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More "Meddling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... weak points and our strong ones. I'm no polemic, I!—I prefer meddling with things that will not bring me into trouble. There was a ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... working away at a mowing-machine as it is? Better own up that you can't get on without your old craft, after all—that you must for ever be messing and meddling with steel and ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... I'm as happy as happy can be." If the little brown thrush keeps singing that song the heart of everyone who hears it will overflow with joy. But it would be easy, very easy indeed, to stop the joyous song of the thrush by meddling with the five pretty eggs, and when the thrush changed his happy song to harsh notes of fear and reproach, the light of joy would fade from our day as quickly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... say, I rather bar meddling with politics, especially the white-hot explosive politics that ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... the room and found Terence hastily laying the fiddle down where he had found it. "Ah, can't I leave you alone a minute," said Peter, "but you must be meddling with things that don't belong to you? What'll I do now if you've ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... needs must have strong walls to keep out all comers from over seas. And we have an ill neighbour or two, who would fain share in our booty. However, men know in Sweden, and Finmark, and Norway also, that it is ill meddling with Jarl Ingvar and ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... an allusion was made to the family at Manor Cross, and had almost worshipped him when he would come to her on Sunday. And now he was going off to London without saying a word to her of the journey. "I don't believe that Toff knows anything about it," she said. "Toff is a nasty, meddling creature, and I wish she had not come here at all." The management of the Marchioness under these circumstances was very difficult, but Lady Sarah was a woman who allowed no difficulty to crush her. She did not ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... done this when the witch called her daughter and bade her lift the pot off the fire and put the stew into a dish, as it had been cooking quite long enough and she was hungry. But no sooner had she tasted it than she put her spoon down, and declared that her daughter must have been meddling with it, for it was impossible to eat anything that was ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... issued. It served to notify these commanders that the army must attack the enemy, and it advised the country of the earnestness of the President to vigorously prosecute the war, and thus aided enlistments, inspired confidence, and warned meddling nations ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... that proud hierarchy by which they had been so heavily oppressed, that, in England, and in the seventeenth century, it was not in the power of the civil magistrate to drill the minds of men into conformity with his own system of theology. They proved, however, as intolerant and as meddling as ever Laud had been. They interdicted under heavy penalties the use of the Book of Common Prayer, not only in churches, but even in private houses. It was a crime in a child to read by the bedside ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... feeling that his son-in-law was responsible for his present disgrace, and began to behave more harshly toward him. [Sidenote:—3—] For these reasons Antoninus became both disgusted with his wife (who was a most shameless creature), and offended at her father himself, because the latter kept meddling in all his undertakings and rebuking him for everything that he did. Conceiving a desire to be rid of the man in some way or other he accordingly had Euodus, his nurse, persuade a certain centurion, Saturninus, and two others of similar rank to bring him word that Plautianus had ordered some ten ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... gone on with their nest-building and brood-rearing, undisturbed by human spectators. I wondered whether many of the visitors noticed the birds, and whether any one but myself had discovered their nest. Indeed, their little ones were safe enough from human meddling, for one could not see the nest without wading up the stream into the sphere of the ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... bowed thy neck to imperial pride and priestly craft, thou who has suffered sorely even to this hour, from Nero down to Pio Nono, the days of thine oppression are over. Gone from thy enfranchised ways for ever is the clang of the praetorian cohorts and the more odious drone of meddling monks!" And yet, as Mackinnon observed, there still stood the dirty friars and the small French soldiers, and there still toiled the slow priests, wending their tedious way up to the church of the Ara Coeli. But that was ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... of Chaldicotes used to say, and the archdeacon had heard him say it a score of times, and had learned the lesson. But now his heart was not with the foxes,—and especially not with the foxes on behalf of his son Henry. "I can't have any meddling with Mr Thorne," he said; "I can't; and ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... do you come meddling here, and carrying off boys from their lawful guardeens, and talking folderol, and raising Ned generally? I've seen skippers before, but I never heered of no such actions as these, never in my days! Why, no one here so much as knows your name; and here you seem to own the hull village, ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... not in a position to judge, and I don't think I want to be. I have no real liking for meddling in other people's affairs." ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... ended by saying that the Governor's answer would be a guide to him in his political correspondence with the government he represented. In consequence of this letter, M. Theron and the French consul at Richmond, who had also been meddling with Texan affairs, were ordered to leave the Confederate States. The object evidently was to set up an independent republic between the new empire in Mexico and whichever power, Union or Confederacy, should triumph in the ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... Carolina can never receive the plan if it prohibits the slave-trade. In every proposed extension of the powers of Congress, that State has expressly and watchfully excepted that of meddling with the importation of negroes. If the States be all left at liberty on this subject, South Carolina may, perhaps, by degrees, do of herself what is wished, as Virginia ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on the Master’s apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. ‘It’s all up now,’ I says. ‘That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!’ Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the Grand-Master’s chair —which was to say the stone of Imbra. The priest begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... assumption or power by the Moullas, and freeing themselves from their thraldom. There has always been great liberty of opinion and speech in Persia, and six hundred years ago the poets Khayyam and Hafiz took full advantage of this in expressing their contempt for the 'meddling Moullas.' Not very long ago the donkey-boys in one of the great towns would on occasion reflect the popular feeling by the shout 'Br-r-r-o akhoond!' (Go on, priest!) when they saw a Moulla pattering along on his riding donkey. Biro is Persian for 'go on,' and, rolled and ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... history was to the Protestant as a seal to the wax, or as a negative to a {702} photograph; what was raised in one was depressed in the other, what was light in one was shade in the other. The same theory of the chosen people, of the direct divine governance and of Satanic meddling, was the foundation of both. That Luther was a bad man, an apostate, begotten by an incubus, and familiar with the devil, went to explain his heresy, and he was commonly compared to Mohammed or Arius. Bad, if often trivial motives were found for his actions, as that he broke ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the big lock was not fastened. The key, not working well, he took it some days ago to the locksmith, and when the latter failed to return it, he laughed, and said he thought no one would ever think of meddling with ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... meet the eyes of his fellow-citizens. Had Fortini known that the Marchese had been made aware of the purposed excursion of his nephew with the singer—as the reader knows that he had been by the officious meddling of the Conte Leandro,—it might have seemed strange that he should have chosen just that day and hour for the declaration of his intention. Was it that he hastened to acquire such an authority over Bianca, as might enable him to put an end to any such escapades for the future? Was it that ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of Oxford, who wrote in his defence against Kenrick; because it was doing him hurt to answer Kenrick. He was told afterwards, the boy was to come to him to ask a favour. He first thought to treat him rudely, on account of his meddling in that business; but then he considered, he had meant to do him all the service in his power, and he took another resolution; he told him he would do what he could for him, and did so, and the boy was satisfied. He said, he did not ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... immediately run back, at any risk, to warn Alexander. He and the painter were now in hiding, and would remain in safety, come what might, in the cellar at the Cock, till the coast was clear again. The tavern-keeper strongly advised no one to go meddling with his wine-skins ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... him to be meddling with canes. It's plenty that Bulldog has a cane, without yon meeserable wretch"; and that was the last effort which Moossy made ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... I must speak," she thought wistfully. "I hate to do it. I always did hate meddling. My mother always used to say that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the last state of a meddler and them she meddled with was worse than the first. But I guess it's my duty. I was Margaret's friend, and it is my duty to protect ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Dost think I want him meddling i' my affairs? Go to young Baines up th' road. Tell him to come at once. He's sure to be at home, as ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... we'll canonize him, Tho' Cant is his hobby and meddling his bliss, Tho' sages may pity and wits may despise him, He'll ne'er make a bit the worse ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... encouraging, and disclosed to me a somewhat consoling prospect of increasing my influence as musical conductor at a time when my disgust was daily growing stronger at the constant meddling with our opera repertoire, which made me lose more and more influence as compared with the wishes of my would-be prima donna niece, whom even Tichatschek supported. Immediately on my return from Berlin I had begun the orchestration of Lohengrin, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... said Stafford dryly. Rising with a yawn, he went on: "Half the marital troubles one hears about are the fault of the wife. She is often too exacting, too fond of meddling in her husband's affairs. A man who respects himself bends to no one—not even to his wife." With another yawn he added: "Will you two excuse me for a few minutes? I ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... consults McDowell and Franklin; consults McClellan; exasperates McClellan by his action; appoints Stanton to succeed Cameron; his lack of personal feeling against Stanton; his patience toward Stanton; his letter to Halleck; wishes a direct attack; accused by McClellan's friends of meddling; decides to force action; issues General War Order No.; its purpose political rather than military; orders McClellan to move South; asks McClellan to justify his plan; calls council of generals; accepts McClellan's plan; insists on preservation of capital; political reasons for his ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... taken aback by this unexpected attack that at first he hardly knew how to meet it. Should he lecture his wife for her presumption in meddling in his affairs, which were quite beyond her comprehension as a woman, or should he make light of the matter and laugh it off? After a moment's reflection he decided ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... been to the village shop, Ditte ran out screaming, as she came back. "Grandad's dead!" she burst out sobbing. Soeren lay bruised and senseless across the doorstep to the kitchen. He had been up on the big chest, meddling with the hands of the clock. Maren dragged him to bed and bathed his wounds, and when it was done he lay quietly following her movements with his eyes. Now and then he would ask in a low voice what the time was, and from this Maren knew that he was nearing ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... disgust of seven-eighths of the town he lived in. He had caused more quarrels, smutted more characters, and created more ill-feeling between friends, neighbors and acquaintances, than all else beside in the community of Frogtown. Uncle Josh was voted a great bore by the men, and a sneaking, meddling old granny by the women. So, at last, the young women of the town did agree, that the very next time Uncle Josh carried, concocted, or circulated any slanderous or otherwise mischievous stories, they would ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... freeing herself, he frankly regarded her as his affianced wife, and could see no reason for further mystery. She understood his impatience to have their plans settled; it would protect him from the formidable menace of the marriageable, and cause people, as he said, to stop meddling. Now that the novelty of his situation was wearing off, his natural indolence reasserted itself, and there was nothing he dreaded more than having to be on his guard against the innumerable plans that his well-wishers were perpetually ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... himself, "all my study and travel and observation tells me a woman's natural position in society is in a safely guarded home; and the evil consequences of meddling with this position must show themselves, sooner or later. Humanity is of one general quality everywhere,—and that not so high as she apparently believes. Changes in social ideals are more or less ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... come to the unalterable determination never, under any circumstances, to either advise anybody or receive it myself where it can be avoided. If it is ordained that I am to make a fool of myself, it shall be done on my own responsibility, and not with the assistance of meddling friends—though if they have any desire to take the credit of it, I shall make no objections whatever. I doubt if they will. The longer I live in the world, the clearer appears the fact that half at least of our unhappiness is unnecessary. We seem perversely bent on tormenting ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... instant," he said, seating himself on the settee, from which Louise had risen on his entrance. "Come here and tell me what you mean by meddling with ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... to pitch into you. Ha! ha! And you call that science—to draw a pistol on a man. But you daren't fire it, and well you know it. You'd better put it up, or you may let it off without intending to: I never feel comfortable when I see a fool meddling with firearms. I came to tell you that I'm going to be married to ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... of my philosophy—that there are cases when to be angry becomes a duty. Men who, knowing nothing of the universities from experience, think proper to run them down, succeed at all events in exposing one crying evil—the absurdity of meddling with what one does not understand. We who know better may afford to smile at once at their spite and their ignorance. But he who lifts his voice against the mother that bore him, can fix no darker blot upon her fame than the disgrace of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... me more gently? You have seized my fine brown coat in such a manner that it is all torn and full of holes, meddling and interfering rubbish that you are!" With these words he shouldered a bag filled with precious stones, and slipped away to his cave ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... was a passive and not suggestive nature; if the first step in some desirable path were taken by another she would follow, and labor heart and hand, and by her judgment and zeal accomplish what that other only projected; but she had a horror of taking the responsibility, of "meddling with other people's affairs," even in the hope of bringing about ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the door, but he rode a piebald mare not to be confused in the most suspicious mind with the no more conspicuous Barmaid. It is true the brown parts smelt of Condy's Fluid, and were at once strange and seemingly a little tender to the touch. But Stingaree allowed no meddling with his mount; and only a very sinful publican, very many leagues ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... of meddling with men's amourettes," said Genvil; "Sir Damian would needs brawl with Wenlock about his dealings with this miller's daughter, and you see they account him a favourer of their enterprise; it will be well if others do not take up the same opinion.—I ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it—low, vulgar, meddling with every thing, assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering at every thing noble, refined, and truly national! The direct and personal despotism will come on by and by, after the multitude shall have been gratified with the ruin and the spoil of the old ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... is meddling with our machines! Back to the road!" shouted Jerry, turning and plunging through ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... me. I didn't know what to say or do. I was afraid you might think I was meddling ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... to have a talk with you," this meddling person told the fat and frolicsome Jennie. "She wants you to stop eating leaves. She says you are doing your best—or your worst—to hurt the trees that she is trying to save. She claims that you are no friend of ...
