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More "Irritating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him permanently as an insufferable idiot. Even Farraday lost ground in his esteem, for, though guilty of no banalities, he had a way of silently hovering over the baby-carriage which Stefan found mysteriously irritating. Jamie alone of their masculine friends seemed to adopt a comprehensible attitude, for he backed away in hasty alarm whenever the infant, in arms or carriage, bore down upon him. On several occasions when the Farraday household invaded the Byrdsnest ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... you done, mio padre?" cried she, addressing herself to her father, as soon as Don Rafael had gone; "you have wounded his pride by your irritating words, at the very moment when, out of regard for us, he has renounced the vengeance which he had sworn on the grave of his father! It may be that the words of oblivion and reconciliation were upon his lips; and you have hindered him from speaking them now and for ever. Ah! mio padre! ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... expect to be welcomed with snuff," said Alice, as she sneezed again. This time Ruth joined her. There was an irritating odor ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... adapt itself, with wonderful elasticity, to the discontents of all parties; not comprehensive enough for the ultra-Abolitionists, it was stigmatized by the Democrats as unconstitutional and oppressive; while moderate politicians agreed that, beyond irritating feelings already bitter enough, it would be practically invalid as an offensive measure. We shall see, hereafter, how these prognostications ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... Aberdeen; and that of Hebrew and Oriental Languages to the Rev. E. Black, of the University of Edinburgh. Difficulties resulting from the Charter prevented these appointments from being actually made at that time. Because of irritating delays, the somewhat hopeless situation brought about by the refusal of the Home Government to permit the increase of Professorships, and numerous other differences of opinion, trouble was now growing between the Governors and the Crown. At a meeting of the former held on November 14, ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... Loudoun women to the Confederate cause was most irritating to a certain class of Federal officers in the armies that invaded Northern Virginia. They seemed to think that through their military prowess they had conquered entrance into Southern society, but the women ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... I watched eagerly the course of events, until at last all mail facilities were cut off, and I was left to endure the horrors of suspense as well as the irritating consciousness that, although sojourning in the home of my childhood, I was an alien, an acknowledged "Rebel," and as such an object of suspicion and dislike to all save my immediate family. Even these, with the exception of my precious mother, were bitterly opposed to the South and Secession. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... The process of cowing her had gone on from childhood, and now she was under a reign of terror. She did not yet know that she could resist her mother. And then she lived in mortal fear of her mother's heart-disease. By irritating her she might kill her. This dread of matricide her mother held always over her. In vain she watched for a chance. It did not come. Once, when her mother's head was turned, she glanced at August. But he was at that moment listening ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... pupil Grosdidier; then Blanc, then Moreau (Gaston), then Moreau (Ernest), then Malepert; then another, and another, who babbled with the same intelligence and volubility, with the same piping voice, this cruel and wonderful fable. It was as irritating and monotonous as a fine rain. All the pupils in the "ninth preparatory" were disgusted for fifteen years, at least, with this most ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... address of the Chadgrove brothers won the hearty admiration of the rustics, but it also brought them more than once into rivalry and collision with some of Mortimer's gentlemen-at-arms, who were not best pleased to be overmatched by mere striplings. It was also galling and irritating to them to note the popularity of these lads with the rustics. Any success of theirs was rewarded by loud shouting and applause, whilst no demonstration of satisfaction followed any feat performed by those wearing the livery of Mortimer. And if the lads scored a triumph over ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... over the Pampas of Patagonia, and who had learned every art and craft of savage life by living among the wild Hoodoos of the Himalayas. This Air-and-Grass-man, as he may be called, is generally supposed to write the story... He was "I" all through. And he had an irritating modesty in speaking of his own prowess. Instead of saying straight out that he was the strongest and bravest man in the world, he implied ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... be kept in view that the hanging about at this court and all the perplexing and irritating negotiations had always one end in view—that of reaching the Nile, where it pours out of the N'yanza as I was long certain ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... Book,' which contains the whole of the correspondence immediately preceding the war, will at once show the patient efforts put forth by the London Cabinet to maintain peace. There are no irritating words used, and the last despatch of importance before the outbreak of hostilities, dealing with the insinuations just alluded to, is not only most courteous and conciliatory in tone, but it states that the Queen's Government ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... were extremely irritating to Bob, but he could not well avoid them, and to have declined to accept the gift which she had made especially for him in anticipation of his coming, would have caused her keen disappointment. So he accepted them and donned them, to ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... for when the tide had run clean out, only pools and reaches, connecting by shallow runnels the volume of the natural stream, remained for the hippopotami to sport about in; and my manoeuvring in these confined places became so irritating, that a large female came rapidly under water to the stern of the canoe, and gave it such a sudden and violent cant with her head or withers, that that end of the vessel shot up in the air, and sent me sprawling ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... dignity he damned at me with his bell. Now, I do not like to see a bicycle wobble under a load of years, and steer into the irascible. As years increase tempers shorten, and bicycles, even the best of bicycles, are seductively irritating. ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... gained if they could settle once for all, by a solemn compact, the matters which had, during several generations, been in controversy between Parliament and the Crown. They therefore most judiciously abstained from mixing up the irritating and perplexing question of what ought to be the law with the plain question of what was the law. As to the claims set forth in the Declaration of Right, there was little room for debate, Whigs and Tories were generally agreed as to the illegality of the dispensing power and of taxation imposed ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in high estimation for this purpose; juice used as an ointment for sores and for sore nipples, and in connection with other herbs for cancer. Dispensatory: The juice of all of the genus has the property of "powerfully irritating the skin when applied to it," while nearly all are powerful emetics and cathartics. This species "has been highly commended as a remedy in dysentery after due depletion, diarrhea, ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... the alien's voice—by now he had heard it often enough so that it was merely irritating in its thin dryness, like old parchments being rubbed together. He watched the stylus as ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... who has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great things no longer portentous; and the world is ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had better go to another goldsmith. Without further provocation he retorted that I was a donkey; whereupon I said that he was not speaking the truth; that I was a better man than he in every respect, but that if he kept on irritating me I would give him harder kicks than any donkey could. He related the matter to the Cardinal, and painted me as black as the devil in hell. Two days afterwards I shot a wild pigeon in a cleft high up behind the palace. The bird was brooding ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... will only read it to a few of us, and do not on any account give, or permit to be taken, any copy of the ballad. If I could be of any service to Dr. M'Gill, I would do it, though it should be at a much greater expense than irritating a few bigoted priests, but I am afraid serving him in his present embarras is a task too hard for me. I have enemies enow, God knows, though I do not wantonly add to the number. Still, as I think there is some merit in two or three of the thoughts, I send it to you as a small, but sincere testimony ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the night-porter, and after some brief explanation, Pierrette got out, wished us a merry "Bon jour!" and disappeared. Then, with the Count mounted at my side, I backed out into the roadway, and we were soon speeding along that switchback of a road with dozens of dangerous turns and irritating tram-lines that leads past Eze into the tiny Principality of His Royal Highness Prince Rouge et Noir—the paradise of ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... trying to throw off the irritating effect of his mother's pin-pricks. As was his usual custom when he was a little depressed, he went home and sat down in front of his wife's portrait. He often sat there for an hour when she was out, looking at it. Any one watching him would have thought he was in a state of ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... course, the two speak, as it were, in the same language. The rough miner, or "puddler," the untrained, undeveloped "tiger-man," heated by a quart or two above his usual measure, comes home and kicks his irritating and injudicious wife to death. He is a murderer. And Gilles de Raiz was a murderer. But you see the gulf that separates the two? The "word," if I may so speak, is accidentally the same in each case, but the "meaning" is utterly different. It is flagrant "Hobson ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... genuine utterance. To this Richard had worked himself in fretting over his position; he was the real sufferer, though decency compelled him to pretend it was not so. He had come to think of Emma almost angrily; she was a clog on him, and all the more irritating because he knew that his brute strength, if only he might exert it, could sweep her into nothingness at a blow. The quietness with which Alice accepted his revelation encouraged him in self-defence. He talked on for several minutes, walking about and swaying his ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... changes were convulsing the Cabinet, irritating the great nobles, and exciting the apprehensions of all those who desired the welfare of the nation, the young sovereigns, whom they more immediately concerned, were either ignorant or careless of their consequences. The girl-Queen, surrounded by her Spanish attendants, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... They consisted in the anomalous restrictions on the coasting trade, the unjustifiable difference in the duties on Spanish and island produce, the high duty on flour from the United States, the export duties, the extravagant expenditure in the administration, irritating monopolies, and countless abuses, vexatious ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... adjusting his glasses, Dr. Armstrong eyed Miss Durant with a quality of imperturbability at once irritating and embarrassing. "I beg your pardon for the hasty remark I just made," he apologised. "Not having my second sight at command, I did not realise I was speaking to so young a girl, and therefore I allowed myself ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... had been more frequent to-day than usual, Helen thought. Perhaps the rain had made people cross. Whatever it was, the hurried woman had been more hurried, and the insolent woman more unbearable. There had been, too, an irritating repetition of the woman who was "just looking," and of her sister who "did n't know"; "was n't quite sure"; but "guessed that would n't do." Consequently Helen's list of sales had been short in ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... little, and nourish the heart more, you would be less of a philosopher, and more of a—" The Parson had the word "Christian" at the tip of his tongue: he suppressed a word that, so spoken, would have been exceedingly irritating, and substituted, with inelegant antithesis, "and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... immediately charged with the government of the province, and finally, from the royal authority and whole English dominion. "With an arrogant and self-sufficient manner, constantly identifying himself with the authority of which he was merely the representative, and constantly indulging in irritating personal allusions, he entirely lost sight of the courtesy and respect due to a co-ordinate branch of the government, and made himself ridiculous, while he was ruining the interests of the sovereign whom he was most anxious to serve. Even Hutchinson, as we learn from the third volume of his ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... with a sort of homesickness those years of poverty, of real misery, the cold nights in his wretched bed, the irritating meals—Heaven knows what was in them—eaten in a bar-room near the Teatro Real; the discussions in the corner of a cafe, under the hostile glances of the waiters who were provoked that a dozen long-haired youths should occupy several tables and order all together only ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... had never got her letter? He had been in London without telling her. He had forgotten her. Perhaps he was deceiving her? And he was making love obviously to that sickening, irritating red-haired fool (so Edith thought of ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... comfort. Unlike a temperate climate, where mere attendance becomes a luxury, the pursuit of game in a tropical country is attended with immense fatigue and exhaustion. The intense heat of the sun, the dense and suffocating exhalations from swampy districts, the constant and irritating attacks from insects, all form drawbacks to sport that can only be lessened by excellent servants and by the most perfect arrangements for shelter and supplies. I have tried all methods of travelling, and I generally manage to combine ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... infrequently happened, something about Judith's attitude had been irritating her father, and he now said with some severity, "Then it's a case where Sylvia's loving heart can do more good than your anger, though you evidently think it very fine of you ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... doctor and myself were sitting; another snapped off a tree-trunk like—well, as a 4.2 does snap off a tree-trunk. Most ominous sign of all—when the seven shots had been fired, three ugly-looking holes ringed themselves round the colonel's hut. Next, a Hun aeroplane, with irritating sauciness, circled above our camp, not more than five hundred feet up. Our "Archies" made a lot of noise, and enjoyed their customary success: the Hun airman sailed calmly back ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... trials. They were not so much implacable as impracticable in their dealings with others in misfortune. To them, virtue, honor, loyalty, all human sentiments consisted solely in the payment of their bills. Irritable and irritating, without feelings, and sordid in their economy, the