|
|
|
More "Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost everywhere, except in the burned districts, and in places it is six inches in height. When dry, it is brittle, and may be crumbled to powder in the hands, but when wet is very much the consistency of jelly, and just as slippery. Through the wooded land the soil appeared to be simply a tangle of fallen and decayed tree-trunks grown over with thick moss of another variety, in which you sank ankle deep, while dark perilous looking holes yawned on every side, making you feel that if once you went in you might never appear again. Sometimes ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... an easy one. Said he wanted a thirty by forty. There it is on the easel," and Fred moved a chair out of his way, hung his wet coat and hat on a peg behind the door, and started to clear up a tangle of artillery ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... birds, but they were drowsy, and longed to sleep on. At last the snowdrops came up and looked shiveringly about; and a primrose leaf peeped through the ground, and died of cold. Then some violets opened their blue eyes, and, hidden beneath the tangle of the wood, listened to the twittering of the birds. The little ragged boy came by; he saw the tender flowers, and, stooping down, gathered them one by one, and put them into a wicker basket ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... beating the Magister, so that the fur gown made a greyish whirl about his scarlet suit in the midst of a tangle of spun wool; spinning wheels were overset, Margot Poins crashed around upon them, wailing; the girls with their distaffs were crouching against the window-places and in corners, crying out each ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... sun warm. The trail led him first across a stretch of stump-dotted wet land with pools and rounded rises, green new grass, and trickling streamlets of recently melted snow. Then came a fringe of scrub growth woven into an almost impenetrable tangle—oaks, poplars, willows, cedar, tamarack—and through it all an abattis of old slashing—with its rotting, fallen stumps, its network of tops, its soggy root-holes, its fallen, uprooted trees. Along ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... in case of an accident when the kite was up, as it would have been no joke for it to have broken loose. But Fred was not very well up in his task, and somehow or other made a perfect Laocoon of himself with the string, and got at last into a regular tangle, so that fully half an hour was taken up in endeavours to get it right again, which was only done at last with a knife, and at the expense of ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... thought is that Lassalle, being a sure shot and a brave man, will surely kill the Prince. This will eliminate one factor in the tangle. Lassalle having killed his man will have to flee—the Government only tolerates him now. And she will flee with him—her father in Paris, the Prince dead, exile for Lassalle—the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... and sorry when he suddenly loosens his grasp of her hands. The shadowed way terminates in a narrow wrought-iron gate; and beyond the gate is the rose garden of Barwell Moat, a tangle of exquisite colouring, jealously guarded and hidden away from those to whom the more familiar beauties ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... was no longer there to explain things away, that she could not crush the horror and resentment with which she regarded him. But of this no one knew anything; and she set herself deliberately not only to make such headway as she could in the tangle of their circumstances, but to conceal from everyone the ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... care; more, God's lightnings sear the eyeballs of virtue, tall and fair as angelhood,—this is our agonized estimate betimes, and we are troubled lest, unwittingly and unwillingly, we malign God. To an explanation of this fiery tangle of adversity the drama of Job sets itself. How prodigious ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... valleys, and the abundance of evergreens of all kinds quite deluded one into the belief that it was summer time, especially as camellias grew like forest trees, covered with red and white bloom, amidst a dense tangle of bamboos and half-hardy palms. There were many strange things upside down to be seen on efther hand—horses and cows with bells on their tails instead of on their necks, the quadrupeds well clothed, their masters without a scrap of covering, tailors sewing from them instead of to them, a ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... Charley was quicker. He dug his spur cruelly into his little pony's flank. With a neigh of pain the animal leaped forward. For a moment there was a tangle of striking hoofs and wriggling coils of the foiled reptile, while Charley leaning over in his saddle struck with the butt-end of his riding whip at the writhing coils. Though it seemed an eternity to the helpless watchers it was really only a few seconds ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... love you," she said fondly. "I believe in you, and father must too. You've got to straighten this tangle out now, for my sake as well as your own. ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... the only man in the world that can straighten out a tangle of things that I don't understand. And I'm sure that if he knew I was here, he'd come to ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... and twisted the course of true love This ditty explains, No tangle's so tangled it cannot improve If the ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... said the old man, going toward a heap of rocks around which grew a tangle of shrubs and creepers. "The plant which I seek is shy, and hides in the shadows of sheltered places. Yonder is a cave, where first I made my dwelling when I came to the forest, before I built the hut in which we now live. And at the entrance, I remember, grew the herb of grace, which more than once ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... at least ten thousand shells were fired at the chateau until it was reduced to a pile of rubbish. Even the garden walls remained standing only in isolated spots, and the surrounding forest was so completely wrecked that great boughs and whole trees lay criss-crossed in an inextricable tangle. ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... strip of shrubs with graceful spray, now bowed in beauty by the river's brink, is a group of young red birches, and this bunch of downy brown twigs, two feet above the snow, sparkling with frost particles, is the downy viburnum. The great tangle of vine and lace work mixed with snow is young hop ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... she replied musingly, as if half speaking to herself; "so strange that I cannot understand it. Life is a queer tangle at best. That is, it seems so to ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... the world alive. If all at once Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless Across would drop in terror to the earth; Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins Would tangle in the frantic hands of God And the worlds gallop ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... over them, one after the other, scanning each rosy face. The baby girl lay upon her side, a round little cheek, a fringe of dark eyelashes, and a tangle of fair curls showing against the pillow. The boy was stretched upon his back, his arms outflung, his head turned toward the light so that his face was fully visible. If he had been attractive with his wonderful eyes open, he was even more winsome ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... officer would tackle the problem of sweetening Troo. If he attempted to envelop it in a cobweb of socketed drainpipes he would get into a tangle with the chimneys; to carry them underground would not be feasible, as he would have to run them through kitchens, bedrooms and salles-a-manger. But even did he make this cobweb, he could not flush his pipes, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... little girl, so like her mother, with her tangle of red curls on the pillow. Picking her up in his arms, he carried her to his room and put ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... lustily will be heard sooner or later. Now if the house itself suffices, under all circumstances, to make such an impression upon the child, how must the town strike him! When he is taken along by mother or father for the first time, he surely does not start to walk through the tangle of streets without a feeling of astonishment, and it is still less likely that he reaches home again without experiencing a sensation of giddiness. Nay, be perhaps brings back lasting typical conceptions ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... One minute before the close of the fourth chukkur the score stood at four all. Both teams were playing with desperation to avoid a decider on tired ponies, when the Wanderers' third man extricated the ball from a tangle of prancing hoofs and clattering sticks, and Alec Delgrado got away with it. He thought his pony was good for one last run at top speed, that and no more. Risking it, he sprinted across two hundred yards of ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... of latitude, and degrees 89 and 90 of longitude, in the northern hemisphere of the New World, serenely anchored on an ever-rippling and excited surface, an exquisitely lovely island. No tropical wonder of palm-treed stateliness, or hot tangle of gaudy bird and glowing creeper, can compare with it; no other northern isle, cool and green and refreshing to the eye like itself, can surpass it. It is not a large island. It is about half-a-mile long and quarter of a mile broad It is an irregular ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... have reduced me to silence because you have interrupted me. Ah! there, you have tangled my hair. How provoking you are! It will take me an hour to put it right. You are not satisfied with being a prodigy of impiety, but you must also tangle my hair. Come, hold out your hands and take this ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... dispatch-riders who had become "rattled" and had blundered into the enemy's arms, but Thatchy had a kind of uncanny extra sense, a bump of locality, if you will, and that is why they had sent him into this geographical tangle where maps became out of date as fast as they ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the deep ruts left by the carts which had carried the bracken the previous autumn, as the stout pony threw himself into the collar with a will. On either side of the narrow lane were