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This is the petty, pin-pricking babble of boarding-school girls, or of those official supernumeraries who have turned sour in their retirement. Even the honest democrat is made indignant. If the German navy is not the work of William the Second, then its parentage is far to seek; and if the German navy is not proud to be called "my navy," it is wofully lacking in gratitude to its creator.
Her nervous disquietude increased every hour, and caused her aunt a species of petty martyrdom resembling the torture of perpetual pin-pricking, the incessant buzzing and stinging of a gnat, the endless creaking of rusty door-hinges, minor miseries often more unendurable than some great mental or physical suffering.
The surprising and illuminating thing to Westerling was the inspired statement to the press from the Gray Foreign Office, adroitly appealing to Gray chauvinism and justifying the "intrepidity" of the Gray commander in response to so-called "pin-pricking" exasperations. At the door of his apartment, François, his valet and factotum, gave Westerling a letter. "Important, sir," said François.
Unable or unwilling to encourage national resistance, he consoled himself, as a weak malcontent will, by setting one power against another, pin-pricking the stronger and blustering to the weaker.
It had seemed to him, though he had borne it more or less silently, very pitiable that a man, the breadwinner, should ever come home weary of evenings to find his dinner not ready; it had seemed to him sometimes, well as he had concealed the feeling for the most part, almost intolerably irksome to bear the strain of the fads and fancies, the nerves and frets of a delicate, child-bearing woman; he had wondered more than once if jolly cynics like Rokeby weren't right after all; the numerous small inroads upon his pocket had been unexpected, pin-pricking sort of shocks.
Did you ever see such idiotic clumsiness!" he ejaculated. And then, in deepest contrition: "I won't attempt to apologize it's beyond all that. But you must let me make your loss good." In all the pin-pricking embarrassment of the moment, he did not fail to remark that she quickly recovered the serenity which belongs to the well-bred.
If another boy did anything to him, Karl would write some verses that made the fellow look like a fool, and we would all recite them just to see the poor fellow get mad. Such fun we had then. But, I tell you, we were awfully afraid of Karl's pin-pricking verses! "Once, I remember well, we had a bad-tempered old teacher. He was a crabbed old fellow, and all the boys got to hate him.
This Average Jones enclosed in an envelope which he addressed in writing to Alden Honeywell, Esq., 550 West Seventy-fourth Street, City, afterward pin-pricking the letters in outline. "Just for moral effect," he explained. "In part this ought to give him a taste of the trouble he made for poor Robinson. You'll be there to-morrow, Bert?" "Watch me!" replied that gentleman with unwonted emphasis.
Direct incentive to rebellion proving completely abortive he now resorted to indirect pettifogging and pin-pricking tactics, harassing the unfortunate priests at every turn, depriving them of food or something else, reducing their rations, giving them the most repulsive work he could discover, and so forth. But it was all to no purpose. Those twenty-two priests beat him at every turn.
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