In it stark, naked fear struggled with craftiness and cruelty.

knowledge of the world, world wisdom, savoir faire [Fr.]; tact; mother wit &c (sagacity) 498; discretion &c (caution) 864; finesse; craftiness &c (cunning) 702; management &c (conduct) 692; self-help.

Cunning N. cunning, craft; cunningness^, craftiness &c adj.

He was peculiarly marked by that inventive craftiness, which forms one of the leading traits of the Phoenician character; he was fond of taking singular and unexpected routes; ambushes and stratagems of all sorts were familiar to him; and he studied the character of his antagonists with unprecedented care.

the man declared with a pretence of admiration, yet underlying it all was a craftiness that surely was unsurpassed.

I stood with my back to the sunset, watching the red light fall upon this old man as he weighed the diamond, rubbed it on the black-stone, or let fall on it a drop of the liquor, and so could see the wonder and emotion fade away from his face, and only hard craftiness left in it.

"that is a singer, or a dancer; neither hear, lest thou be taken in her craftiness."

To see him stealthily crouching, or crawling silently and sneakingly after a herd of cattle, dodging behind every clump of bushes or tuft of grass, running swiftly along the high bank of a watercourse, and sneaking under the shadowing border of a belt of jungle, is to understand his cunning and craftiness.

Hence, from these two characteristics, rashness on the one hand and craftiness on the other, he did much harm, falling upon some persons with the swiftness of a thunderbolt and damaging others by carefully prepared plots.

'No one who is not experienced in the ways of lunatics can imagine the danger of any association with themtheir consummate craftiness, their capacity for crime.

In the middle ages, the Roman Catholic and Greek churches statedly adopted singing as an essential part of public worship; but this, like the reading of the Scriptures, was too frequently in an unknown tongue, by an affectation of wisdom, to excite the veneration of ignorance, when the learned, in their craftiness, taught that "Ignorance is the mother of devotion;" and Ignorance was very willing to believe it.

But he was liable to intercurrent fits of jealousy and rage, such as the light-hued races are hardly capable of conceiving,blinding paroxysms of passion, which for the time overmastered him, and which, if they found no ready outlet, transformed themselves into the more dangerous forces that worked through the instrumentality of his cool craftiness.

There were certain spirits who, from a habit they had acquired in the life of the body, infested me with peculiar cunning, and this they did by a sottish and as it were waving influx, such as is usual with well-disposed spirits; but I perceived that they employed craftiness and similar means, to the intent that they might engage attention and deceive.

There is nothing of the naive and guileless innocence of a cloistered virtue in the book, but though the serpent is very cunning his wiliness and craftiness coexist with a simple enthusiasm of humanity which is very marvellous to behold.

He was grimly amused at the little Jew's craftiness, yet it sorely offended him to think that any one should consider him such a welcher.

In the text, "The man was old and crafty," Murray sees no connexion of the ideas of age and craftiness, but thinks the text a compound sentence, containing two nominatives and two verbs; i.e., "The man was old, and the man was crafty."

They are Alsatians, and speak German, and with the craftiness which accompanies the simplicity of the French peasant, made the most of this lucky chance.

He cackled with laughter at the remembrance of a moment of craftiness when he crept out of his back door and wrote a German sentence on his front door in white chalk.

Jonathan combined the qualities of Simon and Judas with a certain craftiness that makes him the least attractive of the three.

Let him guard as much as he can against the ravening of the wolves, but let it not be with carnal craftiness.

If he had fully and permanently scared Najib into a conviction that the strike would spell ruin for the Syrian himself, then the little man's brain might possibly be jarred into one of its rare intervals of uncanny craftiness; and Najib might hit upon some way of persuading the fellaheen that the strike was off.

On learning of my situationfor he extracted my secrets with a quiet craftiness and good nature, of which the remembrance touches my heart to this day, he gave up for a time the ambition of his whole life; for twenty-two years he had been carrying water in the street, and he now devoted his hundred crowns to my future prospects.

For there was a general atmosphere of subtlety and slyness about the man that forced itself upon me, young as I was; and the way he kept eyeing me as we talked made me feel that I had to do with one that would be hard to circumvent if it came to a matter of craftiness.

He complimented himself on his craftiness, but never dreamed that this was a trail herd, bound for some other country three hundred miles beyond his native Texas.

He seemed guileless, and yet had moments of suspicion and craftiness worthy of the wisdom of the serpent.