|
|
|
More "Blunder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but still she did not believe it. It could not be that after all her boastings she should have made so gross a blunder. 'I hope you do love me,' she said; 'indeed, you are bound to do so, for you promised that you would ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... To remedy the blunder of having left Dantzic behind in the hands of the Prussians, Lefebvre was despatched with his new corps to beleaguer it. Savary drove the Russians from the Narew and out of Ostrolenka; Mortier threatened Stralsund and stopped the Swedes, who, as members of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... survived a storm of indignation, in which even Chatham joined. The small minority of British settled in Quebec and Montreal made vehement protests, while the American Congress itself in 1774 committed the irreparable blunder of making the establishment of the Roman Catholic religion in Canada one of its formally published grievances against Great Britain. When war broke out, and the magnitude of the mistake was seen, efforts were made to seduce the Canadians by hints of a coming British tyranny, but the Canadians ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... be very nice about it," the girl went on. "He came in to tea with us—Mr. Meadows and me—almost every evening. And he always had something amusing to relate, some blunder of Scotland Yard or some ripping mystery. I think he found it immense fun to be Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. I loved the talk: Mr. Meadows was always interested and Sir Henry likes ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... please all parties; and—what is far more difficult—she succeeded. Twice a week she received the bourgeoisie of Provins at her house in the Upper town. This intelligent young woman of twenty had not as yet made a single blunder or misstep on the slippery path she had taken. She gratified everybody's self-love, and petted their hobbies; serious with the serious, a girl with girls, instinctively a mother with mothers, gay with young wives and disposed to help them, gracious to all,—in short, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... spoil. At the appointed hour Bonaparte's agent arrived, and was completely the dupe of these adventurers, who plundered him of twelve hundred thousand livres. Though not many days passed before he discovered the imposition, prudence prevented him from denouncing the impostors; and this blunder would have remained a secret between himself, Bonaparte, and Talleyrand, had not the unusual expenses of Caumartin excited the suspicion of the Russian Police Minister, who soon discovered the source from which they had flowed. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... all. A glance at the Hatfield maze will show that there are three of these detached hedges or islands at the centre, so this method will never take you to the "centre" of that one. But the rule will at least always bring you safely out again unless you blunder in the following way. Suppose, when you were going in the direction of the arrow in the Hampton Court Maze, that you could not distinctly see the turning at the bottom, that you imagined you were ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... Leave behind sectarian lurches; Jump on board the Car of Freedom, Ere it be too late to need them. Sound the alarm! Pulpits thunder! Ere too late you see your blunder! ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... two farmers who had had a disagreement over a horse-trade. On the day of the trial, Mr. Logan, having bought a new shirt, open in the back, with a huge standing collar, dressed himself in extreme haste, and put on the shirt with the bosom at the back, a linen coat concealing the blunder. He dazed the jury with his knowledge of "horse points"; and as the day was sultry, took off his coat and "summed" up in his shirt-sleeves. Lincoln, sitting behind him, took in the situation, and when his turn came he remarked to the jury: "Gentlemen, Mr. Logan ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... at seeing so many innocent beings perish before arriving at years of discretion, and without having received baptism. They argued that such a practice, which was worse than a crime, because it was a theological blunder, could not be carried on in a state of slavery. "This style of reasoning," says Las Casas, "proves absolutely nothing; for God knows better than men what ought to be the future destiny of children ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Metz as his base, and stupidly putting himself in position to be driven back to it, when there was no possible obstacle to his joining forces with MacMahon at Chalons; while the third and greatest blunder of all was MacMahon's move to relieve Metz, trying to slip 140,000 men along the Belgian frontier. Indeed, it is exasperating and sickening to think of all this; to think that Bazaine carried into Metz—a place that should have been held, if at all, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... have heard no language but what is good, must be correct. On the contrary, children who hear a mixture of low and high vulgarity before their own habits are fixed, must, whenever they speak, continually blunder; they have no rule to guide their judgment in their selection from the variety of dialects which they hear; probably they may often be reproved for their mistakes, but these reproofs will be of no ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... woman!" whispered Lady Delacour "she was to have been at the drawing-room to-day but for a blunder of mine: ready dressed she was, and I didn't call for her! Ah, Mad. de Pomenars, I am actually ashamed to see you," continued her ladyship; and she went forward to meet Clarence Hervey, who really made his entree with very composed assurance and grace. He ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... no blunder, I resolved, before proceeding further, to learn what I could of the character and antecedents of the suspected one, and this from the only source ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... especially, was a miniature sacrament; and the story of that premature audacity of Elsa with Lohengrin never failed to touch his sense of awe. "What's in a name?" for him, was a significant question—a question of life or death. For to mispronounce a name was a bad blunder, but to name it wrongly was to miss it altogether. Such a thing had no real life, or at best a vitality that would soon fade. Adam knew that! And he pondered much in his childhood over the difficulty Adam must have had "discovering" the ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... to those who know next to nothing of it. They know enough to have pedestals of their own; to be on their guard; to have a reputation to maintain; to conceal the "dram of folly;" to be, to that extent, artificial in their relations with men. They dare not betray the "laughable blunder," which, said Charles Lamb, is the test your neighbour giveth you "that he will not betray or ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... was necessary for Peggy to begin at the beginning, and in the course of twenty minutes or so, the good man began to understand. As the extent of his blunder gradually dawned upon him, he threw back his head and broke into a hearty guffaw whose enjoyment was contagious. Peggy joined him, and then there was an exultant note in her laughter. Observation had taught her that when a man is laughing, it is one of the hardest things in ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... He saw his blunder even while he was speaking. But he was red-hot with indignation and didn't care a jot for the consequences. And Jake came at him. If the foreman's taunt had roused him, it was nothing to the effect of his reply. Jake crossed the room in a couple of strides ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... thought, Dagaeoga, but keep straight in the direction we are going. See that you do not paddle unconsciously in a curve. We shall certainly be pursued, and although our foes cannot see us well in the dark, some out of their number are likely to blunder upon us. If it comes to a battle you will notice that I have an extra rifle and pistol for you lying in the bottom of the canoe, and that I am something more than a ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had made a bad blunder, which I attempted to rectify by reaching Buffalo that night; but Tom Barrett had won the game. I was arrested at Fort Erie, handcuffed, jailed, tried, convicted of attempted assault and illicit whiskey-trading on the Grand River Indian Reserve—and spent the next five years in Kingston ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... event; it was a proceeding utterly without precedent. Nothing but the most extraordinary circumstances could have called it forth. The blunder of the jury must have been open, glaring, painfully notorious, indeed, when such an astonishing course was adopted by the whole ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... that St. James's pilgrims are distinguished by scallop-shells, but it is a blunder to suppose that other pilgrims are privileged to wear them. Three of the popes have, by their bulls, distinctly confirmed this right to the Compostella pilgrim alone: viz., Pope Alexander III., Pope Gregory ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... now but one thought, one ferocious desire: to avenge himself upon those who have denied him—and even upon all mankind! Really, Mr. Hart, your governments of Europe and America committed a stupendous blunder in refusing to pay Roch the ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... and introductions of works for mottoes and embellishments to his thesis. He cannot learn anatomy by thrusting an exploring needle into the body. He will be very liable to misquote his author's meaning while he is picking off his outside sentences. He may make as great a blunder as that simple prince who praised the conductor of his orchestra for the piece just before the overture; the musician was too good a courtier to tell him that it was only the tuning ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... not give their names purposely, since I have no wish that the actual perpetrators of the terrible blunder that I am about to describe should be known to posterity. After all, they acted honestly according to their lights, and were but tools in the hand of that villain ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... not have turned them out of hand fast enough. The enlightened few, in these countries, were as a drop in the bucket to the unenlightened many; and although no doubt there were numbers of the former who were well—meaning men, yet they were one and all guilty of that prime political blunder, in common with our Whig friends at home, of expecting a set of semi—barbarians to see the beauty of, and to conform to, their newfangled codes of free institutions, for which they were as ready as I am to die at this present moment. Bolivar, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... bodies, took up arms before the appointed night, and was repulsed by the soldiers quartered in his village. The alarm was given, and the Spaniards were all put on the alert. The cacique fled to Guarionex for protection, but the chieftain, enraged at his fatal blunder, put him to ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... looks toward the house. Yes, it is handsome, grand. Youth and age together did not make any blunder of it. There is the tower, that was to be his study and library and place of resort generally. What crude dreams he had in those days! Science and poesy, art and history, were all a sad jumble in his brain, and now he has found his life-work. He hopes that he ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the Karl der Grosse, our best and biggest. Run down in the night by a British liner that blundered into the fighting in trying to blunder out. They're fighting in a gale. The liner's afloat with her nose broken, sagging about! There never was such a battle!—never before! Good ships and good men on both sides,—and a storm and the night and the dawn and all in the open ocean full steam ahead! No stabbing! No submarines! Guns ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... gig came alongside the schooner, the lieutenant offered his hand to Miss Lydia, and then helped the colonel to swing himself up on deck. Once there, Sir Thomas, who was still very much ashamed of his blunder, and at a loss to know what he had better do to make the man whose ancestry dated from the year 1100 forget it, invited him to supper, without waiting for his daughter's consent, and with many fresh apologies and handshakes. Miss Lydia frowned a little, but, after all, she was ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... an insight into the true state of the case, and I felt much easier on the subject. That Marble ever intended to serve under the British flag, I had not supposed for a moment; but I was not sure that regret for the blunder he had already made, might not lead him into some new mistake of equally serious import, under the impression that he was correcting the evil. As for Neb, I knew he would never desert me; and I had not, from the first, ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... on numerous occasions, to laugh heartily at a much less amusing blunder, but on this occasion I sought his usually expressive face in vain for even the ghost of a smile. To add to my annoyance and the constraint of the situation, old Robbins found it necessary to again ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... an army is likely to be a mere encumbrance in war, it is perhaps even a still graver blunder to maintain one during that conflict of preparation which is at present the European substitute for actual hostilities. It consumes. It produces nothing. It not only eats and drinks and wears out its clothes and withdraws men from industry, but ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... less debased, though scarcely more heartless, who countenance this inhuman logic. The average mercantile sentiment of this and other great Northern cities runs thus: 'True, Slavery is unjust and barbarous—it is at once a wrong and a mistake—but it is not our blunder. Its perils are braved and its evils endured by those who cherish it, hundreds of miles away; while to us it is a positive advantage. By obstructing the mechanical and manufacturing development of the South, it dooms her products, her commerce, her navigation, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... his fashion. It must have taken a great effort—premature, therefore mistaken, according to my judgment—for him to screw himself up to the pitch of proposing for a girl of whose answering regard he was uncertain. Having made the blunder and paid the penalty, he is not at all likely to put his fate to the touch again, so far as Dora is concerned. He is not the style of pertinacious, overbearing fellow who would persecute a woman with his ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... in his exasperation, was guilty of the colossal blunder of showing this letter and allowing it to be copied. His indignation drove him to every ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... An allusion and pun which occasioned the French translator of the present work an unlucky blunder: puzzled, no doubt, by my facetiously, he translates "mettant, comme on l'a tres-judicieusement fait observer, l'entendement humain sous la clef." The great work and the great author alluded to, having ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... why we didn't find this place the other night," he said aloud. "I guess we were in too big a hurry. That's the trouble with us boys. We blunder along without using our heads. But, I guess I had better not boast until after I have gotten back safely from Forsythe," he laughed. "I may need some good advice myself ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... needn't think I am going to let you off so," said he "you must give me half a dozen kisses at least, to prove that you have forgiven me for making so great a blunder." ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... necessary, I have availed myself of the opportunity thus afforded me by the publishers to revise it. Some slight revision was necessary to correct one or two errors which crept unavoidably into the earlier edition. By an oversight, an important typographical blunder went uncorrected into the former edition, making the date of the first use of the word "Socialism" 1835 instead of 1833. That error, I regret to say, has been subsequently copied into many important publications. Even more ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... came differently to what we expected. Still we did our duty. Had we come to grief through any blunder or fault of mine or any of our officers there might have been cause for regret and heartburnings. Our orders were very simple—to hold the trenches at all costs until relieved. We carried out these orders and held the line. When finally ordered out we ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... that you are able to do all this work," he said, with an attempt to turn the corner of his blunder. ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... occurred. Even had they not, differences of opinion between the Executive, bound by an oath to the strict performance of his duties, and writers and debaters must have arisen. It is not necessarily evidence of blunder on the part of the Executive because there are these differences of views. Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit, but it seems to me oftener in the selections made of the assistants appointed to aid in carrying out the various duties of administering the Government—in nearly ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... my lords, have heaped one blunder upon another; they have disgusted the nation both by the means and the end; and have insulted the senate with no other view than that of plundering the people. They have ventured, without the consent of the senate, to pursue measures, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... recognized in him the English rancher of good family; usually a man of fine courtesy within reasonable bounds; always a hard hitter when those bounds are exceeded. Y.D. knew that he had made at least a tactical blunder; his sensitiveness about his brand would arouse, rather than allay, suspicion. His cheeks burned with a heat not of the afternoon sun as he submitted to this unaccustomed discipline, but he could not bring himself to express ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... I could have counted on hitting him where I liked. I trust I shall not blunder against his vitals now. However, if I do, he has ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... meet with a young, beautiful, and wealthy woman of fashion who would be willing to teach me, what you women can explain so well—life. I shall find a M. de Trailles everywhere. So I have come to you to ask you to give me a key to a puzzle, to entreat you to tell me what sort of blunder I made this morning. I ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... exclaimed Publius annoyed. "But you might—it seems to me—be rather more zealous in helping me to preserve her from the misfortune which threatens her through your own blunder. We cannot bring her here, but I think that I have thought of a safe ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tastes, an affectionate disposition, great perspicuity of perception, much force of character; and Franceska's, scarcely yet formed, showed that she was affectionate, romantic, and, of all things in the world, fond of horses and of boating. Emilia's was held as a great blunder, for she was said to have an eye devoted to temporal advantages, also volatile, yet of great determination, triumphing over every obstacle, and in much ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the place, but for fear I might get another kick from Badger, I passed it by. A flat house with narrow lattice windows and black curtain at the entrance, near the gate, is the place where I ate dango and committed the blunder. A round lantern with the signs of sweet meats hung outside and its light fell on the trunk of a willow tree close by. I hungered to have a bite of dango, but ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... failed to put in an appearance at St. Wennys—and would he come down to Mallow Court? With Peter once more at hand, she felt sure he would be able to charm Nan's bitterness away and even prevent her, in some magical way of his own, from committing such a rash blunder as marriage with Trenby could ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Long Parliament did nothing but blunder and talk, so he marched into the House one day with a company of soldiers, and sternly ordered the members all off, calling out, as he pointed to the mace that lay before the Speaker's chair, "Take away that bauble." After that he called together a fresh Parliament; but there were very few ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... or victory Was his device, "and there was no mistake," Except his last; and then he did but die, A blunder which the wisest men will make. Aloft, where mighty floods the mountains break, To stand, the target of the thousand eyes, And down into the coil and water-quake, To leap, like Maia's offspring, from the skies— For this all vulgar flights he ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... not, the bombardment of the Venetian churches is a blunder for which the Austrians will pay dearly in loss of international good-will. A century hence these shattered churches will be pointed out to visitors as the work of the modern Vandals, and lovers of art and beauty throughout the world will execrate the nation ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... While it would not be acceptable for formal social correspondence, it does very well on more intimate letters and saves the necessity of writing each time the home address. It is best to use printed letterheads, rather than commit the blunder now so common, among those who do not habitually use engraved paper, of omitting the address from the letter. This, in case the letter is misdirected, and travels to the Dead-Letter Office, prevents effectually its restoration to ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... was all for the coming of the railway, Wilson had seized the chance to put him in a false position. He knew Gourlay could not put forty words together in public, and that in his dilemma he would blunder and give ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... unless every purchaser who takes land with a bad title which he believes to be good is a criminal. But, probably wrong technically, certainly needless and disastrous, it will always remain for New Zealand the classic example of a blunder worse than ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... was amused at Joan's naive way of referring to her advice as if it had been a valuable present to a hostile leader who was saved by it from making a censurable blunder of omission, and then he went on to admire how ingeniously she had deceived that man and yet had not told him anything that was not the truth. This ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... sure where he is going to get his catch, so he picks out the place, or run-way, where the game has been in the habit of coming. He hides his traps about that place, and trusts to luck that the animal will blunder ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... raised by authority above what it will yield with a profit to the buyer, that commodity will be the less dealt in. If a second blundering interposition be used to correct the blunder of the first, and an attempt is made to force the purchase of the commodity (of labour for instance), the one of these two things must happen, either that the forced buyer is ruined, or the price of the product of the labour, in that proportion, is raised. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... this sort of theory is a blasphemy against the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well as a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial explanation when there is obviously a human explanation. It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a quadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... See how it can err! Was there ever such a boundless, unlimited blunder in the whole annals of penny fiction? Probably not. I remember nothing like it in all the learned pages of the London Journal and the Family Herald. Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Braddon never dreamed of aught like this. Philippa must be told. ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... of superstition hugged their chains Culpable audacity and exaggerated prudence The wisest statesmen are prone to blunder in affairs of war ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... trials of the same character. Nothing ever annoyed her so much as a little blunder she made, the week after the opening of the session. I have not yet mentioned that there was already a universal dissatisfaction among the women, on account of their being liable to military service. The war seemed to have hardly begun, as yet, and conscription was already ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... exclusion, by shewing the consequences to Christianity of a Pagan Emperor attaining the throne. It would seem, that one of the sheriffs had mistaken so grossly, as to talk of Julian the Apostle; or, more probably, such a blunder was circulated as true, by some tory wit. Wood surmises, that Hunt had some share in composing Julian. Ath. Ox. II. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... on Burnet i. 393. Dartmouth says that it was from Fagel that the Lords extracted the hint. This was a slip of the pen very pardonable in a hasty marginal note; but Dalrymple and others ought not to have copied so palpable a blunder. Fagel died in Holland, on the 5th of December 1688, when William was at Salisbury and James at Whitehall. The real person was, I suppose, Dykvelt, Bentinck, or Zulestein, most ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... possibly it had never before fallen into the hands of a man who was so little qualified to govern Rigganites, as was the present rector, the Reverend Harold Barholm. A man who has mistaken his vocation, and who has become ever so faintly conscious of his blunder, may be a stumbling-block in another's path; but restrained as he will be by his secret pangs of conscience, he can scarcely be an active obstructionist. But a man who, having mistaken the field of his life's labor, ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... consequences,—lessons which, unfortunately, seem to have but little effect on cabinets, owing to their shifting personelle, England following up the disasters of Carthagena with the still greater blunder of the Walcheren expedition, where, out of England's small available physical war material, nearly forty thousand men were either left to fatten the swamps of Walcheren, or to wander through England in after years on the pension-list, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... you don't mind, I'll sit here a while longer and think things over, Lester. Perhaps I'll blunder on ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... out of humour with yourself for a blunder that might happen to any man—it was as much my good luck as a good hand would have been, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... these ethical qualities that Buddhism owes its marvellous success.[Note 10] A system which knows no God in the western sense; which denies a soul to man; which counts the belief in immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin; [69] which refuses any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice; which bids men look to nothing but their own efforts for salvation; which, in its original purity, knew nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred intolerance, and never sought the aid of the secular arm; yet spread ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... prima donna's courtesy ere she sings; Prologues in metre are to other pros As worsted stockings are to engine-hose. "The world's a stage,"—as Shakespeare said, one day; The stage a world—was what he meant to say. The outside world's a blunder, that is clear; The real world that Nature meant is here. Here every foundling finds its lost mamma; Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa; Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid, The cheats are taken in the traps they ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... vigor, and many a gallant fight for health has gone unrewarded. But in the great majority of cases a wise conduct of life would retain robust strength for the threescore or more years of our allotted course, increase it for those who start poorly equipped, and regain it for those who by mischance, blunder, or imprudence have lost their heritage. Yet half the world hardly knows what real health is. Our hospitals and sanitariums are crowded, our streets are full of half-sick people-hollow chests, sallow faces, dark-rimmed ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... the enclosed is worth your reading. I am smashed to atoms about Glen Roy. My paper was one long gigantic blunder from beginning to end. Eheu! Eheu! (524/1. See "Life and Letters," I., pages 68, 69, also pages ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... had made the serious blunder of speaking of Queen Louise in a manner wanting in proper respect for a woman, and especially for a woman in misfortune. Josephine, who was full of tact, was much pained by this lack of generosity, and reproached her husband for it. Napoleon sought to excuse himself, writing, November ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... its mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... some diamonds with you a short time ago, which should have been delivered to Tiffany & Co. Mr. Hafferman read the order without his spectacles, and it's rather a good joke on him, for he thought it was signed Venner & Co. The blunder was partly owing to the fact, no doubt, that Mr. Venner called to see him yesterday ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... dismounted in the encounter,—in what manner we are not told,—and would have been cut down by a British sergeant, but for his wearing a uniform that resembled that of a British colonel. He was helped to a horse at a most fortunate moment. He did not know, in consequence of the blunder of Clarke, that the dragoons whom he had fought and beaten, were only an advanced guard of a body of infantry. Horses and men were in his hands, and, dividing his force, he sent off one party of his men in charge of the prisoners ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... was anxious to make amends for his blunder of a moment before. "Shall I send the bank watchmen to go on each floor in turn and ask everybody to ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... you know, that we are a couple of old fools, to be troubling ourselves about Aggie's future, at present. Still, in a matter which concerns us both so nearly, we cannot be too careful. If we had a woman with us, we could safely leave the matter in her hands; as it is, we must blunder on, ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... episcopal palace at Farnham. Cobbett's main doctrine is that when the Catholic church flourished, the population was actually more numerous and richer, that the care of the priests and monks made pauperism impossible, and that ever since the hideous blunder perpetrated by the reformers everything has been going from bad to worse. When it was retorted that the census proved the population to be growing, he replied that the census was a lie. Were the facts ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... its commanders in terms of its own suffering. And then, when another extravagant promise of victory turns out to be the customary bloody defeat, you may find that a mutiny breaks out over some comparatively minor blunder, [Footnote: The Allies suffered many bloodier defeats than that on the Chemin des Dames.] like Nivelle's offensive of 1917, because it is a cumulative blunder. Revolutions and mutinies generally follow a small sample of a big series ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... "The blunder was not a life and death matter. In the mountains where we don't see one woman a year it might happen that any man expecting one young lady should mistake another for her. Miss Brock is full of mischief, and the temptation to her to let ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... conclusion respecting Oliver's bravery as the majority in the Fifth, did not allow his conscience to trouble him as to his share of the morning's business. He never had liked Oliver, and lately especially he had come to dislike him. He was therefore glad to have made him smart; and now, since the blunder in the cricket match, he felt greatly inclined to repeat the blow, particularly as there did not seem much to fear ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... could be more sincere, to serve the Church, to place its claims on adequate grounds, to elevate the standard of duty in its clergy, and in all its members. To have missed the aim of the movement and to have been occupied and irritated by obnoxious details and vulgar suspicions was a blunder which gave the measure of those who made it, and led to great evils. They alienated those who wished for nothing better than to help them in their true work. Their "unkindness" was felt to be, in Bacon's phrase,[77] injuriae potentiorum. ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... him as criticising the Greek of all Payne's lines, and not discovering that "the lines" were Pindar's {275} until after publication. Byron was too much of a scholar to make this blunder himself: he either accepted the facts from report, or else took satirical licence. And why not? If you want to laugh at a person, and he will not give occasion, whose fault is it that you are obliged to make it? Hallam did criticise ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... point it may be urged that those exercises which quicken the action of the thoracic viscera, to any considerable degree, are simply exhaustive. This is another blunder of the "big-muscle" men. They seem to think you can determine every man's constitution and health by the tape-line; and that all exercises whose results are not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... coming performance and mentally rehearsing her part. It was not really difficult, but it was tricky, for unless she sprang through the paper-covered hoops at just the right moment, it would be an awkward blunder. However, after many rehearsals, she felt pretty sure of herself, and looked forward ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... tempered man is not quite the proper person for you; his modesty will be easily confounded.—The talkative man will be apt to forget himself, and blunder out something ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... of some social importance, so long as it is believed by large numbers to be essential to the right ordering of life. Whether true or false, beliefs are facts—mental and social facts, and the scheme of things which leaves them out of account is making a blunder of the ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... View, on the Frontiers of Egypt. She was found alone, and in a very disconsolate Condition. This Lady must, doubtless, said they to themselves, be the Queen of Babylon: And without listning to her Complaints, convey'd her instantly to my Husband Moabdar. Their gross Blunder at first incens'd his Majesty to the last Degree; but after he had view'd the Lady with an attentive Eye, he found she was extremely pretty, and was soon pacify'd. Her Name was Missouf. I have been since inform'd, that her Name in the Egyptian ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... cause, to him could point appeal. His mistress was the thing of uses tried. Frigid the netting smile on whom he wooed, But on his Policy his eye was lewd. That sharp long zig-zag into distance brooked No foot across; a shade his ire provoked. The blunder or the cruelty of a deed His Policy imperative could plead. He deemed nought other precious, nor knew he Legitimate outside his Policy. Men's lives and works were due, from their birth's date, To the State's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sturdy old Commodore Jones will blunder along with the American liners, CYANE and UNITED STATES, and haul down that proud Mexican ensign. He will hoist for the first time, on October, 19, 1842, the stars and stripes over the town. Even though he apologizes, the foreigners will troop back there like wolves around the dying bison of the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... looked rather sharply at me, and said with equal sharpness, "You don't belong about here." I was alarmed, and thought I had betrayed myself. A fip in Maryland was six and a quarter cents, called fourpence in Massachusetts. But no harm came from the "fi'penny-bit" blunder, and I confidently and cheerfully went to work with my saw and buck. It was new business to me, but I never did better work, or more of it, in the same space of time on the plantation for Covey, the negro-breaker, than I did for myself in these ...
— Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass • Frederick Douglass
... made a terrible blunder. She wasn't my mistress. I killed Crimtyphon for quite another reason. She had ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... the Roman legions: "They make a solitude, and call it peace." Strength! There are those in perdition at this moment who could tell them that what they call strength is the stupidity which adds to sin the increment of a huge blunder. ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... cradle of the revolution, and set sail for Halifax, in Nova Scotia. Before they departed the British troops destroyed Castle William, but they left their barracks uninjured, with a large quantity of cannon and ammunition, of which Washington was in want. This was a great blunder; for if they could not have been carried away they should have been destroyed. And this was not the only blunder committed. In sailing away, Howe left no cruizer in Boston Bay to warn the ships expected from ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Wonstead blunder in to follow his example, and for the first time in months the other was dumb, not uttering a word as he stowed away for the breakthrough which should take them back into normal space and the star worlds. Raf tore a ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... wealthy client of mine. One of his detectives arrested her on a charge of shoplifting. The girl, mind you, is of excellent family and irreproachable character. My client and his lawyer tried to show Captain Clinton that he had made a serious blunder, but he brazened it out, claiming on the stand that the girl was an old offender. Of course, he was forced at last to admit his mistake and the girl went free, but think of the humiliation and mental anguish she underwent! It was simply a ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... Various were the impediments which obstructed the embarkation of the troops for several weeks, while Mr. Pitt expressed the greatest uneasiness at the delay, and repeatedly urged the commander-in-chief to expedite his departure; but a sufficient number of transports, owing to some blunder in the contractors, had not yet arrived. The troops expressed an eager impatience to signalize themselves against the enemies of the liberties of Europe; but the superstitious drew unfavourable presages from the dilatoriness of the embarkation. At last the transports arrived, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... recounting of these cold wanderings, of days and nights with nothing but snow and rain, and always the hounds of fear on every hand, that I had forgotten to exercise my mind upon the blunder and the shame of Argile's defeat at Inverlochy. So far is this from the fact that M'Iver and I on many available occasions disputed—as old men at the trade of arms will do—the reasons of a reverse ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... What was wrong? He saw the Eagles and the Foxes carrying their loads slowly, with precious care. All at once he understood. Oh, what a blunder ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... in a position to perceive the magnitude of the blunder of which the American people were guilty in constructing this most mischievous quantity of fixed capital in the form of railways. They acted precisely like a landowner who had an estate of L10,000 a year, and spent L20,000 on drainage. It could not be made out of savings, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... old inducement would be always at work. Why not kill them both, while he had the choice? It would be more troublesome to produce proof of the death of either, later. But he mistrusted his skill in dealing with fatal illness. A blunder might destroy everything. Stop!—he knew something better than that. Had not the transport that brought him out passed a drowned body afloat, and wreckage, even in the English Channel? Shipwreck was the thing! He decided on sending Nicholas Cropredy, his wife's brother-in-law, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... moment that the rabble would have attacked the Tower. We supposed, of course, that the drawbridge would be raised as soon as we had passed over it, but whether the order was not given for it or whether it was misunderstood I know not, but the blunder has cost the lives of the archbishop, the lord treasurer, and others, the insult to the princess, and the disgrace of the Tower having been in the hands of this rascaldom. Well, I must be off there and see what is ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... knows that I am as anxious to push on as you, but we have already made one blunder and we can't afford another; when the time comes that it is safe to trot you shall do so and ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... shrugged and smiled, replying that his compatriots all spoke French like Parisians, enquiring, after a moment's thought, if they learned it, la bas, des negres, and laughing heartily when Durham's astonishment revealed her blunder. ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... to the hobbles, and tied that in turn to a long, heavy slab of rock, and turned in. He would not risk losing his horse in this desert land. At best a posse could not reach Showdown before noon the next day, and rather than blunder into Showdown at night and take unnecessary risks, he decided to rest, and ride in at sunup, when he would be able to see what he was doing and better estimate the possibilities of getting food for himself and his horse and of finding refuge in some ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... I am sent. I am under orders, Messieurs, and until I report in Paris I know not what duty I am to perform. But I am charmed to see you again, and rest assured I shall not repeat my lamentable blunder." ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... words. I will not urge that all speakers would reasonably be called upon to render such an account, if any of their words were spoken for money; I only say this. If Aeschines in his private capacity has spoken wildly on some occasion or committed some blunder, do not be over-strict with him, but let it pass and grant him pardon: but if as your ambassador he has deliberately deceived you for money, then do not let him go, or tolerate the plea that he ought not to be called to account for what he said. {183} Why, for what, if not for his words, is ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... that the genus old maid is one in whom the positive currents neutralize the negative currents? Your affinity is perhaps the plainest woman in the room. But beauty is a juggling sprite, entirely uncontrolled by electricity, and you are quite likely to make a mistake. It is absurd the way we blunder on in a scientific age. We touch a button, and are married. The judge touches another button, and we are divorced. If when we touched the first button it revealed us both negatives, we should start back in horror, for it is only before engagement that two negatives make an affirmative. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... neighbor that lived on the opposite shore of the lake. And once a raven, roosting on the dry bough of a lightning-blasted pine, dreamed that the white moonlight was the light of dawn, and began to stir his sable wings, and croak a harsh welcome; but awakened by his blunder, and ashamed of his mistake, he broke off in the very midst of his discordant call, and again settled gloomily down amid his black plumes to his interrupted repose, making by his sudden silence the surrounding silence more silent ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... preventing the tremendous waste that this process involves. English literature is a comparatively recent addition to the secondary curriculum. Its possibilities of service are almost unlimited. Shall we wait for ten or fifteen generations of teachers to blunder out the most effective means of teaching it, or shall we avail ourselves of these simple principles which will enable us to concentrate this experience within one ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... finally surrendered, but not until she had exhausted the means of defence and life. At that time, few men in America but were in the habit of denouncing the French President for his indifference to the Italian cause. He was charged with having been guilty of a blunder and a crime. His consent to the expedition to Rome aggravated his offence, for it was an act of intervention on the wrong side. But the passage of ten years enables us to be more just to him than it was possible for us to be in 1849. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... to work his way to land, and this he began doing by using his hands as paddles. It was slow progress; and he was of the opinion that he had made a rather foolish blunder in permitting himself to be "carried out to sea" in this fashion. He was disturbed still further by the appearance of the sky. Dark, threatening clouds were gathering and sweeping across it, frequently shutting out the light of the moon and causing the most grotesque shadows to whisk over ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... the provinces when I said you ought to be President. You said old Winkelstein had been in the position too long to be ousted. And yet I felt certain your superior English would tell in the long run in such a miserable congregation of foreigners, and when Winkelstein had made that delicious blunder about the 'university' of the Exodus instead of the 'anniversary,' and I went about laughing over it in all the best circles, the poor man's day was over. And when we came to London, and seemed to fall again to the bottom of the ladder ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... explanation a little further. The three Matzoth Shimmurim used in the Haggadah Service were made with especial care, and in medieval times were denominated Priest, Levite, Israelite, in order to discriminate among them. Picard, by an amusing blunder, speaks of a gateau des levites; he, of course, means the middle cake. From several authorities it is clear that the three Matzoth were inscribed in some cases with these three words, in others with the letters ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... at himself as he hurried back to the station, and his face burned hotly as he thought of the chance such a blunder on his part would have given Quade and Culver Rann to circulate the stories with which they largely played their scoundrelly game. He sent another and longer telegram. This time it was ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... the moon,' returns Colonel Sterett, 'cannot be deemed wonders in any proper sense. They're merely interestin' details which any gent gets onto who brings science to his aid. But usin' the word "wonders," I does once blunder upon a mir'cle which still waits to be explained. That's a shore-enough marvel! An' to this day, all I can state is that I sees it ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... but this, as well as a farce produced at Dublin in 1720 by Charles Shadwell and entitled The Plotting Lovers; or, The Dismal Squire, cannot claim to be anything but translations. Miller's Mother-in-Law, again, includes much of Monsieur de Pourceaugnac; and Thomas Sheridan's Captain O'Blunder; or, The Brave Irishman, produced at Goodman's Fields, 31 January, 1746, is a poor adaptation. Mrs. Parsons abbreviated Moliere to The Intrigues of a Morning, played at Covent Garden, 18 April, 1792, a jejune effort. Les Femmes Savantes was rather racily transformed by Thomas Wright into ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... Carleton was there. Fleda sat a little apart from the rest, industriously bending over a complicated piece of embroidery belonging to Constance and in which that young lady had made a great blunder which she declared her patience unequal to the task of rectifying. The conversation went gayly forward among the others; Fleda taking no part in it beyond an involuntary one. Mr. Carleton's part was rather reserved and grave; according to ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... fatal blunder To be blind to this appalling Tragedy you wrong by calling The result of spells—no spells Are such signs, but miracles Outside man's experience falling. He came here because he yearned With his pure and holy breath To give life, and so found death. ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... was well known that a man had to be up very early in every sense if he wanted to keep an eye on a Putnam horse. Mat Woodburn might be old, but he was by no means sleepy; and Joses could not afford to blunder. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... be severe were it not sheer gossip, and gossip dictated by a feeling of intense hostility to Louis Philippe, who committed the unpardonable blunder of not bestowing any particular regard upon the prince's secretary, though, with others, he had been specially introduced to him. In that case, and if M. Colmache really was, as he says, present in the chamber when this interview took place, we can only express our ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the fatal blunder of mistaking the enchantment of desire for that of love. Angelique was so happy in reconciling the voice of her heart with that of duty, by giving way to a liking that had grown up with her from childhood, that the deluded man could not discern which of the two spoke the louder. ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... constituencies—that it is well you should have patience enough to listen to a speech about India; because it is no secret to anybody who understands, that if the Government were to make a certain kind of bad blunder in India—which I do not at all expect them to make—there would be short work for a long time to come, with many of those schemes, upon which you have set your heart. Do not dream, if any mishap of a certain kind were to ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... seize his old schoolmate by the hand, proclaim his friendship for him and assure Mr. Westall and the rest that they had committed the worst kind of a blunder—that they had made as great a mistake in arresting this boy for a horse-thief, as Nels and his fellow wood-cutters had made in suspecting him of being Tom Percival, simply because he happened to have in his possession a watch chain that somewhat resembled Tom's. But two things restrained ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... dignitary than the Common Serjeant[8], personally to convey to us the invitation on the first day of Michaelmas term at our inn. Sir Thomas Chambers, when he occupied this office, was accustomed to commit a most amusing blunder. Whether moved by some idea of his own dignity, or acting under civic instruction, I am unable to say, but when he came to perform his task he addressed himself solely to the Judges, not even naming the Serjeants, although the former were asked only in that ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... giving out my suspicions; but we've made a blunder in letting that fellow get away tonight; but it's all up now unless some other of the games against ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... lies Judge Boat within a coffin, Pray, gentlefolks, forbear your scoffin'; A Boat a judge! yes, where's the blunder A wooden Judge is no such wonder! And in his robes you must agree, No Boat was better dekt than he. 'Tis needless to describe him fuller, In short he was an ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... living their lives as we are living ours, in the shimmer of a globule in space, it is not enough that we should lift our faces to the sky and blunder and guess at a God there, because there is so much room between the stars, and murmur faintly, "Spiritual things are spiritually discerned." By the infinite bones of our bodies, by the seeds of the million years ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... instance, he "floundered all the summer among the extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics—the most damnable set of pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark." His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of the finest in England. Froude loved Devonshire folk, and enjoyed talking to them in their own dialect, or smoking with them on the shore. He was particularly fond of the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... chance," she exclaimed. "They've got it all settled! You are the rising light, which is to astonish the world—and I'm your youthful blunder. I stay at home and take care of the baby, and they all feel sorry ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... she muttered to herself, "I have made a grievous blunder; it may be I have ruined Cornelius, the tulip, and myself. I have given the alarm, and perhaps awakened suspicion. I am but a woman; these men may league themselves against me, and then I shall ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... of this was uncanny. He played, it seemed, a spiritual Blind Man's Buff. On every side of him things filled the air; once and again he would touch them, sometimes he would fancy that he was alone, clear, isolated, when suddenly something again would blunder up against him. And always with him, driving him into the bustle of his fellow men, flinging him, hurling him from one noise to another noise, was the terror of silence. Let him once be alone, once waiting ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... all that—so far as it's true," said Beth with startling candor, "but we know it isn't true at all, and you've got to confess that you made some ridiculous blunder or else that ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... of brilliantly dressed young women came running from the nearest room, all in fancy costume and all of them masked. Evidently a fancy-dress party was about to begin in the house. Garrison realized his blunder. ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... there is no great difference between an armchair and a throne. The minor actors are not so accustomed to their new position. Nothing is more amusing than the embarrassment of the courtiers when they have to answer the Emperor's questions. They begin with a blunder; then, in correcting themselves, they fall into still worse confusion; ten times a minute was repeated, Sire, General, Your Majesty, Citizen, First Consul. Constant, the Emperor's valet de chambre, has given us a description of this 18th of ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... lower part of the shield, being divided at the fess point by something like an inverted chevron, from the arms of Clare Hall, which thus occupy the upper half of the shield. The date is 1713. Is this way of dividing the arms a blunder of the painter's, or can any of your readers point out a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... junior officer seems to notice them. Abbot's thoughts are evidently far away, and he makes no reply. The surgeon who sanctions his return to field duty yet a while would, to all appearances, be guilty of a professional blunder. The lieutenant's face is pale and thin; his hand looks very fragile and fearfully white in contrast with the bronze of his cheek. He leans his head upon his hand as he gazes away into the distance, and the colonel ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... presume Mr Horne believes he has authority for applying "so pricketh hem nature in hire corages" to the folks that "longen to go on pilgrimages"—and not to the "smale foules." Or is it intended for a happy innovation? To us it seems an unhappy blunder—taking away a fine touch of nature from Chaucer, and hardening it into horn; while "all energies and ages" is indeed a free and affected version of "corages." "For to wander thro'," is a mistranslation of "to seken;" and to "sing the holy mass," is not the meaning of to "serve halwes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... spoken I perceived that I had got back to my old blunder; for I saw Dick's shoulders shaking with laughter; but he wouldn't say a word, but handed me over to the tender mercies of ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... not, I regret to say, confess his blunder, but left the Reverend Mr. Withholder to remain under suspicion of having committed an unprovoked assault and battery. It was characteristic of Rocky Canyon, however, that this suspicion, far from injuring his clerical reputation, incited ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... were gone out of Egypt, and lighted upon three hundred and eighty thousand men about Pelusium, who had been left there by Amenophis, and so they invaded Egypt with them again; that thereupon Amenophis fled into Ethiopia. But then this Cheremon commits a most ridiculous blunder in not informing us who this army of so many ten thousands were, or whence they came; whether they were native Egyptians, or whether they came from a foreign country. Nor indeed has this man, who forged a dream from Isis ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... some offender against the law who had been foiled in an ingenious scheme by the stupidity rather than the sagacity of him he would have defrauded; or, rather, like one who has been brought to justice by misadventure—through some blunder which Fate itself had suggested to his prosecutor. He was filled with bitterness and mortification, and also with fear. This miscarriage now imposed a necessity upon him, which he had contemplated, indeed, but never looked fairly in the face; he had always hoped it might be evaded. The only ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... "I expected you to blunder into Klae's body one of these days," he said. "The explanation is quite simple. Klae had been ill for many months, and he knew his time was up. His one desire in life was to go on this expedition with me, and he made me promise to ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... not Mademoiselle Madeleine's fault," cried M. de Bois, coming to the rescue. "It was my folly,—another blunder of mine! I was dolt enough to think that you had only to see her for all to be well; and, instead of warning Mademoiselle Madeleine that you were in Washington, I kept from her a knowledge which would have prevented your encountering ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... had once been attached to George Marteen, the Younger Brother, married for a convenience the clownish Sir Morgan Blunder. Prince Frederick, who had seen and fallen in love with her during a religious ceremony in a Ghent convent, follows her to England. They meet accidentally and she promises him a private interview. George Marteen had recommended a page to Mirtilla, and the lad is his sister Olivia ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... of his tongue there were words of adoration, not fastidious and carefully chosen, but simple, elemental words such as a farmhand might blunder out in the deep shadow of a lane, after dark. But he held them back. He would wait until after they had dined together and all round them there were silence and solitude. He drove still more slowly in order to give the two Japanese servants ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Jimmy Kinsella, came towards them from the boat He was bent on being particularly polite to Miss Rutherford, feeling that he ought to atone for his unfortunate blunder with the boat He took off his ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... are," was the answer; "they exist in the shape of Farmer Perryman's big rams. The rams are the direct creations of genius working upon appropriate material. None but a dreamer of dreams could have brought them into being; every one of them is an embodied ideal. Don't make the blunder of thinking that Snarley's sheep-raising has nothing to do with his star-gazings and spirit-rappings. It's all one. Shakespeare writes Hamlet, and Snarley produces 'Thunderbolt.'[3] To call Snarley inarticulate ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... moods that would have shamed created man? Did the All-Father now and then punish, out of sheer malevolence, or in an attempt to get even with man for the results of instincts He had put into him at first creation? Was that first creation final in its wisdom; or had it been a partial blunder, needing the interference of a heaven-sent, earth-born Intercessor to set the matter right? Could the All-Wise make a blunder? If not, then why the Atoning Son? In short, aside from some mysterious force which had set certain laws to rolling like ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... ready to surrender, though he knew now that he had committed a woful blunder. In fact, the knowledge that he was dealing with Frank Merriwell aroused him to a fierce resistance. He felt that it would simply be ruinous to be held and recognized by Merriwell, and he began to fight like a ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... it, though, often afterward, men of clerkly attainments took me aside and kindly pointed out what they conceived to be a blunder. I have dwelt, perhaps tediously, upon this swap; my excuses are—first, that, having made few such good bargains during the days of my vanity, the memory is a pleasant one; and, second, that the horse will necessarily play a ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... been members of the solar family. Some of them, indeed, we know were adopted into it by the influence of one or other of the greater planets: Uranus we know is responsible for the introduction of one, Jupiter of a considerable number. The vast majority of comets, great or small, seem to blunder into the solar system anyhow, anywhere, from any direction: they come within the attractive influence of the sun; obey his laws whilst within that influence; make one close approach to him, passing rapidly ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... save that he admitted being tired or having a headache, when she sought to enliven him, to draw him up to her own plane of merriment. He was reminding himself every hour of the night and day that he must make no irretrievable blunder, that he must do nothing to injure his wife needlessly. Appearances were against her, but ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... Sphex was given as the heroine of the story. How could I do otherwise, not having the original text in front of me? How could I suspect that an entomologist of Lacordaire's standing should be capable of such a blunder as to substitute a Sphex for a Common Wasp? Great was my perplexity, in the face of this evidence! A Sphex capturing a Fly was an impossibility; and I blamed the British scientist accordingly. But what insect was it that Erasmus Darwin saw? Calling logic to my aid, I declared ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... by the touch of the horn-tip that its opponent has found an opening, and woe betide the bull that puts its weight into a stab which the other has time to elude. In the flick of an eye,—as the Malay phrase has it,—advantage is taken of the blunder, and, before the bull has time to recover its lost balance, its opponent has found an opening, and has wedged its horn-point into the neck or cheek. When at last a firm grip has been won, and the horn has been driven into the yielding flesh, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... he should come to no harm—I know that," he said quickly. "At first I thought that it must have been a blunder, but on reflection I am sure that it is not. It is the Emperor. He must have given the order for the arrest himself, behind my back. That is his way. He trusts no one. He deceives those nearest to him. I made out the list of those to be arrested to-night, and your father's name was not ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... a Mississippian gal she'll flare-up like a scorched feather, and return the compliment by bruising your sky-lights, or may-be giving the quid pro quo in the shape of a blunder-buss. Baltimore girls, more beautiful than any in the world, all meet you with a half-smiling, half-saucy, come-kiss-me-if-you-dare kind of a look, but you must be careful of the first essay. After that no difficulty ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... for the murder of the woman? On my life, Quentin, you make a serious blunder unless you can prove all this. When did it ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... course, merely blunder into beauty; his methods are far from being accidental; by deliberate aims and principles he holds himself close to the regions of the decorative. He likes the rococo and the Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace without any busy function. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... merits and demerits of Prince Louis's notable comparison between the Christian religion and the Imperial-revolutionary system. There are many blunders in the above extract as we read it; blundering metaphors, blundering arguments, and blundering assertions; but this is surely the grandest blunder of all; and one wonders at the blindness of the legislator and historian who can advance such a parallel. And what are we to say of the legacy of the dying revolution to Napoleon? Revolutions do not die, and, on their death-beds, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... from the party before him. He had nearly crushed one of them by the fragment of rock which he had detached; and the jovial old hunter, in the broad hat and buck-tail, had fired at the place where he saw the bushes move, supposing it to be some wild animal. He laughed heartily at the blunder; it being what is considered an exceeding good joke among hunters; "but faith, my lad," said he, "if I had but caught a glimpse of you to take sight at, you would have followed the rock. Antony Vander Heyden is seldom known to miss his ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... time he visited Hoskins, to tell him the awful secret, and to see how the situation of that night, with this lurid light upon it, affected him: it could do poor Andersen, now on his way to India, no harm. He yielded to his temptation, at the same time that he confessed his own blunder about the flowers. ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... knowledge of reading, writing and ciphering, with a something of grammar. Miss Brown's childhood had passed under the tutilage of accomplished masters. She could dance, execute a few showy pieces upon the piano without a blunder, utter glibly French and Italian phrases, and had, with the help of her teacher, finished, creditably, a landscape, a gorgeous sunset, of amber and crimson, and purple-tinted clouds, which hung in the most conspicuous ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... you do love me, Beatrice, and your rebellious young American nature dreads surrender." He tried to look into her eyes and smile, but she kept her eyes looking straight ahead. Then Sir Redmond made the biggest blunder of his life, out of the goodness of his heart, and because he hated to ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... are offered to the dead. And as Crassus was haranguing his soldiers, he let fall a word which was thought very ominous in the army; for "I am going," he said, "to break down the bridge, that none of you may return;" and whereas he ought, when he had perceived his blunder, to have corrected himself, and explained his meaning, seeing the men alarmed at the expression, he would not do it out of mere stubbornness. And when at the last general sacrifice the priest gave him the entrails, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... uniform waited upon us at dinner, and that seemed so funny. I wanted to watch him all the time, which distracted me, I suppose, for once I called General Phillips "Mister!" It so happened, too, that just that instant there was not a sound in the room, so everyone heard the blunder. General Phillips straightened back in his chair, and his little son gave a smothered giggle—for which he should have been sent to bed at once. But that was not all! That soldier, who had been so dignified and stiff, put his hand over his mouth ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... dingy palm his first instinct was to take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It—and, oh, what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind's eye! He had tumbled to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged, cold, drifting; and ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... it was a wonder how the poet could be mistaken there, who once herded the very ground where the grave is, and saw both hills from his own window. Mr. L—w testified great surprise at such a singular blunder, as also how the body came not to be buried at the meeting of three or four lairds' lands, which had always been customary in the south of Scotland. Our guide said he had always heard it reported that the Eltrive men, with Mr. David Anderson at their head, had risen before day on the Monday ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... "but some blunder into luck, and others are shrewd and look after the chances. I don't suppose I shall ever be rich, although I ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... distance, he comes furiously towards me, quite possessed by his enmity. At a certain point in his charge a doubt begins to beset him; he moderates his pace; his roaring bark passes into a whine; and as the full measure of his blunder is borne in upon him by my voice, he becomes the picture of shame. In his perplexity, he always finds relief in endeavoring with his paw to scrape a supposititious fly from the side of his nose. He then deals with what I suppose to be an equally imaginary flea; after he has thus gained a few ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... unknown to the public, knowledge of which would partially justify the conduct of the victor toward the vanquished, in 1859; but, if we judge from what we know, which is all that any monarch can demand of the formers of opinion, Napoleon III. was guilty of a monstrous political and military blunder when he forced a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the enemy, the army escaped all disorder, except that arising from a few detachments following corps to which they did not belong. The most remarkable feature of the whole transaction is found in the fact that after such a blunder Berthier should have received the title of ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... and all good things were a very good and wise wish, Lettice," was Aunt Joyce's answer; "but to know evil things, this was the very blunder that our mother Eve made in Eden. Prithee, repeat it not. Now, Aubrey, what ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... are not," and Jacintha laid a grasp of iron on him. "Will you be quiet?—is not one blunder a day enough? If you go near her now, she will affront you, and order the doctor ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... sorry!" said Penuel, in a tone of great distress. "Mother will be sore troubled. Everybody loves Mistress Benden, and few loveth her master. There's some sorry blunder, be ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... a long season at the Exposition. A blunder was somewhere made in dating the arrival of the March King and his splendid instrumentalists, who came while yet the Boston Symphonists were playing in Festival Hall. As a result the finest of bands was placed in competition with the finest of orchestras. But nothing disastrous happened. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... what he would say, to see how he would try to get out of the difficulty or flounder staggeringly through it. Her mother knew in an instant that her own speech had been a stupid blunder. She had put the man into exactly the position Joan would enjoy seeing him in. But he wasn't in a ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... loyalty followed him out of office. This may have been a proper thing to do if their distrust of Shelburne was incurable, but the next step, coalition with Lord North against him, was not only a political blunder, but a shock to party morality, which brought speedy retribution. Either they had been wrong, and violently wrong, for a dozen years, or else Lord North was the guiltiest political instrument since ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... made and accepted through the telephone. However, one is subjected to frequent annoyances from wrong connections at the Central Office, and sometimes grave errors are made. Once, through a serious blunder, or a mischievous joke, I lost a dinner in my Legation in Washington. My valet received a telephone message from a lady friend inviting me to dine at her house. I gladly accepted the invitation, and at the appointed time drove to her home, only to find that there was no dinner-party ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... bravery as he did, the fortunes of the day would have been vastly different; but though personally brave, he was no genius in war, and his fatal determination to fight the battle on foot was a gross blunder in military tactics. Even when he and his division were being charged by the Prince of Wales at full gallop, at the head of two thousand lances, the men all flushed with victory, John made his own men dismount, and himself did the same, ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... somebody's blunder," Barrett offered. "These section plats we have been studying may have been made after the locations were staked out; in all probability that was the case. That sort of thing happens easily in a new country ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... information; because," he added a bit wistfully, "that little word chuck she annoy me exceeding and make me for not sleep that I must grasp the meaning fich elude. I am now happy that I do not make the extensive blunder for one small word fich I apprehend must be a food fich I must buy and perhaps not to understand the preparation of it. Yes? It is the excellent jest at the ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... old age, crowned with honour? It was not yet God's time in 1817, but God's time was helped forward, as it generally is, by this anticipation of it. It is a commonplace that a premature outbreak puts back the hands of the clock and is a blunder. Nine times out of ten this is untrue, and a revolt instantaneously quenched in blood is not merely the precursor, but ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... denounced, by the best critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however, concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own critics, was still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... be bound and dragged until he dies? Shall dogs devour the scoundrel as he lies? If he should be impaled, 't would be no blunder, Nor if we had the ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... they persisted in their present plan they would be adding another to the list. And as to their power to help us positively, it is nil. Their initial omission to send a formidable military force to Poland was an irreparable blunder, for it left them without an executive in eastern Europe, where they now can help none of their protegees against their respective enemies. Poles, Rumanians, Jugoslavs are all left to themselves. From the Allies they may expect inspiriting telegrams, but little else. In fact, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... on Monday morning she sent a person to Captain Watson's, to know if Mrs. Veal was there. They wondered at Mrs. Bargrave's inquiry; and sent her word, that she was not there, nor was expected. At this answer Mrs. Bargrave told the maid she had certainly mistook the name, or made some blunder. And though she was ill, she put on her hood, and went herself to Captain Watson's though she knew none of the family, to see if Mrs. Veal was there or not. They said, they wondered at her asking, for that she had not been in town; they were sure, if she had, she would have been there. Says Mrs. ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... and wrote articles upon Altars and Abbeys and Architecture. B made a blunder which C corrected. D demonstrated that E was in error, and that F was wrong in Philology, and neither Philosopher nor Physician though he affected to be both. G was a Genealogist. H was a Herald who helped him. I was an inquisitive ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... declaration, Cagatinta bounded from his chair as if stung by a wasp; and the blood ran cold in his veins when he perceived the grand blunder he had ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... no danger of his backing out of his bargain. Seated at the desk, he perused his folly, and grunted with exasperation. Well, after all, what of it? He had coveted a masterpiece; now he was to have two in one—the contemplation of his own blunder, and Mrs. Marteen's criminal genius—cheap at the price. How long had this been going on? Whom had she victimized? And how in the world had she been able to obtain the whole correspondence? That his lawyers should have been deceived by copies was not so surprising—they ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... Hooker and Sickles both testify that the panic of the Eleventh Corps produced a gap in the line, and that this was the main cause of disaster on this field. But the fatal gap was made long before the Eleventh Corps was attacked. It was Hooker's giddy blunder in ordering away, two miles in their front, the entire line from Dowdall's ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... out of camp before we arrived, but as yet not a tent was struck nor a wagon loaded, and most of the men were asleep in their quarters. The Sixth corps was obliged to halt and stand in the mud for hours, waiting for the delinquent corps to get out of the way. Here was the first blunder of the new campaign. ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... not for one moment to be considered, whether the Stralsund authorities might not have blundered. It was a dangerous notion to put into people's heads, that the Stralsund authorities, of whom he was one, could blunder. Blunders meant a reproof from headquarters and a retarded career; their possibility, therefore, was not to be entertained for a moment. Even should they have been made, it must not get about that they had been made. He accordingly ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... alone to cope with Hungary, committed the immeasurable blunder of calling in the 200,000 Russians who made conquest certain, but the price of whose aid she may still have to pay. Venice, and Venice only, continued to defy her power. Since Novara, the first result of which was the withdrawal of the Sardinian Commissioners, who had taken over ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... and lived happily, very happily, although they had their sorrows, as others have. The schoolmaster was man enough to keep the knowledge of his blunder a secret between himself ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... hope so. You must know she was regularly struck with dear Papa. I am sure he is the first saint in her calendar, and everything is—"What did Cousin Edward say?" And when once she has made up her mind that a thing is right, she will blunder on through fire and water, but she will ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... last of the Goths, has been laid hold of by legend and by poetry. Southey wrote his poem on the theme, and Scott his "Vision of Don Roderic," an odd blunder in the title, as don was not used prior to the ninth century. Roderic ascended the throne of the Goths in Spain in 709. According to the legend he seduced the daughter of Julian, Count of the Gothic possessions in Africa. She complained to her father, and he in revenge invited ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... Pye Smith, and comprises divines such as Hitchcock and the Archbishop of Canterbury now,—is worthy of being noted. In two sermons, "Christianity without Judaism," written by this clergyman of the Church of England, to show that all days of the week are alike, and the Christian Sabbath a mere blunder, I find the following passage:—"Some divines have consistently rejected all geology and all science as profane and carnal; and some even, when pretending to call themselves men of science, have stooped to the miserable ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... I pursued with so much diligence and sagacity, that I was able to relate, of every man whom I knew, some blunder or miscarriage; to betray the most circumspect of my friends into follies, by a judicious flattery of his predominant passion; or expose him to contempt, by placing him in circumstances which put his prejudices into action, brought to view his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... [7] By some strange blunder, Lichefild says they came to Cananor; but from all the circumstances in the contexts, it is obvious that the fleet came to anchor on the outside ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... forty years," replied the Earl. "Ah, child, dost thou make that blunder?—dost thou think the child's sorrows worse than the man's? I have known both, and I tell thee the one is not to be compared to the other. Young hearts are apt to think it, for grief is a thing new and strange to them. But if ever it become to thee as ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... yet. The stake was too big. He was playing for all that life held worth having. He couldn't rush a girl of that kind. A blunder would be fatal. He had a reputation as a flirt. She had heard it, no doubt. He must put his house in order. His word must ring true. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... Frontiers of Egypt. She was found alone, and in a very disconsolate Condition. This Lady must, doubtless, said they to themselves, be the Queen of Babylon: And without listning to her Complaints, convey'd her instantly to my Husband Moabdar. Their gross Blunder at first incens'd his Majesty to the last Degree; but after he had view'd the Lady with an attentive Eye, he found she was extremely pretty, and was soon pacify'd. Her Name was Missouf. I have been since inform'd, that her Name in the Egyptian Language ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... should have believed, as late as October fourth, that he would not be condemned to death. Even more pathetic that his friends and comrades should once more have made the blunder in crediting the enemy with a sense of justice. Time and again they had placed faith in the judicial powers, only to see their brothers killed before their very eyes. They made no preparation to rescue Ferrer, not even a protest ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... th' tables are. Don't fumble this thing. When Olga or Minna comes waddlin' up t' you an' says: 'Nu, Fraulein?' you gotta tell her whether your heart says plum-kuchen oder Nusstorte, or both, see? Just like that. Now make up your mind. I'd hate t' have you blunder. ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... precipitates itself with the same lack of sense and reason that marks the loafer's gravitation toward a lighted groggery. Moreover, in the beetle phase, it is sure to appear at the most inopportune times and unsuitable places, creating the inevitable commotion which the blunder and tactless are born to make. As it whisks aimlessly around, it may hit the clergyman's nose in the most pathetic sentence of his sermon, or drop into the soprano's mouth at the supreme climax of her trill. Satan himself could scarcely produce a more complete absence of devotion than ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... first in the field with these pleasant and genial theories; but M. Ghil informs us that Rimbaud was mistaken in many things, particularly in coupling the sound of the vowel u with the colour green instead of with the colour yellow. M. Ghil has corrected this very stupid blunder and many others; and his instrumentation in his last volume, "Le Geste Ingenu," may be considered as complete and definitive. The work is dedicated to Mallarme, "Pere et seigneur des ors, des pierreries, et des poissons," and other works are ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God, having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' And so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... this intelligence is at times, or how wanting in judgment, may be seen when it tries to develop a callosity upon the foot as a result of the friction of the shoe, and overdoes the matter and produces the corn. The corn is a physiological blunder. Or see an unexpected manifestation of this intelligence when we cut off the central and leading shoot of a spruce or of a pine tree, and straightway one of the lateral and horizontal branches rises up, takes the place of the lost leader, ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... clever woman in spite her blunder about you; and had I dealt with her only I should have thought that she might have expressed herself as she did, and still have had the paper in her own keeping. I could not read her mind as I could read his. Women ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... his daughter Lucy, which has never yet been seen in any exhibition or loan collection. "Oho," says Master, "then I won't fight a chap who has a daughter like that." Ha! Mad bull "heard without"—one of the "herd without,"—Master picks up blunderbuss, no blunder, makes a hit and saves a miss; i.e., Lucy. What shall he have who kills the bull with a bull 'it? Why, a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890 • Various
... the two danced with delight. Many in the situation of Fred Greenwood would have laughed at Jack and "guyed" him over his blunder, but the incident was too dreadful and the terror of his friend too intense for Fred to wish to amuse himself at his expense. However, he could not help indulging just a trifle. Suddenly pausing in his antics he looked down ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... in a towering rage because such a blunder had been made, and called upon the fleetest ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... endeavour to make the facts of this transaction known, had placed what it called the domicile of this company in Paris, whereas it was ascertained that its official head-quarters had in truth been placed at Vienna. Was not such a blunder as this sufficient to show that no merchant of higher honour than Mr Melmotte had ever adorned the Exchanges of modern capitals? And then two different newspapers of the time, both of them antagonistic to Melmotte, failed to be in accord on a material point. One declared that Mr Melmotte ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... invective were twenty new enemies whom Napoleon sent into the provinces, and who would bring a new hostile army—public opinion—into the field against him. Many hoped that the emperor, perceiving his blunder, would call back the deputies by some pleasant word, in order to bring about a reconciliation between him and those who, whatever the emperor might say, represented in the throne-hall the opinion ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... Verrinder by the name of Mr. Hilary. The association was clear, for Mr. Hilary had called Mr. Verrinder atrocious names in Parliament; but it was like calling "Mr. Capulet" "Mr. Montague." Marie Louise tried to redeem her blunder by putting on an extra effusiveness for the sake of Mr. and Mrs. Norcross. Mrs. Norcross had only recently shaken off the name of Mrs. Patchett after a resounding divorce. So Marie Louise called her new husband by the name of her old, which made ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... the same thing precisely happens when men of scientific eminence indulge in religious dissertations, for of course, though it is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same blunder is quite possible in non-scientific fields of knowledge. I once asked one versed in theology what he thought of the religious articles of a distinguished man, unfamiliar himself with theology, yet, none the less, then splashing freely and to the great admiration of the ignorant, in the ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us And foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... phrase, induced me suddenly to make all possible allowances for him. I ceased to be annoyed at my unexpected predicament. It was some mistake on his part; he was blundering, and I had an intuition that the blunder was of an odious, of an unfortunate nature. I was anxious to end this scene on grounds of decency, just as one is anxious to cut short some unprovoked and abominable confidence. The funniest part was, that in the midst of all these considerations of the higher order I was conscious of a certain trepidation ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... suffering!" rather impatiently asserted Malcom. "If either had died, then the other might have borne it patiently and been just as noble. But such a blunder! I threw the book aside in disgust, for the author had absorbed me with interest, and ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... Brigade!' Was there a man dismay'd? Not though the soldier knew Some one had blunder'd. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... therefore our duty—not because it is ours, and therefore, under the Constitution of the United States, her right and her fate. The admission of that ill-omened and unfounded claim would be, at the bar of politics, a colossal blunder; at the bar of ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... together, these biographies contain the history, upon the civil side, of the war period. Seward represents the policy of the administration as a whole, for all civil business centred in the office of the secretary of state. He was a man of extraordinary ability. It is true that he made a strange blunder or two, at the outset, odd episodes in his intelligent, clear-sighted, cool-headed career,—psychologically interesting, as has been suggested; but he immediately recovered himself and settled down to that course of wise statesmanship which ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... the object of his mission without perpetrating, as he thought, any disastrous blunder, Mr. Sapp brought the interview to a close with a few commonplace remarks, and hurried away to enjoy in solitary self-communion the ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... your Highness; the past has disturbed you. We can stand war, and it is possible that we might win, even against Jugendheit; but war at this late day would be a colossal blunder. Victory would leave us where we began thirty years ago. One does not go to war for a cause that has been practically dead these sixteen years. And an insult to Jugendheit might precipitate war. It would be far wiser to let me answer the ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... blunder-heads," two frizzled physicians of the last century, and the invariably accompanying cane, or Esculapian wand. This edition is by Mr. Britton, who has prefixed a dedication and an essay on the genius of Anstey, both of which sparkle with humour and lively anecdote; and an amusing sketch ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... and were accessible by anybody. Dare took occasion to go and study both sets, with a view to finding a flaw in Somerset's which might have been passed over unnoticed by the committee of architects, owing to their absence from the actual site. But not a blunder could he find. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... at her and bit his lip. He was annoyed with himself for his blunder and with her for being anything but Rhoda Vivian—pure ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... anon." So the Chaplain came in. Now the servants say he is my sweetheart, Because he's always in my chamber, and I always take his part. So, as the devil would have it, before I was aware, out I blunder'd, "Parson" said I, "can you cast a nativity, when a body's plunder'd?" (Now you must know, he hates to be called Parson, like the devil!) "Truly," says he, "Mrs. Nab, it might become you to be more civil; If your money be gone, as a learned Divine says,[12] d'ye ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... sympathy drew the composer to her. After the death of her husband, she persuaded Haydn to sign a promise to marry her if his wife should die, but the composer afterward repudiated the agreement, very likely not wishing to repeat his first matrimonial blunder. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... such set trash of phrase Ineffably—legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,— Nor even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of endless torments and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... These two expedients, adopted by the Directory in the summer of 1799, were temporary measures adopted to stem the tide of invasion and to crush revolts; but they were regarded as signs of a permanently terrorist policy, and their removal greatly strengthened the new consular rule. The blunder of nearly all the revolutionary governments had been in continuing severe laws after the need for them had ceased to be pressing. Bonaparte, with infinite tact, discerned this truth, and, as will shortly appear, set himself to found his government on the support of that vast neutral ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... griev'd we cannot smoke the Pipe of Peace, And part with stronger Proofs of Love and Friendship; Meantime we hope you'll so consider Matters, As still to keep the Hatchet dull and buried, And open wide the shining Path of Peace, That you and we may walk without a Blunder. [Exeunt INDIANS. ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... necessity. But that, the American Union is indissoluble is essential to our national existence. If that be not so, we have neither a flag nor a country,—we can neither contract a debt nor make a treaty,—we have neither honor abroad nor strength at home,—our experiment of free government is a blunder and a failure, and for us, "Chaos ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Bad blunder all I have to say, It is a most unchristian way To rig Miss Moll Carew— She has my hat, my cut of hair, Just such an ulster as I wear, And ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... ordinary concrete is cheaper than rubble concrete. We may add that if the quarry yields a rock that breaks up naturally into small sized blocks, it is the height of economic folly to specify large sized cyclopean blocks. Nevertheless this blunder has been frequently ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... still, we have learned practically to appreciate the difference between our Saviour's gentle I must lead ([Greek: dei me agagein]) and our forefathers' various attempts to produce "uniformity" by driving. The reproach of that sinful blunder is one that none of our greater Churches—Roman, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Puritan—can cast in another's teeth. Each of us committed it in our day of triumph. "What fruit had we then in those things whereof we are now ashamed?" The memory—one-sided, and carefully cultivated—of what ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... fights the reservoir by silent cohesion. There is a temptation, from which some people suffer, to think that one can't be fighting for God at all, unless one is doing it furiously, and all the time, and successfully, and on a large and impressive scale. That is a fatal blunder. To hide your adversary's sword is often a very good way of fighting. To have an open tussle often makes the bystanders sympathise with the assailant. It is really a far more civilised thing, and often stands for a higher degree of force and honour, to be able to bear ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... certain sense, we were to be our own masters for a few hours. Billy Wise, the captain's steward, was also sent in the boat. I have not mentioned Billy for some time. He had not, however, improved in sense since he came to sea this time, but was continually committing some extraordinary blunder or other. Toby Bluff also accompanied us. The boat was manned and ready to shove off, but Grey had not appeared, so I ran up the side to call him, leaving Billy in charge. I was not gone a minute, for Grey, who was waiting for a basket to collect shells, at once joined me. ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... Hall' was in proof, Ellis's and Acton's publisher sold it to an American firm as the last and finest production of the author of 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights.' Strange, that even a publisher could so blunder, even for his own interest. However, this mistake caused sufficient confusion at Cornhill to make it necessary that the famous Charlotte, accompanied by Anne, in her quality of secondary and mistakable genius, should go to ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... common practice, which, to own the truth, had proceeded from his own obstinacy, and had been done in the very teeth of the objections of the scribe who forged the papers. But Andrea was still too little of an English scholar to understand the blunder, and the Jack passed, with him, quite as currently as would "John," "Edward," or any other appellation. As to the Wing-and-Wing, all was right; though, as the words were pointed out and pronounced by both parties, one pertinaciously ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... for, when the drawbridge was drawn slowly up that evening, it was ten men, and three of them unarmed, against a regiment; and short and terrible would have been the shrift accorded to them had an inkling of suspicion arisen, or had the slightest blunder, or ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... morals to this tale on which young men had better reflect. First mistake: Eugene thought it would be amusing to make Madame de Listomere laugh at the blunder which had made her the recipient of a love-letter which was not intended for her. Second mistake: he did not call on Madame de Listomere for several days after the adventure, thus allowing the thoughts of that virtuous young woman ...