— The Tale of Mrs. Ladybug • Arthur Scott Bailey
... family, of Augsburg, tell us again that there is nothing new in the world. Five hundred years ago they were millionaires. One of these Fuggers had a voice even in the election of Charles V, and we are still hard at it trying to keep our Fuggers from meddling in politics. Another Fugger, Marcus by name, wrote a capital book on the horse in the sixteenth century, and at the last horse-show at Olympia, in 1912, a Fugger came over from Germany and took away the first prize for officers' chargers. So far flung was their fame as money-lenders ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... and I met again. He had the same simple character and good temper as of old, and had, too, some of his old unlucky fortune, which clung to him always; yet notwithstanding that—as all of his trouble came from good-natured meddling with other people's affairs, for their benefit, I am not at all certain that I would not risk my chance of success—in the broadest meaning of that word—in the next world surely, if not in this, against all the Steerforths living, ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Glencora Palliser know about it? If Lady Glencora Palliser would mind her own affairs it would be much better for her. I remember when she had troubles enough of her own, without meddling ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Ruskin, whose writing is art, and whose art is unworthy his writing. To him and his example do we owe the outrage of proffered assistance from the unscientific—the meddling of the immodest—the intrusion of the garrulous. Art, that for ages has hewn its own history in marble, and written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still, and stammer, and wait for wisdom from the passer-by?—for guidance from the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... 'Meddling coxcomb!' he exclaimed, 'what is there in him that commands the attention and respect that I fail to obtain ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... institution appeal to the imagination of both ignorant and cultured alike. The aim of the distinguished writer of the "Grip of Desire" is far removed from that of vulgar and gratuitous image-breaking. He seeks to show the danger to human character that comes through meddling with one of the most imperious of natural instincts. If in the "Chastisement of Mansour" he bodies forth the consequences of unbridled Libertinism, in the "Grip of Desire" he demonstrates the evils attendant on a ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... about me. I have reached a point where I can no longer suffer, because all suffering is become so sweet. Besides, it is quite a mistake to trouble yourselves as to what I may still have to undergo. It is like meddling with God's work. We who run in the way of Love must never allow ourselves to be disturbed by anything. If I did not simply live from one moment to another, it would be impossible for me to be patient; but I only ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... Jugurtha's half-brother. The Romans did not care to turn into a province a country of which the frontiers were so hard to guard. But they received some Gaetulian tribes in the interior into free alliance, so that they had plenty of opportunities for meddling if they wished ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... commended him for his religion. In answer to this the Quakers observe, first, that no solid argument can be drawn from silence on any occasion. Secondly, that Jesus Christ seems, for wise purposes, to have abstained from meddling with many of the civil institutions of his time, though in themselves wicked, thinking probably, that it was sufficient to have left behind him such general precepts, as, when applied properly, would be subversive ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... a plaint against M. de La Tour d'Azyr! You are out of your senses, I think. Oh, you are mad; as mad as that poor friend of yours who has come to this end through meddling in what did not concern him. The language he used here to M. le Marquis on the score of Mabey was of the most offensive. Perhaps you didn't know that. It does not at all surprise me that the Marquis should have ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... read and mark; and only hope there is no harm done by my meddling; and lose the sense of it all in the sense of beauty and power everywhere, which nobody could kill, if they took to meddling more even. And now, what will people say to this and this and this—or 'O seclum insipiens et inficetum!' or ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... monogamy and not a disguised polygamy, especially in the fact that it is a free union and only subject to the inherent penalties that follow its infraction, not to external penalties. Ours is not free; our faith in its natural virtues is not quite so firm as we assert; we are always meddling with it and worrying over its health and anxiously trying to bolster it up. We are not by any means willing to let it rest on the sanction of its own natural or divine laws. Our feeling is, as James Hinton used ironically ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... not your father or your brother I want to see this turn, but just your own self." And Father John sat himself down by the fire. "I'm come just to have a little chat with you, and you musn't be angry with me for meddling with what, perhaps, you'll say was ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... take heed how he behaves. If he persists in saying to me what he likes, he'll be hearing things that he don't like. Am I meddling with these matters or interesting myself? Can you not endure your troubles with a patient mind? For as to what I say, whether it is true or false what I have heard, can soon be known. A certain man of Attica, a long time ago,[94] his ship being wrecked, was cast ashore at Andros, and this woman ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... justice, which I do not believe they will relish. But the other two, the spaceman and the company agent, are to be sent to Xecho to face Combine authorities. It is my thought that those will not accept kindly the meddling of ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... laws of the State was also a topic which he felt required a word. "Considering the great probability," he said, "that the framers of those laws were wiser than myself, I should prefer not meddling with them, unless they were attacked by others; in which case I should feel it both a privilege and a duty to take that stand which, in my view, might tend most to the advancement ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... if my theory be right—and I hope I've convinced you—I see no use in meddling. The girl is respectably married. It will cause her quite unnecessary trouble if we rip this affair open again. Her husband will have just ground for complaint, and it might—I need not point ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... second man, "is that if you leave the gods alone they'll leave you alone. It's no trouble to them to do whatever is right themselves, and what call would men like us have to go mixing or meddling with their ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... said to her brother, "for meddling with foreigners, and especially for mixing your love affairs up with an English girl. Proud, haughty creatures all of them! And you are a very fool to tell any woman such a—crime. Yes, it is a crime. I won't ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... interest in this matter—my reason for meddling," she informed me. "Belle's welfare means a great deal to me; just how much you can perhaps best understand after hearing a bit of my history. Have you ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... give it to any one who goes meddling in my brush cupboard now that I've just put all in order against the prying and nozzling of the good-for-nothing baggage what's coming along with ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... awake, dote on the first thing they see. Some of the juice of that flower I will drop on the eyelids of my Titania when she is asleep; and the first thing she looks upon when she opens her eyes she will fall in love with, even though it be a lion or a bear, a meddling monkey or a busy ape; and before I will take this charm from off her sight, which I can do with another charm I know of, I will make her give me that ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... screamed the archdeacon, giving so rough a pull at his nightcap as almost to bring it over his nose; "why not!—that pestilent, interfering upstart, John Bold;—the most vulgar young person I ever met! Do you know that he is meddling with your father's affairs in a most uncalled-for—most—" And being at a loss for an epithet sufficiently injurious, he finished his expressions of horror by muttering, "Good heavens!" in a manner that had been found very efficacious in clerical meetings of the diocese. He must for the ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... kind did not count for much; but the king's prime-minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who really managed everything, knew very well that Rochelle could give a great deal of trouble if it chose, and so, perhaps, he really would have let the town alone if it had not been for the meddling of the ...
— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston
... not pain, and sorrow, and evil enough in this fallen world of ours, that meddling gossips must needs poison the few pure springs of enjoyment and peace? Not the hatred of the Theban brothers could more thoroughly accomplish this fiendish design than the whisper of detraction, the sneer of malice, or the fatal innuendo of envious, low-bred tattlers. Human life ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the beach; and the nurse, a German, said something that she could not understand. On the 1st of July—yes—but I have the date here—came a telegram to the hotel to have rooms for Lady de Lyonnais and Mr. Egremont ready by the evening. The whole place knew it, and some meddling person burst on Alice with the news, roughly and coarsely given, that they were coming to call her to account for her goings on. Captain Egremont found her crying in the utmost terror, and—she really hardly knew what he said to her—she thinks he offered to shelter her on board ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... so busy as to say, In this fashion shall you live, in that fashion shall you die, and in such another fashion shall you take leave of the world, to be sent before the judgment-seat of the Lord! A wicked and a troublesome meddling is that, with the business of One who has not made His creatures to be herded, like oxen, and driven from field to field, as their stupid and selfish keepers may judge of their need and wants. A miserable land must that be, where they fetter the mind as well as the body, and where the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... said I, somewhat testily, though without a grain of anger in my heart against any one but the meddling old woman. 'But, Helen, I've something to say to ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... search-warrant; and she tells you to mind your own business; and droll enough it is. We always fancy we're saying an impertinence to a man when we tell him to attend to what concerns him most. It shows, at least, that we think meddling a luxury. And then she adds, "Kilgobbin is welcome to you," and I can only say you are welcome to Kilgobbin—ay, and in her own words—"with such regularity and order as the meals succeed."—"All the luggage belonging to you," etc., and "I am, very respectfully, your Aunt." By ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... deliverance might be on its way, and resolved to keep attention awake for what might appear. In his inmost being he knew that the mission of man is to help his neighbors. But in as much as he was ready to help, he recoiled from meddling. To meddle is to destroy the holy chance. Meddlesomeness is the very opposite of helpfulness, for it consists in forcing your self into another self, instead of opening your self as a refuge to the other. They are opposite extremes, and, like all extremes, touch. It is not correct that extremes ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... persisted in without grave danger to these states. To deal with trade and industry as though they were matters that concerned only the particular business firms engaged in them was no longer an economical error, it was also a political blunder. To Government meddling in trade and industry the British people have ever been averse. And their dislike is intelligible although no longer warranted. A glance at Germany's economic campaign and its results ought to have borne out the thesis that individual self-reliance and push are unavailing to ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... been the mere register of the President's will, now turned upon him. On January 19 it passed a resolution making Lee general-in-chief of the army. This Mr. Davis might have borne with patience, although it was intended as a notification that his meddling with military affairs must come to an end. But far worse was the bitter necessity put upon him as a sequel to this act, of reappointing General Joseph E. Johnston to the command of the army which was to resist Sherman's victorious march to the ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... is war, there is misery and outrage; notwithstanding which, it is not only lawful to wish, but even a duty to pray for the success of one's country. And as to the neutralities, I really think the Russian virago an impertinent puss for meddling with us, and engaging half a score kittens of her acquaintance to scratch the poor old lion, who, if he has been insolent in his day, has probably acted no otherwise than they themselves would have acted in his circumstances and with his power ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... hero of this troop of infant robbers; he valued himself much on never meddling with small matters or committing any meaner crime than that of the highway. It happened he had a mistress coming out of the country and he would needs have his companions take each of them a doxy and go with ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... There is much behind, even more worth saying, which must not be said. Perhaps some far wiser men than I will think that I have said too much already, and be inclined to answer me as Elisha of old answered the over- meddling sons ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... than the Abbe Le Loutre. But while his energy, ability and patriotism are undoubted, his conduct has been the subject of severe criticism not only on the part of his adversaries but of the French themselves. He did not escape the censure of the Bishop of Quebec for meddling to so great an extent in temporal affairs, but the Bishop's censure is mild compared to that of an anonymous historian, who writes: "Abbe Loutre, missionary of the Indians in Acadia, soon put all in fire and flame, and may be justly deemed the scourge and curse of this ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... all the investigations that I have been able to make that the farmers as a whole are determined to maintain the independence of their business. They do not wish to have meddling on the part of the Government or to be placed under the inevitable restrictions involved in any system of direct or indirect price-fixing, which would result from permitting the Government to operate in the agricultural markets. They are showing a very ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge • Calvin Coolidge
... villagers to the inn, felt certain that their true character would be discovered, and that they would be sent to prison. Paul was especially unhappy under the belief that his bad French had betrayed him. He wished that he could give Reuben warning to keep out of the way of the meddling villagers, lest he also should be captured. Still, he was not a lad to give in, and he determined to play the part he had assumed as long as he could. When the villagers saw Francois, they shouted out to him that they had got the young rogues fast enough. Paul at once began to expostulate with ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... Aylward, who detested the two ladies, and repelled their meddling, stiffly assured them both of Miss Delavie's discretion and her own vigilance, which placed visits from the young baronet beyond the bounds of possibility. Supposing his Honour should again visit his uncle, she should take care to be present at any interview with the young ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him very soon. Am I to mention you? I might—" he hesitated for the right words—"I could only say the pleasantest things of you, and the most general, but I am his friend, whom he claims to like and respect. If I am meddling with what is ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... Jimmy Jay is a very mischievous little bird. Yes, sir, he certainly loves to tease. Grandmother Magpie is mischievous, too, but she's no worse than little Jimmy Jay. She does harm by meddling ...
— Little Jack Rabbit and the Squirrel Brothers • David Cory
... condemned by his best friends. They told him in plain terms that this was come as a judgment upon him for his loose life, his gluttony, drunkenness, and avarice; for laying aside his father's will in an old mouldy trunk, and turning stock-jobber, newsmonger, and busybody, meddling with other people's affairs, shaking off his old serious friends, and keeping company with buffoons and pickpockets, his father's sworn enemies; that he had best throw himself upon the mercy of the court, repent, and change his manners. To say ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... debauched Emperor's favourite concubine in public affairs; and we have seen, under the heading of Law in Chapter XX., how one of the imperial statutes, proclaimed or read regularly in the vassal kingdoms, prohibited the meddling of women in public business. But, in spite of this, so far as promoting the succession rights and political interests of their own children goes, wives and concubines certainly exerted considerable influence, whether legitimate or not, in all the states. ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... had left youth behind. I made the mistake of thinking I could play a new role—and I cannot. I am tired—yes, I am deadly tired; and I feel now as if I wanted to get out of it all, and just leave things to work themselves out. I have meddled, and I am being punished for meddling. I have been playing with fire, and I have been burnt. I had thought of a new sort of life. Don't you remember," he added with a smile, "the monkey in Buckland's book, who got into the kettle on the hob, and whenever ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... at her fixedly, and Sylvia's face became what it seldom was—very forbidding in expression. She wished this meddling, familiar woman would go away and leave ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... had ever a quick temper, and as he turned on his heel, was like to have replied and raised a brawl. My own meddling tongue had brought the rebuff upon me: but yet my heart was hot as ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... Human pride is not worth while Hunger is the handmaid of genius If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank Inherited prejudices in favor of hoary ignorances It is easier to stay out than get out Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to Meddling philanthropists Melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense Most satisfactory pet—never coming when he is called Natural desire to have more ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Mark Twain • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... that he spends much of his time learning the exact number of buttons, tags and laces, and the cut of all the cocked-hats, pigtails, and gaiters in his army. Oh, yes, he is so great that he is always meddling in other people's affairs. He pokes his red face into every cottage for miles around. Imagine the King of England going about in his old wig, shovel-hat, and Windsor uniform, hob-nobbing with pig-boys, ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... been the lesson he had received for meddling with Imperial fiefs; and he must have been mad had he thought of provoking further the resentment of the Emperor. To Farnese, Charles V was a sleeping dog it was as well to ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... been meddling with my things again?" demanded Dick. "Mother, I've an engagement at eight o'clock and it's quarter past now; every blessed collar button is ...
