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More "Inoffensive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... watched all his movements with jealousy and envy, and who were silently preparing instruments for his destruction, was Joseph Martinengo, a Piedmontese count belonging to the prince's suite, whom G——— himself had formerly promoted, as an inoffensive creature, devoted to his interests, for the purpose of supplying his own place in attending upon the pleasures of the prince—an office which he began to find irksome, and which he willingly exchanged for more useful employment. Viewing this man merely as the work of his own hands, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... be expressed, Inoffensive, welcome guest! While the rat is on the scout, And the mouse with curious snout, With what vermin else infest Every dish, and spoil the best; Frisking thus before the fire, Thou hast ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Inoffensive individuals of retiring temperament, being introduced to each other solemnly and with ceremony, felt that to be silent was to be guilty of a glaring breach of Bilberry decorum, and, casting about ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... knew what to say. Cuthbert talked of the matter in so easy a manner that it was impossible to think he had killed Miss Loach. Also he was not the sort of man to murder an inoffensive old woman, the more especially as he—on the face of it—had no motive to commit so brutal an act, or to jeopardize his neck. Struck by his friend's silence, Mallow looked up suddenly. Whether he read the truth in Jennings' ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... of the window. Matters looked serious, for the room was a flight above ground, the window was already open, and angry men were laying hands on the economist. The latter, however, picked out one inoffensive person, a very fat man, who happened to be standing by. Dupont managed to get near him and suddenly grasped him round the body. "What do you want?" cried the startled fat man. "Sir," answered Dupont, "every one for himself. They are going to throw me out of the window, and you ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... unfortunate to depend on the success of his Labours for his Bread, he must be an inhuman Creature indeed, who would out of sport and wantonness prevent a Man from getting a Livelihood in an honest and inoffensive Way, and make a jest of starving him and his Family." There is other evidence that young men about town were wont to amuse themselves by damning plays 'when George was King.' In the Prologue to this ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... thing to do, too gross a rebuke to the little Doctor's Ego. She was wrong, of course, though her sensibilities were indubitably right. Therefore she feigned enormous engrossment in her algebra, and struggled to make herself as small and inoffensive as ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... about Ernest or Laddie. I had taken no part in the discussion, for I felt no great interest in the matter. Laddie was a nice dog; Ernest was a quiet, inoffensive little fellow, five years younger than myself; that was all I thought ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... wherever they came from, they were doubtless driven southward by the invading tribes of the north. They nobly fought their way, contesting every foot, until superior numbers took them by force. Thus these quiet and inoffensive creatures were finally expelled from their home which doubtless their fathers had occupied through centuries. If any escaped they, no doubt, found an asylum southward, where there were other tribes equally civilized, and, forming an union ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... relate, I met with a little misadventure on account of the sheep—an animal which one is accustomed to regard as of a timid and inoffensive nature. When I set out at a brisk pace to walk to the house I have spoken of, in order to make some inquiries there, a few of the sheep that happened to be near began to bleat loudly, as if alarmed, and by and by they came hurrying after me, apparently in a great state of excitement. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... Guard battalions, had protested against any attempt to disarm their constituents. Then came an immense popular demonstration on the Place de la Bastille, where there were red flags, incendiary speeches and a crowd that overflowed the square, the affair ending with the murder of a poor inoffensive agent of police, who was bound to a plank, thrown into the canal, and then stoned to death. And forty-eight hours later, during the night of the 26th of February, Maurice, awakened by the beating of ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... own recollections, how many good, quiet, inoffensive men, unendowed with any extraordinary abilities, have been enabled, by means of divinity, to enjoy a long life in tranquillity ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... offended that I smile at the resonant titles which make you something more than human in your own eyes. I would not for the world be mistaken for one of those literary roughs whose brass knuckles leave their mark on the foreheads of so many inoffensive people. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... one foe that had successfully defied the powerful mistress of the Mediterranean. The popular Jewish party bitterly resented Rome's interference. True, the Pharisees welcomed the relief from civil war, but they could not hold the majority of the people in leash. The inoffensive Hyrcanus was left in possession of the high-priesthood and from time to time was elevated to positions of nominal civil authority, but he was little more than the plaything of circumstance and party intrigue. The ambitions of Aristobulus and his ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... welcome; all the sadder because it need not have happened but for the evil doings of the colonists. After the departure of Columbus they had soon quarreled among themselves and had treated the inoffensive natives so cruelly that, unable to endure it, they had risen against the ...
— Las Casas - 'The Apostle of the Indies' • Alice J. Knight
... should be clear. He was no capricious and unlicensed oppressor of a God-fearing and inoffensive peasantry, but a soldier waging war against a turbulent population carrying arms and willing to use them. I have nowhere tried to soften the bitter tale of folly, misrule, and cruelty which drove those unhappy men into rebellion, nor to heighten by ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... bath," with which coarse and brutal remark he imitated the shrill war-hoop of the western savige, and, assisted by his infamus coal-heavin companyins, he threw all my wax-work into the river, and let my wild bears loose to pray on a peaceful and inoffensive ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 5 • Charles Farrar Browne
... left after the waste portions of the carcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had mixed it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which they brought in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads for that purpose, the substance was ready to be put into bags and sent out to the world as any one of a hundred different brands of standard ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... superior race of beings. It was very cruel in Lord Spencer to shoot the poor animal—but it was honorable in him to make up the farmer's loss, for it doubled the amount of wages he gained; yet to sum up the proceeding, it was wrong—for besides killing an inoffensive animal, it ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... great order and decency was wont to be observed, for he would not endure to hear or see any thing that was rude or unhandsome, but made it the habit of all who kept his company, to entertain themselves with quiet and inoffensive amusements. But in the middle of this entertainment, those who sought occasion to quarrel, fell into dissolute discourse openly, and making as if they were very drunk, committed many insolences on purpose to provoke him. Sertorius, being offended with ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... now clearly conscious of what he had vaguely felt while listening to Bristow's questioning of Withers: the lame man had the faculty of seeming entirely inoffensive in his queries but at the same time putting into his voice an irritating, challenging quality which was bound to work on the feelings of the person to whom he talked. He had begun to have this ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... party resumed its former tranquillity. Other guests had come in, among them a lame old Spaniard of mild and inoffensive aspect leaning on the arm of an elderly Filipina, who was resplendent in frizzes and paint and a European gown. The group welcomed them heartily, and Doctor De Espadana and his senora, the Doctora Dona Victorina, took their seats among our acquaintances. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... it was unconscious. When, for example, Mollie was speaking, Betty tossed her head, tilted her chin, and arched her brows, to the delight and amusement of the family; and now, there she sat—good, kind, most inoffensive of creatures— drawing her wisps of eyebrows together in a lowering scowl, and twisting her lips into an expression ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... poverty. Their country is a succession of gentle undulating hills, without trees or plantations of any kind. The late sultan Muhamed used to compare the provinces or races of men in his empire, to the nations of Europe, the English he called warriors, the French faithless, the Spaniards quiet and inoffensive, the Romans, i.e. the people of Italy, treacherous, the Dutch a parsimonious and trading people; the other powers of Europe, having no consul at Marocco, nor merchants in the country, are known only by name: accordingly, ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... He shot one assailant, and grappling with another, brought him to the ground and cut his throat with a pocket knife. Lieutenant Peyton was by birth, education, and character a thorough gentleman. Perfectly good natured and inoffensive—except when provoked or attacked—and then—he dispatched his affair and his man in a quiet, expeditious and thorough manner. The Federal cavalry retreated from the town ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... comments upon it. It was not particularly supernatural, but, after all, the natural has its place, too, in life, and he had undoubtedly fulfilled to-day some of the duties for whose sake he occupied the position of Rector of Merefield, in a completely inoffensive manner. The things he hated most in the world were disturbances of any kind, abruptness and the unexpected, and he had a strong reputation in the village for being ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... one of the most inoffensive of all animals. We have even heard that it has sometimes been successfully applied for the cure of the cancer, the most dreadful, and one of the most ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... the next larger, and he again the one larger still, and so on, till we get up to the cinnamon, and from him to the great grizzly, who is a fierce beast best avoided. As for the others, they are stupid, inoffensive creatures, whose great aim in life is to get out of man's way, and who will not interfere with him or fight if they are left alone. Now then, what do you say to ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... endure that the buildings in which they worked or lived should be ugly blots on the fair face of the earth. Beginning by making their factories, buildings, and sheds decent and convenient like their homes, they would infallibly go on to make them not merely negatively good, inoffensive merely, but even beautiful, so that the glorious art of architecture, now for some time slain by commercial greed, would be ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... "An inoffensive old man," asserted Bernard. At the same time, however, he was not fully content to let the matter ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... editorial office force can insert missing commas and semicolons, and iron out blunders in the English; but it has not the time, if indeed the ability, to instil life into a lifeless manuscript. A living style is rarer than an inoffensive one, and the road of literary ambition is strewn with ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... souls of his people. Very Faithful himself stood before the bar of Judge Jeffreys in the person of Richard Baxter. It took all the barefaced falsehood and scandalous injustice of the crown prosecutors to draw out the sham indictment that was read out in court against inoffensive Richard Baxter. But what was lacking in the charge of the crown was soon made up by the abominable scurrility of the judge. 'You are a schismatical knave,' roared out Jeffreys, as soon as Baxter was brought into court. 'You are an old hypocritical villain.' And then, ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... eloquence, discreet, envious, fond of glory, fond of learning, fond of music, fond of poetry, fond of sports, fond of the arts and sciences, frank, full of expedients, generous (three times), gracious, honourable, hostile to crime, impervious, ingenious, inoffensive, joyous, just (twice), laborious, liberal, lofty, magnanimous, modest, noble, not easy to be understood (!), parsimonious, pious (twice), profound in opinion, prone to regret his acts, prudent, rash, religious, reverent, self-confident, sincere, singular ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... was a careful and painstaking farmer, a kind neighbor, and an inoffensive, amiable man. His "untimely taking off" was indeed a sad loss to the community at large, but how much more to his wife! She had loved him with a love that amounted to idolatry. When he was returning from his daily toil she would go forth to meet him. When absent from home, if ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... I persuaded to trace out your whole career," was the reply. "I could have forgiven my wrongs at your hands, but when you saw fit to attack that inoffensive girl, ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... beheld without concern a thousand forms of religion subsisting in peace under their gentle sway, to inflict a severe punishment on any part of their subjects, who had chosen for themselves a singular but an inoffensive ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... taught me good humour, to be obliging, and to bear with the ignorant and thoughtless. From Maximus I learned to command myself, and to put through business efficiently, without drudging or complaint. From my adoptive father I learned a smooth and inoffensive temper, and a greatness proof against vanity and the impressions of pomp and power; I learned that it was the part of a prince to check flattery, to have his exchequer well furnished, to be frugal in his expenses, not to worship ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... alone, or where he comes from, I can't say. Some people say he is crazy, and some people say he is an escaped criminal—but then people will say anything, particularly when they know nothing about it. Judging from the reports of the two or three men who have met him, however, he appears to be quite inoffensive, and evidently he is a friendly-disposed fellow from your description of him. If you should come across him again you might invite him to come down and see us. I don't suppose