"Ah, but he was a rich man," cries the carping critic; "he could afford to do it."

These verdant meadows were also surrounded by hedges and ditches; one of them, moreover, contained a pond in which well-fed carp swam about in shoals.

That carping censoriousness which scents out impurity in every bold sally, is, at best, but an ambiguous criterion of purity of morals; and beneath this hypocritical guise there often lurks the consciousness of an impure imagination.

In her father's lifetime, she had sought, on occasions of unwonted cheerfulness, to please him with certain charming tricks of attire; and sometimes, with only a white rose-bud gleaming through the braided shadows of her hair, lighted herself up as with a star; then, not a carping churl, not an envious coquette in Hendrik, but confessed to the prettiness of Sally Wimple.

Wrapped up as she was in this marvel of romance that had happened in the placid, everyday lives of the Winnebagos, she was not bothering about any carping correctness of words.

He had felt the supreme joy of swaying an audience by his eloquence, and he had endured with fortitude the carping criticism of the envious.

For, partly from the lessening of the physical strain and partly from the influence of congenial companionship, the carping discontent that had so possessed her of late had begun to give way to a softer and infinitely more gracious frame of mind.

And, lest some carping mathematician should dispute his figures, he had declared that if, by any miscalculation, the earth's surface should not suffice for the Saints and their Gentile slaves, the Lord "would build a gallery around the earth."

But at once the mental picture of herself, making inaudible carping strictures on her companion's sootiness and, all unconscious, lifting to observe it a critical countenance as swart as his ownthe incongruity smote her deliciously, irresistibly!

'The pike in the European carp-pond,' said Bismarck once, 'prevent us from becoming carp.

Embittered and suspicious she had found him, noted for the carping tongue he lacked both power and inclination to bridle; and she had, against his nature, made Maudelain see that every person is at bottom lovable, and that human vices are but the stains of a traveller midway in a dusty journey; and had incited the priest no longer to do good for his soul's health, but simply for his fellow's benefit.