— Brother and Sister • Josephine Lawrence
... to you," said I, "for your courtesy: but, for the future, I shall be more cautious in meddling with History when you are present; whom I may justly commend as a most exact and scrupulous relator of the Roman History; but nearly at the time we are speaking of (though somewhat later) lived the above-mentioned Pericles, the illustrious son of Xantippus, who first improved his eloquence ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... lore which Nature brings; 25 Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... mixture. And then again the party that to outsiders may seem the angelic one may in reality be the devilish one. It is a well-known fact that people who to the outside world may seem the personification of honor and good nature may be very devils at home. I have long ago given up not only meddling in, but even judging, domestic disharmonies. For it is almost impossible for an outsider to judge justly. I knew a husband who was considered a paragon of virtue. And when a clash came between him and his wife everybody was inclined to blame the ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... gentleman publicly pummelling her in the Rue Gay-Lussac. He hastened to remonstrate; and the husband went off, hiccoughing of his outraged rights, and calling the universe to witness that he would have the law of the meddling stranger. Pair picked the girl up (she was scarcely eighteen then, and had only been married a sixmonth), he picked her up from where she had fallen, half fainting, on the pavement, carried her to his lodgings, which were at hand, and sent for a doctor. In his manuscript-littered study, for ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... does it cease on the child's leaving the parental roof for another place of residence? Or, on entering upon the married state? Or, upon the commission of some great act of outward transgression, shall we pronounce the covenant to be dissolved? Do we not see that we are meddling with a divine prerogative, if we assume to act in such cases? Expostulations, warnings, entreaties, from parents, pastor, brethren of the church, may always be in place; but further than these we ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... of friendly advice is quite to the taste of the amateur, who, being a non-practical man, is wise in abstaining from meddling in directions for which he has no natural bent, and unlike the numerous tribe of would-be repairers who think that any person who can use glue and cut a piece of wood can engage in the restoration of such a small ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... Morris complained of our interfering as he thought in that department; and therefore he did not incline to subject himself to any further censures, or as he expressed it "raps over the knuckles" for meddling in the affair. We were indeed as much surprised as Mr Izard appears to have been on the occasion, but our surprise arose from another cause; it was to find Mr William Lee desirous of holding such a plurality of appointments, in their ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... lift the tea-pot lid, To peep at what was in it; Or tilt the kettle, if you did But turn your back a minute. In vain you told her not to touch, Her trick of meddling grew ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... as though he owned the place. He was sly enough with me at first, and would brow-beat the Squire only while I was out of earshot. It chanced one day, however, that I heard loud voices through an open window and paused to hearken. That vile servant called my father 'a meddling old fool,' 'Fool and meddler art thou thyself, varlet,' I shouted, springing through the window, 'that for thy impudence!' and in my heat I smote him a blow mightier than I intended, for I have some strength in mine arm. The fellow rolled over and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... by way of Picture. The English Nation, having flung its old Puritan, Sword-and-Bible Faith into the cesspool,—or rather having set its old Bible-Faith, MINUS any Sword, well up in the organ-loft, with plenty of revenue, there to preach and organ at discretion, on condition always of meddling with nobody's practice farther,—thought the same (such their mistake) a mighty pretty arrangement; but found it hitch before long. They had to throw out their beautiful Nell-Gwynn Defenders of the Faith; fling them also into the cesspool; and were rather at a loss ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... scandal gave him no concern, compared with his fear that his own castle would suffer in wars of the League. As to the Reformation, he held it for a hasty, conceited movement on the part of persons who did not know what they were meddling with, and, being a perfect sceptic, he was a perfectly good Churchman. Full of tolerance, good-humour, and content, cheerful in every circumstance, simple and charming, yet melancholy in his hour, Montaigne is a thorough representative of the French spirit in literature. His English translator ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... "How about your letters? Who asked you to try to persuade me to marry him? Was not that a declaration from you? Why do you force yourself upon us in this way? I confess I thought at first that you were anxious to arouse an aversion for him in my heart by your meddling, in order that I might give him up; and it was only afterwards that I guessed the truth. You imagined that you were doing an heroic action! How could you spare any love for him, when you love your own vanity to such an extent? Why could you not simply go away from here, instead ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... listening to a musical-box, and well out of hearing of such fearfully direct falsehoods, as it seemed to her, not knowing that the boys excused it to their own minds by the notion that it was not the SPRING of the engine that they had been meddling with, and that so they did not know how the harm had been done—as if it made it any better that they lied to themselves as well as their father! The German saw her dismay, and began to say how ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... having been urged to do so by some meddling friend; for I'm quite sure that she would never have thought of doing so herself, seeing that she received no damage at all beyond a fright. I'm going to pay her a visit to-day in reference to that ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... always dangerous business meddling with lovers' affairs," rejoined Richard. "Lovers take themselves very seriously indeed, and—well, here the thing is! Now, who will go and fetch her from Liverpool? I should say that both my father and my mother ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... either for partiality or dislike. Yet he was thoroughly kind-hearted, and many remembered his good deeds with generous gratitude. Nor was he wholly wrong in his theory that a tutor often does as much harm by meddling interference as he ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... its present ingenuities, it will break out in a new method of grafting raspberries on a rosebush, in the comfortable cut of a pilot-coat, or the safest machinery for a steamer. Ne sutor ultra crepidam is a rule of moderation it repudiates; incessant energy provokes unabated meddling, and its intuitive qualities of penetration, adaptation, and concentration, are only hindered by the accidents of life from carrying any one thing out to the point at least of respectable attainment. Look at Michael Angelo; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... addressing the girl, 'unless you want to be thrown out the same way you were thrown in! The sooner I see your back, my sulky Madam, the better I shall be pleased. No more meddling with petticoats for me! This comes of working with fine gentlemen, ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... right," said Lady Mary. "It would really be a very nice thing for Blanche. At all events, we are out of the Chipchase girls for to-day." And, so saying, she rose somewhat comforted, little aware, poor woman, that another ringer was meddling ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... world rejoicing in hope of the glory of God. The elements of an empire, which I hope will lead Ethiopia very soon to stretch out her hands to God, is the fruit of the institution here. An officious meddling with the institution, from feeling and sentiments unknown to the Bible, may lead to the extermination of the slave race among us, who, taken as a whole, are utterly unprepared for a higher civil state; but benefit them, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... with each other, and destroy reciprocally each other's nature and power: competing and fighting for place at every tread of your foot; sand squeezing out clay, and clay squeezing out water, and soot meddling everywhere, and defiling the whole. Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their atoms may get ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... laughed Herbert "You, prying, meddling Meta; talking about other people's curiosity! Well, ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... who crowded about and paid her no attention. Then the soldier, as if suddenly remembering, took the rabbit from her arm and handed it to me. She looked about at this, as if missing the snuggling animal, and I stared hard at the meddling soldier to reprove him for interfering with his queen, and gently restored the rabbit ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... doubtless, he administered a rough remedy to cool the fit of passion, for he appeared red and breathless. I got the dishcloth, and rather spitefully scrubbed Edgar's nose and mouth, affirming it served him right for meddling. His sister began weeping to go home, and Cathy stood by ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... twins' exploit of yesterday, had spread through the house. For when Rolf returned from his morning lessons, he went straight for his bow, and of course discovered at once the loss of one arrow. Very much incensed, he ran about the house to find out who had been meddling with his property. He had little trouble in discovering the offenders, for the twins were so broken down by the suffering they had been through, that they confessed at once, and told him the whole story, including their horror at the cry of pain, and adding ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... other book; he will have, therefore, ultimately, a popular judgment of his task and its performance. But he is unfortunate in another point: for he must meet that popular sentiment which at the outset looks with disfavor upon anything that has even the appearance of meddling with the commonly received and almost universally approved version of the Holy Scriptures. Let us, in a brief space and with as little of formal and scholastic criticism as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... your own business, and leave mother and me to ourselves. It's your meddling puts everything ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... also as if he missed the chance to explain the purity of his motive; but this privation of relief should be precisely his small penance: it was not amiss for Strether that he should find himself to that degree uneasy. If he had been challenged or accused, rebuked for meddling or otherwise pulled up, he would probably have shown, on his own system, all the height of his consistency, all the depth of his good faith. Explicit resentment of his course would have made him take the floor, and the thump of ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... under the loving hands of nourrice Nature, the whole elongated animal economy, steeped in rest divine from the organ of veneration to the point of the great toe, be it on a bed of down, chaff, straw, or heather, in palace, hall, hotel, or hut? If in an inn, nobody interferes with you in meddling officiousness; neither landlord, bagman, waiter, chambermaid, boots;—you are left to yourself without being neglected. Your bell may not be emulously answered by all the menials on the establishment, but ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... that," returned the Winkie. "We have trouble enough in keeping track of our own dishpans, without meddling ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... wonder that you find no answer from your country friends to the curious questions you put. They belong to that middle region between science and poetry which sensible men, as they are called, are very shy of meddling with. Some people think that truth and gold are always to be washed for; but the wiser sort are of opinion, that, unless there are so many grains to the peck of sand or nonsense respectively, it does not pay to wash for either, as long ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... some men are professionally bound to attend to the concerns of others. But this is not the case supposed. The bulk of mankind will be happier, and do more for others, by letting them alone; at least by avoiding any of that sort of meddling which may be construed ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Hood's band," he continued. "At least I've been adopted by a new sort of Robin Hood who's travelling round robbing the rich to pay the poor, and otherwise meddling in people's affairs—the old original Robin Hood brought up to date. If it hadn't been for him I might be cooling my heels in jail right now. He's an expert on jails—been in nearly every calaboose in America. He's tucked ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... I had but just cut, and I thought what a good one it would be to knock a man down with. I was going along, in and out among the bushes, when I caught sight of him coming riding slowly in front. I knew he was most likely going to the creek, for it seemed as if he could not keep from meddling with me continually, and I did not want to talk to him, so I slipped into a big bush to wait till he was gone by. I declare I had no thought of harming him, but he always put me in a rage, so I did not mean to speak to him at all. Well, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... enough for food and lodging; the subscriptions did not flow very freely into an untried scheme; and great economy was necessary in all the domestic arrangements. He determined to enforce this by frequent personal inspection; carried perhaps to an unnecessary extent, and leading occasionally to a meddling with little matters, which had sometimes the effect of producing irritation of feeling. Yet, although there was economy in providing for the household, there does not appear to have been any parsimony. The ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... wife of his may feel the consequence of meddling in other folk's concerns. Not that I care for that now, there's metal more attractive; but she has crossed me, and shall suffer for it.' These short sentences met the ear of a broad-shouldered man in a rough coat, as, in elbowing ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... saw Tanner and L—— enter the lobby of the hotel in which he sat. They registered as man and wife and went upstairs together. He followed—to walk the floor of his room all night, struggling against the impulse to break in, and kill Tanner, and damn his own soul by meddling with the man who had been ordained by the Prophets ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics. Hafiz praises ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... what Roderic proposed a shudder of horror ran through the land. Nobles and bishops hastened to the audience chamber and sought to hinder the fateful purpose of the rash monarch. Their hearts were filled with dread of the perils that would follow any meddling with the magic spell, and they earnestly implored him not to bring the foretold ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... polypragmosyne. Liddell and Scott definitions: "poikilia metaph: cunning; pleonexia a disposition to take more than one's share; polupragmosune meddling." ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... particularities, more zealous than discreet, and even more intent to carry his own point, than to consider the good that might flow from a more urbane spirit. Not that the man was devoid of ability—few, indeed, could set forth a more plausible tale; but he was continually meddling, keeking, and poking, and always taking up a suspicious opinion of every body's intents and motives but his own. He was, besides, of a retired and sedentary habit of body; and the vapour of his stomach, as he was sitting by himself, often mounted into his upper story, ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... no light affliction to be kin to the Hyndses!—What do you want me to explain? I have already told you it was necessary for Miss Smith and me to attend to a matter that is none of your business. In return, you hold us up like brigands. Would it make a dent in your armor of righteous meddling, if I were to remind you that you are seriously ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... be all that he does, for he's meddling with every thing, and continually making remarks about our society," said Grimshaw, evidently intending to create ill feeling against the consul, and to make the matter ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... more still was that, at last of all, after I had made five or six such voyages as these, and thought I had nothing more to expect from the ship that was worth my meddling with,—I say, after all this, I found a great hogshead of bread, and three large runlets of rum or spirits, and a box of sugar, and a barrel of fine flour; this was surprising to me, because I had given over expecting any more provisions, except what was spoilt ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... he was being called upon to play flowed through him like some elixir; he felt that he was transcending himself, that his inspiration was drawn from the hidden springs of the spirit, and that he could neither falter nor go astray. "You don't know what you are meddling with! This man has plotted to lay the South in ruins—he has been arming the negroes—it—it is incredible that you should all know this—to such I say, go home and thank God for your escape! For the others"—his shaggy brows met in a menacing frown—"if they force our hand we will toss ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... it's a fine dance—I'm with you there—and looks mighty like a hornpipe in a rope's end at Execution Dock by London town, it does. But who done it? Why, it was Anderson, and Hands, and you, George Merry! And you're the last above board of that same meddling crew; and you have the Davy Jones's insolence to up and stand for cap'n over me—you, that sank the lot of us! By the powers! but this tops ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... glint of anger in the blue-gray of his eyes. He lifted his broad shoulders. "Or wise man enough to do my own work when needs be, and when I'd have no bungling? I'm going to square with you, girl. Square with you for meddling, for a bullet-hole in each shoulder. If there's a fool in our little junketing party, it's a girl who thought she ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... or clapped. He was sent out a sacrifice, and came home a burnt offering; a saying of seamen who have caught the venereal disease abroad. He has burnt his fingers; he has suffered by meddling. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... they will be unceremoniously pushed from their boxes by an inanimate thing of vapour and flywheels—by a meddling fellow in a clean white jacket and a face not ditto to match, who, mounted on the engine platform, has for some weeks been flourishing a red hot poker over their heads, in triumph at their discomfiture and downfall; and the turnpike road, shorn of its glories, is left desolate and ...
