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More "Mystery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of some clue to this mystery, I carefully inspected the other maps in this collection. In a map of the eastern hemisphere I soon observed the outlines of islands, which, though on a scale greatly diminished, were plainly similar to that of the land ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... printing was done at enormous cost; scientific communication had little or no facility; the Church persecuted science and all research which was based on the analysis of natural phenomena. Persecution begat mystery. So, to the people as well as to the nobles, physician and alchemist, mathematician and astronomer, astrologer and necromancer were six attributes, all meeting in the single person of the physician. In those days a superior physician ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... auditorium and made them one and very intimate, was dispelled. John watched her as she moved about the stage, and wondered why it was that the audience had suddenly become a little fidgetty. His eyes were full of astonishment. He gazed at Mrs. Cream as if he were trying to understand some ineluctable mystery.... He remembered how enthralled he had been by the acting of the girl who had played Juliet. He had been caught up and transported from the theatre to the very streets of Verona. He had felt that he was one of the crowd that followed the Montagues or ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... she leaned against her chair-back and closed her eyes. Continuous and assiduous attention from Mrs. Hilbrough was more than she had expected; and now that the messenger was proven to be Millard's own man, she doubted whether there were not some mystery about the matter, the more that the flowers ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... "nor can I solve the riddle of life. That is the great mystery. Death is simple. We know why we die but we don't know ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... the disappearance of the locket was a mystery. In Mrs. Barbara's mind there was no doubt that Ah Lon had taken the coveted picture and concealed it in safe hiding. Jinty almost thought so too, and a gloom crept over Old Studley. "I dursn't tell the master, he's that wrapped up in the ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... suppressed amazement at each other's presence there. Darton's eyes, too, fell continually on the gown worn by Helena as if this were an added riddle to his perplexity; though to Sally it was the one feature in the case which was no mystery. He seemed to feel that fate had impishly changed his vis-a-vis in the lover's jig he was about to foot; that while the gown had been expected to enclose a Sally, a Helena's face looked out from the bodice; that some long-lost hand met ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the cattle which had sunk into the marshes near the lake, and were unable to extricate themselves. In every part of the world where I have since been, I have heard similar legends, and have in most instances been able to discover a very probable explanation of the mystery. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... greater. And to tempt him there was this new mystery, this knowledge that he could not miss. It had been vaguely present in his mind when he faced the crowd at Martindale, he remembered now. And the same merciless coldness had been in his hand when he pressed his gun into ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... to be an ordinary tourist," Theo said, with just the right air of mystery, "but if she liked, she could travel as a personage. She has her own reasons for coming to America, just as I have mine, though hers are different. Don't you think she ought to see Shasta, and the McCloud River, if her impressions are ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... place, at length, to which former intimations had pointed, and recognize the connexion which they themselves have with their ancient forerunners[175]." ... It is as if for four hundred years and upwards, a mighty mystery,—described in many a dark place of Prophecy, exhibited by many a perplexing type, foreshadowed by many a Divine narrative,—had waited for solution. The world is big with expectation. The long-expected time at last arrives. Up springs ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... time it had seemed that this desired condition would never be obtained. Coombe had felt the breath of a mystery. It was supposed to know everything and suspected that it knew nothing—a state of things aggravating to any well ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... acquire glory in combat: but there was no wailing in the camp of our foes; their arrows were not felt, their shouts were not heard. Yet they fell not by the hands of their foes; but perished, we know not where or how. At length, the sun shone on the mystery, and the parted clouds ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... wondering. There had been a note of reservation in his manner when she had spoken of Goldbanks. Was there after all some mystery about him or his occupation, something he did not want them to know? Her interest was ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... of mind of primitive peoples, the flood that submerged all but the strongest swimmers. The savage spent his days suspecting and exorcising evil. The echo in the cliff is an enemy, the wind in the grass an approaching sickness, the new-born child clad in mystery and defilement. But it wasn't for us to laugh at the savage for, so to speak, not having found his earth-legs, since our quite recent ancestors had held comets and eclipses to be menacing gestures of the stars. Some primitive suspicions were reasonable, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... queens which are said to germinate eggs in distinct series? It is all out of the usual line. Other animals or insects usually produce the sexes promiscuously. As we are ignorant of causes deciding sex in any case, we must acknowledge mystery to belong to both sides of the question here. The stumbling-block of more than two sexes, which seems so necessary to make plain, is no greater here than with some species of ants, that have, as we are told, king, queen, soldier ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the young lady who, as it will be remembered, was found six months later alive and married in New York. My friend was in excellent spirits over the success which had attended a succession of difficult and important cases, so that I was able to induce him to discuss the details of the Baskerville mystery. I had waited patiently for the opportunity, for I was aware that he would never permit cases to overlap, and that his clear and logical mind would not be drawn from its present work to dwell upon memories of the past. Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... decided step as an adherent of the cause of the Stuarts. We cannot doubt that James Stuart knew to the full the part that Bolingbroke had played. He knew that he owed Bolingbroke no favor, and that he could have no confidence in him. Still, it remains to the present hour a mystery why James should then, and in that manner, have got rid of Bolingbroke forever. Bolingbroke himself does not appear to have known the cause of his dismissal. It may be that James had grown tired of the whole fruitless struggle, and was glad ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... whole, though it is not without many defects." That these reviews appeared in May and October 1768 is compelling evidence for dating the pamphlet, in spite of Mr. Griffin, 1768. Walpole once more proves himself a reliable source. Why the publication was delayed for over a year will probably remain a mystery. ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... have become of the pretty precious boy?" asked Fabens, as a tear rolled over each cheek. "Can he be alive? I often think of the little fawn, and mother's dying words. O, the terrible mystery! Will it never be solved on earth?—The Lord's ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... a curious thing, but Emma—isn't her name Emma?—always has to work like a slave when you go out. I don't know why there should be so much more to do: you don't help her to clean the kettles or the steps in the general way, do you? It's a mystery. Anyhow, Lydia has to see after my tea, and then I have buttered toast or muffins and rashers of bacon. Lydia's attentions are just a trifle greasy perhaps, now I come to think of it. But she toasts muffins very well, does that young woman, and makes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... took on shapes strange and fantastic; the road became a gleaming causeway whereon I walked, godlike, master of my destiny. Beyond meadow and cornfield to right and left gloomed woods, remote and full of mystery, in whose enchanted twilight elves and fairies might have danced or slender dryads peeped and sported. Thus walked I in an ecstasy, scanning with eager eyes the novel beauties around me, my mind full of the poetic imaginations conjured up by ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... wandered to this remote place. A vague sentiment of awe caused the hunters involuntarily to lower their voices before the supernatural charm of this austere landscape. Those hills, enveloped in mist—even when the plains shone with the blazing rays of the sun—seemed to hide some impenetrable mystery. It might be fancied that the invisible guardians of the treasures, the lords of the mountains according to Indian superstition, were hidden under this veil ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... circumstance which caused a wound on the back part of his jaw to be visible, and one-half of the left-hand little finger had been shot off in defence of his church and country, according to his own account. This was a subject however, upon which he always affected a good deal of mystery when conversing with the people, or we should say, he took care to throw out such oracular insinuations of what he had suffered in their defence, as, according to their opinion, almost constituted him ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... cleared away several dogs, and made room for us to lie down—a more tolerable position, in our case; though how a whole family, with innumerable dogs, stow themselves in the compass of a circle eight feet in diameter, still remains a mystery. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... riveted by the chic, black-clad figure of her employer, standing in the centre of the pale grey carpet, minus her voluminous, inky veil which, during the early half of the day, had transformed her into a creature of mystery. Her mourning was exceedingly elegant and smart. Esther, gazing fascinated, wondered in spite of herself how long before Sir Charles's death it had been planned. She had never been able to rid her memory ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... from him to us, inquiringly. I recollected that my editor had mentioned a daughter who might prove to be an interesting and important figure in the mystery. She spoke in an overwrought, agitated tone. ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... was the Tower. It was suffused with the loveliest glow of gold, ivory, and delicate green, all blending. The lights revealed and interpreted the architecture softening the colors and adding the subtle charm of mystery. A hundred beautiful hues were reflected in the waters of the fountains. The floral effects made by submerged lights in the basin were exquisite, and the witchery ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... afterward, and in the great still joy that had come to him, Sanford Hantee chose to reflect upon the mystery of pain he had known on the lonely out-journey—the spiritless incapacity to cope with life—the loss even of his mastercraft with animals. He would look toward Carlin in such moments and then look away, ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... So the mystery was wholly cleared up at last, and when ex-Private Hinkey departed to begin his term of imprisonment the Army was well rid of one who was in no sense fit to be the comrade of any honest man wearing Uncle ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... quickly on assets, or buying to hold as an investment, was gambling pure and simple, and these men were gamblers. He was nothing more than a gambler's agent. It was not troubling him any just at this moment, but it was not at all a mystery now, what he was. As in the case of Waterman & Company, he sized up these men shrewdly, judging some to be weak, some foolish, some clever, some slow, but in the main all small-minded or deficient because they were agents, tools, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... organism on fire was supposed to be especially beneficial. One taste of the plant gives a realizing sense of its value as an emetic. How the red man enjoyed smoking and chewing the bitter leaves, except for the drowsiness that followed, is a mystery. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... held her course for the open sea, while behind her in the gathering dusk the coast grew hazy—faded out—was gone. The two boys, sitting late into the first watch, shivered with that fine ecstasy of adventure that can come only in the shadowy mystery of star-lit decks and the long, whispering ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... use. The whole country about Stonehenge is dotted with groups of sepulchral barrows, and at the western end of the Cursus is a cluster of them more prominent than the others, and known as the "Seven Burrows." Stonehenge itself inspires with mystery and awe, the blocks being gray with lichens and worn by centuries of storms. Reference to them is found in the earliest chronicles of Britain, and countless legends are told of their origin and history, they usually being traced to mythical hands. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... therefore, take our old friend the fox for our first lesson. This is the animal sure to be selected by all learners, and the reason is not far to seek—it being of a manageable size, not too large nor too small; an animal, moreover, of a picturesque habit of body, and about whose death more or less of mystery hangs—this mystery so dear to the imagination of the youthful amateur! In some places the death of the vulpine robber of hen roosts is hailed with delight, and people are to be found even —oh, horror!—willing to grasp in friendship the hand of ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... at least, the right of the elect to employ the sword against the worldly authorities, "the godless," "the enemies of the saints." It was predicted, he maintained, that a two-edged sword should be given into the hands of the saints to destroy the "mystery of iniquity," the existing principalities and powers, and the time was now at hand when this prophecy should be fulfilled. The new movement in the North-west, in the lower Rhenish districts, and the adjacent Westphalia sprang up ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... physical aspect of either path. The journey had become interminable. The unspeakable monotony, whose only variant was peril, had smothered the spark of hope and interest. The allurement of mystery had wholly ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... professional beggars were fitted with all the appliances of imposture; where there was an agency for the hire of children to be carried about by forlorn widows and deserted wives, to move the compassion of street-giving benevolence; where young pickpockets were trained in the art and mystery which was to conduct them in due course to an expensive voyage for the good of their country to ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... could not bear it. Nor could she bear that Monty should cry, as he was doing in that dreadful, quiet way. Boys shouldn't cry—it meant something terrible when they did. Besides, why should he now, anyway? The knowledge of his father's death was nothing new; and here was all the mystery explained, and the suspicion which had clouded ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... a bed, and the usual instruments of a lady's toilet; but Lady Selina does not choose to have it shown, and it has become invested, in the eyes of the visitors, with no ordinary mystery. Many a petitionary whisper is addressed to the housekeeper on the subject, but in vain; and, consequently, the public too ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... hand as though he wanted something. Mr Springett without a word passed him one of Dan's broad chisels. 'Ah! Wood-carving, for example. If you can cut wood and have a fair draft of what ye mean to do, a' Heaven's name take chisel and maul and let drive at it, say I! You'll soon find all the mystery, forsooth, of wood-carving under your proper hand!' Whack, came the mallet on the chisel, and a sliver of wood curled up in front of it. Mr Springett watched like an ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... Prussians as to leave them powerless—if these two "if's" had become realities, Napoleon must have driven Wellington back on Brussels. Then the Belgians would have joined him, and the Austrians would have forsaken the Allies, Metternich wishing well to Bonaparte for the sake of his wife and child. The mystery of his escape from Elba, which the English fleet might easily have prevented, remains still to be explained: for the Vienna Congress was riddled with intrigue. [Footnote: Sir Charles Dilke discussed the whole question of Napoleon's escape from Elba in an article in the Quarterly ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... might be but dimly conscious of the meaning in the eyes that met hers; her own drooped, half troubled, half confused, before them. But to Helen, who knew what love's signals were, there was no mystery whatever in the ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... mounted sappers, who so boldly penetrated into the heart of the enemy's line to destroy the railway north of Bloemfontein. A night-attack must of necessity always be a delicate operation. Shrouded in the mystery of darkness, men know that their safety and the success of the enterprise is dependent upon the sagacity and coolness of one or, at the most, two men. They must be momentarily prepared to meet the unexpected. The smallest failure or miscarriage—the merest ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. We must bring our wills under His. Here and now we can do this by resolution and effort, in the strength of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we know. The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague. The mistake people make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form. We have it travestied to-day under many forms—under the form of throwing open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as far as possible: ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a mystery. She wondered greatly what it all meant. Never in anything else had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but she felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up fifty stories which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was brought before a Court of Love by a baron and lady of Champagne, whether love is compatible with marriage. "No," said the baron, "I admire and respect the sweet intimacy of married couples, but I cannot call it love. Love desires obstacles, mystery, stolen favors. Now husbands and wives boldly avow their relationship; they possess each other without contradiction and without reserve. It cannot then be love that they experience." And after mature deliberation the ladies of the Court of Love adopted the baron's conclusions (E. de la Bedolliere, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a great mystery. Before very long it always develops a spirit which is something more than the sum of the individual spirits which compose it. And no man can quite say how it comes into existence. It may be a greater spirit than that of any individual. ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... him labouring his breath, and felt the heat come up from his body like the sun in the dog- days from a paved courtyard. I was too uncomfortable, too perturbed, too much enraged over the fact to spend much thought on what the fact might mean. Was I taken for a soldier? Then why such a mystery about it? I had seen men crimped in the open piazza, out of wine-shops, from the steps of churches. What then was my fate? I ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... in fact a girl who couldn't grow up, because whenever she visited a little mystery island in the Outer Hebrides "they" who lived in a "lovely, lovely, lovely" vague world beyond these voices would call her vaguely (to Mr. NORMAN O'NEILL'S charming music), and she would as vaguely return with no memory of what had passed and no change in her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... or any other gentleman could be. However, his uneasiness made him write to the Count what he had advised, who returned for answer, that such a step was both unnecessary and impolitic, as it would only strengthen suspicions by giving every thing an air of mystery, while there was not the least occasion ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... together, to take an exact account of it, staying a fortnight at a time, I found out the entire work by degrees. The second time I was here, an avenue was a new amusement; the third year another. So that at length I discovered the mystery of it, properly speaking, which was, that the whole figure represented a snake transmitted through a circle. This is an hieroglyphic or symbol of ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... grandfather, who had known the whole story, often mentioned these matters to his grandson. The Popess Juana had loved no other than Jaime's father. General Ortega was a deluded person whom Dona Juana received with extraordinary show of mystery, gowned in white, in a darkened salon, talking in a sweet voice which seemed to come from beyond the tomb, as if she were an angel of the past, concerning the necessity of turning Spain back to its ancient customs, sweeping away the liberals, and reestablishing the government of ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of the ship's company had been injured by the blast, the origin of which remained for ever a total mystery to all but one—the sailor who knew that Paulvitch had been aboard the Kincaid and in his cabin the previous night. He guessed the truth; but discretion sealed his lips. It would, doubtless, fare none too well for the man who had permitted ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to produce the vast quantities of foods that are now dependent upon such insect life. It is true that they take their toll of the food that they are instrumental in sometimes producing but when one attempts to unravel the mystery of balance of nature one is confronted by the big question of how far to go in the eradication of both animals and insect pests. Before man's interference the wild crops were plentiful and balances were kept in harmony ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... established in France, although not in any other country. But it is not quite certain whether we actually possess anything earlier than the twelfth century, even in French, and it is exceedingly doubtful whether what we have in any other vernacular is older than the fourteenth. The three oldest mystery plays wherein any modern language makes its appearance are those of The Ten Virgins,[151] mainly in Latin, but partly in a dialect which is neither quite French nor quite Provencal; the Mystery of Daniel, partly Latin and partly French; ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... didn't really oppose him before that time. Now, I want to know what this is." Her voice hardened. "I'm tired of being treated like a schoolgirl; I'm twenty-four, and old enough to think for myself, and I demand to know what mystery has forced a black ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... underlying jocularity in this remark of Mrs Brand, for she was a strange and incomprehensible mixture of shrewdness and innocence; but no one took much trouble to find out, for she was so lovable that people accepted her just as she was, contented to let any small amount of mystery that seemed to be in her ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... me, father," I retorted, "what is the signal. You needn't make such a blooming mystery of it, like that chap we saw ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... through the peep-hole, was baffled, too. She was an interested party in what seemed a death-struggle—was not one of the fighters her Joe?—but the audience understood and she did not. The Game had not unveiled to her. The lure of it was beyond her. It was greater mystery than ever. She could not comprehend its power. What delight could there be for Joe in that brutal surging and straining of bodies, those fierce clutches, fiercer blows, and terrible hurts? Surely, she, Genevieve, ...
