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Stinging   /stˈɪŋɪŋ/   Listen
Stinging

adjective
1.
(of speech) harsh or hurtful in tone or character.  Synonyms: cutting, edged.  "Edged satire" , "A stinging comment"



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"Stinging" Quotes from Famous Books



... hunger, the sharp stinging thrusts of conscience were warring for the victory. Oh, those who have never known the pangs of hunger can but poorly imagine that fearful struggle. At last, thank God! Conscience ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes

... been fathered upon a Jekyll and a Rogers. Many of his jests had a political character, and got him into serious scrapes. This, Mr. Hervey appears to doubt, but without reason. In various memoirs and reminiscences of the early years of the present century, we find recorded Brunet's stinging sarcasms, and the consequent reprimands and even imprisonments be incurred. "L'Empereur n'aime que Josephine et la chasse!" was his exclamation when Napoleon's project of divorce was first bruited about; and for days Paris rang with the sharp jest. "Le char ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various

... For some time now it had been broad day, but the clouds had thickened rapidly, and the summit was wrapped and completely hidden in them. Blasts of frigid wind began to whistle about us, driving stinging pellets of ice into our faces. We quickened our steps, for it would not do to be caught in a storm here. The Grand Plateau has taken more lives than ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various

... adjoining parts. Thus when the nostrils are irritated by pungent vapours, though the eyelids may be kept firmly closed, tears are copiously secreted; and this likewise follows from a blow on the nose, for instance from a boxing-glove. A stinging switch on the face produces, as I have seen, the same effect. In these latter cases the secretion of tears is an incidental result, and of no direct service. As all these parts of the face, including the lacrymal glands, are supplied with branches ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin

... lot to do, of course: the invalid to get ready, the mother's dressing to see to, so that she should not look slovenly in her appearance, and call forth some of those stinging remarks from Bela which had the power to wound the susceptibilities of ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... of the combs had been let down, the bees became rather numerous below, flying about wildly and stinging viciously. Several got about me, and I was soon stung, and had to run away, beating them off with my net and capturing them for specimens. Several of them followed me for at least half a mile, getting into my hair and persecuting me most pertinaciously, so that I was more astonished than ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... sacrificially demeaned herself in the service of Harriet, who would now have felt herself a recreant friend unless she had promptly detailed every annoyance of her life. She would go home, having left behind her the infinite little swarm of stinging things—having transferred them to the head of Miss Anna, around which they ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen

... as if a stinging blow had been delivered between his eyes. As he met Craig's fixed glare he knew there was no hope. Slowly, as if the words were being wrung from him syllable by syllable, he said in ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... deeply wounded the pride of more than one delegate of the lesser Powers in a way which they deemed incompatible alike with circumspect statesmanship and the proverbial hospitality of his country. For he is incapable of resisting the temptation to launch a bon mot, however stinging. It would be ungenerous, however, to attach more importance to such quickly forgotten utterances than he meant them to carry. An instance of how he behaved toward the representatives of Britain and France is worth recording, both as characterizing ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... to whom she announced her discovery; "and it's stinging! and coming on to blow. It will be a night! I like ...
— Trading • Susan Warner

... stinging heart-pang, I think of my ill-concealed and selfish weariness in our twilight walks and scented drives, of the look of hurt kindness on his face, at his inability to please me. I think of our return, of the day when ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... descending into the most minute particulars, such as what fine was to be paid in the case of one person's cat stealing milk from another person's house, what fine in the case of one woman's bees stinging another woman, a careful distinction being preserved in this case between the case in which the sting did or did not draw blood! Even in the matter of fines it does not seem clear how the penalty was to be enforced where the person on whom it was inflicted refused to submit and ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... consider the divers killings,—the death of the Stinging Lizard and the Dismissal of Silver Phil, to say nothing of the taking off of the Man from Red Dog—don't you, I say, consider ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis

... that I have gagged, smothered, killed, annihilated—with what efforts, the Gods know. In past years I have certainly tasted its bitterness, and served it like a wasp, which, though it knows that in stinging it must die, yet uses its sting. But now I am old in years, that is in knowledge, and I know that of all the powerful impulses which stir our hearts, one only comes solely from Seth, one only belongs wholly to the Evil one and that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... beds of violets. Is stormy life preferr'd to the serene? Or is the public to the private scene? Retir'd, we tread a smooth and open way; Through briers and brambles in the world we stray; Stiff opposition, and perplex'd debate, And thorny care, and rank and stinging hate, Which choke our passage, our career control, And wound the firmest temper of our soul. O sacred solitude! divine retreat! Choice of the prudent! envy of the great! By thy pure stream, or in thy waving shade, We court fair wisdom, that celestial ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... began, and started coughing again. The Chief fixed him with an unwinking green stare. When the coughing spell ended, Fancher sat silent, his eyes stinging with tears, fumbling at ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay

... a veil and handkerchief round her head and followed the priest with an aching brow and throbbing heart. When she heard a step behind her she started-for it might be Constantine following her up; when a gust of wind flung the stinging sand in her face, or the storm-flash threw a lurid light on the sky, her heart stood still, for was not this the prelude to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Jerrold's soul had once stirred in the warm darkness under the first stinging of remorse, so now it pushed and struggled to be born; all his will fought against the darkness to deliver his soul. His soul knew that Anne saved it. If her will had been weaker his would not have been so ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair

... drew himself up, with the stabbed amour propre prompting him to make some stinging retort contrasting the wells of truth with the brackish waters of sheer worldliness. Then he saw how inadequate it would be; how utterly impossible it was to meet this charmingly vindictive young person upon any grounds save those of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... the honors and glories of the little town which had hitherto been but a name and forever after was to be a smiling memory. Snow and slush covered its sidewalks, mud was deep in the middle of the streets, but the air went to the head with its stinging freshness, the sun shone brilliantly, and in the faces of ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher

... army was given to the bees and the wasps. Early in the morning the two opposing armies were assembled on the battle-field. At a given signal the battle began. The land-animals tried to chase the air-animals, but in vain, for they could not leave the ground. The bees and wasps were busy stinging the eyes and bodies of their enemy. At last the land-animals retired defeated, because they could not endure longer their ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... everywhere about me, enveloping all, the willows, those endless, shaking willows. A bird uttered its morning cry, and a string of duck passed with whirring flight overhead in the twilight. The sand whirled, dry and stinging, about my ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... little Canadian settlement in the great lonely land which runs north from the American frontier to Athabasca. There was no blink of starlight in the murky sky, and out of the great waste of grass came a stinging wind that moaned about the frame houses clustering beside the trail that led south over the limited levels to the railroad and civilization. It chilled Winston, and his furs, somewhat tattered, gave him little protection. ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss

... little why he should say that, and while I was wondering he felled me with a stinging blow ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller

... sawmill where we expected to get work, and we were caught in one of those three-days' gales, with rain and hail in it and cold enough to cut off a man's legs. Camping out was not to be thought of, so we just tramped on in silence, with the stinging pain coming between our shoulder-blades—from cold, weariness, and the weight of our swags—and our boots, full of water, going splosh, splosh, splosh along the track. We were settled to it—to drag on like wet, weary, muddy working bullocks till we came to somewhere—when, ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson

... self-reproach was terrible—in the dead of night, when no one saw it. With a strange perversity, the only intelligence she cared to hear, the only sights she cared to see, were the circumstances which gave confirmation to the idea that Mr Farquhar was thinking of Ruth for a wife. She craved with stinging curiosity to hear something of their affairs every day; partly because the torture which such intelligence gave was almost a relief from the deadness of her heart to all ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... his name with a sharp and stinging note of command, "I'm willin' ter look over what ye've said so fur—because of what I owes ye—but don't say ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... of the corner by the fire and the well-filled pot. For he slew with the shrewdness and blood-hunger of the fiercest, drew in his belly to famine with the youngest, and with the stoutest faced the bitter seas and stinging trail. But because of his many deeds, and in punishment, a warship carried him away, even to thy country, O Hair-Face and Boston Man; and the years were many ere he came back, and I was grown to something more than a boy and something less than a young man. And Ligoun, being childless ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London

... How easy to see that in the case of another, how hard to see it in our own case! But it has helped me too to throw myself outside the morbid perplexities in which I am involved; to hold out open hands to the gift of God, even though He seems to give me a stone for bread, a stinging serpent for wholesome provender. It has taught me to pray—not only for myself, but for all the poor souls who are in the grip of a sorrow that they ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... round another sighing (Forgot the serpents stinging at my breast), Gayly, when I in the dumb grave am lying, Pour the warm wish or speed the wanton jest, Or play, perchance, with his new maiden's tresses, Answer the kiss her lip enamored brings, When the dread block the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... your good opinion is more than I deserve," said Eve, her memory stinging her with past recollections. "If you want to see a dear, kind-hearted, unselfish girl, wait until Joan comes. I do so hope that you will take to her! I think you will, after what you've been to Jerrem and to Adam. I want you and Joan to like ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... as could not exist for any lengthened period. It did, nevertheless, drag on to the end of the war, when all these apron farmers were brushed off their farms, as one would brush from off one's leg a fly that was stinging it. These gentry long since quitted the turmoil and difficulty of agricultural pursuits. Those that purchased have given up their land to the mortgagee; and those that rented have had their stocks sold to pay their creditors; and many of them, cursing the evil hour when they were induced ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt

... no official immunity could minimize, he was at once upon his guard, moving quickly into the middle of the street. The two men followed him, and another whom he had not seen came upon him from the rear. He dodged the blow of a stick which caught him a stinging blow upon the forearm, but he sprang aside, striking a furious blow full in the face of one of his antagonists and leaping out of harm's way as the third came on; and then, finding discretion the better part of valor, took to his heels, emerging into the Ringstrasse some moments later, with no greater ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... the sharp-edged Cockney voice! The scorching contempt in the pale, ugly little eyes of W. Keyse! She wilted to her tallest feather, and the tears came crowding, stinging the back of her throat, compelling a miserable sniff. Yet Emigration Jane was ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... stretched away into the level, white, never-ending prairie. A farmer tried to force his tired horses through the drifts; a little boy with a milk-pail plodded bravely from door to door, sometimes laying down his burden to blow his breath on his stinging fingers. ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung

... impact jar home in her brain but the rider kept his seat. Worse was coming. For sixty seconds the horse was in an ecstasy of furious and educated bucking, flinging itself into odd positions and hitting the earth. Each whip-snap of that stinging struggling body jarred the rider shrewdly. Yet he clung in his place until the fight ended with startling suddenness. The grey dropped out of the air in a last effort and then ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... shook. A hot, white eye flashed by, and a blurred streak of cars. Snow pelted in the window, stinging Tolliver's face. Tolliver closed the window and picked up thirty-three's orders. If he had kept the revolver here he could have prevented Joe's leaving the tower. Why had Sally locked it in the cupboard? At least ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... beautifully moulded it seemed one an artist might have dreamed of. She had loved him better than he knew. Lighthearted deceiver and fickle like all his sex he would never understand what he had meant to her and for an instant there was in the blue eyes a quick stinging of tears. Their eyes were probing her mercilessly but with a brave effort she sparkled back in sympathy as she glanced at her new conquest for ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... the bluff the plank road ran out into the deep sand. Through this the phaeton made its way heavily. The fine particles were blown in the air like a spray, mingling with the spume from the lake, stinging Carroll's face like so many needles. Already the beach was strewn with pieces of wreckage, some of it cast high above the wash, others still thrown up and sucked back by each wave, others again rising and falling in the billows. This wreckage constituted a miscellaneous ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White

