, and that owing to a war I was delayed three months at Unyanyembe, leading a fretful, peevish and impatient life. But while I was thus fretting myself, and being delayed by a series of accidents, Livingstone was being forced back to Ujiji in the same month. It took him from June to October to march to Ujiji. Now, in September, I broke loose from the thraldom which accident ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... earth have been irradiated with heavenly light, and the death shriek of immolated victims changed for ascriptions of praise to God and the Lamb. Envy and Malice have been rebuked by her contented look, and fretful Impatience by her gentle and ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson
... my patient makes no scruple of calling me up at an hour when his wants or his fancies require my presence. But he is manifestly afraid of my displeasure; and if at one time he tries my patience by his unreasonable exactions, and fretful complaints and reproaches, at another he depresses me by his abject submission and deprecatory self-abasement when he fears he has gone too far. But all this I can readily pardon; I know it is chiefly the result of his enfeebled frame and disordered nerves. What annoys me the most, is his occasional ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... for England in the month of June. When we were about the north latitude 42, we had contrary wind for several days, and the ship did not make in that time above six or seven miles straight course. This made the captain exceeding fretful and peevish: and I was very sorry to hear God's most holy name often blasphemed by him. One day, as he was in that impious mood, a young gentleman on board, who was a passenger, reproached him, and said he acted ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... it from a totally different point of view. The parallax of time helps us to the true position of a conception, as the parallax of space helps us to that of a star. And the moral nature loses no less. It is well to turn aside from the fretful stir of the present, and to dwell with gratitude and respect upon the services of those mighty men of old who have gone down to the grave with their weapons of war, but who, while they yet lived, won splendid ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... unable to get out, and he grew rather fretful sometimes, even with Christie. It was very dull for him sitting alone all day; and he had nothing to comfort him, not even his old friend the organ. And when Christie came home at night, if the store of pence was not so large as usual, poor old Treffy ...
— Christie's Old Organ - Or, "Home, Sweet Home" • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... pressed his snout against her cheek and gazed Wistfully, with his keen, sagacious eyes. One arm with lax embrace the neck enwreathed, With polished roundness near the sleek, gray skin. Admetus, fixed with wonder, dare not pass, Intrusive on her holy innocence And sacred girlhood, but his fretful steed Snuffed the air, and champed and pawed the ground; And hearing this, the maiden raised her head. No let or hindrance then might stop the king, Once having looked upon those supreme eyes. The drooping boughs disparting, forth he sped, And then drew in his steed, to ask the path, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... of wood on the mountain-side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow round becomes pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented prisoner. Just as he has fallen already ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... became tiresome, and very soon she fell to talking always of herself, thrusting her poems upon him, and growing vexed and peevish when he would not praise them. As was well said, "he grew moody and she fretful when their mutual ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the restless pleasure of youth, while in another street, so far away that it might have been in a distant city, in a different world even, this woman, with the face of tragedy, lay dying with that fretful wail in her ears. A different world it might have been, and yet what divided her from this other woman except the blind decision of chance, the difference between beauty and ugliness, nothing more. In ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... restless and feverish, and she would have gone to bed immediately, but crossing the drawing-room she heard the fretful voice of her aunt saying, "Is that you, Roma?" and she had no choice but to go into ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... the leaves of her Bible over to the second slip of paper. "I don't find any reference to it in my concordance till way over here in Exodus, after the children of Israel had been in Egypt so many years, and Moses led them out through the wilderness, and they got fretful because they hadn't any bread such as they used to have in Egypt, so God sent them manna that fell every morning. But He told them not to leave any over for the next day because it would gather worms and smell ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... foolish friendships that 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 reproachful when ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... his kind offices without speaking; but after a few minutes he turned his head from him with a fretful, impatient, "There, that'll do," and stretched out his hand for his crutches. Georgie brought them to him, and helped him to get upon them. But poor Alick had severely sprained his shoulder in trying to save himself as he fell, ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous
... was now ashamed to 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 tutor and ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... sent us back to Aveley with the zest of returning to a beloved home. Of course there were little bickerings at times, little complexities of friendship; but these never came to anything in Father Payne's kindly present. Sometimes a man would get fretful or worried over his work; if so, he was generally despatched on a brief holiday, with an injunction to do no work at all; and I am sure that the prospect of even temporary banishment was the strongest of all motives for the suppression of strife. I remember spring mornings, when ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. 50 If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft— In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, 55 Have hung upon the beatings of my heart— How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, [7] How often has ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... beloved farm, and to be free there from questions, and from the evidences of her unfitness for the simple duties which life seemed offering her with heartless irony. She was not good for anything after all, it appeared, and she had been cheating herself. This was no life at all, this fretful idleness; if only she had been trained as boys are, to the work of their lives! She had hoped that Dr. Leslie would help her; he used to talk long ago about her studying medicine, but he must have forgotten that, and the girl savagely rebuked ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... as playwright and novelist can hardly be said to have survived to the present day. Sheridan caricatured him as Sir Fretful Plagiary, in the "Critic." We shall meet with him ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... 