She took the paper almost mechanically, and for some moments she studied the crabbed signature before realizing whose it was.
The letter was worded in the English of that day--the quaint and crabbed language in which Chaucer wrote.
Liberty has thriven here from the earliest times, crabbed and savage, home-born and tough like a stem of their own boxwood.
When she came to a crabbed fir she leaned against it and stooped to kiss her babe.
If you think a bad, cross-crabbed man will mend as he grows older, you make a mistake.
You would be an acquisition to somecrabbed old Spaniard who had a beautiful young wife to look after!
But people do not say that this proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbedcontroversialist and metaphysician.
Have you any thing crabbedor difficult to propose?
We should always represent to them some useful and solid end, which may support them in their application: and never pretend to keep them in subjection by a crabbed and absolute authority.
Just as the crabbedold sexton was going to drive him out of the gate with a big stick, I says, more in the way of a joke than anything else: 'Graves, come here!
It was, perhaps, because of the unbroken misery with which they were surrounded that the Leonese were individuallycrabbed and cynical.
His brothers, on the other hand, spoke the crabbed dialect of Andalusia.
The crabbed village that I fell upon at dusk furnished me bread and wine, but no lodging.
The document in question had a sinister look, it is true; it was crabbed in text, and from a broad red ribbon dangled the great seal of the province, about the size of a buckwheat pancake.
In the midst of the excitement Ruth received a letter in the crabbed hand of dear old Aunt Alvirah.
Nature had been in a crabbed mood when she fashioned this gaunt, angular form, these gnarled, unlovely features.
The old stone was sunk half-way in the earth, and was gray with moss and lichens; but the inscription was still legible, if one looked close, and had patience to decipher the crabbed text.
In the panelled end of each shelf may be noticed a tiny folding door, which on being opened proves to contain the catalogue, in crabbed early seventeenth century writing, of the books which the shelf held when first filled.
But Adam Hogarth said no more than "Least said is soonest mended," for he was a crabbed old man of few words.
And he had crabbed books of Greek and other sorceries.
Will you be so good as to spare us your slang speeches," continued Mademoiselle de Corandeuil, who seemed to become more crabbed as the young girl's confusion increased.
Mademoiselle de Corandeuil certainly was the ugly, crabbed creature that Casorans had described; but had she been as frightful as the witches in Macbeth I was determined to make her conquest.
If anybody disputes this, he must be a sour and crabbed fellow.
He used to tell a story of a crabbed old fellow, who was very much annoyed by the boys stealing his apples.
He did so; and Brother Gimblet listened with a crabbed smile.
Together they had read the crabbed lines in the Bible; they had been silent thereafter as to each came imagined pictures like ghosts from the past; ghosts of greed and envy and despair.