... King was in a state of vehement wrath with the Spanish Netherlands on account of a stinging libel against himself, "an infamous and wonderfully scandalous pamphlet," as he termed it, called 'Corona Regis', recently published at Louvain. He had sent Sir John Bennet as special ambassador to the Archdukes to demand from them justice and condign and public ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... up the steep hillsides. Midway along the defile, where it widened beyond a projecting spur of cliff, they saw the Indians driving the stolen herd of horses before them, urging them with yells and stinging quirts. ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton

... Cigarette came to the side of the temporary ambulance in which Cecil was placed. He was asleep—sleeping for once peacefully with little trace of pain upon his features, as he had slept the previous night. She saw that his face and chest had not been touched by the stinging insect-swarm; he was doubly screened by a shirt hung above him dexterously on some ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... another place, and there he saw sinners prone on their faces, with two thousand scorpions lashing, stinging, and tormenting them, while the tortured victims cried bitterly. Each of the scorpions had seventy thousand heads, each head seventy thousand mouths, each mouth seventy thousand stings, and each sting seventy thousand pouches of poison and venom, which ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... to meet men in orbit, or something. But they didn't. They made a surprise landing, and cleared a big space of humans, keeping themselves to themselves. But if they do think we're animals, like rabbits, they'd kill people instead of stinging them up a bit, or paralyzing them for a while and then letting them go. That's not like any monster I ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... conservative party. "For my part," he said, "I have no fear that learned and pious men will ever ruin the Church. I am far more afraid of the action of those high-minded and stupid schemers, who think more highly of themselves than they ought to think." It is clear to whom these stinging words refer. They are a plain hit at Augusta. "It is absurd," he continued, "to be afraid of learning and culture. As long as our leaders are guided by the Spirit of Christ, all will be well; but when craft and cunning, and worldly prudence creep in, then ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... the whole front side of the hive covered with the combatants, (but for such hives I have no fears; they are able to defend themselves.) Several will surround one stranger; one or two will bite its legs, another the wings; another will make a feint of stinging, while another is ready to take what honey it has, when worried sufficient to make it willing. It is sometimes allowed to go after yielding all its honey, but at others, is dispatched with a sting, which is almost ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby

... trail breaking. An old native whom we met on his way to the potlatch later in the day spread out his hands with a look of despair and cried: "Good trail all lose'm!" All day we pushed on against the driving storm, the flakes stinging our faces and striking painfully against our eyeballs, now following a narrow steep woodland trail, now awhile along a creek bed, now across open country with increasing difficulty in finding our way, until it grew ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... himself, his work, and his judgment, as during the next few weeks. His friendship with Mary Scott, which had been a more pleasant thing than he had ever realized, seemed to him to be practically at an end, he had received a stinging rebuke from the one man in the world whose right to administer it he would have vigorously denied, and he was forced to admit to himself that his last few weeks had been spent in a fool's paradise, into which he ought never to have ventured. He had ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... subject to intestinal worms besides. I have observed bunches of a tape-like thread and short worms of enlarged sizes in the rhinoceros. The zebra and elephants are seldom without them, and a thread-worm may often be seen under the peritoneum of these animals. Short red larvae, which convey a stinging sensation to the hand, are seen clustering round the orifice of the windpipe (trachea) of this animal at the back of the throat; others are seen in the frontal sinus of antelopes; and curious flat, leech-like worms, with black eyes, are found in the stomachs of leches. The zebra, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... jumped on to the bundle and seated herself on the top of it; and however withered she might be, she was yet heavier than the stoutest country lass. The youth's knees trembled, but when he did not go on, the old woman hit him about the legs with a switch and with stinging-nettles. Groaning continually, he climbed the mountain, and at length reached the old woman's house, when he was just about to drop. When the geese perceived the old woman, they flapped their wings, stretched out their necks, ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers

... for him. She gratefully contrasted his treatment of her with the treatment she had received from the women. Resist it as firmly, despise it as proudly as we may, all studied unkindness—no matter how contemptible it may be—has a stinging power in it which reaches to the quick. Magdalen only knew how she had felt the small malice of the female servants, by the effect which the rough kindness of the old sailor produced on her afterward. The dumb welcome of the dogs, when the movements ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... bring aid. After a day in which they ate nothing, supplies reached them from the valley; but now they were so weakened that food could not fortify them against the extreme cold that had set in. They wrapped themselves in their few poor quilts, and struggled bravely on into a white, stinging fog of snow. Each morning there were more and more of them to bury. And even the burial was a mockery, for wolves were digging at the graves almost before the last debilitated straggler had left the camping-place. The heavy snows continued, but movement was necessary. ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson

... and the royal diadem about her brows, and arms outstretched to talent of every kind. Great men would greet him there as one of their order. Everything smiled upon genius. There, there were no jealous booby-squires to invent stinging gibes and humiliate a man of letters; there was no stupid indifference to poetry in Paris. Paris was the fountain-head of poetry; there the poet was brought into the light and paid for his work. Publishers should ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... the stinging remark he heard flung at him. "Do you want to play the police-officer here and ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green

