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More "Cranky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fearlessness of her eyes gave her that. And Mrs. Baynes, too, shrewdly recognized that behind the uncompromising frankness of June's manner there was much of the Forsyte. If the girl had been merely frank and courageous, Mrs. Baynes would have thought her 'cranky,' and despised her; if she had been merely a Forsyte, like Francie—let us say—she would have patronized her from sheer weight of metal; but June, small though she was—Mrs. Baynes habitually admired quantity—gave her an uneasy feeling; and she placed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the motor over, first of all. Perhaps it's a small matter, and I can fix it up. Sometimes these new machines act a bit cranky. Want of oil will even bring about trouble. Jerry, you take a look with me. Two heads are often better ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... cranky Governor— His name it wasn't Waterman. For office he was hotter than The love of any lover, nor Was Boruck's threat of aiding him Effective in dissuading him— This pig-headed, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... Miss Hamilton means to call on you one afternoon, only she seems puzzled to know how she is ever to find you at home. I cannot think what put Hamilton into such a bad temper; he scarcely spoke to any of us, and looked horribly cranky, only I laughed at him and he got better; he never mentioned your name. You have not fallen out again, eh, little she-bear?' looking ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... doors in the morning, with his foot on the native heath of his farm, Holcroft's hopefulness and courage always returned. He was half angry with himself at his nervous irritation of the evening before. "If she becomes so cranky that I can't stand her, I'll pay the three months' wages and clear her out," he had concluded, and he went about his morning work with a grim purpose to submit to ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... dried up man of forty-five, was crabbed, cranky, sour and mean. He had the eyes, nose and brain of a fox, while perhaps the rest of him, heart and soul, came close to being just plain hog. He was stingy and suspicious, and people were no more in the habit of speaking well of him than they were of ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... Boy Scout Troop is supposed to employ a lawyer. You strike me as a special pleader. You had better go in for the law instead of music. We are not so cranky that we would have objected to an ordinary descent upon us, even with the idea of showing us what inferior creatures we are. But when it comes to trying to frighten us, and some of the more timid girls were frightened, you behaved as ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... as she replied: "'Twould be a merry riot, surely, doctor, if I gave in to my complaints, with noisy customers downstairs and two cranky ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... itself. But soft-hearted as he was, he repented of his irritation a moment later and soothed the waiter's wounded feelings by a rich tip. The boy ran out to open the cab door for his strange customer and looked after him, wondering whether the man was a cranky millionaire or merely a poet. For Joseph Muller, by name and by reputation one of the best known men in Vienna, was by sight unknown to all except the few with whom he had to do on the police force. His appearance, in every way inconspicuous, ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... intellects more commonly have normal nervous systems. But the psychopathic temperament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it, or in some way "works it ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... yellow and mottled! And hasn't Sir Benjamin Hall, and the gallant Commodore Napier, Made such a cabal with Cabbell and Hamilton as would make any chap queer? Whilst Sankey, who was backed by a Cleave-r for Marrowbone looks cranky, Acos the electors, like lisping babbies, cried out "No Sankee?" Then South'ark has sent Alderman Humphrey and Mr. B. Wood, Who has promised, that if ever a member of parliament did his duty—he would! Then for the Tower Hamlets, Robinson, Hutchinson, and Thompson, find that they're in the wrong ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... the floor a minute and then was silent. He had been given only a mild shock, but it had been enough for his fluttery, cranky heart. ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... of the sea mingling with the pungent fragrance of the yellow gorse, hot with the sun ... surely the Cornish coast was a very favoured spot, and the Scilly Isles, to which passage could be taken in a queer, cranky boat, were indeed the Fortunate Isles, cradled by the bluest, most magical, most romantic waters in ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... strengthless^, powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, adynamic^, asthenic^; nervous. soft, effeminate, feminate^, womanly. frail, fragile, shattery^; flimsy, unsubstantial, insubstantial, gimcrack, gingerbread; rickety, creaky, creaking, cranky; craichy^; drooping, tottering &c v.. broken, lame, withered, shattered, shaken, crazy, shaky; palsied &c 158; decrepit. languid, poor, infirm; faint, faintish^; sickly &c (disease) 655; dull, slack, evanid^, spent, short-winded, effete; weather-beaten; decayed, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... York, has been arrested by Comstock for selling photographs of celebrated paintings from the art galleries of Paris. It is a foul mind which sees obscenity in that which cultivated people admire, and the Hoboken Evening News says very appropriately, "Of all the cranky Pharisees allowed to run at large, Anthony Comstock is the chief. He is a most unmitigated nuisance and requires ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... up to four years ago, I was never able to get a canoe that entirely satisfied me as to weight and model. I bought the smallest birches I could find; procured a tiny Chippewa dugout from North Michigan and once owned a kayak. They were all too heavy and they were cranky to a degree. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... plainly," he said. "'What's the matter with you, Dora?' I asked her. 'Don't you like me any more?' And she got wild and said she hated me like poison. She never talked to me like that before. It was a different Dora. She was always downhearted, cranky. The slightest thing made her yell or cry with tears. It got worse and worse. Oh, it was terrible! We quarreled twenty times a day and the children cried and I thought ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... tap of the bell, the "bad lot" of men came together. They numbered more than two hundred, though the Foundry was working short. They had been notified that "that gonoph of a Whiffler was kicked out, and a new feller was in, who looked cranky enough, and wanted to see 'em and tell 'em whether he was a damn' ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... old crank, and Jakie's a waxed angel," she surrendered with a little grimace. "You think so now, but that's because you are being led astray by your appetites, like all men. You just wait: You'll be homesick for a sight of that fat, bald-headed, cranky old Patsy bouncing along on the mess-wagon and swearing in Dutch at his horses, before you're through. If you're not so completely gone over to Jakie that you will eat nothing but what he has cooked, come on up to the house. The Countess is making a twogallon freezer of ice-cream for you, and ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... canoes have, I understand," Bristles chuckled. "They just watch till you're not lookin', and then chuck you overboard. Some of 'em are worse than a bucking bronco at throwing a feller. But looky here, Billy, how does it come you're in this cranky boat? I'd 'a thought your dad would have told you to leave ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... gaiety, and a minute of his old hearty laugh, but it was soon stifled. As they had kept up in Paris all their suburban habits, there appeared at the breakfast hour, in the midst of this household disorganized by poverty and illness, a parasite, a seedy looking little bald man, cranky and peevish, of whom they always spoke as "the man who has read Proudhon." It was thus that Heurtebise, who probably had never known his name, introduced him to everybody. When he was asked "Who is that?" he unhesitatingly ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... namely, to and from the South Coast with mail-bags. Many of those whom I had wished to see were absent; but Mr. Hogg set to work in the most business- like style. He borrowed a boat from the Rev. William Walker, of the Gaboon Mission, who kindly wrote that I should have something less cranky if I could wait awhile; he manned it with three of his own Krumen, and he collected the necessary stores and supplies of cloth, pipes and tobacco, rum, white wine, and absinthe for ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... is running for Judge again: really, Laura, I hope he'll win. George says he will. George says Henry Fenn is the only trouble Mr. Van Dorn will have, though I don't see as Henry could do much. Though George says he will. George says Henry is cranky and mean about the Judge someway and George says Henry is drinking like a fish this spring and his legs is hollow, he holds so much; though he must have been joking for I have heard of hollow horn in cattle, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... was a cranky cuss with side-whiskers. He used to wear a stove-pipe hat. I think he was a chemist. Whenever he showed up he would run us kids out of the building. I think ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... in wet boats. When, in order to change my uncomfortable position, I placed both legs on one side, the edge of the prahu nearly touched the water and the Dayaks would cry out in warning. I have not on other rivers in Borneo met with prahus quite as cranky as these. At the Bugis settlement I bought fifty delicious pineapples at a very moderate price ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... explained as they hurried away. "But it wouldn't do any good, I guess, if we knew. We couldn't go and question them, for it's plain from what the agent said that they don't want to talk about it. My, but that man was cranky, wasn't he!" ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... no, no,' said Peggotty, shaking her head, and folding her arms; 'not she, my dear. It isn't that there ain't some Cats that would be well enough pleased if she did, but they sha'n't be pleased. They shall be aggravated. I'll stay with you till I am a cross cranky old woman. And when I'm too deaf, and too lame, and too blind, and too mumbly for want of teeth, to be of any use at all, even to be found fault with, than I shall go to my Davy, and ask him to ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... He might have backed out only that he chanced to have a stubborn streak in his make-up, and his word had been given. But he certainly looked far from happy as he faced the gloomy prospect of days and days cooped up in that cranky craft, where the least movement abroad [Transcriber's note: aboard?] set up a ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... mood was that known as cranky. We were in the drawing-room, after what we were compelled to call dinner. It had consisted of steak burned to cinders, potatoes soaked to a pulp, and a rice pudding that looked like a poultice the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... he; "I can't make out what's come over it. My old grandfather's shot scores of deer with the tarnation weppin, and I guess it's jest cranky, that's all. I bet I'll shoot the next fowl that comes across haar, ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... the London prize ring. Sum times thay abooz hisself individooally. Thay hev pulled the most of his hair out at the roots & he wares meny a horrible scar upon his body, inflicted with mop-handles, broom-sticks, and sich. Occashunly they git mad & scald him with bilin hot water. When he got eny waze cranky thay'd shut him up in a dark closit, previsly whippin him arter the stile of muthers when thare orfsprings git onruly. Sumptimes when he went in swimmin thay'd go to the banks of the Lake & steal all his close, thereby compellin ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... was enveloped in reeds, and at a loss which way to go, the soft ripple of breaking waves struck my ear like sweet music. The sea was telling me of its proximity. Carefully balancing myself, I stood up in the cranky canoe, and peering over the grassy thickets, saw before me the broad waters of Helena Sound. The fresh salt breeze from the ocean struck upon my forehead, and nerved me to a renewal of my efforts to get within a region of higher land, and to a ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... and cranky, much of it haywired together, much of it invented from scratch. But Rakkan the Martian, for all his lack of formal education, was unbelievably clever where it came to making apparatus and making it behave, and Friedrichs was a top-flight designer. The lab had what it needed—wasn't ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... between England and the United States. Our Anglo-Saxon element think normally; and the vast majority of our German citizens have always been on the sensible and morally right side of national questions—there's nothing long-haired or cranky about them. I like the Germans because they don't hanker after the unknown. I believe that most reading Americans—that is to say three-fourths of all—feel toward England as Irving and Hawthorne did.