— Study of a Woman • Honore de Balzac
... than that a nation, after having assured itself that an enterprise will benefit the community, should have it executed by means of a general assessment. But I lose patience, I confess, when I hear this economic blunder advanced in support of such a project—"Besides, it will be a means of creating ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... individual, the sphere of applications is as long and broad and deep as life itself. Not only do the internal secretions open up before us the great hope—that Life at last will cease to stumble and grope and blunder, manacled by the iron chains of inexorable cause and effect. They provide tools, concrete and measurable, that can be handled and moved, weighed and seen, for the management of the problems of human ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of woman,' soliloquized Percy, as he saw the carriage drive off. 'Gentleness, meekness, and a dash of good sense, is the recipe for a rational female—otherwise she is a blunder of nature. The same stamp as her sister, I see; nothing wanting, but air and the beauty, which, luckily for ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and beautiful quality of fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the quality of refinement. And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection. One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negative has offered up a singular blunder in honour of robustiousness. Refinement is not negative, because it must be compassed by many negations. It is a thing of price as well as of value; it demands immolations, it exacts experience. No slight or easy charge, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... former the stones of the chapter-house, which had been doubtless much injured but not irreparably so. In the cathedral itself he erected a mass of masonry intended to support the central tower, which was, however, nothing but a hideous architectural blunder. In itself it was ugly to behold, and actually weakened by lateral pressure that which it was intended to support. He also presented an elaborate altar-piece and Grecian oak screen with scenic decoration above, boards painted to represent curtains, and wooden imitations of tassels which hung ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... to have perceived at once that Berkeley must have been responsible for the Rebellion. He probably cared very little whether the old Governor oppressed the people or not, so long as he kept them quiet, but it was an inexcusable blunder for him to drive them into insurrection. Charles himself, it is said, had resolved long before, never to resume his travels; he now wondered why Sir William had brought upon himself this forced journey to Accomac. He decided to institute ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... last attempt to break away from the benumbing power of opium, and in his desperation had sought freedom in death. Let no man judge him, and least of all those who are strangers to the fascinating and infernal strength of his enemy. You may call it a grave mistake, a dreadful blunder, a doleful insanity, but do not assume to put him beyond the reach of mercy, or to decide that his lamentable end was not the iron door through which he may have passed to the city of ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... was intense. For themselves they were unconcerned, believing that their share in the matter was unknown, and that the Government was without a particle of evidence against them. And here we find that another blunder was made. Major Robert White, one of the raiders, had brought with him a despatch-box containing the key to a cypher, which had been used during the whole of the negotiations, and with it the names of the principal persons engaged in the conspiracy. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Gulliver having been received into the ship's cabin, he calls upon the crew to bring the box into the cabin, and put it on the table, the cabin being only a quarter the size of the box. It is the veracity of the blunder which is so admirable. Had a man come from such a country as Brobdingnag ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... realized that the power to inspect and sum up existed only on her own side. This pretty woman neither knew what inquiries to make nor cared for such replies as were given. Being swift to reason and practical in deduction, Mademoiselle Valle did not make the blunder of deciding that this light presence argued that she would be under no supervision more serious. The excellent Benby, one was made aware, acted and the excellent Benby, one was made aware, acted under clearly defined orders. Milord Coombe—among other ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... prevent its occurrence. If, on the contrary, it be caused by an event, that which has been occasioned by anything human, by the co-operation of human circumstances, can be, and invariably is, removed by the same means. Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of Grief the blunder of a life. Mix in the world, and in a month's time you will speak to me very differently. A young man, you meet with disappointment; in spite of all your exalted notions of your own powers, you immediately sink under it. If your belief of your powers were sincere, you should have proved it by ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... fraternity; but they failed to climb the heights which with anointed eyes they saw. To us, their children, belongs the work to build up the living reality of what they conceived and uttered. It is not our mission to criticise the past. Nations, like individuals, must blunder and repent. It is not wise to waste our energy in vain regret, but from each failure we should rise up with renewed conscience and courage for nobler action. The follies and faults of yesterday we cast aside as the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... you will help me out," she said to John as he bowed and seated himself. "'Some one has blundered,' and here is a whole bottle of champagne which must be drunk to save it. Are you prepared to help turn my, or somebody's, blunder into hospitality?" ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... responsible for that blunder, which in most countries would certainly have evoked a cry of betrayal, the mainsheet of Nelson's Victory would be all too inadequate as a penitential white sheet and far too illustrious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... went away in the midst of dinner? There's a man opposite staring at us now! You're not as tactful as you were the night of the burglar. Then, you did just the right thing, cleverly and bravely. For that I can forgive you a good deal—but not everything. Now you make one blunder ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... damned weak I am," he said to himself. The adventure was like a blunder that one had committed at a party so horrible that one felt nothing could be done to excuse it: the only remedy was to forget. His horror at the degradation he had suffered helped him. He was like a snake casting ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Kerby's place. I did not know who else to call upon—of course I could not go out into the audience to find some one, and thus betray my predicament to everybody; neither could I take one of the housemaids, because she would have been sure to blunder and be so awkward. Oh! isn't this ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... seemed worse than ever. The Eusebians had behaved discreditably enough, but they had at least frustrated the council, and secured a recognition of their creed from a large body of Eastern conservatives. So far they had been fairly successful, but the next move on their side was a blunder and worse. When the Sardican envoys, Vincent of Capua and Euphrates of Cologne, came eastward in the spring of 344, a harlot was brought one night into their lodgings. Great was the scandal when the plot was traced up to the Eusebian leader, Stephen of Antioch. A new council ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... curious circumstance is said to have occurred. By some mistake of General Mack's, in directing the operations of a feigned fight, it so happened that his own troops were completely surrounded by those of the enemy; when Lord Nelson, vexed at the unfortunate and inauspicious blunder, immediately exclaimed, to his surrounding friends—"This fellow ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... and patriotic warmth evaporated at once, at this sudden inlet of cold air into the conversation. He perceived that he had made a terrible blunder; and, as it was not his business at that moment to vindicate the British constitution, but to serve Leonard Fairfield, he abandoned the cause of the aristocracy with the most poltroon and scandalous abruptness. Catching at the arm which Mr. Avenel ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... he. 'We have got our case—one of the most remarkable in our collection. But, dear me, how slow-witted I have been, and how nearly I have committed the blunder of my lifetime! Now, I think that, with a few missing links, my chain is ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... and challenging the British control of the sea. Had the French navy been more efficient and energetic in its leadership France might have made her ancient enemy pay far more dearly for her strategic blunder. As it was, England lost ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... connection with the Transvaal War of 1881. I gazed mournfully on Majuba Hill, that black spot of bitter memories to every Briton, and of natural exultation and pride to the Boers; and on Colley's grave, the unfortunate commander, whose unhappy and most unaccountable military blunder led to the lamentable and fatal defeat, which cost him his life, and resulted in the miserable fiasco—the retrocession of the Transvaal to the Boers. It is impossible to estimate the damage done to British influence, prestige, and ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... to have pedestals of their own; to be on their guard; to have a reputation to maintain; to conceal the "dram of folly;" to be, to that extent, artificial in their relations with men. They dare not betray the "laughable blunder," which, said Charles Lamb, is the test your neighbour giveth you "that he will not ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... then, express our disapprobation of Homer, or any other poet, who is guilty of such a foolish blunder as to tell us (Iliad, xxiv. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, And foolish notion; What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... always been members of the solar family. Some of them, indeed, we know were adopted into it by the influence of one or other of the greater planets: Uranus we know is responsible for the introduction of one, Jupiter of a considerable number. The vast majority of comets, great or small, seem to blunder into the solar system anyhow, anywhere, from any direction: they come within the attractive influence of the sun; obey his laws whilst within that influence; make one close approach to him, passing rapidly across ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... gate the carriage which was to take us to the station. Now came the moment when I was tried by the crucible and found to be dross. I committed the most foolish blunder of my life. My love suddenly overleapt its bounds. In a moment my arms were around her lithe body; my lips met hers squarely. After it was done she stood very still, as if incapable of understanding my offence. But I understood. I was overwhelmed ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... after one of these absences, I appear to him in the distance, he comes furiously towards me, quite possessed by his enmity. At a certain point in his charge a doubt begins to beset him; he moderates his pace; his roaring bark passes into a whine; and as the full measure of his blunder is borne in upon him by my voice, he becomes the picture of shame. In his perplexity, he always finds relief in endeavoring with his paw to scrape a supposititious fly from the side of his nose. He then deals with what I suppose to be an equally imaginary flea; after he ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... will devote myself to the only real powers which can enlighten us. Yet there is humiliation in failure after so many years of study. It is folly to follow a partial truth of which we miss the keynote, though we sometimes blunder on its harmonies." ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... homeward—he the calmest and most far-seeing of all authorities on the Bourse—the man who, excepting only De Mauleon, most decidedly deemed the cause of the war a blunder, and most forebodingly anticipated its issues, caught the prevalent enthusiasm. Everywhere he was stopped by cordial hands, everywhere met by congratulating smiles. "How right you have been, Duplessis, when you have laughed at those who have said, 'The Emperor is ill, decrepit, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... symbolised by the law and Gospel. Again, some that the two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's supper, were these two witnesses, and so on almost without end. These instances will suffice for our present purpose; for surely any of you reading God's own Word need not so blunder. ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... officer seems to notice them. Abbot's thoughts are evidently far away, and he makes no reply. The surgeon who sanctions his return to field duty yet a while would, to all appearances, be guilty of a professional blunder. The lieutenant's face is pale and thin; his hand looks very fragile and fearfully white in contrast with the bronze of his cheek. He leans his head upon his hand as he gazes away into the distance, and the colonel stands attentively regarding him. He recalls the young fellow's gallant and spirited ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... me with any message you may have to send," replied Hsiao Hung with a laugh. "I'll readily go and deliver it. Should I not do so faithfully, and blunder in fulfilling your business, my lady, you may visit me with any punishment your ladyship may please, and I'll have ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... murder of the Earl of Norbury, on 1 Jan., set all tongues wagging. His Lordship was walking in the shrubbery, near his own house at Kilbeggan, in the county of Meath, talking to his steward, and pointing out to him some trees he wished to have cut down, when some miscreant, behind a hedge, fired a blunder-buss loaded with swan shot at him, and he fell, mortally wounded. He lived for 43 hours afterwards—but his assassin ran away and escaped; nor, in spite of large rewards offered, was ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... could speak he had his own fur-lined coat off, insisting that she should put it on. "I can take Casa Triana's," said he, "since he's still posing as a soldier of Spain." And a glance warned me not to blunder by asking why, in the name of common sense, she shouldn't have mine which I wasn't using, instead of his, which was on his back. He wanted her to wear his coat, and ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the English mind than this intended crime; and it strengthened the prejudices against the Catholics even more than the persecutions under Queen Mary. Had the crime been consummated, it would only have proved a blunder. It would have shocked and irritated the nation beyond all self-control; and it is probable that the whole Catholic population would have been assassinated, or hunted out, as victims for the scaffold, in every corner of England. It proved, however, a great misfortune, and the severest blow ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... to speak. Now that it was too late she did see the silly, stupid blunder she had made, and she could have bitten out ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... all." He looked at me. "What's he mean, Mister?" He looked almost surprised with himself at catching the drift of Sarakoff's sentence. Inwardly he felt something insistent and imperious, forcing him to grasp words, to blunder into new meanings. Some new force was alive in him and he was carried on by it in spite of himself. He felt strung up to a pitch of nervous irritation. He got up from his chair and came forward, pointing at Sarakoff. "What's this?" he demanded. "Why don't ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... all," said the judge. "That was a blunder, indeed. I merely told him I wanted to see you. I wanted to see if you could throw any light on ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... took a wagon and made a week's hunt, returning with eight or ten deer carcasses, and perhaps an elk or a mountain sheep as well. I never became more than a fair hunter, and at times I had most exasperating experiences, either failing to see game which I ought to have seen, or committing some blunder in the stalk, or failing to kill when I fired. Looking back, I am inclined to say that if I had any good quality as a hunter it was that of perseverance. "It is dogged that does it" in hunting as in many other things. Unless in wholly exceptional cases, when we were very hungry, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... conclusion, rush to a conclusion, leap to a conclusion, judge hastily, shoot from the hip, jump to conclusions; look only at one side of the shield; view with jaundiced eye, view through distorting spectacles; not see beyond one's nose; dare pondus fumo[Lat]; get the wrong sow by the ear &c. (blunder) 699. give a bias, give a twist; bias, warp, twist; prejudice, prepossess. Adj. misjudging &c. v.; ill-judging, wrong-headed; prejudiced &c. v.; jaundiced; shortsighted, purblind; partial, one-sided, superficial. narrow-minded, narrow-souled[obs3]; mean-spirited; confined, illiberal, intolerant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... They showed him that the marae was completely deserted now, the group about the cooking-place having retired into the whares for the night. If he only knew which of those silent whares held Dick, a rescue was possible. To blunder on the wrong whare would only serve ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... the title of "champion of the world," Rustem escorted the stupid king home, but this monarch, not satisfied with this blunder, committed one folly after another. We are told that he even undertook to fly, his special make of aeroplane being a carpet borne by four starving eagles, fastened to the four corners of its frame, and frantically striving to reach a piece of meat fixed temptingly ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... thirty-seventh of the era to the forty-eighth inclusive should be common years, by which means the intercalations were reduced to the proper number of twelve in forty-eight years. No account is taken of this blunder in chronology; and it is tacitly supposed that the calendar has been correctly followed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... vain to clear matters up. Your aunt would insist that I took her to be forty, and the fun that my blunder made rather drew us together, and gave me a start over the other fellows at the station, half of whom fell straightway in love with her. Some months went on, and when the mutiny broke out we were engaged to be married. It is a proof of how completely ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... in power some day, he shows that to rule well requires other things than one-sidedness in the ruling person; and is fortunate if he does not acquire that part of renown which consists in notoriety, by committing some colossal blunder, ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... silly blunder of my copyist evidently has more interest for you than it has for me. I will send my private secretary to you and let him discuss the subject with you ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... sovereign, and one of whom, Egmont, had performed distinguished services for his country and king, was profound. A wave of mingled rage and sorrow swept over the land. It was not only an act of cruel injustice, but even as an act of policy a blunder of the first magnitude, which was sure to bring, as it did bring, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... quick, Count! Aye, aye, that was a blunder indeed. Don't you see the dogs? There they run—they have lost the scent. [Exit Baron ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... could speak like a native, and he had dabbled in the humanities; but he would drag forth my smattering of learning with so much glee that one might have thought him ignorant of the plainest A B C of the matter. More than once I have known him blunder in a Latin quotation that I might correct him. Aileen and he had a hundred topics in common from which I was excluded by reason of my ignorance of the Highlands, but the Macdonald was as sly as a ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... didn't mean that," said she flushing up at the thought that in trying to express herself she had made such a blunder. "I meant—I meant, that this something about the place that is always reminding me of itself might make ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... down the road to the stable, and cursed the impulse that had made him blunder so. He had no compunctions for the lie, if only it had done any good. It had done harm; he could see now that it had. But he could not believe that it would make any material difference in Aleck's case. As the story had been repeated to Lite ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... turned to to lick me, and what with keeping you apart and holding you off, and taking your valuables away from you all at the same time, and me all alone here as it was the night-man's day-off, I've made a blunder of it. Just take your change out of the wad, and call for a drink on me when you feel like ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... just the intonation of that phrase, induced me suddenly to make all possible allowances for him. I ceased to be annoyed at my unexpected predicament. It was some mistake on his part; he was blundering, and I had an intuition that the blunder was of an odious, of an unfortunate nature. I was anxious to end this scene on grounds of decency, just as one is anxious to cut short some unprovoked and abominable confidence. The funniest part was, that in the midst of all these considerations of the higher order I was conscious of a certain ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... with the man they suspect. I want you to be just with me. You are not to blame my father for anything, no matter how absurd his actions may appear to you in the light of the past few days. It is right that he should try to safeguard me. I am wayward but I am not foolish. I shall commit no silly blunder, you may be sure of that. Now do you ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... E. Allison did not write "Derelict," let him come to me like a man and say so and I'll give him a good swift stab in the eye, with my eye, and say: "You don't want to be convinced." This includes the editor of The New York Times Book Review. When he made an egregious blunder by stating that "Derelict" was an unskilled sailor's jingle, a wave of protest reached him. He then printed Walt Mason's letter describing the poem as a work of art and altered his editorial characterization of it to "famous old chanty." In the same breath he wrote ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... the movement of alliterative verse got the initial or the final beat? In the middle of the 18th century Bishop Percy decided this question with sufficient accuracy, though he mixed up his statement with a blunder which it is not easy to account for. He points out how the poets began to introduce rhyme into alliterative verse, until at length rhyme came to predominate over alliteration, and "thus was this kind of metre at length ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... which you have referred, senor, was a most deplorable blunder on the Viceroy's part; but I had no hand in it, and I must refuse to be held responsible for it. You must yourself surely admit that it would be unjust in the extreme to make me answerable for the actions of a man over whom I ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... orator of such set trash of phrase Ineffably—legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile; Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of endless ...