... more valuable than a vineyard. Sidonius complains that the town is destitute of fountains and aqueducts; and ranks the want of fresh water among the local evils, such as the croaking of frogs, the stinging of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... increase the loneliness of the way, which now traversed tracts of naked moorland, now plunged again into forest, with no sign of habitation but here and there a cowherd's hut under the trees or a chapel standing apart on some grassy eminence. When night fell the waters grew louder, a stinging wind swept the woods, and the carriage, staggering from rut to rut, seemed every moment about to land them in some invisible ravine. Fear and cold at last benumbed the little boy, and when he woke he was being lifted from his seat and torches ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... says, as polite as a stinging lizard, that he stands ready to give her a chance at any game she can think of, from mumblety-peg up. He says if she'll turn him and Leonard loose in a cellar that he'll give her fifty dollars for every one she's winner if he don't have ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... draw aside, he was upon his feet, and I felt the stinging blow of his hand across ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... my early serious impressions on one occasion in a measure revived, and I felt some stinging of conscience for my neglect of the Sabbath and religious observances. I recommenced attending a place of worship, and for a short time I attended the Rev. Mr. Campbell's church, by whom, as well as by several of his members, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various

... me by lifting on the point of your dissecting knife this stinging sin of mine to which you refer? The noxious brood swarm so teasingly about my ears that they deprive me of your cool, clear, philosophic discrimination. Which particular Tenthredo of the buzzing swarm around my spoiled apple of life would you advise me to ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... are all right again, as you write from the R.S. Liver permitting I shall attend meeting and dinner. It is very odd that the Medal should come along with my pronouncement in "Nature", which I hope you like. I cut out rather a stinging ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... to simplify our life and restore its old divine order of marriage and hard work, of "plain living and high thinking," which luxury and self-ease are fast undermining. Here, in the slain of the daughters of our people, is a stinging wrong that will goad us into seeing that the people are so housed that a human life is possible to them. Here, if anywhere, is a passion of conscience, and pity, and duty, and interest combined, strong enough, a heaped-up weight of evil heavy enough, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... martyrs" before the universe of men and angels, that army will not be found officered and led by just such women as these, who fought silently with the flesh and the Devil by their own hearth, quickened by no stinging excitement of battle, no thrill of splendid strength and fury in soul and body, no tempting delight of honor or even recognition from their peers,—upheld only by the dull, recurrent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various

... inauspicious and difficult and trodden by men of sinful deeds. It was enveloped in thick darkness, and covered with hair and moss forming its grassy vesture. Polluted with the stench of sinners, and miry with flesh and blood, it abounded with gadflies and stinging bees and gnats and was endangered by the inroads of grisly bears. Rotting corpses lay here and there. Overspread with bones and hair, it was noisome with worms and insects. It was skirted all along with a blazing fire. It was infested by crows and other birds ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... men on the hillside. The breaking of glass, the cries of the jungle animals trapped in their cages, the shrieks of dying peons who were eaten at a gulp by the big frogs or stung to death, impaled on the mandibles of some great stinging centipede. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... blows without ever returning them; the blood of the early martyrs still lives in their veins. Well-born women, their husbands' equals, feel the impulse to annoy them, to mark the points of their tolerance, like points at billiards, by some stinging word, partly in the spirit of diabolical malice, and to secure the upper hand or the right of turning ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... Selingman declared. "This young man is your slave. Whatever your daily business may be here, some part of your time, I imagine, will be spent in his company. Let me know what manner of man he is. Is this innate corruptness which brings him so easily to the bait, or is it the stinging smart of injustice from which he may well be suffering? Or, failing these, has he dared to set his wits against mine, to play the double traitor? If even a suspicion of this should come to you, there must be an ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... in the Lava Beds of Arizona. The faint tinge on the eastern horizon fades, and the stars shine the more brilliantly in the brief, darkest hour before the true daybreak. An icy wind sweeps down canons and over mesas, stinging the marrow of the wayfarer's bones. In the heavens, the innumerable stars burn steadily in crystal coldness. Shadows lie in Stygian blackness at foot of rock and valley. Soft and clear the lights of night swathe the uplands. An awesome silence hangs over ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... used to go to his mother, who fondled her and seemed to say, "Thank Heaven you are not like that little Bohemian!" This was my aunt's stinging epithet for me in moments of anger. I used to go up to my room with a heavy heart, thoroughly ashamed and vexed, vowing to myself that I would never again jump the ditch, but on reaching my room I used to find the gardener's daughter ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... life, in your company. Do you remember the turbulent magnificence of our winter passage of the Splgen, not in a snowstorm, but in something much more thrilling—a fierce windstorm in a great frost? The whirling, stinging, white dust darkened the air and coated our sledges, our horses, and our faces. We shall neither of us ever forget how just below the Hospice your sledge was actually blown over by the mere fury of the blizzard; how we tramped through the drifts, and how all ended in "the welcome ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... had landed him in a very lively lawsuit, he was glad enough to slink back through the stinging comments to the security of authority; and his bellows of exasperation under reproof were half pretence. He expected Malcourt to get him out of it if he could not extract himself; he had no idea of defending ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... and the wind arose as a giant refreshed with his rest, and drove the dark thunder- clouds upward before the sounding pinions of his might like demon hounds upon the track of a flying world. Then came the sharp swift hiss of the stinging hail and rain, and the baying of the hurricane, and the awful roll of the storm that shook the whole broad heaven from end to end. Strange! that in the tumult of such a wild and terrible night as this, so gentle and so calm a soul should be ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... features had not been exaggerated. They were tormented by insects and great quantities of ants—a small red ant found on tree trunks, and a large black one, about an inch in length, frequently seen among the leaves on the ground. The bite of the red ant caused a stinging and burning for about fifteen minutes. One of their carriers who was bitten in the foot by a black ant suffered intense pain for a number of hours. Not only his foot, but also his leg and hip were affected. The savages were both fishermen and hunters; the ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