— The Game • Jack London
... himself to love liberty; but he serves it, and that is enough for me. I shall be there to defend him." Thus, three of Robespierre's subsequent victims combined that night, and unknown to him, for the safety of the man by whom they were eventually to die. Destiny is a mystery whence spring the most remarkable coincidences, and which tend no less to offer snares to men through their virtues than their crimes. Death is everywhere: but, whatever the fate may be, virtue alone never repents. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... him to see those accounts, which he came so many miles on purpose to settle. Perceiving him begin to waken to the suspicion that she had some interest in suppressing the accounts, and hearing him, in an altered tone, ask, "Madam, is there any mystery in these accounts, that I must not see them?" she instantly rang the bell, and answered, "Oh, none; none in the world; only we thought—that is, I feared it might fatigue you too much, my dear friend, just the day before your journey, and I was unwilling to lose so many hours of your good company; ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the rest shall bear this burden? Or, to ask another question, where is the sense of it? Does the poet mean, that He, that kill'd the deer, shall be sung home, and the rest shall bear the deer on their backs? This is laying a burden on the poet, that we mist help him to throw off. In short, the mystery of the whole is, that a marginal note is wisely thrust into the text: the song being design'd to be sung by a single voice, and the stanzas to close with a burden to be sung by the whole company.] This note I have given as a specimen of Mr. Theobald's jocularity, and the eloquence ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... on the 19th, whence they crossed to Panama and were compelled to wait there two days for the Columbia to bear them south, to Peru. One of the passengers from New York, was a curious and erratic character, who was the possessor of a weighty secret. After much mystery, he decided to make Boyton his confidant, and he solemnly revealed to him the matter that was bearing on his brain. It was to the effect that a great treasure was buried on a distant island and he was about fitting out an expedition to go in search of it. A female relative, who was a clairvoyant, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... arm's length of that little gipsy, I shall intercept her, even at the risk of receiving such a spiritual-shock as that which struck Mrs. Alicia Dubarry to the ground," said Lyon, facetiously; for he might well make a jest of this lighter affair of the chapel mystery to veil the deep anxiety he felt in the heavy matter ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... know better to-day the value of Coronado's great discoveries. He had solved the age-long mystery of the Seven Cities, and explored the southwest of the United States of our day. The rich region now included in the great states of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas had been seen, and ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... remembering exactly what she looked like when she was kissing a rose with a certain knight in armour in a square garden, since for some perverse reason it was this picture that remained so painfully clear to his mind. Then he drifted off into speculations upon the general mystery of things of a sort that were common with him, and in these became ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... in many other places. It is, therefore, no longer necessary to say that golf is not a highly developed and scientific sort of hockey, or bandy-ball. Still, there be some to whom the processes of the sport are a mystery, and who would be at a loss to discriminate a niblick from a bunker-iron. The thoroughly equipped golf- player needs an immense variety of weapons, or implements, which are carried for him by his caddie—a youth or old man, who is, as it were, his ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase—all that is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety, scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is providential, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... missionary; though it was only the duties of one whom he saw to be needed, without an appointment, that he undertook. How he found time, or strength, with his feeble constitution, for preaching to prisoners and paupers, and visits to the destitute and dying, is a mystery to one less diligent in filling up little interstices ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... and faith give to the mind a power which it is utterly incapable of possessing without them. I believe in the mind, children. I believe that in some day to come it will reach those heights where it will unlock the mystery of life itself to us. I have seen many strange things in my forty-odd years in the wilderness, and not the least of these have been the achievements of the primitive mind. And it seems to me, Roger, ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... manufacture of the Mormon Bible; but beyond this, nothing. His library was small: he left no manuscripts, and refused persistently to have a picture of himself taken. It can only be said that he was a compound of ability, versatility, honesty, duplicity, and mystery." ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... river's song. Folded hands lie in my lap, for the time forgot. My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand. Drifting clouds and tinkling waters, together with the warmth of a genial summer day, bespeak with eloquence the loving Mystery round about us. During the idle while I sat upon the sunny river brink, I grew somewhat, though my response be not so clearly manifest as in the green grass fringing the edge of the ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... the sobbing heard behind doors, and that wild run of the girl who tried to get away from the place by actually scaling a back fence, and who was recognized as the demure little Sarah, all this furnished plenty of material for a mystery story. ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... receipts and issues of the revenue, together with two reports from the commissioners of accounts concerning sums issued for secret services, and to members of parliament. This was a discovery of the most scandalous practices in the mystery of corruption, equally exercised on the individuals of both parties, in occasional bounties, grants, places, pensions, equivalents, and additional salaries. The malcontents therefore justly observed, the house ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... then it may prove the key to all the mystery. What made their intimacy so difficult to understand was that I knew the captain's dislike of Eric had in no way diminished. He spoke of him as savagely ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... over his head, and the forest-bound sheet of water lay embedded between its mountains, as calm and melancholy as if never troubled by the winds, or brightened by a noonday sun. Once more the loon raised his tremulous cry, near the foot of the lake, and the mystery of the alarm was explained. Deerslayer adjusted his hard pillow, stretched his form in the bottom of the canoe, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... drunk with glory, "The victory is perfect—no other will venture against me—knight-errantry is dead." Now imagine my astonishment—and everybody else's, too—to hear the peculiar bugle-call which announces that another competitor is about to enter the lists! There was a mystery here; I couldn't account for this thing. Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then I noticed that my lasso was gone! The old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sirr; vara true, and sae I doot I will never attain the height o' profeeciency ye hae reached. An' at this vara moment, sir," continued Groove, with delicious solemnity and mystery, "ye see before ye, sir, a man wha is in maist dismal want—o' ten shellen!" (A pause.) "If your superior talent has put ye in possession of that sum, ye would obleege me infinitely by a temporary ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... rose as he saw all the well-known items following each other; and when his last new acquisition, the latest addition to his wardrobe, lay solemnly smoothed down upon the top, Freddy's patience could bear no more. Bursting into a long howl of affliction, he called aloud upon Nettie to explain that mystery. Was he going to be sent away? Was some mysterious executioner, black man, or other horrid vision of fate, coming for the victim? Freddy's appeal roused from her work the abdicated family sovereign. "If I'm to be sent away, I shan't go!" cried ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... grievances? Was there any political significance in that strange mingling of curses and blessings? That his temper was not of martyr firmness was evident enough from the sudden change in the current of his thoughts brought about by the tingling of the horsewhip. All else was mystery. But the commonest knowledge of the English and colonial history of those days was sufficient to stimulate conjecture on these points. At the date of the incident recorded James II had been on the throne more than a year, and for a long time both as duke and king had been ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... fancy that in going down stream the shores would show to better advantage, if possible, than in the ascent. From Coblentz to Mayence the river is narrower than before; and every rock more precipitous than its neighbor, has a castle. How some of these towers were built, or could be got at, seems a mystery. I had no idea of the number of these robbers' nests, for such they were. Much as I love the Hudson, yet I cannot help saying that the Rhine is the river of the world, so far as I have seen the watery highways. Frankfort ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... I show the great mystery to thee, for the Lord shall make it fair. Ye minds shall soon depart from the earth, to join ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... Grail, as Wagner uses it, has in it the usual accompaniments of mediaeval tradition,—something of paganism and magic. But these pagan elements are only contrasts to the purity and splendor of the simple Christian truth portrayed. The drama suggests the early miracle and mystery plays of the Christian Church; but more nearly, perhaps, it reminds one of those great religious dramas, scenic and musical, which were given at night at Eleusis, near Athens, in the temple of the Mysteries, before the initiated ones among the Greeks ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... her lost fawn were with me. As yet she knew not what had happened. The bear had frightened her into extra care of the one fawn of whom she was sure. The other had simply vanished into the silence and mystery ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... already surrounded with myth and mystery, Hereward flashed into the fens and out again, like the lightning brand, destroying as he passed. And the hearts of all the French were turned to water; and the land had peace from its tyrants for ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... of the type and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, that priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be very variously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a great degree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catholic continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism, there ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... of troopers detailed for special service, and that his command, with small knowledge of the country, fell into an ambush from which not more than two or three extricated themselves. Beyond this all was mystery, for those who survived that desperate skirmish could say nothing of the fate of their companions. The loss of his son gave Mr. Eustis additional interest in his daughter, if that were possible; and the common sorrow of the two so strengthened and sweetened their lives that their affection ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... brown, melancholy eyes upon Zenobia—only upon Zenobia!—she evidently saw nothing else in the room save that bright, fair, rosy, beautiful woman. It was the strangest look I ever witnessed; long a mystery to me, and forever a memory. Once she seemed about to move forward and greet her,—I know not with what warmth or with what words,—but, finally, instead of doing so, she dropped down upon her knees, clasped her hands, and gazed piteously into Zenobia's face. Meeting no ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Once more they had had their hour together and she had wasted it. As in her girlhood, her eyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep. She was still afraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery. She was still the petted little girl who cannot be left alone in the dark...His memory flew back to their youthful story, and long-forgotten details took shape before him. How frail and faint the picture was! ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... than, standing on the pavement outside the Stock Exchange, he would have experienced greeting his brother jobbers after a settling day that had transferred a fortune from their hands into his. Sennett, in particular, he liked and encouraged. Our whole social system, always a mystery to the philosopher, owes its existence to the fact that few men and women possess sufficient intelligence to be interesting to themselves. Blake liked company, but not much company liked Blake. Young Sennett, however, could ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... the first moment in which she feels intensely all the weight and meaning and mystery ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... interlude takes us for a little while to the Paris cafe where Danton, Robespierre, and Marat sit in angry counsel, even while we are on the sea with the royalist Marquis and Halmalo, the reader is subtly haunted by the great Vendean woods, their profundity, their mystery, their tragic and ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... die, and presently get into orchestras of one kind or another, and so leave the ranks of daily labour and join the great clan or caste of musicians, who are a race or family apart, and carry on their mystery from father to son. ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... that some mystery lay beneath it all, and vowed that she would fathom it to its nethermost depths. What was it that had taken place at Champdoce? Had the Duke, contrary to Daumon's prognostications, recovered? Had he discovered his son' insidious attack upon his life, and only pardoned it upon a ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... means simply "a revealed secret." In other words, "mystery," which we derive from the Greek word quoted, means neither more nor less than a secret revealed and explained to us. A man of mature years and finished education knows that which no school-boy can comprehend. To the elder a secret has been revealed. He is in possession of the mystery. To the younger ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... Caroline—came to me here in a hospital and I put him on my table alongside my tiny bust of Lincoln, which is the sacred place. I wish indeed those eyes could see within this shell of mine and tell what it is that twists my heart, physically turns it on its axis, so that its polarity is changed. From mystery to mystery we have traveled the past year, Anne, with her unfaltering trust, and I, a doubting Thomas. We came here for an operation, but the doctors somewhat doubt its wisdom at all, certainly not now, when pneumonia might befall. So after ten hard days of closest examination I go forth ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... "That is about what I expected. Nancy is in close confinement, charged with the most serious offense possible in war times. I doubt if I, her legal representative, am allowed to see her until this mystery is ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... view is that of the philosopher and religionist, who ponder the tie that binds "soul" and body in an effort to solve the riddle of "creation" and pierce the mystery ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... beyond him. No formula could ever frame and hold for him that vision of his calling which had come to him four years ago on Harcombe Hill. He had conceived and sung of Nature, not as the indomitable parent by turns tyrannous and kind, but as the virgin mystery, the shy and tender bride that waits in golden abysmal secrecy for the embrace of spirit, herself athirst for the passionate immortal hour. He foresaw the supreme and indestructible union. He saw ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... typified the firm immovable bond of marriage between the two; their unity could not be broken. Mark the words of Ulysses: "Woman, thou hast spoken a painful word," when she commanded the bed to be removed; "who hath displaced my bed?" In it there was built "a great sign" or mystery; "now I do not know if my bed be firm in position, or whether some other man has moved it elsewhere, cutting the trunk of the olive tree up by the roots." Such is his intense feeling about that marriage bed, deeply symbolic, truly "a sign," as ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... suppose I'm not up to your standards of honour, but if a person makes a mystery, why shouldn't the others try to find it out? That's what it's for! And there's nothing else ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... have played such tricks with proper names as to make them often unintelligible; thus we find La Rochefoucauld figuring as Ruchfucove; and in an old treatise on the mystery of Freemasonry by John Leland, Pythagoras is described as Peter Gower the Grecian. This of course is an Anglicisation of the French Pythagore (pronounced like Peter Gore). Our versions of Eastern names are so different from the originals that when ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... odd," said Gus, for the nth time sniffing the "tainted breeze." Curiosity piqued the fisher to trace the mystery. He reconnoitred carefully, and presently fancied he could hear the faint murmur of voices. This proceeded from the boat-house, wherein Hill moored the moat punt. "I'll just make a reconnaissance in ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... little while they yielded to the glamour of the divine knowledge that amidst the chaos of eternity each soul had found its mate. There was no need for words. Love, tremendous in its power, unfathomable in its mystery, had cast its spell over them. They were garbed in light, throned in a palace built by fairy hands. On all sides squatted the ghouls of privation, misery, danger, even grim death; but they heeded not the Inferno; they had created a Paradise ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... crossed the trails of these wanderers swarming out of the thickets, sometimes by twos and threes, and again in straggling, endless lines converging upon the vast open barrens where the caribou gathered to select their mates for another year. Where they all came from was a mystery that filled the cubs' heads with constant wonder. During the summer you see little of them,—here a cow with her fawn hiding deep in the cover, there a big stag standing out like a watchman on the mountain top; but when the early autumn comes they are everywhere, crossing ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... there should be no delay. I've a child's eagerness now to push the black curtains aside and see what lies beyond. I've often dreamed and wondered. In a few minutes I shall know. I hear it calling me, that unknown world of silence, beauty and mystery. Let us make haste." ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... upon the list of the city corporations, under the name and style of "the Wardens and Commonalty of the mystery of Fishmongers of the city of London." It is a livery company, and very rich, governed by a prime and five other wardens, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... plata doble, and so to be continued, as long as the house should be used by me, upon merchant security: such a dearth there is really of accommodations of this nature for the present, and for a long time hath been; yet there want not descants, that there is some great mystery of state in the matter, which doubtless will fly as far as Paris, if not ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... stalking off, for a moment, returned with a long pipe and a brass chafing-dish: he blew the coal for the pipe, which he motioned me to smoke, and left me there with a respectful bow. This delay, this mystery of servants, that outer court with the camels, gazelles, and other beautiful-eyed things, affected me prodigiously all the time he was staying away; and while I was examining the strange apartment and its contents, my respect and awe for the owner ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... around their mother and Apollonie, who were clearing up the mystery for them. The mother had barely been able to check their violent outbreak, but could not quite quench all enthusiasm. When they heard that Leonore had come to introduce them to her uncle, they were a little scared, but Leonore understood their hesitation ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... mystery to me where he gets so much money," said Dick to Captain Blossom one day, "Is ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... here, as well as everywhere else, are unavoidable, and the natural consequences of corruption, and might be promulgated, therefore, without attaching any reproach to our rulers; but they are so accustomed to the mystery adherent to tyranny, that even the most unimportant lawsuit, uninteresting intrigue, elopement, or divorce, are never allowed to be mentioned in our journals, without a previous permission from the prefect of police, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... spoke, the orchestra, which was a good one, and perhaps the most satisfactory feature in the performance, broke into some weird Mendelssohnian music, and when the note of plaintiveness and mystery had been well established, the curtain rose upon the great armoury of the castle, a dim indistinguishable light shining upon its fretted roof and masses of faintly gleaming steel. The scene which followed, in which the Countess Hilda, disguised as the traditional phantom of the ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and ancestry were shrouded in mystery; even his age was a matter of pure conjecture. Although he was of the Maltese race, I have reason to suppose that he was American by birth as he certainly was in sympathy. Calvin was given to me eight years ago by Mrs. Stowe, but she knew nothing of his age or ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... dropped back from Henry's side, but was following closely behind him. He was deeply impressed by a situation so extraordinary for one of his type. The thunder, the lightning, the darkness and the danger contained for him all the elements of awe and mystery. ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that had for so long echoed through the factory ceased queries concerning the noise and the mission of the carpenters died away. Even Peter himself forgot about the great mystery, for the ball season was now on and in addition to its engrossing interests he and Nat were transferred to Factory 3 where they became much absorbed in the tanning of cowhides. Here again the preparation ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... eyes of a girl. Simultaneously there came another discovery which completely upset all her calculations and to which she had not fully adjusted herself even up to the time of the critic's visit to Adoree. One great mystery she had solved; another, the deepest mystery of a woman's life, had begun to unfold, and as yet she could scarcely give ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... which a piece of English coal was burning slowly, rose to his feet, amazed at the unusual sight; but he was too lazy for a frolic at that hour, and after a soft "wuf-wuf" he lay down and went to sleep again. The library was dimly lighted, and wore an air of wonder and mystery to the now excited children. Rique, the canary, was curled into a little round yellow ball, and paid no attention to his visitors. Lorito, who was perched in a big gilded cage in the corner, had his beak buried in his ...
— Harper's Young People, November 4, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... evil—in the unmerited sufferings of innocence—in the disproportion of penalties to desert—in the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin—Shakespeare is true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it; and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the intellectual emotions than the understanding,—knowing well that the understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... marriage of the distinguished foreigner (sub rosa, of course), and to our childish vision pictured a wonderful career for this New York girl. The marriage, however, soon terminated unfortunately, and to the day of his death Tasistro's origin remained a mystery. He was an intellectual man of fine presence and skilled in a number of foreign languages. He claimed he was a graduate of Dublin College. Many years later, after I had become more familiar with title-bearing foreigners, Tasistro again crossed my path in Washington, where he was ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Ferdinand de The Gondreville Mystery The Thirteen A Bachelor's Establishment Scenes from a ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... quite right about French women. They are like French dishes, uncommonly well cooked and sent up, but what the dickens they are made of is a mystery. Not but what all womenkind are mysteries, but there are mysteries of godliness and mysteries ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... darkness, and were able to distinguish the outlines of the tall pines and telegraph posts. From time to time the sound of whistles reached them from the station and the telegraph wires hummed plaintively. From the copse itself there came no sound, and there was a feeling of pride, strength, and mystery in its silence, and on the right it seemed that the tops of the pines were almost touching the sky. The friends found their path and walked along it. There it was quite dark, and it was only from the long strip of sky dotted with stars, and from the firmly trodden earth under their ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... slowly, "not alone by her wondrous beauty and grace of manner, but even more by her intelligence and intellectual ability, her natural refinement and delicacy, which, considering her surroundings, seemed to me simply inexplicable. From the very first, she has been to me a mystery, and as I become better acquainted with her, the mystery, instead of being lessened, is ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... Because of this mystery, upon which he merrily insisted, she affected a fear that he would some day desert her. "You don' tell me where you lif, I t'ink you goin' ran away of me, Toby. I vake opp some day; git a ledder dod you gone back home by 'Talian lady dod's ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... medicine-man). Last year some relatives of these Ibans moved to this village, and for three months the knowledge of the part played by the porcupines was hidden from them as a mysterious secret. At the end of that time this precious mystery was disclosed to the new-comers, and the porcupines were feasted with every variety of cooked rice, some of it being made into a rude image of a porcupine, and with rice-spirit and cakes of sugar and rice-flour, salt and dried fish, oil, betel-nut, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... scenting a mystery, looked up curiously Commines made haste to cover his slip, "Or rather, how did you know ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... we would watch for everything that might improve and instruct us; if the arrangements of our daily life were so disposed as to be a constant school for our minds! but oftenest we take no heed of them. Man is an eternal mystery to himself; his own person is a house into which he never enters, and of which he studies the outside alone. Each of us need have continually before him the famous inscription which once instructed Socrates, and which was engraved on the walls ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... communicated to others. If any person makes a gift of the whole earth with all her treasures, unto one conversant with truth, the latter would still regard the gift of this knowledge to be very much superior to that gift. I shall now discourse to thee on a subject that is a greater mystery than this, a subject that is connected with the Soul, that transcends the ordinary understandings of human beings, that has been beheld by the foremost of Rishis, that has been treated in the Upanishads, and that forms the topic of thy inquiry. Tell ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... felt when we heard that they had been barbarously murdered in their bedroom. The eldest son and daughter had been at a ball somewhere near, and on coming home they found that one of the men-servants had dashed out the brains of both their parents with a poker. The motive remains a mystery to this day, for ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... more kept me company. He sat on a twig just across the brook, cocking his head at me, and saucily wagging his tail. Occasionally he would dart off among the trees crying shrilly; but his curiosity would always get the better of him and back he would come again to try to solve the mystery of this rival whistling, which I'm sure was as shrill and as harsh ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... mixed all the babies up, just as you would mix up a delicious fruit salad. We took from the mind all question of mystery and surprise by quickly and honestly answering his question. Thus, his first knowledge of his origin, if he is able to recall it, will ever be associated with ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... the lunar hemispheres in union inseverable? Or cans't thou have been some errant bolide, which missing its way, butted blindly against the lunar face, and there stuck fast, like a Minie ball mashed against a cast-iron target? Alas! nobody knows. Not even Barbican is able to penetrate thy mystery. But one thing I know. Thy dazzling glare so sore my eyes hath made that longer on thy light to gaze I do not dare. Captain, have you any ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... of Charles II." Clarke's "Life of James II." "Vindication of the English Catholics." "The Tryals, Conviction and Sentence of Titus Oates." "A Modest Vindication of Oates." "Tracts on the Popish Plot." Macpherson's "Original Papers." A. Marvell's "Account of Popery." "An Exact Discovery of the Mystery of Iniquity as Practised among the Jesuits." Smith's "Streets of London." "London Cries." Seymour's "Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster." Stow's "Survey of London and Westminster." "Angliae Metropolis." Dr. Laune's "Present State of London, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... labourers, brickmakers, and such like. Mr Crawley had now passed some ten years of his life at Hogglestock; and during those years he had worked very hard to do his duty, struggling to teach the people around him perhaps too much of the mystery, but something also of the comfort, of religion. That he had became popular in his parish cannot be said of him. He was not a man to make himself popular in any position. I have said that he was moody and disappointed. He was even worse than this; he ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... deep shelves, its pools, and its overhanging and hazelly banks concealed. They remitted further search till the stream should become pure; and old man taking old man aside, began to whisper about the mystery of the youth's disappearance; old women laid their lips to the ears of their coevals, and talked of Elphin Irving's fairy parentage, and his having been dropped by an unearthly hand into a Christian cradle. The young men and maids conversed on ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... Perhaps the most powerful character in George Meredith's "Evan Harrington" is the great Mel, whose death is announced in the very first sentence of the novel. Hawthorne, in "The Marble Faun," never clears away the mystery of Miriam's shadowy pursuer, nor tells us what became of Hilda when she disappeared for a time from the sight and ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... God, happily delivered.[196] Although, as yet, he knew but little of experimental religion. And, says he, "The world thought I had religion: but to know the hidden things of godliness was yet a mystery to me. I did not know any thing as yet of the new birth, or what it was spiritually to take the kingdom of heaven by violence, &c." Which serves to shew, that one may do and suffer many things for Christ and religion, and yet at the same ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... a general anticipation of a coming time when the mystery of God's providence will be cleared up, and His righteousness displayed in the final judgment to be then passed on the evil and on the good. What the human race are led to anticipate, as likely to occur hereafter, from the many unsettled questions here between man and his brother, and ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... he was about to tell me remained for the present a mystery; for, just then, the squalls ceasing and the wind shifting to the northward of west, the captain ordered the lee braces to be slacked off, and we hauled round more to starboard, still keeping on the same tack, though. Our course now was pretty nearly south-west ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... at the breakfast table looking over this note, "how long do you mean to sit the picture of The Delicate Embarrassment? To relieve you as far as in me lies, let me assure you that I shall not ask to see this note of Mrs. Beaumont's, which as usual seems to contain some mighty mystery." ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... their way. At Carsphairn they were deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion, neglected to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James's money. Who he was is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his papers were evidently forgeries—that, and his final flight, appear to indicate that he was an agent of the Royalists, for either the King or the Duke of York was heard to say, "That, if he might have his wish, he would have them all turn rebels ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping, something louder than before. 'Surely,' said I, 'surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see then what thereat is, and this mystery explore— Let my heart be still a moment, and this mystery explore; 'Tis ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... few lessons from my teacher of rhetoric hard by the Forum—I will give you a letter to him when you become wise enough to accept a suggestion which I am reminded to make you—a little practise of the art of mystery, and Delphi will receive you as Apollo himself. At the sound of your solemn voice, the Pythia will come down to you with her crown. Seriously, O my friend, in what am I not the Messala I went away? I once heard the greatest logician in the world. His subject was Disputation. One saying I remember—'Understand ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the whole assemblage sings appropriate songs in its praise; and this is kept up until the decoction has been strained to its dregs. But here, as the using it as a beverage is an illicit process, a great mystery attends it. It is said that awa drinking is again on the increase, and with the illicit distillation of unwholesome spirits, and the illicit sale of imported spirits and the opium smoking, the consumption of stimulants and narcotics on the islands ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the extinction of species has been involved in the most gratuitous mystery. Some authors have even supposed that as the individual has a definite length of life, so have species a definite duration. No one I think can have marvelled more at the extinction of species, than I have done. When ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... (Paulitschke, E.N.A., 199) of pouring strong perfumes over the bride in order to stimulate the ardor of the suitor and make him willing to pay more for her—a trick which is often successful. How, under such circumstances, Somal marriages can be "mostly based on cordial mutual affection" is a mystery for Dr. Paulitschke to explain. Burton proved himself a keener observer and psychologist when he wrote (F.F., 122), "The Somal knows none of the exaggerated and chivalrons ideas by which passion becomes refined ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... The Spider drew a newspaper clipping from his pocket. The El Paso paper stated that there was one chance in a thousand of Pete recovering. The paper also stated that there had been money involved—a considerable sum in gold—which had not been found. The entire affair was more or less of a mystery. It was hinted that the money might not have been honestly come by in the first place, and—sententiously—that crime breeds crime, in proof of which, the article went on to say; "the man who had been shot by the police was none other than Pete Annersley, notorious as a gunman ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... of avoiding the direct address. A term of relationship or some title of courtesy was commonly used instead of the personal name by those who wished to show respect. We were taught generosity to the poor and reverence for the "Great Mystery." Religion was the basis of ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... into a dwelling-house, would have been under any circumstances, sufficient temptation to all true English stragglers so blest as to witness it, to force a way into that dwelling-house and see the matter out. But when the phenomenon was enhanced by the notoriety and mystery by this time associated all over the town with the Bank robbery, it would have lured the stragglers in, with an irresistible attraction, though the roof had been expected to fall upon their heads. Accordingly, the chance witnesses on the ground, consisting of the busiest of ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... described round one another. The discovery afterwards of two additional planets testified to the absurdity of this speculation. A description of these extraordinary researches was published, in 1596, in a work entitled 'Prodromus of Cosmographical Dissertations; containing the cosmographical mystery respecting the admirable proportion of the celestial orbits, and the genuine and real causes of the number, magnitude, and periods of the planets, demonstrated by the five regular geometrical solids.' This volume, notwithstanding ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... this mystery, upon which he merrily insisted, she affected a fear that he would some day desert her. "You don' tell me where you lif, I t'ink you goin' ran away of me, Toby. I vake opp some day; git a ledder dod you gone back home by 'Talian ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... asked what was this building we stood in presence of, nobody could know so well as I what it was. The mystery was how it had come to be there for in the midst of this splendid city of equals, where poverty was an unknown word, I found myself face to face with a typical nineteenth-century tenement house of the worst ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... dinner—this was in that seminary town in France where he attended school—he bestrode a certain iron lion, the same strange to him and guarding the portals of a public building. Being thus happily placed, he drew two huge American six-shooters, whereof his possession was wrapped in mystery even to himself, and blazed vacuously, yet ferociously, at the moon. Spoken to by the constabulary who came flying to the spot, Richard replied ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Tiny, you'll never know it— For the mystery lies in this: Just the fact of such warm uprising From winter's chill abyss, And the joy of our heart's upspringing Whenever the Spring is born, Because it repeats the story Of the ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... the yurts of the helpful lama of the morning. We were expected and given a warm welcome in more senses than one, for the yurt into which I was at once taken was so hot that I thought I should faint. How those people in their woollen clothes could endure the heat was a mystery. ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... more than a week previously. His wife distinctly remembered having folded and laid it away in the top of a large trunk on the Saturday of the week before last, since which time she had never set eyes on it. Here was a deepening of the mystery. ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... white-bodied child, groping his stumbling way toward the border-land of consciousness, staring out on a new world and finding it wonderful. It was my Little Stumbler, my Precious Piece-of-Life, walking with his arm first linked through the arm of Mystery. It was my Dinkie looking over the rampart of the home-nest and breaking lark-like ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... words and took no note, and she spoke again to Umslopogaas, saying: "Here is a mystery, O Lord Bulalio. Will it then please you to declare to us ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... who were expected to unravel all mysteries and solve all perplexing problems. And it is to their credit that they never turned a deaf ear to such appeals. It took nearly two years and a half to get the solution of the mystery. There were others in the patrol when it started, but Inspector La Nauze, Constable Wight, Special Native Constable Ilavinik and Corporal W. V. Bruce were those who were in at the end when two Eskimo men, Sinninsiak and Uluksak, were arrested by them at Coronation Gulf as ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... garter, Villon found two of the small coins that went by the name of whites. It was little enough, but it was always something; and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... Stewart remains a mystery to this day. That she was cognisant of the plot to murder Darnley is the more probable theory, in view of facts which no one denies; yet those facts remain intelligible if she was innocent. There are no admitted facts which preclude her guilt: none which prove it conclusively. The various ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... and a mad hatred surged up in him of this mystery in woman's form in whose power, as it seemed, his ruin lay, and whose eyes mashed with revenge and the desire to undo him. What was she plotting against him? Was there a being on earth who would dare to accuse ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... consisted of one hundred and twenty-one persons, of whom seventeen were women and six children. Of all these souls only two men returned to the old country, the fate of the remainder being unknown, and shrouded in the gloom which always attends mystery. England did not, however, leave her children to perish on a barren shore in the new land without at least an effort to ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... man. "That's how I was sprayed! Your dog picked up the hose after you left it, and raised it high, so the water shot over the hedge and on me! Now the mystery is explained! It was ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope
... such clumsy tactics merited. Meanwhile the ravages went on, and the children were kept close housed at night, and cool-eyed old woodsmen went armed and vigilant along the lonely roads. The French habitant crossed himself, and the Saxon cursed his luck; and no one solved the mystery. ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... at pains to ascertain," replied Sir Lucien, "at Mrs. Irvin's express desire, that the man of mystery is still in session and will ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... considered it? A sublime and divine mystery is accomplished. Such a being costs nature the most vigilant maternal care; yet man who would cure you, can think of nothing better than to offer you lips which belong to him in order to teach you how to cease ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... All that would wake the soul to earth. Choose ye the softly-breathing-flute, The mellow horn, the loving lute; The viol you must not forget, And take the sprightly flageolet And grave bassoon; choose too the fife, Whose warblings in the tuneful strife, Mingling in mystery with the words, May seem like ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... were located many miles south of the incubator, and would be visited yearly by the council of twenty chieftains. Why they did not arrange to build their vaults and incubators nearer home has always been a mystery to me, and, like many other Martian mysteries, unsolved and unsolvable ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... back part of the coach; Mr. Winkle had got inside; and Mr. Pickwick was preparing to follow him, when Sam Weller came up to his master, and whispering in his ear, begged to speak to him, with an air of the deepest mystery. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... on the hoary summit of Mont Blanc, flows through a sinuous mountain-channel, and terminates its grand career by liquefaction in the vale of Chamouni. A mighty river it is in all respects, and a wonderful one—full of interest and mystery and apparent contradiction. It has a grand volume and sweep, varying from one to four miles in width, and is about twelve miles long, with a depth of many hundreds of feet. It is motionless to the eye, yet it descends into the plain continually. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Felix was strangely disturbed; not only were his material affairs unsettled, but he was also passing through a crisis in his spiritual life. Two paths were open before him; On one side lay the dazzling mystery of passion; on the other "the small old path" held out its secret and spiritual allurements. I had hope that he would choose the latter, and as I was keenly interested in his decision. I invested the struggle going on in his mind with something ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Gilbert. Alone, Thyrza tried to recall the mind with which she had gone down to have tea with the Grails on a Sunday evening. It used to cause her excitement, but that was another heart-throb than this which now pained her, In those days Gilbert Grail was a mystery to her, inspiring awe and reverence. How would he meet her now? Would he have bitter words for her? No, that would be unlike him. She must stand before him, and say something which had been growing in her since the dark days of winter ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... mortification to see them retreat amicably into a side room, and the next thing announced to him was, that Mistress Clarissa had evanished home, before anybody could get rightly at the bottom of the mystery. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... relations with Mexico has involved this subject in much mystery. The first information in an authentic form from the agent of the United States, appointed under the Administration of my predecessor, was received at the State Department on the 9th of November last. This ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... signed by Elizabeth's own hand, without which the wary old seaman absolutely refused to go, doubtless fearing that he might be sacrificed when it suited his mistress's crooked policy. What the order contained was no mystery to the French envoy.[643] Neither party in this solemn farce was deceived, but both wanted peace. Catharine would have been even more vexed than surprised had Elizabeth confessed the truth, and so necessitated a resort to open ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... illustrations, will of course, be of interest to the man who repairs batteries. A knowledge of the manufacturing processes will give him a better understanding of the batteries which he repairs. The less mystery there is about the battery, the more efficiently can the repairman do ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... and would not be satisfied with any thing of a superficial nature. "She cried to the Lord for mercy, and obtained," says the diary, "real saving faith; it was surprising to observe how well she comprehended the meaning of the gospel, and in how clear a light the mystery of the cross of Christ was revealed to her soul, insomuch that she could apply to herself the sufferings of Jesus, as meritorious and allsufficient for the remission of sin, and the sanctification of soul and body. ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... realms the dreary way, And gives him trembling to Elysian day. 335 Beneath in sacred robes the PRIESTESS dress'd, The coif close-hooded, and the fluttering vest, With pointing finger guides the initiate youth, Unweaves the many-colour'd veil of Truth, Drives the profane from Mystery's bolted door, 340 And ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... friends of the bride should know what had happened. Soon, however, it began to be rumored about that the chief's beautiful daughter had returned to life, and was living in the Red Fox's lodge. How it ever became known was a mystery, for, of course, the grandmother never ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... The mystery that spreads over the existence of the universe comes in great part from this, that we want the genesis of it to have been accomplished at one stroke or the whole of matter to be eternal. Whether we speak of creation or posit an uncreated matter, it is the totality of the universe that we are ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Another has been a poet or musician, and has uttered in words or in song thoughts dimly possible to many men, but by them unutterable and left inarticulate. Another has been influenced still more directly by the universe around him, has felt at times overpowered by the mystery and solemnity of it all, and has been impelled by a force stronger than himself to study it, patiently, slowly, diligently; content if he could gather a few crumbs of the great harvest of knowledge, happy if he could grasp some great generalization or wide-embracing law, and so in some small measure ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... strange in this world, Wilson, nothing at a We may slave for years and get no reward, and do a trifle out of politeness and become independent. In my opinion, this mystery is unravelled. The old lady, for I knew the family, must have died immensely rich: she knew you in your full uniform, and she asked your name; a heavy fall would have been to one so fat a most serious affair; you saved her, and she has rewarded ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... "He's a mystery," said another priest, Father Blackmore; "but he seems to be causing great excitement. They were selling his 'Life' to-day ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... congealed stores are also drawn on by the people who live in the vicinity when the domestic ice supply runs short. The cave is entered from the side of a ravine and its opening is arched by lava rock. How the ice ever got there is a mystery unless it is, as Mr. Volz claims, glacial ice that was covered and preserved by a thick coat of cinders which fell when the San Francisco Peaks were in active eruption. As far as observed the ice never ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... composition; for the characteristics of the brute creation meet and combine with those of humanity in this strange yet true and natural conception of antique poetry and art. Praxiteles has subtly diffused throughout his work that mute mystery, which so hopelessly perplexes us whenever we attempt to gain an intellectual or sympathetic knowledge of the lower orders of creation. The riddle is indicated, however, only by two definite signs: these are the two ears of the Faun, which are ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to unveil the mystery and to render this field accessible to others, at least to a certain degree, for I have by no means completed my ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... the poor-laws and the price of bread; and as a remedy for these evils the people were taught to ask for universal suffrage. A favourite practice with the parties to these transactions was to assemble by torch-light in the open air—a practice which gave a mystery to the meetings well calculated to strike the imagination of the vulgar, and which gave those whose employment did not admit of their being present in the daytime, an opportunity of attending them. The speeches delivered at these meetings ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... as one of holy seclusion and beauty. I went down to the river's edge, where the weird loneliness seemed to increase. The basin is enclosed by high and almost precipitous banks—covered, at the time, with russet woods. A kind of mystery attaches itself to gyrating water, due perhaps to the fact that we are to some extent ignorant of the direction of its force. It is said that at certain points of the whirlpool, pine-trees are sucked down, to be ejected mysteriously elsewhere. The 'water is of the brightest emerald-green. The gorge ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body, anything but friendly or hospitable,—the pair of them were discovered comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had ever heard the woman called anything, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Bill had any desire to sleep, now that the solution of the mystery seemed so near. They remained in the same place where the halt was made until the blackness of night gave way before ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... nature and with all the great arts; for Truth is one; and if you are quite ignorant of her in her highest and grandest revelations, you cannot by possibility understand the more subordinate and initiative. Some dim sense of the hidden mystery, some vague appreciation of the outward beauty of the language without getting at its expressed meaning, or but very partially, just so far as you have the key; that is all ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... did, indeed, and discovered a great mystery of iniquity. The witnesses made oath that they had heard some of the liverymen* frequently railing at their mistress. They said she was a troublesome fiddle-faddle old woman, and so ceremonious that there was no bearing ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... prescribed for performing this trick; but I have discovered another, which although, perhaps, a little more complicated, has the desirable advantage of explaining the seeming mystery. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... a hot dog with mustard and took a satisfying bite. It was a down-to-earth hot dog with no mystery, no eerieness about it, for which he was grateful. He hadn't admitted it, but the incident in ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... let us adore The Lord of all the earth, And in our songs of praise recount The mystery ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie
... false, and that his brother was alive and had actually seized the throne; but the assurances of the suspected person, and a suggestion which he made, convinced him of the contrary, and gave him a clue to the real solution of the mystery. Prexaspes, the nobleman inculpated, knew that the so-called Smerdis must be an impostor, and suggested his identity with a certain Magus, whose brother had been intrusted by Cambyses with the general direction of his household and the care of the palace. He was probably led ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... as any form of paganism, though it has many beauties, and though much of its very mingled influence has been for good. In the teaching of my early youth, this transformation of Christianity was described as the great predicted apostasy, the mystery of iniquity, the work of Antichrist among mankind. Under the influence of the historic method it assumed a different aspect, and the mystery became very explicable. Hobbes had struck the keynote in a passage of profound truth as ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Gillenormand had ascended to her chamber greatly puzzled, and on the staircase had dropped this exclamation: "This is too much!"—and this interrogation: "But where is it that he goes?" She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less illicit, a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair. Tasting a mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal; sainted souls do not detest this. There is some curiosity about scandal in the secret compartments ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... I intrude one story before another is finished. As you read on you will find that this is not so. And when I have detailed those distant events and you have solved this mystery of the past, we shall meet once more in those rooms on Baker Street, where this, like so many other wonderful happenings, will find ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... brethren ran to the boat imploring St. Brendan's aid; and he helped them each in by the hand, and cast off. After which the island sank in the ocean. And when they could see their fire burning more than two miles off, St. Brendan told them how that God had revealed to him that night the mystery; that this was no isle, but the biggest of all fishes which swam in the ocean, always it tries to make its head and its tail meet, but cannot, by reason of its length; and its name ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... more than nature could do to sleep with a mystery like this on the top of my misery. I listened to the clock as it struck the hours through the night, and thought the day would never come. Indeed, the getting-up bell had sounded before the winter sun struggled in through ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... whom you make so much mystery, passed under my window last night," said the young lady the next day, with the usual display of carnation in her cheeks at ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... ashore one night in a dory, been arrested and carried before Otaballo who refused to recognize him and gave him the alternative of going to jail or leaving the coast at once. It had all been an incomprehensible mystery to him; the only explanation he could think of being that the Queen was seized by the General who had usurped the throne. He tried once more to land and this time learned of the movement afoot by the Republican party. He had made a dash for the ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... I think, have a healthier hatred of incendiarism than I have. This hatred dates from my eleventh year, or thereabout; when I was strongly impressed by a bush-fire which cleaned the grass off half the county. The origin of that fire still remains a mystery, though all manner of investigation was made at the time; one of the most dilligent inquirers being a boy of ten or twelve, who used to lie awake half the night, wondering what could be done to a person for trying to smoke a bandicoot ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... predisposed for their reception, produced high fever; I was in a fever,—of unrest. Brain in a whirl!—Marjorie, Paul, Isis, beetle, mesmerism, in delirious jumble. Love's upsetting!—in itself a sufficiently severe disease; but when complications intervene, suggestive of mystery and novelties, so that you do not know if you are moving in an atmosphere of dreams or of frozen facts,—if, then, your temperature does not rise, like that rocket of M. Verne's,—which reached the moon, then you are a freak of an entirely genuine kind, and if ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... believe that even you could work that miracle. I have known him since we were at Cambridge together, and I am convinced that there is some strange lack in that marvellous brain which renders his creative faculty helpless until fired by alcohol. If the human brain is a mystery how much more so is genius? Much is said and written, but we are none the wiser. But this peculiar fact I do know. The island records and traditions tell us that all his forefathers save one were abstemious, dignified, normal men, mentally active and important. ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... older, the Corsair applied himself seriously to their education, as he felt convinced there was some great mystery attached to ...