— English Satires • Various
... Kinsella, came towards them from the boat He was bent on being particularly polite to Miss Rutherford, feeling that he ought to atone for his unfortunate blunder with the boat He took off his cap ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... uneasiness and lack of application to the matter in hand, and made evident his irritation by even longer pauses before each play. He liked a semblance of opposition at least, and he lifted his head, scowling a little at Ogden's last, most flagrant blunder, to find that his antagonist had moved without so much as looking at the piece he had ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... Blunder! golden idol, hail!— Clay-footed deity of all who fail. Celestial image, let thy glory shine, Thy feet concealing, but a lamp to mine. Let me, at seasons opportune and fit, By turns adore thee and by turns commit. In thy high service let me ever be (Yet never serve thee as my critics ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... the Literary Panorama for March, 1812. To the reviewer's dismay, the article, which appeared before the poem was out, was shown to Byron, who was paying a short visit to his old friends at Harrow. Dallas quaked, but "as it proved no bad advertisement," he escaped censure. "The blunder passed unobserved, eclipsed by the dazzling brilliancy of the object which had caused it" ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... army tone; he meant to be punctiliously polite; perhaps he was a little stiff in his politeness. But he was young, had had small practice in society, was somewhat hampered by modesty, and so sometimes made a blunder. Such things annoyed him excessively; a breach of etiquette seemed something like a breach of orders; hadn't meant to charge Coronado with drawing the long bow; couldn't help coloring about it. Didn't think much of Coronado, but stood somewhat in awe of ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... every weak-headed noodle says when he has made a blunder. Well, Leigh, it is fortunate for you that I was sufficiently recovered to resume the command; but of all the pickles which one of his majesty's ships could be got into, this is about the worst. Here we are as helpless as a turned turtle on ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... me: the music was merry: I was reckless, and my companions were full of glee. Even the ennuye skipped up and down the room like a school-boy: I never shall forget Richard's happy and relieved expression, when I laughed aloud at somebody's amusing blunder. ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... love you when he discovers the trick! What a boor he makes of himself to cover his designs! Here is a bag of trouble, and necessity has forced our hands into it. For all his gruffness and seeming impatience, D'Herouville has never yet made a blunder or ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... know if Mrs. Veal was there. They wondered at Mrs. Bargrave's inquiry; and sent her word, that she was not there, nor was expected. At this answer Mrs. Bargrave told the maid she had certainly mistook the name, or made some blunder. And though she was ill, she put on her hood, and went herself to Captain Watson's though she knew none of the family, to see if Mrs. Veal was there or not. They said, they wondered at her asking, for that she had not been in town; they were sure, if she had, she would have ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... books, is the rather humiliating one that they are not worth making. The specific weight of individual words is in them of so little influence, that one does as well as another. Instances could indeed be pointed out, where an incidental blunder has much improved a sentence, giving it the point which its author failed to achieve—as a scratch or an accidental splash of the brush sometimes supplies the painter with the ray or the cloud which ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... to all readers of this narrative that from the moment M. Zola left Paris, and throughout his sojourn in London and its immediate neighbourhood, there was little if any skill shown in the matter of keeping his movements secret. In point of fact, blunder upon blunder was committed. A first mistake was made in going to an hotel like the Grosvenor; a second in openly promenading some of the most frequented of the London streets; and a third in declining to make the slightest ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... with affectations of diction, do not always invalidate general statements or conclusions,—for a bad writer often equivocates out of a blunder as he equivocates into one,—but I have been strict in pointing out the confusions of idea admitted in scientific books between the movement of a swing, that of a sounding violin chord, and that of ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... gone smoothly," he thought, "I should have cursed the fellow's stupidity. As it is, I'm not sorry for the blunder." ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... seeing the mass of prisoners delirious with sudden liberty and fright, pricked them with his sword to the pumps, thus keeping the ship afloat by the very blunder which had promised to have been fatal. The vessels now blazed so in the rigging that both parties desisted from hostilities to ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... water, a hundred feet or so, and quite easily make out a submerged U boat. I was testing a new plane fitted with a 90 h.p. R.A.F. engine—" He paused and quickly glanced at her, for he realised his blunder the instant the slip had been made. Madame was all eager attention—what did she know of the marques of aeroplane engines!—"It was a day of rotten luck for me. I spotted nothing, and late in the afternoon my engine ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... that the perception of some tremendous blunder began to seize upon Mr. Hazeltine. He had been red before; now, he felt the redness creeping over his scalp ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... accepted as the uniform language of English writers. Towards the close of his "Troilus and Cressid," he thus addresses his "little book," in fear of the mangling it might undergo from scriveners who might blunder in the copying of its words, or from reciters who might maltreat its verse in the distribution of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the Light Brigade!" Was there a man dismay'd? Not tho' the soldier knew Someone had blunder'd. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... hammering away meanwhile at a pair of shoes which he must finish that night for Beckmesser to wear on the morrow. Beckmesser is in despair. Finally they come to an arrangement. Beckmesser shall sing his song, and Sachs shall act as 'marker,' noting every technical blunder in the words and tune with a stroke of his hammer. The result is such a din as disturbs the slumbers of the neighbours. David, the apprentice, comes out and recognises his sweetheart Magdalena at Eva's window. He scents a rival in Beckmesser, and begins lustily to cudgel the unfortunate musician. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... first move in his game, Messer Simone lost no time in making the second move. Fortified, as he was, by the friendship and the approval of certain of the leaders of the city, he could confidently count upon immunity from blame if any seeming blunder of his delivered to destruction a certain number of young gentlemen whose opinions were none too popular with many of those in high office. So, while still the flambeaux of the festival were burning, and while still a few late guests were carousing at Messer Folco's tables, the emissaries of ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... precarious and imperfect obedience. To restrain them, when intoxicated with success and confident of their strength, would probably have been too hard a task even for him, as it had been, in the preceding generation, too hard a task for Montrose. The new general did nothing but hesitate and blunder. One of his first acts was to send a large body of men, chiefly Robertsons, down into the low country for the purpose of collecting provisions. He seems to have supposed that this detachment would without difficulty occupy Perth. But Mackay had already restored order among the remains of his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ever doubted the good faith of the King of Sardinia, whom she acclaimed as being truly a king. Swinburne, lyrically alluding to her as "Sea-eagle of English feather," broadly hinted that the chief blunder of that wild fowl had been her support of an autocratic adventurer: "calling a crowned man royal, that was no more than a king." But it is not fair, even in this important connection, to judge Swinburne by Songs Before Sunrise. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... voice for Eli's, as we all often do. And not less often we make the converse blunder, and mistake Eli's voice for God's. It needs a very attentive ear, and a heart purged from selfishness and self-will, and ready for obedience, to know when God speaks, though men may be His mouthpieces, and when men speak, though they may call themselves His messengers. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the leadership of Calhoun, came presently to regard the Missouri arrangement as a capital blunder on its part, and from the standpoint of that section this conclusion seems strictly logical. For the location of a slave line upon the Louisiana territory operated in fact as a decided check to the expansion of slavery as a social rival and a political power at one and the ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... of the chief executive was immediate. He determined that no word of this incredible blunder was to become publicly known. He directed that all documents relating to antarctic flights, and to this flight in particular, were to be collected and impounded. They were all to be put on one single ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... like a gamecock. It was a Corsican who had years before called him cochon sauvage—cocon chauvage, as Hoka mispronounced it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality. When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly explained the nature of my offence: I had asked him ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... way. "Suppose my mother, with her present feelings, was to take a leaf out of your book, and use all her power; where would you be then? Come, old fellow, I know what love is, and one of us shall have the girl he loves, unless any harm should come to my poor father owing to your blunder—oh, that would put it out of the question, I feel—but let us hope better. I pulled you out of the fire, and somehow I seem to like you better than ever after that; let me pull you out of ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... sir," said Heath as the pair left the shop, thus aggravating his blunder. Louis and Rachel crossed Duck Bank in constrained silence. Rachel was scarlet. The new cinema next to the new Congregational chapel blazed in ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... saying such kind things to him, and at the same time shut the door between him and the great opportunity of his life? What did it all mean? Where had he failed? Surely there was some terrible misunderstanding! In his complete bewilderment he created quite the most dreadful blunder that is registered against him in his ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... Burnet i. 393. Dartmouth says that it was from Fagel that the Lords extracted the hint. This was a slip of the pen very pardonable in a hasty marginal note; but Dalrymple and others ought not to have copied so palpable a blunder. Fagel died in Holland, on the 5th of December 1688, when William was at Salisbury and James at Whitehall. The real person was, I suppose, Dykvelt, Bentinck, or Zulestein, most ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The beggar had the impudence to spoon on my sister Zoe. That was my fault, not hers. He was an old college acquaintance, and I gave him opportunities—I deserve to be horsewhipped. However, I am not going to commit the same blunder twice. My sister is in your neighborhood for a ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... considerable period, the falsetto register, singing everything, however high, in chest voice. I am afraid it cannot be said even that they have been beguiled into this serious mistake by the imperceptible rise of pitch just mentioned, but the truth is that they have committed this fatal blunder knowingly and wilfully, because they saw that it would pay. In support of this statement I will quote a few lines from the publication called "The Opera and the Art ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... distinguishing parts of their characters strike directly in the face of their benefactor, whose idea presenting itself along with his guineas perpetually to their imagination, occasioned this desperate blunder. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... One gets at truth only by experiment, and through repeated mistakes. Why except women's hearts from the same law? I give his opinion, not his words. He doesn't talk of "women's hearts." You know his trick of suggesting when it comes to talk of the feelings. I slid into a worse blunder and sympathised with him. He replied that it didn't make the difference to him which I might think. I felt as if a stream of ice-water had been turned down my back on Christmas Day. However, he went on in a sort of shame-faced style, like ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... You must know she was regularly struck with dear Papa. I am sure he is the first saint in her calendar, and everything is—"What did Cousin Edward say?" And when once she has made up her mind that a thing is right, she will blunder on through fire and water, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had made a very ridiculous blunder in a French translation that morning. Such a thing was unusual for him, and was such a comical one that it set the others of the class in a roar of laughter. Drake was so extravagantly affected by Alf's blunder that Mr Clare had to stop his laughter, which ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... friendship, kinsmanship, camaraderie, and patronage. He is no longer either a county magistrate or an honorary citizen. He has done with all those qualities which make up a man's social amiability. Here Vertessy is only a soldier, a rigorous, inexorable commandant, who never overlooks a blunder, and never leaves ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... of debt deserves only compassion. The merchant suddenly failing; the tenderly reared family who by some strange blunder or unkind kindness have been kept in ignorance of their real circumstances, and been spending pounds for which there was only pence to pay; the individuals, men or women, who, without any laxity of principle, are such utter children in practice, that they have to learn the ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... your movements, by means of the confederate who awaited his arrival at the station. As it happened, they simply hit upon the wrong person. It might have paid them much better to follow me. The outcome of the blunder is that I am in a fair way towards ascertaining all I want to know about them, whereas, up to the present, they do not even suspect my existence as an ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... What is justice? See how it can err! Was there ever such a boundless, unlimited blunder in the whole annals of penny fiction? Probably not. I remember nothing like it in all the learned pages of the London Journal and the Family Herald. Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Braddon never dreamed of aught like this. Philippa must be told. It was too good a joke. Would ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... to see Dick's mother and sister rise, also, and turn to Nell with dark, proud, searching eyes. Belding vaguely realized some blunder he had made. Nell's white, appealing face gave him a pang. What had he done? Surely this family of Dick's ought to know his relation to Nell. There was a silence that ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... a school of physics, and seeing a sign posted for the admittance of more students, I thought this might be a kind of "affinity," and having asked for the prospectus, at once filed my application for entrance. When I think of it now, it was a blunder ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... experiences where Hans was concerned, my natural tendency to blunder took the form of relying upon another's judgment instead of on my own. Although I had formed a certain view as to what should be done, the pros and cons seemed so evenly balanced that I determined ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... And for defence of this good cheer, and my lady's little pearl necklace, there was the family basket-hilt sword, the great Turkish cimiter, the old blunder-buss, a good bag of bullets, and a great ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... should blunder into your house to get my bandaging. My first stroke of luck! Anyhow I meant to sleep in this house to-night. You must stand that! It's a filthy nuisance, my blood showing, isn't it? Quite a ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... beginning to think it was time for him to go to bed, when I heard somebody else blunder into my sitter, and in a moment Lambert appeared at the door. Now Lambert, who was only gorgeous by day, frequently became aggressive at night, and I told him to clear out jolly quickly. But instead of doing what he was wanted to he lit a huge cigar, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... and daughter were dressing simultaneously for an important occasion—either the first night or something else. In that feverish environment he forgot the form of words which he had carefully prepared for the breaking to his wife of the great financial news. Fortunately she gave him no chance to blunder. ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... alike. Those that seem better than their neighbours, are only more artful. They mean the same thing, though they take a different road. He deceived me for a while, but it is all out now. They are the makers of the mischief. Fools might blunder, but they would not persist, if people that ought to set them right did not encourage them ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... side. "Fool that I was not to allow for that earlier train! It's abduction, Watson—abduction! Murder! Heaven knows what! Block the road! Stop the horse! That's right. Now, jump in, and let us see if I can repair the consequences of my own blunder." ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the contrary.[1] Then he judged it necessary to occupy the town of Florina. He occupied it. An appreciation of the efficacy or expediency of these measures—beyond a passing allusion to the obvious blunder committed by the destruction of the Demir-Hissar bridge—would be out of place here. For our present purpose their interest lies in the light they throw upon the conditions, apart from the purely military difficulties, created by the intrusion of ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... up so much room aboard, the scouts saw that it was no false alarm. A number of men were hurrying toward them, splashing through water that was in places almost knee deep, even when they took the upper levels. Should they make a blunder, and stray off the ridges, it was likely they would speedily have to swim ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... Yes; very nearly. And, what is a wiser and better thing, Can keep the living from ever needing Such an unnatural, strange proceeding, By showing conclusively and clearly That death is a stupid blunder merely, And not a necessity of our lives. My being here is accidental; The storm, that against your casement drives, In the little village below waylaid me. And there I heard, with a secret delight, Of your maladies physical and mental, Which neither astonished nor dismayed ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... he feels bound to make restitution. And in order to make restitution, to be kind and helpful and remedial, he must retain the management of Irish affairs in his benevolent hands. In order to expiate the crimes of the past he must repeat the basal blunder that was the cause and source of them. For this kind of sympathy we have only to say, in a somewhat vulgar phrase, that we have no use whatever. The Englishman who ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... day came differently to what we expected. Still we did our duty. Had we come to grief through any blunder or fault of mine or any of our officers there might have been cause for regret and heartburnings. Our orders were very simple—to hold the trenches at all costs until relieved. We carried out these orders and held the line. When finally ordered out we left ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... more heartless, who countenance this inhuman logic. The average mercantile sentiment of this and other great Northern cities runs thus: 'True, Slavery is unjust and barbarous—it is at once a wrong and a mistake—but it is not our blunder. Its perils are braved and its evils endured by those who cherish it, hundreds of miles away; while to us it is a positive advantage. By obstructing the mechanical and manufacturing development of the South, it dooms her products, her commerce, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the blunder which "the classes" had committed in their estimate of Lincoln had an even greater effect in softening the asperities which the war left behind it than had the exposure of the egregious miscalculations of English statesmen as to the comparative military strength ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... assure you, Monsieur Spencer, that it was with reluctance. The others of whom I have spoken—Sir George Duncombe, Monsieur Pelham, and his toy detective—forgive me that I smile—walk all the time in the palm of our hand. But they remain unharmed. If by any chance they should blunder into the knowledge of things which might cause us annoyance, why, then—there would be more invalids in Paris. Indeed, Monsieur, we do not seek to abuse our power. My errand to you to-day is ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... entitled to the preference. Lord Ellenborough is of a different opinion. He takes away the gates from a Mahometan mosque, and solemnly offers them as a gift to a Pagan temple. Morally, this is a crime. Politically, it is a blunder. Nobody who knows anything of the Mahometans of India can doubt that this affront to their faith will excite their fiercest indignation. Their susceptibility on such points is extreme. Some of the most serious disasters that have ever befallen us in India have been caused by that susceptibility. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... instant; then he said: "You are mistaken; it was Octavius and not Antony who was on Sextus' galley with Lepidus." And he went on his way to the courtyard, confining his blame to the historical blunder. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... piece of bell-cord, one end of which was fixed to the fellow's left foot and the other to the whistle lever, Yank set his fireman, with a white light and the robber's gun, on the rear car and flagged back to the rescue. The robbers, seeing the blunder they had made, took a few parting shots at the trainmen on the top of the train, mounted ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... Gothard was still sobbing, his hands purple and swollen from the tightness of the cord that bound them. Catherine maintained her attitude of artless simplicity, which was quite impenetrable. The corporal, who, according to Corentin, had committed a great blunder in arresting these smaller fry, did not know whether to stay where he was or to depart. He stood pensively in the middle of the salon, his hand on the hilt of his sabre, his eye on the two Parisians. The Durieus, also ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... thing to have deep water between that camp and any assailants instead of behind it. Many Bears was a chief of great experience, but it had never occurred to him that it would cost him all his horses if he should be beaten in a fight with a river behind him. The blunder was remedied now with a rapidity which astonished even Murray, for he had not known how good a ...
— The Talking Leaves - An Indian Story • William O. Stoddard
... provinces when I said you ought to be President. You said old Winkelstein had been in the position too long to be ousted. And yet I felt certain your superior English would tell in the long run in such a miserable congregation of foreigners, and when Winkelstein had made that delicious blunder about the 'university' of the Exodus instead of the 'anniversary,' and I went about laughing over it in all the best circles, the poor man's day was over. And when we came to London, and seemed to fall again to the bottom of the ladder because our greatness was swallowed ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... for I now saw too clearly that I had made a dreadful blunder, and that any attempt to carry assertion further, or even to explain away my words, might be to challenge the very discovery I would have given ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... brave for that night's work, for, when the drawbridge was drawn slowly up that evening, it was ten men, and three of them unarmed, against a regiment; and short and terrible would have been the shrift accorded to them had an inkling of suspicion arisen, or had the slightest blunder, or precipitation, exposed the ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... to clear matters up. Your aunt would insist that I took her to be forty, and the fun that my blunder made rather drew us together, and gave me a start over the other fellows at the station, half of whom fell straightway in love with her. Some months went on, and when the mutiny broke out we were engaged to be married. It is a proof of how completely the opium dreams ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... sovereignty, thou owest him the greater repayment. Render therefore to thy Benefactor the debt of thanksgiving, by the keeping of his holy commandments and by turning aside from every path whose end is destruction. For it is with kingdoms as with ships. If one of the sailors blunder it bringeth but small damage to the crew. But if the steersman err, he causeth the whole ship to perish. Even so it is with sovranty: if a subject err, he harmeth himself more than the state. But if the king err, he causeth injury to the whole realm. Therefore, as one that shall render strict ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... conversation; but Howe passed from one to another of the malcontents, and instructed them what to do in the next drill. They were to create all the confusion they could in the discharge of their duty. They were to misunderstand the orders, and to blunder in the execution of them, in such a manner as to conceal their own agency in the mischief, and divide the responsibility of it among their companions. The runaway crew of the Josephine, mortified at their failure, ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... have been told by Kant's old friends, that for the space of more than thirty years, during which he had been in the habit of reading the newspaper published by Hartung, Lampe delivered it with the same identical blunder on every day of publication.—'Mr. Professor, here is Hartmann's journal.' Upon which Kant would reply—'Eh! what?—What's that you say? Hartmann's journal? I tell you, it is not Hartmann, but Hartung: now, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... former instances of a single vacancy in a cabinet, on which there was an entire concurrence. I repeated what I had said of his and their most indulgent judgment and took occasion distinctly to apologise for my blunder, and the consequent embarrassment which I caused to him in Feb. 1842, on the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... each name was called its young bearer rose and confronted her inquisitors. And the inquisitors began to blunder. Accusations of the fatal taint were met with denials and withdrawn with apologies. Sometimes it was truth, and sometimes pure arrogance and falsehood, that triumphed over these champions of instinctive racial antagonism. One dark girl ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... which she was remarkable. She ever knew full well what she desired to gain or to avoid, and once having fixed her mind upon any object, she showed an adroitness and brilliancy of resource, a control of herself and others, the which there was no circumventing. She never made a blunder because she could not control the expression of her emotions; and when she gave way to a passion, 'twas because she chose to do so, having naught to lose, and in the midst of all their riotous jesting with her the boon companions of Sir Jeoffry ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter? For all the deeper suffering, I am conscious of writhing under lacerated vanity when I think of that grotesque and humiliating blunder in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... descended upon him this afternoon that especial ecstasy that is surrendered once and again by the gods to men to lead them, maybe, into some especial blunder or to sharpen, for Olympian humour, the contrast of some swiftly ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... over him. The Duc d'Orleans asked the price of the picture. The clergy told Madame la Dauphine that the subject was suggestive of good thoughts; and there was, in truth, a most satisfying religious tone about it. Monseigneur the Dauphin admired the dust on the stone-floor,—a huge blunder, by the way, for Fougeres had painted greenish tones suggestive of mildew along the base of the walls. "Madame" finally bought the picture for a thousand francs, and the Dauphin ordered another like it. Charles X. gave the cross of the Legion of honor to this son of ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... the idea may become, it can rest on no other or sounder basis than which is presented to us in the psychology of primitive man. Each stage of theistic belief grows out of the proceeding stage, and if it can be shown that the beginning of this evolution arose in a huge blunder, I quite fail to see how any subsequent development can convert this unmistakable blunder into ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... EURIPIDES. The blunder is even worse than I had thought to make it out; for if he holds his office in the nether ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Teufelsdrockh, wandering in regions where he had little business, confound the old authentic Presbyterian Witchfinder with a new, spurious, imaginary Historian of the Brittische Journalistik; and so stumble on perhaps the most egregious blunder in Modern Literature! ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Wilfred, a rare, sweet smile flitting across his lips, "dost thou blunder as Mary did? Is the Lord yet in the sepulchre? 'He is not here; He is risen.' And why then should His sepulchre be holier than other graves, when He that made the holiness is ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... in the least," replied the young woman, with nevertheless a sigh of relief. "It was all my own fault in so carelessly leaving the money. Some time, when less in a hurry than I am at the present moment, I will tell you how I came to make the blunder." ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... most common-place affairs! We may be thankful that the world has at last seen through these pretenders to superhuman sagacity. With but remarkably few exceptions, the great railway men of the time have committed the grossest blunders; and the stupidest blunder of all, has been the confounding of proper and improper expenditure; just as if a shopkeeper were to fall into the unhappy error of imagining that his returns were to be in the ratio, not of the business he was to do, but of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... given to be able to say it off from beginning to end, exceptions and all, without a blunder! But he could only stand and hang his head; he did not know a word of it. Then through the hot pounding in his ears he heard the master's voice; it was quite gentle; not at all the scolding voice he expected. And it said, "I'm not going to punish you, little Franz. Perhaps ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... of the identity of the story with the "Leonore" operas, of Gaveaux and Paer. Much confusion has existed in the books (and still exists, for that matter) touching the order in which the four overtures were composed. The early biographers were mistaken on that point, and the blunder was perpetuated by the numbering when the scores were published. The true "Leonore No. 1," is the overture known in the concert-room, where it is occasionally heard, as "Leonore No. 2." This was the original ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and Annie's answers were related quickly enough, and the cause of Michael's blunder was ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... admitted history, that this dull but determined Missouri senator approached Judge Douglas, then chairman of the Committee on Territories, and, by some incomprehensible influence, induced that distinguished senator to commit the flagrant and terrible blunder of reporting the Kansas-Nebraska bill, with a clause repealing the Missouri Compromise, and thus throwing open Kansas to the occupation of slavery. That error was grievously atoned for in the subsequent hard ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... knew more than Mangan, most of them wouldn't have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... that all their feats of prowess have not prevented me from going my own little way. It was bound to be. Those fellows imagine that there's no one to equal them. When they meet an adversary like myself, one who is not to be bounced, it upsets them and they make blunder after blunder, while still believing that they are hoodwinking him like mad. Schoolboys, that's what they are! However, as you seem to have some illusions left about the aforesaid Lupin, as you are counting on that poor devil to crush me and to work ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... make no blunder, I resolved, before proceeding further, to learn what I could of the character and antecedents of the suspected one, and this from the only source which ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... was in progress, another event showed how imperative was his need and how precarious his situation. He had, in fact, been guilty of a serious military blunder in going with a mere flying column into Britain as he had gone into Germany. The Channel was not the Rhine, and ships were exposed to risks from which his bridge had been entirely exempt. Nothing but a crushing defeat would cut him off from retiring by that; but the Ocean ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... official register correct to the most evanescent item, Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks down, Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism; Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder, twenty-seven million strong or one unit strong, and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in consequence of that—Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day after day, rigorously as Fate (for this is Fate that is writing); ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... now and then introduces an unintentional advertisement of the linotype by presenting to its readers a line upside down. Another trick is the mixing of two paragraphs, which sometimes occurs even in books. The most famous instance of this blunder is probably that which happened in the English "Men of the Time" for 1856, and which led to a serious lawsuit against the publishers. The printer had mixed the biographies of the Bishop of Oxford and Robert ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... it with great advantage. He intends, as you will see by his speech, to move the previous question on Pitt's proposition, which he is afraid to attempt to negative. After this recantation was over, the day was closed by such a blunder of Sheridan's, as I never knew any man of the meanest talents guilty of before. During the whole time that I have sat in Parliament, in pretty warm times, I never remember such an uproar as was raised by his threatening us with the danger of provoking the ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... work, ignorance on the part of parents, teachers, and other advisors; ignorance on the part of employers. As a race, we do not know human nature; we do not know how to determine, in advance of actual, painful and costly experience, the aptitudes of any individual. We blunder a good deal even in trying to learn from experience. We do not know work; we do not know its requirements, its conditions, its opportunities, its emoluments. And so, in our ignorance, we go astray; ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... In the armoury of apologetics etymology has been the most serviceable weapon. It is easy to see that by aid of etymology the most repulsive legend may be compelled to yield a pure or harmless sense, and may be explained as an innocent blunder, caused by mere verbal misunderstanding. Brahmans, Greeks, and Germans have equally found comfort in this hypothesis. In the Cratylus of Plato, Socrates speaks of the notion of explaining myths by etymological guesses at the meaning of divine names as "a philosophy which came to him all ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... what a misleading blunder she had committed towards Loveday in playing to the yeoman. Perhaps she had sown the ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... promised that he should come to no harm—I know that," he said quickly. "At first I thought that it must have been a blunder, but on reflection I am sure that it is not. It is the Emperor. He must have given the order for the arrest himself, behind my back. That is his way. He trusts no one. He deceives those nearest to him. I made out the list of those to be arrested to-night, and your father's name was ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God, having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' And so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... to Martin, as you prescribed; the blunder was my own, as well as a more considerable one, that of Lord Sandwich's death—which was occasioned by my supposing, at first, that the translation of Barba was made by the second Earl, whose death I had marked in the list, and forgot to alter, after I had ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... to him across the counter, and he took and held it tight; he had never seen her looking sweeter, nor felt that she was half so dear to him. After all, his blunder had brought them together again, and he was ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... most overpowering emotion; for, in truth, no one up to that hour had really credited that England would take the lives of those three men on a verdict already publicly admitted and proclaimed to have been a blunder. Now, however, came the news that all was over—that the deed was done—and soon there was seen such an upheaving of national emotion as had not been witnessed in Ireland for a century. The public conscience, utterly shocked, revolted against the dreadful ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... had her trials of the same character. Nothing ever annoyed her so much as a little blunder she made, the week after the opening of the session. I have not yet mentioned that there was already a universal dissatisfaction among the women, on account of their being liable to military service. ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... Death and damnation! (Goes up and down with agitated steps.) Is it for this that I have sacrificed my nights—that I have mowed down mountains and filled up chasms? For this that I have turned rebel against all the instincts of humanity? To have this vagabond outcast blunder in at last, and destroy all my cunningly devised fabric. But gently! gently! What remains to be done is but child's play. Have I not already waded up to my very ears in mortal sin? Seeing how far the shore lies behind me, it would be madness to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... pilot and captain at sword and pistol, the crew playing Donnybrook freely. Their cooler heads are shrewd enough to see the folly, but it catches the Irish fancy to rush to the extreme, and we have allowed it to be supposed that it frightens us. There is the capital blunder, fons et origo. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... astonished that she still bent over the lock, motionless, saw in hand. In the instant she made a mental review of her proceedings and satisfied herself that she had been guilty of no professional blunder. The inopportune appearance of Mr. Cragg must be attributed to a blind chance—to fate. So the first wave of humiliation that swept over her receded as she gathered her wits ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... not being an experienced lover—indeed, never before having been engaged in the practice of love-making at all, except in a small schoolboy way—could not take advantage of the situation; and out came the blunder, which afterwards cost him so many bitter ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... perhaps no class of puzzle over which people so frequently blunder as that which involves what is called the theory of probabilities. I will give two simple examples of the sort of puzzle I mean. They are really quite easy, and yet many persons are tripped up by them. A friend recently produced five pennies and said to me: "In throwing these five pennies ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... town'll go to hell— Blow the bugle, draw the sword— 'Fore I see him 'live an' well— 'Im the best beside the ford. Ford, ford, ford o' Kabul river, Ford o' Kabul river in the dark! Gawd 'elp 'em if they blunder, for their boots'll pull 'em under, By the ford o' Kabul ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... night he had done something terrible, he had made a blunder. There had been a party. The guests, a lot of them, were mostly drunk, or touched with drink. And he too had too much. He remembered having thrown his arms about a tall woman, gowned in black with loose shoulder straps, dragging her through a dance. He had even sung a bit of a song, madly, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... man wisely waits until his judgment is matured, and then proceeds to choose his mate; he does not blunder into heroic fooleries in the way of self-abnegation; for, if his choice is judicious, the lady will prevent him from hurting his own prospects. Whether he be aristocrat or plebeian, he knows the worth ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... shine, Thy feet concealing, but a lamp to mine. Let me, at seasons opportune and fit, By turns adore thee and by turns commit. In thy high service let me ever be (Yet never serve thee as my critics me) Happy and fallible, content to feel I blunder chiefly when to thee I kneel. But best felicity is his thy praise Who utters unaware in works and ways— Who laborare est orare proves, And feels thy suasion wheresoe'er he moves, Serving thy purpose, not thine altar, still, And working, for he thinks it his, thy will. If such ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... politicians, my lords, have heaped one blunder upon another; they have disgusted the nation both by the means and the end; and have insulted the senate with no other view than that of plundering the people. They have ventured, without the consent of the senate, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... and so are Mephistopheles, and Prometheus, and Achilles; but they are not true to human nature; they are beings created by the poets' minds, and true to their laws of being. There is no commoner blunder in men, who are themselves mere critics, never creators, than to require consistency to the nature of us and our world in the works of ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... rule it is in writing that the scholar is liable to slip; in oral speech he seldom makes a blunder. In fact, there are many people who are perfect masters of speech,—who never make a blunder in conversation, yet who are ignorant of the very principles of grammar and would not know how to write a sentence ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... not until she had exhausted the means of defence and life. At that time, few men in America but were in the habit of denouncing the French President for his indifference to the Italian cause. He was charged with having been guilty of a blunder and a crime. His consent to the expedition to Rome aggravated his offence, for it was an act of intervention on the wrong side. But the passage of ten years enables us to be more just to him than it was possible for us to be in 1849. He was not firm in his seat. He was but a temporary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... are living their lives as we are living ours, in the shimmer of a globule in space, it is not enough that we should lift our faces to the sky and blunder and guess at a God there, because there is so much room between the stars, and murmur faintly, "Spiritual things are spiritually discerned." By the infinite bones of our bodies, by the seeds of the million ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... would partially justify the conduct of the victor toward the vanquished, in 1859; but, if we judge from what we know, which is all that any monarch can demand of the formers of opinion, Napoleon III. was guilty of a monstrous political and military blunder when he forced a truce upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... friend, no: I can't part with you tonight, no, not for an instant. I have many lessons to give you. How are we to learn our parts for to-morrow, if we don't rehearse them beforehand? Do you not know that a single blunder may turn what I hope will be a farce into a tragedy? Go home!—pooh! pooh! why, man, I have not seen my wife, nor put my house to rights, and if you do but listen to me I tell you again and again that not a hair of our ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... country, and I am tired of roturiers already.—The government has committed dangerous faults. The king is an excellent man, but his heart is where his head ought to be, and his head where his heart.—His flight was a terrible affair, but it was a blunder on both sides; he ought never to have gone, or the government ought never to have brought him back.—However, I have no cause to complain of its epitaph. The blunder dissolved that government. I have to thank it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... to me, for it was the first time in my life that I had struck society, and I would have given all of my previous summer's wages to have been away from there. I did not know how to conduct myself, and every time I made a blunder—which seemed to me every time I made a move—I would attempt to smooth it over, and always ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... to all he said. But this did not propitiate him, and I soon found him so jealous as to be a nuisance. He was Colonial-born and was always airing the fact. He rejoiced in my rawness, and when I made a blunder would crow over it for hours. 'It's no good, Mr Crawfurd; you new chums from England may think yourselves mighty clever, but we men from the Old Colony can get ahead of you every time. In fifty years you'll maybe learn ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... my calmness! If I could but think it might be a tremendous blunder out of which I would sometime wake into verity! But there has been no mistake; I have not been dreaming unless I am ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... the track Of flying Fortune, emulously panting, The empires, kingdoms, dukedoms of the earth I saw, now clinging to her waving locks, Now to the end of her encircling boa. Beholding this, and o'er the ample sheets Profoundly meditating, I became Of my sad blunder, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... or possibly her own inclination might set in the same direction; or, again, she might wish to renew her early engagement with the emperor himself. The same uncertainty had been felt at Brussels; the Bishop of Arras, therefore, had charged Renard to feel his way carefully and make no blunder. If the queen inclined to the emperor, he might speak of Philip as more eligible; if she fancied Courtenay, it would be useless to interfere—she would only resent his opposition.[87] Renard obeyed his instructions, and ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... consulted the Shakspere of Malone, and verified my recollections, when the query of "Mr. JEBB" appeared—but forbore to notice its misconceptions. Besides, one C., after an interval of two months, merely asserted that it was not a blunder of Malone; the other C. furnished, ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... said Elinor, in eager sympathy, feeling with the greatest relief that she was reinstated in Rachael's good graces after her stupid blunder. "I don't see how you stand it ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... another thing," she continued rather proudly, "a thing men too often blunder over—with the very best intentions, bless them, only they do blunder, and that leads to ructions. Please put the question of money out of your head once and for all. I have a certain amount of my own, nothing princely ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... demonstrations of a style of admiration I neither desire, appreciate, nor intend to permit. If accident should ever thrust you again across my path, you will do well to forget that our minister committed the blunder of sending you here to-day. Mr. Laurance will please accept my thanks for this package of papers, which shall be returned to-morrow to the office of the American embassy. Resolved to forget the unpleasant ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... whom the positive currents neutralize the negative currents? Your affinity is perhaps the plainest woman in the room. But beauty is a juggling sprite, entirely uncontrolled by electricity, and you are quite likely to make a mistake. It is absurd the way we blunder on in a scientific age. We touch a button, and are married. The judge touches another button, and we are divorced. If when we touched the first button it revealed us both negatives, we should start back in horror, for it is only before ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Lady Elliston was still a little confused, by her blunder, and by his words. "What a happy life you and your mother must have had, cloistered here. I've been telling your mother that it's like a cloister. I've been scolding her a little for shutting herself up in it. And now that I have this chance of talking to you I do very ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... made a very ridiculous blunder in a French translation that morning. Such a thing was unusual for him, and was such a comical one that it set the others of the class in a roar of laughter. Drake was so extravagantly affected by Alf's blunder that Mr Clare had to stop his laughter, which ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... spark through the air breaks up some of these pairs and in the confusion of the shock the lonely atoms seize on their nearest neighbor and so may get partners of the other sort. I have seen this same thing happen in a square dance where somebody made a blunder. It is easy to understand the reaction if we represent the atoms of oxygen and nitrogen by the initials of their ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... poets without thinking of Shakspeare, who towers above them all. We have yet to discover an editor capable of doing him full justice. Some of Johnson's notes are very amusing, and those of recent editors occasionally provoke a smile. If once a blunder has been made it is persisted in. Take, for instance, a glaring one in the 2nd part of Henry IV., where, in the apostrophe to sleep, "clouds" is ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.11.17 • Various
... have headed the fugitive or at the least brought its rider in rope-throw, now, outworn by the long trail it had followed, the little animal stumbled and almost fell when Perris with iron hand swung it around. That blunder lost fatal yards, but still it did its honest best. It was a veteran of many a round-up. No pony in the arduous work of cutting out was surer of eye or quicker of foot, and now this dodging back and forth brought a gleam into the bronco's eyes. There ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... of Calhoun, came presently to regard the Missouri arrangement as a capital blunder on its part, and from the standpoint of that section this conclusion seems strictly logical. For the location of a slave line upon the Louisiana territory operated in fact as a decided check to the expansion of slavery as a social rival and a political power at one and ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... themselves, and without water must surrender at the discretion of the soldiers. Gen. Howard, however, complained that his troops were worn out, that he could not come up until the following day, and ended by ordering the command under Bernard to return to his camp. This was Gen. Howard's first fatal blunder, to be followed by others equally as serious. The Indians remained in their position until the next day, when they moved out towards the head of the South Fork of the John Day River. They camped on Buck Mountain three days while Howard was resting his troops. ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... of companionship which is the one sympathetic link between a drunken man and his race, he had left his place of concealment at a strangely inopportune time, entailing the most deplorable consequences upon those nearest and dearest to him—a blunder that had almost the dignity ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... fault? Tis not my arrogance, But candor, Lord, that puts the blame on Thee. What right hadst Thou to make these people free And let all nature prompt them to advance?— Oh, no such blunder, Lord, hadst Thou called me, Instead of Wisdom, to approve ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... tenderness than seemed consistent with the granite-hewn strength and sternness of his general character. A thorough soldier, with a soldier's contempt for fine-spun diplomacy, he had been led into many a blunder when acting as a chief of party and of State; but his absolute single-minded honesty had more than redeemed such errors; "integrity and uprightness had preserved him," and through him the land and its rulers, amid difficulties where the finest statecraft ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... James, irritably. "Mesne profits refer to profits derived from real estate. Just like a solicitor to make such a blunder." ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... ourselves and which require years to straighten out, render this life absurd, if it be final. It cannot be more than a series of tentative beginnings, and if there be no continuation, the scheme of things is a gigantic blunder. If Jesus does no more than supply us with an ideal hopelessly beyond our attainment and inspire us irresistibly to set out on its quest, He is no Saviour but ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... that I saw an instance of want of tact which struck me as most remarkable. Fighting being over, diplomacy stepped in, and a man of somewhat high rank in that service was sent to make friendly overtures to the authorities. Can it be believed (I do not say it as a sneer against diplomacy, for this blunder was really unique), this big man had scarcely finished the pipe of peace which he smoked with the authorities, when he proposed to introduce vaccination and tracts among the people? Badly as the poor fellows felt the licking they had received, and much as they feared another should ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... marriage was a good one," replied his mother, "but I could not swear all that Shanks would have had me, John—No, I could not swear that, for Dr. Paulding had nothing to do with it, and if he were to repeat it all over to me a thousand times, I am sure that I should make a blunder, even if I consented to tell such a falsehood. My father and good Mrs. Danby used always to say that the mutual consent made a marriage, and a good one too. Now your father's own letter shows that he consented to it, and God knows I did. But these lawyers will not let well alone, and by trying ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... sheds her horns every two years; a most palpable errour, which Goldsmith has faithfully transferred into his book. It is wonderful that Buffon, who lived so much in the country, at his noble seat, should have fallen into such a blunder. I suppose he has confounded the cow with the deer. BOSWELL. Goldsmith says:—'At three years old the cow sheds its horns and new ones arise in their place, which continue as long as it lives.' Animated Nature, iii. 12. This statement remains in the second edition. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... within a coffin, Pray, gentlefolks, forbear your scoffin'; A Boat a judge! yes, where's the blunder A wooden Judge is no such wonder! And in his robes you must agree, No Boat was better dekt than he. 'Tis needless to describe him fuller, In short he was an ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... present net results of the discussion of the miraculous element in the Bible.—Evaporation of the former evidential value of miracles.—Further insistence on this value a logical blunder.—The transfer of miracles from the artillery to the baggage of the Church.—Probability of a further reduction of the list of miracles.—Also of a further transfer of events reputed miraculous to the domain of ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... Street houses, and the mist was heavy besides; otherwise he had made shift to locate Number 9 by ticking off the dwellings from the corner. If he went on, hit or miss, the odds were anything-you-please to one that he would blunder into the servant's quarters of some inhabited house, and—be promptly and righteously sat upon by the service-staff, while ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... our friends are coming here to-day! You must have been dreaming, Austin," cried Aunt Charlotte, sitting bolt upright. "How can you have made such a blunder? Of course you ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... the mooring-chains The wide-eyed corpse rolled free, To blunder down by Garden Reach And rot at Kedgeree, The tale the Hughli told the shoal The ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of Birmingham keenly, the one man who could say to the executive with authority, this appointment would be a blunder. Birmingham being somewhere on the continent, out of reach of appeals for help, his place was honorably filled by the General of the Army, with an influence, however, purely sentimental. Arthur accompanied him for the last ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... soldiers will either have fretted themselves out of the army or have been driven out as political non-effectives, troublesome, innovating persons anxious to spend money upon "fads." So armed, the New Democracy will blunder into war, and the opening stage of the next great war will be the catastrophic breakdown of the formal armies, shame and disasters, and a disorder of conflict between more or less equally matched masses of stupefied, scared, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... continued the count, "ought to practise discretion, shrewdness, caution from the start; he should be incapable of such a blunder as taking a peer of France for ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... several times up and down, takes a cigar, stops near her and says, after a pause: You think the topic of my talk to-night Extremely ludicrous, I should not wonder? [Pauses for an answer. SVANHILD is silent. I'm very conscious that it was a blunder; Sister's and daughter's love alone possess you; Henceforth I'll wear kid gloves when I address you, Sure, ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... to put in an appearance at St. Wennys—and would he come down to Mallow Court? With Peter once more at hand, she felt sure he would be able to charm Nan's bitterness away and even prevent her, in some magical way of his own, from committing such a rash blunder as marriage with Trenby could not ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... in an eloquent and powerful speech at a special session of the Greek parliament. The accusation against him was not only that during the late war he had sacrificed Greek interests to Bulgaria but that he had committed a fatal blunder in joining her in the campaign against Turkey. His reply was that since Greece could not stand alone he had to seek allies in the Balkans, and that it was not his fault if the choice had fallen on Bulgaria. He had endeavored to maintain ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... Were you to draw your own conclusions from the descriptions which have been given of the sloth, you would probably suspect that no naturalist has actually gone into the wilds with the fixed determination to find him out and examine his haunts, and see whether Nature has committed any blunder in the formation of this extraordinary creature, which appears to us so forlorn and miserable, so ill put together, and so totally unfit to enjoy the blessings which have been so bountifully given to the rest ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... painted in three dresses, as a gallant, a Presbyterian minister, and a Scotch Highlander in his plaid." Langbaine and Aubrey both make the mistake of ascribing the third figure to Teague in "The Committee;" and in spite of Evelyn's clear statement, his editor in a note follows them in their blunder. Planche has reproduced the picture in his "History of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... of the pension vetoes. Toward the end of the canvass Sir Lionel Sackville-West, the British Minister, fell into a Republican trap and wrote to a pretended naturalized Englishman, who called himself Murchison, that a vote for Cleveland would best serve Great Britain. His tactless blunder caused his summary dismissal from Washington and aided the Republican cause much as the Burchard affair had injured it ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... written in letters of light on the tablets of our hearts. It is no slight matter for any man, whether he be President or private citizen, so to wound the sense of right of a whole race, so to shock its faith in the justice and righteousness of its rulers and government, as that cruel blunder of the President of the United States produced among the colored people of the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... fine morning, having caught Gaubertin with his hand in the bag, as the saying is, the general flew into one of those rages peculiar to the imperial conquerors of many lands. In doing so he committed a capital blunder,—one that would have ruined the whole life of a man of less wealth and less consistency than himself, and from which came the evils, both small and great, with which the present history teems. Brought up in the imperial ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... companionship apply to it. In fact, we live with it, as well as in it. And if we have a saving conscience as to the immeasurability of home by money standards we are not to be tempted by the veriest bargain of a house that does not nearly represent our ideals. To blunder here is to topple over ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... in a snow storm, and on a night so dark that it would have been impossible to keep together, to be sure of the way, or to distinguish friend from foe, to do a thing which he hesitated to do in the daytime and with his entire force, would have been a more serious blunder than either. Of course, if Preston had started, it would have been with the determination to succeed or lose his life in the adventure. That was his reputation and his character as a soldier. But the services ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... some day, he shows that to rule well requires other things than one-sidedness in the ruling person; and is fortunate if he does not acquire that part of renown which consists in notoriety, by committing some colossal blunder, henceforth historical from ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... incapable of rendering correctly into English the spirit and the letter of a foreign tongue, I have respectfully declined. I may say, and with accuracy, that scarcely a translation is made which does not show some blunder ...