— Hints on Driving • C. S. Ward
... or, at least, strain it and interpret it as they please. Always in the general council, in the municipal council, and in the mayoralty, they are tempted to usurp it; the prefect has as much as he can do to keep them within the local bounds, to keep them from meddling with state matters and the general policy; he is often obliged to accept their lack of consideration, to be patient with them, to talk to them mildly; for they talk and want the administration to reckon ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... little comment from me. Who was it that crushed in embryo, the reform which was in progress thirty-five years ago? It was the abolitionists, and every one is aware of it, who is informed on the subject; and intelligent men among the abolitionists know it, as well as any one else. The officious inter-meddling of abolitionists with Southern slavery, never has, and never can effect anything for the slave; it has served but to retard emancipation, and to rivet the chains of slavery. This opinion has been expressed a thousand times, by the wisest and best men, that our nation ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... you will tell her all that has chanced and how you believe in her powers over the powers of Lurgha, and the Mother will be well pleased with you. But you shall say nothing to the men of the village, for this quarrel is between Lurgha and Assha now and not for the meddling of others." ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... clerk, a native, who runs things to suit himself, and in his turn makes his office an occasion for graft. The parish priests who formerly had so great influence in the villages have now been ordered by the governors to cease meddling with secular matters, and some of them even are in collusion with the alcalde, whom they endeavor to aid in order that they may gain their own ends. Notwithstanding the alcaldes are few who are not ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... it that Foe removed his papers to the College strong-room. I did suggest it; but when he pointed out that it would involve an afternoon's work at least, and went on to grumble that it would probably cost him a month to re-sort them—that he hated all meddling with his records—" ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... volunteer to unite against, or freely to give his opinions, even in society, against the political system of the country to which he is accredited. Discretion and delicacy both tell him to use a proper reserve on a point that is of so much importance to others, while it is no affair of his, and by meddling with which he may possibly derange high interests that are entrusted to his especial keeping and care. All this is very apparent, and quite beyond discussion. Still circumstances may arise, provocations may be given, which will amply justify such a man in presenting the most ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... country, to the disgrace of religion and the dishonor of God. We are bound to say, however, that none among the priesthood encourage or take a part in them, unless those low and bigoted firebrands who are alike remarkable for vulgarity and ignorance, and who are perpetually inflamed by that meddling spirit which tempts them from the quiet path of duty into scenes of political strife and enmity, in which they seem to be peculiarly at home. Such scenes are repulsive to the educated priest, and to all who, from superior minds and information, are perfectly aware that no earthly or other good, ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... commenced between the Protestants and Catholics of Germany, the former had met with considerable assistance from the United Provinces. Barneveldt, who foresaw the embarrassments which the country would have to contend with on the expiration of that truce, had strongly opposed its meddling in the quarrel; but his ruin and death left no restraint on the policy which prompted the republic to aid the Protestant cause. Fifty thousand florins a month to the revolted Protestants, and a like sum to the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... top, she kneaded it gently despite the infant's cries, trying to round it a bit. Madame Lorilleux grabbed the baby from her; that could be enough to give the poor little thing all sorts of vicious tendencies, meddling with it like that while her skull was still soft. She then tried to figure out who the baby resembled. This almost led to a quarrel. Lorilleux, peering over the women's shoulders, insisted that the little girl didn't look the least bit ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again on the veranda of a sea-side hotel. "As for the eternal-womanly, it will be her salvation from herself. When once she is expropriated from her household effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling with those of the Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin to get back her peace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in trying to pry into anything that you see that another person wishes to keep to herself; for it shows a meddling disposition, and is a breach of the command to do as you would be ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... doctrine of the Godhead, and compared it with Arian and Socinian, many doubts interfered, and I even began to think that the more nicely the subject was investigated, the more perplexed it would appear, and was on the point of forming a resolution to go to heaven in my own way, without meddling or involving myself in the inextricable labyrinth of controversial dispute, when I received and perused this excellent treatise, which finally cleared up the mists which my ignorance had conjured around me, and clearly pointed out the ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... nervous state, felt worried and annoyed by this persistent gaze; but he bore it till he could bear it no longer, for the man stared as if he were some street beggar he had to watch for fear of his meddling ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... up an egg," was a part of Betsey's daily duty for some weeks. Then came the soap-boiling in great iron kettles over the fire in the wide fireplace. Apparently, this was not always a certain operation. Science had not yet put her meddling but useful finger into the soap-pot, for madam sadly records that on the twenty-first of May she had superintended the soap-boiling, but had not been blessed with "good luck;" and on the third of June we find ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... every time we stirred Stood up to us as to a mother-bird Whose coming home has been too long deferred, Made me ask would the mother-bird return And care for them in such a change of scene And might our meddling make her more afraid. That was a thing we could not wait to learn. We saw the risk we took in doing good, But dared not spare to do the best we could Though harm should come of it; so built the screen You had begun, and gave them back their shade. All this to prove we cared. Why is there then ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... was tremendous. "Then I don't mean to be allowed less liberty than Oliver. It's no good continuing this conversation. Why, I declare! some fool has been meddling ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the worst. He's cut me out altogether, eh? That comes of me meddling with the girl's affairs—damnation! When there wasn't the least ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... nearly related to the families of A— and A—, and well acquainted with the particular affairs of each; who, far from treating him as a bastard and impostor, received him with civility and seeming kindness, asked him to eat, presented him with a piece of money, and, excusing himself from meddling in the affair, advised him to go to Ireland, as the most proper place for commencing a suit for the ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... do so, if it pleases you? Women must aye be meddling with pins and barbs. If they be not pricking velvets or home-spun, they must be thrusting sharp points into those that love them best. Why shouldst thou differ from others ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the protectorship to Don Luis Arias de Mora; for, in addition to exercising this office, he is the archbishop's counselor. Therefore he despatches and performs what pertains to him in ecclesiastical matters, without meddling with the royal patronage and jurisdiction of your Majesty, as the archbishop has tried to do hitherto. By that means I think that the archbishop will be quiet, and we shall be able to live in peace. Doctor Luis Arias is a person who merits honor from your Majesty by ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Various
... and not meddling with things that don't concern me, as seems to be the way out in the Great World you are so fond of talking about," retorted Grandfather Frog. "Wise people know enough to be content with what they have. ...
— The Adventures of Grandfather Frog • Thornton W. Burgess
... through the gap in the white fence, and went around the house, past the dripping evergreens and the bare, wet lilac bushes, to the side door, the lock of which Keziah's key fitted. There was a lock on the front door, of course, but no one thought of meddling with that. That door had been opened but once during the late pastor's thirty-year tenantry. On the occasion of his funeral the mourners came and went, as was proper, by that ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... other merchants, I up and down about several businesses, and so home, whither came one Father Fogourdy, an Irish priest, of my wife's and her mother's acquaintance in France, a sober, discreet person, but one that I would not have converse with my wife for fear of meddling with her religion, but I like the man well. Thence with my wife abroad, and left her at Tom's, while I abroad about several businesses and so back to her, myself being vexed to find at my first coming Tom abroad, and all his books, papers, and bills loose ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... it seems, has been meddling with matters in Mississippi, the President states, and has ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... discerned in the ungainly figure of one of the party the same suspicious Welsh gentleman, on whose calling she had divined long ago; and she was so loyal a subject as to hold in extreme horror her husband's meddling with such "Popish skulkers" (as she called the whole party roundly to their face)—unless on consideration of a very handsome sum of money. In vain Parsons thundered, Campian entreated, Mr. Leigh's groom swore, and her husband danced round in an ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... give 'em to my mama," said Jimmy, "'cause I never could had no more fun; they'd be stuck right under my nose all time, and all time put their mouth in everything you want to do, and all time meddling. You can't fool me 'bout twinses. But I wish I could see 'em! They so weakly they got to be hatched in ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... me still more, was, that, last of all, after I had made five or six such voyages as these, and thought I had nothing more to expect from the ship that was worth my meddling with; I say, after all this, I found a great hogshead of bread, and three large runlets of rum or spirits, and a box of sugar, and a barrel of fine flour; this was surprising to me, because I had given over expecting ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... An assembly being called some of the Carthaginians counseled maintaining peace with the Romans, but the party attached to Hannibal affirmed that the Saguntines were guilty of wrongdoing and the Romans were meddling with what did not concern them. Finally those who urged them to ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... south, evidently ignorant that the former commander of the Third Force was still alive, had proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Foxx Travis and was forbidding everybody, on pain of court-martial and firing squad, from meddling with Merlin. And an evangelist in the west was declaring that Merlin was really ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... with bold statesman's hand, and with like hand REBUILD, is no darling of your political Repairer. Call the party and the men by their right names: and give me for utility in legislation or administrative action an Old Tory and Obstructive party rather than this middling, meddling, muddling Repairer— ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... I of all mankind fro' meddling wight * Who, seeing others err, self error ne'er can sight: Riches and talents are but loans to creature lent, * Each wears the cloak of that he bears in breast and sprite: If by mistaken door attempt on aught thou make, * Thou shalt go wrong and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Bah! Mrs. Sam Titmarsh is a minor, and can't touch a shilling of it. No, no, no meddling with minors for me! But stop!—your mother has a house and shop in our village. Get me a mortgage ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... boyhood and many Persians account for it by paternal severity. Youths arrived at puberty find none of the facilities with which Europe supplies fornication. Onanism[FN399] is to a certain extent discouraged by circumcision, and meddling with the father's slave-girls and concubines would be risking cruel punishment if not death. Hence they use each other by turns, a "puerile practice" known as Alish-Takish, the Lat. facere vicibus or mutuum facere. Temperament, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... mused. Her duty, she now felt convinced, was to abstain from any sort of meddling. These two people must settle their affairs as they chose. To interfere was to incur an enormous responsibility. For what she had already done in that ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... the bitterness and folly of such a man as I am—that you should consider and listen to the sorry wisdom of a homeless mountebank—a wandering fool—a preacher of empty platitudes, who has brought you to this with his cursed meddling!" ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... in, to rule over the island, a Greek prince, Constantine, the son of the king. Eight years later he had become very unpopular through meddling with Cretan politics—on the wrong ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... it, you little fiend, well, you shall get what you deserve for your meddling." He motioned to the frightened boatman. "Get me a rope, I'll make a gag of my handkerchief; hurry man, if you are found you ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent
... hardworking, energetic Western man. HAYES is a meddling Yankee. Of course HALL is the better man for carrying out ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... overmastered in the presence of Elsa. His swagger and domineering ways had availed him nothing. Andor had threatened him and he had not had the pluck or the presence of mind to stand up to that meddling, interfering peasant. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... discover the powers thereof, how far they reach, to what things they are in any degree proportionate, and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension: to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are proved to be beyond the reach of our capacities. We should not then, perhaps, be so forward, out of an affectation ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... And now France is fighting not so much to recover her lost provinces, she is fighting to recover her self-respect and her national independence; she is fighting to shake off this nightmare that has been on her soul for over a generation, [cheers,] a France with Germany constantly meddling, bullying, and interfering. And that is what would happen if Russia were trampled upon, France broken, Britain disarmed. We should be left without any means to defend ourselves. We might have a navy that would ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Sinzendorf, far enough away and in no want of it just now] are mere hay-mows, bigger than houses: who can object,—in a case of necessity? No man, unless he politically meddle, is meddled with; politically meddling, you are at once picked up; as one or two are,—clapped into gentle arrest, or, like old Schaffgotsch, and even Sinzendorf before long, requested to leave the Country till it get settled. Rigor there is, but not intentional injustice on Munchow's part, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... at a Balaklava. The revenges of history are fearful; and if the end of human experience is not reached in our downfall, other races will be careful never to rivet a chain of caste or color, or so to rivet it that no meddling fingers of fanaticism can ever ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Elizabeth, and then uniting with her lover in a plot to strangle her husband. "I am quite aware," said Voltaire, "that she is reproached with some bagatelles in the matter of her husband, but these are family affairs with which I cannot possibly think of meddling." ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... have happened had things gone on in this way, I am not prepared to say; probably had not a meddling Fate decided to take a hand in the game, Betty would have continued to think she hated Alfred, and I would never have had occasion to write his story; but Fate did interfere, and, one day in the early fall, brought about ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... piece of friendly advice is quite to the taste of the amateur, who, being a non-practical man, is wise in abstaining from meddling in directions for which he has no natural bent, and unlike the numerous tribe of would-be repairers who think that any person who can use glue and cut a piece of wood can engage in the restoration of such a small instrument as ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... There, recovering his courage and presence of mind, he recalled the important responsibilities attached to his office, and resolving to fulfil them whatever might happen, hastened to consult with the other magistrates, but as they all gave him very excellent reasons for not meddling, he soon felt there was no dependence to be placed on such cowards and traitors. He next repaired to the episcopal palace, where he found the bishop surrounded by the principal Catholics of the town, all on their knees offering up earnest ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and Werner would get back at you for meddling with their supplies," remarked Jack sharply. "They have certainly paid ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture, requires an effort of memory before a picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... venal pens and voices to condemn Mr. Madison, and to justify the British doctrine. This is a deep stain on the character of our clergy; and the subsequent conduct of the British, may serve to shew these ever meddling men, that our enemies despised them, and ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... of old grandmotherly prejudices about Englishmen being punished by Englishmen, and notions of that sort. He protested, not only in speech, but actually in print. He was soon made to learn the perils of meddling in the high politics of the High Dutch militarists. The fine feelings of the foreign mercenaries were soothed by Cobbett being flung into Newgate for two years and beggared by a fine of L1000. That small incident is a small transparent ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... things he could not possibly be supposed to understand, and which to the Malay himself were matters of an almost special knowledge. There was a twinkle of mischief in his eye as he contemplated the meddling of Murtagh, and waited ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... much of this meddling business—rummaging the mails for the books of a conscientious writer like Tolstoi, suppressing the poems of one of the gentlest and noblest of writers, Whitman, and now taking a gentleman to the Tombs for having on ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... privileged character, and the protection he enjoyed from the sovereign, that any of the courtiers resented his remarks; but Sir Thomas Wyat's feelings being now deeply interested, he turned sharply round, and said, "How now, thou meddling varlet, what business ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that the interference with her method of work is bad. But Nature is mindful of this tendency and if it is not in accordance with the profoundest laws of being, Nature will have her way in spite of man's meddling. Any change that can be brought about by selective mating must come by natural processes aided by the education of each individual through a closer study of the origin and evolution of life. This must leave everyone free to do his own selecting, rather than to trust it to the state. ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... tries a little calomel powder on the sore, and it either "dries up" and secondary symptoms of syphilis appear in due course, or it gets worse or remains unchanged and the patient finally goes to a doctor or a dispensary to find that his meddling has lost him the golden opportunity of aborting the disease. If secondaries appear, a bottle or two of XYZ Specific, again at the suggestion of the all-knowing drug clerk, containing a little mercury and potassium iodid, ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... believe one word of it," she said, firmly. "I don't believe it. I wouldn't believe it was anything but your mean meddling ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... ashore; and, secondly, the Deal men had such a reputation as desperate characters that no officer, unless he was pretty sure that a smuggling transaction was being carried on and could rely, too, on being well supported by other Customs men and the soldiers, would think of meddling in the matter. But, lastly, the men who came ashore from the East Indiamen had a smart little dodge of their own for concealing ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... affair. It was received by a yell of laughter, that completely discomfited my meddling antagonist, who, after some little swaggering and loud talk, at length went below to the "bar" to soothe his ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... upon Old Mr. Toad!" grumbled Jimmy, as he ambled up the Lone Little Path through the Green Forest on his way to the hill where Prickly Porky lives. "Of course I'm not afraid, but just the same I don't like meddling with things I don't know anything about. I'm not afraid of anybody I know of, because everybody has the greatest respect for me, but it might be different with a creature without legs or head or tail. Whoever heard of such a thing? It gives ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... like a downy young owl. She wasn't sure but she thought that he muttered, "I'm damned if I will." She considered with wholesome fear the perils of meddling with other people's destinies, and she said timidly, "Hadn't ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... try to persuade me to marry him? Was not that a declaration from you? Why do you force yourself upon us in this way? I confess I thought at first that you were anxious to arouse an aversion for him in my heart by your meddling, in order that I might give him up; and it was only afterwards that I guessed the truth. You imagined that you were doing an heroic action! How could you spare any love for him, when you love your own vanity to such an extent? Why could you not simply ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... her to wait. "I am convinced that that woman is meddling in our affairs. It is plain enough that we ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... one in their houses; and if any should by chance come to their hands, they were on this penalty to carry them to the Secretary of State; and after the punishment had passed on two or three offenders, it deterred the rest from meddling with those edge tools: I must tell you also, that the title of king, which Cesario had taken so early upon him, was much against his inclinations; and he desired to see himself at the head of a more ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... her daughter and bade her lift the pot off the fire and put the stew into a dish, as it had been cooking quite long enough and she was hungry. But no sooner had she tasted it than she put her spoon down, and declared that her daughter must have been meddling with it, for it was impossible to eat anything that was ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... are," Denham reassured him. "I've got enough to do without meddling in other folks' business. The lady outside the case doesn't exist. But as for 'Churn' being Lorenz Czerny, it doesn't go without saying that we shall spot Chuff and Jake, and the rest of the gang through him. That will depend on himself, and his Moll—Kit. I wouldn't mind offering your young ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... lived with him, day in, day out, and not seen what you saw in an hour or two? No," she said, "I know there's wrong in it; what wrong, I neither know nor want to know. There was never an ill thing made better by meddling, that I could hear of. But, my lad, you must never ask me to leave my father. While the breath is in his body, I'll be with him. And he's not long for here, either: that I can tell you, Charlie—he's not long for here. The mark is on his brow; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... watched her curiously, then stole away with another smile. She liked the spell that was acting now, but knew Annie too well to say much. Miss Eulie was one of those rare women who could let a good work of this kind go on without meddling. ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... mad him," retorted the cook, "if he comes meddling with my larder when my back's turned. I have a very great mind not to finish cooking those sausage-meat cakes for his tea—behaving like ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... the various attempts to legislate in behalf of women and child workers strikes the average employer as a gross interference with his constitutional rights. Where he can he evades. Where he cannot he is apt to grow purple over the impertinence of meddling reformers who cannot let ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... career, The barrier tops, and o'er the bridge would fly, But sullen Rodomont, with troubled cheer, Afoot, as he that tower is standing nigh, For he disdains to brandish sword or spear, Shouts to him from afar with threatening cry, "Halt! thou intrusive churl and indiscreet, Rash, meddling, saucy villain, stay ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Gordon; "it's quite different with us; we don't want to rob him or Ollypybus, or to annex their land. All we want to do is to improve it, and have the fun of running it for them and meddling in their affairs of state. Well, Stedman," he said, "what shall ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... be, Mr. Franklin! Take my advice, and let the Diamond be! That cursed Indian jewel has misguided everybody who has come near it. Don't waste your money and your temper—in the fine spring time of your life, sir—by meddling with the Moonstone. How can YOU hope to succeed (saving your presence), when Sergeant Cuff himself made a mess of it? Sergeant Cuff!" repeated Betteredge, shaking his forefinger at me sternly. "The ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... just the one to do it, and that it is your obvious duty, and all that?" said Mrs. Swan. "Now, just take my advice, and don't burn your fingers meddling with other people's affairs, nor do any such ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... the lesson he had received for meddling with Imperial fiefs; and he must have been mad had he thought of provoking further the resentment of the Emperor. To Farnese, Charles V was a sleeping dog it was ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... business of her estate, which was ample, with skill and ability, and asked advice from no one. Like my father, she had a liking to control those about her, was restlessly busy, and was never so pleased as when engaged in arranging other people's lives, or meddling with the making ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... much of the story as he would hear. Almost immediately he saw whither it tended, he began to abuse him for meddling with things he had nothing to do with. What right had he to interfere with lord Forgue's pleasures! Things of the sort were to be regarded as non-existent! The linen had to be washed, but it was not done in the great court! Lord Forgue ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... but then the House of Peers seldom interferes in matters that concern the interests of the others. The Lords seem not to think it their province; and, in general, more through diffidence than negligence, they avoid meddling, though, to do that honourable house justice, to it we owe much. Many bills, of a dangerous tendency, have been thrown out by it, after they had passed the other house; and it has been generally done with a wisdom, magnanimity, and moderation, which is only to be accounted for by ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... apprehended from that source than had lately been the case. Thus, the "cup of bitterness," of which Granvelle had already complained; was again commended to his lips, and there was more reason than ever for the government to regret that the national representatives had contracted the habit of meddling with financial matters. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... better managed than the caution which the king gives the meddling Archbishop, not to advise him rashly to engage in the war with France, his scrupulous dread of the consequences of that advice, and his eager desire to hear ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... precipitate attempts to change externals. He let slavery—he let war alone; he let the tyranny of the Roman Empire alone—not because he was a coward, not because he thought that these things were not worth meddling with, but because he, like all wise men, believed in making the tree good and then its fruit good. He believed in the diffusion of the principles which he proclaimed, and the mighty Name which he served, as able to girdle the poison-tree, and to take the bark off it, and the rest, the slow ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... had his mouth all fixed to tell Brother Bill that, in his opinion, he wasn't much better than a faro dealer, for he used to brag that he never let anything turn him from his duty, which meant his meddling in other people's business. I want to say right here that with most men duty means something unpleasant which the other fellow ought to do. As a matter of fact, a man's first duty is to mind his own business. It's been my experience that it takes about all the ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... Grace; "you have a taste in these things, let us have your aid in the selection." Rupert was by no means backward in complying, for he loved to be meddling in ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... soon forgotten all about her raid upon Uncle Ewen's affairs. Her thoughts floated to a little cottage on the hills, and its two coming inhabitants. And in her dream she seemed to hear herself say—"I oughtn't to be meddling with other people's lives like this. I don't know enough. I'm too young! I want somebody to ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... impossible for any object to get into the ear itself; the depth of the external passage is only about one inch in an adult. At this point the passage is completely closed by the drum membrane. Most of the harm is done by ignorant meddling, not by the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... that the Bill proposed to throw technical education into the hands of the Science and Art Department. But, in reality, no power of initiation, nor even of meddling with details, was given to that Department—the sole function of which was to decide whether any plan proposed did or did not come within the limits of "technical education." The necessity for such control, somewhere, is obvious. ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... man, turning a disgusted shoulder on this display of emotion, "to my mind this business of draining Pontesordo is too much like telling the Almighty what to do. If God made the land wet, what right have we to dry it? Those that begin by meddling with the Creator's works may end by ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... say generally," she went on, "that there are people who are quite indifferent and completely devoid of all feeling of sympathy, yet who do not pass human suffering by, but insist on meddling for fear people should be able to do without them. Nothing is sacred for ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Tullis was not in Edelweiss for the purpose of meddling with state affairs. He was there because he elected to stand mentor to the son of his life-long friend, even though that son was a prince of the blood and controlled by the will of three regents chosen by his own subjects. He was there to watch over the doughty little chap, who one day ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... directing the attention of his companion to the Cove: "'Tis the bark that has so often foiled the efforts of all thy cruisers, and which transports me and my wealth whither I will, without the fetters of arbitrary laws, and the meddling inquiries of venal hirelings. The scud, which floats above the sea, is not freer than that vessel, and scarcely more swift. Well is she named the Water-Witch! for her performances on the wide ocean have been such as seem to exceed all natural means. The froth of the sea does not dance more ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... is, laddie. It's a matter of life and death, I'm thinking!" He smiled grimly, as it entered his head that he might be driven to do violence to that meddling policeman. The yellow gas-light gave his face such a sardonic ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... sometimes spied, Sad sight! slow moving o'er the prostrate dead: Listless, she crawls along in doleful black, Whilst bursts of sorrow gush from either eye, Past falling down her now untasted cheek. Prone on the lowly grave of the dear man She drops; whilst busy meddling memory, In barbarous succession, musters up The past endearments of their softer hours, 80 Tenacious of its theme. Still, still she thinks She sees him, and, indulging the fond thought, Clings yet more closely to the senseless turf, Nor heeds the passenger who looks ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Empire under the elder Pitt; a man whose like the world had never seen before and may not see again; orator, statesman, founder of empire, champion of freedom, and one of the very few civilians who have ever wielded the united force of fleets and armies without weakening it by meddling with the things that ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... the citizen is held quite as sacred as his person. Now, some of these very tenures existed when the State institutions were framed; and, not satisfied with this, we of New York, in common with our sister States, solemnly prohibited ourselves, in the constitution of the United States, from ever meddling with them! Nevertheless, men are found hardy enough to assert that a thing which in fact belongs to the ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... thence to Niagara. Here he spent some time in making a fresh examination of the cataract, and then resumed his voyage on Lake Ontario. He stopped, however, at the great town of the Senecas, near the Genessee, where, with his usual spirit of meddling, he took upon him the functions of the civil and military authorities, convoked the chiefs to a council, and urged them to set at liberty certain Ottawa prisoners whom they had captured in violation of treaties. Having settled this affair to ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... pardon, monsieur, for meddling in your business; but, really, you play a very poor game. Let ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... constitutional proviso which created the American principle of federalism. The Constitution made no grant, or even inferred a grant, of power to the federal government for meddling, to any extent, or for any purpose whatever, in the private cultural, economic, social, educational, religious, or political affairs of individual citizens—or in the legitimate governmental activities of the individual states which became members of the federal ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... The sense of having done right made her heart light and happy as she ran home. The experience had taught her that one must learn to see many pretty things without wishing to possess them; and also that small acts of disobedience and a habit of meddling may lead further than ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... groaned Dan Dalzell, now beginning to shiver in earnest. "Some meddling marine sentry has ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... He had collected every possible scrap of evidence, down to Rose's new brooch. I suppose Marion told him about that. He said at the end of the letter that he had no motive in writing it except a sincere wish for Conroy's welfare. This was quite untrue. He had several other motives. His love of meddling was one. Hatred of Crossan was another. Jealousy of Bob Power was ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... self-contained aspect, and, being a bachelor, has doubtless spent a calm life among his clay and marble, meddling little with the world, and entangling himself with no cares beyond his studio. He did not talk a great deal; but enough to show that he is still an Englishman in many sturdy traits, though his accent has something foreign about it. His conversation was chiefly about India, and other topics ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Captain and owner. I of course take my boy's word in preference to that of any stranger. Having thus detected the hollowness of your sympathy, and the falseness of your pretended friendship for my husband, I must request you to refrain from further meddling in this matter. ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... little snort. "And what would Loraine Mosby be doing meddling in my affairs? She hasn't called on me for years. Like as not it was that fool Lavinia Burrus. You would think she owned and was running the town. The salvation of Bloomfield weighs mighty heavy on her shoulders ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... Butcher] That was no foolish thought of thine, yon candle. I do remember now as I look back, They always loved the lights. My Rudi there Would aye be meddling with my tinder-box. And once ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody
... place; At council set as foils on Danby's[56] score, To make that great false jewel shine the more; Who all that while was thought exceeding wise, Only for taking pains and telling lies. But there's no meddling with such nauseous men; 80 Their very names have tired my lazy pen: 'Tis time to quit their company, and choose Some ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... It was meddling with vested interests of a powerful kind, but there were so many rivers at Oxford that each turned one or two mills without ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... men were still denounced as fanatics, meddling with what was none of their business. In 1843 they had not enrolled in their ranks the most influential men in the community. Ministers, professors, lawyers, and merchants generally still held aloof from the controversy, and were either hostile or indifferent to it. So, with the aid of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... open my mouth boldly, and tell him all from beginning to end. You knew it before me, and ought to have given me a hint of what was going on! The girl might yet have been advised. It might still have been time to save her! But, no! There was something for your meddling and making, and you must needs add fuel to the fire. Now you have made your bed you may lie on it. As you have brewed so you may drink; I shall take my daughter under my arm and be off with her over ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... that you were a poor Mormon, Cecilia. And from first to last I opposed my family's entering the community. Tithes and meddling sent my father out of it a poor man. But I'm glad he went before ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... old man said, 'What are you after now? 'and the Lion asked if he had seen Ananzi pass that way, but the old man said 'No, that fellow Ananzi is always meddling with some one; what mischief has he been ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... God! Where are they now? Not coming here? I don't have any policemen trampling here and meddling with my finds—tell them to clear out, Thatcher, you know there's no ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... than that. They could impose a protective duty upon corn, or endow the Roman Catholic religion, making such protection or endowment a fundamental law (s. iv., n. 8, p. 323), and withholding from the government, which they proceed to set up, the power of meddling with that law. They are then not only a Constituent but likewise a Legislative Assembly. But this power of making laws and moulding the future constitution of the State, what else is it but sovereign power, and indeed the very ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... I must make you acquainted," said our hostess (the meddling lady whom I have already quoted on the subject of the Hollingford misdemeanours). "You intend passing the winter at ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... have let these conspirators run into Pensacola Bay without meddling with the matter?" ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... latter, "I'll manage my own affairs, and allow of no meddling and no questioning. I said so once before, and I was not minded and bad came of it; and now I say it again. And if you're to come here and put impertinent questions, and stare at me as you've been doing this half-hour past, why, the sooner you leave ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the title of Patrician from the Pope, but sent him no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the measure of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul which his sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is now, as St. Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing therefore in the lowest abyss ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... girl. I fancy what meddling you do will make no difference to me. Just don't get my papers ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... if it is!" fairly shouted Muchmore. "Let the pictures burn. As for you, old woman, if I find you meddling any more, with what doesn't concern you, I'll find a way to stop you! ...
— The Young Firemen of Lakeville - or, Herbert Dare's Pluck • Frank V. Webster
... but one course for this country to pursue in its dealings with other States; she must abstain from all interference, all mischievous meddling with their domestic concerns, and leave them to support, or to destroy, or to amend their own institutions in their own way. Let us cherish our own Government, keeping our own institutions for our own use, but never attempt to force them upon ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... used it for years. It had the advantage that it could be used inside a gravity field, where a Lawlor drive could not. It had the other advantage that commercial spacecraft could not mount such gadgets for defense, because the insurance companies objected to meddling with ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... the colonel's blood suddenly cooled. This was no accident; this meddling peasant had at some time or other held a saber in his hand and knew how to use it famously well. The colonel realized that he had ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... expressed in terms which, albeit the reproaches were just, showed but little chivalrous consideration towards a peccant but very contrite woman. He told her that he "had much to do besides defending himself from the consequences of the meddling gossip of the ladies of modern times," and he asked indignantly, "What do Sir John Burgoyne and his family and your Ladyship and others—talking of old friendship—say to the share which each of you have had in this transaction, which, in my opinion, is disgraceful ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... you can discharge a man without paying him off?" I asked him. "Well," he said, "I didn't have the money on hand to pay him with." I told him that his meddling with these men did not suit me, and that I did not want his four men, moreover, I said, "I will not move a peg from camp with them. I employ my drivers ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... fellow who had the ducking,' replied Neil. 'He will be quite harmless, only a little odd. You will nefer be seeing him with the others; he will always be wandering about by himself, and sleeping in all kinds of places. Och! but this will not do though; he is meddling with our coats that we took off when we were going to climb. Hi, Gibbie! you must ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... secrets, whose promulgation, by no law of duty required, would make the streets of every city and village run with blood. There is a style of speaking, miscalled sincerity, which in mere tattling and tale-bearing, minding others' business, interfering with their relations, impertinently meddling with cases we can neither settle nor understand, and eating over again the forbidden fruit of that tree of knowledge of good and evil planted in the Garden of Eden, whose seed has been scattered through the earth, though having less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... House of Commons, in which, among other matters which he stated respecting the late riot at Knightsbridge, he said, 'That he had been anxious that a Committee should investigate this question, because he wished to let the world know the real character of this Great Common Council, who were always meddling with matters which they had nothing to do with, and which were far above their wisdom and energy. It was from such principles they had engaged in the recent inquiry, which he would contend they had no right to enter upon. Not only was evidence selected, but questions were ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... said the rough voice of a workman, carrying a plank on his shoulder. The man passed on. He was the voice of Providence saying to the watcher: "What are you meddling with? Think of your own duty; and leave these ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... you to mind your own business; and droll enough it is. We always fancy we're saying an impertinence to a man when we tell him to attend to what concerns him most. It shows, at least, that we think meddling a luxury. And then she adds, "Kilgobbin is welcome to you," and I can only say you are welcome to Kilgobbin—ay, and in her own words—"with such regularity and order as the meals succeed."—"All the luggage ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... acquired taste. Added to which he had all sorts of old grandmotherly prejudices about Englishmen being punished by Englishmen, and notions of that sort. He protested, not only in speech, but actually in print. He was soon made to learn the perils of meddling in the high politics of the High Dutch militarists. The fine feelings of the foreign mercenaries were soothed by Cobbett being flung into Newgate for two years and beggared by a fine of L1000. That small incident is a small transparent picture of the Holy ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... to put us. We're meddling. It doesn't seem the right thing to come between mother ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... was strictly enjoined from meddling with them, even if they came in his way. If they chased the Bronx, she would be justified in defending herself under the orders; and that was the most she could do. Flint was terribly disappointed, and he regarded the commander with the deepest interest to learn what interpretation ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... of the inclosure, might he feel justified in wetting the gum and securing the envelope for safety's sake? After thinking it over, Moody decided that he was not justified in meddling with the letter. On reflection, her Ladyship might have changes to make in it or might have a postscript to add to what she had already written. Apart too, from these considerations, was it reasonable to act as if Lady Lydiard's ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... lived was always communicated to me, and as far as I had it in my power I obtained redress for the oppressed. I very soon, therefore became an object of suspicion and dread amongst the petty tyrants of that district; and by them I was denominated "a busy meddling fellow;" but as a set off to this, I received the thanks, the blessings of the poor, and the love of my servants, whom I looked upon as my friends and neighbours. I had as much work done for my money as any man; I ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... was not to keep me from meddling with the money that my patriarchal friend locked the chest. There was something in it, I fancied, which was connected with the mystery of my parentage. Though it did not occur to me then, I have thought since that Matt Rockwood did very wrong in not trying to ascertain ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... could it be said to be accomplished. The pontificate of his ancestor in the third degree, Pope Felix III., might be called heroic, in that, while under the domination of the Arian Herule, Odoacer, he resisted the meddling with the received doctrine of the Church by the emperor Zeno, guided by the larger mind and treacherous fraud of Acacius, the bishop of Constantinople, who ruled its emperor. Then the Arian Vandals bitterly persecuted the Church ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... a bill of broken-glass to pay for meddling in neighbors, elections before. The year was not yet ended, when Villars and the Sardinian Majesty had done their stroke on Lombardy; taken Milan Citadel, taken Pizzighetone, the Milanese in whole, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the extent of my rudeness and the venom of my repartee. Montreuil, on his entrance into our family, not only fell in with, but favoured and fostered, the reigning humour against me; whether from that divide et impera system, which was so grateful to his temper, or from the mere love of meddling and intrigue, which in him, as in Alberoni, attached itself equally to petty as to large circles, was not then clearly apparent; it was only certain that he fomented the dissensions and widened the breach between my brothers and myself. Alas! after all, I believe my sole crime was my ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... saints that no further harm was done," ejaculated the lady shuddering, while her lord proceeded—"It was not malice, but malapert meddling, then. Master Leonard Copeland, thou must be scourged to make thee keep thine hands off where they be not needed. For the rest, thou must await what my Lord of Whitburn may require. Take him away, John Ellerby, chastise him, and keep him in ward ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but he threatened us, and struck the dog again with all his might and knocked one of his eyes out, and he said to us, 'There, I hope you are satisfied now; that's what you have got for him by your damned meddling'—and he laughed, the heartless brute." Seppi's voice trembled with pity and anger. I guessed what Satan would say, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to shut her up in jail—to say nothing of her carrying off poor little Biddy—and you may be sure that Jim was not long in sending her there, spite of her vociferations that, "If there was law in the counthry she'd have the right of him yet, for meddling with an honest woman like ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... was so taken aback by this unexpected attack that at first he hardly knew how to meet it. Should he lecture his wife for her presumption in meddling in his affairs, which were quite beyond her comprehension as a woman, or should he make light of the matter and laugh it off? After a moment's reflection he decided ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... Meddling in everybody's interests, Tonsard heard everybody's complaints, and often instigated frauds to benefit the needy. His wife, a kindly appearing woman, had a good word for evil-doers, and never withheld either ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... says that he hath no more mind to be found meddling with the Navy, lest it should do it hurt as well as him. So to talk of general things: and telling him that with all these doings he, I thanked God, stood yet; he told me, Yes, but that he thought his continuing in did arise from his enemies my Lord ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... blundering, meddling, thick-headed fool," said Zurich unpleasantly; "can't you see what you've done? You've locked up our best chance to lay a finger on that mine. Now I'll have to get your Cousin Stanley out of jail; ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... possible defence can be made for Calvinism or any other 'ism' than the wretched recrimination: "Why, yours, Dr. Priestley, is just as bad!"—Yea, and no wonder:—for in essentials both are the same. But there was no reason for Fuller's meddling with the subject ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... some one else has not been meddling with that money? I do not see that it follows no one could touch it but Seabrooke ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... the original five hundred, but there was no help for it. At half after ten he knocked on the panel of Jane's door and waited. He knocked again; still the summons was not answered. The third assault was emphatic. Ling Foo heard footsteps, but behind him. He turned. The meddling young officer was ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... canons were issued for the Church of Scotland, which owed their existence to the dangerous meddling of Laud, now Archbishop of Canterbury. James, who loved Episcopacy, had dreaded the influence of Laud in Scotland; his fear was justified, for it was given to Laud to make an Episcopal Church impossible north of the Tweed. Although ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... his kind and I like not the breed," replied Dauvrey. "Methinks he resembles rather his brethren of Italy than those I have seen in this land of mist and fog. He has been meddling with ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... Quixote was eager to give the mummer a lesson in courtesy, even, as he said, if he had to visit his sin upon the rest of the company, not barring the Emperor himself. Sancho did his best to warn his master that there was great danger in meddling with actors, as they were a favored class; but had the King himself interfered in their behalf, it would not have stayed the hand ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Ready-Money Jack; which only shows the intrigues and internal dangers to which the best regulated governments are liable. In this perplexing situation of their affairs, both mother and son have applied to Master Simon for counsel; and, with all his experience in meddling with other people's concerns, he finds it an exceedingly difficult part to play, to agree with both parties, seeing that their opinions and wishes are so ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... strong and self-respecting man should behave toward the other men with whom he is brought into contact. In other words, our aim is disinterestedly to help other nations where such help can be wisely given without the appearance of meddling with what does not concern us; to be careful to act as a good neighbor; and at the same time, in good-natured fashion, to make it evident that we do not intend ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... could not forbear incessantly reminding the king, that had it not been for Avenant she would never have come, and that it was he alone who had procured her the water of beauty that was to preserve her ever youthful and beautiful. So it happened that some meddling bodies went and told the king that she preferred Avenant to himself, when he became so jealous that he ordered his faithful subject to be thrown into prison, and fed upon nothing but bread and water. When the Fair One with ...