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 appeal nor argument ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... longer a malicious spirit of evil who took delight in thwarting her, but a poor, fretful old lady whose soul was bound in shallows. And Aunt Matilda? Rosemary's eyes filled at the thought of Aunt Matilda, unloved and unsought. Nobody wanted her, she belonged to nobody, in all her lonely life she had had ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... died on his lips; a shadow darkened over his feelings, and the meal passed in almost total silence—at least so far as he was concerned. Once or twice he ventured a remark to Mrs. Abercrombie; but the half-fretful tone in which she replied, only disturbed him ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... she couldn't do anything but lie about, reading fairy-tales, and being petted by every one. Mamma and papa had tried all sorts of things to amuse and do her good; for she was their only little daughter, and they loved her very dearly. But nothing pleased her long; and she lounged about, pale and fretful, till Aunt Laura came. Daisy called her "Wee" when she was a baby, and couldn't talk plainly; and she still used the name because it suited the cheery little ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... night, Miss Mattie was partially awake and inclined to be fretful. "The strength is gone out of my medicine," she grumbled, "and it ain't time to take more. I've got to set here and be deprived of my sleep ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... trance of woe, and, glancing sovereign contempt upon the new, unconscious passenger, discover to me a countenance as plain, withered, and fraught with the impress of evil passions, as that of the Lady in the Sacque, in Sir Walter's tale of the Tapestried Chamber. I never beheld so fretful and malignant-looking a being!—and the contrast which her visage afforded to that of my kind-hearted widow, which beamed with satisfaction and good-humour, was quite remarkable. This "lady," indeed, now appeared to have regained her native element, and not to be out-done in frankness ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... pictures—one fair and bewitching, which lit up the student's face with its reflection, while the other, dark and lowering from its deep and gloomy appearance, shed a cloud of despondency and sadness upon the thoughtful brow, leaving thereon an expression that was fretful and annoying. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... much during their dinner. After it was over she helped him to walk about a little, but he was not able for much and soon got tired. He did not get fretful, though. He was too glad of having the sun and the wind again, to fret because he could not run about. He lay down on the dry sand, and his mother covered him with a shawl. She then sat by his side, and took a bit of work from her pocket. But Diamond ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... grandma staid with her to the very last, and now she has come to me. I really don't know what I should do without her, and her life has been most praiseworthy in every respect. She would give her life for any of us. Suppose she were cross and fretful, and thought, as some old ladies do, that we ought to work every moment, and never take a bit ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... has been exhausting and the nerves are so alive and wrought up that sleep will not come, do not allow the mind to delve into worry about it. Do not say to yourself: "I wish I could sleep. Why can't I sleep?" Such fretful thinking produces mental tension, which drives sleep away. Instead, say to yourself: "I am very comfortable. I am having a refreshing rest. It does not matter whether I sleep or not." By all means relax the body. Choose a comfortable position ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... world was horribly changed. The long line of the naked dead, flanked by the rigid silver statue, was not pleasant to look upon. It was made up of men alone. Were the womenkind, then, forced to sleep in the shelter of the stifling mud- huts as best they might? The fretful wail of a child from a low mud-roof answered the question. Where the children are the mothers must be also to look after them. They need care on these sweltering nights. A black little bullet-head peeped over the coping, and a thin—a painfully thin— brown leg was ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... begins to writhe in the orchestra, and we know that Elsa's soul is fast bound in the spell of suspicion which Ortrud put upon her. She gets nearer and nearer to the fatal question, and suddenly in the impotent rage of a fretful woman who cannot get her way—a woman driven mad by baseless jealousy—in fancy she sees the swan coming to lead Lohengrin away from her; with mournful and dreary effect a fragment of the swan theme sounds from the orchestra. This simple touch is weird to a degree ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... 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 the turbid stream ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... parting be a fretful corrosive, It is applied to a deathful wound. To France, sweet Suffolk; let me hear from thee, For whereso'er thou art in this world's globe I'll have an Iris ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... talk, unwilling to sit silent, eager for food, wakeful for news, weary of a good book, quick to anger, easy of offence at my neighbour, and too ready to judge him, too merry over prosperity, and too gloomy, fretful, and peevish in adversity; so often making good rules for my future life, and coming so little speed with them all, and so on. And, in facing even such a terrible thicket as that, let not even an old man absolutely despair. At forty, at sixty, at threescore and ten, let ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... certain that I shall—I do already. You can't imagine what queer, fretful-looking lines were beginning to show themselves on George's brow. He would have looked old enough for a grandfather in a few years, if I had gone on trying to realize the hope he expressed, that I would abstain from the performance of all household tasks. ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... been used to, and the horse which had been led out for her was a wiry, dapple-gray mare of impatient blood. I knew the correct thing to do, and while I feared that I could not perform the service successfully, I determined to try. So as she walked towards the fretful mare which a negro was with difficulty restraining, I stepped forward, doffed my hat, and with "Permit me, Miss Salome," I bent, and hollowed my hand for the reception of her foot. With the naturalness and grace of a queen she placed the sole upon ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... long waiting and the fretful impatience of the past few days there were only two plausible ways in which to treat such a letter. One way was with anger. One way was with amusement. With conscientious effort Stanton finally summoned a real ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... into his confidence was not yet. He had perforce to wait till dead of night before he could tell whether the changes, more and more delicate and minute, made upon his key during the day were effective. And the Babu was fretful; having done his part admirably, as Desmond told him, in working the key into his story, he seemed to expect that the rest would be easy, and did not make account of the long ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... upon to marry for love, and if she marry not for love, she disobeys the ordinance of nature and must pay the penalty. But at the same time all her material fortune depends upon the nature of that love. An industrious