he will, but you might ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... depart from the principal succession, and meet together wherever they please.... From all such we must keep aloof, but we must adhere to those who both preserve, as we have already mentioned, the doctrine of the apostles, and exhibit, with the order of the presbytery, sound teaching and an inoffensive conversation." [585:1] "The order of the presbytery" obviously signifies the official character conveyed by "the laying on of the hands of the presbytery," and yet such was the ordination of those who, in the time of Irenaeus, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... very patient with him; we should have made short work with an American who had approached us with the same inquiries. Even from a foreigner, the citizen of a republic founded on the notion, elsewhere exploded ever since Cain, that one is his brother's keeper, the things he asked seemed inoffensive only because they were puerile; but they certainly were puerile. I felt that it ought to have been self-evident to him that when a commonwealth of sixty million Americans based itself upon the great principle of self-seeking, ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... was abandoned, the idea of sending ambassadors to the Council still offered the most inoffensive and amicable means of preventing the danger of subsequent conflict. Its policy or impolicy was a question to be decided by France. Several bishops, and Cardinal Bonnechose among the rest, urged the Government to resume its ancient privilege, and send a representative. But two ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... can help being bald if his hair will not grow any more than he can help being fat if his stomach will swell. Fatness was another of the accusations which McNeice hurled against the bishops. I suppose this violent hatred of an inoffensive class of men was partly the result of McNeice's tremendous Protestantism. The poet Milton, I think, felt in the same way about the prelates of his day. Partly it may have been the expression of his naturally democratic temperament. Bishops like to be called ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... chasms, and shaggy ice-palaces, with tender memory of the Adriatic; courageously steered his way through the inoffensive guttural populations; had got to Berlin, just in this time; been had to dinner daily by the hospitable Barberinas, young Cocceji always his fellow-guest,—'Privately, my poor Signorina's Husband!' whispered old Mamma. Both the Barberinas were very kind ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... contribute to raise doubts as to the validity of Edward's claims.[601] What if, after all, this ruinous war, the issue of which is uncertain, should turn out to be an unjust war as well? Verses are even composed on the subject of wrongs done to inoffensive people in France: "Sanguis communitatis Franciae quae nihil ei nocebat ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... youth plead his love; in vain did he show, that if the spirits of the flood warred on their neighbours, who were unable to inflict a wound on their adversaries, it furnished no reason why the beautiful maiden, so lovely and so inoffensive, should be banned. She had not injured, then why should she be spurned? But his argument availed not to influence the warriors, or to bend their stern hearts to pity. They drove the fair Menana from the arms of him she loved best, and, exerting the authority, so potent among the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... an evil record in the matter of crime, and they were so accustomed to outrages of almost weekly occurrence around them that it was not easy to shock them. There was an inoffensive family sitting round the fireside with a couple of neighbours. They had given no offence, they had wronged no man, they had crossed no man's path. But that inhuman beast went to the door and lifted the latch, and there, at a few yards ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... sense. A tun of man in thy large bulk is writ, But sure thou'rt but a kilderkin of wit. Like mine, thy gentle numbers feebly creep; Thy tragic muse gives smiles, thy comic sleep. With whate'er gall thou sett'st thyself to write, Thy inoffensive satires never bite. 200 In thy felonious heart though venom lies, It does but touch thy Irish pen, and dies. Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame In keen Iambics, but mild Anagram. Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... languages and took the Vermilionville newspaper—and with all his books, almost an entire mantel-shelf full—he was feeling heart-hunger the same as any ordinary lad or lass unmated? Zosephine found her eyes, so to speak, lifting, lifting, more and more as from time to time she looked upon the inoffensive Bonaventure. But so her satisfaction in her own husband was all the more emphatic. If she had ever caught a real impulse toward any thing that even Carancro would have called culture, she had cast it aside now—as to herself; her children—oh! ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Letters, is an entertaining, and correct piece of criticism: All his other Letters are written with a great deal of wit and spirit, a fine flow of language; and are so happily intermixt with a lively and inoffensive raillery, that it is impossible not to be pleased with them at the first reading: we may be satisfied from the perusal of them, that his conversation must have been very engaging, and therefore we need not wonder that he ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... gravely considering this a most serious charge of unprovoked attack upon an industrious individual, ordered the parties to find bail, in default of fully satisfying the inoffensive dealer in pastry, which was ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... light, intersecting, multi-colored rays, and cascading flares of sparkling energy, the beam was reflected, thrown back, hurled away on all sides into space in coruscating, blinding torrents. And neither was the monster globe inoffensive. The straining watchers saw a port open suddenly, emit a flame-erupting something, and close as rapidly as it had opened. That something was a projectile, its propelling rockets fiercely aflame; as smoothly ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... the assembly. This gentleman suffered under a truly aristocratic affliction—the ever-reviving difficulty of passing his day. Mild in demeanour, easy in the discharge of petty social obligations, perfectly inoffensive, he came and went like a vivified statue of gentlemanly ennui. Every morning there arrived for him a consignment of English newspapers; these were taken to his bedroom at nine o'clock, together with a cup of chocolate. They presumably occupied him ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... to fix him as belonging to one at least of the Oriental races. And a dabbler in the Eastern tongues even sought to reduce the simple name of Zanoni, which a century before had been borne by an inoffensive naturalist of Bologna (The author of two works on botany and rare plants.), to the radicals of the extinct language. Zan was unquestionably the Chaldean appellation for the sun. Even the Greeks, who mutilated every Oriental name, had retained the right one ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... their neighborhood for a gulp or two at their fountains of culture. Some day, naturally, we'll be more alike, and have more in common. The stronger colors will fade out of the newer fabric and we'll merge into a more inoffensive monotone of respectability. Our Navajo-blanket audacities will tone down to wall-tapestry sedateness—but not too, too soon, I ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... inoculation a quarter of a lunation precedes the commencement of the fever, another quarter terminates with the complete eruption, another quarter with the complete maturation, and another quarter terminates the complete absorption of a material now rendered inoffensive to the constitution. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... "Gentle perhaps, and surely inoffensive, but I repeat melancholy. Why does this sadness continue? Alas, it is the law of God. Do not look at me, I beg you, as on one of those women whom I have seen and of whom I have read, who create imaginary misfortunes for themselves, and deck ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the wanton killing of a Negro has come to be regarded in some Southern communities is brought out by an incident of the week at Memphis, which hardly needs comment. An inoffensive Negro was hawking chickens about the street, when ——, who was not in uniform at the time, jumped to the conclusion that the chickens had been stolen, and arrested the man. While he went to put on his uniform he left ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... That whirls the wavering fortunes of the state. Third in the list, the happy lover's prize Is won by honeyed words from women's eyes. If some would have it first instead of third, So let it be,—I answer not a word. The fourth,—sweet readers, let the thoughtless half Have its small shrug and inoffensive laugh; Let the grave quarter wear its virtuous frown, The stern half-quarter try to scowl us down; But the last eighth, the choice and sifted few, Will hear my words, and, pleased, confess ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and wrote you letters, which you have probably forgotten in the mass of the correspondences of that crazy class, of whose complaints, and terrors, and mysticisms, the several Presidents have been the regular depositories. Macpherson was too honest to be molested by any body, and too inoffensive to be a subject for the mad-house; although, I believe, we are told in the old book, that 'every man that is mad, and maketh himself a prophet, thou shouldst put him in prison ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... usually admit our own right to live, and therefore to kill in self-defence all creatures that would kill us. Where the line is drawn, however, by many earnest thinkers and feelers, is at killing harmless, inoffensive creatures ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... nature, in the fields, in the woods and in the animals. Of aristocratic birth, he hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a philosopher by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory hatred. His great strength and his great weakness was his kind-heartedness, which had not arms enough to caress, to give, to embrace; the benevolence of a god, that gave freely, without questioning; in a word, a kindness of inertia that became almost ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a voice behind them, "that man can have descended to such a state of congenital idiocy as to do all this to an inoffensive ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... the only one who behaved sensibly was my friend the chief. He spoke in a slow and dignified manner, but the rest worked themselves up into a furious rage, and twanged their bowstrings, and jumped about and fitted arrows to their bows, and pointed them at inoffensive "papaya" trees, whilst two little boys shot small arrows into the green and yellow fruit, seeming to catch the fever from their elders. One man actually danced a kind of war-dance on his own account, strutting ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... murmur of pleasure at the announcement from those who were with the speaker. Stanford slowly opened his eyes, wondering what these savages were who rejoiced in the death of an inoffensive stranger cast upon their shores. He saw a group standing around him, but his attention speedily became concentrated on one face. The owner of it, he judged, was not more than nineteen years of age, and the face—at least so it seemed to Stanford at the time—was the most beautiful ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... supported on legs so short and bowed that it crawled with its belly almost dragging the ground. Its small head, which it carried close to the earth, was lizard-like, shallow-skulled, feeble-looking, and its jaws cleft back past the stupid eyes. In fact, it was an inoffensive-looking head for such an imposing body. At the base of the head began a system of defensive armor that looked as if it might be proof against artillery. Up over the shoulders, over the mighty arch of the back, and down over the haunches ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... he thought his men had been morally disgraced. It had become their duty, immediately after their arrival at the seat of war, to participate, in obedience to fanatical orders from the head of the department, in the sack and burning of the inoffensive little town of Darien on the Georgia coast. "I fear," he writes to his wife, "that such actions will hurt the reputation of black troops and of those connected with them. For myself I have gone through the war so far without dishonor, and I do not ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Androcles to explain to them this unintelligible mystery, and how a savage of the fiercest and most unpitying nature should thus in a moment have forgotten his innate disposition, and be converted into a harmless and inoffensive animal. ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... natives cracking their long raw-hide whips and urging the sleek, long-horned oxen forward through the mud. Following the waggon-train came the cavalcade of armed lion-hunters, grim and determined-looking enough from a distance, but most peaceful and inoffensive when once they understood the stranger's motives. No order or discipline was visible in the commando on the march, and if the rifles and bandoliers had not appeared so prominently it might readily have been mistaken for a party ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... and little dead cats, and little old slippers, and bits of little bricks, in front of little shops in little bazaars; where vociferous little circars are driving little bargains with obese little banyans, and consequential little chowkedars—that is, policemen—are bullying inoffensive little poor people, and calling them sooa-logue,—that is, pigs;—where—where, in fine, everything in heathen human-nature happens butcha, and the very fables with which the little story-tellers entertain the little loafers on the corners of the little streets, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... arriving, administered a significant "poke" behind the leaf, then indulged in several eccentric movements in their jerky style, dashed after a fly, stood a full minute staring at me, and at last flew. This programme was scarcely varied. Inoffensive as I was, however, the birds plainly did not relish my spying upon them, and when I returned from luncheon, they had removed their infant. For a day or two, I heard on the farther side of the grove the ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... happier, and no longer lonely. It was all rather absurd—but it was all very pleasant! She had never met an hotel keeper like little Polperro, one at once so familiar and so inoffensive in manner. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... king by public proclamation promised a reward to him that would find out any new sort of luxury and pleasure. And let the governor, the king of an entertainments propose some pleasant reward for any one that introduceth inoffensive merriment, profitable delight and laughter, not such as attends scoffs and abusive jests, but kindness, pleasant humor, and goodwill; for these matters not being well looked after and observed spoil and ruin most of our ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... think that item of evidence so satisfactory as Isel did. But he had not come with any intention of ferreting out doubtful characters or suspicious facts. He was no ardent heretic-hunter, but a quiet, peaceable man, as inoffensive as a priest ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... the character of a good clergyman always have upon even forward spirits, where he is known to have had an inviolable regard to it himself.