Preston thought, crabbily, though he knew it was true.

"Now you're really putting two and two together," he says crabbily.

I have to live in the woods,' the captain replied crabbily, as though the chaplain ought to know.

Stepovich asked crabbily.

"They're old-timers; they know you," he says crabbily to Poet O. The bench-warmer is the penultimate cranky old man.

Several bathtub rotations later we crabbily assemble in Jasmine's Chrysler, a mammoth secret-service-white number with a blackout windshield.

'Get my girl back from the car,' he commanded Colonel Moodus crabbily, and waited in one spot with his scowling face down until his nurse had rejoined him.

In this weather your food will stay fresh far longer, that's a help, and you must try to give him milk from my ewe as well as water," she lectured crabbily.

At the recent 50th reunion of his New York University Law School class, he crabbily commented to his wife, Rhoda, that the rest of the alums looked ancient.

Crabbily, I got up and helped cover stuff to protect it, helped get out means for recovering some of the water, then confiscated a piece of tenting and another blanket, rolled up and went back to sleep, ignoring the rain.

Writing about personal discomforts can work brilliantly when handled with the self-deprecating humor of a writer like Redmond O'Hanlon or Bill Bryson, but Middleton whines tepidly and crabbily about the thin curtains in his hotel and his wrists hurting after digging snow.