man may marry a silly fretful woman, and may be triumphant in his counting-house though he be bankrupt in his drawing-room. But a woman has but the one chance. She must choose her life's companion because she loves him; but she knows how great is the ruin of loving one who cannot win for her that worldly success which all ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... working in the corn-field at a little distance, and ordered him to bring his hoe along 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 hoe, began to dig a pit in the earth; and the Dooty, who appeared to be a man of a very fretful disposition, kept muttering and talking to himself until the pit was almost finished, when he repeated dankatoo (good for nothing;) jiankra lemen (a real plague;) which expressions I thought could be applied to nobody but myself; and as the pit had ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... answers, sympathetically. She is not only pale, but sallow, and there are hollows in her cheeks. Her hands, which were once very pretty, are thin as birds' claws. There is a fretful little crease in her forehead, and her eyes have a ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... innocence, the young man strolled, seeking a grassy by-road, seldom used, redolent of bush, tree, vine, dust-laden weed. It was a road where the sun seemed almost a stranger; a road gone to sleep and dreaming of the feet of stealthy Indians, of noisy settlers, and skilful trappers. All such fretful bits of life had the old road drained into oblivion, and now it seemed to call on Abbott to share their fate, the fate of ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... been out of town a week yet," she said. "We're not half settled. Not having any one to help makes it harder; and the baby is rather fretful." ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... 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, and all painted yed; A box full of tandy, ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... the child may be fretful and restless most of the time, being seemingly comfortable for only an hour or ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... with gratifying conviction. "And you're—you're a trump, you know. I'm ashamed of acting like such a boor. If you'll bear with me I'll try from now on to be more like a man and less like a fretful ghost." ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... on the white foam of the Kodor like a quantity of mercurial salmon fry. And as I sat on some rocks overlooking the river there occurred to me the thought that, as likely as not, the cause of the gulls' and cormorants' fretful cries where the surf lay moaning behind a belt of trees to the right was that, like myself, they kept mistaking the leaves for fish, and as ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... eloquent;—it had the greater effect:—The surgeon was confounded;—not that there wanted grounds for such, or greater marks of impatience,—but 'twas unexpected too; in the four years he had attended him, he had never seen any thing like it in my uncle Toby's carriage; he had never once dropped one fretful or discontented word;—he ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... shirt, with his foot upon the hub, bending across the wheel and gesticulating in an endless discussion of politics or crops, while my brother and I were impatient to be off. Dolly was of course patient, for she had long since passed her fretful youth. If by any biological chance it had happened that she had been an old lady instead of a horse, she would have been the kind that spent her day in a rocker with her knitting. Any one who gave Dolly an excuse for standing was her friend. There she stood as ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... said I, may be assigned for that: I thought myself in danger: I looked upon every one as my enemy; and it was impossible that I should not be fretful, uneasy, jealous. But when my dearest friend had taken from me the ground of my uneasiness, and made me quite happy, I should have been very blamable, if I had not shewn a satisfied and easy mind, and a temper that should engage every one's respect and love at the same time, ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... conditions which produce general excitability and chronic derangement. A full development of this portion of the brain indicates that the person is naturally dependent, inferior, and subservient to stronger characters. Such a one is fearful, fretful, complaining, irritable, dejected, morose, and, sooner or later, becomes a fit subject for chronic disease.[5] The ultimate result of excessive fear, excitability, and irritability, is functional or organic ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... 2884, and with such heart as he had, he admired her. He intended, if she went on as she had begun, to "set the good word going" which would reach those "at the top." But now, at a moment when he happened through acute indigestion to be in a particularly fretful mood, he believed that he had found out the "bright girl" in a ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... two friends met in George's room. George was in low spirits, nervous and fretful. It was plain to see his friend's protest had come too late to be of much use, for he had grown more and more worn every day; and the additional hours spent in bed had only been a source of worry and vexation. Jim, on the other hand, was doing ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... had not arranged their September meeting on the day that a freight wreck made the trains from Barham westward very late and irregular; if Miss Herron had not been waiting a fretful half hour in the dusty station for the means of reaching the meeting before it was over, when Archie Fraser drove his car thither in a search for an express package, the latter part of this story would have been very different. But as the boy ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for little things forgotten, the untidy camp broke up and led the half-dozen stiff and fretful horses along the Kalka road in the fresh of the rain-swept dawn. Kim, regarded as Mahbub Ali's favourite by all who wished to stand well with the Pathan, was not called upon to work. They strolled on by the easiest of stages, halting every few hours at a wayside shelter. Very many Sahibs travel ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... reckless licence, by contemplation of the loveliness of external nature, and the great exploits and perishing monuments of man in the past; but he, equally with the others, embodies the paradoxical hope that angry isolation and fretful estrangement from mankind are equivalent to emancipation from their pettiness, instead of being its very climax and demonstration. As if freedom of soul could exist without orderly relations of intelligence ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... nursery, and did her best to comfort Jessie, but the poor child was languid and fretful, and could hardly put away the ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... formerly was said of the Micawber resemblances, Dickens has been sharply criticized; and in like manner it was thought objectionable in Scott that for the closing scenes of Crystal Croftangry he should have found the original of his fretful patient at the death-bed of his own father. Lockhart, who tells us this, adds with a sad significance that he himself lived to see the curtain fall at Abbotsford upon even such another scene. But to no purpose will such objections still be made. All great novelists will continue to use ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... for instance, that it is good where there is much black to break it with white, and where there is much white to break it with black, etc., etc.; in later life remain silent altogether, or speak only in despair (fretful or patient according to their character); one who might have been among the best of them,[63] the last we heard of, finding refuge for an entirely honest heart from a world which declares honesty to be impossible, only in a madness nearly as sorrowful as its own;—the religious madness which makes ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... anxious, his voice fretful. "There can be no retreat for me, gentlemen. Though many that we depended upon are not here to join us, yet let us remember that Heaven is on our side, and that we are come to fight in the sacred cause of religion and a nation's emancipation from the thraldom ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... hung low, running before the wind, and bringing intermittently little dashes of rain that seemed still further to compress the walls of horizon. The sea was not what could be called rough, but merely choppy and fretful, with short waves that would not have troubled a larger craft. The steamer proved to be a small, undistinguished dingy-looking boat, more like a commercial tramp than a government vessel. An officer, apparently the mate, stood on the bridge, sinewy hands grasping the rail, peering ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... three reasons for her exasperation. In the first place, the constant spectacle of Sarah Gailey's pain, and the effect of the pain on Sarah's character, was exasperating—to Hilda as well as to George Cannon. Both well knew that the watery-eyed, fretful spinster was a victim, utterly innocent and utterly helpless, of destiny, and that she merited nothing but patient sympathy; yet often the strain of relationship with Sarah produced in them such a profound feeling of annoyance that they positively resented Sarah's sufferings, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... said, withdrawing his eyes from the space above my head. "And why do we stay in it when there are such glorious paradises to go to? Hawaii now. If you really want divine laziness—sun and warmth and the absence of all fretful ambition—you should go to the South Seas. You can't get it anywhere else. I remember when I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... the table. The fire is very low, and the light from it is only sufficient to render all indistinctly visible. In a chair opposite is a young woman with such a mournful, careworn face, that a glance inspires you with sorrow; and from a bundle of clothes on her knee issues the fretful wail of a restless child. The monotonous tick of an old clock is the only sound, saving the longdrawn sigh of that young mother, or the quick, hollow breathing of the sleeping man. Now and then the wind whistles more shrilly through the crevices of the door, and the rain beats with ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... home was enough to convince Sally that no magician had been at work. It was the same squalid house, and the same squalid room that she reached after the splendour of her dinner. And it was the same fretful mother who complained of her lateness and chided her for the dangers she ran in being about the streets so late. Sally made no answer. She looked in the mirror at the dilated pupils of her glowing eyes, and at her flushed cheeks and laughing lips; and her heart first sank and ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... delicate of constitution and his ailments made him passionate and fretful, though to the multitude he ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... made 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 ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... in years, and had become impatient and fretful. He left Paris for Vienna in 1780, having amassed considerable property. There, as an old, broken-down man, he listened to the young Mozart's new symphonies and operas, and applauded them with great zeal; for Gluck, though fiery and haughty in the extreme, was singularly ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... the intellect and the development of noble sentiments is as essential for the perfection of the one, as of the other, fretful, envious, malicious, ill humoured feelings must never be indulged by those who value their personal appearance, for the existence of these chronic maladies of the ...
— The Jewish Manual • Judith Cohen Montefiore
... his own testimony is to be depended upon) insists on her suckling it herself. You ask my advice on this matter; and, to give it you frankly, I really think that Mr ——'s demand is unreasonable, as his wife's constitution is tender, and her temper fretful. A true philosopher would consider these circumstances; but a pedant is always throwing his system in your face, and applies it equally to all things, times and places, just like a taylor who would make a coat ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... after the birth of her second, whom she had lost through scarlet fever. James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre never heard much of her, and barely knew of her past existence because in the picture gallery he had seen a portrait of a tall, thin, fretful-looking young lady, with light ringlets, and pearls round her neck. She had not attracted him as a child, and the fact that he gathered that she had been his mother left him entirely unmoved. She was not a loveable-looking person, and, indeed, had been at once empty-headed, ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... characteristic! It is forbidden to the Ghost to communicate to 'ears of flesh and blood' the secrets of its fiery prison-house. Yet it knows how to tell enough of the horrors of that gruesome place to make the hair of a stronger mortal than Hamlet is, stand on end, 'like quills upon the fretful porcupine.' ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... since you made love, O Whiskey Bill, O Whiskey Bill! The happy sun grinned up above At Whiskey Bill. And down the middle of the street The sheriff comes on toe and feet A-wishin' for one fretful ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... temperament, soured by misfortunes, made irritable by infirmities, cannot view nature and her author under the same perspective, as the healthy man of a sprightly humour, who is contented with every thing. Deprived of happiness, the fretful man can only find disorder, can see nothing but deformity, can find nothing but subjects to afflict himself with; he only contemplates the universe as the theatre of malice, as the stage for tyrants to execute their vengeance; he grows superstitious, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... will be boys, that's all—especially big ones—but thar'! I've known 'em to get over it a hundred times and not hurt 'em none. If you're always lookin' at human natur' on the dark side, it seems kind o' desp'rit. My first husband, he wasn't a fretful man, but he was always viewin' the dark side o' things. I suppose one reason was he didn't have no father nor mother, and so he kind o' begun life as a took-in boy, but Pollos Slocum, he done very well by him, for he hadn't no children of his own, but his brother—that was Daniel Slocum—he had ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Books Take a heavy-wing'd flight, and grow busy as rooks; And the postman (that Genius, indifferent and stern, Who shakes out even-handed to all, from his urn, Those lots which so often decide if our day Shall be fretful and anxious, or joyous