—Besides, the good gentleman has, naturally, a genteel and inoffensive vein of raillery, and so was too hard for them at their own weapons. But after dinner, and the servants being withdrawn, Mr. Martin singled me out, as he loves to do, for a subject of encomium, and made some high compliments to my dear Mr. B. upon his choice; and wished ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... of the Petrolia Oil Exchange provide that refined kerosene shall be of the odor "locally known as inoffensive," and shall "absolutely stand the test of oxide of lead in a strong solution of caustic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... found really some degree of comfort. It is true our neighbors were hardly congenial, but they were inoffensive and kindly disposed. The piano on the floor beneath did not furnish pleasing entertainment, but neither was it constant in its efforts to do so. The stairs were long and difficult of ascent, but our distance from ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the Chateau de Montalais, after haunting it for upwards of a month, without definite knowledge that he would gain nothing by staying on, or without an equally definite objective, some motive more inspiring than such simple sensuousness as he might find in assassinating inoffensive folk indiscriminately. ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... only three-tenths of his countrymen were in favor of a republic—in itself, however, a considerable proportion of the population; now that the republic is in existence, will it be accepted tranquilly by the rest? The majority of these people are the inoffensive and industrious peasants of the interior, who have long been accustomed to bad government; as they will scarcely find their lot harder now, they will probably quietly accept the new order, unless some ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... on the morning of Thursday, July 18th,—that same day which witnesses the preliminary Battle of Blackburn's Ford—that Johnston, being at Winchester, and knowing of Patterson's peculiarly inoffensive and timid movement to his own left and rear, on Charlestown, receives from the Rebel Government at Richmond, a telegraphic dispatch, of July 17th, in these words: "General Beauregard is attacked. To strike the Enemy a decisive blow, a junction of all your effective force will be needed. ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... that broadest of broad, but morally inoffensive stories, in which the laundress, in trying to cure a smoking chimney, blows herself to death, having merely power to speak a few words to Betty,—who gaspingly explains to her mistress ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... seems, deemed an embargo laid on his tongue would warrant his hand to launch every envenomed shaft against his benefactor, who by restricting had paid him the compliment of avowing that his eloquence was not totally inoffensive. Craftsmen, pamphlet, libels, combinations, were showered on or employed for years against the prime-minister, without shaking his power or ruffling his temper; and Bolingbroke had the mortification of finding his rival had abilities to maintain his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... chaplain, I will tread as lightly over him as a middy's clumsy foot encased with boots is capable. Dear man, he came all the way from the Emerald Isle to join our ship, and brought with him an ample supply of pure brogue, which he spoke most beautifully. He was very inoffensive, perfectly innocent, and never ruffled in temper, except when the wicked youngsters played tricks with him while he was composing his sermon. One day he was much alarmed by the following adventure, got up expressly by the mids. Some of these incorrigible fellows, among whom I blush ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... and taught by dear-bought experience, have only given an unequivocal proof of their inveterate hatred to France and Spain; since, not being able to obtain any advantage over the French and Spanish forces, they directed their fire against an inoffensive town, which received no small injury in the buildings. This is the only glory which the arms of Great Britain have to ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... he is 'a fool so nicely writ, The ladies might mistake him for a wit.' Then, Millamant is the ultimate expression of those who, having all the material goods which nature and civilisation can give, live on paradoxes and artifices. Her insolence is the inoffensive insolence only possible to the well-bred. 'O ay, letters,—I had letters,—I am persecuted with letters,—I hate letters,—nobody knows how to write letters; and yet one has 'em, one does not know why,—they serve ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... group—from Arorai in the south to Makin in the north—do to this day of quiet, spectacled Bob Corrie, of wild Maiana, who can twist them round his little finger without an angry word. Perhaps poor Keyes, being a notoriously inoffensive man, might have died a natural death in due time, but for one fatal mistake he made; and that was in bringing a ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... clear that in the case of my dirt-heap the foul matters added have thus been destroyed. The practical bearings of this fact are of the utmost importance. Earth is not to be regarded as a vehicle for the inoffensive removal beyond the limits of the town of what has hitherto been its most troublesome product, but as a medium for bringing together the offensive ingredients of this product, and the world's great scavenger, oxygen. My experiment ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... all all shoo had to protect hersen wi wor th' rollin' pin. Thinks aw to misen, this sooart o' thing has gooan far enuff, an as awd just been readin' abaat th' "atrocities," aw fancied misen England an him Turkey an her a poor Bulgarian, an aw determined awr wodn't see a poor inoffensive young woman ill-treated bi a brute like that, soa just as he wor gettin' ready to strike her daan into th' eearth, aw stept behund him an planted mi naive at th' back ov his ear, an he rolled ovver like a skittle pin. Just as ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... covet. To me war is no glory—conquest no Renown. To be forced thus to uphold my right Sits heavier on my heart than all the wrongs[aj] These men would bow me down with. Never, never Can I forget this night, even should I live To add it to the memory of others. 510 I thought to have made mine inoffensive rule An era of sweet peace 'midst bloody annals, A green spot amidst desert centuries, On which the Future would turn back and smile, And cultivate, or sigh when it could not Recall Sardanapalus' golden reign. I thought to have made my realm a paradise, And every moon an epoch ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... began to shine. He glanced at Juliet. "Really I am much more inoffensive than you seem to think," he said. "I hope you are not going to repeat the dose. I was hoping to secure your forgiveness for what happened this afternoon. Believe me, no one regrets it more sincerely ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... a general hegira to a wooded section two or three days' journey to the northward for the purpose of tapping the maple trees and boiling down the syrup into sugar. As before mentioned, they are friendly and inoffensive in their dealings with the white people, but their patience must be sorely tried sometimes. The town-boys hoot at them, throw stones at their ponies, and try in many ways to annoy them. I remember once seeing them pass through another ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... behind his stroke than mere awkwardness. It was downright savagery. Generally when a man is in anger or despair he longs to smash things; and these inoffensive tennis-balls were to Thomas a gift of the gods. Each time one sailed away over the backstop, it was like the pop of a safety-valve; it averted ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... that it is any of your business, my good woman," he answered, his insolence increasing as he noticed how mild and inoffensive she appeared to be; "but if it makes any difference to you, I will tell you that I ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... mouth according to instructions. An hour later, Henry entered the pilot-house, unaware of what had been going on. He was a thoroughly inoffensive boy, and I was sorry to see him come, for I knew Brown would have no pity ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hand, by writing their name on a ticket prepared for that purpose. Those who bore these tickets, wherever they came, were acknowledged by their brethren, and were received with all cheerfulness. These tickets also supplied us with a quiet and inoffensive method of removing any disorderly member. He has no ticket at the quarterly visitation (for so often the tickets are changed); and hereby it is immediately known that he is ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the amazed parents of Bobberts to the amazed Billy who was standing in the hall with the inoffensive pan of hot water in his hands, and put her hand ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... of those who die in the service. This fund is greatly opposed by the miners, from whose wages from 1 to 2 per cent. is deducted for its maintenance. In the absence of a fund of this character, the sick or infirm are abandoned by their companions and left to die. Generally miners are inoffensive when fairly dealt with. They are said to be indolent and dishonest as a rule. The managers of mines receive from 3,000 to 5,000 lire per annum; chief miners from 1,500 to 2,500 lire; surveyors, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... hand in breaking the camp and loading the boats, and early in the day they were once more off in their swift journey down the mountain river. The river itself seemed to have changed almost overnight. From being mild and inoffensive it now brawled over its reefs and surged madly through its canyons. Many times they were obliged to go ashore and line down some of the bad water, and all the time, when running, the paddlers were silent and eager, looking ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... is true. With fierce joy I turned a temperature of a million degrees on those two things I had modelled, and saw them vanish in an instant into inoffensive dust. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... which is not the least among the self-made impediments is the microscopic faculty which most of us possess for increasing small, inoffensive pebbles to good-sized rocks. A quiet insistence on seeing these pebbles in their natural size would reduce them shortly to a pile of sand which might be easily smoothed to a level, and add to the comfort of the path. Moods are stones which not only may ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... disturbances certainly do not originate with the lay-pilgrims, the great body of whom are, as I believe, quiet and inoffensive people. It is true, however, that their pious enterprise is believed by them to operate as a counterpoise for a multitude of sins, whether past or future, and perhaps they exert themselves in after life to restore the balance of good and evil. The Turks have a maxim which, like most ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... depict the anguish of the brave Who envied comrades sleeping in the grave? Shall I exult o'er inoffensive dust Of valiant men whose swords have turned to rust? Shall I, like Menelaus by the coast, O'er dead Ajaces make unmanly boast? Shall I, in chains of an ignoble Verse, Degrade dead Hectors, and their pangs rehearse— ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... He had not meant to provoke a quarrel with Storm, but had simply wished to soften the blow for Hoek Matts, who was an inoffensive man. Just the same, he could not help feeling chagrined over the reply he had got; but before he could think of a retort, one of the men who had come in with Hoek Matts ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... of these versions imply that the "massacre" was a mere marauding, cruel, and murderous invasion of an inoffensive and peaceful settlement; while the other two versions of Dr. Ramsay and Mr. Hildreth clearly show the provocation and cruel wrongs which the Loyalists, and even Indians, had experienced from the continentals and inhabitants of Wyoming; ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... fragment of them occasionally, but had never been able to make anything of them. In fact, from the way they dressed and all, she had come to the conclusion that Mr. Vaughan and the yogi were both a little crazy, but quite inoffensive and harmless. ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... remained entirely passive during all these violent operations. The few servants who continued faithful to him, were seized with astonishment at the rapid progress made by the commons in power and popularity, and were glad, by their inactive and inoffensive behavior, to compound for impunity. The torrent rising to so dreadful and unexpected a height, despair seized all those who from interest or habit were most attached to monarchy. And as for those who maintained ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Engleton, in speaking of him afterwards to Hadria, "it is strange that his cleverness does not come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance over boggy ground, like some will-o'-the-wisp, but for whose freakish allurements the good man might have trodden a quiet and inoffensive way." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... documents which filled his drawers. As to his relations with women, they appeared to have been promiscuous but superficial. He had many acquaintances among them, but few friends, and no one whom he loved. His habits were regular, his conduct inoffensive. His death was an absolute mystery and likely ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... This inoffensive and pretty little creature is found in all parts of the Arctic lands. Its fur is peculiarly fine and thick; and as in winter this is closer and more mixed with wool than it is in summer, the intense cold of these regions is easily resisted. When ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... usually an inoffensive activity, but if done incorrectly there can be problems with odor and flies. This chapter will show you how to ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... very soon after. Through a simple extension of the same resolution, others of the Fructidor victims, a crowd of priests huddled together and pining away on the Ile-de-Re, the most unfortunate and most inoffensive of all.