brother and sister bore a dreadful reputation among the other merchants of the rue Saint-Denis. Had it not been for their connection with Provins, where they went three or four times a year, when they could close the shop for ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... herself scarcely knew: it was an accident that on this occasion his absence had been marked for her. Selina had had her reasons for wishing not to go up to town while her husband was still at Mellows, and she cherished the irritating belief that he stayed at home on purpose to watch her—to keep her from going away. It was her theory that she herself was perpetually at home—that few women were more domestic, more glued to the fireside and absorbed in the duties belonging to it; and unreasonable as she ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... horses crowded nearer to the man, and the woman clung tighter to him as he wrapped her more closely in the protecting cloth. He felt suffocated, stifled, his lungs bursting, his throat burning, while every breath he drew was laden with the irritating sand. It penetrated through all the openings of his clothing, down his collar, inside his shirt, into his boots. The heat was terrific, unbearable, the darkness intense. Wargrave began to wonder if his first ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... was not sentimental, and any exhibition of feeling appeared to have an irritating effect upon his nerves. There were times when he shrank from some little sudden caress of Charlotte's as from the sting of an adder. Aversion, surprise, fear—what was it that showed in the expression of his face at these ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... if well-aired, I should no more object to your putting on clean underwear than to your changing your dress. Most especially would I advise a frequent change of napkins, in order to remove those which are soiled from their irritating contact with the body. A full bath during menstruation would, for most people, be unadvisable, but the cleansing of the private parts is imperative. For this, tepid water, with good soap, may be used daily or oftener. Other parts of the body may be rubbed with a wet cloth, followed by vigorous, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... States were also sunk in the torpor of the Middle Ages; but in the northern districts of Bologna and Ferrara, known as the "Legations," the inhabitants still remembered the time of their independence, and chafed under the irritating restraints of Papal rule. This was seen when the leaven of French revolutionary thought began to ferment in Italian towns. Two young men of Bologna were so enamoured of the new ideas, as to raise an Italian tricolour flag, green, white, and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... restless, her hands were restless too and she kept snapping the catch of her hand-bag with an irritating click as ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... faculty of putting something extremely irritating in her voice. It was honey smooth, and ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... made him truckle down, he found him less distasteful work, but always so ungraciously that it was impossible to be grateful to him for it: Christophe had to be ground down by necessity before he would ever go to Hecht again. In any case he preferred to earn his money by such work, however irritating it might be, than accept it as a gift from Hecht, as it was once more offered to him:—and, indeed, Hecht meant it kindly: but Christophe had been conscious of Hecht's original intention to humiliate him: he was forced to accept his conditions, but nothing would induce him to accept ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... firmly convinced that I owe any modest success I may have attained and all my annual income to his beneficent efforts on my behalf. And the worst of it is, that he has a kind of top-heavy and overwhelming good-nature about him. He honestly means to be kind and genial where he only succeeds in irritating his perverse acquaintances. Was BULMER always thus? When he began on his small salary, did he patronise the office-boy? When he had learnt to spell, did he devote his first epistolary efforts to the pompous patronage ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... of Carrara. There are men to whom silliness is an absolute freezing mixture; to whose hearts a plain, sensible woman at once appeals as a woman, while no amount of beauty can serve as sweet oblivious antidote to counteract the nausea produced by folly. Malcolm had found Clementina irritating, and the more irritating that she was so beautiful. But at the first sound from her lips that indicated genuine and truthful thought, the atmosphere had begun to change; and at the first troubled gleam in her eyes, revealing that she ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... have been to him to arrive at the right answer of a sum or a problem by tampering with the processes. Such a man, with strong affections and keen perception of all forms of beauty, and with the deepest desire to be reverent towards all that had a right to reverence, would find himself in the most irritating state of opposition and impatience with much that passed as religion round him. Principles not attempted to be understood and carried into practice, smooth self-complacency among those who looked down on a blind and unspiritual ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... Misprints are very irritating to most authors, but some can afford to make fun of the trouble; thus Hood's amusing lines are probably founded upon some blunder that ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... BRETT YOUNG'S manner of presenting The Tragic Bride (SECKER) is not free from affectation, and this is the more irritating because his literary style is in itself admirably unpretentious. But having recorded this complaint I gladly go on to declare that his tale of Gabrielle Hewish has both charm and distinction. I protest my belief in Gabrielle both ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... amiable and sympathetic, kind and thoughtful, never irritating, crossing, or censuring the king; wonderfully judicious, modest, self-possessed, and calm, she was irreproachable in conduct and morals, tolerating no improper advances. Although the characteristics and general deportment of Mme. de Montespan were entirely different from those ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... of pain, only a mild irritating smarting and no more. The Chinaman laid down the knife and took up ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... accommodation in the very interests of truth itself. Fanatic is a name of such ill repute, exactly because one who deserves to be called by it injures good causes by refusing timely and harmless concession; by irritating prejudices that a wiser way of urging his own opinion might have turned aside; by making no allowances, respecting no motives, and recognising none of those qualifying principles, which are nothing less than necessary to make his ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... A severe and unjust review of "Marmion," by Jeffrey, appeared in 1808, accusing Scott of a mercenary spirit in writing for money (though Jeffrey himself was writing for money in the same article), and further irritating Scott by asserting that he "had neglected Scottish feelings and Scottish characters." "Constable," writes Scott to his brother Thomas, in November 1808, "or rather that Bear, his partner [Mr. Hunter], has behaved by me of late not very civilly, and I owe Jeffrey a flap with ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... was in the position of a man striking at an adversary whose construction was of India-rubber. He struck home, but left no bruise and drew no blood, which was an irritating thing. He ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the two shells; the large pearls almost loose in that part called the beard.' Now, these may be the effect merely of an excess in the supply of calcareous matter, of which the oyster wishes to get rid; or, they may be formed by an effusion of pearl, to cover some irritating and extraneous body." The reality of the latter theory is strengthened, if not proved by the Chinese forcing the swan muscle to make pearls by throwing into its shell, when open, five or six minute mother-of-pearl beads, which, being left for a year, are found covered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... advisers among his theological, as he had among his legal, friends; and had he allowed them equal influence with him; he would not, I suspect, have written this irritating and too egometical paragraph. But Baxter would have disbelieved a prophet who had foretold that almost the whole orthodoxy of the Non-conformists would he retained and preserved by the Independent congregations ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Australian Eucalyptus Globulus Oil "Kangaroo" Brand Recommended by the highest medical authorities for sick-room and household use as a general Antiseptic, Disinfectant and Deodorant. It is non-poisonous and non-irritating. Used the world over. Take no substitute but see that you get our ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... patient of defeat. In more recent times there had been a number of disputes, the more angry because they were between brethren. There had been disputes about boundaries, in which England believed herself to have been overreached by your negotiators, or, what was still more irritating, to have been overborne because her main power was not here. There had been disputes about the Right of Search, in which we had to taste the bitterness, now not unknown to you, of those whose sincerity in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... German Minister, certainly does not lack men. We encountered them everywhere. Travelling first class gives one more or less privacy in Holland, so that it was decidedly irritating to have a listener make for our compartment, while adjoining first-class compartments were entirely empty. If the intrusion resulted in our going to another compartment, an ever-ready Kamerad would ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... bucket of water over my horse's legs. "You'd better look out for your elephant; those drunken Bretons are irritating him," I said. "Mahouts are born, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... Could she not have divined it was only his fear of what she might say! And now it was all over! She had washed her hands of him with the sending of that manuscript and letter, and he would pass out of her memory as a foolish, conceited ingrate,—perhaps a figure as wearily irritating and stupid to her as the cousin she had known. He mechanically lifted his eyes to the distant hotel; the glow was still in the western sky, but the blue lamp was already shining in the window. His cheek flushed quickly, ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... displeased they pushed people to the utmost extremity, and they were incapable of showing any gratitude for services done them. Thus they were alike hated by the Court, by the Fronde, and by the populace, and nobody could live with them long. All France impatiently suffered their irritating conduct, and especially ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Lord Fawn a long time to write his letter, but at last he wrote it. The delay must not be taken as throwing any slur on his character as a correspondent or a man of business, for many irritating causes sprang up sufficient to justify him in pleading that it arose from circumstances beyond his own control. It is, moreover, felt by us all that the time which may fairly be taken in the performance of any task depends, not on the amount of work, but on the performance of it when ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... inventor the bitterest animosity; a feeling which he took no pains to conceal. Many of his letters to him at that time, and for many years afterward, were couched in studiously insulting language, which must have been in the highest degree irritating to a sensitive artistic temperament like ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... again. In a word, it was the season of setting fire to the prairies. As he advanced he began to perceive great clouds of smoke at a distance, rising by degrees, and spreading over the whole face of the country. The atmosphere became dry and surcharged with murky vapor, parching to the skin, and irritating to the eyes. When travelling among the hills, they could scarcely discern objects at the distance of a few paces; indeed, the least exertion of the vision was painful. There was evidently some vast conflagration in the direction toward which they ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the Government," adding his opinion that "the present English Government has thus far given us no just cause of offence[346]." Meanwhile the Government, just at the moment when the Declaration of Paris negotiation had reached an inglorious conclusion, especially irritating to Earl Russell, was suddenly plunged into a sharp controversy with the United States by an incident growing out of Russell's first instructions to Lyons in regard to that negotiation and which, though ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... accompaniment which Don Giovanni plays while he sings "Deh Vieni." Filomena, knowing nothing about Mozart, used her mandoline for the delivery of a melody which she performed with great skill, though it was but a silly tune and sounded sillier than it was because of the irritating tremolo. It was like her embroidery—very well done but not worth doing. She had been taught the mandoline by the nuns, who had also taught her needlework. I expected the corporal to accompany her on the guitar; he admitted that he was passionately devoted to music, ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... kidnapped us, and for his present conduct towards an unprotected female. He even threatened him with exposure as soon as we reached the shores of America. Peter, his friend, in vain urged him to refrain from irritating the captain; but the hot-headed youth heeded not the advice, and stood by his point, till the captain, who uttered not one word, bit his lip, and, hurrying to his cabin, returned with a cocked pistol in each hand. The mate, who was a good-hearted kind of lad, was, at the moment, persuading ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... Weimar, who was my good friend, to the Duchess of Gotha, who did not know me, and to the Jews of Berlin. And he departed secretly, leaving for Count Waldstein a letter at once tender, proud, honest and irritating. Waldstein laughed and said he would return. Casanova waited in ante-chambers; no one would place him either as governor, librarian or chamberlain. He said everywhere that the Germans were thorough beasts. The excellent and very amiable Duke ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and not my enemy, Mavriky Nikolaevitch, that such overtures only aggravate the insult. He feels it impossible to be insulted by me!... He feels it no disgrace to walk away from me at the barrier! What does he take me for, after that, do you think?... And you, you, my second, too! You're simply irritating me that I ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... preserved an urbane tranquillity which gave him on all occasions the full possession of his extraordinary faculties, enabled him to concentrate them instantly upon whatever was submitted to his attention, however suddenly—and to conquer without irritating or mortifying even the most eager and sensitive opponent. He never suffered himself to be in a hurry, or fidgeted; however sudden and serious the emergency which frighted others from their propriety, he retained and exhibited complete composure; surveying his position ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... It was undignified and irritating; for in this uninteresting competition the precious moments were flying, and my interview leading ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... lightening of its gloom as he spoke, but there was a firing-up of the black eyes, and the woman with the knitting felt that—for whatever reason—he was purposely irritating his father. ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... and cocoa—in fact, in all our cooking processes where milk is required—will also immeasurably aid in sugar conservation. The substitutes mentioned are all available in large amounts. Honey is especially valuable for children, as it consists of the more simple sugars which are less irritating than cane sugar, and there is no danger of acid stomach ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss
... learned from her that woman is always woman under any clime or epoch. The greater strength of her physique lessened, perhaps, the vine-like tendency, yet she clung sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating, with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm, however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one of those sweet silences, she would ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... customs of legalistic orthodoxy. But it was also felt that mysticism went dangerously near to a denial of the absolute Unity of God. It was more difficult to attack it on its theoretical than on its practical side, however. The Jewish mystic did sometimes adopt a most irritating policy of deliberately altering customs as though for the very pleasure of change. Now in most religious controversies discipline counts for more than belief. As Salimbene asserts of his own day: 'It was far less dangerous to debate in the schools whether God really existed, than to wear publicly ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... monotony of that suffering, touch their wound to procure a sharper pang. Anne of Austria was nearly fainting; her eyes, open but meaningless, ceased to see for several seconds; she stretched out her arms towards her other son, who supported and embraced her without fear of irritating ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... times, to take some part in this work. She was eager to teach the women better methods, but at last the patriarch told her to let them alone, as she was only irritating them. Unlike the men, who almost worshipped the revolvers, and would have handled them, and even quickly learned to shoot, if Stern had allowed, the women clung sternly to their ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... military to disperse them; but the utmost care is taken to prevent any fatal circumstances from attending these acts of needful hostility, and orders are uniformly issued never to fire upon the natives, unless any particularly irritating act should render such a measure expedient. They are amazingly expert at throwing the spear, and will launch it with unerring aim to a distance of thirty to sixty yards. I myself have seen a lad hurl his spear at a hawk-eagle (a bird which, with wings expanded, measures from seven to ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... out of place to give here a closer description of the training of the officers and men of the new navy, drawn from personal experience. To do this without the irritating egoism of the personal narrative it will be necessary, as often in future pages, to adopt the ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... and leave the question of possibility of development under such wholesale tyranny to the judgment of the public. It is difficult to conceive how any persons can expect that Europeans, especially Englishmen, will become landowners and settle in Cyprus when subjected to such unfair and irritating restrictions. ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... given as soon as the symptoms of colic manifest themselves, has frequently afforded relief. At any rate, the irritating substances may be expelled from the alimentary canal before the pains will subside. All local remedies will be ineffectual, and consequently the purgative should be given in large doses until a copious ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... gentleman who has a wife, towards four others who have not got one, and he abused that privilege so far as to kiss Fly in our presence, when he put her on his knee after meals, and by other prerogatives, which were as humiliating as they were irritating. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... on down the ledge and Shefford plodded thoughtfully after him. The others followed. A jutting corner of wall again hid the canyon. The Indian was working round to circle the huge amphitheater. It was slow, irritating, strenuous toil, for the way was on a steep slant, rough and loose and dragging. The rocks were as hard and jagged as lava. And the cactus further hindered progress. When at last the long half-circle had been accomplished the golden and rosy lights ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... systems of ideas; as a psychological fact of long standing we know that other elements may be injected into that system so as to change it, or that one system may be destroyed and another system built up to take its place. This is the secret of cures of this nature—of mental troubles—the irritating factor, the thorn ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... this in no spirit of bravado," continued the other with irritating insolence, "but so that you may remember my words and this warning when I am gone." Then, with a final fling of defiance: "This is the first time you have seen me, M. Coquenil, and you will probably never see me again, but you will hear ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... his cell, when the terror had become unbearable, Vasily Kashirin attempted to pray. Of all that had surrounded his childhood days in his father's house under the guise of religion only a repulsive, bitter and irritating sediment remained; but faith there was none. But once, perhaps in his earliest childhood, he had heard a few words which had filled him with palpitating emotion and which remained during all his life enwrapped with tender poetry. ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... to grease sore and chafed parts. A little may be inserted into the nostrils for a cold. Camphorated vaseline is especially good for this. In case of an irritating cough that keeps a child from sleeping, a little plain pure vaseline may be put in the mouth, and it ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... way Badger could not tell whether the professor's gaze was fixed on him or on Agnew. Professor Barton had fiercely penetrating eyes, anyway, and the peculiar manner in which he looked at students in the classroom had always been especially irritating to ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... flesh, a little above the ankle-bones—of discomfort, rather, in comparison with the anguish throbbing and biting across her shoulder-blades. Some one—it may have been in unthinking mercy—had drawn down the sackcloth over her stripes, and the coarse stuff, irritating the raw, was ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... in the steamer chair and turned a trifle pale. Then she laughed, that irritating little laugh of hers, and said, "Really I did not think it had gone so far as that. I'll bid you ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... to a murmur, during which Sam took breath, casting a bold gaze upon the bystanders. Then again, this man, who could not read, was as gentle, polished, select in his language, as a well-informed person—at other moments modest, measured, attentive, going step by step over the irritating parts of the argument, courteous to his judges. Once only he gave way to a burst of passion. The attorney-general had proved in his speech that Sam Needy had assassinated the director without any violence on his part, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... the tactual silence of the country is always most welcome after the din of town and the irritating concussions of the train. How noiseless and undisturbing are the demolition, the repairs and the alterations, of nature! With no sound of hammer or saw or stone severed from stone, but a music of rustles ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... the man who sees what has to be done, and does it—and says nothing about it." Scott agreed. And if you were "sledging with the Owner" you had to keep your eyes wide open for the little things which cropped up, and do them quickly, and say nothing about them. There is nothing so irritating as the man who is always coming in and informing all and sundry that he has repaired his sledge, or built a wall, or filled the cooker, or ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... that not a very long time ago—to speak of political society with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an irritating but inevitable restriction upon the "natural" sovereignty and entire self-government of the individual. That was the dream of the egotist. It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... existence of Black Roger Audemard became with him a sort of indefinite reality. Black Roger was a long way off. Marie-Anne and Bateese were very near. He began thinking of her as Marie-Anne. He liked the name. It was the Boulain part of it that worked in him with an irritating insistence. ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... their families because of its often startling contrast to their life in the services. There was even evidence that some of the off-base segregation, especially overseas, had been introduced through the efforts of white servicemen. Particularly irritating to the committee were restrictions placed on black participation in civil rights demonstrations protesting such off-base conditions. The committee ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... couldn't have cared less if they never did move. It was nice that old Holati Tate had made an almost indecently vast fortune out of his first-discovery rights to the things, because she was really very fond of the Commissioner when he wasn't being irritating. But in some obscure way she found the plasmoids themselves and the idea of unlimited plastic life which they embodied rather appalling. However, she was in a minority there. Practically everybody else seemed to feel that ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... supplemented Hall, remembering the rivalry of the traders. Again he did deliberate thinking. If he should place McDevitt it would be a small but irritating way to annoy Burroughs. He was not above seeking even infinitesimal means of stinging, and this chance encounter might lead to something more to his set purpose. So he went on: "Get you a job, eh? Se-ve-ri-al others want sinecures." He grew facetious as his thought took shape. "I'm ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... and irritating cranks. I have met scores of them. They are intense, but shortsighted. Some are delightfully ingenuous, with the lovable simplicity of the child. Others are of a morbid and carping disposition, with an inordinate sense of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Tim was in one of his sour, irritating moods. He served the ball and resolved to pay no attention to the catcher. By and by ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... just see Zara's profile all the time when she put up those irritating, longhandled glasses of hers, now gave her opinion of the bride-elect to Lord Charles Montfitchet, her neighbor on the ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... yards were seized and its flag fired upon, it is inconceivable that the man who then had such courage of his opinions entertained any further doubt as to his future course; though it may well be that he did not imperil his personal liberty and safety by any irritating avowal of his purpose. In a reception given to him, when he thus revisited the place which should no longer be his home, he recalled those days and said: "I was told by a brother officer that the State had seceded, ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... often, and her scheme of obtaining subsistence for herself and child had become so offensively apparent, that she had about exhausted the patience of all the kith and kin on whom she had the remotest claim. Her presence was all the more unwelcome by reason of the faculty for irritating the men of the various households which she invaded. Even the most phlegmatic or the best-natured lost their self-control, and as their wives declared, "felt like flying all to pieces" at her incessant rocking, gossiping, questioning, and, what was worse still, lecturing. ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... smile irritating. "I ought to know," she added sharply, "for I've lived in the house with him ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... than because he can sit a horse or brew beer! In that happy time the true writer will be neither an atom the more regarded nor disregarded; he will only be less troubled with birthday books, requests for autographs, and such-like irritating attentions. From that time, also, it may be, the number of writers will begin to diminish; for then, it is to be hoped, men will begin to see that it is better to do the inferior thing well than the superior thing after a middling fashion. The man who would not rather be a good ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... may often, perhaps usually, be ugly, but at least there is no conventional prettiness, there is no smug veneer of an artificial good taste which refuses to call a spade a spade, and which deliberately turns away from those things in life which are irritating to its sense ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... condemned by the German courts to fifteen months' imprisonment for playing off an innocent little joke on four German officers, and did his share of fighting with the French in the early part of the War, is the darling of the Boulevards. They adore his supreme skill in thrusting the irritating lancet of his humour into bulging excrescences on the flank of that monstrous pachyderm of Europe, the German. Professor Knatschke (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), aptly translated by Professor R.L. CREWE, is a joyous rag. It purports to be the correspondence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... impossible soup made of seaweed. After which there are little fish dried in sugar, crabs in sugar, beans in sugar, and fruits in vinegar and pepper. All this is atrocious, but above all unexpected and unimaginable. The little women make me eat, laughing much, with that perpetual, irritating laugh which is peculiar to Japan—they make me eat, according to their fashion, with dainty chop-sticks, fingered with affected grace. I am becoming accustomed to their faces. The whole effect is refined—a refinement so entirely different from our own that at first sight I understand nothing ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and saw the wall beyond. It was uncanny. But another strange thing about him was the impossibility of telling whether he was serious. There was a mockery in that queer glance, a sardonic smile upon the mouth, which made you hesitate how to take his outrageous utterances. It was irritating to be uncertain whether, while you were laughing at him, he was not really enjoying an elaborate joke at ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... assumed that Halet was simply going out of her way to be irritating, as usual. Looking back on the incident, however, it occurred to her that the chatter between her aunt and the newscast woman had sounded oddly stilted—almost like something the ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... her with his most irritating smile, as he sat down at the kitchen table, "I don't find I git thru any more work by tumblin' out o' bed 't sun-up 'n I dew 'f I lay a spell 'n' let the univarse git het up 'n' runnin' a leetle mite. 'Slow 'n' easy goes fur in a day' 's my motto. ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to him, back of Chesterfield, touches his hair.) Try not to be so irritating, Bobbie dear; just because you don't happen to appreciate good literature, it's very small and narrow to ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... mud-bespattered cobble-stones on either side. Of course we are followed through these fearful thoroughfares by a surging and vociferous crowd of people such as a Central Asian city alone can produce; but I can this time happily afford to smile at these usually irritating accompaniments to my arrival in a populous city, for ten minutes after entering the gate finds me shaking hands with Mr. Gray, the genial telegraphist of the Afghan Boundary Commission. With a well-guarded gate between our cosey quarters and the shouting mob outside, the evening ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... journey from Yaroslav to Nizhni is beautiful, but I had seen it before. Moreover, it was very hot in the cabin and the wind lashed in our faces on deck. The passengers were an uneducated set, whose presence was irritating. At Nizhni we were met by N., Tolstoy's friend. The heat, the dry wind, the noise of the fair and the conversation of N. suddenly made me feel so suffocated, so ill at ease, and so sick, that I took my portmanteau and ignominiously ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... the thing happened which was to prove both a promise and a despair. Joel Latham felt a hardness at his heel, an irritating lump inside his ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... reason I drink no wine, is because I can practise abstinence, but not temperance." Yes: in all things, abstinence is easier than temperance; for a little enjoyment has invariably the effect of awaking the sense of enjoyment, irritating it, and setting it on edge. I, therefore, recollecting my own case, have allowed for no wine-parties. Let our friend, the abstraction we are speaking of, give breakfast-parties, if he chooses to give any; and certainly to give none at all, unless he were dedicated ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... young composer was unsuccessful in his attempts to break through the barren and irritating drudgery of a schoolmaster's life. At last a wealthy young dilettante, Franz von Schober, who had become an admirer of Schubert's songs, persuaded his mother to offer him a fixed home in her house. The ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... entered by another door. He intercepted the glance, and returned it to John with one of contemptuous defiant anger. It did not help to soothe Richard that John looked unusually handsome. There was a fire and persuasion in his face, a tenderness and grace in his manner, that was very irritating, and Richard could neither control his hands nor his tongue. He began at once to feel for his pistol. "Why is John Millard here?" he asked of ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... medicines most frequently needed in the minor ailments of children, and a wise mother will not undertake herself the management of serious diseases. Of all aperients castor oil is perhaps the safest, the least irritating, the most generally applicable; it acts on the bowels and does nothing more. The idea that it tends specially to produce constipation afterwards is unfounded; it does not do so more than other aperients. All aperients quicken for ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... entered at this moment Ringfield's young and untried heart, his vanity was deeply wounded, and the thought that Miss Clairville could allow Edmund Crabbe to caress her was like irritating poison in his veins. Yet he was in this respect unfair and over-severe; the fact being that Pauline very soon observed, on coming into closer contact with the guide, the traces of liquor, and she then adroitly kept him at a distance, for in that moment of disenchantment Ringfield's ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... you?" and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of the conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it constantly, with such a serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at hunting ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... lords, that I do not oppose the ministry for the sake of obstructing the publick counsels, or of irritating those whom I despair to defeat; and that I am not afraid of trusting my conduct to the impartial examination of posterity, I shall beg leave to enter, with my protest, the reasons which have influenced me in this day's deliberation, that they be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... striking and pernicious. The results have been such as to establish conclusively the great principle that all local inflammatory mischief and general febrile disturbances which follow severe injuries are due to the irritating and poisonous influence of decomposing blood or sloughs. For these evils are entirely avoided by the antiseptic treatment, so that limbs which would otherwise be unhesitatingly condemned to amputation may be retained, with confidence of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... Henderson, who devoted himself to her, made the lack unnoticed. The talk ran, as usual, on the opera, Wagner, a Christmas party at Lenox, at Tuxedo, somebody's engagement, some lucky hit in the Exchange, the irritating personalities of the newspapers, the last English season, the marriage of the Duchess of Bolinbroke, a confidential disclosure of who would be in the Cabinet and who would have missions, a jocular remark across the table about a "corner" ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... offered me money for myself, but I refused. You see I am not—well, I am not a servant. But afterward she gave me a hundred jacobusses for the poor, and I thanked her. I am very sorry that I was angry the day of the fight, but you know the great persons who come here from Whitehall are very irritating, and ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... attended or followed with little danger; but in the extracting of the food, no matter how carefully performed, some small portion is liable to drop into the abdominal cavity; and this, in consequence of its indigested condition, resists absorption or expulsion, undergoes an irritating decomposition, and may very probably originate some serious inflammatory disorder. Any animal which has suffered a very bad case of impaction of the paunch, ought, immediately after complete restoration to health, to be sent to ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... there is no pretense of sanitation, cleanliness or domestic privacy. The whole family herds together around the smoking fire, thus early beginning the destruction of their eyesight by the never-ceasing and irritating smoke. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... me. Then, still raging, I sat on the edge of the berth and put on the obnoxious tan shoes. The porter, called to his duties, made little excursions back to me, to offer assistance and to chuckle at my discomfiture. He stood by, outwardly decorous, but with little irritating grins of amusement around his mouth, when I finally emerged with the red tie in ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... financial obligations to Great Britain, which whether just or not must have an air of hardness, and with the habitual presence in Ireland of a British army under the direction of the British Executive, lay an ample foundation for the most irritating of conflicts. ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... comprehension, or charitableness, or anything else that was precious; and it was because she looked for more that she was for ever feeling disappointed. She would take them as they were, being happy in what they did give her, and ignoring what was less excellent. She herself was irritating, she was sure, and often she saw did produce an irritating effect on the Chosen. Of sundry minor failings, so minor that she was ashamed of having noticed them, but which had yet done much towards making the days difficult, she tried not to think. Indeed, they could hardly ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... therefore, took the desperate resolution to get himself banished. This he could not do except he committed the crime of murder, and an opportunity soon offered itself.[A] The victim was a young girl, a servant in the same house with himself. She was of a taunting, irritating disposition, and disputes were constantly occurring between them—he resolved she should be the sacrifice to his home-sickness, and accordingly in the next provocation he received from her, he gave her a blow which killed her. He was imprisoned, tried by military law, and his judges not ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... was blockaded eight hundred years by the deer, and its environs, now so rich, so fertile, did not yield bread enough to support the gamekeepers." [Footnote: The following details from Bonnemere will serve to give a more complete idea of the vexatious and irritating nature of the game laws of France. The officers of the chase went so far as to forbid the pulling up of thistles and weeds, or the mowing of any unenclosed ground before St. John's day (24th June), in order that the nests of game birds might not be disturbed. It was unlawful to ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... perhaps, the essence of the love token, is not its history, and I shall hazard a guess as to why that is not written. The reason is that it is not only the cherished token of a woman's love, but is also the irritating reminder of her equality with man. At the altar she unhesitatingly swears to love eternally—an oath sometimes beyond her power to keep; but in increasing numbers she refuses to make the promise of obedience—a promise always possible to fulfill. With the freedom that in this generation ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... capable of locomotion and able to crawl out of the blood-vessels Not infrequently they are found to take into their bodies small objects with which they come in contact. One of their duties is thus to engulf minute irritating bodies which may be in the tissues, and to carry them away for excretion. They thus act as scavengers These corpuscles certainly have some agency in warding off the attacks of pathogenic bacteria Very commonly they ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... the owner's hair turned white in a single night, or of shame by mentioning a sudden rush of scarlet to the cheeks, is as lamentable as may be. But! But with the universal use of cosmetics and the consequent secernment of soul and surface, upon which, at the risk of irritating a reader, I must again insist, all those old properties that went to bolster up the ordinary novel—the trembling lips, the flashing eyes, the determined curve of the chin, the nervous trick of ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... blood was coursing feverishly through her veins, her spirit had been made reckless by the wilful violence that she was doing her conscience, and also by her deep and growing dissatisfaction with herself, that was like an irritating wound. She was therefore prepared to resent any interruption to the whirl of excitement, which gave her a kind of pleasure in the place of the happiness that was impossible to one ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... culture led out of the ruts of routine, away from plagiarism and from disorder and anarchy, one word upon the most distasteful and effectual blight to which art is subject—the loss of naturalness, viz., affectation. Can anything be more irritating than an affected actor or singer, caterers to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... girl rose. She was tall and slender, like Jane. She had a pasty complexion and weak, reddish eyes. Her expression was somewhat plaintive and distressed—irritating, too, in ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... green. Old Sir Nicholas, though his convictions had survived the tempest of unrest and trouble that had swept over England, and he had remained a convinced and a stubborn Catholic, yet his spiritual system was sore and inflamed within him. To his simple and obstinate soul it was an irritating puzzle as to how any man could pass from the old to a new faith, and he had been known to lay his whip across the back of a servant who had professed a desire to try ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... returns and brings in the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces. Let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all the day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... Until a profession respects itself, it cannot very well ask for the world's respect, and until it can respect itself on the basis of scientific principles indubitably established, its respect for itself will be little more than the irritating self-esteem of the goody-goody order which is so ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... time he was speaking he was performing the operation known as "washing the hands with invisible soap," a trick which always has an irritating effect upon my nerves. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... Acting on the Lungs.—These have for their type carbonic acid gas and coal gas. The fumes of ammonia are intensely irritating, and may give rise to laryngitis, bronchitis, and even pneumonia. Nitric acid fumes sometimes produce no serious symptoms for an hour or more, but there may then be coughing, difficulty of breathing, and tightness in the lower part of the throat, followed ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... attention, I should punish any neglect with the utmost severity. I then adverted to the natives, and interdicted all intercourse with them, excepting with my permission. That as I attributed many of the acts of violence that had been committed on the river to this irritating source, so I would strike the name of any man who should disobey my orders in this respect off the strength of the party from that moment, and prevent his receiving a farthing of pay; or whoever I should discover encouraging any of the natives, but more particularly the native women, to ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... and humor; very naturally, therefore, he listened to his friend with varying feelings; one moment indignant, then uncertain how to take him. The superior airs assumed had been offensive to him in the beginning; soon they became irritating, and at last an acute smart. Anger lies close by this point in all of us; and that the satirist evoked in another way. To the Jew of the Herodian period patriotism was a savage passion scarcely hidden under his common humor, and so related to his history, religion, and God that ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... it better not to dwell on the subject, for fear of irritating the chief; but I recalled to my memory the handful of Spaniards who conquered the well-trained armies of the Inca Atahualpa, and had little hope for the success of his descendant, Tupac Amaru, with his host of undisciplined ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... spiritualistic believers who had to pay their entrance fees; here a little, naive, ten-year-old girl among her toys in the kitchen of her parents' modest white cottage in a lovely country village! I never felt a more uncanny, nerve-irritating atmosphere than in Palladino's squalid quarters, and I do not remember more idyllic, peaceful surroundings than when I sat between Beulah and her sister through bright sunny mornings in their mother's home with their cat beside them and the pet lamb coming into the room from the meadow. There ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... fortitude; nor can soldiers readily submit while in such a country to the deprivation of food. It is not, therefore, surprising that among a few of the troops some indications of a mutiny appeared. It is much more astonishing that the great body of the army bore a circumstance so irritating, and to them so unaccountable, without ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... the fatalist, if he had a sensible soul, would commisserate the prejudices of his fellow-man— would lament over his wanderings—would seek to undeceive him—would try by gentleness to lead him into the right path, without ever irritating himself against his weakness, without ever insulting his misery. Indeed, what right have we to hate or despise man for his opinions? His ignorance, his prejudices, his imbecility, his vices, his passions, his weakness, are they not the inevitable consequence of vicious institutions? Is he not sufficiently ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... with the desire to give some irritating people a very hard knock—witness the barbed dedication with which the normally peaceful theatre-announcement columns have bristled some little time past; and I think I dare say that we were interested ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... want him now,' he answered, with one of his irritating sniggers, and I fully understood the significance of his words. I try to do the Turtons no injustice, reminding myself that, to begin with, they were far from rich, and that they had lost the forty pounds or more which should have been paid for the last term's board ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... him altogether, I believe, if he had been in any manner apologetic to me; but he wasn't that. He kept reassuring me in a way I found irritating. Mostly, however, his solicitude was for Aunt Susan ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... importance to allay by increased efficiency, independence, and organisation. Nationalisation of the schools is necessary, if a real highway of education is to be established: it must be obtained without irritating conditions which make freedom, experiment, and progress too often impossible. The task before the teaching profession is to retain full scope for initiative and experiment, whilst working loyally under a public body. This should be specially the work of the ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... and saw the figurehead; it seemed to be simpering at him with an irritating smile. There was something of bland triumph in that grin. In the upset of his feelings there was personal and provoking aggravation in the expression of the figurehead. He swore at it as if it were something ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... have spoke to the Baron before I had assumed my title would have only provoked a premature and irritating discussion on the subject of the change of name, when, as Earl of Glennaquoich, I had only to propose to him to carry his d-d bear and bootjack PARTY PER PALE, or in a scutcheon of pretence, or in a separate shield perhaps—any way that ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... that some of the jelly-fishes possess the power of stinging. Only a few of the larger species, however, seem to be thus endowed; and the name sea-nettle is by no means applicable to the class as a whole. The poisonous fluid which produces the irritating effect on the skin, and no doubt paralyses the creatures upon which the jelly-fish feeds, is secreted by the arms. By means of its poison-bearing tentacles, the soft, gelatinous medusa is more than a match for the armed crustacean and the scale-clad fish. ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... was gazing at some bay left dry by the receding tide, with the seaweed steaming in the sun, the bare rocks drying, and the beach smelling strongly of the brine. All around him the fish in their perfect freshness exhaled a pleasant perfume, that slightly sharp, irritating perfume which ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... that no less harmful means are available. And secondly, we must feel sure that these evil means are really adapted to attain the purpose. Is there no other way of securing votes for women than by the hysterical and criminal pranks our British sisters have been playing? And will those irritating acts actually forward their cause, or tend to bring about a revulsion of feeling? Did the crimes of the Jesuits make the Church triumphant? Not in the long run. Immediate gains may often be won by unpleasant methods, as in the case of the Titanic. But when the struggle is bound ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... most interesting, becomes in a second sense most irritating. We would give much to know how long an interval had elapsed since the last bishop, whether this rude East Saxon building was erected on the ruins of another or on a different site, whether the name ST. PAUL'S was a continuation or ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... copiousness of assonants and consonants in Arabic, the strain is often put upon it intentionally, like the Rims cars of Dante and the Troubadours. This rhymed prose may be "un English" and unpleasant, even irritating to the British ear; still I look upon it as a sine qua non for a complete reproduction of the original. In the Terminal Essay I shall ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... at one time advocated on what was thought very sufficient theory, is now abandoned as at war with experience. Of these means, clothing acts primarily on the skin, and we will suppose heat to do the same: the cordial drinks must however affect this organ by stimulating and irritating the gastric and intestinal surface. Against all stimulation of this surface we are then bound, from knowledge ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... the bills, and remonstrated against the alterations which had been made in the propositions of peace. Their language was bold and irritating; they characterized the conduct of the parliament as a violation of the league and covenant; and they openly charged the houses with suffering themselves to be controlled by a body, which owed its origin and its subsistence to their authority. But the Independents ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... put the last touch to his irritating caprices by asking Edith to take out of her hair a bandeau of blue that he had first asked her to put in. Every woman will know what agony that must have caused. The pretty fair hair was waved and arranged specially for this ornament, and ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... friends, and of his fellow men. His life was human, kindly and unselfish, and he allowed no clash between the pursuit of personal perfection and devotion to the public cause, even when the latter demanded sacrifice of the most cherished projects and adherence to the most irritating drudgery. ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... true robber-fray; for the rage of one adversary, the jests of the other, the rude laughter of the bystanders, the jeering, irritating remarks do not occur in ...
— The Corsair King • Mor Jokai
... into a minute and most irritating catalogue of all the mortifications and insults she had received; the grievances of a petty provincial family, with much pretension and small power; of all people, indeed, without the disposition to please—without the ability to serve—who exaggerate every offence, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Mary said deliberately, "that it is one of those cases where you should have exercised a little more discrimination. This is a small neighborhood, and I find it irritating to be continually running up ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not a few Chiefs inclined Government to meet their wishes without probing them too closely, and in the first place to relax the control hitherto exercised by its political officers on the spot—often, it must be confessed, on rather petty and irritating lines. The leading Princes were encouraged to come to Delhi during the winter season, and those who favoured a policy of closer combination amongst themselves were those who responded most freely to these official promptings. Conversations soon assumed the shape of informal ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... rushed to the boy's face. It was an irritating fact that in the senior class of that particular Los Angeles high school a Japanese boy stood at the head. This was embarrassing ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... powerful backing upon which McClellan could still rely was that of the President, and he was surely wearing away the patience of his only friend by the irritating attrition of promises ever reiterated and never redeemed. No man ever kept his own counsel more closely than did Mr. Lincoln, and the indications of his innermost sentiments concerning McClellan at this time are rare. But perhaps a little ray is let in, as through a cranny, by a dispatch ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... short, it must be so, and Lady Davenant begged her daughter would not spend the short remaining time they were to have together in entreaties, distressing and irritating to the feelings of those who ask and of those who must refuse. "Let us enjoy in peace," said she, "all that is to be enjoyed this day ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... fellow said it, with what a devilish concentration of malice. He had the most irritating manner of any man in England; I never heard him speak without wanting to dash my fist in his ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... the hesitation of the Imperial Government, and their indignation was roused by the fact that, in contravention of the settlement by Act of Parliament of the rights of Ireland, an Irish case had been heard in an English court of law, and decided by Lord Mansfield. The circumstances were irritating, and peculiarly calculated to shake the confidence of so sensitive a race in the sincerity of their rulers. Nor were there wanting persons who were ready to avail themselves, for factious purposes, of every fresh symptom ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... of plaster are taken off, fresh ones must be applied. Great care is required in treating cuts of the head, as they are often followed by erysipelas taking place round them. They should be strapped with isinglass plaster, which is much less irritating than the ordinary adhesive plaster. Only use as many strips as are actually requisite to keep the two edges of the wound together; keep the patient quite quiet, on low diet, for a week or so, according to his symptoms. Purge him well ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the hills, they found themselves in a more broken country. They climbed and descended with a rather irritating regularity. The spurs of the Pyrenees keep their form right down to the plains and the road to Torre Garda passes over them. Juanita leant sideways out of the carnage and stared ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... head broken, you scoundrel!" roared the footman, who was beside himself with rage at this insult to his mistress, coming as it did at the close of so long and irritating a delay. "Hold your infernal tongue, and open the gate at once. Is this the way you dare ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... claims of our citizens upon some of them are yet sources of dissatisfaction and complaint. No danger is apprehended, however, that they will not be peacefully, although tardily, acknowledged and paid by all, unless the irritating effect of her struggle with Texas should unfortunately make our ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and more courteous name. Their gaze is fascinated by markets, concessions, monopolies. They are now making preparations for a great haul. At this politicians cannot affect to be scandalized. For it has never been otherwise since men came together in ordered communities. But what is irritating and repellent is the perfume of altruism and philanthropy which permeates this decomposition. We are told that already they are purchasing the wharves of Dantzig, making ready for 'big deals' in Libau, Riga, and Reval, founding a bank in Klagenfurt and negotiating for oil-wells in Rumania. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Rachela's hopes regarding them. Thomas had always said yes to all his father's opinions. How could she expect anything from John when he was being carefully trained in the very principles which everywhere made the Americans so irritating ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... instead of irritating a painful wound, some one had been tickling him in the most delightful manner, Chicot, during the operation, copied the letter from the Duc de Guise to his sister, and made his ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... exhaustion he was fain to appease the boisterous temper of his associate, by admonishing him of the uselessness of such denunciations, and of the possibility of their hastening the very evil he deprecated, by irritating the resentments of a race, who were sufficiently fierce and lawless, even in their ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... but it's never there when you look; he moves it away.'" His punchbowl may be seen here, his footprints there; but the greatest of his enterprises was certainly the Dyke. His purpose was to submerge or silence the irritating churches of the Weald, by digging a ditch that should let in the sea. He began one night from the North side, at Saddlescombe, and was working very well until he caught sight of the beams of a candle which an old woman had placed in her window. Being a Devil of Sussex rather ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... that the traditional American view of the Revolution as caused by tyranny and oppression is symbolical, if not fictitious. The British government, in all its measures, from 1763 to 1774, was moderate, hesitating, and at worst irritating. Its action threatened to destroy the practical independence of the colonial assemblies; but the danger was political. Even the five "intolerable Acts" inflicted hardship on the town of Boston alone. It was not until the year 1775, ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... "Plainly the irritating system was not to be perpetual, and it was plausibly urged that it could be modified at once with advantage. The case could scarcely be worse; and whether it could be made better, could only be determined by a trial. In this view, and not to ban or brand ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... continue permanently open instead of closing when the animal for a moment discontinues his efforts. If after a while he loses his balance and tumbles over, there can be no longer any mistake. It is the saliva becoming more and more glutinous, irritating the fauces and ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... that he or she is prone to ill-nature and spitefulness, not to say fiendish malice on occasion. There appears to be a deep-rooted conviction that the elfish race devotes itself to the annoyance of mankind, practising a species of peculiarly irritating trickery, wanton and destructive. Only very rarely is a spirit of friendliness evinced, and then a motive is usually obvious. The 'friendly' fairy invariably ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... he trusteth in Thee," describes the second. There is a good deal in learning to "stay." Sometimes we forget that it literally means to stop. It is a great blessing even to stop all thought, and this is frequently the only way to answer the devil's whirlwind of irritating questions and thoughts, to be absolutely still and refuse to even think, and meet his evil voice with a simple and everlasting "No!" If we will be still ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... parts are knee deep in water, and icy cold water trickling into your boots is the reverse of pleasant or warm. Then the rain trickles through the dug-out roof—that caps it. I really don't think there can be anything more irritating than the drip, drip in the region of the head. Then of course your hands are covered in mud, for as you walk along you need your hands to keep your balance, and the sides are all muddy as well. You come inside then and eat your ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... night has now been brought out into the open. The poor beast is in a miserable condition, very thin, very weak on the hind legs, and suffering from a most irritating skin affection which is causing its hair to fall out in great quantities. I think a day or so in the open will help matters; one or two of the other ponies under the forecastle are also in poor condition, but none so bad as this one. Oates ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... ... Englishmen love liberty, and the Southerner is fighting, not only for his life, but for that which is dearer than life, for liberty; he is fighting against one of the most grinding, one of the most galling, one of the most irritating attempts to establish tyrannical government that ever disgraced the history of the World."