— Bo-Peep Story Books • Anonymous
... faces in a rapid succession; an 'aiery of children,' embryo actors, artists, poets, or philosophers. Like unfledged birds, they are hatched, nursed, and fed by hand: this gives room for a vast deal of management, meddling, care, and condescending solicitude; but the instant the callow brood are fledged, they are driven from the nest, and forced to shift for themselves in the wide world. One sterling production decides the question between them and their patrons, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... has the effrontery to say? Tetedieu! it seems that he has profited little by the lesson you read him in the horse-market about meddling in matters which concern him not. He has come hither to tell me that he will not permit his sister to wed the Cardinal's nephew; that he will not have the estates of Canaples pass into the hands of a foreign upstart. He, forsooth—he! he! he!" And at each ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... anger. "I think that it's damned impertinent of you to come here meddling in my business. I might have expected it. You've always been an ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... As for Dr. Tusher's boasts that he was the cause of this conversion—even in these young days Mr. Esmond had such a contempt for the Doctor, that had Tusher bade him believe anything (which he did not—never meddling at all), Harry would that instant have questioned the ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... hundred is of this latter character, but nearly, if not all, depend upon the inflammation and swelling above mentioned. How futile then, not to say hurtful, must be all instruments for, and all attempts at replacing and supporting it by force! All such mechanical meddling is injurious, and should, with all the "supporters," ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... was certainly correct in so regarding it. On one occasion after his return from Europe, he denied the truth of an assertion made in a newspaper, as to the amount he derived from the sale of each of his novels. "It remains for the public to decide," said he, "whether it will tolerate or not this meddling with private interests by any one who can get the command of a little ink and a few types." In the prefatory address to the publisher which appeared in the first edition of "The Pioneers," he made the statement, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... eve of St. Andrew's Day, in 1729, that a party of the Natchez approached the French settlement. It was some days in advance of that fixed, on account of the meddling with the rods. They brought with them one of the common people, armed with a wooden hatchet, to kill the commandant, the warriors having too much contempt for him to be willing to lay hands on him. The natives strayed in friendly fashion into the houses, and many made ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... in a declaration warning the Holy Allies not to meddle with the South American republics. Thus, just at the time when Adams was protesting against European colonization in the Northwest, England suggested a protest against European meddling in the affairs of Spanish America. The opportunity was too good to be lost, and Adams succeeded in persuading President Monroe to make a protest in behalf of the nation against both forms of European interference in American affairs. Monroe thought it best to make the declaration ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... governmental meddling in industry and business were reduced save for a few necessary safe-guards of minimum-wage and maximum-safety laws. With these restrictions removed, and with control of so many vital sciences and technologies taken away from the military, ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... keep in mind these things, Nature, free at once, and rid of her haughty lords, is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself, without the meddling of the gods.' [Footnote: Monro's translation. In his criticism of this work ('Contemporary Review' 1867) Dr. Hayman does not appear to be aware of the really sound and subtile observations on which the reasoning of Lucretius, though ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... shall by no means think of doing it. A poor wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these bandbox reputations. A Prince-Rupert's-drop, which is a tear of unannealed glass, lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from meddling hands; but break its tail off, and it explodes and resolves itself into powder. These celebrities I speak of are the Prince-Rupert's-drops of the learned and polite world. See how the papers treat them! What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, that can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... veins, she would know more, not only of the gate, but of its owner, his wife, his children, his means, his hopes, wishes, intentions and thoughts, than he ever knew himself, or would be likely to know. But if this prominent love of meddling must of necessity in its very nature lead to what is worse than contented ignorance, gossiping error, and a wrong estimate of our fellow-creatures, it has, at least, the advantage of keeping a people from falling asleep over ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... therefore fashionable, affected by the tenderlings of that era, "as the proper thing to have." The quack-doctor, continues the writer above mentioned, must have been a fashionable style of man, not meddling much with the poor, and familiar with boudoirs, curing the new disease with new and ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... uniting with her lover in a plot to strangle her husband. "I am quite aware," said Voltaire, "that she is reproached with some bagatelles in the matter of her husband, but these are family affairs with which I cannot possibly think of meddling." ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... in sage accord with the Philistines of the day, a new conception of classicality is evolved. In other departments of art, too, the Greeks are pressed into service, on the ground that Greece was the very home of "clear transparent serenity;" and, finally, such shallow meddling with all that is most earnest and terrible in the existence of man, is gathered together in a full and novel philosophical system [Footnote: Hanslick's "Vom Musicalish-Schoenen," and particularly Vischer's voluminous "System der AEsthetik."]—wherein our varnished musical ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... not be disguised, that we ourselves find the priests far more accommodating than these meddling parsons. The priests, for instance, allow us to amuse ourselves in any manner we think fit, week-day or Sunday; and far from finding fault, ten to one if they don't join in the sport; the Protestant minister, on the contrary, never allows a violation of the sacred ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... at work on some more of the Young Astronomer's lines. I find less occasion for meddling with them as he grows more used to versification. I think I could analyze the processes going on in his mind, and the conflict of instincts which he cannot in the nature of things understand. But it is as well to give the reader a chance to find out for himself what is going ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... my child," interrupted Bertha with a patronizing air which usually made the meddling infant grit her teeth and ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... prattling page aside, To me, in converse sweet, impart 25 To read in man the native heart; To learn, where Science sure is found, From Nature as she lives around; And, gazing oft her mirror true, By turns each shifting image view! 30 Till meddling Art's officious lore Reverse the lessons taught before; Alluring from a safer rule, To dream in her enchanted school: Thou, Heaven, whate'er of great we boast, 35 Hast blest this ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... able to pay the high rent required by the Royal Institution, was removed to its present site in Brown Street, placed under the management of Mr. Hammersley, who had previously been a successful teacher at Nottingham, and freed from the meddling of incompetent authorities. And now pupils anxiously crowd to receive instruction, and annually display practical evidence of the advantages they ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... of the conduct of the young, to admonish or advise different manners and conduct from that which the inclination of the young seems to suggest, would be to run the risk of being regarded as officious or meddling, and thereby of inviting insult. Parents whose children are known to be of the class pictured are themselves timid and indisposed to insist upon obedience from them, for fear of offending them and causing them to go ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... about all we can do here," Dick replied. "All we know is that a man seemed to have been hurt here. If he was, he was able to take himself away, and to conceal the signs of his hurt before going. Therefore we've no further excuse for meddling around ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... hours, How am I to you all engag'd! that thus By such strange means, almost miraculous, You should preserve me; you have gone the way To make me rich by taking all away. For I—had I been rich—as sure as fate, Would have been meddling with the king, or State, Or something to undo me; and 'tis fit, We know, that who hath wealth should have no wit, But, above all, thanks to that Providence That arm'd me with a gallant soul, and sense, 'Gainst all misfortunes, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... assembly; but I hope it may stir up others of my brethren to exhort their several congregations, after a more effectual manner, to shew their love for their country on this important occasion. And this, I am sure, cannot be called meddling ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... one meddling with this lock," he said, after a moment's hesitation, looking stealthily up and down and around ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... of the sort occurs entirely without one's aid and rather against one's will—one may as well submit," she said later to Lord Coombe. "Endeavouring to readjust matters is merely meddling with Fate and always ends in disaster. As an incident, I felt there was a hint in it that it would be the part of wisdom to leave ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... people, who supplied us with milk, and treated us very kindly. We had some adventures, nevertheless. One day as we were passing by a tuft of small trees, a rhinoceros charged upon my horse, which very narrowly escaped by wheeling short round and getting behind him; the beast then made off without meddling with us any more. Every day we used to shoot some animal or other, for provision: sometimes it was a gnu, something between an antelope and a bull; at other times it was ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... AGNES.] Agnes—[To AGNES, in rapid, earnest undertones.] They sent me to the railway station; my brother told me you were likely to leave for Milan tonight. I ought to have guessed sooner that you were in the hands of this meddling parson and his sister. Why has ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... wasn't meddling—I was your own. I was your own," said the Colonel, "from the moment ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... you set about it. You are always saying that you don't like to let feeling interfere with business. But I wouldn't stand Farnsworth—little shrimp!—setting up to run a bank. Ill? Well, he ought to be; makes himself ill meddling with other people. He'd be better if he didn't worry about what doesn't belong to him. I'd give him rest. It's all well enough to sneer at a woman's notion of business, but the bank would be better off if you had entire ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... was very encouraging, and disclosed to me a somewhat consoling prospect of increasing my influence as musical conductor at a time when my disgust was daily growing stronger at the constant meddling with our opera repertoire, which made me lose more and more influence as compared with the wishes of my would-be prima donna niece, whom even Tichatschek supported. Immediately on my return from Berlin I had begun the orchestration of Lohengrin, and in all other ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... I know him; 'tis a meddling friar; I do not like the man: had he been lay, my lord, For certain words he spake against your Grace In your retirement, I had ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... not speak; under his bronzed cheek the flat muscles stirred. Had some meddling, malicious fool ventured to whisper an unfit jest to this young girl? Had a word—or a smile and a phrase cut in two—awakened her to a sorry wisdom at his expense? Something had happened; and the idea stirred him to wrath—as when a child is wantonly frightened or ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Earnshaw snatched up the culprit directly and conveyed him to his chamber; where, doubtless, he administered a rough remedy to cool the fit of passion, for he appeared red and breathless. I got the dishcloth, and rather spitefully scrubbed Edgar's nose and mouth, affirming it served him right for meddling. His sister began weeping to go home, and Cathy stood by ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... society. The author of France is described as 'not beautiful, but with something lively and agreeable in her whole person. She is very clever, and seems to have a good heart; it is a pity that for the sake of popularity she should have the mania of meddling in politics.... Her vivacity and rather springing carriage seemed very strange in Parisian circles. She soon learned that good taste of itself condemned that kind of demeanour; in fact, gesticulation and noisy manners ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... first thing they see. Some of the juice of that flower I will drop on the eyelids of my Titania when she is asleep; and the first thing she looks upon when she opens her eyes she will fall in love with, even though it be a lion or a bear, a meddling monkey, or a busy ape; and before I will take this charm from off her sight, which I can do with another charm I know of, I will make her give me that ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... must tell you, you know, as a friend, you'd better not be meddling with such notions; they are bad, George, very bad, for boys in your condition,—very;" and Mr. Wilson sat down to a table, and began nervously chewing the handle of ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... quarrel that sets the land on fire, between King George and his foes: What call has a man of your kind—much less, a woman—to interpose? Yet you needs must be meddling, folk like you, not foes—so much the worse! The many and loyal should keep themselves unmixed ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Sociology—] "we have allowed that province of Biology to become autonomous; but I should like you to recollect that this is a sacrifice, and that you should not be surprised if it occasionally happens that you see a biologist apparently trespassing in the region of philosophy or politics; or meddling with human education; because, after all, that is a part of his kingdom which he has only voluntarily forsaken"]—how to learn biology, the use of Museums, and above all, the utility of biology, as helping to give right ideas in this world, which] "is after ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... like Mrs. Octagon—I never did," said Mallow, impetuously, "but I don't care two straws for her opposition. I shall marry Juliet in spite of this revenge she seems to be practising on you. Though why she should hope to vex you by meddling with my marriage, ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... arrived he would have sat down in the middle of the treacherous carpet, but Utsuken pulled him aside and seated him on the edge of the felt. Meanwhile a woman was meddling with the horse and cut off its left stirrup. Belgutei, who noticed it, drove her out, and struck her on the leg with his hand, upon which one Buri Buke struck Belgutei's horse with his sword. The nine Orloks now came round, helped their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... not obey. The Pope fulminated against him in the Bull Maleficus pastor, in which the venerable pontiff was accused of being a disobedient member of the Church, a heretic, or one smelling of heresy, a keeper of concubines, a committer of incest, a corrupter of the people, an old woman and a meddling old fool, ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... to console him, and felt a gust of impatience, for he did not like any meddling with ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... all fixed to tell Brother Bill that, in his opinion, he wasn't much better than a faro dealer, for he used to brag that he never let anything turn him from his duty, which meant his meddling in other people's business. I want to say right here that with most men duty means something unpleasant which the other fellow ought to do. As a matter of fact, a man's first duty is to mind his own business. It's been my experience that it takes ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... Third's—and ended long before!— Though in your daughters' daughters yet you thrive, Burst from your lead, and be yourselves alive! Back to the ball-room speed your spectred host; Fools' Paradise is dull to that you lost. No treacherous powder bids conjecture quake; No stiff-starch'd stays make meddling fingers ache (Transferr'd to those ambiguous things that ape Goats in their visage, women in their shape): No damsel faints when rather closely press'd, But more caressing seems when most caress'd; Superfluous hartshorn ...