— The Importance of the Proof-reader - A Paper read before the Club of Odd Volumes, in Boston, by John Wilson • John Wilson
... newspapers from Mexico to Cape Horn during August, 1914, to the end of that year shows plainly that for several months public opinion had not cleared up, that the conflict seemed to be a frightful blunder, a terrific misunderstanding, that might have been avoided, and for which no one nation in ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... returning with the emperor's refusal. Godfrey, the bravest and most determined of the leaders of the Crusade, was not a man to swerve from his word, and the country was given up to pillage. Alexius here committed another blunder. No sooner did he learn from dire experience that the Crusader was not an utterer of idle threats, than he consented to the release of the prisoner. As he had been unjust in the first instance, he became cowardly in the second, and taught his enemies (for so the Crusaders were forced to ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... "Why did I blunder in on this road?" the lover asks. He had not thought his situation so terrible as it ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... closing the door behind him. I, sitting there, and listening to his footsteps, heard him speak to somebody on the stairs, and heard two sets of footsteps blunder down the ill-lighted staircase together. I took the papers Mr. Gregory had left behind him and looked them through. They were short and simple, and I mastered them in five minutes. Then I went back ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... in his curious mistake of regarding the differences between the two as altogether to the disadvantage of the "John." Spitta, indeed, goes further than this. So bent is he on proving the superiority of the "Matthew" that what he sees as a masterstroke in that work is in the "John" a gross blunder; and, on the whole, the pages on the "John" Passion are precisely the most fatuous of the many fatuous pages he wrote when he plunged into artistic criticism, leaving his own proper element of technical or historical criticism. This is a pity, for Spitta really had a very good case to spoil. ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... so good; but, in another quarter, Allcraft suddenly discovered that he had committed an egregious blunder. He had entrusted Planner with the secret of his critical position—had made him acquainted with the dishonest transactions of his father, and the consequent bankruptcy of the firm. Not that this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... a refusal would be an insult to the hundreds and thousands of loyal Dutch subjects the King has in all parts of South Africa, I say that this invidious treatment of the Orange River Colony would be the greatest blunder, a fitting pendant to all that long concatenation of fatal mistakes which has marked our policy in South Africa for so many years; and I say it would be a breach of the spirit of the terms of peace, because we could not say, "We promised ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... I regret to say, confess his blunder, but left the Reverend Mr. Withholder to remain under suspicion of having committed an unprovoked assault and battery. It was characteristic of Rocky Canyon, however, that this suspicion, far from injuring his clerical reputation, ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... do it. I do say, I won't be any too surprised if he pulls it off. It's a thing that calls for invention. He'll swear he hasn't an ounce of it in him—says he just happens to blunder on things, or applies what he has picked up. All gas! He once showed me some musty old drawings that made it look like one of his grandfathers ought to be credited with the basic inventions of a dozen machines that to-day are making the owners of the ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... hours I was quite perfect, and Timothy Ruddel, who was called up before me, was also able to say his lesson without a blunder very much to the disappointment of Mr O'Gallagher, who observed, "So you've slipped through my fingers, have you, this time, Master Timothy? Never mind, I'll have you yet; and, moreover, there's Master Keene to go through the fiery furnace." Just ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... stereotyping the ignorant prejudices of the people into statutes and constitutions, to educate this public sentiment, by the utterance of sound ideas, by the example of honest action. When God gives new truths to the few, it is that they may win the response of the many. There is no blunder more constantly made by politicians than the assumption that the people are never ready ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of Bishops recently held in Rome it was resolved that the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception would be reconsidered and abolished at the approaching General Council; in fact, that the definition was a mistake, and that the blunder of 1854 would be repaired in 1869." I told him, of course, that no such question could be entertained in the Council; that the doctrinal decrees of the Church were irrevocable, and that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... it was to see Dick's mother and sister rise, also, and turn to Nell with dark, proud, searching eyes. Belding vaguely realized some blunder he had made. Nell's white, appealing face gave him a pang. What had he done? Surely this family of Dick's ought to know his relation to Nell. There was a silence that positively ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... enclosure. Yet one has also the feeling that such magnificence is right: to so lovely a word as Arundel, to the Premier Duke and Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, should fittingly fall this far-spreading and comely pleasaunce. Had Arundel Park been small and empty of deer what a blunder it would be. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... palpable blunder, in materialistic science, consists in its overlooking the necessary outgrowth of theological ideas in the human mind—as conclusively a phenomenal fact of nature as the invariable uniformity of astronomical movements, the ebb and flow of the tides, or the electro-magnetic waves of the earth itself. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... of you! I shall never forgive myself for the foolish blunder I made. See! these people look upon you as a hero, for you risked your life for a child of Malta. I am proud to be ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... the whole Irish line gave way. Tyrconnel looked on in helpless despair. He did not want personal courage; but his military skill was so small that he hardly ever reviewed his regiment in the Phoenix Park without committing some blunder; and to rally the ranks which were breaking all round him was no task for a general who had survived the energy of his body and of his mind, and yet had still the rudiments of his profession to learn. Several of his best officers fell while vainly endeavouring to prevail on their soldiers ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... broke out: "That was my blunder, Mr. Twelvemough. Mr. Homos and I had talked it over conditionally, and I was not to speak of it till he had told you; but it slipped out in ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... least one great blunder. Though he had been three months in office, and McClellan was still inactive, there were already several successes to the credit of the Union arms. The Monitor and Virginia (Merrimac) had fought their famous duel, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... they ask for information that will help them make good use of their courtship opportunity. They rightly feel that if they blunder in this period, there is little hope of their making their goal later. They have grown suspicious of a strong feeling of attachment, because they have been forced to see in the experiences of many of their friends that this ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... Hugh. "Look you, they have had wondrous ill-luck with their children; the Freiherrinn Kunigunde has had a dozen at least, and only two are alive, my young Freiherr and my young Lady Ermentrude; and no wonder, you would say, if you could see the gracious Freiherrinn, for surely Dame Holda made a blunder when she fished her out of the fountain woman instead of man. She is Adlerstein herself by birth, married her cousin, and is prouder and more dour than our old Freiherr himself—fitter far to handle shield than swaddled babe. And now our Jungfrau ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... daily more complicated. She showed a decided inclination for Stratton's society, and when he came to know her better he found her frank, breezy, and delightfully companionable. He knew perfectly well that unless he wanted to take a chance of making some tremendous blunder he ought to avoid any prolonged conversation with the lady. But she was so charming that every now and then he flung prudence to ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... morning grows drowsy with the heat. The crimson and creamy-gold of the opening honeysuckle swings heavy with its own sweetness. The hart's-tongue ferns, matted all over the steep banks, hang down like the tongues of thirsty dogs. The bees blunder sleepily from flower to flower. The black and crimson butterflies take short flights and long panting rests. Even the late wild roses seem less saucily cheerful than usual, and the branching ferns on the hillsides look as though they ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... Odo wearily. "And meanwhile we blunder on, without ever really knowing what incalculable instincts and prejudices are pitted against us. You and your party tell me the people are sick of the burdens the clergy lay on them—yet their blind devotion ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the better class, is scrupulously exact in spelling proper names as a rule. Perhaps Loch Fyne is not exactly "Le Lac Beau" (I have not the Gaelic). But from Pentland to Solway (literally) he makes no blunder, and he actually knows all ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... he gave the word of command—Quick, March!—while every officer felt his trigger. To the immense relief of all concerned the men stepped off, marched straight between the flags and back to quarters, tamed. The criminal War Office blunder was rectified and peace was restored in ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... of it. They know enough to have pedestals of their own; to be on their guard; to have a reputation to maintain; to conceal the "dram of folly;" to be, to that extent, artificial in their relations with men. They dare not betray the "laughable blunder," which, said Charles Lamb, is the test your neighbour giveth you "that he will ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... was perhaps not without misgivings. Six years previously, he had endeavoured to obtain two war-galleons from the Portuguese, and had he succeeded, the history of the Far East might have been radically different. Evidently, however, he committed a blunder which his countrymen in modern times have conspicuously avoided; he drew the sword without having fully ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... churches Leave behind sectarian lurches; Jump on board the Car of Freedom, Ere it be too late to need them. Sound the alarm! Pulpits thunder! Ere too late you see your blunder! ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... her, and all around, beyond the tent and in the far distance there was a provocative alluring darkness: if she only could get away, only could reach the shelter of that remote and sombre distance, she would hide, and wait, not blunder again, oh no! she would be prudent and wary, if ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Peace, And part with stronger Proofs of Love and Friendship; Meantime we hope you'll so consider Matters, As still to keep the Hatchet dull and buried, And open wide the shining Path of Peace, That you and we may walk without a Blunder. [Exeunt INDIANS. ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... this blunder of the postmaster on account of the enclosures, some of which I wished to have got to your hands without delay, that they might have undergone the consideration and acting upon which were suggested in the letter accompanying them. On another account I am not sorry for ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... dramatist had penned these words, the management of Blackfriars met with disaster. The cause, however, went back to December 13, 1600, when Giles and Evans were gathering their players. In their overweening confidence they made a stupid blunder in "taking up" for their troupe the only son and heir of Henry Clifton, a well-to-do gentleman of Norfolk, who had come to London for the purpose of educating the boy. Clifton says in his complaint that Giles, ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... jumped at the correct conclusion regarding the apparent blunder. The toy-mender's two thoughtless apprentices had played a joke ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... reach our destination you will refrain from giving the least hint, by word or action, that the sixteenth century has passed away. If you feel unable to carry out this deception, we must leave you here. The slightest blunder would ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... larger reason for their marvel. They could rise above their hatred for sin more easily than their race prejudice; so can we. The Samaritans were an inferior people. Degraded they were. They had been degraded for centuries. The Jews shunned them. Socially our Lord was making a great blunder, perhaps a fatal blunder, in talking to this Samaritan woman. His cause was in its infancy. The hand of social prejudice would surely throttle it. Why antagonize the existing order of society? How much better to utilize ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various
... not play pieces that are away beyond your grasp. This is the greatest fault in our American musical educational systems of to-day. Pupils are permitted to play works that are technically impossible for them to hope to execute without years of preparation. What a huge blunder ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... came in. She crossed immediately to the desk. As Thomas looked up, she smiled at him. It was the first smile of the kind he had witnessed, coming in his direction, since before that blunder on the tennis-courts. ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... difficulty in holding his wrath. Perceiving that something was amiss, Mr. Kenby made a pretext to accompany Bagley a part of his way, with the design of leaving him in a better humor. In magnifying his newly discovered Bagley, Mr. Kenby committed the blunder of taking too little account of Turl; and thus Turl found himself suddenly alone ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... sentence. Ah, do not interrupt me, doctor, and upon your life, upon Jacques's life, do not say a word of what I am going to tell you. A suspicion which should cross M. Galpin's mind would destroy my last hope; for it would give him an opportunity of correcting a blunder which he has committed, and which justifies me in saying to you, 'Even if the count should give evidence, even if sentence should be passed, nothing would be ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... he had not profited by his experience; he was incapable of doing so. His length of service and reputation for hard work had saved him from dismissal, but Chillingwood was less fortunate; subordinates in Government service generally are less fortunate when their superiors blunder. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... heard, and hurried To find the hole by which she came, And seem'd to find it not the same; So round she ran, most sadly flurried; And, coming back, thrust out her head, Which, sticking there, she said, "This is the hole, there can't be blunder: What makes it now so small, I wonder, Where, but the other day, I pass'd with ease?" A Rat her trouble sees, And cries, "But with an emptier belly; You entered lean, and lean ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... to a young girl? Is he not her Cure? More than that, her Confessor. Her confessor! Has he still the right to call himself so? And the weather-beaten soldier, the disciple of Voltaire, the malevolent, unmannerly father? Come, another blunder! he sees clearly that he cannot dream of stopping. And then, after what he has done, what would he dare to say? He will pass by therefore rapidly, without even turning his head; she will see him, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... not the clear-cut blunder of which I spoke. The real blunder is this. Mr. Wells deserves a tiara of crowns and a garland of medals for all kinds of reasons. But if I were restricted, on grounds of public economy, to giving ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... political correspondence in rhyme. Mrs. Browning sternly reproached those who had ever doubted the good faith of the King of Sardinia, whom she acclaimed as being truly a king. Swinburne, lyrically alluding to her as "Sea-eagle of English feather," broadly hinted that the chief blunder of that wild fowl had been her support of an autocratic adventurer: "calling a crowned man royal, that was no more than a king." But it is not fair, even in this important connection, to judge Swinburne by Songs Before Sunrise. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... In some of the Boston hotels, the prominent book on the parlor table is "Webster's Unabridged Dictionary." You may be left in doubt about the Bostonian's character, but need not doubt his capacity to parse a sentence, or spell without any resemblance of blunder the word "idiosyncrasy." ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... replied Jack. 'Takes better care of his sixpences than that. Up in the dark, breakfast by candlelight, grope our ways to the stable, and blunder along the deep lanes, and through all the by-roads in the ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... flood]. Now Ceridwen came in and saw that her whole year's work was lost. She took a pestle and struck the blind man so hard on the head that one of his eyes fell out on his cheeks. "You have unjustly deformed me," cried Morda; "you see that I am guiltless. Your loss is not caused by my blunder." "Verily," said Ceridwen, "Gwyon the Small it was that robbed me." Immediately she pursued him, but Gwyon saw her from a distance and turned into a hare and redoubled his speed, but she at once became a hound, forced him to turn around and chased him towards ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... set trash of phrase Ineffably—legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,— Nor even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of endless torments and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... cloth a single broken thread ruins a whole web; it is traced back to the girl who made the blunder and the loss is deducted from her wages. But who shall pay for the broken threads in life's great web? We cannot throw back and forth an empty shuttle; threads of some kind follow every movement as we weave the web of our fate. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... was not ready to surrender, though he knew now that he had committed a woful blunder. In fact, the knowledge that he was dealing with Frank Merriwell aroused him to a fierce resistance. He felt that it would simply be ruinous to be held and recognized by Merriwell, and he began to fight like ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... the heavens, or the towering Big Horn Mountains, he would have gained an approximate idea of where he was; but, despite his experience in the West, he galloped forward at an easy canter, with never a suspicion of the blunder he was making. ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... sedition. Both Aaron and Miriam had received a portion of the prophetic genius that distinguished Moses, and they naturally thought that they should have some share in the government, at least to make a few suggestions, when they thought Moses made a blunder. Miriam was older than Moses, and had at this time the experience of 120 years. When Moses was an infant on the River Nile, Miriam was intrusted by his parents to watch the fate of the infant in the bulrushes and the daughter of Pharaoh in her daily walks by, the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Another blunder little less extraordinary occurs in Chapter vi., in which the ordinances of Rienzi's Buono Stato ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sir," he said, becomin again affable, to reconcile me, I suppose, to the unfortunate blunder, an' speakin wi' great volubility, "my name is Smith, which, I suppose, is yours too, sir. I'm from London. Now, you see, my dear sir, my brother Bob, who lives in Ireland, and whom I haven't seen for some years, was to have met me here last night, agreeably to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... the gulf; but Beaujeu, the naval commander of the expedition, was not in sympathy with La Salle. Beaujeu was a noble by birth; La Salle, only a noble of the merchant classes. The two bickered and quarreled from the first. By some blunder, when the ships reached the Gulf of Mexico, laden with colonists, in December of 1684, they missed the mouth of the Mississippi and anchored off Texas. The main ship sailed back to France. Two others were wrecked, and La Salle in desperation, after several trips seeking the Mississippi, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... genial chuckle which preceded an invitation to inspect some candidate's egregious blunder; Irving would read and smile quietly, unaware that Barclay was watching him and wondering how appreciative he might be ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... She ever knew full well what she desired to gain or to avoid, and once having fixed her mind upon any object, she showed an adroitness and brilliancy of resource, a control of herself and others, the which there was no circumventing. She never made a blunder because she could not control the expression of her emotions; and when she gave way to a passion, 'twas because she chose to do so, having naught to lose, and in the midst of all their riotous jesting with her the boon companions of Sir ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... made with me I could not see that it weakened his wits or his muscles. I was told that such journeyings were not at all uncommon, the coolies taking work wherever offered, and going on and on as new jobs turned up. With all its shortcomings the Manchu Government did not make the blunder of imposing artificial restraints upon the movements of the people, and since no passports were required within the empire, men could come and go at their own will. The part of the commercial traveller in creating the American nation has been noted. Who can tell what ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... now how she could ever have looked with approval on her rash act. She wondered what demon of interference and meddling had possessed her, to make her blunder into people's lives, upsetting them. She wondered that she was allowed to go around loose. She was nothing more nor less than a menace to society. Here was an estimable young man, obviously the sort of young man who would always have to be assisted through life by his relatives, ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... be in a towering rage because such a blunder had been made, and called upon the fleetest runners ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... nothing of the call that had loosed from its lethargy the essential Jan. But the roar spoke of doom and Bill flinched; wavered in his attack, as a horse will momentarily waver at a high leap. That peril might have passed. But it was part of a double blunder. The leap had been wrongly conceived. It had come too soon. And now the leaper balked, conscious of error; conscious also, dimly, of some terrific change in Jan, heralded by his ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... old fortress in Provence—only the fortress had forty small rooms, and its modern prototype had seventy large ones, and now every window was blazing with lights. A man does not let himself be caught twice in such a blunder; and having visited a "shooting-lodge" which had cost three-quarters of a million dollars and was set in a preserve of ten thousand acres, he was prepared for Adirondack "camps" which had cost half a million and Newport "cottages" which had ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... in the House of Commons, attacked the policy of the ministry from beginning to end. Everything was a blunder or a mishap of some description or other; the government had invaded Russia with 25,000 troops without providing ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... such thing had happened as was popularly supposed (and "everybody" received the announcement with the remark that she knew all along it couldn't be so), and that a grievous and absurd but most mortifying blunder had been made. It was a most unpleasant ghost to "down," the shadow of that scandal, for it would come up to the surface of garrison chat at all manner of confidential moments; but no man or woman could safely speak of it to Chester. It was ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... noticed any deficiencies, but if he met an English friend in Florence and brought him home to dine, then Ronald began to wish that Dora would leave off blushing and grow less shy, that she could talk a little more, and that he might lose all fear of her making some terrible blunder. ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... how damaging is his conduct. He falls into a kind of fit on discovering that his nephew's engagement had been broken off, which he might well do if his crime turned out to be not only a crime but also a blunder. And his conduct to the girl is, to say the least of it, strange. Nor will his character help him. He frequents the opium dens of the East-end of London. Guilty, guilty, most certainly guilty. There is nothing to be said in arrest of judgment. Let the judge put on the black cap, and Jasper ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... United States; that the two opposing parties had been represented by the passengers of the Excelsior; and that one party had succeeded, headed by the indomitable Perkins. If she could be able to convince them of their blunder, would it be wise to do so? She thought of Mrs. Brimmer's supplication to be ranged "on her side," and realized with feminine quickness that the situation might be turned to her countrymen's advantage. But which side had Todos Santos favored? It ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Holiday found one clear ray of comfort. With all their vagaries, their rash impulsions, their willful blindness, their recklessness, they had each run splendidly true to type. Not one of the three had failed in the things that really count. He had faith that none of them ever would. They might blunder egregiously, suffer immeasurably, pay extravagantly, but they would each keep that vital spirit which they had in common, untarnished and ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... specimen of the genus. I certainly have placed him in the country, and scenes which I know best myself, for the simple reason, that I knew them better than any others, and therefore was less likely to blunder in writing ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... work at first. It was found that Adams could blunder on pretty well with the small words, but made sad havoc among the long ones. Still his condition was pronounced hopeful. As to Sally, she seemed to take up the letters at the first sitting, and even began to form some correct notion of the power ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... it. Nor was this due to the perfection of his rhetorical art. He really did feel what he expressed. Sometimes, of course, like all statesmen, he had to maintain a cause whose weakness he knew, as, for instance, when it became necessary to defend the blunder of a colleague. But even in such cases he did not simulate feeling, but reserved his earnestness for those parts of the case on which it could be honestly expended. As this was true of the imaginative and emotional side of his eloquence altogether, so was it especially ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... power to inspect and sum up existed only on her own side. This pretty woman neither knew what inquiries to make nor cared for such replies as were given. Being swift to reason and practical in deduction, Mademoiselle Valle did not make the blunder of deciding that this light presence argued that she would be under no supervision more serious. The excellent Benby, one was made aware, acted and the excellent Benby, one was made aware, acted ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... among pages and clerks of the kitchen;—and that he has no more pretensions as an author, than if his appointment had been to the mastership of the stag-hounds. When he takes state upon him with the public, therefore, in consequence of his office, he really is guilty of as ludicrous a blunder as the worthy American Consul, in one of the Hanse towns, who painted the Roman fasces on the pannel of his buggy, and insisted upon calling his foot-boy and clerk his lictors. Except when he is in his official duty, therefore, the King's ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... arms on the instant. One gets at truth only by experiment, and through repeated mistakes. Why except women's hearts from the same law? I give his opinion, not his words. He doesn't talk of "women's hearts." You know his trick of suggesting when it comes to talk of the feelings. I slid into a worse blunder and sympathised with him. He replied that it didn't make the difference to him which I might think. I felt as if a stream of ice-water had been turned down my back on Christmas Day. However, he went on in a sort of shame-faced style, like a schoolboy caught talking sentiment. "One owes her a debt ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... to Lord Shelburne, which has been so often mentioned, and which he really did make to him, was only a blunder in emphasis: "I wonder they should call your Lordship Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good man;" meant, I wonder they should use Malagrida as a term ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... that these enlightened intentions remained, down to the year 1800, secret except to those Powers. But statesmen err when they bury their good intentions in the secrecy of archives and allow public opinion to sympathize with the enemy. Here was Pitt's most serious blunder. At the outset of the struggle, and throughout its course, he scorned those tactful arts and melodramatic ways which win over waverers and inspire the fainthearted. Here he showed himself not a son of Chatham, but a Grenville. The results of this ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... account also for the fact that, systematic and logical thinker as he was, he perpetrates what might appear at first sight as a logical blunder. Instead of first proving the existence of God and then discussing his nature and attributes, as Saadia, Bahya, Ibn Daud and others did before him, he treats exhaustively of the divine attributes in the first book, whereas the proof of the existence of God does not appear ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... the Latin of Hakluyt, pelles rubes, are probably the zaphilines pelles, or sables, of other travellers; converted into red skins by some strange blunder.—E. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... may I ask in what manner I might serve as a witness?" Ere the words had fully crossed my lips I recognized that my smartness had caused me to commit an unpardonable blunder for a man who wished to show up well in an adventure of this sort. (But fate had a hand in it, as presently you ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... platform, grasping the back of his chair, a curious mocking Mephistophelian glitter about his eyes, his lips wreathed into a half smile. There was no hurry for him to get Denzil Cantercot arrested now. Wimp had made an egregious, a colossal blunder. In Grodman's heart there was a great glad calm as of a man who has strained his sinews to win in a famous match, and has heard the judge's word. He felt ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... means to do," he wrote to Atticus. "I do not think he knows himself. Certainly none of us know.—It is all panic and blunder. We are uncertain whether he will make a stand, or leave Italy. If he stays, I fear his army is too unreliable. If not, where will he go, and how and what are his plans? Like you, I am afraid that Caesar ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... Grateful, yes, but with a faint hint, too, that Ted had been rather fortunate, a little honoured perhaps in having enjoyed the privilege of assisting, however slightly, in the launch of my career. At one time I had gladly regarded it as a present. That, it seemed, was a blunder of my remote infancy. Honest Ted's pound was a loan, of course, and like any other honourable man I should naturally repay ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the Straits and Zeebrugge. When the weather is fine we can see deep down into the water, a hundred feet or so, and quite easily make out a submerged U boat. I was testing a new plane fitted with a 90 h.p. R.A.F. engine—" He paused and quickly glanced at her, for he realised his blunder the instant the slip had been made. Madame was all eager attention—what did she know of the marques of aeroplane engines!—"It was a day of rotten luck for me. I spotted nothing, and late in the afternoon my engine began to overheat and miss fire. ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... however, was not, as we have said, contemplated. It was not supposed by Lee that his adversary would adopt the bold plan of crossing the Blue Ridge to assail Jackson; thus, to leave that commander in the Valley, instead of being a military blunder, was a stroke of generalship, a source of embarrassment to General McClellan, and a standing threat against the Federal communications, calculated to clog the movements of their army. That Lee aimed at this is obvious from his ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... not a few to say, "How ill-instructed the poor children were!—actually mingling the gospel and the fairy tales!" "Happy children," say I, "who could blunder into the very heart of the will of God concerning them, and do the thing at once that the Lord taught them, using the common sense which God had given and the fairy tale nourished!" The Lord of the promise is the Lord of all true parables ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast. That "perfect innocence" ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... sorry for the stricken child,—though his eyes still twinkled, "it was just a mistake. But remember after this, my child, to speak to God when you pray. Remember that you are talking to Him. Then you will not make such a blunder.—So many of us," he said reflectively, "ministers as well as others, pray into the ears of the people, and forget we are ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... unfortunate family; and the hills and waters around are sad with the memories of his lady's heroic efforts and sufferings. So, when Prince Charles came again, in 1745, they were moved neither by his beauty nor his romantic daring: they would take no part at all in his brilliant blunder. ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... street. Up to that point Rita was real. I killed her at that point and she became unreal. This statement cures me. Nevertheless, my sanity is a myth. I have invented it, by arbitrarily identifying the moment of its departure. But it is better that way than to blunder on without knowing how mad I am or whether I am mad at all, or whether I ever have been mad. A lie believed in is an ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... journey improves our position. Conde feels secure now; he dreaded only the passage of the Loire. Guise made a huge blunder which, in the future, ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... Perhaps the greatest blunder of the present day, upon the part of scientists, is their attempt to bring into disrepute the cosmogony given in the Bible by a scientific cosmogony, which leaves off as "unknown" the only active world-forming force. They arrogantly assume ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... cough, then looked out of the window, and softly whistled to himself. Lettice, meanwhile, cast about hastily in her mind for the possible bearing of what her brother might have to say. She was about to take advantage of his blunder, and decline to hear anything further; but for more than one reason which immediately occurred to her, she thought that it would be better to let ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... whether this be the dedication of the cloister, or the name of one of the city gates, near which it stood. I have translated it in the former sense; but fearful of having made some blunder, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of Sanchia's crowd,' he said with high assumption of carelessness. 