— The Frog Prince and Other Stories - The Frog Prince, Princess Belle-Etoile, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp • Anonymous
... at heart, grieved in spirit, and humbled to the dust at this solution of the mystery which had hung over me, yet there was some repose in the degree of security it afforded against any sudden revolution in my destiny. I was somewhat calmer, and sometimes, for a few hours together I shook ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... filled his fine eyes as he thought of her)—"that my blessed mother had made long on purpose, are now ten inches too short for me. Whir-r-r! my coat cracks i' the back, as in vain I try to buckle it round me; and the sleeves reach no farther than my elbows! What is this mystery? Am I grown fat and tall in a single night? Ah! ah! ah! ah! ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... expression, and, notwithstanding all the aspiration and effort, the incongruity between the spiritual idea and the sensuous form remains insuperable. This is, then, the first form of art-symbolic art with its endless quest, its inner struggle, its sphinx-like mystery, and its sublimity. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... was very curious. I—I knew Johnny would never permit things to be said that were said. So it was a beautiful moonlight evening, and I wanted—I shall be expected to describe our Arizona plains by moonlight. So I decided that I would solve a mystery and collect my material that evening, and ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... supporting her cousin. "I'm interested in the mystery surrounding the girl. I now think I was wrong in suspecting her to be the lost Lucy Rogers; but there is surely some romance connected with her, and she is not what she seems to be. I'd like ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... to my familiarity at court and to the emperor's fondness for my society, I was cordially hated by the nobility; but as they feared me quite as much as they hated me, and as my real standing among them remained a mystery, I was constantly fawned upon to a degree that was nauseating. Even the story I had so lately heard from the lips of the princess had not materially lessened the liking I felt for Alexander, for I could ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... they saw on earth, only as in a glass darkly, dimly, and afar; and can contemplate the utterly free, the utterly beautiful, and the utterly good in the character of God and the face of Jesus Christ. They entered while on earth into the mystery and the glory of self-sacrifice; and now they find their bliss in gazing on the one perfect and eternal sacrifice, and rejoicing in the thought that it is the cause and ground of the whole universe, even the Lamb slain before the ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... you last, just before starting on this motor match-making venture of ours, there have been several new developments. I don't know whether you are any deeper in Dick's confidence, in this affair, than I am (though I fancy not), but I scent a mystery. Dick really has detective talent, dear Sis, and if I were you, I shouldn't oppose his setting up as a sort of art nouveau Sherlock Holmes. Whether he has found out about some schoolgirl peccadillo ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... lake. Mr. Pattison sunk at once, but his wife's clothes buoyed her up for a considerable time; ineffectually, however, for none of the bearers of the chaises a porteurs could swim; her cries were in vain, and she, too, perished. How the accident arose, none can tell, and a mystery must for ever hang ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... a second time, and it turned his curiosity into a desire to probe the mystery. He concluded to put off the interview with his nephew, and see him later in the day. He hailed a cab, and told the driver to ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... were yet but like those crack-groats, and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, while their gold is in their trunks at home. Oh, I saw my gold was in my trunk at home. In Christ my Lord and Saviour. Further the Lord did lead me into the mystery of union with the Son of God. His righteousness was mine, His merits mine, His victory also mine. Now I could see myself in heaven and earth at once; in heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteousness and Life, though on earth by my body ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... that; look at the oily drops running down the glass)—well, steering to the north-west, you will understand, was out of the captain's course. Nevertheless, finding no solution of the mystery on board the ship, and the weather at the time being fine, the captain determined, while the daylight lasted, to alter his course, and see what came of it. Toward three o'clock in the afternoon an iceberg came ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... "Oh, it's no great mystery, senator. Robert J. Spencer, of Keokuk, Iowa. We know quite a bit about him, actually, but it's all third hand. He was a retired court stenographer, seventy-three years old, going to New York for his sister's funeral at the time of the crash. He boarded the plane at Chicago. He took a train to ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... uninteresting to the old, who have heard both spoken of, and to the present generation who know nothing of their extent and his singularity. It certainly does appear remarkable, but it is a fact, that many people possess a natural taste for prosecuting underground works. There is so much of mystery, awe, and romance in anything subterranean, that we feel a singular pleasure in instituting and making discoveries in it, and it is not less strange than true that those who once begin making excavations seem loth to leave off. Mr. Williamson appears to have been a true Troglodite, one ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... "must your malignity then extend even to those whom I wish to benefit? I indeed recognise my enemy," said she to the woodcutter; "beware of him, and believe that it is with no good intention he destines your daughter for the bride of a king. Some mystery is here ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... toothsome fish, about which rages an ichthyological argument as to whether he is a distant species of the salmon tribe or merely a half-grown coho, is the first to show in great schools. The spring salmon is always in the Gulf, but the spring is a finny mystery with no known rule for his comings and goings, nor his numbers. All the others, the blueback, the sockeye, the hump, the coho, and the dog salmon, run in the order named. They can be reckoned on as a man reckons on changes of the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... down on the step of the old staircase and he could feel the tremble in every pulse of her slim young figure. Was it the strange mystery that had come to her half an hour ago in the parlor opposite, a something that was not knowledge, but a vague consciousness that there was a person in the world who could say the words that would thrill her with delight instead of bringing ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... for the Christmas-tree With its glory and glitter and mystery! Its twinkling candles that bud and bloom Like strange bright flowers in the darkened room, Its glistening gold and silver balls, Its candy canes and its blue-eyed dolls, The sugary fruits it bears,—for oh, Where else do such ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein
... in the clearing around the Sidon Chapel at West Woodlands, undertaken by the Rev. James Seabright, have disclosed another link in the mystery which surrounded the loss of the Tamalpais some years ago at Whale Mouth Point. It will be remembered that the boat containing Adams & Co.'s treasure, the Tamalpais' first officer, and a crew of four men was lost on the rocks shortly after leaving the ill-fated ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... forests in the deepening twilight, one is impressed with a feeling of awe and mystery by the strange, weird shapes outlined against the sky. In the cooler air of evening the animals come from their retreats. The insects and the snakes are then abroad, and if one is on foot the sudden buzz of a rattlesnake is not ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... chaotic ice-field would have shown small beauty, every wave-beaten floe being soiled and streaked with rust-coloured Tantramar mud. But under the transfiguring touch of the moon the unsightly levels changed to plains of infinite mystery—expanses of shattered, white granite, as it were, fretted and scrawled with blackness—reaches of loneliness older than time. So well is the mask of eternity assumed by the mutable moonlight and ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... terror; twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps fifty years lie a head of him and her, but the years and their burdens are not for his eyes any more than the flowers he elects to disdain. Love is blind, but sometimes there is no love. How then shall we explain this inexplicable mystery; wonderful riddle that none shall explain and that every ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... to spoil our tiny slumbers, Or, as they said, to certify our skill, Sent us a screed, all signs and magic numbers, And what it signified is mystery still. We flung them back a message yet more mazy To say we weren't unravelling their own, And marked it urgent, and designed That it should reach them while they dined. All night they toiled, till half the crowd were crazy And bade us breathe its burthen o'er the 'phone. * * * * * But now ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... council held by, in Philadelphia, i. 239; disappointment of Washington as to the results of his interview with—remark of Franklin in relation to, i. 240; insolent speech of, in the northern council of governors, i. 247; mystery drawn by, around his plans—at the head of six thousand provincial troops in 1757—delays and indecision of—determines upon an expedition against Louisburg, i. 248; embargo laid by, on all ships in American ports—suspected of sharing the profits of army ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... party remained in this place, preaching, teaching, and working among the people. It was a mystery to the students how their teacher found time for the great amount of Bible study and prayer which he managed to get. He surely worked as never man worked before. Late at night, long after every one else was in bed, he would be bending over his Bible, beside his peanut-oil lamp, and early ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... Strawberry hill, inspired his romance, The Castle of Otranto (1764), which began the romantic movement in fiction. To this movement, destined to be adorned by the genius of Scott, belong Beckford's Vathek, Clara Reeve's Old English Baron, and the once widely popular tales of mystery of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, as he was called after his best-known romance (1795). The novel of manners was developed by Fanny Burney's (Madame d'Arblay) Evelina (1778), founded on acute observation, dealing almost wholly with every-day life, replete with satire, and ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... and in the face of his explanation and absolute denial, the case against him fell for want of proof. Mark me, I do not say that he is innocent; and when the struggle with Buckingham is over we will go deeper into this mystery." ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... sea; it may do what it is not recorded to have done. It is not to be ordered, it may overleap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has a potency unfathomable. There is still something in it not quite grasped and understood—something still to be discovered—a mystery. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... these severe prejudices, and to speak of the Catholics in more charitable language, and with more reconciling expressions. From this foundation a panic fear of Popery was easily raised; and every new ceremony or ornament introduced into divine service, was part of that great mystery of iniquity, which, from the encouragement of the king and the bishops, was to overspread the nation.[*] The few innovations which James had made, were considered as preparatives to this grand design; and the further ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... ENVIRONMENT. In the case of two different species, e.g. the hay and anthrax bacilli or two varieties of Campanula with blue and white flowers respectively, a similar environment produces a constant difference. The cause of this is a mystery. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... that children should early begin to appreciate the difference in the way plots are handled, to discriminate between a tale that is well told and one that is poorly told. At an early age boys delight in stories that are full of the excitement of adventure, conflict and mystery. Their craving is natural enough and must be satisfied. At such time they will read little or nothing else unless they are driven to it, and to compel them to read what they do not want is to make them hate reading for the time being and perhaps permanently. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... about it, after all. We have managed to do a great many things with it. We have learned some of its properties, but it holds fast its inner secrets. The great universe of electrical discovery has hardly been entered." But electricity is not the only modern mystery. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... and kept her here for so long a time since I had last seen her at Sumatra, I was at a loss to understand. The unexpected appearance of this vessel seemed likely to complicate our plans, and I determined to elucidate the mystery before proceeding ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... silent. Richard could not answer. He saw her far away like the moon she spoke of. She was growing to him a marvel and a mystery. Something strange seemed befalling him. Was she weaving a spell about his soul? Was she fettering him for her slave? Was she one of the wild, bewildering creatures of ancient lonely belief, that are the souls of the loveliest things, but can detach themselves from them, and wander out in garments ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... KING. There's a mystery about that fellow that I can not understand.—Whom have we here? Oh, the English traveller who is in such a good humor with my manufactory, and who has such ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... 'tis to bear: Strange mystery of God which set Upon her brow yon coronet,— The foremost crown Of all the world, on one so fair! That chose her to it from her birth, And bade the sons of all the earth ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... came to his senses the gray mystery of dawn was passing through the silent forest aisles; the beeches, pallid, stark, loomed motionless on every side; the pale veil of sky-fog hung festooned from tree to tree. There was a sense of breathless waiting in the shadowy woods—no sound, no stir, nothing of life ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... said she. "Because I do. Philetus is firmly persuaded that he is an invaluable assistant to me in the mystery of gardening; and the origin of Earl Douglass's new ideas is so enveloped in mist, that he does not himself know where they come from. It was rich to hear him the other day descanting to Lucas upon the evil effects of earthing up corn, and the advantages of curing hay in ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... asserted that some new scheme might be looked for from the man who had got rid of the mother and one brother by making use of Fario's attack upon him, the particulars of which were now no longer a mystery. Monsieur Hochon had taken care to reveal the truth of Max's atrocious accusation to the best people of the town. Thus it happened that in talking over the situation of the lieutenant-colonel in relation to Max, and in trying to guess what might spring from their antagonism, the whole ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... is developed for the child the mystery of work and of worship; but it is all accomplished through incidents appealing wholly to imagination, and with beautiful art. "The Little Castaways"—really a deliberate farce, "taking off," the stories of similar incident written for older folk—is yet, in itself, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... went to the hatches and slid them over to leeward; they then descended, and although the seas broke over the vessel, and a large quantity of water must have poured into her, the hatches were not put on again by those who remained on deck. But in a few minutes this mystery was solved; one after another, at first, and then by dozens, poured forth, out of the hold, the kidnapped Africans who composed her cargo. In a short time the decks were covered with them: the poor creatures had been released by the ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... could not but believe; which you must believe whether you would or not. No doubt, in that case, the requisite evidence would have been such that scepticism would have been impossible; that word 'incumbent' implies duty; and that word duty is the key to the whole mystery, for it implies the possibility of resisting its claims. We do not speak of its being incumbent on a man to run out of a burning house, or to swim, if he can, when thrown into deep water. He cannot help it. If there be a Supreme Ruler of the universe, and if the posture of his intelligent creatures ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... half-stifled by the hot and pungent vapor, but drawn by that painful, unnatural curiosity which possesses one in a nightmare dream. The great cone in the centre was the point to which he wished to attain,—the nearest point which man can gain to this eternal mystery of fire. It was trembling with a perpetual vibration, a hollow, pulsating undertone of sound like the surging of the sea before a storm, and the lava that boiled over its sides rolled slowly down with a strange creaking; it seemed the condensed, intensified essence and expression ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... here used in its philosophical sense. What is called explaining one law of nature by another, is but substituting one mystery for another; and does nothing to render the general course of nature other than mysterious: we can no more assign a why for the more extensive laws than for the partial ones. The explanation may substitute a mystery which has become familiar, and has grown to seem ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... exceedingly fine, and the Texan did not attempt to explain that which must always remain a partial mystery. ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... we linger in that impressive darkness before dawn which prevailed upon the continent before the advent of Columbus. The mystery which shrouds the origin and annals of the races which inhabited America previous to the European invasion has been assiduously investigated, but never dispelled. At first it was taken for granted that the "Indians," as the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... that La Sahla returned to France the second time with the same intentions as before. This project, however, is a mystery to me, and his detonating powder gives rise ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... mother's womb; He inspires dead matter with the active principle of life; in man He unites an ethereal spirit to a lump of clay—wonders these which have perplexed the wisest men, and remain as incomprehensible to philosophers as to fools. Yet, as if there was no mystery in these but what our understanding could fathom—as if there was nothing in these to teach proud man humility and rouse his admiration—as if there was indeed no wonder but Christ himself in all this great and glorious universe, He is ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... journeys, fatigues, and persecutions. How great was the purity and sanctity of him who was chosen the guardian of the most spotless Virgin! This holy man seems, for a considerable time, to have been unacquainted that the great mystery of the Incarnation had been wrought in her by the Holy Ghost. Conscious therefore of his own chaste behavior towards her, it could not but raise a great concern in his breast, to find that, notwithstanding the sanctity of her deportment, yet he might ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... with the true mystery of a person in office, gave two grave nods, and withdrawing from the wards a ponderous key of about two feet in length, he proceeded to shut a strong plate of steel, which folded down above the keyhole, and was secured by a steel spring and catch. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... noteworthy story which has been told me since the war, of boys whom I knew. At the breaking out of hostilities there existed in Toledo a festive little secret society, such as lurking boys frequently organize, with no other object than fun and the usual adolescent love of mystery. There were a dozen or so members in it who called themselves "The Royal Reubens," and were headed by a bookbinder named Ned Hopkins. Some one started a branch of the Order in Napoleon, O., and among the members was Charles E. Reynolds, of that town. The badge of the society was a peculiarly ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Eph. iii. 3-5, R. V., "By revelation was made known unto me the mystery, as I wrote afore in few words, whereby, when ye read, ye can perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ; which in other generations was not made known unto the sons of men, as it hath now been revealed unto His holy Apostles and prophets ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... the real mystery about the exodus, is that in all the Southland there has not been a single meeting or promoter to start the migration. Just simultaneously all over the South about a year ago, the negro began to cross the Mason and Dixon line. Indeed, this is a most striking ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... Bertie in the little roselit saloon, and as he welcomed the stranger Culver drew Hilary aside. There was much mystery on his comical face. ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... I know not. In the dark mystery that shrouds her fate— In the dread agony of this suspense, Where I can grasp at naught of certainty— One single ray of comfort beams upon me. From out the ruins of the tyrant's power Alone can she be rescued from the grave. Their strongholds must be levell'd, every ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... before you, madam, a man utterly weary of the week-end riverside hotels of the Euphrates, the minstrels and pierrots on the sands of the Persian Gulf, the toboggans and funiculars of the Hindoo Koosh. Can you wonder that I turn, with a hungry heart, to the mystery and beauty of these haunted islands, thronged with spectres from a magic past, made holy by the footsteps of the wise men of the West. Consider this island on which we stand, the last foothold of man on this side of the Atlantic: this Ireland, described by the earliest bards ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Doctor George G. Proctor, that he was a practising physician some place in the Middle West and that he was visiting Coach Robey. But that was unsatisfactory data and some enterprising youth hunted back in the football records and, lo, the mystery was explained. Eight years before "Gus" Proctor had played tackle on the Princeton eleven and in his junior and senior years had been honoured with a position on the All-American Team. Subsequently he had coached at a college in Ohio and had put said ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... achieved so great a triumph as her last ball was allowed to be, it was quite inexplicable. It was talked of, canvassed over, and commented upon, at the band stand, race course, conversaziones, and mess room, for several days, and, in fact, until the mystery was cleared up ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... paper back into my bosom, I sat for some time pondering upon its contents. Part was clear enough—the remaining part full of mystery. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... chatter commonplaces or he feels a gene! See, I will take you where I have been into this infinite sky and air"—she let her hand fall on his arm and thrilled him—"look up at Pilatus. Do you see his head so snowy, and all the delicate shadows upon him, and his look of mystery? And those dark pines—and the great chasms, and the wild anger the giants were in when they hurled these huge rocks about? I have been with them, and you and I seem such little people, Paul. We cannot throw great rocks about—we are only two small ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... seen in Fayal and in the West Indies, as we heard once, are only got up to mislead suspicion. You know papa's great dislike—nay, I may call it weakness—is being talked about and discussed. And he thought the best way was to say nothing about the peculiarity or mystery attending my marriage, but merely say I was a widow. Somebody in Barton said Charles died of a fever, and as nobody contradicted it, so it has gone; but, Aunt Marian, it is often my hope, and even belief, that I shall ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... decisive step, the step across the Workhouse threshold, must be taken with none to witness. If they could not pass out of their small world by the more reputable mode of dying, they would at least depart with this amount of mystery. They had left the village in Farmer Lear's cart, and Farmer Lear had left them in the high road; and after that, nothing ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Perhaps the whole mystery is as simple as this," said her son's voice "as simple as this: that as there are tones of music too fine to be registered by the human ear, so there may be vibrations of light not to be seen by the human eye; form and color as well as sounds; just beyond earthly perception, and yet ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... said, as she seated herself, with something more of composure in her manner. "There was never any money in my father's house. I wondered at first where it could all go; I watched and reflected, and used all means of finding out the mystery. At last I knew it—my father drank; in the privacy of his room, when no eye was on him, he drank, drank. He paid strict enough attention to my education. I read with him much; he had stores of books. I read the Bible with him, too; often he spent long evenings ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... whom thou wast sent for ease, being by name Legality, is the son of the bond woman which now is, and is in bondage with her children (Gal. 4:21-27); and is, in a mystery, this mount Sinai, which thou hast feared will fall on thy head. Now, if she, with her children, are in bondage, how canst thou expect by them to be made free? This Legality, therefore, is not able to set ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... success, what is? It would be not uninteresting to trace this current of success to its source, and to lay bare all the springs of the machinery which sustains her artificial character as an authoress. The details of course form the mystery of her craft, but the general causes are apparent enough. First and foremost, her magnificent house and luxurious dinners; then the alliance offensive and defensive which she has contrived (principally ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... things were to be managed with the secrecy and mystery so dear to the heart of Philip. The marquis was instructed to go first to the castle of Antwerp, as if upon financial business, and there begin his operations. Should he find at last all his private negotiations and coaxings of no avail, he was then to make use of his secret letters from the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... prodigious hair spread like wild-fire among the populace of the district; and so the exhumation of Crepereia Tryphaena was accomplished with unexpected solemnity, and its remembrance will last for many years in the popular traditions of the new quarter of the Prati di Castello. The mystery of the hair is easily explained. Together with the spring-water, germs or seeds of an aquatic plant had entered the sarcophagus, settled on the convex surface of the skull, and developed into long glossy threads ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... up that creek Lum himself lived in a log cabin, and he lived alone. This in itself was as rare as a miracle in the hills, and the reason, while clear, was still a mystery: Lum had never been known to look twice at the same woman. He was big, kind, taciturn, ox-eyed, calm. He was so good-natured that anybody could banter him, but nobody ever carried it too far except a bully from an adjoining county one court day. Lum ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... child?' said the old warrior, in vain endeavouring to penetrate the mystery of the hut's contents, and dropping his figurative language under the influence of excitement—'say, Son of the Evening Light, ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... a pity you an' men like you can't see the truth. That's the mystery to me—why any one who had spent half a lifetime an' prospered here in our happy an' beautiful country could ever hate it. I never will understand that. But I do understand that America will never harbor such men for long. You have your reasons, I reckon. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... on leaving the land is still a mystery. Although they are never seen, it is conjectured that they spend the winter at sea. Their natural enemy in the waters round Macquarie Island is the sea-leopard, and the stomachs of all specimens of this animal taken by us during the penguin ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... left Rome, by way of Orvieto and Chiusi. They crossed that dead, mystic Campagna that flows, like a sea, all around Rome—a sea of silence and mystery; with its splendid ruins of the old aqueducts and tombs, its vast stretches of space that were all aglow, in those June days, with scarlet poppies. They stopped one night at Viterbo, the little city made famous since those days by Richard Bagot's tragic novel, "Temptation," and ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... letter first, the last four or five sentences would have meant little for me. As it was, I would have given a month out of my future for the gift of an astral body which could go this minute to the ball at the Ghezireh Palace. I was lost in the mystery of ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... him, said it was a strange affair, a riddle I could not read, a mystery which time must elucidate, for it baffled all conjecture. He did little more than echo me, and I pretended I would have ridden half over the world to recover his sister, had there been but the least clue; but there was not, and I found myself obliged to sit ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... to the artist, was a part of his son's fleet; what brought it there was a mystery ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... alone on a haunted shore, With curious words of deathless lore On its massive gate impearled; And its carefully guarded mystic key Locks in its silent mystery From the seeking eyes of ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... general sense of well-being, and of contented life under pleasant conditions. But it is aroused just as strongly by prospects that are inimical to life and comfort, lashing storms, inaccessible peaks, desolate moors, wild sunsets, foaming seas. It is a sense of wonder, of mystery; it arouses a strange and yearning desire for we know not what; very often a rich melancholy attends it, which is yet not painful or sorrowful, but heightens and intensifies the significance, the value of life. I do not know how to interpret it, but ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... able to suffer almost indefinitely, our physical strength is strictly limited. Thus he fell asleep, dreaming even in his sleep that he was hard at work, and just about to discover the means by which he could penetrate the mystery of Miss Brandon. ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... manifesto of 1890—the whole aim and effort of the Church was to exalt and sanctify and make pure the practice of plural marriage by means of the community's respect and the reverences of religion. The doctrine of polygamy was taught as a revealed mystery of faith. It was accepted as a sacrament ordained by God for the salvation of mankind. The most important families in the Church dignified it by their participation, and were in turn dignified by the Church's approval and by the wealth and power ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... enemy you have on this island is now dead. I can assure you I have until now been much puzzled to account for the lack of living things on this luxuriant and lonely island, save birds. The sight of this anaconda has solved the mystery; he has depopulated it (if I may so say) of every creeping or four-footed thing. Nay, I am also certain it has destroyed its own kind too. By what means it became of so monstrous a size I know not; but, ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... spiritual and sacred union, my child," he said, "a type of the holy mystery of Christ's relation ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... element of fantasy in connection with the man who gave "Pekin" as his address. There was no explaining the conceit; it was just one of those whimsies which are alike plausible yet enigmatical. Had Curtis described himself as being of London, or Paris, or even of Yokohama, no sense of mystery would have attached itself to his personality. But, to the world at large, Pekin represents the unknown, and therefore the incongruous. It is the Forbidden City, the inner shrine of the East, the symbolic rallying-point ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... Nirvana, no cause by which Nirvana is produced can be declared. The path that leads to Nirvana may be pointed out, but not any cause for its production. Why? because that which constitutes Nirvana is beyond all computation,—a mystery, not to be understood.... It cannot be said that it is produced, nor that it is not produced; that it is past or future or present. Nor can it be said that it is the seeing of the eye, or the hearing of the ear, or the smelling ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... remarkable relic of prehistoric man to be found in Britain. Nearly everyone is familiar with pictures of this solitary circle of stones standing on an eminence of Salisbury Plain, but one who has not stood in the shadow of these gigantic monoliths can have no idea of their rugged grandeur. Their mystery is deeper than that of Egypt's sphynx, for we know something of early Egyptian history, but the very memory of the men who reared the stones on Salisbury Plain is forgotten. Who they were, why they built this strange temple, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... be looking up into a sunny sky. He heard the wind and the sound of a horse cropping grass, and the voice of the girl penetratingly sweet as that of a young mother calling her baby back to life, and slowly his benumbed brain began to resolve the mystery. ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... for community of worship is the chief misery of man, of all humanity from the beginning of time." We recognise Nietzsche in Dostoievsky's "the old morality of the old slave man," and a genuine poet in "the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars." His naive conception of eternity as "a chamber something like a bathhouse, long neglected, and with spider's webs in its corners" reminds us of Nietzsche when he describes his doctrine of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... one of the settlements, nearer to the region of civilised life. There was a murmur of mystery about the second widowhood of Hickman Holt, which only became hushed on his "moving" further west—to the wild forest where we now find him. Here no one knows aught of his past life or history—one only excepted—and that is the man who is to-day ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... before the text the Apostle Paul has been speaking of what he calls a mystery—that is, a revealed secret. And the secret was this, that the Gentiles would be "fellow-heirs and of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ by the gospel." It had been kept secret from the former ages and generations; it was a secret which ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... was a great mystery to the gossips of Sandy Cove; for there are gossips even in the most distant isles of the sea! Some men (we refer, of course, to white men) thought that she must have been the wife of an admiral at least, and had fallen into distressed circumstances, and gone ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... the citizens who had not been either directly concerned in the conspiracy, or privy to it. With one accord, therefore, they preferred exile to trusting to the tender mercies of their judges. In this way, says the Curate of Los Palacios, by the mystery of our Lord, was the ancient city of Guadix brought again within the Christian fold; the mosques converted into Christian temples, filled with the harmonies of Catholic worship, and the pleasant places, which for nearly eight centuries had been ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... Anyway, the mystery was not very comforting. The column were forbidden to talk; they rode on, northward, through the long grass of the rich bottoms; the two scouts led, Scout Gruard every now and again halting, to scan about from ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... Commissioner Hawks rose and began to stride restlessly back and forth across the spacious office. He stopped in front of the window and stared out over the exposition grounds, watching the thousands of holiday visitors streaming in and out of the buildings, all unaware of the strange mystery in the sky above them. Hawks' attention was drawn to the giant solar beacon, a huge light that flashed straight out into space, changing color every second and sending out the message: "Quis separabit homo"—Who shall ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... costume is a jelabea,[150] and a belt, without shoes or head dress; their country is said to abound in gold. It is "a consummation devoutly to be wished," that our knowledge of Africa should increase so as to enable us to unravel the mystery of these doubtful reports, to ascertain the degree of credit that is due to these mysterious traditions. These desiderata, however, can hardly 201 be expected, whilst the present injudicious plans for the discovery of Africa ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... Pondering upon the mystery as I walked up and down beneath the flaring lights, on the windy platform at Bletchley, waiting, after a day at Stratford, for a belated train to London, I reflected that genius has no pedigree nor prescription, and that at last the greatest ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Yesterday we had a pleasant dinnette. In the evening Lady Glyn arrived bien triste, and Mrs Beaumont all magnificence for Lady Castlereagh's. We were much surprised to find Count Holmar [2] in town, but we have had the mystery explained. He took the Princes back to their own country, and then came back here on account of his love for Miss Gifford, Lady Lansdowne's daughter by her first husband. [3] She is pretty and clever, without much fortune, but Lord Lansdowne has taken a fancy to ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... or was crazy," said Mollie, with relief. Then she suddenly turned and started off into the woods. "I'm going all alone to find out what that was," she told her stupefied chums. "I've got to clear up the mystery before I'm an ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... accept the news I bring. I come to make a solemn mystery clear, One that affects you deeply; for I sing Of a most ancient king Nine hundred years ago in fair Kashmir, Who yearned towards a bride, and—hear, oh hear, Lord of the reboant nose and classic hunch— "Married a princess of the House ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... to let Yorkburg know who its friend is. I don't doubt she meant well. To do things as nobody else does them is to her irresistible. But how a woman of her sense and understanding of human nature could fail to see the complications of a situation in which secrecy and mystery were elemental parts ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... boasted of the possession of "plenty of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of Christianity. One who has not tried it may form an estimate of this kind of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Writings of Fuller. No doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which they ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... shallows a child could wade through, among bristling needles of rocks no one had ever guessed at; and rise in a morning to the tops of the spruce scrub on its banks,—a sweet spread of water with not a rock to be seen. What hidden spring fed it was a mystery. But in the bitterest winter it was never cold enough to freeze, further than to form surging masses of frazil ice that would neither let a canoe push through them, nor yet support the weight of a man. Winter or summer, ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... precautions of the parties, and they were honest in taking them, our little village had its inklings of what was going on. There were certain signs of commotion and explosion which made themselves understood. Our little maid, Susan Hinkley, was the first, very innocently, to furnish a clue to the mystery. She had complained to her mother that Cousin William had not shot the little guns for her ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... switch the impulses evoked by sense stimuli on to one or other tract of the axons, or axis cylinder processes, which form the association pathways? Such a hypothesis is no explanation; it simply puts back the whole question a step further, and leaves it wrapped in mystery. It cannot be fatigue that produces the hypothetical interruptions of the dendritic synapses and then induces sleep, for sleep can follow after fatigue of a very limited kind. A man may sleep equally well after a day spent in scientific research as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... mother-in-law all her attendants, and to commit her to the custody of Lord John Pelham in the castle of Pevensey.