high, sandy banks, riddled with rabbit-holes and crowned with a tangle of brambles and briars. The leaves were just beginning to turn, and the hips and haws had already clothed themselves in their winter finery, and shone in flaming scarlet against the blue sky overhead. There was a pleasant coolness in the air, and the birds twittered merrily in tune ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... under arrest. I'm a Secret Service man, sent here to prevent the revolution that's been brewing all spring and summer. I guess I've done it, all right." He stared at her with growing bitterness in his eyes. His hurt began dully to ache again. "Helen May, what in God's name did you tangle up with 'em for?" he flashed in a sudden passion of ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... dress that she was wearing and put on some horrible old rags belonging to a beggar, all torn and covered with mud. After that she smeared mud all over her hands and face, and shook her hair into a great tangle. Having thus changed her appearance, she went about offering herself as a goose-girl or shepherdess. But the farmers' wives would have nothing to say to such a dirty maiden, and sent her away with a morsel of ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... the stream leaps out into the light in a fluted curve thick sown with sparkling crystals, and falls into a pool filled with brown boulders, out of which it creeps gray with foam-bells and disappears in a tangle of verdure like that from ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... of a modern state, because of the conflict and confusion of ideas, all or most of these five sub-classes may usually be found intertwined. The British constitution, for instance, is a complicated tangle of arrangements, due to a struggle between the ideas of Class I.(2), Class II.(3), tending to become Class II.(1) and Class II.(2) in both its aristocratic and monarchist forms. The American constitution is largely dominated by Class I.(2), from which it breaks away in the case of the President ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... world must be built on universal prosperity, and this is only possible on a foundation of universal justice. If the web of the cloth is knotted in one place it is because the threads have, in an unmeaning tangle, been withdrawn from another part. Human misery is the correlative and equivalent of injustice somewhere else ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... kept him away ten days: he hated to connect the place with anything but his offices or to give a glimpse of the curiosity that had been on the point of moving him. It was absurd to weave a tangle about a matter so simple as a custom of devotion that might with ease have been daily or hourly; yet the tangle got itself woven. He was sorry, he was disappointed: it was as if a long happy spell had been broken and he had lost a familiar security. At the last, however, ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... as refreshed as though I had been dreaming through a long night, An, seeing me open-eyed, helped me to my feet, and when I had recovered my senses a little, asked if we should go on. I was myself again by this time, so willingly took her hand, and soon came out of the tangle into the open spaces. I must have been under the spell of the Martian wines longer than it seemed, for already it was late in the afternoon, the shadows of trees were lying deep and far-reaching over the motley crowds of people. Out here as the day waned they had developed some ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... open palm. "Look at it! By time, there ain't nothin' I can't do with that knife! Every time I look at it I find somethin' new. Now, I wonder what that is," pointing to a particularly large and ferocious-looking implement which projected from the steel tangle. "I cal'late I've sized up about everything else, but I can't seem to make out what that's for. What do you cal'late 'tis, ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... under Socialism; to which Thyrsis made retort by picturing "the home" under capitalism. They wanted to know about liberty and individuality under Socialism; and so Thyrsis discussed the liberty and individuality of the hundred thousand wage-slaves of the Steel Trust. They sought to tangle him in discussions as to the desirability of competition, and the impossibility of escaping it; but Thyrsis would bring them back again and again to the central fact of exploitation, which was the one fact that counted. They insisted upon knowing how this, that, and the other thing ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the dogs to pull to greater advantage than if all the traces were of the same length, causing the dogs to spread out like a fan. At every few miles the traces have to be unloosened and extricated from the most abominable tangle that it is possible to conceive. This comes from a habit the dogs have of constantly running under and over the other traces to avoid the whip, or in some cases merely from a spirit of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... or two, and others that Nero did not see until later. And there was also a queer, wild-animal smell, which Nero liked very much. It was almost like the smell of the jungle, and it made him homesick when he thought of the deep tangle of green vines, the thick trees and the silent ...