[3120]—Two months later, a law declares that the list of emigres is definitely closed;[3121] a resolution orders immediate investigation into the claims of those who are to be struck off ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... man. Ours is the "land of the free"—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.] As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... triumph of the Revolutionist annuls the historian 54. By its authentic exponents, Jefferson and Sieyes, the Revolution of the last century repudiates history. Their followers renounced acquaintance with it, and were ready to destroy its records and to abolish its inoffensive professors. But the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction, is that this was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly and indirectly, by process of development and by process of reaction, an impulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... right to say altogether if they can without disturbance of the Queen's peace? The procession enabled many thousands to do that without the least inconvenience or danger to themselves, and with no injury or offence to their neighbours. To prohibit or punish peaceful, inoffensive, orderly, and perfectly innocent processions upon pretence that they are constructively unlawful, is unconstitutional tyranny. Was it done because the ministers discovered that the terror of suspended ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... daylight, and cut them up and dispersed them. Our position in front of the group of buildings (In den Kraatenberg) naturally led the enemy to believe that we were using the building for cover, so he shelled the poor inoffensive houses and barns most industriously but never put anything close enough to our real position to do any damage. This taught me a lesson which I put into operation, later on, at Sniper's Barn, ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... one of the Vaudois valleys. He had framed a lofty conception of the people as ideal Christians, and he underwent a chill of disappointment on finding them apparently much like other men. Even the pastor, though a quiet, inoffensive man, gave no sign of energy or of what would have been called in England vital religion. With this chill at his heart he came upon the atmosphere of gorgeous Rome. It was, however, in the words of Clough's fine ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... knows where, and had set himself up in business as a marine-store dealer, in a back street which ran down to the shore of the Tweed. He was a little red-haired, pale-eyed rat of a man, with ferrety eyes and a goatee beard, quiet and peaceable in his ways and inoffensive enough, but a rare hand at gossiping about the beach and the walls—you might find him at all odd hours either in these public places or in the door of his shop, talking away with any idler like himself. And how I came to get into talk with him on that particular night was ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... street, his impulse was to flee—get out, get away from the whole business. A sullen shame was pumping the hot blood up into his neck and cheeks. He strove to find an inoffensive name for what he was proposing to do, but ugly terms, synonym after synonym, crowded in to characterise the impending procedure, and he walked on angrily, half frightened, looking back from moment to moment at the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... as he gave a nod. "And I feel sure that this Spanish captain, who is evidently an ordinary trader, will prove perfectly inoffensive; and besides, my dear sir, we are not at war now, and what enemies can you have ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... that the harmless, innocent, inoffensive automatic shot gun, that "don't matter if you enforce the bag limit," figures prominently in both stories ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... must continue still to lie Alone, for reasons which don't matter; you The same, Katinka, until by and by: And I shall place Juanna with Dudu, Who's quiet, inoffensive, silent, shy, And will not toss and chatter the night through. What say you, child?"—Dudu said nothing, as Her talents were of the more ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... puts in a clear view the point aimed at by the Catholics in thus confusing and blending the doctrines of heresy and the practice of witchcraft, and how a meeting of inoffensive Protestants could be cunningly identified with a Sabbath ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... met on terms artistic which were most satisfying to them both. Dave had made good junior marks in spite of his inoffensive sprees and conflicts with his father. He was in many ways Adelaide's superior, but she gave him a large companionship in things beautiful, and worshiped at his feet in questions profound. His father had ignored, or failed to notice, Dave's references to the young lady-so ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... himself stunned by the words thus heaped upon his inoffensive head, made a brief though pertinent rejoinder; the same being neither more nor less than that he had long perceived Miss Fanny to have no nonsense about her, and that he had no doubt of its being all ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... contain possibilities of character which may be manifested in consequence of a sudden change of environment. This explains how it was that among the most savage members of the French Convention were to be found inoffensive citizens who, under ordinary circumstances, would have been peaceable notaries or virtuous magistrates. The storm past, they resumed their normal character of quiet, law-abiding citizens. Napoleon found amongst them his ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Murdoch without difficulty. It was now late, and the old clerk came down the stairs with inoffensive imprecations upon the head of his untimely caller, but his mutterings soon gave way to a cry ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... an unamiable bird, as was proved by Colonel Montagu in the case of one which he managed to catch by means of a slight wound in the wing, and which lived with him for upwards of a year. It used to follow its feeder about, and displayed a most inoffensive disposition. With other birds it was on terms, of peace, and goodwill, never threatening them with its big, strong bill. An excellent angler, its skill in capture was seen to greatest advantage when it had to encounter ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... or a tall portly Stephens, concluding his inward estimate of the prize with a peculiar grunting chuckle, known by the initiated to be an important announcement. This is no doubt one of the milder and more inoffensive types, but still a thoroughly confirmed and obstinate case. Its parallel to the classes who are to be taken charge of by their wiser neighbours is only too close and awful; for have not sometimes the female members of his household been known ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... history, happening to have a few inoffensive Danes on hand, on the 13th of November, the festival of St. Brice, 1002, he gave it out that he would massacre these people, among them the sister of the Danish king, a noble woman who had become a Christian (only it is to be hoped a better ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... certainly works hard enough for the pennies thrown to him, lugging his big box around the city from morning until night." To this good word for the organ grinder it may be added that he is generally an inoffensive person, who attends closely to his business during the day, and rarely ever falls into the hands of the police. Furthermore, however much grown people with musical tastes may be annoyed, the organ ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... and a quiet, inoffensive behavior, began to get them the good opinion of the country, and the people began to pity them and speak very well of them; the consequence of which was, that upon the occasion of a very wet, rainy night, a certain gentleman who lived in the neighborhood sent ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... travelled 202 miles from Queen Victoria's Spring, although, in a straight line, we were only 180 miles from it. Almost immediately upon the arrival of the caravan, a number of native men and one young boy made their appearance. They were apparently quiet and inoffensive, and some of them may have seen white people before, for one or two spoke a few English words, such as "white fellow," "what name," "boy," etc. They seemed pleased, but astonished to see the camels drink such an enormous quantity of water; they completely emptied ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... charitable suppositions; but at all events, he had the impertinence to address Mrs. Tubbs in a low tone, audible only to herself. He muttered some compliment to her appearance—talked a little nonsense—inoffensive in itself, but intolerable as coming from a stranger. Mrs. Tubbs made no reply, but she was glad to spring from the conveyance when the driver pulled up at the Norfolk House. To her great joy she espied the faithful Tubbs, attired in a blouse, and wheeling a barrow ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... realize the possible significance of this seemingly inoffensive query, and her look to the other girls signaled them ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... art matters has already been spoken of. He took himself very seriously, moving through life with a sunny-faced self-complacency so inoffensive and sincere as to be positively delightful. He was too good-natured and in all respects of character too little virile to meet Irons with anything but kindness, but as he was a trifle less sure of his social standing than ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... Nuncomar, named Goordas. Nuncomar's services were wanted, yet he could not safely be trusted with power; and Hastings thought it a master stroke of policy to reward the able and unprincipled parent by promoting the inoffensive child. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in existence," he says, "are so little anarchical in their habits, or live, unless under immediate excitement, in a more orderly and peaceable manner, or are so easily governed. The presiding genius of the country is tranquillity, and quiet, inoffensive demeanour, in every class of society, and in every part of the kingdom; nor is there any necessity, unless where domination, or unpopular and false principles are the object, for the application of force to coerce them at any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... him very early, probably about the time when he visited England to receive knighthood, was sent to Lincoln; and friends of the king were consecrated to Winchester, Ely, Bath, Hereford, and Chichester. Prior Richard of Dover, a man "laudably inoffensive who prudently kept within his own sphere," was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Richard de Lucy remained in charge of the whole kingdom as justiciar. The towns and trading classes were steadfast in loyalty, and the baronage was again driven, as it had ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... inoffensive, respectable-looking man not coarse or low in type; this would have been his comment upon the dead man, if he had known nothing about him. Max shuddered as he withdrew his gaze; and, as he did so, he met the ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... enough man for that, all right," suggested another member of the same group, "there wasn't any of them who could pull a bead quicker than our grazing Chief yonder." Wilbur turned and saw crossing the room a quiet-looking, spare man, light-complexioned, and apparently entirely inoffensive. "I guess they were ready enough to give him a wide berth when ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... seizes an inoffensive British gentleman merely because he travels from Paris to Delgratz, I appeal to you, the Austrian minister, to go and release him, and you refuse; yet you tell me I am making war on your country if I rescue him. The notion ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Fifth Form, having come direct from another school. He was what many persons would call an agreeable boy, although for some reason or other he was never very popular. What that something was, no one could exactly define. He was clever, and good-tempered, and inoffensive. He rarely quarrelled or interfered with any one, and he had been known to do more than one good-natured act. But whether it was that he was conceited, or selfish, or not quite straight, or a little bit of all three, he never made any very great friends at Saint Dominic's, ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... of wit, in Ireland, who in the night amuse themselves with cutting inoffensive passengers across the face with a knife. They are somewhat like those facetious gentlemen some time ago known in England by the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... nothing on earth which did not love the radiant god. So the servants returned to Frigga, telling her that all had been duly sworn save the mistletoe, growing upon the oak stem at the gate of Valhalla, and this, they added, was such a puny, inoffensive thing that no harm could ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... even if it does not finally settle some conflicting claims, will most assuredly help to teach the warring nations just how far they can go, and will help, consequently, to restrict its subsequent policy within practicable and probably inoffensive limits. It is by no means an accident that England and France, the two oldest European nations, are the two whose foreign policies are best defined and, so far as Europe is concerned, least offensive. For centuries these Powers ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... unable to help herself as yet, was still imprisoned in her cot in the bedroom until such time as her mother could attend to her, and on the dining-room floor George and the three-year-old, ordered to keep extremely quiet and inoffensive, played with their bricks. Now and again an erection of bricks toppled down accidentally with a shattering noise, when Osborn exclaimed: "Shut up, you kids!" and their mother implored: "Do try to keep quiet ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... rhapsodists as trenching on the province of poetry. He condemns all French writers (as well of poetry as prose) in the lump. His list in this way is indeed small. He approves of Walton's Angler, Paley, and some other writers of an inoffensive modesty of pretension. He also likes books of voyages and travels, and Robinson Crusoe. In art, he greatly esteems Bewick's woodcuts, and Waterloo's sylvan etchings. But he sometimes takes a higher tone, and gives his mind fair play. We have known him enlarge with ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... office of captain over them, that you might lead them in this service of mine in the ways of duty, submission, and loyalty. Instead of that, you were the instigator of that outrage this morning, when murder was almost done upon an inoffensive man who was my guest. What have you ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... backgrounds. That he did not wholly abandon the decorative convention which he heired, and often employed to excellent purpose, was due in large measure to caution. "He came," says W. E. Henley, "at the break between new and old—when the old was not yet discredited, and the new was still inoffensive; and with that exquisite good sense which marks the artist, he identified himself with that which was known, and not with that which, though big with many kinds of possibilities, was as yet in perfect touch with nothing actively ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... (gratified) by sacrifices, the Rishis, by study, meditation, and asceticism, the (deceased) ancestors, by begetting children and offering the funeral cake, and, lastly other men, by leading a humane and inoffensive life. I have justly discharged my obligations to the Rishis, the gods, and other men. But those others than these three are sure to perish with the dissolution of my body! Ye ascetics, I am not yet freed from the debt I owe to my (deceased) ancestors. The best of men are born ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... writ, The ladies might mistake him for a wit.' Then, Millamant is the ultimate expression of those who, having all the material goods which nature and civilisation can give, live on paradoxes and artifices. Her insolence is the inoffensive insolence only possible to the well-bred. 