—But, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... how he looks at it. And of course the bigger the scale of the work the cheaper the power will work out. But the Khedive's holding back. It may be just a temporary whim—may be all right again to-morrow. But you never know. And if you think Ferdinand's the man to give in to a cranky Khedive, you're much mistaken. His idea now is to raise all the capital he can lay hands on, and buy him out! What do you say to that? Buy the Khedive clean out of the company. It's a large order. And if I were you, old man, as soon ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... support you enny longer? I am your godfather and you are my godchild and it is a legal afare, dad sez, and if ennybody sez ennything about it they will have to deel with me, see? Ennyway mebbe I was kinder cranky about it, and you kinder fibbd, so lets say we had a scrap and shake on it and let it go at that. Lots of the fellers hear have scraps with the girls, and last weak Dinky Odell who is Carl Odells yungist brother had one with Heloise because he hollerd, Heloise go wash ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... my adventoor. It emejetly sot her into one of her cranky tantrums. Says she, "HIRAM, you've an old fool. Why don't you stay home, where you belong, and not go pokin about the country like a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... She was cranky an' foul, she was stubborn an' slow (Let 'er go—let 'er go), An' she shipped it green when it come on to blow; 'Er crews was starved an' their wage was low, An 'er bloomin' owners was ready to faint At a scrape o' pitch ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... two-by-four he lugs around a lot of cranky whims, and it looked like this was one of his pets. There's quite a mulish ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... bankers and mechanics by this time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things—one who, moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for certain labours—once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... see him descending from this venerable conveyance. He forbears to drive right in, lest the cranky wheels of his carriage should cut up the beautiful round pebbles with which ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... "He thinks by mid-summer he can take me right into the interior, in that cranky red car. And I don't know but what I am ready to risk it; there are places I'd like to see—where he was caught his first winter in a blizzard, and where he picked up the nuggets for my necklace. You remember it—don't you?—Mrs. Daniels. I wore it that night in Seattle ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... debarred? Too old and cranky or something like that?" teased Jane. Her hair was bursting from her cap like an over-ripe thistle, and her cheeks were velvety in a rich glow of early winter tints. She hardly looked too old even for ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... impetuously, "I can shoot better than Allen right now. You ask him if I can't. You ask him what I did with that cranky twenty- two last Sunday ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tell 'bout you bein' poorly? You do look so well as ever I knawed 'e, but mother sez you'm that cranky with vittles as you never was afore, an' wrong ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... candle and went out to the wood-shed. No; there, in the dim shadows of the cobwebby place, was the stanza that was proof of her son's genius. Then Peggy reflected with a glad heart that it was the accepted belief of the world that geniuses were always cranky and uncomfortable, and, womanlike, Peggy gave thanks that it was permitted her to have a ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... challenge. Suddenly in the midst of it all there came a terrific peal of thunder, and he awoke with a start, to hear the bars being removed from his prison-door and to see the bright sunlight streaming in through cracks in both roof and wall of the cranky hut. ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... always want to know what things look like, old Pam, so I'll try and tell you. In the first place, it's just a glorious spring day. At the back of the cranky bit of a ruined farm where we have our diggings (by the way, you may always go back at night and find half your bedroom shot away—that happened to me the other night—there was a tunic of mine still hanging on the door, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that; not but what I'd do it myself if I had his salary. He got a scoop last year, and you couldn't speak to him for a month after. Mrs. Foster,—she's one of the biggest guns, you know, a regular cannon,—refurnished her house last summer, and all the New York papers wanted photographs. She went cranky, and said they shouldn't have them. Wouldn't even listen to Lancaster's pleadings. But he hadn't jollied the butler for nothing. She didn't stop here last summer—only came down every two weeks and rearranged every stick of the furniture. ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... to-night, no matter what comes, make your mind up to that. And, win or lose, it's my last. Get that? But I've got a definite reason for it. You see I haven't been as idle as you think. I've been hunting around on the trail of Peter Blunt. Folks all think him a fool, and cranky some. I never did. He's been a gold prospector most of his life. And it's not likely he don't know. Well, I'm not giving you a long yarn, and to cut it short, I'm right on to a big find. At least I've got color in a placer up at the ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... Lord only knew how much longer thou wouldst ramble about abroad. Well, but thou art a dashing fine fellow, a fine fellow; thou canst still lift ten puds in one hand as of yore, I suppose? Thy deceased father, excuse me, was cranky in some respects, but he did well when he hired a Swiss for thee; thou rememberest, how thou and he had fistfights; that's called gymnastics, isn't it?—But why have I been cackling thus? I have only been keeping Mr. Panshin" (she never ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... it. The sentiment of the thing has rather blinded her natural keen judgment. Curious that I should criticise sentiment in another person; but it 's like my cranky, contrary way. Only I was thinking of Will's thousand pounds. Newtake will suck it out of his pocket quicker than Cranmere sucks up ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... I fought three wars wi' them, and they carried off one of my spars, and be hanged to them! If I've let daylight into a few of them, d'ye see, it's all in good part and by way of duty. I've drunk my share—enough to sweeten my bilge-water—but there are few that have seen me cranky in the upper rigging or refusing to answer to my helm. I never drew pay or prize-money that my mate in distress was not welcome to the half of it. As to the Polls, the less said the better. I've been a true consort to my Phoebe since she ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... laughed, "don't be cranky, Phoebe. Here comes Phares and he'll tell you that your eyes are black when you're cross. ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... home and the rest of us went to bed,—all except Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, who was so cranky and snappy that we left her by the fire. It seemed hours after when I awoke. She was still sitting by the fire; she was absently marking in the ashes with a stick. I happened to be the first one up next morning and as I stirred ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... the innocent candor of a twelve-year-old. "Aunt Rebecca—is she here again? Ach, if she wasn't so cranky I'd be glad still when she comes, but you know how she acts all ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... boat (pulled by a crew of six natives), that we had hired for the occasion from a Chinaman in the capital. More than half our journey had to be accomplished by sea, which, as it was blowing half a gale, and looking at the capabilities of our cranky old craft (christened Sri Laut, or Beauty of the Sea, by her proud owner), was not a pleasant prospect. Ere we had been half an hour afloat we were wet through with the rain, which beat through the old palm awning as if it had been note-paper. This state of things, with a journey ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... received from my friend Don Manuel Rodriguez, the cranky miser of New Castile. On New Year's Eve in 1879 he showed me nine treasure boxes, and after informing me that every box contained a square number of golden doubloons, and that the difference between the contents of A and B was the same as between B and C, D and E, E and F, G and H, or H and ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... but how? No schoolboy ever drew a truer circle with a bit of string and a slate-pencil than that cranky craft made on the placid surface of the river each time Ramrod put a little ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... things. But I'll tell you about Aunt Pam—her name is Pamela, I think, but we call her Pam for short. She wasn't ever married, though I guess she's old enough. Somebody once said Aunt Pam was an old maid; but that can't be, for old maids are always cranky, and get out of bed backward every morning. Now Aunt Pam was never cranky in her life; and I know she gets out of bed like everybody else, for I've slept with her many a time. And nobody in their senses would call Aunt Pam old, and you'd better ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a few words as to Tom the hunter? Was ever a keener, a more patient, a more self-possessed, and consequently a more successful, sportsman? He it was who, from a cranky punt (no white man would venture out to sea in such a craft,) at three o'clock one windy afternoon, harpooned an immense bull-turtle, which towed him towards the Barrier Reef, into the track of the big steamers ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... both counts," he admitted. "I'm a cross, cranky old brother with a gun-powder temper that sometimes gets the best of me. As for the Willis will—what do you think ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... deluded cranky resistive unco-operative will-less hipped obsessed hypocritical of mean disposition excitable fearful exacting dissatisfied undecided wilful self-centered morbid doubtful demanding retarded ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... was indignant. "I might have known you would be ready with the cold water," she declared. "Clara is—well, cranky, and particular and all that, but the opportunity is wonderful. The girl would travel ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... feelings with regard to the vessel for which (man and tackle included) we were to pay two dollars per diem. It was a canoe of the smallest, built to hold one person besides the man at the small oars. It was impossible to stand up in such a cranky craft, and your seat was about 6 in. from the bottom boards. No wonder all the fishing was done by hand-lines. The local method was simplicity itself. To fifty yards of line of the thickness of sash-cord was attached ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... sympathize with the inebriates, if it does nothing else; and I am afraid it does nothing else with me. In spite of the warning, I continue to take my favorite beverage as strong and as frequently as ever, and so I suppose must look forward to a cranky nervous old age. ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... English in your ways, Henry, he wrote to his son, and I want you at home for a while. There's a young fellow called Marsh who can tutor you until you go to the University. I met him in Dublin a while since, and I like him. He's a bit cranky, but he's clever and he'll teach you a lot about Ireland. He's up to his neck in Irish things, and speaks Gaelic and wears an Irish kilt. At least he used to wear one, but he's left it off now, partly ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... those cranky dances, it'll do both of us good to step out in some other way than that silly tango, and monkey climb. Have you thought up any scheme yet for learning the truth ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... bounds, and if the comicality of his vein could be restrained by good taste." Reynolds, the dramatist, relates that on one occasion he was sitting in the front row of the balcony-box at the Haymarket, during the performance of O'Keeffe's farce of "The Son-in-Law," Parsons being the Cranky and Edwin the Bowkitt of the night. In the scene of Cranky's refusal to bestow his daughter upon Bowkitt, on the ground of his being such an ugly fellow, Edwin coolly advanced to the foot-lights, and said: "Ugly! Now I submit, to the decision of an enlightened ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... 'em gets no more, and is not so bad off,—leastways does not show it as he does. But father won't let 'em want, now he knows. Yo' see, Boucher's been pulled down wi' his childer,—and her being so cranky, and a' they could pawn has gone this last twelvemonth. Yo're not to think we'd ha' letten 'em clem, for all we're a bit pressed oursel'; if neighbours doesn't see after neighbours, I dunno who will.' Bessy seemed almost afraid ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... armed, they have to "ride any kind of a log in any water, to propel a log by jumping on it, by rolling it squirrel fashion with the feet, by punting it as one would a canoe; to be skilful in pushing, prying, and poling other logs from the quarter deck of the same cranky craft." Altho the logs are carried by the river, they have to be "driven" with amazing skill ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... up to the house, leapt on to the sill of the unused back-kitchen, some five feet from the ground, pushed with his paw at the cranky old hatchment, which was its only covering; and, in a second, the boy, straining out of the window the better to see, heard the rattle of the boards as the dog dropped ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... But I am sorry for the little boat. She was a good little scout and she was game to the end. You'll find that boats are a good deal like people," she went on, "when you know them as well as I do. Some of them are cranky and have to be coaxed along. Others are just plain lazy and must be pounded on the back. And there are some that are treacherous and the minute they get you in a tight place, they ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... there is a rude little fort and small garrison of Beluch soldiers, and a Wali, or governor. Starting the following morning, we put to sea again, and in three days—sailing against a strong southerly current, aggravated by a stiff north-easterly breeze, almost too much for our cranky little vessel, and which frightened the crew and our little timid Sheikh so much that they all lost presence of mind, and with the greatest difficulty were repressed from "'bouting ship," and wrecking themselves, together with us, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... lots o' cousins an' friends 'ut live all along on this 'ere river, more or less, till ye git to Chartham, that's sitooated to the mouth. Well, these fellers has been in the habit o' gittin' together and goin' deown river and hirin' once in a spell, some sort of old, cranky craft and goin' skylarking reound to Eastport and Portland. Arter a while they'd cum back and smuggle in a cargo o' somethin' or 'nother from the States, and sheirk the dooties. Well, 'beout a week ago, there was a confounded old crittur ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... along to the University of Lund, with letters to another doctor still more cranky than himself. This man was Doctor Kilian Stobaeus, a medical professor, physician to the king, and a naturalist of note. Stobaeus had a mixed-up museum of minerals, birds, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... are large caverns, not taverns: a mummy in a tavern would frighten all the idlers and ragamuffins out of it. I don't know but what it would be a good plan, but you two dear little twisters and turners of the king's English would frighten that cranky old fellow, Dr. Johnson, into a long sickness, if he was only alive and could hear you. I love to hear you talk; it does me good. Don't go out of the room, but take that pack of cards I gave you to play with, and sit down on the floor and ...
— Little Mittens for The Little Darlings - Being the Second Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... I and Hella and Verbenowitsch because we shan't see Frau Doktor M. any more for nearly 3 months. I only had 2 in History and Natural History, but 1 in everything else. Franke says: Anyone who is not in Professor Igel-Nigl's good books can find out that he's cranky and stupid and he could never get a one. Father is quite pleased. Of course Dora has got only ones and Hella has three twos. Lizzi, I think, has 3 or 4. Father has given each of us a 2 crown piece, we can blow it, he says and Mother has ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... library was a book-case which my father had recently purchased of some cranky inventor and had not filled. It was in shape and size something like the old-fashioned "wardrobes" which one sees in bed-rooms without closets, but opened all the way down, like a woman's night-dress. It had glass doors. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... telegraphed General Grant, and he, thinking General Caravajal (then in Washington seeking aid for the Republic) would answer the purpose, persuaded him to report to me in New Orleans. Caravajal promptly appeared, but he did not impress me very favorably. He was old and cranky, yet, as he seemed anxious to do his best, I sent him over to Brownsville, with credentials, authorizing him to cross into Mexico, and followed him myself by the next boat. When I arrived in Brownsville, matters in Matamoras had already reached ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... on Post. Big day. Pelican goes from here to York, stopping at Ungava on way out and comes back again. Brings supplies. Captain Gray came on shore. Has been with company thirty years, in northern waters fifty years. Jolly, cranky, old fellow. "You'll never get back" he says to us. "If you are at Ungava when I get there I'll bring you back." Calder, lumberman on Grand River and Sandwich Bay, here says we can't do it. Big Salmon stuffed and ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... the matter with the man? This mania for conversation irritated Stanley beyond words. And it was always the same—always some piffle about a dream he'd had, or some cranky idea he'd got hold of, or some rot he'd been reading. Stanley turned over on his back and kicked with his legs till he was a living waterspout. But even then... "I dreamed I was hanging over a terrifically high cliff, shouting to some one below." You would be! thought Stanley. ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... and a wife. Of this part of his life we know little beyond the fact that he was an able and industrious official. Probably, we shall not be far wrong in supposing him to have been much like other officials, only more intelligent, more witty, more sceptical, more learned, and more "cranky": also he kept stored somewhere at the back of his mind a spark of that mysterious thing called genius. At any rate, his recorded opinion, "There has never been anything perfect under the sun except the compositions of Mozart," smacks strongly of classical concerts ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... a toss of her head, "the on'y differ there is in it is that I am the same as ever I was, an' you have turned crabby an' cranky." ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... wouldn't do any harm," the man repeated in irritated tones; "he will be with me most of the time, and not around the house. You're getting too cranky for living, Lettice." He set the dog upon his feet. "What I'll call him I don't know; he's as gritty as—why, yes, I do, I'll call him General Jackson. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... it's mainly because I don't want a husband. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... from the mountain-tops to the pastures and plots below, I can always distinguish the back of Marie-Joseph from the others. To-day she brought me a present of milk and potatoes, and we sat down to chat over a cup of coffee—nay, four cups of coffee, for Marie-Joseph has no cranky ideas about abstinence from food and drink, and I must, perforce, pretend I have none. I love her and her ways, though she always manages to disturb me when I wish to work or think. Writing and thinking are not work to Marie-Joseph. She is wholly innocent of the former dissipation ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... kind, to play in the gutter, to splash in the sink about the hydrant, and to dance to the hand-organ that came regularly into the block, even though they sadly missed the monkey that was its chief attraction till the aldermen banished it in a cranky fit. Dancing came naturally to them, too; certainly no one took the trouble to teach them. It was a pretty sight to see them stepping to the time on the broad flags at the mouth of the alley. Not rarely they had for an appreciative audience the big chief himself, who looked ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... surprise of Isabel, who saw the red spark on the lawn. She thought her brother must be tired, and perhaps it really was the long day without food that made him so restless in mind and so uneasy. Bernard Clowes had been more than usually cranky that afternoon. Even the patient Val had had thoughts of throwing up his job when the cripple made him go through his week's accounts, scrutinizing every entry and cross-examining him on every transaction in such a tone as the head of a firm might employ to ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... tide turned I started paddling down. A little water came through a couple of deep cracks, but not much and I sopped it up with my hat. But oh, jingoes, I never had to sit up so straight in school (not even when the principal came through the class-room) as I did in that cranky old log with a hole in it. And oh, you would have chucked a couple of chuckles if you'd seen me guiding my Indian bark with a bunch of reeds. Honest, they looked like, a ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... empty. Oxford is—Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another: such at all events was to be its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make friends, for they knew that his education had been cranky, and had severed him from other boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory of a radiance, but the memory of ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... stubbed her toe, plunging forward and tilting the litter so that it turned turtle, like a cranky hammock. With a little scream of alarm Hazel Holland pitched out headfirst and took a graceful, curving dive into the top of a tree just below them. The others saw her feet disappear in the foliage, heard a muffled ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... life of the family and instead of the husband and father being cross and cranky at times, he will always be the same; trying each day in some new way to make his wife and children better and happier, and they in return will be a joy to themselves and a comfort to him. What a happy home ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... and the pressure never relaxed. And suddenly I heard a snap behind me, and the place in which we stood was lighted up—feebly, but enough to show me a cell-like sort of room, stone-walled, of course, and destitute of everything in the furnishing way but a bit of a cranky old table and a couple of three-legged stools on either side of it. With the released hand he had snapped the catch of an electric pocket-lamp, and in its blue glare he drew the revolver away from my head, and stepping aside, ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... give it up if she knew I wanted it! She's an unselfish little thing. She took it because it was all that was left when Laura disposed of the 'soulful poet' part," Ivy said. Then after a silence, "I wonder why bad health makes me cranky and selfish and envious, instead of patient and meek, like the ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... leave the earth-moon system. And they deserved that success when one considers the difficulties and discomforts—the months spent in acclimatization chambers back on earth, learning to breathe the air as tenuous as that of Mars, the challenging of the void in the tiny rocket driven by the cranky reaction motors of the twenty-first century, and mostly the facing of ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... to the council. Fee was awfully cut up over his disappointment, and cranky too; but nobody minded what he said, until, all at once, Nora got in a tantrum, and declared he was "acting very mean to Phil," that he needn't always expect to have things his own way, and that papa was perfectly right to give Phil the first chance. That set Fee off, and in about two ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... the plantation because they were sold and their children were sold. Sometimes their masters were mean and cranky. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... leave the steamer and shoot the current of the swift Lesser Slave River in a cranky dugout. The Dominion Government, with a series of wing-dams, is putting this river to school, teaching it how to make its bed neatly and wash out its own channel. Where the Lesser Slave River runs into the Athabasca, we change the dugout for a scow, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... voyage in an open boat.] At Guiuan I embarked on board an inconveniently cranky, open boat, which was provided with an awning only three feet square, for Tacloban, the chief town of Leyte. After first experiencing an uninterrupted calm, we incurred great danger in a sudden tempest, so that we had to retrace the whole distance by ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... "Too good! too cranky!" said Master Putnam. "A pretty world the rascals would make of it, if the honest men were too good to fight. It seems to me there is something absolutely wicked in their ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... Wilkie objected to keeping a cranky old body like Mysy in his house, Cree came back to Thrums and took a single room with a hand-loom in it. The flooring was only lumpy earth, with sacks spread over it to protect Mysy's feet. The room contained two dilapidated old coffin-beds, a dresser, a high-backed arm-chair, several three-legged ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... be a jolly, cranky old seadog of the old school. He has been with the Hudson's Bay Company for thirty years, and has sailed the northern seas for fifty. He shook his head pessimistically when he heard about our expedition. "You'll never get back," ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... "Thankee! thankee!" or "cranky! cranky!" sounded from all the furniture; there was so much of it, that each article stood in the other's way, to get a ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... 'toilettes.' I am going to have a good time with all the farm people, and the school children, and be just as I was before I married. There are some of my clothes still hanging up in my old room, I shall put them on, and grub in the garden, rake, weed, and mow. Our poor machine was dreadfully cranky before I left; I should think it has fallen to pieces by now, but I mean to have a try. Mother's bit of front lawn is the pride of her heart. Black Bess will meet me at the station, and Rover—dear affectionate dog. I shall swing on the ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... fool of himself. Most boys attract more attention the first time they kick over the traces than they ever did in all their lives before. 'Tisn't any wonder to me that the elder brother gets a little cranky when he sees the fuss made over the prodigal, first because he's gone wrong and then because he's going right, same as decent folks have been doing ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... what his poor, cranky system needed, an' I knowed how to get it into him, especially as he'd never tasted meat in all his life. From that time on, he never saw no meat on our table, nor no chickens, nor sea scavengers, nor nothin', but ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... Gilbert said to Lucia. "He's got a heart of gold, but he can be cranky and eccentric sometimes. Maybe he's got one of his moods to-day. I never know. Tomorrow he'll be all right—perhaps. I hope so, anyhow.... But come inside. You must be tired after your trip. ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... erect a little table with legs in the water, to lay these on. One roll had a slightly musty smell, and Gibson said to me, "This roll's rotten; shall I chuck it away?" "Chuck it away," I said; "why, man, you must be cranky to talk such rubbish as throwing away food in such a region as this!" "Why," said he, "nobody won't eat it." "No," said I, "but somebody will eat it; I for one, and enjoy it too." Whereupon he looked up at me, and ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... hurried out to the garage, muttering: "Lord, what a family! And now Myra is going to get pathetic on me because we don't train with this millionaire outfit. Oh, Lord, sometimes I'd like to quit the whole game. And the office worry and detail just as bad. And I act cranky and—I don't mean to, but ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Guthrie Carey ground through his strong teeth, "that the cranky beast would break his neck." It was not the beast's ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... internal-combustion engine, carburetion, compression, ignition, and explosion, but also a keen insight into the whims of the human, and terribly inhuman, thing—the gasolene-motor. Nothing can be sweeter when it is sweet, and nothing more devilish when it is cranky, than an airplane engine. ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... cost of cutting and hauling in different seasons, on mill-work and transportation and overhead expenses, and how to market and where, and how to get money and how to get credit and how to manage these cranky independent Yankees and the hot-tempered irresponsible Canucks. It was all very well for advanced radicals to say that the common workmen in a business were as good as the head of the concern. They weren't and that was all there was to ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... natural transition, her thought turned from Tom Verity to fix itself upon the one other possible witness of her ignominy—namely, the young master mariner who, coming ashore in Proud, the lobster-catcher's cranky boat, had walked up the shifting shingle to the crown of the ridge and stood watching her, in silence, for a quite measurable period, before passing on his way down to the ferry. For, from her first ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the west country, as though the demand for such colonial productions in these parts was insatiable. This was pleasant, you will say; but what was to be done? We had nothing else. Now, nothing saps a man's temper like ennui. The cranky, peevish people one meets with would be excellent folk, if they only had something to do. As for us, I'll venture to say two men more disposed to go pleasantly down the current of life it were hard to meet with; and yet, such was the consequence of these confounded four months' sequestration from ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... on the south side of a long lagoon, we preferred sleeping on the mainland, though they offered their cranky canoes to ferry us over. This ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... yourself all this while just what a fat run is, here is your answer: Tips; a fine train filled with fine ladies and fine gentlemen, not all of them so cranky as X, of Cleveland—thank heaven for that!—though a good many of them have their peculiarities and are willing to pay generously for the privilege of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... followed by Pete Wilson, mounted the platform to relieve the branders. "Chase yoreselves—me an' Pete are shore going to show you cranky bugs how to do a hundred an hour. Ain't we, Pete? An' look here, you," he remarked to the heaters, "don't you fellers keep us waiting ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... enough for all standing around to bear, and then he ran for the train, which had just come in. Soon he and his brothers were on board and off, leaving poor Ricks to be heartily laughed at by those who had observed his sudden terror. It was many a day before the cranky station master heard the last ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... he whispered. "Ase Peters said the Grand Panjandrum was cranky as a shark with the toothache all day yesterday. You must tell me the yarn when we get together. I missed you when I called just now, but I'll be down again pretty soon. You won't lose nothin' by this. ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... excursion was not to be a very formidable one; it was only a canoe trip several miles up the coast, to a place where the wild ducks and geese were numerous. Like all white people, on their first introduction to the birch canoe, they thought it a frail, cranky boat, and were quite disgusted with it, and some of the tricks it played upon them, on some of their first attempts to manage it. For example, Frank, who prided himself on his ability in pulling an ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... he fingered the horrible ridged cicatrice, he could see the boundless ocean and the boundless blue sky from a wretched cranky canoe-shaped boat, in which certain Arab, Somali, Negro, and other gentlemen were proceeding all the way from near Berbera to near Aden with large trustfulness in Allah and with certain less creditable goods. It was a long, unwieldy vessel which ten men could row, one could steer with a broad ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... broken in the cargo net while loading, and then proceeded to pile more vegetables on top of it and around it until the Maggie's funnel barely showed through the piled-up freight, and the little vessel was so top heavy she was cranky. In order to get at the small boat, therefore, it would be necessary to shift this load off the house, and the question that now confronted Scraggs and his crew was to find a spot that would accommodate the part of the deckload ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... museum of fossils, but a garden full of rosebuds; nobody with a strand of gray hair will be invited. As for the lame, the halt and the blind, they can come next week. I've just been looking you over, Peter; you are getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age"—I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—"is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some young blood pumped ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... ignition, and explosion, but also a keen insight into the whims of the human, and terribly inhuman, thing—the gasolene-motor. Nothing can be sweeter when it is sweet, and nothing more devilish when it is cranky, ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... she, "I haven't enough trouble trying to keep a cranky man like her pa in good humour, without being plagued by Julia Elizabeth"—she paused, for there was a knock at the door.—"If," said she to the door, "you are a woman with ferns in a pot I don't want you, and I don't want Dublin Bay herrings, or boot-laces ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... was no way of corroborating this. She fully acknowledged to us the lies which had created so much trouble. "Well, I was telling the first lies and then when I was going to tell him that I knew that I was telling wrong he acted so cranky and said such things to me. He said he knew somebody had done bad things to me and so I thought I had to give the name of somebody and ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... a book-case which my father had recently purchased of some cranky inventor and had not filled. It was in shape and size something like the old-fashioned "wardrobes" which one sees in bed-rooms without closets, but opened all the way down, like a woman's night-dress. It had glass doors. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... not in the racing class, Frank was well satisfied with her, for he had discovered that she possessed many good qualities. She could be held pretty near to the wind without yawing and she was not at all cranky, nor did she require much weather helm. Of course, she could not run as near to the wind as a cutter-rigged yacht of the racing class, but she could do ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... cause Ray so vehemently championed was away on detached service, and Canker really did not know just what to do, and was too proud and sensitive to seek advice. He was a gallant soldier in the field, but a man of singularly unfortunate disposition,—crabbed, cranky, and suspicious; and thus it resulted that he, too, joined the little band of Ray haters, despite the fact that he felt ashamed ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... reassure herself she took a candle and went out to the wood-shed. No; there, in the dim shadows of the cobwebby place, was the stanza that was proof of her son's genius. Then Peggy reflected with a glad heart that it was the accepted belief of the world that geniuses were always cranky and uncomfortable, and, womanlike, Peggy gave thanks that it was permitted her to have a genius ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... you I'll be," said Mrs. Jones. "I wish my poor old mother was as easy to live with as you, Sara; but 'tis being alone so long has made her cranky. And the money—oh, she loves it dearly. Indeed, if I can get Davy to agree, we will give up this house and go home and live near her; 'tis pity the old woman should grow harder in her ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... to be your nurse. Just an awfully cranky old nurse, and so scientific. And you must have fresh air." Her voice broke. "Oh, and me sleeping away from you! I'll never do it again. I don't know what I would do if anything happened to you.... Do ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... mebbe so," said the Squire. He felt that the vagaries of the affections was too deep a subject for him. "Anyhow, Looizy, I don't want no old maids and bachelors potterin' round this farm getting cranky notions in their heads. Look at the professor. Why, a good woman would have taken the nonsense out ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... Little-Lovely Leila for seeing sights? Anybody could see sights—any dreary and dried-up fossil, any crabbed and cranky old maid—the Tower and Westminster Abbey were for those who had nothing better to do. As for herself, her horizon just now was bounded by primrose wreaths and fragrant boxes, and the promise of seeing Barry ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... gave her that. And Mrs. Baynes, too, shrewdly recognized that behind the uncompromising frankness of June's manner there was much of the Forsyte. If the girl had been merely frank and courageous, Mrs. Baynes would have thought her 'cranky,' and despised her; if she had been merely a Forsyte, like Francie—let us say—she would have patronized her from sheer weight of metal; but June, small though she was—Mrs. Baynes habitually admired quantity—gave her an ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gutter, to splash in the sink about the hydrant, and to dance to the hand-organ that came regularly into the block, even though they sadly missed the monkey that was its chief attraction till the aldermen banished it in a cranky fit. Dancing came naturally to them, too; certainly no one took the trouble to teach them. It was a pretty sight to see them stepping to the time on the broad flags at the mouth of the alley. Not rarely ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... many on 'em gets no more, and is not so bad off,—leastways does not show it as he does. But father won't let 'em want, now he knows. Yo' see, Boucher's been pulled down wi' his childer,—and her being so cranky, and a' they could pawn has gone this last twelvemonth. Yo're not to think we'd ha' letten 'em clem, for all we're a bit pressed oursel'; if neighbours doesn't see after neighbours, I dunno who will.' Bessy seemed almost afraid lest ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... should pray a whole lot—and pursue the even tenor of my way; and if my conscience should assert itself in the face of all this, I should think it too cranky a ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... never able to get a canoe that entirely satisfied me as to weight and model. I bought the smallest birches I could find; procured a tiny Chippewa dugout from North Michigan and once owned a kayak. They were all too heavy and they were cranky to a degree. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... worry over such things. He wants me to give up buying him the fur-trimmed overcoat and get a coat and shoes for Goodman's children, as they were praying so hard for them, but I have enough to do without clothing other people's children. If Goodman would quit his cranky notions and use his talents for people who could understand him, instead of preaching to those ragamuffins he might now be receiving a magnificent salary and clothing ...
— Children's Edition of Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer • S. B. Shaw
... one who really caused the trouble. He spent a good deal of time in the spring-house trying to fool his stomach by keeping it filled up all the time with water. He had got past the cranky stage, being too weak for it; his face was folded up in wrinkles like an accordion and his double chin was so flabby you could have tucked it ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... brig enough, and handy to manage when she had plenty of sea-room, and a wind right aft; but on a bowline, or when the wind was on the quarter, and there was a bit of a sea on, she kept such a stiff weather-helm, and was such a downright cranky vessel, never bending down to a breeze or lifting to the swell, that it was no wonder that as soon as the hands got used to her ways, and tumbled to her contrary points—and she was that contrary sometimes as ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... sad little heart lying as heavy as a plummet in her breast, was just as bright and useful and entertaining to her cranky old friend as if life was a boon instead of a bane to her. You know from her letter how bitter life was to her; and I think if you have ever known sorrow and a great disappointment, you will comprehend how it was possible for her, with the fear of God before her, and a desire ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... more to that business than you folks think. Olive didn't notice Bill Edwards till Sol went off to sea and stayed two years and over. How do you know she shook Sol? You might just as well say he shook her. He always was stubborn as an off ox and cranky as a windlass. I wonder how he feels now, when she's lost her last red and is goin' to be drove out of house and home. And all on account of that fool 'mountain and ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... me had a long talk, Christmas Day, respecting of the Model. William is very sensible. But sometimes cranky. William said, 'What will you do with it, John?' I said, 'Patent it.' William said, 'How patent it, John?' I said, 'By taking out a Patent.' William then delivered that the law of Patent was a cruel wrong. William said, 'John, if you make your invention public, before you get a ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... ennyway and why don't you want me to support you enny longer? I am your godfather and you are my godchild and it is a legal afare, dad sez, and if ennybody sez ennything about it they will have to deel with me, see? Ennyway mebbe I was kinder cranky about it, and you kinder fibbd, so lets say we had a scrap and shake on it and let it go at that. Lots of the fellers hear have scraps with the girls, and last weak Dinky Odell who is Carl Odells yungist brother had one with Heloise because he ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... gathers rare editions of the Bible; and tens of thousands of humbler Americans carry their inherited idealism into the necessarily sordid experiences of life in an imperfectly organized country, suppress it for fear of being thought "cranky" or "soft," and then, in their imagination and all that feeds their imagination, give it vent. You may watch the process any evening at the "movies" or the melodrama, on the trolley-car or in ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... investments. You can do this. It is not hard, and will pay in the end. I am old and lonesome, and want somebody to speak to besides the cat—somebody to sit at table and say good-morning to me. In short, I want you for my son, or grandson, if you like that better. I shall be queer, and cranky, and hard to get along with at times, but I shall mean well always. I shall give you a thousand dollars a year to manage my affairs, and when I die I shall divide with you and Bessie. I have made a new will to that ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... longer thou wouldst ramble about abroad. Well, but thou art a dashing fine fellow, a fine fellow; thou canst still lift ten puds in one hand as of yore, I suppose? Thy deceased father, excuse me, was cranky in some respects, but he did well when he hired a Swiss for thee; thou rememberest, how thou and he had fistfights; that's called gymnastics, isn't it?—But why have I been cackling thus? I have only been keeping Mr. Panshin" (she never called him Panshin, ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... be a cranky car," Foster interposed pacifically. "Why, she's practically new!" He stepped over a puddle and stood beside Bud, peering down at the silent engine. "Have you looked at the ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... fright, not knowing whether we might find a precipice at the bottom, and be shot over, perhaps into the sea. Very soon, too, we reached some steps, down which we went, of course faster than ever, with terrific bounds, till the cranky old vehicle could no longer stand ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... way. Every one of the ten girls in the store had little pork-chop-and-fried-onion dreams every night of becoming Mrs. Ramsay. For, next year old Bachman was going to take him in for a partner. And each one of them knew that if she should catch him she would knock those cranky health notions of his sky high before the wedding cake ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... My mood was that known as cranky. We were in the drawing-room, after what we were compelled to call dinner. It had consisted of steak burned to cinders, potatoes soaked to a pulp, and a rice pudding that looked like a poultice ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... good dancers, diet. That is, they are careful to eat what is best for them, and not everything that may tickle the palate yet raise a rumpus inside one and upset the whole system, and make them cross and cranky and ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... of the trials of the young soul going through it, a suffering so great that suicide is often seriously contemplated as the only solution. And all this turmoil is kept within the heart of the sufferer. To the outsider the boy, the girl, is merely "cranky" or "contrary." If not constantly nagged at and reproved for his awkwardness at home, he is sure to have it ridiculed by his schoolmates, particularly by those of the opposite sex. He cannot help being round-shouldered and loose-jointed, ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... an able and industrious official. Probably, we shall not be far wrong in supposing him to have been much like other officials, only more intelligent, more witty, more sceptical, more learned, and more "cranky": also he kept stored somewhere at the back of his mind a spark of that mysterious thing called genius. At any rate, his recorded opinion, "There has never been anything perfect under the sun except the compositions of Mozart," smacks strongly ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... himself shaking hands with a cranky-eyed, bald-headed man, whose face looked youthful enough from what little could be seen of it, for most of it was covered by a snow-white beard, carefully trimmed—by his wife, who did it on Sundays, at which times she also shaved the back ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the Spahi, which conveyed us across the Strait, was seaworthy for all her cranky appearance, and made the passage of thirty-two miles quickly and comfortably for all her roughness of accommodation. She was a cargo-boat, but her skipper was English, and did his best to make the ladies feel at home. Besides, Captain No. 1 had brought a select basket of provisions and ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... Dulcibella, but, anyway, she seemed to take no notice of us and steamed slowly on. We quite expected to fall in with her when we came to the islands, but the actual sight of her has excited us a good deal. She is an ugly, cranky little vessel, painted grey, with one funnel. Davis is contemptuous about her low freeboard forward; says he would rather go to sea in the Dulce. He has her dimensions and armament (learnt from Brassey) at ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... well lie down and read under the shade of one of the trees," mused the boy, "for the trout will be all in the most cranky places right under the stones and roots. But one can't read without a book, and I came out on purpose to catch something, and I mean to do it; so ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... anti-Semitism.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} As a matter of fact, it was then high time to bid him farewell: but the proof of this came only too soon. Richard Wagner, ostensibly the most triumphant creature alive; as a matter of fact, though, a cranky and desperate decadent, suddenly fell helpless and broken on his knees before the Christian cross.