... do her such service except for lack of another at hand. And a fair sight it was for one who loved her as I, with no privilege of jealousy, and yet with it astir within him, like a thing made but of claws and fangs and stinging tongue, to see her with that crowd of gallants about her, and the other maids going their ways unattended, with faces of averted meekness, or haughty uplifts of brows and noses, as suited best their different ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins

... incident, he was tasting something of the sweet sensations and experiences that follow a sincerely generous action. Smiles and pleasant greetings from Polly, who had heretofore met him with venomous looks and stinging words, were balm to his soul. He felt well-satisfied with himself and kindly toward the whole world. The fiendish torturer of helpless men and harmless beasts, the cold-blooded murderer, the devilish intriguer to incriminate an innocent man, thought that ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... in love with life, Roaming like wild cattle, With the stinging air a-reel As a warrior might feel The swift orgasm of the ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

... they be like waters to physicians, full of flattery and uncertainty, yet they are not to be despised specially with the advantage of passion and affection. For so we see Tiberius, upon a stinging and incensing speech of Agrippina, came a step forth of his dissimulation when he said, "You are hurt because you do not reign;" of which Tacitus saith, Audita haec raram occulti pectoris vocem elicuere: correptamque ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... to shrink from the companionship of his family. The play and voices of his little children jarred his shattered nerves almost beyond endurance; and every look of love and act of trust became a stinging irritant instead of the grateful incense that had once filled his home with perfume. In bitter self-condemnation he saw that he was ceasing to be a protector to his daughters, and that unless he could break the dark, self-woven spells he would drag them down to the depths of poverty, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... then a raindrop whistled Like a bullet past my head; And I hollered out to you, dear, "Scrooch down in the wagon bed." Then they come as big as hen eggs; Struck the hosses stinging raps, Till the frightened, tremblin' critters Leaped beneath the angry slaps. Lord a'mighty, how they scampered! While I gripped the lines in tight, As the wagon box sailed upward Like a mighty wind-borne kite. Down below us ran the hosses, While we floated through the air, But through ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker

... the frenzy of despair. Haggard and breathless he leapt mounds, rushed past multitudinous obstacles. He forced a passage through brambles, broke down palings, thrice caught his feet in wire work which he had not seen, and fell among nettles, yet picked himself up went on again, spurred by the stinging of his hands and face. It was then Guillaume and Pierre saw him pass, unrecognisable and frightful, taking to the muddy water of the rivulet like a stag which seeks to set a last obstacle between itself and the hounds. There came to him a wild idea of getting ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... lips opened as do those of one whose tongue's end holds a quick and stinging retort. Then they closed again. She walked over to the big window that faced the street. When she had stood there a moment, silent, she swung around and came back to where T. A. Buck stood, still ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber

... Scottish crown on the death of the Maid of Norway in 1290; was supported by Edward I., and did homage to him for his kingdom, but rebelled, and was forced publicly to resign the crown; died in 1314 in Normandy, after spending some three years in the Tower; satirised by the Scotch, in their stinging humorous style, as King Toom Tabard, i. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... untied the knot, but while at this occupation the tendrils, shining like gold in the warm, yellow glow of the moon skylight, curled about his fingers, electric, tingling, leaving a faint, stinging remembrance. ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... send murderers to Macduff's castle. They did not find Macduff, and asked Lady Macduff where he was. She gave a stinging answer, and her questioner called Macduff a traitor. "Thou liest!" shouted Macduff's little son, who was immediately stabbed, and with his last breath entreated his mother to fly. The murderers did not leave the castle while one ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit

... however, was rather more level. I pitied the poor girl who led the way, and whose fat naked arms were both stung and torn. She at last stopped amidst a huge grove of nettles, doing the best she could to shelter her arms from the stinging leaves. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... possibilities which rolled themselves higher and murkier the longer she refused to look at them? She snatched at the weeds, twitching them up, flinging them down, reaching, straining, the sun molten on her back, the sweat stinging on her face. It was a silly impression of course, but it seemed to her that if she hurried fast enough with the weeds, those thoughts and doubts could ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... wild girls like Ellen Jorth and all that seemed promising or menacing in his father's letter could never change the Indian in Jean. So he thought. Hard upon that conclusion rushed another—one which troubled with its stinging revelation. Surely these influences he had defied were just the ones to bring out in him the Indian he had sensed but had never known. The eventful day had brought new and bitter food for Jean to ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... earnest entreaty in his voice. LeNoir must have been mad with his rage and vanity, else he had caught the glitter in the blue eyes looking through the shaggy hair. Again LeNoir approached, this time with greater confidence, and dealt Macdonald a stinging blow on the side ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor

... tufts of stiff upstanding spines that pierced like sharp needles. This was not because the caterpillar tried to hurt you, but because the spines were on it, and so arranged that if pressed against, an acid secretion sprang from their base. This spread over the flesh the spines touched, stinging for an hour like smartweed, ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... fear, it shall be stinging stuff'; and with that he began to brew without more fuss, but all ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them—his own face-towel, his wife's, Verona's, Ted's, Tinka's, and the lone bath-towel with the huge ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... deep relief which every mortal feels in a moment of open and safe confession, sprang to his feet, and stood on the hearth rug, his eyes sparkling with humour. "Confess, sir," he cried gaily. "You do not like Jefferson any better than I do. Fancy him opposite to you day after day, stinging you with honeyed shafts and opposing you with obstacle after obstacle, while leering with hypocrisy. Put yourself in my place for an instant, and blame me if ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... one of his horses, and she could hear the stinging whish of a whip, a wicked and sinister emphasis to the beast's snorting and frenzied thumping of hoofs. Her blue eyes dilated with fear; she knew in what pain and fright the horse must be lunging under those blows. And Wes, raucous, violent, his mouth foul with unclean words—only ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... and unparalelled outrage to sacrifice them from mere prejudice, or in the belief that their presence would injure the chances of Mr. Dunlap. Then arose Collector Elliott, his face fairly glowing with honest indignation, and his voice sharp and stinging in his tirade against the newspapers. What did he care what the newspapers said? What are the newspapers but sheets sold out to the highest bidder? The newspapers, he cried, are all in the market, to be bought and sold the same as coal! That was their business, and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... to the fracture and destruction of straps; or the hornets, whose nests, suspended from the branches, were disturbed by the passage of the caravan, would drive the unlucky oxen nearly mad, by a stinging assault upon their hind quarters. Finally, both horses and bullocks had a singular propensity to stray back during the night to the previous halting place, whence they had to be fetched in the morning, causing great delay, and often ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... his resistance, though never submit; and Felix had some hope that it would be so in the present case, when, while speeding to church in the dark winter Monday morning, he overheard Lance say to Clement, 'I say, Clem, 'tis a jolly stinging frost. If you'll take your skates and give us a lesson, we'll be off for the lake ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... have been the most strenuous defender of that balance of power between the weak and the strong on which all social life depends. But he resents those smaller penalties which society will always inflict on those who disturb its dignified peace and comfort:—avoidance, exclusion, a cold look, a stinging remark. Had Mill any right to complain of these social penalties? Would it not rather amount to an interference with individual liberty to deprive any individual or any number of individuals of those weapons of self-defence? ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... that Eleanor never should be bride of mine; nor would he receive, under his roof, her mother, the discountenanced daughter of his father. I endeavored to remonstrate with him. He was deaf to my entreaties. My mother added sharp and stinging words to my expostulations. 'I had her consent,' she said; 'what more was needed? The lands were entailed. I should at no distant period be their master, and might then please myself.' This I mention in order to give you ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... her little Thomas a Kempis, marked through and through with lines and references, and sat and read steadfastly for an hour and more. That was her school, as it has been the school of many a noble soul. And, for some cause or other, that stinging thought returned no more; and she knelt and prayed like a little child; and like a little child slept sweetly all the night, and was away before breakfast the next morning, after feeding the canary and the cat, to old women who worshipped her as their ministering angel, and said, looking after ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... her. "She gave me quite a fright," he was saying. "There, that's it, nurse. She'll be sleeping sweetly in a minute." The nurse hurried forward, and Corydon felt a stinging sensation in her side, and then a delightful numbness crept over her. "Oh, thank ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... will not run away," quietly remarked the missionary, refraining from making the stinging retort that rose to his lips; "but my brother, the mighty Wa-on-mon, is wise, let him say how he and the white hunter shall meet, and the missionary will ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis

... tried your plan of non-resistance with all my power. I pleaded with all the earnestness of my soul, and so did my wife and daughters, but though I am certain many were moved in conscience against the savage outrage, and did their work with a stinging heart, yet they felt that they must stick to their party, and complete the destruction. Slavery, indeed, makes the most hardened savages the world ever knew. The savage war-whoop of the Indian never equalled their dastardly cry of 'shoot him,' 'cut his throat,' 'stab him,' ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... coming back? There came flying bees in countless numbers from all parts of the world, and began stinging us on all sides ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various

... propelled the keels and flats of the Ohio, they were a class unto themselves—"half horse, half alligator," a contemporary styled them. Rough fellows, much given to fighting, and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse drollery and stinging repartee. The river towns suffered sadly at the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried from thirty to forty boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently traveled in company. After the Indian scare was over, they generally stopped over night in the settlements, and the ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... to be a very waggish air, Harry put out his tongue, and held it with his finger and thumb. It was unfortunate that he had not time to draw it in again before the hot-tempered gentleman gave him a stinging box on the ear, which brought his teeth rather sharply together on the tip of his tongue, which ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... I've bent my heart beneath the yoke Of goading toil, remembering to forget, To still upon my lips his kiss that woke Me in elysian love one word has broke— One stinging word of severance and regret. All day I've blotted from my eyes his face, But now at evening tide it comes again, And memories into my darkened soul Rush as the stars into high heaven's space. As the bright stars! But, ah, tomorrow! when Once more ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice

... The first step in securing his services was always to persuade him that one's cause was just He sometimes threw up a case in open court because the course of it had revealed deception on the part of the client. At times he expressed his disdain of the law's mere commercialism in a stinging irony. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... accent of respect, but the words were so stinging that William's eyes, for an instant only, flashed fire, and the aide-de-camp in the room made a step forward as if to arrest the Scots officer. There was a pause, say, of fifteen seconds, which seemed an hour, and then the Prince ordered his aide-de-camp to leave the chamber, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... teeth and cracked his fingers, till all the air was filled with stinging things. His eyes glistened and for the last time he asked, "Are you warm, now, beautiful maiden? Are you ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... position would soon be untenable. The infernal vapors from the unholy mixture of green and dry grass, berry bushes, willow scrub, and the ubiquitous sage, made breathing a misery and brought unwilling tears to our stinging eyes. And presently, above the subdued but menacing noises of the fire, the beat ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... through him, fierce and stinging—remorse and terror! Then on their heels followed an angry denial of responsibility, mingled with alarm and revolt. Was he to be robbed of Lucy because Eleanor had misread him? No doubt she had imprinted what she pleased ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... dream of that drear night to be, Wild with the wind, fierce with the stinging snow, When, on yon granite point that frets the sea, The ship met ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... thing happens—swift as lightning she lifts her hand, and gives him a little stinging blow across ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford

... how it would be impossible for him to support the Government. Mr. Gladstone listened with lowering brow and face growing ashy pale with anger. When plain, commonplace Mr. Miall resumed his seat, Mr. Gladstone leaped to his feet with torpedoic action and energy. With voice stinging with angry scorn, and with magnificent gesture of the hand, designed for the cluster of malcontents below the gangway, he besought the honourable gentleman "in Heaven's name" to take his support elsewhere. The injunction was obeyed. The Bill was thrown out by a majority ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... that stern fast out to the last ringbolt. Mr. Second Mate... get your fenders aboard." The wind increased in a violence tipped with stinging rain. "Give her the jib and stay-sail." She heeled slightly and gathered steerage way. Roger Brevard involuntarily waved a parting salutation. An extraordinary emotion swept over him: a ship bound to the East always stirred his imagination and sense of beauty, ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer

... sufficient. His hand, held against his stinging cheek, was telltale enough for the proprietress of the ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath

... names than these, each of which is held in highest reverence by its own special admirers. The patriotic fervour with which Lord Tennyson has done almost all his laureate work, the lucid splendour of his style, the perfect music of his rhythm, and the stinging sharpness with which he has sometimes chastised contemporary sins, have all combined to win for him a far wider popularity than even that accorded to the fine lyrical passion of Mrs. Browning, or to the deep-thoughted ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... heart being probably disturbed, if not actually injured. The positive symptoms of the overuse of tobacco on the heart are attacks of palpitation on exertion lasting perhaps but a short time, sharp, stinging pains in the region of the heart, less firmness of the apex beat, perhaps irregularity of the heart, and cold hands and feet. Clammy perspiration frequently occurs, more especially on the hands. ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... impossible for him to conceive of ultimate failure as it was for him to realize that he should ever cease to exist. The air was stagnant, the light was bad, his stomach was empty, and he was tormented by the stinging of the gnats that circled around the flame—but he was gloriously happy with the happiness of a man who has given ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... might have stayed and enjoyed his triumph, but that would not have been Tom Slade. He had not forgotten those stinging and accusing words of Roy's that morning when they had last met. He did not remember them in malice, but he could not forget them, and he did not wish to see Roy. We have to take Tom Slade as ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... must confess I cannot use it as well as some young friends of mine, who knock over nearly every sitting bird they aim at, and even now and then are successful with such difficult shots as at swallows on the wing; a novice, on the contrary, nearly always succeeds in stinging his fingers and missing the object ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... lead to an embassy of complaint being sent to Rome to misrepresent him in exaggerated accusation. Pointing to Jesus, he exclaimed with unveiled sarcasm: "Behold your King!" But the Jews answered in threatening and ominous shouts: "Away with him, away with him, crucify him." In stinging reminder of their national subjugation, Pilate asked with yet more cutting irony, "Shall I crucify your King?" And the chief priests cried aloud: "We have no king ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... my name shall one day be known to the world—at least to such extent that common inquiry shall be unnecessary. This, I know will be deemed excessive vanity—but time shall prove it prophetic." To the charge of youth he makes this stinging rejoinder, which evinces the progress he was making in the tournament of language: "The little, paltry sneers at my youth by your correspondent have long since become pointless. It is the privileged abuse of old age—the hackneyed allegation of a thousand centuries—the damning crime to ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... night, listened for a moment to the straining hull and wind shrilling aloft, and then rose and went forward again to examine the mooring. A second hawser now reached into the darkness. Halvard had been on deck and put out another anchor. The wind beat salt and stinging from the sea, utterly dissipating the languorous breath of the land, the odors ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer

... to make a strong and stalwart man turn pale with sickness and horror, much less a baby-boy of three or four years old. There lay the man, all through the dreadful night, with swarms on swarms and myriads upon myriads of stinging insects, biting and sipping, and sucking his life-blood with distracting agony away. Ah! think of the hellish torture often practiced by those bloody pirates upon their victims in the West Indies! The bound man's eyes were closed, the lips and cheeks puffed and swollen out of all human ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... taste for reading, his favourites being La Fontaine's Fables, Anquetil's History of France, and Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, "to get the hang of things," as he put it. His sister made fruitless efforts to distract his attention with some stinging criticism of the neighbours or a question about "our fat friend who had not come back," for she made a point of never remembering ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France

... friend," Domiloff answered, cheerfully. "You need a good gallop, a little of this stinging air. Well, what we need of you is action, is it ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim

... words with a full compassionate air, as though he were seriously concerned for Dame Hilda's happiness; but she, marching up to the bed where Jack lay, dealt him a stinging slap ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt

... rappee^, stogy^. V. be pungent &c adj.; bite the tongue. render pungent &c adj.; season, spice, salt, pepper, pickle, brine, devil. smoke, chew, take snuff. Adj. pungent, strong; high-, full-flavored; high-tasted, high-seasoned; gamy, sharp, stinging, rough, piquant, racy; biting, mordant; spicy; seasoned &c v.; hot, hot as pepper; peppery, vellicating^, escharotic^, meracious^; acrid, acrimonious, bitter; rough &c (sour) 397; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... he may pay others, there is none who dares even to shoot a shaft at him." Present at this talk of Gudrun and Thorhalla were both Bolli and the sons of Osvif. Ospak and his brothers said but little, but what there was, rather stinging for Kjartan, as was always their way. Bolli behaved as if he did not hear, as he always did when Kjartan was spoken ill of, for his wont was either to hold his peace, or ...
— Laxdaela Saga - Translated from the Icelandic • Anonymous