'O ay, letters,—I had letters,—I am persecuted with letters,—I hate letters,—nobody knows how to write letters; and yet one has 'em, one does not know why,—they serve ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... negroes of Cranceford County, and eager ears in the North, not the ears of the old soldier, but of the politician, shutting out the suggestions of justice, heard only the clamor of a political outrage; and again arose the loud cry that the South had robbed the inoffensive negro of his suffrage. But the story, once so full of alarm, was beginning to be a feeble reminiscence; Northern men with business interests in the South had begun to realize that the white man, though often in the wrong, could sometimes be in the right. But now a problem—graver than the ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... do, what shall I do! My home is gone! My husband is gone! My children are gone! And for what?"—wringing her hands and gesticulating wildly. "For what, Messieurs? For being quiet, inoffensive, loyal people!" ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... —a quieter, more inoffensive ghost than that described by Defoe in his Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions: "A grave, ancient man, with a full-bottomed wig and a rich brocaded gown, who changed into the most horrible monster that ever was seen, with eyes like two fiery daggers ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... and several more, while the days were passed suspiciously and uneasily. But we saw no sign of more Indians, those who shared our camp seeming quite at home, and proving to be gentle, inoffensive creatures, now that they were satisfied that we intended to do them ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... the other lady rejoined gaily. "I am as inoffensive as a stained-glass saint in a chapel window. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... even a Thousand new Vegetables, created ad libitum.' Having been struck by the fact, that the ass so often feeds upon the thistle, he took some specimens of that plant, and, by careful experiment, has succeeded in producing for the table 'a savoury vegetable, with thorns of the most inoffensive and flexible sort.' Whatever be the kind of thistle, however hard and sharp its thorns, he has tamed and softened them all, his method of transformation being, as he says, none other than exposing the plants to different influences of light. Those which grew unsheltered, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... the glorification of suffering little Belgium. Whatever brief we may hold for her though, we ought not to picture even her peasant people as a mild, meek and inoffensive lot. That isn't the sort of stuff out of which her dogged and continuing resistance was wrought. That isn't the mettle which for two weeks stopped up the German tide before the Liege forts, giving the allies two weeks to mobilize, and all they had asked the Belgians for was two or ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... could answer there was a noise as of men and horses coming up the defile, and, thinking it was some of the former gang returning, guns were whipped out. But they were not needed. Two mild-mannered and inoffensive appearing men rode into sight. They had the look of college professors. Behind them ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... Ruo, lying directly to the south of it, is inhabited by heathens, each village governed by its own chief, holding little or no communication with their neighbours. The people appear to be mild and inoffensive, though perfect pagans. They posses a considerable amount of ingenuity, and manufacture a most beautiful fabric from fine grass, equal to the finest grass cloth ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... said he was merely making his rounds in his park; the senator and Monsieur Grevin might perhaps have been alarmed at the sight of his gun and have thought his intentions hostile when they were really inoffensive. He called attention to the fact that in the dusk a man who was not in the habit of hunting might easily fancy a gun was pointed at him, whereas, in point of fact, it was held in his hand at half-cock. To explain the condition of his clothes when arrested, he said he had slipped and fallen ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... eye had told him, at a glance, that there was no chance for him to escape; and, before his natural looks could be noted, he had become transformed into a lout of so stolid and inoffensive an appearance, that his captors seemed greatly disappointed, and evidently entertained doubts whether he could be the one they supposed they were about to secure. And it was not till his pale and trembling fellow-prisoner had been conducted off on her horse some rods, that they could make him ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... Winkle was urged by a variety of considerations, the first of which was his reputation with the club. He had always been looked up to as a high authority on all matters of amusement and dexterity, whether offensive, defensive, or inoffensive; and if, on this very first occasion of being put to the test, he shrunk back from the trial, beneath his leader's eye, his name and standing were lost for ever. Besides, he remembered to have heard it frequently surmised by the uninitiated in such matters that by an understood arrangement ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... eyes rest for a moment on the motley of dressing-gowns, mackintoshes, uniforms, I inevitably see in the line one face set on a slant, one pair of eyes forsaking the stage and fixed on me in a steady, inoffensive beam. ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... wounded me, that she should look upon me as being so utterly inoffensive. I braced myself up, steeled my heart, and seized her hand; but she withdrew it softly, and moved a little away from me. That just put an end to my courage again; I felt ashamed, and looked out through the window. I was, in spite of all, in far too wretched a condition; ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... along Piccadilly, the more stately pace of the private carriages crossing the Park. Was it possible that in the world of today—the world of telegraphs and express trains, of the newspaper and the motor car—two inoffensive human beings could be done to death so shamefully and openly as would be the fate of Iris and himself if they fell into the hands of these savages! It was inconceivable, intolerable! ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... that item of evidence so satisfactory as Isel did. But he had not come with any intention of ferreting out doubtful characters or suspicious facts. He was no ardent heretic-hunter, but a quiet, peaceable man, as inoffensive as ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... these instruments of rural felicity would afford me few gratifications. I never shot but to miss the mark, and, to confess the truth, was afraid of the fire of my own gun. I could discover no musick in the cry of the dogs, nor could divest myself of pity for the animal whose peaceful and inoffensive life was sacrificed to our sport. I was not, indeed, always at leisure to reflect upon her danger; for my horse, who had been bred to the chase, did not always regard my choice either of speed or way, but leaped hedges and ditches at his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... assailant, and grappling with another, brought him to the ground and cut his throat with a pocket knife. Lieutenant Peyton was by birth, education, and character a thorough gentleman. Perfectly good natured and inoffensive—except when provoked or attacked—and then—he dispatched his affair and his man in a quiet, expeditious and thorough manner. The Federal cavalry retreated from the town ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... settled peoples. In physical characters they closely resemble the Kenyahs, being well-built and vigorous; their skin is of very light yellow colour, and their features are regular and well shaped. Mentally they are characterised by extreme shyness and timidity and reserve. They are quite inoffensive and never engage in open warfare; though they will avenge injuries by stealthy attacks on individuals with the blow-pipe and poisoned darts. Their only handicrafts are the making of baskets, mats, blow-pipes, and the implements used for working the wild sago; but in these and in ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... keep watch over my temper always, and I hope it isn't too bad; yet I'm certain that in Jonkheer Brederode's place I couldn't have endured Nell's behavior, but would have stopped being skipper the second day out, even if I left a whole party of inoffensive people stranded. Instead of leaving us in the lurch after undertaking to act as skipper, however, he has worked for us like a Trojan. Not only has he been skipper, but guide, philosopher and friend—to say nothing ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... it. But it was a difficult thing to find any pretext for its capture. It was held by the Knights of St. John, the decrepit remnant of an order whose heroism had many times been the shield of Christendom against the Turk, and whose praise had once filled the whole earth. They were now as inoffensive as they were incapable. Their helplessness was their true defence,—and the memory of their good deeds. At last, in 1798, Napoleon, on his way to Egypt, partly by force and partly by treaty, obtained possession of it. So strong were its fortresses, that he himself acknowledged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... an erring mind, which, on his return to England soon afterwards, ripened into mental derangement of the milder species. After several years passed in this way, during which the mental disease considerably relaxed, so that young Campbell became wholly inoffensive, and his father received him into his house. The effect of this upon a mind of the most exquisite sensibility like the poet's, may be readily imagined: it was, at times, a source of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 407, December 24, 1829. • Various
... cautiously avoided all engagements with that youth; for besides that Tommy Jones was an inoffensive lad amidst all his roguery, and really loved Blifil, Mr Thwackum being always the second of the latter, would have ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... like them at all," she retorted, shaking her head. "You remind me of a toy I used to play with years ago—a very pretty, harmless, inoffensive-looking toy, but which when touched unguardedly changed all of a sudden into a dreadful little fiend that flew right up into your face. Such a surprise is enough to make one's hair ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... now began to be called by their enemies. There was perhaps good reason for intelligent disapprobation, but Understanding was left far behind the flying feet of Zeal, who, torch in hand, rushed from house to house. It was related that Joseph Smith was in the habit of wounding inoffensive sheep and leading them bleeding over the neighbouring hills under the pretext that treasure would be found beneath the spot where they would at last drop exhausted; and there were dark hints concerning ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... unfortunate human creature, who, if his ill-treatment had made him "frenetic," was chained in the cellar or garret of a workhouse, fastened to the leg of a table, tied to a post in an outhouse, or perhaps shut up in an uninhabited ruin; or, if his lunacy were inoffensive, was left to ramble, half-naked and half-starved, through the streets and highways, teased by the rabble, and made the jest of the vulgar, ignorant, and unfeeling. "I have witnessed," he says, "instances of each of these modes ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Mills, the superintendent of the Royal Victoria, had many a secret conference with Jim Woppit, and it finally leaked out that the cold, discriminating, and vigilant eye of eternal justice was riveted upon Steve Barclay, the stage-driver. Few of us suspected Steve; he was a good-natured, inoffensive fellow; it seemed the idlest folly to surmise that he could have been in collusion with the highwaymen. But Mr. Mills had his own ideas on the subject; he was a man of positive convictions, and, having pretty nearly always demonstrated that he was in the right, ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... clean Elzevir, or a tall portly Stephens, concluding his inward estimate of the prize with a peculiar grunting chuckle, known by the initiated to be an important announcement. This is no doubt one of the milder and more inoffensive types, but still a thoroughly confirmed and obstinate case. Its parallel to the classes who are to be taken charge of by their wiser neighbours is only too close and awful; for have not sometimes the female members of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... The process is more slow, but none the less sure; and it is clear that in the case of my dirt-heap the foul matters added have thus been destroyed. The practical bearings of this fact are of the utmost importance. Earth is not to be regarded as a vehicle for the inoffensive removal beyond the limits of the town of what has hitherto been its most troublesome product, but as a medium for bringing together the offensive ingredients of this product, and the world's great scavenger, oxygen. My experiment seems to demonstrate the fact that there is no occasion to carry away ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... from the tops of the hills, and the sides of the boat offered no protection against the latter. The men of the fleet returned the fire, but their lead was sent into the forest and the undergrowth, and they did not know whether it hit anything except inoffensive ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... feet. He had just been knocked down by Nelson. As the man was rising Nelson gave him a blow across the loins with the handle of his whip, which had the effect of straightening out the villain on the grass and rendered him an inoffensive spectator during ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... solemn occasions they are thoughtful, serious, and grave; yet I have seen them free, open and merry at feasts and entertainments. In their common deportment towards each other they are respectful, peaceable, and inoffensive. Sudden anger is looked upon as ignominious and unbecoming, and, except in liquor, they seldom differ with their neighbour, or ever do him any harm or injury. As for riches they have none; nor covet any; and while they have plenty of provisions, ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... being carried off by a lurking wolf while his parents were working in the field, to the time when, after having been recovered by his mother six years later, he escaped from her into the jungle. In all these cases certain marked features reappear. In the first, the boy was very inoffensive, except when teased, and then he growled surlily. He would eat anything thrown to him, but preferred meat, which he devoured with canine voracity. He drank a pitcher of buttermilk at one gulp, and could not be induced ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... judgment of Gringoire, was an inoffensive and charming creature, pretty, with the exception of a pout which was peculiar to her; a naive and passionate damsel, ignorant of everything and enthusiastic about everything; not yet aware of the difference between a man and a woman, even in her dreams; ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Andirondacks, whose blood remained unrevenged. In vain did the youth plead his love; in vain did he show, that if the spirits of the flood warred on their neighbours, who were unable to inflict a wound on their adversaries, it furnished no reason why the beautiful maiden, so lovely and so inoffensive, should be banned. She had not injured, then why should she be spurned? But his argument availed not to influence the warriors, or to bend their stern hearts to pity. They drove the fair Menana from the arms of him she loved best, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder: in the same way Francoise had adopted, to minister to her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any other servant, a series of crafty and pitiless stratagems. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... was arrested and charged with injuring with intent to murder. Tried with many others from other villages in the district at the Salisbury Assizes, he was found guilty and sentenced to transportation for life. Yet the Doveton shoemaker was known to every one as a quiet, inoffensive young man, and to the last he protested his innocence, for although he had gone with the others to the farm he had not taken the hammer and was ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... at Brunn, the capital of Moravia, where an English colonel, a Mr. Mills, was detained in exile; he was a man of the most perfect goodness and obliging manners, and according to the English expression, altogether inoffensive. He was made dreadfully miserable, without the least pretence or utility. But the Austrian ministry is apparently persuaded that it will derive an air of strength from turning persecutor; its counsellors ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... The Portuguese are wholly inoffensive, except when their pride is touched. In politics, or when they hunger after African territory we fancy needed for our own people, they may not seem so. When a rebuff excites them against the English, Lisbon may not be pleasant for Englishmen. But in such cases would London commend itself ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... white with black spots on them. His back was gray with a huge patch of yellow on one side and a black patch on the other. His tail was yellow with a gray tip. One ear was black and one yellow. A black patch over one eye gave him a fearfully rakish look. In reality he was meek and inoffensive, of a sociable disposition. In one respect, if in no other, Joseph was like a lily of the field. He toiled not neither did he spin or catch mice. Yet Solomon in all his glory slept not on softer cushions, or feasted more fully on ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... never knew a college besides ours whereof the members were so perfectly well satisfied with one another, and so inoffensive to the other part of the University. All the Fellows I have yet seen are both well-natured and well-bred; men admirably disposed as well to preserve peace and good neighbourhood among themselves as to preserve it wherever ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... time the children were in a state of intimidation. It was plain that their mother was fairly aroused, and each deemed it best to be as quiet and inoffensive as possible. The reappearance of harmony being thus restored, Mrs. Abercrombie, whose head and heart were now both throbbing with pain, retired in a most unhappy state of mind to her chamber, where she threw herself into a large chair, ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... flight with Lilla and my aunt upon the little raft, while I and Tom covered their escape with our guns; but the distance being lessened each moment, we could make out that these men belonged to one of the inoffensive fishing tribes who lived upon the rivers and their banks; and a new thought struck me—one which I directly ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... killing of a Negro has come to be regarded in some Southern communities is brought out by an incident of the week at Memphis, which hardly needs comment. An inoffensive Negro was hawking chickens about the street, when ——, who was not in uniform at the time, jumped to the conclusion that the chickens had been stolen, and arrested the man. While he went to put on his uniform he left his prisoner in custody of a nearby grocer, ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... South Seas upon some of the inoffensive islanders will nigh pass belief. These things are seldom proclaimed at home; they happen at the very ends of the earth; they are done in a corner, and there are none to reveal them. But there is, nevertheless, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... several office buildings in the city, they will realize that the problem is not without a solution. In almost every case where the architect has refrained from useless decoration and stuck to simple lines, the result, if not beautiful, has at least been inoffensive. It is where inappropriate elaboration is added that taste is offended. Such structures as the Singer building, corner of Liberty Street and Broadway, and the home of Life, in Thirty-first Street, prove ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Is not that a convincing proof of what I say, that you have no cause to be afraid of them, and that it is very silly to be so? It is certainly foolish to be afraid of any thing, unless it threatens us with immediate danger; but to pretend to be so at a mouse, and such like inoffensive things, is a degree of weakness that I can by no means suffer any of my children to indulge.' 'May I then, madam,' inquired the child, 'be afraid of cows and horses, and such great beasts as those?' 'Certainly not,' answered her mother, 'unless they are likely to hurt you. If a ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... trouble one so inoffensive and so easily troubled as her poor little self? They did not know all they were doing,—but if they had eyes they must see a little of it. Why could she not have been allowed to keep her old free simple feeling with everybody, instead of being hampered and constrained and miserable from this ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... not have idled those autumn days away so lazily, even though he so urgently required rest after that rapid travelling, had he but known that the person who occupied the next room to his—that middle-aged commercial traveller—an entirely inoffensive person who possessed a red beard, and who had given the name of Jules Dequanter, and his nationality as Belgian, native of Liege—was none other than Gustav Heureux, the man who had been recalled from New York by the evasive doctor ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... service. They never heap the ashes of charitable oblivion upon the coals of prejudice and hate, but continue to replenish it with the most exciting and fiery appeals. The Edgefield paper makes light of this dastardly violence done to aged and inoffensive women by ascribing it as the work of "rash boys." Manly pastime for these brave boys! a crime sir, that in any other State, and done to any other class, would have demanded and met with immediate punishment, perhaps in the Court of Judge Lynch, as was the case in Marlboro County a few ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... in the forest I often came across snakes of considerable length, but never found any difficulty in killing them, as they were sluggish in their movements and seemed to be inoffensive. The rubber-workers, who had no doubt had many encounters with reptiles, told me about large sucurujus or boa-constrictors, which had their homes in the river not many miles from headquarters. They told me that these snakes were in possession of hypnotic powers, but this, like many other ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... Rousseau, he had a loving tenderness for all nature; for the fields, the woods, and for animals. An aristocrat by birth, he hated '93 by instinct; but of a philosophical temperament and liberal by education, he loathed tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory hatred. The strongest, and at the same time the weakest, trait in his character was his generosity; a generosity which had not enough arms to caress, to give, to embrace; the generosity of a creator which was utterly devoid of system, and to which ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... Good Spirit, (whom they call in the Seneca language Nau-wan-e-u,) as the Creator of the world, and of every good thing—that he made men, and all inoffensive animals; that he supplies men with all the comforts of life; and that he is particularly partial to the Indians, whom they say are his peculiar people. They also believe that he is pleased in giving them (the Indians) good gifts; ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... stage Calliope generally began to drink. Finally, about midnight, he was seen going homeward, saluting those whom he met with exaggerated but inoffensive courtesy. Not yet was Calliope's melancholy at the danger point. He would seat himself at the window of the room he occupied over Silvester's tonsorial parlours and there chant lugubrious and tuneless ballads until morning, ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... his fellow roomers. A strange, drab lot he thought them from the occasional glimpses he had had in passings upon the dark stairway and in the gloomy halls. They appeared to be quiet, inoffensive sort of folk, occupied entirely with their own affairs. He had made no friends in the place, not even an acquaintance, nor did he care to. What leisure time he had he devoted to what he now had come to consider ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... checked it! Did you see the man stare as you reached out to take my check away from me? Have I eaten or drunk to-night? I've not, for I'm not a creature! And mad, I? Look to yourself, as I told you to look before it was too late! You fool, you've been staring inoffensive women out of countenance, with all the hate from my face printed on yours, and in the eyes of all these people you've been sitting here for half an hour talking to yourself, and ordering wine and food for an empty ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... district by Mr. Macauley, who published a history of Claybrook, may be amusing to many readers.—The people here are much attached to wakes; and among the farmers and cottagers these annual festivals are celebrated with music, dancing, feasting, and much inoffensive sport; but in the neighbouring villages the return of the wake never fails to produce at least a week of idleness, intoxication, and riot. These and other abuses by which those festivals are grossly perverted, render it highly desirable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... deed of justice, Dinsmore in high good humor with himself set out to call on Clint Wadley. He had made an inoffensive human being suffer, and that is always something to a man's credit. If he could not do any better, Pete would bully a horse, but he naturally preferred humans. They were more sensitive ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... handsome face (which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite inoffensive, on his English lips ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... compulsatorily; such are we all by nature, discontented, perverse, and changeable; though all have not courage to appear so, and few, like Belfield, are worth watching when they do. He told me he was happy; I knew it could not be: but his employment was inoffensive, and I left him without reproach. In this neighbourhood I heard of you, and found your name was coupled with praise. I came to see if you deserved it; I have ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... appeared. He was decidedly good as an actor; but as a comic singer (with considerable powers of pathos as well) he is quite first-rate. His chief merit seems to be the earnestness with which he throws himself into the work. The songs (mostly his own writing) were quite inoffensive, and very funny. I am very glad to be able to think that his influence on public taste is towards refinement and purity. I liked best "The Future Mrs. 'Awkins," with its taking tune, and "My Old Dutch," ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... mare was the better horse," and poor Bishop, an inoffensive man, and a cripple withal, was wedded to a regular Xantippe. It was evident that unpleasant thoughts were dominant in the woman's mind as she proceeded sullenly and vigorously with preparations for breakfast. The bitter bread ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... the wavering fortunes of the state. Third in the list, the happy lover's prize Is won by honeyed words from women's eyes. If some would have it first instead of third, So let it be,—I answer not a word. The fourth,—sweet readers, let the thoughtless half Have its small shrug and inoffensive laugh; Let the grave quarter wear its virtuous frown, The stern half-quarter try to scowl us down; But the last eighth, the choice and sifted few, Will hear my words, and, pleased, confess ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... general. I indulge the hope and expectation that WAR shall one day be universally and finally extinguish'd. But I will confess also, that appearances would tempt us to apprehend that day is far distant. And while we make War for Sport on useful, generous, inoffensive Animals, it is not easy to imagine that we shall cease to make War ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... her again and she stopped. I could see the look of amazement on our junior's face, and did not wonder at it. What sudden dislike could her mistress have conceived against this inoffensive and devoted creature? ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... is dangerous. People think that dreamers do no harm. They are mistaken: dreamers do a great heal of harm. Even apparently inoffensive utopian ideas really exercise a noxious influence. They tend to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... accomplished with a precision that was almost automatic, so did the work yet to be done go off with the nicety of a well-regulated schedule. Everything came about as Holmes had predicted, even to the action of the police in endeavoring to fasten the crime upon an inoffensive and somewhat impecunious social dangler, whose only ambition in life was to lead a cotillion well, and whose sole idea of how to get money under false pretences was to make some over-rich old maid believe that he loved her for herself alone ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... manners, agreeable in society, not given to monkish austerities—except in the matter of Fridays—nor yet to the Low-Church severity of demeanour. He was thoroughly a gentleman, good-humoured, inoffensive, and sociable. But he had one fault: he ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... him with contempt. Whoever he might be he looked upon a Quaker as a mild, inoffensive person, hardly deserving the name ...