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Was there no German at that time who had the eyes to see, and the sympathy in his soul to feel, the ghastly nature ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... man turned with a dignified drawing-together of his dressing- gown and moved back. Apparently, the renovation of a cranky lamp was the whole content of the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... in reeds, and at a loss which way to go, the soft ripple of breaking waves struck my ear like sweet music. The sea was telling me of its proximity. Carefully balancing myself, I stood up in the cranky canoe, and peering over the grassy thickets, saw before me the broad waters of Helena Sound. The fresh salt breeze from the ocean struck upon my forehead, and nerved me to a renewal of my efforts to get within a region of higher land, and to a ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... this letter until I get out of Russia for they are so cranky about their blessed old country. They would not even let me have a little flag to send to the boys at home! I found out to-day that a policeman comes every day to see what we have been doing, what hours we keep, etc. In fact every movement is watched, and one day when we returned to the hotel, ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... him along to the University of Lund, with letters to another doctor still more cranky than himself. This man was Doctor Kilian Stobaeus, a medical professor, physician to the king, and a naturalist of note. Stobaeus had a mixed-up museum of minerals, birds, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... up your cranky opinions against the hard facts? The plain truth is that everybody who ever heard of Stanhope is going to give you the cold shoulder for a dog; we can depend absolutely ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... at your sarvice," replied the urchin, giving me a familiar nod. "'Ope your leg ain't so cranky as it wos, ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... swiftly on her way, bounding over the low, gentle swell of the calm ocean. Tom shivered whenever he thought of the possibility of the motors becoming cranky. With such important human freight aboard any mishap to the machinery would ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... old and cranky, much of it haywired together, much of it invented from scratch. But Rakkan the Martian, for all his lack of formal education, was unbelievably clever where it came to making apparatus and making it behave, ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... out-climb McGee. Did you see how McGee took off? Like a cadet doin' solo—afraid to lift her. And they say he's one of the best aces in the R.F.C. Huh! I think he's got the pip! Ever since he first touched his wheels to this 'drome he's been yellin' about his motor bein' cranky. And it's all jake. She takes gas like a race horse ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... had wished to see were absent; but Mr. Hogg set to work in the most business- like style. He borrowed a boat from the Rev. William Walker, of the Gaboon Mission, who kindly wrote that I should have something less cranky if I could wait awhile; he manned it with three of his own Krumen, and he collected the necessary stores and supplies of cloth, pipes and tobacco, rum, white wine, and absinthe ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... power—that's how he looks at it. And of course the bigger the scale of the work the cheaper the power will work out. But the Khedive's holding back. It may be just a temporary whim—may be all right again to-morrow. But you never know. And if you think Ferdinand's the man to give in to a cranky Khedive, you're much mistaken. His idea now is to raise all the capital he can lay hands on, and buy him out! What do you say to that? Buy the Khedive clean out of the company. It's a large order. And if I were you, old man, as soon ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... tough as fencing-wire), or humping great buckets of sour milk to the pigs or the 'poddies' (hand-fed calves) in the pen. I'd get off the horse and give her a hand sometimes with a young steer, or a cranky old cow that wouldn't 'bail-up' and threatened her with her horns. ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... and with a deck-load of lumber she's cranky and topheavy. I'm warning you, Joey. Remember he is a poor ship owner who doesn't know ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... carried off one of my spars, and be hanged to them! If I've let daylight into a few of them, d'ye see, it's all in good part and by way of duty. I've drunk my share—enough to sweeten my bilge-water—but there are few that have seen me cranky in the upper rigging or refusing to answer to my helm. I never drew pay or prize-money that my mate in distress was not welcome to the half of it. As to the Polls, the less said the better. I've been a true consort to my Phoebe since she agreed to look ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Joyce explained as they hurried away. "But it wouldn't do any good, I guess, if we knew. We couldn't go and question them, for it's plain from what the agent said that they don't want to talk about it. My, but that man was cranky, wasn't he!" ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... for the poor girl's power of endurance was almost exhausted when her friends turned the kayak violently up. This was well, and Adolay drew a long gasping breath; but now the inexperience of the rescuers came into play, for, being ignorant of the cranky nature of a birch-bark canoe, they acted without the necessary caution, the canoe overturned and they all found themselves in the water. This time Adolay managed to wriggle out of her position, but being unable to swim she could only cling helplessly to the kayak. Nootka, ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... a minute of his old hearty laugh, but it was soon stifled. As they had kept up in Paris all their suburban habits, there appeared at the breakfast hour, in the midst of this household disorganized by poverty and illness, a parasite, a seedy looking little bald man, cranky and peevish, of whom they always spoke as "the man who has read Proudhon." It was thus that Heurtebise, who probably had never known his name, introduced him to everybody. When he was asked "Who is that?" he unhesitatingly replied, "Oh! a very clever fellow, ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... the skippers seemed to think so, and as a rule they declined to take us, saying that it would get them into trouble, while in one case, where the captain of a schooner eagerly agreed to take us, merely stipulating to be well paid, the vessel was such a cranky, ill-found affair that I shrank from trusting my aunt and Lilla ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... bunches of lilacs in a broken pitcher. Twelve yellow chairs, a mahogany stand, a dark rag-carpet, some speckled Pacific sea-shells on the shelf, among which stood a whale's tooth with a drawing of a cranky ship thereon, and an ostrich's egg that hung by a string from the ceiling, were the adornments of the room. When we were dressed for church, we looked out of the window till the bell tolled, and the chaise of the Baxters and Sawyers had driven to the gate; then we went ourselves. Grand'ther ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... not a thing have I found stowed away anywhere. It isn't often that he's left to himself, for when I get my midday sleep Mrs. Wendover sits with him; or, if he's cranky, and wants to be alone, she stays in the next room, with the door ajar between them; and Robert, the groom, is on duty in the passage, in case the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... man in the bunch right now," he rejoined. "Look at me—as calm as you please, and as happy as a king, while they're fluttering around like a lot of cranky hens whose heads are ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the morning tide in a sampan or native boat (pulled by a crew of six natives), that we had hired for the occasion from a Chinaman in the capital. More than half our journey had to be accomplished by sea, which, as it was blowing half a gale, and looking at the capabilities of our cranky old craft (christened Sri Laut, or Beauty of the Sea, by her proud owner), was not a pleasant prospect. Ere we had been half an hour afloat we were wet through with the rain, which beat through the old palm awning as if it had been ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... all ashore and looking around, before Bandy-legs managed to jump out of his cranky cedar canoe. He acted as though glad at least to have arrived safe and sound, ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... me, namely, that they might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things—one who, moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for certain labours—once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all that, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... charge here ever since Mr. Butterwood took to travelling about for the good of his rheumatisms? Why, my dear young lady, the whole country looks upon Mike as a pattern man-of-all-work. He may be getting a little cranky and independent in his notions, for he has been pretty much his own master for years, but I am sure you could find no one to take his place who would be more ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... vein could be restrained by good taste." Reynolds, the dramatist, relates that on one occasion he was sitting in the front row of the balcony-box at the Haymarket, during the performance of O'Keeffe's farce of "The Son-in-Law," Parsons being the Cranky and Edwin the Bowkitt of the night. In the scene of Cranky's refusal to bestow his daughter upon Bowkitt, on the ground of his being such an ugly fellow, Edwin coolly advanced to the foot-lights, and said: "Ugly! Now I submit, to the decision ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... So were his associates, Kid Blaney, Stormy Longton, Holy Dick, and Cranky Herefer. Where were Pete Clancy and Nick Devereux, Kate Seton's hired men? They were all absent. So was Kate herself. Ah, yes, he had heard she had gone to Myrtle. Anyway, her sister, Helen, was there—with Mrs. John Day. Where was her beau—Charlie ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the bell, the "bad lot" of men came together. They numbered more than two hundred, though the Foundry was working short. They had been notified that "that gonoph of a Whiffler was kicked out, and a new feller was in, who looked cranky enough, and wanted to see 'em and tell 'em whether he was a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... He says he 'd figgered all along on bein' married in September, 'n' he never for one moment mistrusted as he wouldn't be; but he says of all the awful things to count on, Tilly Pearson was the worst. Oh! my, he says, but she was cranky! 'n' then he rubbed his chin with his hand a long while 'n' then said 'cranky,' over again in a very hard tone. He says would you believe it that after all his love-makin' along the first o' September she begin to get terrible uppish 'n' throw her head aroun' ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... 1866.—Chirumba's village being on the south side of a long lagoon, we preferred sleeping on the mainland, though they offered their cranky canoes to ferry us over. This lagoon ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... old thing!" said he; "I can't make out what's come over it. My old grandfather's shot scores of deer with the tarnation weppin, and I guess it's jest cranky, that's all. I bet I'll shoot the next fowl that comes across haar, or I'll ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... depth, he would fall easy victim to the first well-aimed paddle-stroke. And he knew it. Thus, hesitant, his snarling teeth not two yards from the canoe, he stood growling in futile indignation at the cranky craft's crankier occupants. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... Amanda with the innocent candor of a twelve-year-old. "Aunt Rebecca—is she here again? Ach, if she wasn't so cranky I'd be glad still when she comes, but you know how she acts all ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... host. "You know, at worst she could only get a wetting if I kept over the sea," he said. "And very likely the Flying Fish will be cranky ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "It makes me cranky," observed Whitney, "to see the way a lot of the girls seem to notice just such fellows as Prescott, Darrin, Reade, Dalzell—-fellows who, by rights, ought to be through with their schooling and earning wages as respectful grocery ...