— Nero, the Circus Lion - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... Felice. Only Felice! She was sitting on a flat tombstone. The little spot was the Raymonde-Arnault family burying-ground. There were many marble headstones and shafts, and two broad low tombs side by side and a little apart from the others. A tangle of rose-briers covered the sunken graves, a rank growth of grass choked the narrow paths, the little gate interlaced and overhung with honeysuckle sagged away from its posts, the fence itself had lost a picket here and there, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... A man with a tangle of hair, and with that about his mouth which showed that he had spent many years in manufacturing a proper modesty with which to bear his greatness, ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... 'em fool you," said the old man earnestly. "Ever'thing's in a tangle, an' ther hain't no Whig party for to ontangle it. Giner'l Jackson an' the cussid bank ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... the interior for fifty yards when they found themselves in a perfect network of trailing vines. Then, after having pulled and cut their way through for fifty yards more, they came to a spot that was rocky and covered with a tangle of thorny bushes. ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... whispered it, and, beneath the sod, every fibre of root and tree quivered with aspiration, groping through the labyrinth of darkness with a blind impulse toward the light. Across the valley, on the southern slope, a faint glow of green seemed to hover above the dark tangle of the vineyard, like some indefinite suggestion of colour, promising the sure beauty ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... confused tangle of ropes I was compelled to traverse, yet none greatly interfered with my progress, except to render it slower, and the consequent strain harder upon the arms. The huge foremast, close against which I swung, grew bulkier as I descended. Suddenly my ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Dodging through the tangle of undergrowth and driftwood, they soon emerged on the loose sand above the beach. As Amos Swan had said, the rains had not yet washed away the black embers of the great bonfire, and near by lay a barrel with staves ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... perennial interests of Mr. Gladstone's life was that shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting interests, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths, that is veiled under the easy name of the Eastern question. The root of the Eastern question, as everybody almost too well knows, is the presence of the Ottoman Turks in Europe, their ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... behaved unspeakably, trailing you everywhere, and I don't deny I have, according to your point of view. But the fact is, I didn't follow you to annoy you; I'm a half-way decent fellow. You have simply got to trust me until I've seen you through this tangle. After that, if you like you need never look ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... deepest part of the woods Dick parted a tangle of bushes through which the trail led. Then, in a voice vibrant with agitation, ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... children is to watch the gradual growth of the acorn into the oak tree. They will suspend the acorn in a glass of water and watch the slow progress during long months. First one tiny white thread is put forth, then another, until at length the glass is almost filled with a tangle of white fibers, a sturdy little stem raises itself up, and the baby tree, if it is to live, must be at once transplanted into good soil. The process may be botanically interesting, but there is something a little sickly about it, too ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... however, by his great speech, of April 5th, in the Senate, did much to clear the tangle in the minds of some faltering Union statesmen on this ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the plural of "dodd," a bunch of threads. The parasite is sometimes called "Red tangle" ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Diverging from this central walk were two narrower paths which, winding in and out in eccentric figures, led, on the one hand, to a rustic summer-house overgrown with honeysuckle and trumpet-vine, and on the other to a tiny grotto constructed of shells and set in a tangle of periwinkle. Along one side of the house, and protected by a stout locust paling overrun with grape-vines, lay the garden, where flowers and vegetables flourished contentedly side by side, the hollyhocks and tall white lilies, the hundred-leaved roses and scarlet poppies showing like gilded officers ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... ungraceful appearance. He had not even a collar, only an old tartan scarf knotted round his neck, and from the shrunk sleeves of the old jacket his hands, red and bony, appeared abnormally large. But when she looked at his face, at the eyes which looked out from the tangle of his hair, she forgot all the rest, and her heart warmed to him before he had ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... a harbor. Crows string over the woods close to the tops of the trees, watching with piercing eyes for lone and hapless fledglings. A cuckoo droops from a tall wild cherry tree on one side of the road to a tangle of wild grape on the other; he peers out and gives his rain-crow call. So is the warp of the summer woven of bird-flight and threaded ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... he