— A Cousin's Conspiracy - A Boy's Struggle for an Inheritance • Horatio Alger
... branch of society, it follows that it can be proper to none who is not in his nature social. Now, society is agreeable to no creatures who are not inoffensive to each other; and we therefore observe in animals who are entirely guided by nature that it is cultivated by such only, while those of more noxious disposition addict themselves to solitude, and, unless when prompted by lust, or that necessary instinct implanted in them by nature for the ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Sovereign was an appreciable influence, and it was her desire that a paragraph in the Queen's Speech opening Parliament in February 1864 was erased. Words which contained at least a veiled or attributed threat to Germany were omitted, and instead of them an inoffensive paragraph was inserted expressing the Queen's ardent desire for peace and recording the earnest efforts she had made to maintain it.[51] At the same time when, by the Convention of Gastein in August ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Portugal. May the Lord in his mercy grant that the soldiers who proceed to her assistance may be of a different stamp: and yet, from the lax state of discipline which exists in the Portuguese army, in comparison with that of England and France, I am afraid that the inoffensive population of the disturbed provinces will say that wolves have been summoned to chase away foxes from the sheepfold. O! may I live to see the day when soldiery will no longer be tolerated in any civilized, or ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... of the watch, "as I was going on my rounds late last night, I saw this ferocious young foreigner, sword in hand, slashing and stabbing three inoffensive creatures. When I arrived they were lying dead upon the ground. Their murderer, overwhelmed by his terrible crime, fled into a house, and hid there, hoping, no doubt, to escape in the morning. Men of Hypata, you do not allow your own fellow-townsmen to commit murder with impunity. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... The failure here alluded to is his Ploutos or Plutus—an inoffensive but tame comedy written when Aristophanes was advanced in years, and of which the ill-success has been imputed to this fact. Mr. Browning, however, treats it as a proof that the author's ingrained ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... too, that the stranger might have imagined the Apaches. But in his motions was something of the lithe grace of the puma. It was part of the business of the cattleman to judge men and he was not convinced that this young fellow was as inoffensive as he looked. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... unmindful of our case that it looks on with indifference when indignity upon indignity is heaped, not only upon our innocent men, but even upon our inoffensive women? ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... lilac and a blue lilac; or a rose pink and a blue pink; or drab and yellow. Instances might be multiplied without end of incongruous inharmonious blending of colours, the mere sight of which is enough to give any one a bilious fever. There are colours which, in themselves, may be inoffensive, but of which only particular shades assort well together. Blue and pink was a very favourite combination at one time; but in order to be both pleasing and effective, it must be one particular shade of each, and these softened and blended by the addition of white. ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... states his surviving brother, "and he wished to see every one happy around him." As a child, his brother informs us, his exemplary behaviour was so conspicuous, that mothers were satisfied of their children's safety, if they learned that they were in company with "Bob Tannahill." Inoffensive in his own dispositions, he entertained every respect for the feelings of others. He enjoyed the intercourse of particular friends, but avoided general society; in company, he seldom talked, and only with a neighbour; he shunned the acquaintance of persons of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Butler was experiencing a change of heart. That they could plan ruthlessly to slaughter the inoffensive little animals passed his comprehension. A remark below him caused the lad to prick up his ears ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... kangaroos, from the tiny kangaroo rat, about the size of an English water-rat, to the huge red kangaroo, which is over six feet high and about the weight of a sucking calf. The kangaroo is harmless and inoffensive as a rule, but it can inflict a dangerous kick with its hindlegs, and when pursued by dogs or men and cornered, the "old man" kangaroo will sometimes fight for its life. Its method is to take a stand in a water-hole or with its back ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... Allwick. "I knew his parents. I have been to their village, and he himself is not a stranger to me. He recognised me this morning in the crowd, and that induced him to pay us this visit. The truth is, I have seen much of the Molokani. A more inoffensive, earnest, religious people do not exist. When travelling in the south of Russia with a gentleman, to whom I was attached as secretary, we have had thirty of them dining with us at once, and, though peasants of the humblest class, they have invariably behaved like gentlemen. Their Christianity ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... 1118 Hugues de Payens, Geoffrey de St. Aldemar, and seven other French noblemen, whose hearts were touched by the sufferings which the pilgrims underwent in their journey to Jerusalem, formed themselves into a society with the object of the protection of these inoffensive persons on their transit from the coast inland. Hugues de Payens, received in audience by Pope Honore II., was sent by the Pontiff to the Peers of the Council, then assembled at Troyes in Champagne; the Council ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... close to which the spring gurgled out of the rock. Here he took the precaution of drinking deeply himself before letting the ponies have their fill of the refreshing water, after which they began grazing in their quiet, inoffensive way, leaving their guardian to his thoughts, which ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... with natives, we feel so anxious to conciliate, and to avoid giving offence, that our behaviour, thus guarded and circumspect, has an air of restraint about it, which may produce distrust and apprehension on their part; whilst, on the other hand, Jack, who is not only unreflecting and inoffensive himself, but never suspects that others can possibly misconstrue his perfect good-will and unaffected frankness, has an easy, disengaged manner, which at once invites ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... discovered among the documents which filled his drawers. As to his relations with women, they appeared to have been promiscuous but superficial. He had many acquaintances among them, but few friends, and no one whom he loved. His habits were regular, his conduct inoffensive. His death was an absolute mystery, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the third lieutenant, had none. How he had got his promotion was surprising to those who knew him, till it was whispered about that he had a very near relative in a high position, who had no difficulty in obtaining it for him. Sims was, however, generally liked; he was very inoffensive, he never talked about himself or his friends, seemed to wish to be let alone, and to let others alone. He was always ready to do a good-natured action, to take a brother officer's watch, or to give up his own leave to ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... manner of fun over Bluff owning a shotgun built after the same principle, nor could they settle the dispute, Jerry claiming that it was all right in a rifle, as a man hunted big game with that, and his life might be in danger; while with the other weapon he usually only shot birds and inoffensive small animals; while Bluff declared that what was black for the pot was also black for ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... At the scaffold he tried to speak a last word to his people. The drums were ordered to drown his voice, and an attendant priest uttered the words, "Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel!"—Son of Saint Louis, ascend to heaven!—and all was over. The kindest-hearted, most inoffensive gentleman in Europe had expiated the ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... were buccaneers. They claimed the same rights as privateers but differed in this—that they would attack any ship or settlement and plunder it at will. At first they confined themselves to small Spanish settlements only, but, later, their desires increased, and neutral ships and inoffensive villages ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... motion rules, The tendons stiffen, and the spirit cools; Each asks the aid of Nature's sister, Art, To cheer the senses, and to warm the heart. The gentle fair on nervous tea relies, Whilst gay good-nature sparkles in her eyes; An inoffensive scandal fluttering round, Too rough to tickle, and too light to wound; Champagne the courtier drinks, the spleen to chase, The colonel burgundy, and port his grace; Turtle and 'rrac the city rulers charm, ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... pleasure of his own importance, and, unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James's had ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... likeness; thine's a tympany of sense. A tun of man in thy large bulk is writ, But sure thou'rt but a kilderkin of wit. Like mine, thy gentle numbers feebly creep; Thy tragic muse gives smiles, thy comic sleep. With whate'er gall thou set'st thyself to write, Thy inoffensive satires never bite. In thy felonious heart though venom lies, It does but touch thy Irish pen, and dies. Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame In keen Iambics, but mild Anagram. Leave writing plays, ...
— English Satires • Various
... cliffs could tell! What a romance they could narrate of various tribes, as distinct from each other as the nations of Europe, crowding each other; and at the last of this inoffensive race, coming from the far south, it may be; driven from pillar to post, making their last stand in this desert land; to perish of pestilence, or to be almost exterminated by the blood-thirsty tribes that surrounded them—then again, when the tide changed, and a new ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... about without a keeper; but inoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailor in their title; nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we dare not trust them with an English pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a giddy, vitious, and ungrounded people, in such a sick and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... over the child and remained perfectly still. He did not dare to move, lest any action, however inoffensive, might induce Moosa to change his mind and separate ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... that this measure was justifiable on military grounds, there can be no excuse for the brutal precipitancy with which it was enforced. It crowded the colonial ports with homeless and impoverished fugitives; it inflicted unnecessary suffering and pecuniary loss upon inoffensive and innocent non-combatants, both European and native; and it was accompanied in some instances by displays of wanton cruelty and deliberate spite utterly unworthy of a people ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... it before? Ever since he had turned on the lights, he had been subjectively busy trying to invest her presence there with some plausible excuse. But somnambulism had never once entered his mind. And in his stupidity, at pains though he had been to render his words inoffensive, he had ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... blow commonly exhausts the receptacle of the duct, a second (the venom being more or less mingled and diluted by the salivary secretion) is comparatively less fatal in results; and each successive repetition correspondingly inoffensive until finally nothing but pure mucus is ejected. Nevertheless, when thoroughly aroused, the reptile is enabled to constantly hurl a secretion, since both rage and hunger swell the glands to enormous size, and stimulate to extraordinary activity—a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... attacks[129] always took place under the pressure of some great injustice, some excess of suffering imposed by the strong on the weak and inoffensive, we must also add that there was in this pretended misanthropy more real goodness and humanity than in all the elegies, songs, meditations, Messenian odes, etc., of all those who ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... been a willful and persistent nuisance in the little community, and there were good reasons for wanting to be rid of her, and right ways to that end. They took the wrong way and tried her for heresy. In like manner, when the Quakers came among them,—not of the mild, meek, inoffensive modern variety to which we are accustomed, but of the fierce, aggressive early type,—instead of proceeding against them for their overt offenses against the state, disorderly behavior, public indecency, contempt of court, sedition, they proceeded ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... brought to a sudden close Gov. Geary's term of office. When he had disbanded the three thousand "Law and Order" militia that were to attack Lawrence, that part of them known as the Kickapoo Rangers were returning home by way of Lecompton. One of this number went into a field where "a poor, inoffensive, lame young man" named David C. Buffum was plowing, and demanded his horses. Buffum protested against this robbery, but the wretch shot Buffum and took the horses. The unhappy man gave the following ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... mutual slaughter, hungering to live." Molluscs are murderers and the most shameless of cannibals. No creature at all conspicuous is safe, unless it is agile and alert, or of horrific aspect, or endowed with giant's strength, or is encased in armour. A perfectly inoffensive crab, incapable of inflicting injury to anything save creatures of almost microscopic dimensions, assumes the style and demeanour of a ferocious monster, ready at a moment's notice to cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war. Another hides itself as a rugged ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... in villanous man, and when cheating and craftines is counted the cleanest wit, and soundest wisedome.'[28] Fuller also, in a similar strain, says, 'He was a pious poet, his conscience having the command of his fancy, very temperate in his life, slow of speech, and inoffensive in company.' ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... settled what the whites called Bulltown, on the Little Kanawha. This was at a salt spring about a mile and a quarter below the present Bulltown P. O., Braxton county, Va. Capt. Bull and his people were inoffensive, and very friendly to their white neighbors, as our ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... contradictions that your artistic zeal encounters. The world is so formed that the practice of the Good and the search for the Better is not made agreeable to any one; not in the things of Art, which appear the most inoffensive, any more than in other things. In order to deserve well one must learn to endure well. The best specific for the prejudice, malice, imbroglios and injustice of others is not to trouble oneself about them. It seems that such and such people find their pleasure where we should not ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... and sneak off to go swimming in the East River. But it kept me from being very much afraid of the Bowery (we went down on the surface cars), but Olive was scared beautifully. There was the dearest, most inoffensive old man in the most perfect state of intoxication sitting next to us in the car, and when Olive moved away from him he winked over at me and said, 'Honor your shruples, ma'am, ver' good form.' I think Olive thought he was going to murder us—she was sure he ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Jack!" growled Phil, walking the floor of his room and savagely kicking an inoffensive chair out of his way. "I should have known. If I had taken Hooker in hand and coached him, instead of Grant—— But I never did like Roy very much, and somehow Rod Grant got on ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... to be a murmur of pleasure at the announcement from those who were with the speaker. Stanford slowly opened his eyes, wondering what these savages were who rejoiced in the death of an inoffensive stranger cast upon their shores. He saw a group standing around him, but his attention speedily became concentrated on one face. The owner of it, he judged, was not more than nineteen years of age, and the face—at least ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... eventually it will necessarily have its effect. Each war, as it occurs, even if it does not finally settle some conflicting claims, will most assuredly help to teach the warring nations just how far they can go, and will help, consequently, to restrict its subsequent policy within practicable and probably inoffensive limits. It is by no means an accident that England and France, the two oldest European nations, are the two whose foreign policies are best defined and, so far as Europe is concerned, least offensive. For centuries these Powers ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... maniac as yet not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all his reserved habits and quiet ways, he had learnt the whole ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... was promulgated in 1850, their chief spoke of it, in his ill-timed letter to the Bishop of Durham, as "insolent and insidious." For many an age to come, Catholics will read with astonishment that so inoffensive an act of the Holy See, done at the request of the Catholic bishops of England, and in the interest of the Catholic people, at the time some seven millions in number, should have excited the anger of so great a portion of the English nation. ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... altogether if they can without disturbance of the Queen's peace? The procession enabled many thousands to do that without the least inconvenience or danger to themselves, and with no injury or offence to their neighbours. To prohibit or punish peaceful, inoffensive, orderly, and perfectly innocent processions upon pretence that they are constructively unlawful, is unconstitutional tyranny. Was it done because the ministers discovered that the terror of suspended habeas corpus had not in this matter stifled ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... been stabbed in wanton cruelty, through the shoulder and the arm, but not mortally. The Indians were still drunk, and some of them having knives in their hands, I thought it most prudent to withdraw from their tents, without offering any assistance. The Indians appear to me to be generally of an inoffensive and hospitable disposition; but spirituous liquors, like war, infuriate them with the most revengeful and barbarous feelings. They are so conscious of this effect of drinking, that they generally deliver up their guns, bows and arrows, and ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... admiral's corpse lying in the court-yard, he went to the adjoining house, in which Teligny lived. All the inmates were killed, but he escaped by the roof. Twice he fell into the hands of the enemy, and twice he was spared; he perished at last by the sword of a man who knew not his amiable and inoffensive character. His neighbor La Rochefoucault was perhaps more fortunate in his fate. He had hardly fallen asleep when he was disturbed by the noise in the street. He heard shouts and the sound of many footsteps; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... never wanted the pretext, and seldom the will, to harass and pursue, even to the very edge of destruction, any of their less powerful neighbours, who attempted to separate themselves from their authority, and to trust for their protection, during the dangers of the times, to their own inoffensive conduct, and to ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... scheme of interplanetary rules or order they harassed and attacked peaceful shipping and inoffensive cultures throughout a wide territory. They were something demanding the Council's military action. But the ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... velvet hat, not of the latest style, its well-kept strings of black vastly different from the glossy blue he had so much admired at an earlier period of the day. Was ever man more disappointed? Who was she, the old witch, for so he mentally termed the inoffensive woman devoutly conning her prayer book, unconscious of the wrath her presence was exciting in the bosom of the young man beside her! How he wished he had stayed at home, and were it not that he sat so far distant from the door, he would certainly have left in disgust. ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... were ordered to burn, sink, and destroy; and that in those times it was not uncommon for a British admiral to do much mischief with a strong fleet; but it is evident that the style is since changed, for our admirals are now very inoffensive, and go out only to come back. I, therefore, think the motion highly necessary, and such as ought ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... forget what the original title was, but they've had Castle Drachenstolz for centuries. Such a picturesque old place! And—actually, Duchess!—Count Ruprecht has a pet dragon there—it's the only one left in Maerchenland now, and as it's rather a curiosity in its way, and quite inoffensive, we see no objection to his keeping it. You will probably meet the Count to-day, he generally drives over to luncheon now—so devoted to dear Edna! And ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... Harvey sat there staring at him, very still; such a pathetic figure that it seemed like rank cowardice to strike again. And yet Fairfax, now that he had begun, was eager to go on striking this helpless, inoffensive creature with all the frenzy of the brutal victor who stamps out the life of his ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... turn this power to a bad use. The amiable cannot use such an instrument, the highminded disdain it. And on the other hand, the husbands against whom it is used most effectively are the gentler and more inoffensive; those who cannot be induced, even by provocation, to resort to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife's power of being disagreeable generally only establishes a counter-tyranny, and makes victims in their turn chiefly of those husbands who ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... turf fire on the hearth needed no stove nor grate, nor was there any in the house. A second room on the ground floor, used as a bed room, had a boarded floor, and although to English notions bare and bald, having no carpet, pictures, dressing table, or washstand, it was clean and inoffensive. The churning and dairy operations are carried on in the room first described, where also the ducks and hens do feed. The farmer holds fifty acres of good land, for which he pays fifty pounds a year. His father, who died thirty years ago, paid twenty-four pounds, which he thinks a ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Indians who came in verified the statement of the ox-driver, and declared that if the teamster had not killed their inoffensive warrior who only asked for something to eat there would have been no ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... editorials, once the most important feature of a daily paper, are rarely so now. They have become in many cases mere casual comment, in some have been altogether eliminated, in others so neutralized and inoffensive that a man who had bought a certain daily for a year might be puzzled if you asked him its political, religious, and sociological views. He would not be in doubt if asked what his favorite magazine was trying to accomplish in the world. Unless it is a mere periodical of amusement ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt
... following him from the room seemed to imitate his salutation as they passed her—all but the youngest, who made her a profound bow accompanied by a wonderful smile. The eldest was about the age of twelve, the youngest about seven. They were rather sickly looking, but had intelligent faces and inoffensive expressions. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... fall in with more people. Just ordinary peaceful people taking a walk, wearing their Sunday clothes and faces; poor people with their babies: workmen loafing. A few here and there wore the red eglantine in their buttonholes: they looked quite inoffensive: they were revolutionaries by dint of self-persuasion: they were obviously quite benevolent and optimistic at heart, well satisfied with the smallest opportunities for happiness: whether it were fine or merely ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... all," said Berry. "Only last week we bound one over for discussing the housing question with a wart-hog. The animal, which, till then, had been laying steadily, became unsettled and suspicious and finally attacked an inoffensive Stilton ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... a definition of what is undesirable matter for the minds of young people, and to make that cover as much suggestive indecency and coarseness as possible, to cover everything, indeed, that is not virginibus puerisque, and to call this matter by some reasonably inoffensive adjective, "adult," for example. One might speak of "adult" art, "adult" literature, and "adult" science, and the report of all proceedings under certain specified laws could be declared "adult" matter. In the old times there was an excellent system of putting "adult" matter into ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... judged that a few years in a country village would improve her health and broaden her view of life beyond that of cockney provincialism. For, though Mrs. Howard had more refinement than strength of mind, and passed generally for a sweet and inoffensive little woman, she did not lack a certain true perception of values, due doubtless to the fact that she had been a New England girl, and, before her marriage and emigration to the great city, had passed her life among unexciting realities, and among people who ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... not observing this rule. The case of the son of Napoleon I. is a notable instance, who, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, began his career of sexual indulgence, which ended his life at the early age of twenty-one years. He was an amiable, inoffensive, and studious youth, beloved by his grandfather and the whole Austrian court; and though the son of the most energetic man that modern times has produced, yet, from his effeminate life, he scarcely ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... younger son of the Jaysalmer family. The first Raja of Sirmaur, whom Hariballabh recollects, was Vijay Prakas, who married a daughter of Jagat Chandra of Kumau. He was succeeded by his son Pradipa Prakas, who, like his father, was a tame inoffensive man. His son Kirti Prakas succeeded when eight years old, and died in his twenty-sixth year; but during this period of youth he fought many battles with the Mogul officers, and took from them Larpur, ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... had not had the fly in his web for five weeks without casting some light toils around him. Heathcote himself would have said that Pledge was as inoffensive to-day as he had been on the first day of the term, and would have angrily scouted the idea that "Junius," or any one else, had been right ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... as remain of the original Quakers, have come to be as good Quakers in character—though still loyal Catholics in dogma—as if they said "thee and thou," and wore drab. They are peaceable, gentle folk, sober and inoffensive; and the transforming influence of Quaker character is seen in certain of them in a ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... Essay on Humour in Comedy, published in a Collection of Dennis's Letters, is an entertaining, and correct piece of criticism: All his other Letters are written with a great deal of wit and spirit, a fine flow of language; and are so happily intermixt with a lively and inoffensive raillery, that it is impossible not to be pleased with them at the first reading: we may be satisfied from the perusal of them, that his conversation must have been very engaging, and therefore we need not wonder ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... fact filled with much curiosity concerning and interest in the Marquis of Coombe. She was a clever and well trained person, but socially a simple creature, who in an inoffensive way "loved a lord." If her work had not absorbed her she could not have kept her eyes from this finely conventional and rather unbending-looking man who—keeping himself out of the way of all who were in charge of the seemingly almost dead boy—still would ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of Austria declared war against Russia because the great empire, ever faithful to its historical traditions, could not forsake inoffensive Serbia, nor acknowledge ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the most unrelenting foe of this inoffensive animal. It is a native of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, and was first discovered by the celebrated navigator Captain Cook, in 1770, while stationed on the coast of New South Wales. In Van Diemen's Land the great kangaroo is regularly hunted with fox-hounds, as the ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... [p. 20 ed. 1684]), 'Since God has prescribed an inoffensive life, as that which only can give acceptance with him; and on the contrary hath determined never to justify the wicked, &c.—Will not the abomination appear greatest of all, where God shall be found condemning the just, on purpose to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... descriptions, sprightliness, and lightness of touch, and was admired by Pope and Gray. The poem owes its name to the use of the term in the author's day to denote depression. G., who held an appointment in the Customs, appears to have been a quiet, inoffensive person, an ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... gaiety of temper in Davenant, while he was in the most deplorable circumstances of distress, carries something in it very singular, and perhaps could proceed from no other cause but conscious innocence; for he appears to have been an inoffensive good natured man. He was conveyed from the Isle of Wight to the Tower of London, and for some time his life was in the utmost hazard; nor is it quite certain by what means he was preserved from falling a sacrifice to the prevailing fury. Some conjecture that two aldermen of York, to whom he had ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... has had a letter from Mr. Forster with the date of Shakespeare's birthday, and overflowing with kindness really both to himself and me. It quite touched me, that letter. Also we have had a visitation from an American, but on the point of leaving Florence and very tame and inoffensive, and we bore it very well considering. He sent us a new literary periodical of the old world, in which, among other interesting matter, I had the pleasure of reading an account of my own 'blindness,' taken from a French paper (the 'Presse'), and mentioned with ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... would gladly have done, would be too crude a thing to do, too gross a rebuke to the little Doctor's Ego. She was wrong, of course, though her sensibilities were indubitably right. Therefore she feigned enormous engrossment in her algebra, and struggled to make herself as small and inoffensive as she could. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
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