— The High School Left End - Dick & Co. Grilling on the Football Gridiron • H. Irving Hancock
... he read her account of how odd and how cranky Colonel Crofton had become when wholly absorbed in his hobby of breeding wire-haired terriers. How, when one of his dogs had failed to win a prize, he would go about muttering to himself, and visiting his annoyance and ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... window after the other, with the cranky mien and action of a thwarted child, and slammed the shutters together, barring out the sinister sight of his guards. Gavin did not try to prevent him from this act of boyish spite. The master-mind's reaction, in its hour ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... that, by natural transition, her thought turned from Tom Verity to fix itself upon the one other possible witness of her ignominy—namely, the young master mariner who, coming ashore in Proud, the lobster-catcher's cranky boat, had walked up the shifting shingle to the crown of the ridge and stood watching her, in silence, for a quite measurable period, before passing on his way down to the ferry. For, from her first sight of him, had ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... blue, with a brown camel train ambling down it; a ravine with its arbor-like shelters for cavalry; wounded soldiers in carts, or riding when they were able to ride; now and then an officer on his cranky little stallion—the whole ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... "Bob" was alone at her desk when he came out, and something about her appearance caused the old warrior to look twice. He was exactly on time, but the judge could wait. He was a cranky old scoundrel anyhow, was Judge Halloran, and it would do him good to cool his heels for a few minutes. Tom paused with his hand ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... father was sick with somepun' mysterious, and all the docs shook their heads and said 'Gee! we dunno what it is,' and so you sneaked down to the treasure-chamber—you see, your dad—your father, I should say—he was a cranky old Frenchman—just in the story, you know. He didn't think you could do anything yourself about him being mysteriously sick. ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... awfully important just because he's making a fool of himself. Most boys attract more attention the first time they kick over the traces than they ever did in all their lives before. 'Tisn't any wonder to me that the elder brother gets a little cranky when he sees the fuss made over the prodigal, first because he's gone wrong and then because he's going right, same as decent folks have been doing ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... After those cranky dances, it'll do both of us good to step out in some other way than that silly tango, and monkey climb. Have you thought up any scheme yet for learning ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... the world by the windpipe. Its very life-breath would be at our disposal. Ha! What about revolution, then? What about popular discontent, and stiff-necked legislators, and cranky editors? What about commercial and financial rivals? What about these damned Socialists, with their brass-lunged bazoo, howling about monopoly and capitalism and all the rest of it? Eh, what? Just one squeeze," here Flint closed his corded, veinous fingers, "just one tightening of the fist, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Big day. Pelican goes from here to York, stopping at Ungava on way out and comes back again. Brings supplies. Captain Gray came on shore. Has been with company thirty years, in northern waters fifty years. Jolly, cranky, old fellow. "You'll never get back" he says to us. "If you are at Ungava when I get there I'll bring you back." Calder, lumberman on Grand River and Sandwich Bay, here says we can't do it. Big Salmon stuffed and baked ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... I don't want a husband. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... writhed on the floor a minute and then was silent. He had been given only a mild shock, but it had been enough for his fluttery, cranky heart. ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... objected to keeping a cranky old body like Mysy in his house, Cree came back to Thrums and took a single room with a hand-loom in it. The flooring was only lumpy earth, with sacks spread over it to protect Mysy's feet. The ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... be limited enough, either way," Mr. Valentin retorted easily. He had no hankering for the East and no grudge against fate for making him a Western man malgre lui. "I've known kickers who didn't appear to grow much, except to grow cranky," he said. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... not quite so gracious as he has been on former meetings," thought Tom, as he led the way inside. "I wonder if he is going to get cranky?" ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... one would at first suspect; John Macdonald, a Scotsman, whose record was that he had never solved a puzzle himself since the club was formed, though frequently he had put others on the track of a deep solution; Tim Churton, a bank clerk, full of cranky, unorthodox ideas as to perpetual motion; also Harold Tomkins, a prosperous accountant, remarkably familiar with the elegant branch of mathematics—the theory ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... of woman's ballot. No one can look upon the face of that venerated, noble woman, who has grown gray in her life-work, and not be impressed that there has been something more than sentiment, more than a cranky idea, impelling her in all these ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... who still point to me as one who has deliberately ruined a brilliant career, who pity me as one who has gone under, who speak with shrugged shoulders and uplifted eyebrows at my unfortunate marriage and my obscure and cranky occupation. The world, they say, was at my feet. So it was. But what the pitying critics lack the grace to understand is that better than to have it under one's feet is to have it, or that of it which ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... not, however, be supposed, because of this perfect and continual illusion of Nature's playful phenomena, that all visible creation is purely an illusion of the senses, as some cranky metaphysicians would have it, because this ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... a little dried up man of forty-five, was crabbed, cranky, sour and mean. He had the eyes, nose and brain of a fox, while perhaps the rest of him, heart and soul, came close to being just plain hog. He was stingy and suspicious, and people were no more in the habit of speaking well of him than they were of riding out ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... "Tom Fillot looks cranky, but there isn't much the matter with him. Coxswain Dance couldn't jig to save his life. T'others are blue mouldy, and old Whitney talks about 'em as if he was using bricks and mortar. He says ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... Livingstone agreed to make a voyage on Lake Tanganyika, one of the chief objects of which was to settle the long mooted point as to whether the Rusizi river is an effluent or an influent. They embarked in a somewhat cranky canoe, hollowed-out of a mvule-tree, which carried sixteen rowers, Selim, Ferajji, the cook, and ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... shaved-head-and-blister treatment. Remember, Ned, his brain is made of finer stuff than that stolid sponge inside your pia mater, that can take in quantum sufficit of beer, fog, and tobacco-smoke, unharmed. He can't stand it, and he's too rare and delicate a machine to go cranky thus soon. You've got the child under your thumb,—bring him out o' that. Make him take a dose of Verulam, get him back into the world again, and order him four hours per ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... I don't care. It was all twice as much fun as being wheeled in lacy prams by cranky nurses, as Jeff and I were. But I know how you feel. Are you ashamed of having ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... it. I've got to be my own natural self. If they don't like me they can tell me to go home. I don't care so long as you and Tommy dear, and Hazel, and cross, cranky Margery like me ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... "Pa's awfully cranky," Mrs. Cox said resignedly. "He's always been that way! You cook him corn beef—that's the night he wanted pork chops; sometimes he'll snap your head off if you speak, and others he'll ask you why you sit around like a mute and don't talk. Sometimes, if you ask him for money, ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... wonderful, considering the cranky nature of a canoe at its best, what journeys can be made in them. My skilled canoeman and I used to run wild rapids, and cross over storm swept lakes of large dimensions. We lived on the game we could shoot as we hurried along, slept on the rocks or sandy beach where night overtook us, and ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... off!" On such occasions, horses had to be sent to drag the waggons as before, and others to haul the engine back to the work-shops. It was constantly getting out of order; its plugs, pumps, or cranks, got wrong; it was under repair as often as at work; at length it became so cranky that the horses were usually sent out after it to drag it when it gave up; and the workmen generally declared it to be a "perfect plague." Mr. Blackett did not obtain credit amongst his neighbours for these experiments. ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... once Harriet stubbed her toe, plunging forward and tilting the litter so that it turned turtle, like a cranky hammock. With a little scream of alarm Hazel Holland pitched out headfirst and took a graceful, curving dive into the top of a tree just below them. The others saw her feet disappear in the foliage, heard a muffled cry for assistance, ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... mots in this here jug, [1] There's none like saucy Dolly; And but to view her dimber mug [2] Is e'er excuse for folly. She runs such precious cranky rigs With pinching wedge and lockets [3] Yet she's the toast of all the prigs ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... fairy-land, with its lights, its banners, its lovely girls, uniformed laddies and music "which would make a wooden image dance," she confided to Mrs. Harold, and added: "And do you know, I used to rebel and be so cranky when Miss Arnaud came to give me dancing-lessons when I was a little thing. I just HATED it, and how she ever made me learn I just don't know. But I had to do as she said, and maybe I'm not glad that I DID. Why, Little Mother, suppose I ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... her plainly," he said. "'What's the matter with you, Dora?' I asked her. 