... and they feared more than before. So it came about that the First of the Tigers taught the Hairless One to kill—and ye know what harm that has since done to all our peoples—through the noose, and the pitfall, and the hidden trap, and the flying stick and the stinging fly that comes out of white smoke [Hathi meant the rifle], and the Red Flower that drives us into the open. Yet for one night in the year the Hairless One fears the Tiger, as Tha promised, and never has the Tiger ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... pastures, a craggy bowlder lifted its face and frowned, and along the woods the stunted pines and hemlocks blackened against a background of leafless oaks and birches. A northwest wind cut shrill across the white wastes, and from the crests of the billowed drifts drove a scud of stinging particles in their faces, while the sun, as high as that of Italy, coldly blazed from a cloudless blue sky. Ezra Perkins, perched on the seat before them, stiff and silent as if he were frozen there, drove them from Bradfield Junction to South Bradfield in the long wagon-body ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... sudden apparition and these stinging words, the boys dispersed with scarce an attempt to reply, and all the more hastily because they spied, coming up the Grand Canal, the gorgeous gondola of the Companions of the Stocking, an association of young men under ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks

... the skies! Pull—out of their gold with a bombard's boom Come Black Bill's honeyed thighs! Pull! Up! Up! Up! with a scuffle and scramble, To that little blue ring of bliss, This Bear doth go with our Bo'sun in tow Stinging his ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... was caught by the expression of vindictive concentration upon the face of a small big-eared boy in the foreground. He didn't for the moment realise what these things might import. Then he received a stinging handful of rice in the ear, and a ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... The stinging sarcasm in the liquid voice perplexed him, and the strange lambent light that seemed now and then to ray out of the brilliant eyes that had never wandered from his, sent ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... oh! Do pray forgive me!" screamed the beautiful youth, as he felt the stinging strokes descend on his ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous

... of wings and muscles, it has also the nervous mechanism by which these parts are mechanically controlled. A ground-wasp deposits its eggs in a small burrow in which it places also a caterpillar or a grasshopper paralyzed by stinging, so that when the larva is hatched from an egg it finds an ample supply of fresh food provided by a complex series of its mother's acts that seem to be directed by conscious maternal solicitude. When the larva passes through the later stages of development ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... the sights that had blown Spanish blockhouses to the four winds of heaven? Had it been he or his ghost who had stood behind the Nordenfeldt shields with the bullets pattering against the steel and stinging the air overhead? He or his ghost, barefoot in the sand that sopped the blood of fallen comrades, the ship shaking with the detonation of her guns, the hoarse cheering of her crew re-echoing in his half- deafened ears? A dream, yes; ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... enchantingly up on the edge of the cowl; he made Lady Vere de Vere bow to astounded farmers; he went to the movies every evening—twice, in Fargo; and when the chariot of the young prince swept to the brow of a hill, he murmured, not in the manner of a bug-driver but with a stinging awe, "All that big country! Ours to see, puss! We'll settle down some day and be solid citizens and raise families and wheeze when we walk, but—— All those hills to sail over ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... indeed a wild night. The wind was rushing from the north, full of sharp stinging pellicles, something between snow-flakes and hail-stones. Down the wide village street it came right in their faces. Through it, as through a thin shifting sheet, they saw on both sides the flickering lights ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... tapering. They would come close in-shore, and I would spear them from the rocks with a Papuan fishing-spear. The smallest I ever caught weighed fifteen pounds, and I could never carry home more than a couple of average weight. They have the power of stinging, I believe, electrically, hence their name. At all events, I was once stung by one of these fish, and it was an experience I shall never forget. It fortunately happened at a time when some friendly blacks were ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont

... made for censuring ministers, without calling for papers, and without any allusion to the circumstances which had occurred in 1830 and 1831, and on which the interpretation of the treaty might in a great degree depend. After some stinging comments upon this speech, Sir Robert Peel wound up the debate in one of his most plausible parliamentary addresses. He clearly confuted the main arguments which Lord Althorp used, and produced an effect ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... the presage was that General Grant had only to secure that phantasm, the capture of Richmond, to be nominated and elected. This reached the President's ears through the "hanged good-natured friend," as Sheridan—the wit, not the general—calls the stinging tongue. ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... summer long, Now found winter stinging, And ceased in his song. Not a morsel or crumb in his cupboard— So he shivered, and ceased ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine

... as fortunate, his fourth likewise, and then, still running forward, he bethought himself of the shotgun that was strapped over his shoulder. He leveled it in an instant and fairly sprayed the pack of wolves with stinging shot. Before that it had been each bullet for a wolf and the rest untouched, but now there was a perfect shower of those hot little pellets. It was more than they could stand, big, fierce, and hungry ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... your medicines, my food would not digest; then neuralgia set in, and I suffered severe pain through my sides, shoulders, breast and stomach. Bilious attacks were frequent; then my flesh began stinging and my heart began beating badly and making me so that I could not lift a chair, and all together threw me into a cramp and a numbness, and the family thought I was dying, and sent for another doctor who said it was hard to ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... a temporary lull. Then the wind came along with a fiercer rush than ever, bearing with it a perfect deluge of spray in great stinging, blinding drops torn from the surface of the waves, and forcing all on board to shelter ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn



Words linked to "Stinging" :   pain, unkind, hurting, cutting



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