—G. W. BENTINCK, quoted by CHAS. FRANCIS ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... an hour he figured that he had covered half the distance. He was plodding doggedly, every muscle aching from the unaccustomed strain. His feet, which burned and itched where the irritating soap rubbed into his skin, had swollen until the boots held them in a vise-like grip of torture. At each step he lifted pounds of glue-like mud which clung to the legs of his leather chaps in a thick grey smear. And each step was a separate, ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... are, in all the maritime coasts, the implacable Corsairs of Barbary. For, however great may be the dangers of which we have just spoken, and no matter now many examples they may see of the fury and inconstancy of Neptune, they cease not their irritating performances, kindling warfare in all the coasts of the Christian nations. It is there that they exercise their infamous piracies, and there also that they glory in the most shameful of all commerce—the trade of ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... seemed to do nothing but lounge in a chair on the lawn, shabbily clad, with a pipe between his lips and a book, generally unopened, on his knee. His political views seemed to Owen to be as vague as were Toni's; and he had an irritating habit of setting aside any recognized standard of perfection as though the world's seal of approval meant ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... I'm such a fool as to tell you? But you ain't so safe nor clever as you think," and, with another irritating smile, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Lefebre the change in his life became for Max more intimately real than it had been before. The fact that he was travelling second-class, though an insignificant thing in itself, brought it home to him in a curious, irritating way. He felt that he must be a weak, spoiled creature, not worthy to call himself a soldier, because little, unfamiliar shabbinesses and inconveniences disgusted him. He remembered how he had revelled in his one trip abroad with Rose and some friends of theirs ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... attempted ruin by the envious viziers is the central incident of the tale, is distinguished in that language. The Arab redaction of the story is, to my mind, far superior to the Persian, both in general simplicity and directness of style and in the absence of the irritating conceits and moral digressions with which Persian (as well as Indian) fiction is so often overloaded. The Persian origin of the story is apparent, not only in the turn of the incidents and style and the names of the personages, but in the fact that ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... there was something irritating to the Polish Jew in the great German's attitude, as if it held some latent reproach of his own. Only a shallow thinker, he felt, could combine culture and spiritual comfort, to say nothing of worldly success. He had read the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... irritating on two separate grounds. It implied that people were talking freely of my attachment, which, until I had formally acknowledged it, I resented as an impertinence; and it implied that, from personal observation, Agalma doubted Ottilie's feelings ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... his voice an irritating drawl, "you cert'nly are some on the talk, for sure! Your folks sorta handed you the tongue for the family when you butted into this here world, didn't they? An' so that's your grandpa? I come pretty near hurtin' him an' you're some het up over it? ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Jane, "Tristram Shandy" would have been the richer by a chapter on "Humphs." He would have analyzed this particular one with a minute delicacy beyond the powers of Clem Sypher through whose head rang the echo of the irritating vocable for some time afterwards. It meant something. It meant something uncomfortable. It was directly leveled at himself and yet it seemed to sum up her previous disparaging remarks about Zora. "What the dickens did she mean by it?" ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... snuff is extremely powerful; it is constantly imported here, and for the satisfaction of snuff-takers and snuff-taking tourists, I am bound to inform them that they will find snuff much cheaper in Ghadames than in Tripoli. People call snuff hot and cold, according to its stimulating, irritating, and tickling power. It is prohibited to drink wine and spirits amongst Moslemites, but, nevertheless, many of them do not fail to intoxicate themselves with everything besides which comes in their way: they snuff most horribly all the live-long day. In the season the Arabs ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... opposite utility and double purpose: the shrines of Saint Piat and Saint Taurinus. The bones of the former saint were displayed to secure dry weather in times of rain, and those of the second to invoke rain in times of drought. But what was far less comforting and more irritating even than this array of side-chapels, with their wretched adornment—with names that had been changed since their first dedication so that the tutelary protection earned by centuries of service had ceased to exist—was the choir, battered, dirty, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... in the case of descent with modification, of which the essence would appear to be that every offspring should resemble its parents, and yet, at the same time, that no offspring should resemble its parents. But for the slightly irritating stimulant of this perpetual crossing, we should pass our lives ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... met by impudence and fraud on the other. The old leadership had passed away. The upper class had lost its power and its responsibility; it insisted the more tenaciously on its privileges. Exemption from certain taxes was the chief of these, but there were others as irritating if less important. Quarrels arose with the priest about the lord's right to be first given the holy water. One vicar in his wrath deluged his ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... tendency to individual transgression, generally displayed the possession of a collective conscience. The men who formulated the standard of purity and self-restraint might be few in number; but, except they displayed the irritating activity and the uncompromising methods of a Cato, they generally secured the support of their peers, and the sterner the censor, the more gladly was he hailed as an ornament to the order. This guardian of morals still issued his edicts ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... lap of the goddess, and added various personalities in the notes. Cibber straightway published a letter to Pope, the more cutting because still in perfect good-humour, and told the story about the original quarrel. He added an irritating anecdote in order to provoke the poet still further. It described Pope as introduced by Cibber and Lord Warwick to very bad company. The story was one which could only be told by a graceless old representative of the old school ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... desirable objects, by giving every possible support and cement to the Union. Fourth, "That, however necessary it may be to keep a watchful eye over public servants and public measures, yet there ought to be limits to it; for suspicions unfounded and jealousies too lively are irritating to honest feelings, and oftentimes are productive of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... was originally composed in the third person; but so much of it consists of my own personal intercourse with Mr. Smith, that the use of that circuitous form of expression became as irksome to the writer, as he thinks it would have proved tedious and irritating to the reader. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... a curse, as in the dropsy, but essential to life with our food. Oil is valuable, properly taken, but an irritating oil to consume the bones is destructive. How awful the case of the rich man when refused a drop of water to cool that fire which he had created while living, and into which ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... a considerable amount of friction was inevitable until they got to understand each other. The occasional over-riding of local desires by the 'autocratic' Department, which in the first rush of its work had to act in a somewhat peremptory fashion, was, no doubt, irritating. Now, however, it is generally recognised that the central body, having not only the advice of its experts and access to information from similar Departments in other countries to guide it, but ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... swore softly. Maru's fingers tightened on the collar of the prisoner till his breath came in short gasps. Kaipi moved around to the side of the prisoner, but I pushed him roughly back. The Fijian's desire to use his knife on all occasions was somewhat irritating. ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... complaint, namely, inability to love, and though he had tried many ladies in many lands he could not fall in love with one of them. Queen Mab, who rules in the Gardens, had been confident that her girls would bewitch him, but alas! his heart, the doctor said, remained cold. This rather irritating doctor, who was his private physician, felt the Duke's heart immediately after any lady was presented, and then always shook his bald head and murmured, 'Cold, quite cold.' Naturally Queen Mab felt disgraced, and first she tried the effect of ordering the court into tears for nine ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... determined, rejection of their demands had the effect of irritating those who had made them; and stimulated by their spite with more energy than ever did they bend themselves to the task ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... sweet-tempered chap. Never before, throughout their year of close association, had he looked at Bangs like that. Rodney knew that he deserved the look. For days past he had deliberately subjected his companion to a series of annoyances, small but intensely irritating. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... is getting less severe; look what large white lumps have arisen on the back of my hand." The sting of the nettle is a very curious and interesting object under the microscope. It consists of a hollow tube with a glandular organ at the bottom of it, in which is contained an acrid fluid very irritating to the skin; the fine point of the sting or hair pierces the skin, and the pressure forces up the fluid from the bottom of the hair, which is then conveyed into the wound by a point at the top of ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... platoon, and company drill in full swing, also part of the battalion drill, and one or two men know their gun drill very fairly. This is so far satisfactory, and I think, if the whole country was not corrupt, they might go on well and quickly, but really it is most irritating to see the jealousies of the mandarins of one another. The people are first-rate, hard-working, and fairly honest; but it seems as soon as they rise in office they become corrupt. There is lots of vitality in the country, and there ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... cometary light—hot on vision and to sensation. I had seen acting before, but never anything like this: never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire; which outstripped Impulse and paled Conception; which, instead of merely irritating imagination with the thought of what might be done, at the same time fevering the nerves because it was not done, disclosed power like a deep, swollen winter river, thundering in cataract, and bearing the soul, like a leaf, on the steep and steelly ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the missionaries in these early days was sorely tried, and the petty annoyances, so irritating to many of us, were neither few nor infrequent. By dint of immense labour, leading the water to it, the ground which the chief had given the missionaries for a garden was made available; then the women, headed by the chief's wife, encroached ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... fellow-citizens, to whom Hawthorne could not bring himself to be indifferent, carried off a good portion of his income. As he says, "If the government chooses to starve the consul, a good many will starve with him." The most irritating thing about the new law was that it merely cut down the consular fees, without bringing the government anything; for the fees came from business that a notary-public could perform, and the consul would naturally decline to ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... failed to see how different it might be with him. Harry would hardly have borne to be told even by her that his sorrow would pass away. The commonplaces supposed to be appropriate about time and change and patience, would have been unwelcome and irritating, even from his sister's lips, and it was all the better that Graeme should sit there, thinking her own dreary thoughts in silence. After the momentary pain and shame which the betrayal of his secret had caused him, there was a certain consolation in the knowledge that he had his sister's sympathy, ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... thought proper, in order to prevent future abuse, to abolish the privilege which gave to Ministers and Ambassadors an opportunity of defrauding the revenue. Though this law was levelled exclusively at the Cardinal, it was thought convenient under the circumstances to avoid irritating him, and it was consequently made general. But, the Comte de Mercy now obtaining some clue to his duplicity, an intimation was given to the Court at Versailles, to which the King replied, 'If the Empress be dissatisfied with the French Ambassador, he shall be recalled.' But ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in reality, require the most delicate and judicious management, combined with the profoundest physiological, as well as psychological, knowledge. The ordinary method of dealing with these lunatics was as simple as it was irritating. Bonds and confinement in a darkened room were the specifics; and the monotony of this treatment was relieved by occasional visits from the sage who had charge of the case, to mumble a prayer or mutter an exorcism. Another popular but unpleasant cure was by ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... certain degree, Mr. MacCabe's confusion is the fault of Chesterton and not of his own lack of humour. When Chesterton says, "I also mean every word I say," he is saying something he does not mean. He is sometimes funny, but not serious, like Mr. George Robey. He is sometimes irritating, but not serious, like a circus clown. And he sometimes appears to be critical, but is not serious, like the young lady from Walworth in front of a Bond Street shop-window, regretting that she could not possibly buy the crockery and glass ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... review he was writing: "I began to warm in my gear, and am about to awake the whole controversy of Goth and Celt. I wish I may not make some careless blunders."[379] The criticisms of "J.B." became more frequent and more irritating to him as he felt a growing inability to achieve precision in details.[380] When Lockhart pointed out some lapses in his style, he wrote in his Journal, "Well! I will try to remember all this, but after all I write grammar as ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... for the protection either of British interests or of individual freedom may be intensely irritating ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... native and the claim which he has to the protection of the law. We hold, and rightly, that British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind. The view is irreproachable in theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt to be irritating when urged by a Boston moralist or a London philanthropist upon men whose whole society has been built upon the assumption that the black is the inferior race. Such a people like to find the higher morality for themselves, not to have it imposed upon them by ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the part becomes infected with microorganisms that have the property of destroying tissue and thus causing the production of pus. These are known as pyogenic microorganisms. There are also bacilli that are capable of multiplying in tissues and so irritating them as to cause them to die ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... detail was the place so marked as by an indefinable oppressive atmosphere. The strong musk and edged perfumes, the races, distinct and subtly antagonistic or mingled and spoiled, the rasping instruments, combined in an unnatural irritating pressure; they produced an actual sensation of cold and staleness like that from ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with singular modesty, had quickly withdrawn, to wander lonesomely for a while, till sheer ennui drove him to bed. His dejection awakened little sympathy in Boyd, who felt happier for the removal of his irritating presence. ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... small a thing? Not if she succumbed. She was petty, vexatious, irritating, stinging, while she resisted: she cast an evil beam on his reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused the giants of his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they were by his pure intentions and the approbation of society. But he had a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was the irritating reply, as Jean, menacing the prisoner with the pistol, reached for the door and closed it with a snap. Dan had the chagrin of hearing the key turn in the lock and the heavy bar fall into place across ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... to anything that concerned Vardri. If anyone was implied she imagined it was herself. These men were never happy unless they were suspecting evil of someone. The Anarchist leader found in her incomprehension merely another sign of feminine stupidity. Her outward air of indifference was as irritating to him as it had been to the Hippodrome Manager. Sobrenski's blood had never stirred for any woman, however charming, and Arithelli's type of looks was repulsive to him. He loathed her thinness and pallor, her silence and immobility of expression. He vowed inwardly ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... an irritating silence, "I am afraid you will have to wait, I do not think I shall be able to get your carriage yet awhile; in a few minutes this crowd will disperse. No use getting crushed to death! What became of Harding and Fletcher? Did ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... eve, and was received with open arms by his sister, and with that painful, irritating affection which such a girl as Violet can show to such a man as Lord Chiltern, when she will not give him that other affection for which his heart is panting. The two men were civil to each other,—but ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... ways. The Earl of Emsworth was so constituted that no man or thing really had the power to trouble him deeply; but Freddie had come nearer to doing it than anybody else in the world. There had been a consistency, a perseverance, about his irritating performances that had acted on the placid peer as dripping water on a stone. Isolated acts of annoyance would have been powerless to ruffle his calm; but Freddie had been exploding bombs under his nose since he went ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... individuals, upon whom a sting produced the singular effect of causing their breath to smell like the venom of the enraged insect! The smell of the poison resembles almost perfectly that of a ripe banana. It produces a very irritating effect upon the bees themselves; for if a minute drop of it is extended to them, on a stick, they at once manifest ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... his helpers (the same three gigantic supernatural beings who took part in the battle) appear. Faust vents his anger and chagrin with regard to the peasant and the irritating ding-dong-dell of the vesper bell. He commissions Mephistopheles to persuade the peasant to take the money and to make him turn out of his wretched hut. Mephistopheles and his mates go to carry out ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... there came two men aboard with a letter from the agent in San Francisco, which agent was irritating on account of slowness, and had weedy-looking hair. ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... written a very interesting book in which he shows that the inner membranes of the nose are in close relationship and sympathy with distant parts and organs of the body. He located in the nose one small area which corresponds to the lungs. By irritating this area with an electric needle he could provoke asthmatic attacks in patients subject to this disease. By anesthetizing the same area he could stop immediately severe attacks of asthma and of coughing. Another area in the nasal cavity corresponds ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... an Englishman does well to look at Home Rule from an English point of view is, that this mode of dealing with the adjustment of the possibly opposed interests of England and Ireland is (paradoxical though the assertion may sound) both the least irritating and in itself the fairest method of meeting the demands of Irish Home Rulers; though—and this is the one certainly good result which has arisen from the changed attitude towards Home Rule of Mr. Gladstone and his followers—these demands may now happily be dealt with ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... shall see. I don't know about Deb and Mary, but France can be all sorts of a cat when the fit takes her; and as she is certain to oppose it to the bitter end, she will never have done irritating his people and setting everybody at loggerheads. However, never mind that now." She enveloped Rose in a comforting embrace. "We'll just enjoy ourselves while we can. And until we MUST start the fuss with the girls at home, we'll keep things ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... the long narrow green leaf of the wheat; in jag means the spray-like drooping awn of the oat; and the hail is the beard of the barley, which when it is white and brittle in harvest-time gets down the back of the neck, irritating the skin of those who work among it. According to Hilary, oats do not flourish on rich land; and when he was young (and everything was then done right) a farmer who grew oats was looked upon with contempt, as they were thought only fit for the poorest soil, and a crop that therefore ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... are undeniably irritating,—their existence is so entirely uncalled for on our part, and they are almost always very faulty people. Mr. Tulliver had succeeded in getting quite as much irritated with Mr. Moss as he had desired, and he was able to say ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... name, was yet to begin. Meantime, the external phenomenon, by which the cold expressed itself, was a sense (but with little reality) of eternal freezing perspiration. From this I was never free; and at length, from finding one general ablution sufficient for one day, I was thrown upon the irritating necessity of repeating it more frequently than would seem credible, if stated. At this time, I used always hot water; and a thought occurred to me very seriously that it would be best to live constantly, and, perhaps, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... [from 'LISt Processing language', but mythically from 'Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... by some people, her father and mother included, she professed agreement by a simple monosyllable, either because she was lazy, or because she saw that there was no chance of further profit in the discussion. It was irritating, because it was always clear she meant nothing. At this instant a servant opened the door, and Alice, a curly brown retriever, squeezed herself in, and made straight for Catharine, putting ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... dog, and puts it in a sack. The next time he is called to the side of a person made sick by the pest, he says to her, "Enter human beings no more: if you do, I will liberate from this sack the woman that tormented you in the abyss," at the same time irritating the dog so that it growls. The Plague, full of terror, begs him for God's sake not to set the woman free, ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... hasty-pudding was called "suppaan." But these were trifles; and being used to them, nobody paid much attention to what our puritanical neighbour saw fit to pour out, in the humility and meekness of his soul. Mr. Worden chuckled, and urged Jason on, in the hope of irritating Dirck; but Dirck smoked through it all, with an indifference that proved how much he really despised the critic. I was the only one who resented this supercilious ignorance; but even I was often more disposed to laugh than ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... his fishing, losing no time and speaking to no one, and his two mates, though hearing him in the deep silence, pretended not to do so, for fear of irritating him, knowing him to be so haughty ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... we are! How easily carried away whenever our awakened imagination brings us the irritating hint of a desire! I cared for the girl in a particular way, seduced by the moody expression of her face, by her obstinate silences, her rare, scornful words; by the perpetual pout of her closed lips, the black depths of her fixed gaze turned ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... mar domestic happiness by persisting in personal peculiarities which they know are unpleasant to those around them. Harmless these habits maybe in themselves, perhaps; but inasmuch as they are teasing, annoying, and irritating to others, they are not harmless. Nay, they are criminal, because they are accompanied by a most unamiable disregard ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... numbers about the house, and tormented us so incessantly by their irritating stings, that we were compelled to keep our rooms constantly filled with smoke, which is the only means of driving them away: the weather indeed was now warm. Having received one of Dollond's eighteen-inch spirit thermometers from Mr. Stuart, which he had the kindness to ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... with all about her, never knowing just when hostilities might be renewed. It had acted upon the girl's sensitive nature much as a chestnut-prickle acts upon the average mortal; a nasty, little, irritating thing, hard to discover, a scrap of a thing when found—if, indeed, it does not succeed in eluding one altogether—and so insignificant that one wonders how it could cause such discomfort. But it is those miserable little chestnut-prickles that are hardest ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... finer grain than they, partly because she had, deep down in her soul, a genuine shyness which showed itself only in quiet reticence. But now that she was the Elder's wife, they felt that she was in a measure theirs. There is a very sweet side, as well as an inconvenient and irritating one, to the old-fashioned rural notion that the parish has almost as much right to the minister's wife as to the minister. Draxy saw only the sweet side. With all the loyalty and directness which had made ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... content with what had been conceded to them, nor were they willing to abide by the terms of the Edict of Nantes in so far as to allow the establishment of Catholic worship in the places which were under their control. Their public attacks on the Blessed Eucharist and on the Pope were very irritating to their countrymen, but Henry IV., who was a good king deeply interested especially in the welfare of the lower classes, continued to keep the peace between both parties. His sympathies were, however, with the Protestants of Germany, and he was actually ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... of all love children as a class. Their dependence, their ignorance, their helplessness, and their unformed characters should appeal to a woman's mind, and make her forget their many and varied faults and irritating qualities. You like lovable, well-bred, and interesting children, but you are utterly indifferent to all others. You adore beauty, and an ugly child offends your taste. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... to have much meaning for them except as an irritating reminder of the now sure failure of their Sargolian venture, they marked the hours into a second full day of detention before Van Rycke finally put in appearance. The Cargo-master was plainly tired, but he showed no signs of discomposure. ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... affair. Soleni started irritating the Baron, who lost his temper and insulted him, and so at last Soleni had to challenge him. [Looks at his watch] It's about time, I think.... At half-past twelve, in the public wood, that one you can see from here across the river.... Piff-paff. [Laughs] Soleni thinks he's Lermontov, and ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic system of life. This does not merely account for the revolt of the vices and of that empty recklessness and horseplay which is sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts also for the return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a nameless thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... with irritating calmness. "Prodigal son sends postal card stating that he is prepared to receive overtures looking to a resumption of ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... he was thorough with himself, so he was with his pupils, trying them with doubtful questions which the studious could easily answer, but which the ignorant could not evade. Yet he was never harsh, nor captious, nor irritating, though quick and ingenious in exposing mistakes and follies. Besides his ample knowledge, he possessed remarkably the power of clear and distinct statement. It was the habit of his mind to reduce his facts to principles, and to present them ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... shrank into a corner the minute you left it. Everything in the apartment folded, or flapped, or doubled, or shot in, or shot out, or concealed something else, or pretended to be something it was not. It was very irritating. Ray took his cigar and his evening paper and wandered uneasily into the Italian living room, doubling his lean length into one of ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the tongue of the natives. In the dominant note of these prayers, the call for courage and cheerfulness, one can hear the cry of the dying Stevenson's need: "The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry.... Give us health, food, bright weather, and light hearts.... As the sun lightens the world, so let our loving-kindness make bright ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... ache with melancholy. She was in the mood when the sea has a saddening effect upon the nerves. It is only when we are very happy, that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Her blood was coursing feverishly through her veins, her spirit had been made reckless by the wilful violence that she was doing her conscience, and also by her deep and growing dissatisfaction with herself, that was like an irritating wound. She was therefore prepared to resent any interruption to the whirl of excitement, which gave her a kind of pleasure in the place of the happiness that was impossible ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... that they get a fair amount of happiness. Simple pleasures are the greatest, perhaps the only real pleasures. We all like to be free of responsibilities. There is no rent-day coming round with dread certainty and irritating monotony to the nomads. No rate collector irritates them with his imperious "demand note." No school-board officer rouses them to a sense of duty by his everlasting efforts to force their children to school. No butcher, no baker, no milkman duns them for payment ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... and found I had forgotten them. That's just like Harris. He couldn't have said a word until I'd got the bag shut and strapped, of course. And George laughed—one of those irritating, senseless, chuckle-headed, crack-jawed laughs of his. They do ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... deplored the ill luck which had brought me to so savage a country. Such and such like are the incidents which make an Englishman in the States unhappy, and rouse his gall against the institutions of the country; these things and the continued appliance of the irritating ointment of American braggadocio with which his sores are kept open. But though I was badly off on that railway platform, worse off than I should have been in England, all that crowd of porters round me were better off than our English porters. They had a "good time" of it. And this, O my English ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... country upon earth where man is exposed to more cruel torments in the rainy season. Having passed the fifth degree of latitude, you are somewhat less stung; but on the Upper Orinoco the stings are more painful, because the heat and the absolute want of wind render the air more burning and more irritating in its contact ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... found unreasonably irritating. Bitter as the sight of her had been and unspeakable her repudiation, he felt to-day as if they did not pertain. The thing that did pertain with a biting force was to remove himself before ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... required—will also immeasurably aid in sugar conservation. The substitutes mentioned are all available in large amounts. Honey is especially valuable for children, as it consists of the more simple sugars which are less irritating than cane sugar, and there is no danger of acid stomach from the amounts ...