— English Satires • Various
... am!" she cried. "You've been a nuisance in the house from the first with your officious meddling! You take too much on yourself! ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... couldn't help it. "Princess, please God, I will never interfere with you again. You shall be safe from any meddling of mine. If you will kindly say what you want, and say it slow, so that my limited faculties can take it in, I will try to act accordingly. But, if I may make so bold as to inquire, what are you up ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... goes the other," cried Nick. "Come on, master, or they'll finish him off before you can get there. Real wild, they birds is, because he's meddling with their booblins. 'Bout half-fledged, that's what ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... astrology was encouraged, and its professors courted and rewarded, necromancers were universally condemned to the stake or the gallows. Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Arnold of Villeneuve, and many others, were accused by the public opinion of many centuries, of meddling in these unhallowed matters. So deep-rooted has always been the popular delusion with respect to accusations of this kind, that no crime was ever disproved with such toil and difficulty. That it met great encouragement, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... a nature to which I was an utter stranger was meddling with my breath and pulses, now checking, now speeding both so that I stood with mind disconcerted in a ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... vintage; the bear sniffing querulously round it, perhaps cracking it like a cocoa-nut, or extracting him like a periwinkle! Of these chances he had been deprived by the interference of the crew. Friends are often injudiciously meddling. ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... in sight of a gang of elk. Wyeth was immediately for pursuing them, rifle in hand, but saw evident signs of dissatisfaction in his half-breed hunters; who considered him as trenching upon their province, and meddling with things quite above his capacity; for these veterans of the wilderness are exceedingly pragmatical, on points of venery and woodcraft, and tenacious of their superiority; looking down with infinite contempt upon ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... 'em bite! It makes 'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as ever and twice as savage. Do you know what meddling with the folks without names, as you call 'em, is like?—It is like riding at the quintain. You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it. The board gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the bag of sand ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... never came. He had his own affairs to pursue; his own parents to visit and console; and at an early hour of the day to take his place on the Lightning coach, and go down to his friends at Brighton. In the course of the day Miss Osborne heard her father give orders that that meddling scoundrel, Captain Dobbin, should never be admitted within his doors again, and any hopes in which she may have indulged privately were thus abruptly brought to an end. Mr. Frederick Bullock came, and was particularly affectionate ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... think of this minister of peace, this restless prelate, half soldier, half pastor, meddling in all these cabals and seditious schemes organized for his own undoing, but nevertheless, he was really the fomenter of all of them. They were his devices for preventing the nobility from combining against him. He set one cabal to watch another, and there was never a conspiracy ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... a criminal of several sorts, among them the crime of meddling with the government. He's over there now—where he ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... professional taint; it has almost become a byword. We are apt to think of the philanthropist as an excitable, contentious creature, at the mercy of every fad, an ultra-radical in politics, craving for notoriety, filled with self-confidence, and meddling with other people's business. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the greatest philanthropist of the nineteenth century, was of a different type. By temper he was strongly conservative. He always loved best to be among his own family; he was fond of his home, fond ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... lost I put down the cards, and told her that she must pay me at Rome. She was a handsome and agreeable woman, but she did not inspire me with any passions, no doubt because my mind was occupied with another, otherwise I should have drawn a bill on sight, and paid myself without meddling with her purse. It was two o'clock in the morning when ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... in the laws of the State was also a topic which he felt required a word. "Considering the great probability," he said, "that the framers of those laws were wiser than myself, I should prefer not meddling with them, unless they were attacked by others; in which case I should feel it both a privilege and a duty to take that stand which, in my view, might tend most ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... he told himself, "all my study and travel and observation tells me a woman's natural position in society is in a safely guarded home; and the evil consequences of meddling with this position must show themselves, sooner or later. Humanity is of one general quality everywhere,—and that not so high as she apparently believes. Changes in social ideals are more or less dangerous and indicate decadence, often, rather than ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... for new experience is seen in simple forms in the prowling and meddling activities of the child, and the love of adventure and travel in the boy and the man. It ranges in moral quality from the pursuit of game and the pursuit of pleasure to the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of ideals. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... strings of sausages. He is so great that he spends much of his time learning the exact number of buttons, tags and laces, and the cut of all the cocked-hats, pigtails, and gaiters in his army. Oh, yes, he is so great that he is always meddling in other people's affairs. He pokes his red face into every cottage for miles around. Imagine the King of England going about in his old wig, shovel-hat, and Windsor uniform, hob-nobbing with pig-boys, and old women making apple dumplings, and hurrahing ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... manage my own affairs, Maria. You seem to have inherited your poor mother's pesky habit of meddling." ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... tracts were in the form of stories of a didactic character, in which the writers assumed the broad principles of Christian theology and ethics which are common to all the followers of Christ, without meddling with sectarian prejudice or party views. In such statements as these the promoters of this work indicated their methods, their aim being to furnish good reading to youth, and to those in scattered communities ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... every man should "receive at least a moderate education." He deprecated changes in existing laws; for, he said, "considering the great probability that the framers of those laws were wiser than myself, I should prefer not meddling with them." The clumsy phraseology of his closing paragraph coupled not badly a frank avowal of ambition with an ingenuous expression of personal modesty. The principles thus set forth were those of Clay and the Whigs, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... like to have had more of Devereux. I do not feel enough acquainted with him. You were afraid of meddling with him, I dare say. I like your sketch of Lord Clanmurray, and your picture of the two poor young girls' enjoyment is very good. I have not yet noticed St. Julian's serious conversation with Cecilia, but I like it exceedingly. What he says about the madness of otherwise ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... to have comers and forgers, murderers and French spies—all sorts of malefactors—hiding in our straw throughout the day, wait-for the whistle to blow from the Street at dusk. I, born with my century, was familiar with these things; but my mother forbade my meddling with them. I expect she knew enough herself—all the resident gentry did. But Ralph—though he was to some extent of the new school, and used to boast that, if applied to, he "would grant a warrant against any Free Trader"—never did, as a matter ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... decided that her mother was equally if not more to blame than she, and, upon catching sight of her lordly, self-satisfied brother, acquitted herself of ALL responsibility and charged everything to her meddling relatives. Her encounter with the exasperating Kenneth, however, served to throw a new and most unwelcome light upon the situation. It WAS a shabby trick to play upon the Strikers. She had not thought of it before. And how she hated him for ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... of Charles was such as to exacerbate the evils of his father's reign. James could leave some things alone in the comfortable hope that all would by and by come out right, but Charles was not satisfied without meddling everywhere. Both father and son cherished some good intentions; both were sincere believers in their narrow theory of kingcraft. For wrong-headed obstinacy, utter want of tact, and bottomless perfidy, there was little to choose between them. The humorous epitaph of the grandson ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... who was watching me with his deep-set eyes, as closely as if I were meddling with some precious possession of his own. I laid the bundle of splints and rolls of linen down on the table with a professional air, while I was inwardly execrating my father's negligence. I emptied the portmanteau in the hope of finding ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... elements are at helpless war with each other, and destroy reciprocally each other's nature and power: competing and fighting for place at every tread of your foot; sand squeezing out clay, and clay squeezing out water, and soot meddling everywhere, and defiling the whole. Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their atoms may get into the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... thin hands through sheer weakness. He was the Portuguese bishop from down-coast of course, and when I remembered that he had just been through black-water fever (which is own brother to yellow jack) I judged that from a human point of view he was behaving with exquisite foolishness in meddling with first-crop cholera patients. But I respected him a good deal for all that, and went and got opium and acetate of lead and gave the man on the hatch a swingeing dose. It was a useless thing to do, because ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... compromise Epimetheus, Prometheus?" demanded Pandora. "Besides, my attendant Hope was always telling me that all would come right, without any meddling of mine." ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... which skilful dispositions cannot overtake. The gardener should be an idler, and have a gross partiality to the kitchen plots: an eager or toilful gardener mis-becomes the garden landscape; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the borders raw, and take the bloom off nature. Close adjoining, if you are in the south, an olive-yard, if in the north, a swarded apple-orchard reaching to the stream, completes your miniature domain; but this is perhaps best entered through a door ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... matter worthy their observation, especially of facts in which they themselves had so large a share. We only relate such things as could not possibly escape our knowledge, and what we actually know to be true. We don't set up for naturalists and men of great learning, therefore have avoided meddling with things ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... he was, and began to boast to his Sister about his good looks: she, on her part, was ready to cry with vexation when she was aware of her plainness, and took his remarks as an insult to herself. Running to her father, she told him of her Brother's conceit, and accused him of meddling with his mother's things. He laughed and kissed them both, and said, "My children, learn from now onwards to make a good use of the glass. You, my boy, strive to be as good as it shows you to be handsome; and you, my girl, ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... and what I might call the upshot," said Keggs, continuing his homily, "of all your making yourself so busy and thrusting of yourself forward and meddling in the affairs of your elders and betters? The upshot and issue of it 'as been that you are out five shillings and nothing to show for it. Five shillings what you might have spent on some good book and improved your mind! And ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... for your infernal meddling!" snapped Halkett. In catastrophic moments many barriers go down; deference to superior officers among ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... are you? What do you want? This ain't an egg-shop. What call have you to come meddling with our eggs? Do you want me to put the police on to you? Is it the crocodile's egg you're after? I don't know nothing about 'no eggs. You'd best speak to Mr. Brown: it's him that ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... Associated Press when they went to Chicago the next day. In the interview, Barclay said that economic conditions were being disturbed by half-baked politicians, and that values would shrink and the worst panic in the history of the country would follow unless the socialistic meddling with business ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... cow-fishes, the stye of hog-fishes, and the kennel of dog-fishes?' Other cases may be more doubtful. On one occasion, Disraeli spoke of the policy of his opponents as a combination of 'blundering and plundering.' The jingle was thought to be adapted from a previous epigram about 'meddling and muddling;' but here is the identical phrase: Coleridge wrote in the 'Courier:' 'The writer, whilst abroad, was once present when most bitter complaints were made of the ——government. "Government!" exclaimed a testy old captain of a Mediterranean trading-vessel, "call ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... told him over and over how his master would give him to the big mastiff if he ever found him 'meddling.' Samson had got too near the mastiff's kennel once, and had felt his terrible breath in his face. He thought about that, but he pulled in his ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... say them of St Paul, if he had ever been in the circumstances," said the Rector; "and I should just like to know what he would have done in a parish like this, with the Dissenters on one side, and a Perpetual Curate without a district meddling on the other. Ah, my dear," continued Mr Morgan, "I daresay they had their troubles in those days; but facing a governor or so now and then, or even passing a night in the stocks, is a very different thing from a showing-up ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Positive Weakness Leave Us to Take Care of Ourselves Let Us to the End Dare to Do Our Duty as We Understand It Lincoln-Shields Duel Lost Townships Manifested His Courage to Stand Alone Marriage, Murder Case National Bank No Hanging after all Not Meddling Not One Slave or One Drunkard Not Seldom Ragged, Usually Patched, and Always Shabby. Not Appearing on the Appointed Wedding Day One Long Step Removed from Honest Men Patronizing If Not Contemptuous Condescension Pay the Fiddler Peace at Any Price Rose on All Sides People Became ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger
... tell me I'm meddling with what doesn't concern me,' said his hostess. 'Of course I know I'm meddling; I sent for you here to meddle. Who wouldn't, for that creature? She makes ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... worshipped him when he would come to her on Sunday. And now he was going off to London without saying a word to her of the journey. "I don't believe that Toff knows anything about it," she said. "Toff is a nasty, meddling creature, and I wish she had not come here at all." The management of the Marchioness under these circumstances was very difficult, but Lady Sarah was a woman who allowed no difficulty to crush her. She did not expect the world to be very easy. She went on with her constant needle, trying ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... his knowledge of the young lady's kind heart, Hannibal now turned his attention toward her. He begged her to plead with his would-be executioner to give him one more chance for his life, and reiterated his promises to cease meddling with all of their affairs if this was granted. As he spoke Daisy crept nearer to Roseleaf's side, and when he paused for a moment to gain breath, she laid her ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... luck," he was saying over and over again to himself, sometimes aloud. "Why should he have a pardon? What are the laws for? Curse that meddling old fool Clegg! They'll set him free, and he'll hunt me out, I know he will. He won't forgive me for that day's work. He may be free now-it may have been he who followed me. But no! That's a silly thing to think. It takes ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... have you come meddling here? Do you want to have a hand in the master's affairs, and swindle ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... morning before going to church? Of course. Oh, how angry Kesselborn and Lehmann would be then—those wretches! He would hold it up before their eyes: there, look! They should be green with envy—why should they always be whispering about him, meddling with things that did not concern them at all? Pooh, they could not make him trouble about it all the same, not even make ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... Faubourg Saint Honore the day after to-morrow. But that constant and minute control, which the Foreign Secretary is bound to exercise over diplomatic agents who are near, becomes an useless and pernicious meddling when exercised over agents who are separated from him by a voyage of five months. There are on both sides of the House gentlemen conversant with the affairs of India. I appeal to those gentlemen. India is nearer to us than China. India is far better known to us than China. Yet is ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... things to sort themselves?' she grumbled within herself. 'But men are over-given to meddling; they mar more ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
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