[126] She was charged with having entertained malicious and treasonable designs against the life of the King, her son-in-law. The Chronicle of London, (1419,) throwing[127] an air of mystery and superstition over the whole affair, asserts that Queen Joanna excited her confessor, one friar Randolf,[128] a master in (p. 127) divinity, to destroy the King; "but, as God would, his falseness was at last espied:" "wherefore," as the Chronicle adds, ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Marie Baumer and Martin Berkeley. This new play was produced by D. A. Doran with International Productions, Inc., on Broadway in the fall of 1936, featuring Frankie Thomas. An entirely new twist is here given to the murder mystery, in that the authors have placed the burden of discovery upon three children whose intelligence and innocence are brought to bear on an adult problem. A most ingenious mystery play worked out, however, in terms of modern ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... rooms are not only beautiful in the highest degree, but have been shown in several French memoirs to obey laws of transcendental geometry, and also to obey physical laws of startling intricacy. These lovely forms of almighty nature wear the grandeur of mystery, of floral beauty, and of science (immanent science) not always fathomable.[6] They are anything but capricious. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like them; and yet, simply because the sad hand of mortality is upon them, because ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... angels. But still the reader ought to have been better made to feel this preparation towards a change of mood. As to the publishing arrangement, I leave them to Cornhill. There is, undoubtedly, a certain force in what you say about the inexpediency of affecting a mystery which cannot be sustained; so you must act as you think is for the best. I submit, also, to the advertisements in large letters, but under protest, and with a kind of ostrich-longing for concealment. Most of the third volume is given ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... is his sense of the supernatural, of the fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our consciousness. The Listeners (1912) is a book that, like all the best of De la Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight and mystery seem soaked in the lines, and a cool wind from Nowhere blows over them. That most magical of modern verses, "The Listeners," and the brief music of "An Epitaph" are two fine examples among many. In the first ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... surely have been better not to have considered it (i.e., the trinity) as a mystery, and with Cl. Kleckermann to have investigated by the aid of philosophy according to the teaching of true logic what it might be, before they determined what it was; just so would it have been better ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... silent, anxious, the guests remained with hearts scarce beating. I trembled, my eyes in mist. We were like the dead of the churchyard about some funeral feast, full of terror and mystery. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... same, as she grew older, her fancy played about this unknown father, as the fancy of young girls always plays about a mystery. Had he committed some crime? Had he disgraced himself and his family that his name might not be breathed in Lady Alice's ear? But she could not believe that her good, beautiful mother would ever have loved and married a wicked man!—such was the phrase that she, in her girlish ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... orphan, the enfranchisement of the slave,—this religion brought also the news of the eternal, hopeless, living torture of the great majority of mankind, past and present. Tender spirits, like those of Dante, carried this awful mystery as a secret and unexplained anguish; saints wrestled with God and wept over it; but still the awful fact remained, spite of Church and sacrament, that the gospel was in effect, to the majority of the human race, not the glad tidings of salvation, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... the footsteps retreated and the savage, repressed sounds died away into a distant murmur, leaned against the damp wall of his prison, and fought with a fresh perplexity. The new-comer into that gloomy house of wickedness and mystery was a woman! He had heard the sweep of heavy skirts as his door was approached, and that one shrill, hardly-stifled cry had surely been in a woman's voice! Then the pale thread of light was withdrawn, ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... boys" puzzled me. They had little or no money, and chickens were always high-priced. I had often noticed that the men in the wards were busy preparing fish-hooks, and yet, though they often "went fishing," they brought no fish to be cooked. One day the mystery was fully solved. An irate old lady called upon Dr. McAllister, holding at the end of a string a fine, large chicken, and vociferously proclaiming her wrongs. "I knowed I'd ketch 'em: I knowed it. Jes' look a-here," and she drew ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... brother, grasping her arm, 'you couldn't have forgotten the medicine.' The poor child only sobbed the harder, and Harry, turning to the table, pointed to the little packet, thus explaining the mystery! ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... not for me, who have none, to judge. They learnt history and reading and writing, and something of the English tongue, but I need scarcely say that I would not suffer him to teach them to pry into the mystery of God's stars, as he wished to do, for I hold that such lore is impious and akin to witchcraft of which I have seen enough from Sihamba ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... we have learned that God is not a Father who answers prayers and works miracles and holds out his arms at the goal. We have come shuddering to the awful mystery of being; strange and terrible words have been spoken—words never to be forgotten—"phenomenon," and "thing-in-itself"; not knowing what these words mean, you are ignorant and recreant to the truth; knowing what they mean, you tug no more ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... weary of the persistent tone of mystery in which her visitor spoke. 'If you want my interest with any friend of mine,' she said, 'why can't you tell ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... mountains and the valleys, are a class of local deities, each one of whom reigns over a certain district. To them is assigned the ownership of the mountains and the deep forest and all lonely patches and uncommon places that give an impression of mystery and solitude. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... egg. Every morning and every evening she visited the nest, felt the egg to ascertain its temperature, and added or removed a blanket according to circumstances. How the good woman knew the proper temperature is a mystery which no one could explain, but certain it is that she succeeded, for in a few days the little one became so lively in its prison as to suggest the idea that it wanted out. Mrs Marais then listened ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... high up over Eastbourne. One such had hung above her as she drove with Mrs. Ormonde up Beachy Head. At this moment the sea was singing; this breeze, which swept the path of May, made foam flash upon the pebbled shore. Sky and water met on that line of mystery; far away and beyond ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... at a time. All his thoughts about some men gradually became prayers. He could not teach us everything that prayer meant to him; he could not teach us to pray as he prayed. Yet through him one or two at least of his undergraduate friends saw a little further into the eternal mystery of prayer. And men must sometimes—with all reverence be it said—have experienced in his presence the same kind of a feeling of some great unseen influence at work as that which the disciples must have experienced ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... for the fray, now found themselves suddenly faced with the prospect of still more training and when as yet they had not the haziest notion of the type of ship that was to be given them for mounts. One rumor had it that they were to get American ships powered by a much-talked-of mystery motor. Very well, but where were those ships? Another rumor, equally persistent, was to the effect that they were to draw French Spads. Very well again, but where were the Spads? Still other rumors included Camels, Sopwiths, Nieuports and Pups. One rumor, uglier and more maddening ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... might be wherever there is a couple that believe through grace. Wherefore that husband that carrieth it undiscreetly towards his wife, he doth not only behave himself contrary to the rule, but also maketh his wife lose the benefit of such an ordinance, and crosseth the mystery of his relation. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... made his 'little tin soldiers' fancy that he did not see their antics. The only hitch in his 'knavish piece of work' arose when, too assured, he placed upon the boards a real live judge, who refused to take the bench in the manager's sham Court of Justice. In every other respect the mystery play was a complete success; everybody was puzzled, players, spectators, and the gentlemen of the press; not one even guessed at the true meaning of the performance; though a few 'men of wicked spirits' would try to peep behind the curtain. But they never found him out; they all ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... realize that vision, however slight, was greatly to be desired. I could distinguish light from darkness, and this enabled me to locate doors and windows; but color, with its varying shades, was then, and is now, a mystery profound. But in my desire to see, to be just like other children, I resolved to learn all I could about color, and so I memorized the list of colors, which ones harmonized, which were most pleasing to the eye, which were bright, which produced a sombre impression. ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... the sleeping girl. Who was she? How could she sleep calmly after that night's deed? The mystery seemed unfathomable; the girl alone in the city, the robbers, the dog, the dead man, and the one who had ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... decisive as that which rewarded the research of the poor washerman's son. I seem now as if I could trace the boy, in the struggling grey of the morning, down the gentle slope, till he reached the tank, found the spot where the idol had been cast into it, and, daring to break its head, laid bare all the mystery of the tears. That, too, was a step preparing him for the great change when he was to turn to One who is not the work of men's hands, but is the Maker of the mighty and the weak. And the same influences which prepared Chickka, and which eventually changed ...
— Old Daniel • Thomas Hodson
... journal, two months later, made more extended reference to this variety and while its bona-fides as a "split" is established its use as a half stamp is as much a mystery as ever. We cannot do better than ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... were. This life's a mystery. The value of a thought cannot be told; But it is clearly worth a thousand lives Like many men's. And yet men love to live As if mere life were worth their living for. What but perdition will it be to most? Life's more than breath and the quick round of blood; It is a great spirit and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... man would never have solved the mystery of the arrival of the big consignment of the weed had it not been accompanied by a letter from the two boys in which all was ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... the Light in my own conscience, to hear what the Lord would say: and the word of the Lord came unto me, and said, "Put up thy sword into thy scabbard.... Knowest thou not that if I need I could have twelve legions of Angels from my Father": which Word enlightened my heart, and discovered the mystery of iniquity, and that the Kingdom of Christ was within, and was spiritual, and my weapons against them must be spiritual, the Power ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... sleep till morning. Half sleeping and half waking I lay there, dreamily watching that army of shadows gliding stealthily by. Shadows they seemed as they moved hurriedly along under the gloom of the overhanging trees, as noiseless almost as an army of spirits from Homer's nether world. The mystery of this secret night march served to quicken imagination, and I could see this same column grimly marshaling in "battle's magnificently stern array" in the dim light of the coming morning, ready to burst upon some exposed point of the ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... book you will like The Great Attempt (MURRAY), for Mr. FREDERICK ARTHUR'S story is quite good of its kind. But what sort of a book is it? Well, on page 31 one character says to another character, "Now listen. Thou knowest that there is some mystery regarding the heir to the estate. He is said to be in hiding abroad. The truth is that they have cheated him out of his inheritance and he can't do anything until he finds his papers." And yet it is not entirely that sort of book, for Mr. ARTHUR is evidently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... tomb; and if the ax effects a clearing in the primeval forest, it will nowhere ring upon the foundations of an old world palace. Africa is poorer in record history than can be imagined. 'Black Africa' is a continent which has no mystery, nor history!" ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... some mystery beneath,' said Genevieve, turning to Sophy, who exclaimed abruptly, 'Oh! is ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I love you." And she would smile, her white face and eyes that were constant as the stars. Constant, eternal. Love that was no mystery but a caress of sea nights. Forgive him. And her sorrow would heal under his fingers. It would end all right. The two years—the halloo of strange sterile things—buried under the smile of her eyes ... deep, sorrowful, beautiful. Words to be. "Anna we will grow old ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... burnt, and one by one the members of the projected syndicate were assassinated by a mysterious person who called himself "X Esquire." Who was he? And what was his purpose? Mr. Charteris shows himself in this story to be one of the real brand of mystery novelists. ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... said the professor, "I will be able to go out, walk along the ocean bed, and investigate the mystery. Do you ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... door, a rag-or-anything-else-gatherer going about with a donkey, and a parcel of dirty children tumbling about on the green, being all that remained on the scene. All the able-bodied men had followed the hounds. Why the hounds had ever climbed the long hill seemed a mystery, seeing that they returned ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... little details. Leslie's charming silk negligee and her frilly little nightgown with its lace and floating ribbons came in for a large amount of contempt, and it was some time before the good ladies arrived at Julia Cloud's room and found the open telegram on her bureau that gave the key to the mystery of the two visitors. ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... the inhabitants of the Necropolis had collected on either side of the lines of sphinxes, between which the princess drove up to the Sanctuary. But none asked what these songs of lamentation might signify, for about this sacred place lamentation and mystery for ever lingered. "Hail to the child of Rameses!"—"All hail to the daughter of the Sun!" rang from a thousand throats; and the assembled multitude bowed almost to the earth at the approach of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gives them license to dissent! Human laws affecting religion can never be the standard of morality; to read the Bible is considered to be sin in Tuscany, and righteousness in Britain. The release of this great and pious man from his tedious imprisonment, has been hitherto involved in a cloud of mystery, which it will be our happiness to disperse, while we record that event in a clear, indisputable narrative of facts. His earlier biographer, Mr. Doe, not having access to archives which the lapse of time has now rendered available, attributed his release to the influence of Bishop Barlow, by the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... that consciousness represents a specialized and individualized form of the infinite Energy; that it is dissolved by death; and that its elements then return to the source of all being. As for our mental attitude toward the infinite Mystery, his advice is plain. We must resign ourselves to the eternal law, and endeavor to vanquish our ancient inheritance of superstitious terrors, remembering that, "merciless as is the Cosmic process worked out by an Unknown Power, yet vengeance is nowhere to ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... Marquise d' The Commission in Lunacy A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Letters of Two Brides The Gondreville Mystery The Secrets of a Princess A Daughter of ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... existence, oppressed me. If I could bear the sight of it, it was only because I hoped; I thought that we should soon find the road which makes life happier, more agreeable to every one. How, where, in what manner? What a mystery! But the future beauty of life was in the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... has been involved in the most gratuitous mystery. Some authors have even supposed that, as the individual has a definite length of life, so have species a definite duration. No one can have marvelled more than I have done at the extinction of species. When I found in La Plata the tooth of a horse embedded ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... twelve instances, and in two it failed from non-appearance of the seven banners in the first instance. The apparent frankness of the operator was not the least surprising part of the affair. He made no mystery, said he possessed this power by inheritance, as a family gift; yet that he could teach it, and was willing to do so, for no enormous sum—nay, one which seemed very moderate. I think two gentlemen embraced the offer. One of them is dead and ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... was singular, and his manners corresponded with both. He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming an air of diplomatic mystery, even while displaying before me, in a coffee-house, his letters and instructions from his principal. As might be expected, he had the adroitness to get himself shut up in the Temple, where, I have been told, the generosity of your Sir Sidney Smith ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... addressed to a social equal, apparently to a man younger than herself, and for whom—supposing him to have been a tutor, secretary, or something of the kind—she must have felt a special sympathy. Her mention of "the papers" and "your secret" must refer to circumstances which would explain the mystery. "So long as you choose to WEAR it," she had written: then it was certainly a secret connected ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... fact to be understood, but I shrunk from giving him occasion for accusing me of an eavesdropping of which I was innocent. Besides, I had no wish to encounter Clara before I understood her game, which I need not say was a mystery to me. What end could she have in such duplicity? I had had unpleasant suspicions of the truth of her nature before, but could never ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... and as it was the only solution of the mystery, he accepted it as the real one, and returned to the letter, learning that the bracelet was purchased, that it could not be told from the lost one, that she was sporting it on Broadway every day, that she did not go to the prince's ball just for the doctor's meanness in not procuring ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... President Johnson. He had begun life at an early age as a clerk on a trading-boat on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, driving sharp bargains with the plantation darkies on the banks, in the exchange of cheap jewelry and gay calicoes for cotton and eggs. Next he undertook to learn the art and mystery of printing, studying law meanwhile, and finally located at Toledo as the editor of a Democratic paper. He was not a success as an editor, and went from the sanctum into a drug-store, where he put up prescriptions "at all hours of the night." Joining ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... light, and I was quite mystified. About a fortnight afterwards Madame d'Albret called upon me and announced her intended marriage to Monsieur de G—, and requested me to make her wedding dresses. Here the whole mystery was out, but why, because she marries Monsieur de G—, you should lose her protection, and why Monsieur de G—should be so inveterate against you, is more than I can tell. I have now, my dear mademoiselle, given you a detail of all I know, and shall be most happy to hear from ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... passed out of Holmes's expressive face, and I knew that with the mystery all the charm of the case had departed. There still remained an arrest to be effected, but what were these commonplace rogues that he should soil his hands with them? An abstruse and learned specialist who finds that he has been called in for a case of measles would experience something ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... today were withered because they had forgotten to eat their bread. The hunger of the pagans was a healthier thing than the jaded sterility of the modern world. Our Lady was ready to give that world the Bread of Life once more. And as he meditated on the mystery of the Virgin Birth he saw God making purity creative. She alone who overcame all heresies could overcome the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... flattery to all who tremble, and the people are always trembling. A real prophet of demagogueism, inspired by insanity, he gave his nightly dreams to daily conspiracies. The Seid of the people, he interested it by his self-devotion to its interests. He affected mystery like all oracles. He lived in obscurity, and only went out at night; he only communicated with his fellows with the most sinistrous precautions. A subterranean cell was his residence, and there he took refuge ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... member of a large family, but it is concerned not so much with childish doings as with the love affairs of older members of the family. Chief among them is that of Laddie and the Princess, an English girl who has come to live in the neighborhood and about whose family there hangs a mystery. ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... sour, dour sort of body, anything but friendly or hospitable,—the pair of them were discovered comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... lady, if you will allow me to say so that you are making a needless mystery of the matter, and further, that you are embarking upon what will certainly prove to be a wild-goose chase. We had news of your father not long before his sad death, and he was ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... prompts the selection of gifts—since selected they all are by some one—is for the most part a mystery. I never but once heard any reasonable solution, and that was volunteered by an old lady who had been listening in silence to a conversation on the engrossing subject of Christmas presents. It was a conversation at once animated and depressing. The time was ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... the test of solitude, excepting only the thought that finds its origin in hopeless self-reproach. The soft mystery of twilight, the solemn silence of the slowly-coming night, daunted Catherine in that lonely place. She rose to return to light and human beings. As she set her face toward the house, a discovery confronted her. She ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... exhausted his credit, and was soon overwhelmed with debt. Among the companions of his dissipation was a young man whose abundant means filled him with admiration and envy; he lived like a prince and had not a single creditor. One day he asked his friend to explain the mystery of the fact that, without possessing any fortune, he could gratify all his tastes and fancies, whilst he himself, with certain resources, was compelled to submit to privations, still ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... of, and, if there at all, it must be pitch-dark and hard to breathe in. And yet the noise I now heard, if it came from anywhere, came from below. I looked about carefully, hoping for a crack in the floor through which to solve the mystery. But crack there was none. Only as I looked further I saw that the reams of paper, which lay usually near the press, were moved somewhat to one side. Now, as my master was always particular that the paper should lie always in the same place, it seemed strange ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... the little people, who had on one occasion actually written them a letter, although as the characters employed were unknown to any person in the village, the object of their communication by this means seems somewhat of a mystery. Another and a more practical instance of their patronage was then related, for the favoured landlord assured us that on one occasion, when he and his wife descended downstairs in the morning, they found the house cleared, the hearth ready swept, and all the contents of ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... ignorant, than as some of us, to be so sore vexed about unprofitable toys: stultus labor est ineptiarum, to build a house without pins, make a rope of sand, to what end? cui bono? He studies on, but as the boy told St. Austin, when I have laved the sea dry, thou shalt understand the mystery of the Trinity. He makes observations, keeps times and seasons; and as [2365]Conradus the emperor would not touch his new bride, till an astrologer had told him a masculine hour, but with what success? He travels into Europe, Africa, Asia, searcheth every creek, sea, city, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... slept on, the sun sank, and night fell upon the earth. And so the morning and evening made the first day of the new existence, which was about to be developed, through all the various phases which compose that strange and touching mystery—a ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... writing to his wife. But Browning has as many soul-sides as humanity. Hence it has been truly called a new life, like conversion, or marriage, or the mystery of a great sorrow,—a change and a bracing change in our outlook on the whole world, to discover Browning. The college should be our Browning, revealing the motive power of every life, the poetry of good and bad. It is ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... book—so suggestive of mystery and romance—excited the strongest curiosity. Apart from this, however, the reading public of 1843 were not unnaturally startled by a book which seemed to profess to be a good, serious, missionary work, but for which it ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... stood waiting for the signal. He looked over the sea at the Craglevin, which had settled a little at the stern, and was rolling heavily; but she was still a magnificent battleship, with the red cross of England floating over her. He could not help the thought that if this motor mystery should amount to nothing, there was no reason why the Craglevin should not be towed into port, and be made again the grand warship that ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... through which certain breeds have passed. Selection, whether methodical or unconscious, always tending towards an extreme point, together with the neglect and slow extinction of the intermediate and less-valued forms, is the key which unlocks the mystery how man has ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... "The fate of the ring. It has never been stolen: if it had, I would have restored it to you. Fear nothing; your household is trustworthy and virtuous. I know where the ring is; but I should deceive you if I bade you hope ever to find it again. This is a great mystery, and the happy consummation surpasses even my hopes. Adieu. The matter has turned out just as you see. You were born under a lucky star. Happy is the man whose household is trustworthy, and who, when his faith is tried, finds a faithful counselor. I forbid you, henceforth and forever, to distrust ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... in practice it may be considerably shortened. In many cases it is the shortest method known for factorizing large numbers, and I have always held the opinion that Fermat used it in performing a certain feat in factorizing that is historical and wrapped in mystery. ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... enigmatic way his thoughts had kept themselves away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening. Now they concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him. Theron seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate many recollections of Gorringe—the early liking Alice had professed for him, the mystery of those purchased plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had lost in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in which he had sat beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the altar-rail in the evening. These raced abreast through the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... paid, and smiled as he shut his empty purse. His mother sighed in amiable pensiveness, saying, "This is a mystery to me, my son." ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... he said, high and clear. "If a mystery is to be played, surely it were better to put it off till ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... full length, and firmly clenched in his hand was a piece of fancy soap. A bullet had entered his forehead, the blood from the wound was trickling down his face, but the hue of health was still on his cheek. How he came to be there is to me a mystery, as that part of the line was forced by colored troops. Swinging by the right flank we kept our way along the Boydton road. A Confederate light battery in position alongside of a cottage, which stood in a hollow, shelled the column as it advanced, and so accurate had ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... to circulate for then they are not, as a body, amused; and when they are not amused, you know, they are not inclined to be harmless; and in this state they are vipers; and where is society then? And yet you cannot do without them!—which is the revolting mystery. I need not say that I am not responsible for these critical remarks. Such tenderness to the sex comes only ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... only an entering-wedge, intended by insidious degrees to pry open the heart of the girl and learn the mystery of her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... colorist, but above all he aims at effect. History wants no illusions; it should illuminate and instruct, not merely give descriptions and narratives which impress us. Tacitus did not sufficiently develop the causes and inner springs of events. He did not sufficiently study the mystery of facts and thoughts, did not sufficiently investigate and scrutinize their connection, to give posterity a just and impartial opinion. History, as I understand it, should know how to catch men and peoples as they would appear in the midst ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and palaces from his little cottage on the banks of the Ayr. You know the meaning of the word "gentleman." It means a gentle man—a man who does things gently with love. And that is the whole art and mystery of it. The gentle man can not in the nature of things do an ungentle and ungentlemanly thing. The ungentle soul, the inconsiderate, unsympathetic nature can not do anything else. "Love doth not behave ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... aptitude for the things of the spirit enabled him intuitively to realise this, to understand it, to use it. And there was no mystery, no secret, no subterfuge on the part of Jesus as to the source of his power. In clear and unmistakable words he made it known—and why should he not? It was the truth, the truth of this inner kingdom that would make men free that he came to reveal. "The words that I speak unto ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... by this holiest mystery The inward parts are cleansed from stain, And, taming all the unbridled lusts, Our sinful flesh we thus restrain, Lest gluttony and drunkenness Should choke the soul and cloud ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... distinction. This has arisen from those who follow it as a trade, maintaining a mysterious secrecy about their processes. No manufacture can ever become great or important to the community that is carried on under a veil of mystery. ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... "Not a mystery," he corrected, "just a heap of tricks; funny ones, sad ones, sensible ones, and crazy ones—and of all the crazy ones this is the worst. But, what's the use? If there's a God, as you believe, it doesn't do any good to argue with Him, and if it's as I think and there's no God, there's no ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... individuality which emanates from the fusion of the parent nuclei. This is the incalculable and intangible Holy Ghost each time—each individual his own Holy Ghost. When, at the moment of conception, the two parent nuclei fuse to form a new unit of life, then takes place the great mystery of creation. A new individual appears—not the result of the fusion merely. Something more. The quality of individuality cannot be derived. The new individual, in his singleness of self, is a perfectly new whole. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... light of love, Shall I be mute, ere thou be spoken of? 280 Thy kindred influence to my heart of hearts Did also find its way. Thus fear relaxed Her over-weening grasp; thus thoughts and things In the self-haunting spirit learned to take More rational proportions; mystery, 285 The incumbent mystery of sense and soul, Of life and death, time and eternity, Admitted more habitually a mild Interposition—a serene delight In closelier gathering cares, such as become 290 A human creature, howsoe'er endowed, Poet, or destined for a humbler name; And ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... idea did not enter their minds that it was not true in every detail, for they knew that what Teeny-bits Holbrook said could be relied upon to the minutest detail. For half an hour they sat talking it over, suggesting possible motives and trying to fathom the meaning of the mystery. Two things Teeny-bits did not mention: the incident of finding Snubby Turner breaking into Campbell's room and the accusatory letter that had led to the discovery of the stolen loot. Those things, ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... lay our finger on the mainspring one day and the mystery will disappear. But as for Brynhild—I gave her the best education possible and yet she has never understood the conception of a universe moving on mathematical laws to which we must submit in body and mind. She has the oddest ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... are in yonder urn. A few unwholesome dews on a summer night were mightier than all his science. For a time I struggled not with despair; but youth is buoyant, and habit is strong. Again I pored over the mystic scroll—again I called on the spirits with spell and with sign. Many a mystery was revealed, many a wonder grew familiar; but still death remained at the end of all things, as before. One night I was on the terrace of my tower. Above me was the deep, blue sky, with its stars—worlds filled, perchance, with the intelligence which I sought. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... fades and revives, gathers to a point, seems as if it would go out in a moment, again recovers its strength, nay becomes brighter than before: it continues to shine with an endurance, which in its apparent weakness is a mystery; it protracts its existence so long, clinging to the power which supports it, that the observer, who had lain down in his bed so easy-minded, becomes sad and melancholy; his sympathies are touched; it is to him an intimation and an ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... weekly bill. Naturally, Mrs Caffyn's affection moved a response from Madge, and Mrs Caffyn by degrees heard the greater part of her history; but why she had separated herself from her lover without any apparent reason remained a mystery, and all the greater was the mystery because Mrs Caffyn believed that there were no other facts to be known than those she knew. She longed to bring about a reconciliation. It was dreadful to her that ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... was, Rhoda listened with savage contempt of his idle talk. Her brain was beating at the mystery and misery wherein Dahlia lay engulfed. She had no understanding for Robert's sentimentality, or her father's requisition. Some answer had to be given, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was as much of a mystery to Eleanor as the dinner had been. Not because it looked so homelike; though in the early morning the doors and windows were all open and the sunlight streaming through on Mrs. Caxton's china cups and silver spoons. It all looked foreign enough yet, among those palm-fern pillars, and on the ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... "There's considerable mystery to all this," said Captain Toby to the boys after Captain Simms had left them to write some letters which, he said, he wished to send ashore by the hotel ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... deeply interesting. I now saw that never before had I really been in earnest about anything, that on winning her I had staked myself, and that myself was a wholly different person from what I had been imagining. In a word, I sat face to face with that unfathomable mystery of sex-affinity that every man laughs at and mocks another man for believing in, until he has himself felt it drawing him against will, against reason, and sense, and interest, over the brink of destruction yawning before his eyes—drawing him as the magnet-mountain drew Sindbad ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... influenced not only the ancient world, but also the literature and poetry of the Middle Ages and of modern times. It forms a contrast to the philosophy of the Greeks, and to that of Europeans of a later age. When the latter have tried to explain the great mystery of God and man, they have invariably failed. In the beautiful writings of the Greeks, wherein we find the height of artistic expression and polish, there is a subsequent gradual decline; but such is not the case in the Old Testament. In every age fresh beauty and hidden ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... his majesty for more information, till at length the truth seemed to be smothered under such an enormous burden of papers, as the efforts of a whole session could not have properly removed. Indeed, many discerning persons without doors began to despair of seeing the mystery unfolded, as soon as the inquiry was undertaken by a committee of the whole house. They observed, that an affair of such a dark, intricate, and suspicious nature, ought to have been referred to a select and secret committee, chosen by ballot, empowered to send for persons, papers, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... a sense of awe in her soul when she bends over her own infant child; but in the case of Mary we may be sure that the awe was unusual, because of the mystery of the child's birth. In the annunciation the angel had said to her, "That which is to be born shall be called holy, the Son of God." Then the night of her child's birth there was a wondrous vision of angels, and the shepherds who beheld it hastened into the town; and ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... right-hand side of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Boulevard des Capucines, and heinously wrong to walk on the left; while, on the contrary, no self-respecting Parisian would allow himself to be seen on the right-hand pavement of the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Indeed, these things are a mystery, and the wise seek only to obey, and not to ask ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... none of them was in actual possession of a bishop's see: the Queen declared every defect, whether as to the statutes of the realm or church-usages, since time and circumstances demanded it, to be nullified or supplied. It was enough that, generally speaking, the mystery of the episcopal succession went on without interruption. What was less essential she supplied by the prerogative of the crown, as her grandfather had done once before. The archbishop consecrated was Dr. Parker, formerly chaplain to Anne Boleyn: a thoroughly worthy man, the father of ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... things therein, that time shall be no more; but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, in the time when he is about to sound his trumpet, also [kai, merely indicating the apodosis] the mystery of God is finished (etelesthe, aor. ind.), according to the gospel He made known to His servants the prophets." The soundings of the seven trumpets are significant of progressive steps in the general ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... "There is some mystery in it," said Tom, "which time alone can unravel; but however, we will not be deprived of our intended ramble." At this moment they entered Piccadilly, and were crossing the road in their way to St. James's Street, when Dashall nodded to a gentleman passing by on the opposite ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... said the Padre, straight, "And thou shalt know whose mercy bore These aching limbs to your heathen door, And purged my soul of its gross estate. Drink in His name, and thou shalt see The hidden depths of this mystery. Drink!" and he held the cup. One blow From the heathen dashed to the ground below The sacred cup that the Padre bore, And the thirsty soil drank the precious store Of sacramental and holy wine, That emblem and consecrated sign And blessed ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
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