'But here is what I can't understand! Your father told Sanchia; she has raced off and staked; and as sure as fate, they are on the wrong hill! Sanchia wouldn't make a blunder like that!' ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... for booksellers, to be sold. The price is 1800 francs a copy, or about $600, the total expense of the edition being 296,000 fr. or not far from $55,000. The publication of the work on so expensive a scale, unaccompanied by an edition cheap enough for ordinary readers, is a great blunder; at least the reputation of the author suffers from it. The book does not reach those for whom it is written, while of Layard's work at least 10,000 copies have been sold, exclusive of the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... all qualities in a military commander, that of deriving substantial fruits from victory instead of barren trophies, he had not manifested. If it had been a great stroke of art to seize reach Deventer, it was an enormous blunder, worthy of a journeyman soldier, to fail to seize the Bourtange marshes, and drive his sword into the fiery vitals of the republic, thus placed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... understand; but possibly it had never before fallen into the hands of a man who was so little qualified to govern Rigganites, as was the present rector, the Reverend Harold Barholm. A man who has mistaken his vocation, and who has become ever so faintly conscious of his blunder, may be a stumbling-block in another's path; but restrained as he will be by his secret pangs of conscience, he can scarcely be an active obstructionist. But a man who, having mistaken the field of his life's labor, yet remains amiably self-satisfied, and unconscious ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... educators. So of an organization like the Grange, its chief work is education. It brings mind in contact with mind; it gives chance for discussion and interchange of ideas; it trains in power of expression; it teaches the virtue of co-operation. Farmers blunder when they fail to encourage organization. Sometimes, out of foolish notions of independence, they neglect to unite their forces. They are utterly blind to their best interests when they do so. They should encourage organization if for no other reason than for the ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... widowhood. She told no more infantile perilous tales about husbands who ate peas with a knife. In her thankfulness that the tyrannic Rosamund had gone to Germany, and that Madame Piriac had vanished back into unknown Paris, Audrey was at pains to take to heart the lesson of a semi-hysterical blunder. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... "You make a blunder like that again, and you'll be sorry for it," he bullied, shaking an angry fist at Phil, who turned a pair of surprised eyes ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... Anxious to make no blunder, I resolved, before proceeding further, to learn what I could of the character and antecedents of the suspected one, and this from the only source which offered—Mr. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... permission sought. When he began to unfold the object of his visit, to obtain permission to capture Henry and Donelson, Halleck silenced him so quickly and sharply that he said no more, and returned to Cairo believing his commander thought him guilty of proposing a military blunder. But, persisting still, he telegraphed on the 28th that, if permitted, he would take Fort Henry and establish and hold a camp there. Next day he wrote to the same effect in detail. On the 28th, Commodore A.H. Foote, flag-officer of the gunboat fleet, ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... used to think, when I first came here, that I'd been a fool; but now, somehow, at times like this, I wonder if I didn't blunder into the wisest act of my life." The prairie spirit had taken hold of him. "And the longer I stay the more it grows upon me that such a life as this, where one's success is not the measure of another's failure, is ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... is in writing that the scholar is liable to slip; in oral speech he seldom makes a blunder. In fact, there are many people who are perfect masters of speech,—who never make a blunder in conversation, yet who are ignorant of the very principles of grammar and would not know how to write a sentence correctly on paper. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... the arts of woodcraft, and were proving apt pupils. They were both going to volunteer to join Rogers' bold band of Rangers, for they had grown almost disheartened at the regular army service, where one blunder and disaster was invariably capped by another; and the life of the Rangers did at least give scope for personal daring and adventure, and might enable them to strike a blow now and again at the enemy who had wrought ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... they don't commit murders—not in Europe, at any rate," said Mr. Flexen. "In the East and in the United States it's different perhaps. Murder is always as much of a blunder as a crime. It makes people so keen after the criminal. No: no really intelligent ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... from getting the faintest hint of who the Spaniard might be, and yet his tongue seemed determined to get him into trouble in spite of all he could do. He made several efforts to creep out of his scrape, but the old man's eye was upon him and he made blunder after blunder. Presently the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... odd I should blunder into your house to get my bandaging. My first stroke of luck! Anyhow I meant to sleep in this house to-night. You must stand that! It's a filthy nuisance, my blood showing, isn't it? Quite a clot over there. Gets visible as it coagulates, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... their present plan they would be adding another to the list. And as to their power to help us positively, it is nil. Their initial omission to send a formidable military force to Poland was an irreparable blunder, for it left them without an executive in eastern Europe, where they now can help none of their protegees against their respective enemies. Poles, Rumanians, Jugoslavs are all left to themselves. From the Allies they may expect inspiriting telegrams, but little else. In fact, the utmost they ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... torture! She could regard them now dispassionately, albeit with wonder. She marvelled now that she had ever given herself to such a man. By the light of experience she realized how tragic had been her blunder, and now that the awful sense of shock and desolation had passed she could be thankful that no heavier penalty had been exacted. The man had been taken swiftly, mercifully, as she believed. He had been spared much, and she—she had been delivered from a fate far worse. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... that notion out of your mind, and don't ever meddle with it again. Tilbury set that trap for you. Don't you know it's a trap? He is on the watch, and fully expecting you to blunder into it. Well, he is going to be disappointed—at least while I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... feeling so far as it could be spared without injustice being done to the country, Booth must have expected to find his act condemned by every rational Southern man as a worse than useless crime, as a blunder of the very first magnitude. Had he succeeded in getting abroad, Secession exiles would have shunned him, and have treated him as one who had brought an ineffaceable stain on their cause, and also had rendered their restoration ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... Beust, the Saxon Minister, was at this time in Berlin and met Bismarck for the first time; they were discussing the conduct of the Austrian Government in shooting Robert Blum, a leading demagogue who had been in Vienna during the siege. Beust condemned it as a political blunder. "No, you are wrong," said Bismarck; "when I have my enemy in my ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... money touched fuzzy's dingy palm his first instinct was to take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It—and, oh, what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind's eye! He had tumbled to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless, friendless, ragged, cold, drifting; and he held ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... the inscription is in shockingly bad Latin; Calpurnia is made conqueror of the Cimbri, not her father, by a grammatical blunder; and one would suspect a forger would have avoided such a grotesque error, which is quite in agreement with other blunders made by the sculptors of monuments in the Alyscamps, who were clearly ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... hunted by a village posse. And bloodhounds! The adventurous side of this rather pleased him. It simply narrowed down to this—it behooved him to loiter no longer in the green world of spring. Penance or no penance he must now try penitential speed. How on earth had he ever managed to blunder into a country all ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... wonder Was some heart-chord snapped asunder When the threads were soft and silken? Did some fatal boyish blunder Plant a canker in my bosom That hath ever burned ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... to their sovereign on his accession, "Nos que valemos tanto como vos," etc., frequently quoted by historians, rests on the authority of Antonio Perez, the unfortunate minister of Philip II., who, however good a voucher for the usages of his own time, has made a blunder in the very sentence preceding this, by confounding the Privilege of Union with one of the Laws of Soprarbe, which shows him to be insufficient, especially as he is the only, authority for this ancient ceremony. See Antonio Perez, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... blower and bloat, a gas-bag and fanfaron, a Gascon and a carajo, alma miserabile, and a pudding-head, a sacre menteur and a verfluchte prahlerische Hauptesel, a brassy old blunder-head and a spupsy, un sot sans pareil and a darned old hoffmagander; a pepper-pot-pourri, a thafe of the wurreld and an owld baste, the divil's blissing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to nothing of it. They know enough to have pedestals of their own; to be on their guard; to have a reputation to maintain; to conceal the "dram of folly;" to be, to that extent, artificial in their relations with men. They dare not betray the "laughable blunder," which, said Charles Lamb, is the test your neighbour giveth you "that he will not betray ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... you do, great or small, will be like some of those hollow images of the gods that one hears of in barbarian temples—looked at in front, fair, but when you get behind them you find a hollow, full of dust and spiders' webs and unclean things. Be sure of this, every sin is a blunder. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... saw what a misleading blunder she had committed towards Loveday in playing to the yeoman. Perhaps she had sown the seeds of ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... consciousness of her blunder dawned upon her, Nattie would gladly have sank into oblivion. But as that was impossible, she took a fresh blank, ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... in quoting prices from Mark Lane, call it Cinquefoil, a very different plant, (Potentilla) of rather a noxious quality. See Gleanings on Works of Agriculture and Gardening, p. 88, where a curious blunder occurs of this kind. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... messengers returning with the emperor's refusal. Godfrey, the bravest and most determined of the leaders of the Crusade, was not a man to swerve from his word, and the country was given up to pillage. Alexius here committed another blunder. No sooner did he learn from dire experience that the Crusader was not an utterer of idle threats, than he consented to the release of the prisoner. As he had been unjust in the first instance, he became cowardly in the second, and taught his enemies (for so ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... I don't know anything about him," I corrected myself. It was my first blunder: the doctor glanced up at me quickly and then turned his attention again to the body. Like a flash there had come to me the vision of the woman with the bronze hair and the tragic face, whom I had surprised in the vestibule between the cars, somewhere in the small hours of the morning. I ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "Forward, the Light Brigade!" Was there a man dismay'd? Not tho' the soldier knew Some one had blunder'd: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die: Into the valley of ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... and after a little further dialogue, in which the cool Highlander completely deceived the French sentries, the British were allowed to slip past in the darkness. The tiny cove was safely reached, the boats stole silently up without a blunder, twenty-four volunteers from the Light Infantry leaped from their boat and led the way in single file up the path, that ran like a thread along the face of the cliff. Wolfe sat eagerly listening in his boat below. Suddenly from the summit he saw the flash of the muskets and ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... a fatal blunder To be blind to this appalling Tragedy you wrong by calling The result of spells—no spells Are such signs, but miracles Outside man's experience falling. He came here because he yearned With his pure and holy breath To give life, and so found death. 'T is a lesson that he ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... style of woman,' soliloquized Percy, as he saw the carriage drive off. 'Gentleness, meekness, and a dash of good sense, is the recipe for a rational female—otherwise she is a blunder of nature. The same stamp as her sister, I see; nothing wanting, but air and the beauty, which, luckily for Arthur, ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "We all agreed that this Gilbert fellow was as cool a customer as we'd ever met. Now the chances are he'll grasp the situation at a glance, laugh at his blunder, put your bag safely away, and hustle to remedy the mistake so as not to be left out of the tournament. Believe that, Will, for ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... afraid, Captain, that I have made a blunder. Mrs. Dillon came to me—most kindly of course—and made an offer to take care of a booth at the bazaar, and I refused her. You know my feeling against giving these Americans ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... about the minutiae of the ius divinum to which the Romans had become habituated under priestly rule—religio in that sense in which it is least really religious. He will find a Flamen Dialis resigning his priesthood because he had made a blunder in putting the exta of a victim on the altar;[696] only too ready, it may have been, to take an opportunity of getting free of those numerous taboos which deprived the priest of Jupiter of all possibility of active life. Such a conjecture finds support in the curious fact that his successor ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... responsible for the worst features of Scotch Presbyterianism. Half cooked beans account for the religion of the Puritans. Fried bacon and saleratus biscuit underlie the doctrine of State Rights. Lent is a mistake, fasting is a blunder, and bad ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the Christian religion and the Imperial-revolutionary system. There are many blunders in the above extract as we read it; blundering metaphors, blundering arguments, and blundering assertions; but this is surely the grandest blunder of all; and one wonders at the blindness of the legislator and historian who can advance such a parallel. And what are we to say of the legacy of the dying revolution to Napoleon? Revolutions do not die, and, on their death-beds, making fine speeches, hand over their property to young officers of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is absurd!" cried Durtal, "the greatest blunder ever introduced into the symbolism of the elements. The medieval sages were mistaken, for snow is pure and cold is chastity. It is the sun, on the contrary, that is the active agent in developing the germs of rottenness, the ferment ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... What do you imagine that I should think of it! The whole thing seems to me the most ghastly blunder—the most horrible anomaly. You—in these surroundings! Married to a man so entirely beneath you, and with whom you ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... of indignation which encircled the globe when reports were printed that over a thousand people lost their lives on the Lusitania, found a sympathetic echo in the Berlin Foreign Office. "Another navy blunder," the officials said—confidentially. Foreign Office officials tried to conceal their distress because the officials knew the only thing they could do now was to make preparation for an apology and try to excuse in the best possible ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... the case of tinned dog, etc., but by some blunder he or his man put the label on the wrong box, and it went per rail, per coach, per camel, and the last stage per boot, and reached my friends' camp on Christmas Eve, to their great joy. My friend broke the case open by the ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... age.' I went away with my steadfast friend, George W. Benson, assured that the legislators of the State had been guilty of a most unrighteous act, and that Miss Crandall's persecutors had also committed a great blunder; that they all would have much more reason to be ashamed of her imprisonment than she or her friends could ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... to ministerial disregard of physical laws and its consequences,—lessons which, unfortunately, seem to have but little effect on cabinets, owing to their shifting personelle, England following up the disasters of Carthagena with the still greater blunder of the Walcheren expedition, where, out of England's small available physical war material, nearly forty thousand men were either left to fatten the swamps of Walcheren, or to wander through England in after years on the pension-list, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Oliver, and realized his blunder. He glanced quickly at Myra, and was relieved to observe that she ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... new-born Democrat, all opinion on that subject was "expressly pretermitted" in the June Platform! Mr. Watkins was in such a hurry to join the Forney, Pierce, and Catholic Democracy, that he did not stop to examine even the Platform which most disgusted him! But this is not the worst blunder which he committed in that speech. He turned to the new Platform, and asked, ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... is to these ethical qualities that Buddhism owes its marvellous success.[Note 10] A system which knows no God in the western sense; which denies a soul to man; which counts the belief in immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin; [69] which refuses any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice; which bids men look to nothing but their own efforts for salvation; which, in its original purity, knew nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred intolerance, and never ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... and apprehension were somewhat mitigated when I observed that Edd was dirty, ragged, and almost as much disheveled as I was. I had feared he would see in my appearance certain unmistakable evidences that I had made a tenderfoot blunder and then run for my life. But Edd took my loss of hat, and torn coat, and general bedraggled state as a matter of course. Indeed I somehow felt a little pride at his acceptance of me ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... last, in a superb silk dress, the broad luster of which would have been beautiful, only the effect was broken and frittered away by six rows of gimp and fringe. But why blame her? This is a blunder in art as universal as it is amazing, when one considers the amount of apparent thought her sex devotes to dress. They might just as well score a fair plot of velvet turf with rows of box, or tattoo a blooming ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... to dissemble his startled expression in a grin that revealed his white teeth. "Ye can't forgive me that blunder, Mr. Caryll," said he. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... relieved their confusion by seconding Burns's praise. The poet saw his mistake, but had the good sense not to try to repair it. Years afterwards he told Professor Walker that he had never spoken of this unfortunate blunder, so painful to him had ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... unsaddling his horse, and shaking down some litter for the poor wearied animal, he heard Smith observe to Ganlesse,—"By my faith, Dick, thou hast fallen into poor Slender's blunder; missed Anne Page, and brought us a great ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... given which lay within the power of the officers of this club. Very well, then, far as it was from my original intention, I present my personal grievance and I claim redress. The vote of censure which the committee has passed upon me I regard as merely a stupid and offensive blunder; the implication conveyed by listening to a servant in relation to a charge against a member is an insult to him as a gentleman, which, to me personally, seems too intolerable to be endured. I came into this club as to a body of gentlemen, and I have ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... witchcraft. An examination being instituted, a waxen image was discovered in his chamber with a hair of the color of the earl's drawn through the body; also, an old woman in the neighbourhood, a reputed witch, being required to recite after a prompter the Lord's Prayer in Latin, was observed to blunder repeatedly in the same words. But these circumstances, however strong, not being deemed absolutely conclusive, the poor old woman was apparently suffered to escape:—after the gentleman of the horse, or his instigators, we do not find ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... purpose; but the villany of the latter is finely defeated in his mistaking a silly, forward girl, Miss Glossop, for Penelope, and accordingly prevailing on her to elope with him to Lord Spoonbill's villa, where the blunder is soon discovered by his lordship, who in return is horsewhipped by the father of Miss Glossop; and Darnley and Penelope are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... Kamraviona to try if we could get rid of the annoying restraints which made our residence here a sort of imprisonment, I discovered that the whole affair was not one of blunder or accident, but that we actually were prisoners thus be design. It appeared that Kamrasi's brothers, when they heard we were coming into Unyoro, murmured, and said to the king, "Why are you bringing such guests amongst us, who will practise all kinds of diabolical sorcery, ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... abashed at her blunder, that she looked absolutely imploring, and Mr. Denis Oglethorpe smiled again. He felt inclined to make ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ago, addressed 'to the most impudent man living,' was universally acknowledged to be dedicated to our commentator." Warburton had always the Dunciad in his head when a new quarrel was rising, which produced an odd blunder on the side of Edwards, and provoked that wit to be as dull as Cooper. Warburton said, in one of his notes on Edwards, who had entitled himself "a gentleman of Lincoln's Inn,"—"This gentleman, as he is pleased to call himself, is in reality a gentleman only of the Dunciad, or, to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... teachings of the previous fifty thousand years. He asks us to believe that God muddled men's minds with a mysterious series of revelations cloaked in fable and allegory; that He allowed them to stumble and to blunder, and to quarrel over these "revelations"; that He allowed them to persecute, and slay, and torture each other on account of divergent readings of his "revelations" for ages and ages; and that He is ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... that the Shibprakash objection stood first for hearing. It was opened by the appellant's pleader, who rose armed with a huge account book and bundle of receipts, in order to prove that his client owed nothing to Government, and that the sale proceedings were a blunder from beginning to end. Asu Babu waited till his turn came, and then informed the Collector that he would find, on examining his books, that the appellant was Rs. 1 11. 0. in arrears at the date of the sale. The Collector ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... that Venice finally surrendered, but not until she had exhausted the means of defence and life. At that time, few men in America but were in the habit of denouncing the French President for his indifference to the Italian cause. He was charged with having been guilty of a blunder and a crime. His consent to the expedition to Rome aggravated his offence, for it was an act of intervention on the wrong side. But the passage of ten years enables us to be more just to him than it was possible for us to be in 1849. He was not firm ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the girl with eager promptness, that must have come from shame from the blunder she had made. Lemuel was twenty, the 4th ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... et ther's bahn ta be sum play-acters at t'Fleece Inn Garritt, and ther bahn ta act 'Catherine fra t'Padding Can, er Who's ta tak t'screws;' ta be follered bi 'Alpaca, er t'smashing up o' t'engines.'" But Billy's blunder was perhaps for the best; for, seeing that this was about the time when hand woolcombing was on the decline, and engines were being brought out, the people had an idea that the announcement had ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... work—a bout at wrestling, be it Caesar's Bridge, the Epistles of Phalaris, the import of {men} and {de}, the Catholic question, or the great roots of Christian faith; ending with the latest joke in the town or the West Raw, the last effusion by Affleck, tailor and poet, the last blunder of AEsop the apothecary, and the last repartee of the village fool, with the week's Edinburgh and Glasgow news by their respective carriers; the whole little life, sad and humorous—who had been ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... murmured as his nimble fingers grew busy, "ye've been drinkin' again! Nay, don't deny it! A' see ye comin' out of Hennessy's the forenoon. An' ye've a wife an' six children, the shame on ye to treat a puir woman so! Another blunder like this an' ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... are more courteous than the French. Here the stranger, let him come from what country he may, and be ever so unacquainted with the people and language, he is sure of a civil reply to any question that he may ask. With the exception of the egregious blunder I have mentioned of the cabman driving me to the Elysee, I was not laughed at ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... horse, fastened his rope to the hobbles, and tied that in turn to a long, heavy slab of rock, and turned in. He would not risk losing his horse in this desert land. At best a posse could not reach Showdown before noon the next day, and rather than blunder into Showdown at night and take unnecessary risks, he decided to rest, and ride in at sunup, when he would be able to see what he was doing and better estimate the possibilities of getting food for himself and his horse and of finding refuge in some out-of-the-way ranch or homestead. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... had made any such gigantic blunder as that," returned Tom firmly, "then we'd deserve to be run out. We wouldn't have the nerve to put ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... jackknife. When the liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their vice, were cursed ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... distinct address to Christ as the Hearer of Prayer. And, note, last of all, about this matter, the singular grammatical irregularity in my text, which is something much more than a mere blunder or slip of the pen. The words which follow, viz., 'comfort' and 'stablish,' are in the singular, whilst these two mighty and august names are their nominatives, and would therefore, by all regularity, require a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... think aloud before such a woman as Mrs. Ready. Who will venture to excuse such an eccentric proceeding? Would not the whole world blame you for your incorrigible blunder? It had, however, one good effect. It quickly cleared the room of your intrusive guest; who swept out of the apartment with a haughty "Good morning." And well she might be offended; she had accidentally heard the truth, which no one else in the town ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... be an expert in legerdemain, and he came to Brown's prepared to perform some of his best feats. When the company assembled in the drawing-room after tea, he determined to redeem the fearful blunder that he ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... to come to close quarters, and ventures on a remark on Sanskrit grammar. It is the only passage in all his writings, as far as I remember, where, instead of indulging in mere sheet lightning, he comes down upon me with a crashing thunderbolt, and points out a real grammatical blunder. He says ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... repeated. "This afternoon I tried to stop the duel you are to fight with my brother, and I am told that I made a very serious blunder. I should like to try and correct it. When I spoke of my brother's skill, I mean his skill with the pistol, I knew you were ignorant of it and I thought if you did know of it you would see the utter folly, the wickedness of this duel. But instead ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... nor compassion for the youth and innocence of the Duke d'Enghien, to perceive the imprudence, as well as wickedness, of the proceeding. The remark of the callous Fouche had passed into a proverb, "It was worse than a crime—it was a blunder." ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... instinct. Set a greedy man before a dish of fruit and he will make no mistake, but take the choicest even without seeing it. In the same way, if you allow a girl who is well brought up to choose a husband for herself, if she is in a position to meet the man of her heart, rarely will she blunder. The act of nature in such cases is known as love at first sight; and in love, first ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... disposition, great perspicuity of perception, much force of character; and Franceska's, scarcely yet formed, showed that she was affectionate, romantic, and, of all things in the world, fond of horses and of boating. Emilia's was held as a great blunder, for she was said to have an eye devoted to temporal advantages, also volatile, yet of great determination, triumphing over every obstacle, and in much ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... modern sovereign ever enjoyed. He was now thirty-three years of age,—supreme in France, and powerful throughout Europe. The French were proud of a man who was glorious both in peace and war; and his consulate had been sullied by only one crime,—the assassination of the heir of the house of Conde; a blunder, as Talleyrand said, rather than a crime, since it arrayed against him all the friends of Legitimacy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... Arabella. It did not take the former long, after Mr. Bennett once explained just how things stood, to comprehend exactly the situation, and to form and mature his plans accordingly. He had committed a blunder, as Mr. Bennett termed it, in giving up Miss Tenant, but that was a conventional mistake, if, which it is very doubtful, Hiram ever admitted that it was a mistake. Here, however, he could bring his keen knowledge of human nature to play, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... boy," cried Brace, with a good-humoured laugh. "Disgraced! You, a mere calf in just learning your drill. If you had been in the troop for four or five years, and made such a blunder, why, it would have been rather disgraceful; but for you! Why, we are quite proud of the rapid way you are ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... celerity, and clearing more bars than the keenest fox-hunter, to be in at the death. But the great trial was an anthem that had been prepared and arranged by Master Simon, and on which he had founded great expectation. Unluckily there was a blunder at the very outset; the musicians became flurried; Master Simon was in a fever, everything went on lamely and irregularly until they came to a chorus beginning "Now let us sing with one accord," which seemed to be a ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... through the trees of the avenue; and there was a strong sweet smell of wet earth and grass. Rose had drawn the hood of her waterproof over her head, and her face gleamed an indistinct whiteness from its shelter. Oh this leaping pulse—this bright glow of expectation! How had she made this stupid blunder about his going? Oh, it was Catherine's mistake, of course, at the beginning. But what matter? Here they were in the dark, side by side, friends now, friends always. Catherine should not spoil their last walk together. She felt a passionate ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... world having the great and beautiful quality of fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the quality of refinement. And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection. One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negative has offered up a singular blunder in honour of robustiousness. Refinement is not negative, because it must be compassed by many negations. It is a thing of price as well as of value; it demands immolations, it exacts experience. No slight or easy charge, then, is committed to such of us as, having apprehension ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... I made another blunder—in England. I should have had more courage and have faced the risk. But you might have turned ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... have tried a dozen times before giving up. There were no landmarks in that all-concealing grayness, and only by sheerest chance would anyone blunder into this valley—unless hypnotically summoned, like ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... sir, I have two vessels waiting for cargoes of India-rubbers there, under a blunder-headed captain, who will do nothing he has not been bidden to,—obey his orders if he breaks his owners. You smile, sir? Why, I should have made thirty thousand dollars this winter, sir, by my India-rubbers, if we had not had this devilish mild, open weather, you and Miss Julia ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... king exercises his functions as ruler over both kingdoms through a council of state, composed of an equal number of Swedes and Norwegians, whose duty it is to advise the sovereign, and, in accordance with a peculiar feature of monarchy, to take the responsibility when any blunder is made; for "the king can do no wrong." If anything is wrong, some one else did it. Having the same king, who rules over each nation separately, is the only connection between Norway and Sweden. The former pays about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars of his civil list, ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... seen the estimated cost of the establishment, further progress was arrested by want of funds. Before the end of the century everybody concerned had come to the conclusion that the villa of Brancifort was a great blunder,—the "settlers are a scandal to the country by their immorality. They detest their exile, and ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... responsibility that would rest upon you," protested the colonel. "A single blunder on your part might ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