and gay) Brings, each morning, more letters of one sort or other Than Cadmus, himself, put together, to bother The heads of Hellenes;—I say, in the season Of Fair May, in May Fair, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... was choppy and fretful. The little bride boat danced and careened about recklessly. Between the Sabah and Piang lay Bongao, and straight for Bongao he headed, skilfully keeping the vinta steady. A white mist rose, as if to hide the vinta from the pursuers, but when the fleet ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... into the fields to search the brambles for stray hips, or locks of wool the sheep had not left there willingly; men and women even worse off had been there before them, and they came home at night, tired out and footsore, only to hear Zitza's fretful cry for food, and the constant chatter of Meister Hans, croaking for his own share in ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... conspicuous among them a beautiful portrait of the king, painted on copper, which represented Frederick in his youthful beauty. It was a morose, sullen-looking room, arranged most certainly by its feminine occupant, and harmonized exactly with her fretful face and angular figure, void of charms. At last the general broke the silence with submissive voice: "I pray you, Clotilda, tell me what the ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... under her chin by a diamond that sparkled in the dim greenish light of the drawing-room; the feathers of the hat were unusually large and drooping; they curled heavily round the thin neck and long, hollow-eyed face, so that its ivory whiteness, its fatigue, its fretful beauty were framed in and emphasized by them; her bloodless hands lay upon her lap, and the folds of the sweeping dress drawn round her showed her slenderness, or rather her emaciation. Two years before this date Madeleine ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... entitles himself to the protection of Church and State. The character of his mind is an utter want of independence and magnanimity in all that he attempts. He cannot go alone, he must have crutches, a go-cart and trammels, or he is timid, fretful, and helpless as a child. He cannot conceive of any thing different from what he finds it, and hates those who pretend to a greater reach of intellect or boldness of spirit than himself. He inclines, by a ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the eye could reach, a thin stream of white and pink and blue, a tumbling river of curls and caps and bare legs, were the children. A babble of shrill cries, of chattering laughter, of fretful screams, an undercurrent of remonstrance, of soothing patience, of angry threatening, marked their slow progress up ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... eats too much, or eats greedily; or she inclines to be slovenly, or indolent, or fretful. Now all these things are in general merely forbidden or rated, or at most, shown to be contrary to the will of the parents. They are seldom or never shown to be right or wrong, in their own nature; nor is the child assured, upon the authority of the parent, ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... slowness, and neither good-will nor patience had Eyebright to bring to the task. Her fingers twitched, she "pshawed," and "oh deared," ran the needle in and out and in irregularly, jerked the thread, and finally gave a fretful pull when she came to the end of the first needleful, which tore a fresh hole in the stuff and puckered all she had darned, so that it was not fit to be seen. Wealthy looked in just then, and was scandalized at the ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... than flower or bird, Or any odor smelled or ditty heard— Love is another and a sweeter thing. But when the music ceaseth in Love's bowers, Who listeneth well shall hear the silence stirred With aftermoan of many a fretful string: For when Love harpeth to the hollow hours, His gladdest notes ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... housekeeper, whatever may be her habits, can escape the frequent recurrence of negligence or mistake, which interferes with her plans. It is probable, that there is no class of persons, in the world, who have such incessant trials of temper, and temptations to be fretful, as American housekeepers. For a housekeeper's business is not, like that of the other sex, limited to a particular department, for which previous preparation is made. It consists of ten thousand little disconnected items, which can never be so systematically ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... on a mountain crest, Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray, My love of you leaps foaming in my breast, Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray; . . . I laugh aloud for love of you, Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather— No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew, But hale and hardy as the highland heather, Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills, Comrade of the ocean, playmate of ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... rheumatism in childhood forms a good example of this tendency. The child who, from time to time, complains of the transient joint pains which are called "growing pains," and who is found by the doctor to be suffering from subacute rheumatism, is commonly restless, fretful, and nervous. Appetite, memory, and the power of sustained attention become impaired. Often there is excessive emotional display, with, perhaps, unexplained bursts of weeping. The child is readily frightened, and when sooner or later the restless, jerky movements of St. Vitus's ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... all the beauty and brightness surrounding her in the little conservatory. Beyond the sympathy unavoidably drawn forth by her helpless and crippled condition, there was absolutely nothing to attract one toward her. She looked peevish and fretful, too, so far as there was any expression in the dull, heavy face. Was it to be wondered at? There had been but little of brightness in her young life; and as I looked from her to my little sisters, our petted ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... delight—that a woman in the house behind the rambler heard the music and was cheered at her task, David did not know. If he found a kitten at play in the sunshine, he put it into a riotous abandonment of tumbling turns and trills—that a fretful baby heard and stopped its wailing, David also did not know. And once, just because the sky was blue and the air was sweet, and it was so good to be alive, David lifted his bow and put it all into a rapturous paean of ringing exultation—that a sick man in a darkened chamber above ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... hurry of preparation downstairs, her mother's low, fretful voice and her father's high and strained one joined in a heated argument, and they started still deep in it, for her father did not call a good-night to Judith. The street door shut, and she was alone in the house. ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... astonished. I know a little girl, ten years old, of nervous temperament, whose whole physical condition is disordered, and seriously, by her mother's habitual atmosphere of rude fault-finding. She is a sickly, fretful, unhappy, almost unbearable child. If she lives to grow up, she will be a sickly, fretful, unhappy, unlovely woman. But her mother is just as much responsible for the whole as if she had deranged her system by feeding her on poisonous ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... her, and she found herself in the presence of a tall thin woman, who was lying full length on a sofa by the open window. Never was there a more peevish face than the invalid wore. Her brows were slightly drawn together, her lips had fretful curves; the pallor of great pain, of intense nervous suffering, dwelt on her brow. Frances went softly ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... in almost a fretful tone, "that you exaggerate. I hardly think there is anything so very objectionable about her associates here. I will admit that many of the children come from what we call the poor whites, but after all their main vice is shiftlessness, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... draw the Manner of Behaviour I would advise People to practise under some Maxim, and intimated, that every one almost was governed by his Pride. There was an old Fellow about forty Years ago so peevish and fretful, though a Man of Business, that no one could come at him: But he frequented a particular little Coffee-house, where he triumphed over every body at Trick-track and Baggammon. The way to pass his Office well, was first to be insulted by him at one of those Games in his leisure Hours; ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... man, "Come, father, you are the oldest among us; you shall be our foreman." And when the coroner had sworn them on the jury, the coffin was uncovered, that they might look upon the body. But the old man, disturbed in his mind at the interruption they had given him, and grown somewhat fretful upon it, said to them: "To what purpose do you show us a dead body here? You would not have us think, sure, that this man died in this room! How then shall we be able to judge how this man came by his death unless we see the place wherein he died, and wherein he hath been kept prisoner before ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... wounded; for, if on one occasion he spoke too favourably, he never spoke unfavourably but with justice. This is among the indications of orderly and elevated minds; and here stands the barrier that separates them from the common and the waste. Is a man to be angry because an infant is fretful? Is a philosopher to unpack and throw away his philosophy, because an idiot has tried to overturn it on the road, and has pursued it with ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... delightful to my heart, still brooding upon solitude. Within six weeks this had changed. The approbation indeed continued, and the public testimony of it. Neither would there, in the ordinary course, have been any painful reaction from jealousy or fretful resistance to the soundness of my pretensions; since it was sufficiently known to some of my schoolfellows, that I, who had no male relatives but military men, and those in India, could not have benefited by any clandestine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... To strangers his manners were somewhat uninviting, and in society he was liable to periods of taciturnity. He loved the ironical and facetious; and did not scruple to indulge in ridicule even at the expense of his intimate associates. With many peculiarities of manner, and a temper somewhat fretful and impulsive, we have good authority for recording, that many unfortunate men of genius derived support from his bounty. Ardent in temperament, he was severe in resenting a real or fancied wrong; but among those to whom he gave his confidence, he was found to be possessed ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... for hours, unable to see anything and having nought else to distract our attention, until Tom, becoming somewhat affected by the smell of the bilge water in the hold as well as by the unaccustomed rocking movement of the brig, began to feel sea-sick and fretful. ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... very sharp on the tip of it, and neither too long nor too short, too thick nor too thin, denotes the person, if a man, to be of a fretful disposition, always pining and peevish; and if a woman, a scold, or contentious, wedded to her own humours, of a morose and dogged carriage, and if married, a plague to her husband. A nose very round at the end of it, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... not incapable of showing his bad temper by rudeness. From the period of his boyhood, when Torrigiano smashed his nose, down to the last years of his life in Rome, when he abused his nephew Lionardo and hurt the feelings of his best and oldest friends, he discovered signs of a highly nervous and fretful temperament. It must be admitted that the dominant qualities of nobility and generosity in his nature were alloyed by suspicion bordering on littleness, and by petulant yieldings to the irritation of the moment which are incompatible with the calm ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... they were a little late in starting. Baby was fretful, and though Billy usually laid him in his crib and unhesitatingly left the room, insisting that he should go to sleep by himself in accordance with the most approved rules in her Scientific Training; yet to-night ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... town. He felt it would be better not to explain the nature of the proposal Mrs. Ormonde was going to make, and affected to know nothing more than that she wished to speak of the child's health. Bunce had knitted his brows; his heavy lips took on a fretful sullenness. He knew that it was impossible to meet Egremont with flat refusals, and the prospect of being driven into something he intensely disliked worked him into an inward fume. He gave a great scrape on the floor with one of ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... find them much more easy and tractable, than the squeamish, fretful, discontented wretches, with which other ministers have had to do. There is but one expence that will be requisite. It is uniform, and capable of an easy calculation. In any great and trying question, I was going to say debate, but debates, I am apt ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... this fretful humour you must add another as bad, which feeds it. You are therefore next to consider him as one highly opinionative and magisterial. Fanciful in his conceptions, and deeply enamoured with those phantasmes, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... select an author likely to win the long-distance dialogue race of the British Isles I should, after reading Uncle Lionel (GRANT RICHARDS), unhesitatingly vote for Mr. S.P.B. MAIS. It is not however so much the verbosity as the gloom of Mr. MAIS'S characters that leaves me fretful. Nowadays, when a novel begins with a married hero and heroine, we should be sadly archaic if we expected the course of their conjugal love to run smoothly; but I protest that Michael and Patricia overdid their quarrels, or, at any rate, that we are told too many details about them. And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... purpose of striking terror into the native population by wholesale executions, nor did the ruling powers realize that the time for such methods had passed. It was a case of sixteenth-century colonial methods fallen into fretful and frantic senility, so in all this wretched business it is doubtful whim to pity the more: the blind stupidity of the fossilized conservatives incontinently throwing an empire away, forfeiting their influence over a people whom they, by temperament and experience, should have ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... If their wants we but meet, So why should we blame them when fretful and cross? Let us find what is wrong, And remove it ere long, And we'll see