— Foods That Will Win The War And How To Cook Them (1918) • C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss
... happening over the rest of the country—in Chicago? New York? Washington? Most probably the same things that were happening with us, we concluded; but the fact that we did not know with absolute surety was irritating. ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... your own road, Davy," said Jane with irritating mockery. "You were born to be thoroughly conventional and respectable. As a reformer you're ideal. As a—an imitator of Victor Dorn, you'd be ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... marriage helped to reassure your friends, and actually obtained for you an ornamental appointment for which an over-taxed nation provides a handsome stipend. But, to sum up, you must always remain an irritating source of uneasiness to your own order, as, luckily, you will always be a sharp-edged weapon ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... hand without thinking of opening it. The reverend father asked himself in alarm, what conclusion Gabriel would draw from these recriminations upon the past; and he durst not make any answer to his reproaches, for fear of irritating the young priest, upon whose head such immense interests now reposed. Gabriel could possess nothing for himself, according to the constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Moreover, the reverend father had obtained from him, in favor of the Order, an express renunciation ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... than that. Jokes about infanticide and Jesus Christ defeat themselves, and always will. They are on a level with jokes about death or one's mother; they recoil and smite the smiter on the nose. I confess that I find the joke about Charles Lamb irritating. Butler said that he could not read Lamb because Canon Ainger went to tea with his (Butler's) sisters. His gibes at Dante are as bad—in fact they are worse, aggravated by the fact that, having never read (he ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... take carbolic baths you may, with God's grace, escape one or more of the seven plagues of Flanders. These seven are lice, flies, rats, rain, mud, smells, and "souvenirs." The greatest of these is lice, for lice may mean cerebro-meningitis. Owing to their unsportsmanlike and irritating habits they are usually called "snipers." But, unlike snipers, they are not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war (their habits partake too much of espionage), and when captured they receive a short shrift from an impassive man with a hot iron in the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... the lake. He has missed, the last three days, his walk with Sophy—missed the pleasing excitement of talking at her, and of the family in whose obsolete glories he considers her very interest an obtrusive impertinence. He has missed, too, his more habitual and less irritating conversation with Darrell. In short, altogether he is put out, and he vents his spleen on the swans, who follow him along the wave as he walks along the margin, intimating either their affection for himself, or ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... determination to force Oliver upon us as perfect saint and infallible hero is irritating and sometimes laughable; it is true that his zeal to be-dwarf every one but Cromwell himself is unjust and untrue; and the depreciation of every man who declines to play into Oliver's hands is too often manifest. But, on the whole, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... while casting out one devil, but prepares the way for seven other devils worse than the first. Women seem to expect to solve problems that have vexed civilisation since the beginnings of society. This attitude is a little irritating. Every attempt hitherto to grapple with prostitution has been a failure. Women have to remember that it has existed as an institution in nearly all historic times and among nearly all races of men. It is as old as monogamic marriage, ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... darken as he gazed at me; then his glance fell upon Cassion, who was leaning forward, his mouth open, his face ashen gray. He straightened up as he met De Baugis' eyes, and gave vent to an irritating laugh. ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... of the highest class. Luxuriously furnished. Visitor's comfort studied. Finest position in London. Cuisine a speciality. Quiet. Suitable for persons of superior rank. Bathroom. Electric light. Separate tables. No irritating extras. Single rooms from 2-1/2 guineas, double from 4 guineas weekly. 250 Queen's Gate." And below this he saw another piece of news: "Not a boarding-house. A magnificent mansion. Forty bedrooms by ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... An irritating cause of the King's purpose lay in the fact that he was incited by the splendors of the chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, built by his ill-fated minister, Fouquet. Louis determined to surpass that mansion by one so much more ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... Rev. Dr. Thomas De Witt, a profound theologian and courtly gentleman; and the Rev. Dr. William C. Brownlee, with his vigorous Scotch accent, preaching against what he invariably called "papery" (popery), and recalling, as he did, John Knox of old, that irritating thorn in the side of the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots, made up this remarkable trio. During the latter part of his life Dr. Brownlee suffered from a stroke of paralysis which rendered him speechless, and his Catholic adversaries improved this opportunity to circulate the report that he had ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... There was a critical note in the accusation which she found vaguely irritating, and it seemed to her the wisest course to let the matter drop where it was. But Priscilla was in the unreasonable mood when even silence is sufficient ground ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... scrolls," was always present to the mediaeval mind. In its broadest and coarsest jests, in its most laborious and (as we are pleased to call them) dullest expansions of stories, in its most wire-drawn and most lifeless allegory, in its most irritating admixture of science and fable, there is always hard by, always ready to break in, the sense of the great and wonderful things of Life, and Love, and Death, of the half-known God and the unknown Hereafter. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... should have dared to entertain jealousy of a being so far above his ken and hers, as Eugenie then was—that she should have made a ridiculous tragedy out of it—and that Fenwick should have conduced to the absurd and insulting imbroglio by his ill-bred and vulgar concealment:—these things were so irritating to Lord Findon that they first stimulated a rapid recovery from his illness at Versailles, and then led him to frantic efforts on Phoebe's behalf, which were in fact nothing but the expression of his own ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lit by Amanda's enthusiasm circled actively round Benham's expedition. It was clear that the idea of giving some years to thinking out one's possible work in the world was for some reason that remained obscure highly irritating to both Mr. Rathbone-Sanders and the Byronic youth. Betty too regarded it as levity when there was "so much to be done," and the topic whacked about and rose to something like a wrangle, and sat down ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Cecilia made with infinite pain to herself, from the reluctance she felt to pursuing her own interest and inclination in opposition to those of her worthy old friend: but as she was now circumstanced, she considered the immediate prosecution of her journey as her only resource against first irritating Delvile by an abrupt disappointment, and appeasing him next by a concession which would make ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... charmingly prepossessing and brilliant, but he could just as easily turn an ill-humoured side forward. He resolved to stay in Strasburg because of a complaint in one of his eyes of the most irritating nature, which required a tedious and uncertain operation, the tear-bag being closed below. Therefore he separated from the prince and removed into lodgings of his own for the purpose of the operation. He confided to me that he intended to compete for a prize offered at Berlin for the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... some brief explanation, Pierrette got out, wished us a merry "Bon jour!" and disappeared. Then, with the Count mounted at my side, I backed out into the roadway, and we were soon speeding along that switchback of a road with dozens of dangerous turns and irritating tram-lines that leads past Eze into the tiny Principality of His Royal Highness Prince Rouge et Noir—the paradise ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... down St. James's Street, and could not help laughing at the affair: but Tallyho, who had a great aversion to duelling, and was thinking of the consequences, bit his lips, and expressed his sorrow at what had occurred; he ascribed the hasty imputation of drunkenness to the irritating effects of the poor creature's accident, and expressed his hope that his cousin would take no further notice of it. Tom, however, on the other 75hand, ridiculed Bob's fears—told him it was a point of honour not to suffer an insult in the street from any man—nor would he—besides, the charge ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... liberty of our citizens are in constant danger and their property destroyed and themselves ruined; where our trading vessels are liable to seizure and are seized at our very door by war ships of a foreign nation; the expeditions of filibustering that we are powerless to prevent altogether, and the irritating questions and entanglements thus arising—all these and others that I need not mention, with the resulting strained relations, are a constant menace to our peace and compel us to keep on a semi war footing with a nation with which we ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... PLUNKET, "I'm not sure that the habits of POE'S raven were not less irritating. It is true that on its first arrival it hopped about the floor, wherein it resembles our honourable friend; but afterwards, having once perched upon the pallid bust of Pallas, it was good enough to remain there. Bad enough, I admit; but surely that situation preferable to ours, not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... necessary. In consequence, of the adoption of this principle, the fatalist, if he had a sensible soul, would commisserate the prejudices of his fellow-man— would lament over his wanderings—would seek to undeceive him—would try by gentleness to lead him into the right path, without ever irritating himself against his weakness, without ever insulting his misery. Indeed, what right have we to hate or despise man for his opinions? His ignorance, his prejudices, his imbecility, his vices, his passions, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... to get accustomed to the position—to feel "at home" in it—and to be able to shift it at a moment's notice, and, when necessary, to make a firm stand. The drill work is very good for all this, and though it is tedious and irritating to many, it is worth ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... steadfastly the depth and the intensity of that devotion which, for so many years, has tended me, and has endured the society of that person whom I peculiarly know to be the most tedious and irritating of companions, I stand aghast, before a miracle. And I cry, Oh, certainly a goddess! and I can think of no queen who is fairly mentionable in the same breath. Hah, all we poets write a deal about love: but none of us may grasp the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... fact that Connor had to stay behind at Campote and could catch us up later, this attention on his part was one of the most generous things that ever happened to me, for certainly the pony he got from me was the most irritating piece of horseflesh imaginable. I am glad publicly to give him my warmest thanks again! Mr. Worcester was well mounted, too; he rode this day at two hundred and thirty-five pounds, and his kit must have weighed some thirty ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... cowardice. (November, 1775). "In November Lord Dunmore proclaimed martial law in the colony, and executed his long-threatened plan of giving freedom to all slaves who could bear arms and would flock to his standard. But these measures, though partially annoying, had the effect of irritating and rousing the people rather than breaking their spirit." (Tucker's Life of Jefferson, vol. i. p. 78). Before the middle of the next year Dunmore made his escape from Virginia, after setting fire ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... confidence in every season of suffering; and we cannot but hope that her mind was long consoled, by the recollection of the heavenly interposition which she had enjoyed sixteen years ago, in her first banishment. No resentful feelings, no irritating language is recorded; and doubtless Abraham dismissed her with as much kindness as the peculiarity ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... her another bow. "If I were, I should make no secret of it with your ladyship," he answered with that irritating suavity in which he clothed ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... you, too, think of Naples for an eventual resting-place! Yes, that is the proper basking-ground for "bright and aged snakes." Florence would be irritating, and, on the whole, insufferable—Yet I never hear of any one going thither but my heart is twitched. There is a good, charming, little singing German lady, Miss Regan, who told me the other day that she was just about revisiting ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Patty's mind could be free to entertain his proposition; could ever secure one precious moment of silence when she was not slatting and banging, pushing and pulling things about, her head and ears out of sight under a shelf, and an irritating air of absorption about her whole demeanor; if that moment of silence could ever, under Providence, be simultaneous with the absence of customers in the front shop, Cephas intended to offer himself to Patience ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... next made by irritating the tips without any object being left in contact with them. Nine radicles, suspended over water, had their tips rubbed, each six times with a needle, with sufficient force to shake the whole bean; the temperature was favourable, viz. about 63o F. In 7 out of these cases no effect whatever ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
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