'Don't you like me any more?' And she got wild and said she hated me like poison. She never talked to me like that before. It was a different Dora. She was always downhearted, cranky. The slightest thing made her yell or cry with tears. It got worse and worse. Oh, it was terrible! We quarreled twenty times a day and the children cried and I thought I ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Van Dorn is running for Judge again: really, Laura, I hope he'll win. George says he will. George says Henry Fenn is the only trouble Mr. Van Dorn will have, though I don't see as Henry could do much. Though George says he will. George says Henry is cranky and mean about the Judge someway and George says Henry is drinking like a fish this spring and his legs is hollow, he holds so much; though he must have been joking for I have heard of hollow horn in cattle, but I never heard of hollow legs, though ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... governess—but I'll fix her. She's a German, and they're always cranky. Anyhow, it's my birthday. I'm always ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that neurasthenia which develops on the basis of inherited disability. Lack of energy resulting from a feeling of tiredness, a quick exhaustion, a mood of depression, an easy irritation, even despair and self-accusation, sullenness and fits of anger, cranky inclinations and useless brooding over problems, headache and insomnia characterize the picture which everyone finds more or less developed in some of his acquaintances. If we classify symptoms, we may separate ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Patsy's an old crank, and Jakie's a waxed angel," she surrendered with a little grimace. "You think so now, but that's because you are being led astray by your appetites, like all men. You just wait: You'll be homesick for a sight of that fat, bald-headed, cranky old Patsy bouncing along on the mess-wagon and swearing in Dutch at his horses, before you're through. If you're not so completely gone over to Jakie that you will eat nothing but what he has cooked, come on up to the house. The Countess is making a twogallon freezer of ice-cream ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... drifted him below the house, he could never hope to go upstream against it. His only chance was to make sure that he could reach the middle of the torrent above the house and drift right down upon it. A few yards' extra leeway would enable him to steer his cranky craft to the desired spot. So, though it seemed to him as if he were going away from Anton, and though, indeed, he was now so far away that the crippled boy's shouts no longer could be heard, Ross stuck ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... after the ladies have sailed is to smoke until his tongue feels like a pussycat's back, eat his lonesome meals at lunch-counter clip, and work himself into a mild bilious state. That makes him a little cranky with the help, and, as there's no one around to smooth 'em out, the cook and half a dozen maids leaves in a bunch. His head coachman goes off on a bat, the housekeeper skips out to Ohio to bury an aunt, and the domestic gear at Blenmont gets to runnin' about as ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... mid-summer he can take me right into the interior, in that cranky red car. And I don't know but what I am ready to risk it; there are places I'd like to see—where he was caught his first winter in a blizzard, and where he picked up the nuggets for my necklace. You remember it—don't ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... rude affair known as a "flat." It was long and narrow, with square ends and sides, and from its cranky motion evidently ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... this sort of thing isn't usually said to a gentleman in his own apartments, but never mind that. Make yourself at home,' adding to this retort an observation to the effect that his friend appeared to be rather 'cranky' in point of temper, Richards Swiveller finished the rosy and applied himself to the composition of another glassful, in which, after tasting it with great relish, he proposed a toast to an ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Washington seeking aid for the Republic) would answer the purpose, persuaded him to report to me in New Orleans. Caravajal promptly appeared, but he did not impress me very favorably. He was old and cranky, yet, as he seemed anxious to do his best, I sent him over to Brownsville, with credentials, authorizing him to cross into Mexico, and followed him myself by the next boat. When I arrived in Brownsville, matters in Matamoras had already reached ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... Yanks! Knowed we didn't see dat ghos' fer nothin' las' night!" Wagon masters shouted, guards and sentries looked townward with anxious eyes. The aide got a flag from the quartermaster's tent; found moreover a very few artillery reserves and an old cranky howitzer. With all of these he returned to the head of the main street, and about the moment the cavalry at the bridge divided, succeeded in getting his forces admirably placed in a strong defensive position: Coffin and Billy Maydew joined just as an ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... and a strange melancholy transformed her face.... She was at a loss for words.... 'Poor Ombos—oh, poor, cranky Ombos,' she muttered. 'One morning I found him dead in his room, with all his wonderful, brown, powdery-looking books. He was leaning on a table over an old volume that he was fond of.... And then the doctors came. He had died, they afterwards said, of ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... this very cross and cranky young man!" she exclaimed, sitting up and winking her eyes in the rushing brilliancy of the blaze. "He is neither a very gracious host, nor a very reasonable one; nor yet particularly nice to a girl who left a perfectly good party for an ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... a gregarious temperament, and missed his fellow-lodger. The cranky little man, with all his soured outlook, must still have had some power of evoking sympathy, some attractive element in his composition. He concealed it under sharp words and moody bitterness, but it must still have been there, for Westray felt his loss more than he had thought possible. The organist ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... of them has got a big sign on it, marked: "Penal Code Tree—Poison." The other trees have lots of apples on them for all. Yet the fools go to the Penal Code Tree. Why? For the reason, I guess, that a cranky child refuses to eat good food and chews up a box of matches with relish. I never had any temptation to touch the Penal Code Tree. The other apples are good enough for me, and 0 Lord! how many of them there are ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... any new problem which presented itself. But soft-hearted as he was, he repented of his irritation a moment later and soothed the waiter's wounded feelings by a rich tip. The boy ran out to open the cab door for his strange customer and looked after him, wondering whether the man was a cranky millionaire or merely a poet. For Joseph Muller, by name and by reputation one of the best known men in Vienna, was by sight unknown to all except the few with whom he had to do on the police force. ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... can hardly wait until Sunday. Amedee will be a handsome bridegroom. Is anybody but you going to stand up with him? Well, then it will be a handsome wedding party." She made a droll face at Emil, who flushed. "Frank," Marie continued, flicking her horse, "is cranky at me because I loaned his saddle to Jan Smirka, and I'm terribly afraid he won't take me to the dance in the evening. Maybe the supper will tempt him. All Angelique's folks are baking for it, and all Amedee's twenty cousins. There will be barrels of beer. If once I get Frank to the supper, ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... no more. Chris was well known to be what the others called "cranky" in his temper; and when he considered, as he generally did, that he was right, and every one else wrong, there was nothing for it but ...
— Archie's Mistake • G. E. Wyatt
... to study him: Sancho Panza may escape a good many sad experiences by knowing his master's weaknesses. But as Nietzsche no longer belongs to the Quixotic class, as Germany seems to emerge with him from her youthful and cranky nebulosity, you will not even have the pleasure of being thrashed in the company of your Master: no, you will be thrashed all alone, which is an abominable thing for any right-minded human being. "Solamen ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... going about in when the ice and seals were off the coast. It was so small and light that it could be carried over the pans of ice from one lane of open water to another. And being small and light it was cranky. It was no rough weather boat; nor was it a boat to move very much about in, as both boys were ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... already on two or three occasions encountered sufficiently rough seas to give me great confidence in the seaworthiness of my canoe, which, though I had ribbed and decked fore and aft, every Indian who saw it thought unfit for the expedition, being, they said, too small, weak and cranky. I wished they could have seen her ride the great seas which come rolling in like mountains, before we reached land again. Ben Melin, a sailor of thirteen years experience on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, says he never saw so small a boat out-live such a sea. "We will all be drowned," ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... know she'd give it up if she knew I wanted it! She's an unselfish little thing. She took it because it was all that was left when Laura disposed of the 'soulful poet' part," Ivy said. Then after a silence, "I wonder why bad health makes me cranky and selfish and envious, instead of patient and meek, like the little ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I can scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she shipped ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... cent," he whined, as they took their places in the cranky pirogue; "but I might jes' happen to kill a squir'l or ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... echoed Amanda with the innocent candor of a twelve-year-old. "Aunt Rebecca—is she here again? Ach, if she wasn't so cranky I'd be glad still when she comes, but you know how she acts all ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... their way to the west country, as though the demand for such colonial productions in these parts was insatiable. This was pleasant, you will say; but what was to be done? We had nothing else. Now, nothing saps a man's temper like ennui. The cranky, peevish people one meets with would be excellent folk, if they only had something to do. As for us, I'll venture to say two men more disposed to go pleasantly down the current of life it were hard to meet with; and yet, such was the consequence of these confounded four ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... great deal better than that—and so do we, too!—you're only cranky! a little cranky, Frank, and given to defending any folly you commit without either rhyme or reason—as when you tried to persuade me that it is the safest thing in nature to pour gunpowder out of a canister into a pound flask, with a lighted cigar between your teeth; to demonstrate ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... be cranky, Phoebe. Here comes Phares and he'll tell you that your eyes are black when you're cross. Won't ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... sir—Robin Slidder, at your sarvice," replied the urchin, giving me a familiar nod. "'Ope your leg ain't so cranky as it wos, sir. Gittin' all ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
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