that time thus spent is never ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... the fretful whining winds that came down from the north chilled the Dream. The winds whispered of the coming of the Snow King, and the river grumbled as it listened. Big Ivan kept out of the way of Poborino, the smith, and Yanansk, the baker. The Dream ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... he give her a guitar lesson. Now Mike himself was a sad musician, and the sound of him fandangoin' uncertainly up and down the fretful spine of that instrument was a tribulation I'd put up with on account of friendship, pure and simple, but when that discord-lovin' lady cliff-dweller set all evenin' in our tent and scraped snake-dances out of them catguts ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... and retold by their hearers until learned. Indian mothers quieted their fretful little ones by stories and songs just as other ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... the verge of that experience which glorifies the simplest life. The exquisite glooming, the tender sky, the full heaving sea, were all in sweetest sympathy; they were sufficient; and Sophy's thin, fretful voice broke the charm ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... example, terribly sensitive about his lost arm and would not allow either the doctor or my-self to enter the room until he was covered to the neck, nor would he eat or drink in our presence. Yet he was the bravest of the brave, careless of himself and only fretful because he had not time to finish his new book. His indomitable spirit did not save him. He died on the 17th of January of this year. I was in Genoa at the time, having gone there at his request to ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... the stiffening regions, while by stronger charms Than Circe e'er or fell Medea brewed, Each brook that wont to prattle to its banks Lies all bestilled and wedged betwixt its banks, Nor moves the withered reeds. . . . The surges baited by the fierce Northeast, Tossing with fretful spleen their angry heads, E'en in the foam of all their ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... magic spell on the audience. They have been boisterous, fretful, even at times disorderly. Not a dozen words are uttered by Trueman and the silence, save for his ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... was it the same that had droned accompaniment to Cap'n' Abe's story-telling upon a former occasion?) boomed against the dusty panes of the window while the fretful, sand-laden wind swept searchingly about the ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... south-east appears split into a pair of steeple-like boulders—an architect of Alexander the Great's day would have easily cut and trimmed them into such towers as the world has never seen. Follows the Umm el-Natkah, bristling like the fretful porcupine, and apparently disdaining to receive the foot of man; while the last item, the Jebel el-Khausilah, has outlines so thoroughly architectural that we seem to gaze ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... Viscount Melville. See post, under Nov. 29, 1777. Boswell wrote to Temple on May 22, 1775:—'Harry Dundas is going to be made King's Advocate—Lord Advocate at thirty-three! I cannot help being angry and somewhat fretful at this; he has, to be sure, strong parts, but he is a coarse, unlettered, unfanciful dog.' Letters of Boswell, p. 195. Horace Walpole describes him as 'the rankest of all Scotchmen, and odious for that bloody speech that had fixed on ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... who was in a pitiable state, and for a long time she labored to soothe him as though he were a child. She undertook to question him about the things which lay uppermost in her mind and which this night had half revealed, but he became fretful and irritated at the mention of mines and mining. She sat beside his bed till he dozed off, puzzling to discover what lay behind the hints she had heard, till her brain and body matched in absolute weariness. The reflex of the day's excitement ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... as to expect to find a pleasant taste in physic, but she expects that it will be of service to her; and she would rather have a bitter taste in her mouth for a few moments, than endure days, weeks, and months of pain and sickness. As peevish, fretful tempers often bring disease on the body, so a patient, even temper not only lessens all suffering, but helps to cure the diseases of the body; Miss Emma, therefore, will perhaps in a short time regain her health, and should such an event happen, what joy it will give to all ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick
... little Liza in a fretful tone. She was standing with head averted from the bowl which was in her mother's hands, with nervous fingers and ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... his mind was in a perpetual ferment, and no comforting spirit spoke quietness to his soul—no stout heart strengthened his—no lively intelligence animated his own to worthy doings. He was very cross and fretful, and knew himself to be so that particular evening—worried and in want of rest. What a chance, if perhaps he found Nettie, whose very provocations were somehow more interesting than other people's most agreeable and tranquillising efforts, all alone and at leisure! He went on with some ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... in dream as these, For all that they have tracked disastrous seas, And winds that left their sails in flagging strips; Nothing disturbs them now, no stormy grips That once had hurt their sides, no crash or swell, Nor can the fretful harbour quite dispel This quiet that they learned ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... objects men pursue," Then Lord knows what is writ by Lord knows who. A modest Monologue you here survey, Hissed from the theatre the "other day," As if Sir Fretful wrote "the slumberous" verse, And gave his son "the rubbish" to rehearse. "Yet at the thing you'd never be amazed," Knew you the rumpus which the Author raised; "Nor even here your smiles would be represt," Knew you these lines—the badness of the best, 10 "Flame! fire! and flame!" (words borrowed ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... another; there was the intermittent snorting, panting, and seething of the steam engines, the suck and thud of their pistons, the dull beat on the air as the spokes of the great driving-wheels came round, a note the leather straps made as they ran tighter and looser, and a fretful tumult from the dynamos; and over all, sometimes inaudible, as the ear tired of it, and then creeping back upon the senses again, was this trombone note of the big machine. The floor never felt steady and quiet beneath one's feet, but quivered and jarred. It was a confusing, ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of man's fretful race Have never ceased to eddy round its base, Not injured more by touch of meddling hands Than a lone obelisk 'mid ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... that spoke to him was the fretful, querulous voice of an old, bedridden woman as he lifted the latch and opened the door of a poor house upon the ramparts, which had no entrance into the street; and where he lived alone with his mother, cut off from all ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... worked away all the time in a little, half-fretful movement, yet spontaneous as butterflies leaping here and there. She chattered rapidly on in her Italian that I could not understand, looking meanwhile into my face, because the story roused her somewhat. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... in merry mood, prepared to solve all the abstruse problems of the Buddhist religion. Our spoilt child stood the camping out better than I expected. She was fretful, of course, and worried about trifles; she missed her maid and her accustomed comforts; but she minded the roughing it less, on the whole, than she had minded the boredom of inaction in the bungalow; and, being cast on Hilda and myself for resources, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... him, more perhaps than any man of his time, to the ridicule of contemporary wits and poets. He was, at least in his literary career, jealous, envious, irritable, vain, pedantic and bombastical, petulant and quarrelsome,—ever on the watch for an affront, and always in the attitude of a fretful porcupine with a quill pointed in every direction against real or supposititious enemies. In such a state of mental alarm and physical vaporing did he live, that he seems to have proclaimed a promiscuous war against all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... in "Humphrey Clinker"; of a fretful temper, yet generous and kind, who has a sister, MISS TABITHA, an ungainly maiden at forty-five, and of anything but a ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... home in the great pile, where for many months he had gone freely in and out on his way to the library, and the housekeeper only met him to make an apology for her working dress, and to hand over to him the keys of the library bookcases, with the fretful comment that seemed to have in it the ghostly voice of generations of housemaids, 'Oh lor', sir, they are ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... must go," said the wife in a fretful tone. "Our rent-roll will be still smaller. There will be still less money to educate Terence. I had set my heart on his going to Cambridge or Oxford. You quite forget that he is ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... to Bolt Court from Johnson's Court, whither he had flitted from Inner Temple Lane, where he was living when the young Scotch barrister who was afterwards his biographer first knew him. His strange household of fretful and disappointed almspeople seems as well known as our own. At the head of these pensioners was the daughter of a Welsh doctor, (a blind old lady named Williams), who had written some trivial poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, her daughter, and a Miss Carmichael. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... language, and when I quizzed her by exaggerating what she had said, how clearly can I now see the little toss of the head, and exclamation of "Oh, papa, what a shame of you!" In the last short illness, her conduct in simple truth was angelic. She never once complained; never became fretful; was ever considerate of others, and was thankful in the most gentle, pathetic manner for everything done for her. When so exhausted that she could hardly speak, she praised everything that was given her, and said some tea "was beautifully good." When I gave her some water she ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... should be above the fretful vanity that lays traps for a compliment. Yes; the time has come in your life and your career when you would do well to marry. I give my consent to that," she added with a smile as if in jest, and a slight nod as if in earnest. The knitting here went on more decidedly, more quickly. "But I do ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his grandmother, "I do not think you said it in a fretful or impatient spirit; but I thought that this story of Samuel would help to ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... Dalmanutha resumed her knitting, swiftly and fiercely, all the pent-up force of a strong nature thrown into the simple act. Instead of the repose that characterizes the faces of the blind, her eaglelike countenance bore the marks of fretful, sullen, caged, almost ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... Nokomis Nursed the little Hiawatha, Rooked him in his linden cradle, Stilled his fretful wail by saying, 'Hush! the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... Carrie Goldthwaite was the chief. Minnie Keane was a bright-eyed, curly-haired maiden of fifteen, wild as an antelope, and as full of fun and frolic as any one of her pet kittens. Their mother was an invalid, seldom able to leave her couch;—not a fretful invalid, you must understand, but a sweet, gentle, unselfish woman, who bore her pain and weakness without a murmur, so that those she loved might be spared pain on her account. Mr. Goldthwaite often said that Mrs. Keane's life was the best sermon he had ever come across; ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... fact that you are a woman, and a very young woman. There are certain things a young woman cannot do. If you had been the boy I always wished you were it would have been a different matter, but you are not a boy, and the whole thing is impossible—utterly impossible." There was a fretful impatience ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... back wi' a cab and went upstairs, free the Spinker's evidence, at aboot a quarter after seven, and came doon five meenites later sair pale an' fretful." ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... his three days' beard, and wriggled uncomfortably in his seat. "I can't gather much from these hints," he said with the fretful impatience of an invalid. "Give me a detailed account of this scoundrel's interview with you, and report his exact words if you can ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... sentence. I told him frankly that I believed that an example should be made of her, for the sake of others who might be tempted to steal. Property has some rights, Demarest, although it seems to be getting nowadays so that anybody is likely to deny it." Then the fretful, half-alarmed note sounded in his voice again, as he continued: "I can't understand why the girl ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... 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 contradiction, ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... overhead light fell on their tired faces, out of which the blood, called up by the sun and wind, had receded, leaving their city pallor. Connie Edwards had indeed produced a lip-stick from her gaudy bead bag, but after a fretful effort ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... intimate friend. The man wears a broad-brim white hat. Among the jam inside, near the door, a young Englishwoman, of the working class, with two children, has had trouble all the way with the youngest, a strong, fat, fretful, bright babe of fourteen or fifteen months, who bids fair to worry the mother completely out, besides becoming a howling nuisance to everybody. As the car tugs around Capitol Hill the young one is more demoniac than ever, and the flushed and perspiring mother is just ready to burst into tears ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... perfect polish of the nobility are rarely found in strength amongst the mass of ordinary gentlemen? It is because, in order to qualify a man for the higher functions of courtesy, he ought to be separated from the strife of the world. The fretful collision with rivalship and angry tempers, insensibly modifies the demeanour of every man. But the British nobleman, intrenched in wealth, enjoys an immunity from this irritating discipline. He is able to act by proxy: and all services of unpleasant contest he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
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