likes his fill iv tangle," said Bill, "well he'll get it t-night. I'm goin t' stand a spree ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... a modus viviendi," Penfentenyou murmured, and tiptoed along the hall to a back door, which he opened quite silently. We passed into a tangle of gooseberry bushes where, at his statesmanlike example, we crawled on all fours, and ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... Eleanor's pride revolted against such a course, and yet what else was there to do? She had not even arrived at Betty's half answer to the problem when she undressed in the silence of the great, sleeping house and, thoroughly tired with her long vigil, forgot the difficult tangle ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... time when a man should pray," he said to himself, "but my thoughts tangle and my ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... least three hundred feet. Jimmy Gaynes, following unconsciously the general train of conjecture, craned his neck over the edge of the road. The broken jagged rock and shale dropped off an hundred feet to a tangle of ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... west side of the Canyon they moved laboriously among fallen logs, boulders and driftwood, and through the tangle of vines, ferns, and foliage ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... seas and enjoy the economic independence which only an adequate merchant marine would give it, but also that the American hemisphere as a whole should enjoy a like independence and self-sufficiency, if it is not to be drawn into the tangle of European affairs. Without such independence the whole question of our political unity and self-determination is very ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... 'You might row and sail about here for days, and I'll warrant you'd never find the castle; it's hidden away more carefully than a nest in the reeds, trust me for that. The way lies through a perfect tangle of channels and islands and marshes, and the fog is sure for at least a good half of the time. The sides of the castle towards the channel show no light at all; and even when you're once through the outlying islets, the only approach ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... biggest chair in the living room, which was none too ample for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brown hair, his broad face masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard. He wore a faded and grimy bush jacket with clips of rifle cartridges on the breast, no shirt and a torn undershirt over a shag of gray-brown chest hair. Between the bottoms of his shorts and the tops of his ragged hose and muddy boots, his legs were covered ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... suddenly. In a meadow to her right a tangle of bulrushes edged a small pond and, perched on a swaying reed, a red-winged blackbird was ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... Meanwhile, the tangle at Dublin was becoming hopeless. There, as Beresford warned Pitt, the report of the proposed Union was the letting out of water. Captain Saurin, an eminent counsel who was commander of a corps of lawyers nick-named the Devil's ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... making them of twigs, strips of bark, grasses and feathers, compactly woven together and located in bushes from one to four feet from the ground. They lay from three to five plain, unmarked, pure white eggs; size .75 x .54. Data.—Wrights, Cal. Nest in a tangle of vines in a deep ravine; composed of strips of bark, moss and grasses, lined with cattle hair; ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... in his The Art of the Short Story, calls the "negative" or "hostile" incident. Incidents, as he points out, are of two kinds—positive and negative. The first openly help to untangle the situation; the second seem to delay the straightening out of the threads or even to make the tangle worse. He illustrates this by the story of Cinderella. The appearance of the fairy and her use of the magic wand are positive, or openly helpful incidents, in rescuing Cinderella from her lonely and neglected state. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... ground-beetles crawled lazily to and fro. Moreover, on the causeways and terraces, large-headed creatures similar to the greater winged flies, but wingless, were visible, hopping busily upon their hand-like tangle of tentacles. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... are large, and even the scrappiest have an artful understanding, in the interest of colour, with the waterways that edge their foundations. On the small canals, in the hunt for amusement, they are the prettiest surprises of all. The tangle of plants and flowers crowds over the battered walls, the greenness makes an arrangement with the rosy sordid brick. Of all the reflected and liquefied things in Venice, and the number of these is ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... nature worship, of which something is said in the opening chapter. Both the title and a small part of the matter are reprinted from an article which I contributed last year to the New York Evening Post. Attention is called to the tangle in the names of glaciers and the need of a definitive nomenclature. As to the name of the Mountain itself, that famous bone of contention between two cities, I greatly prefer "Tacoma," one of the several authentic forms of the Indian name used by different tribes; ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... to one side of Patty, a horse went down, a big roan colt, and she got one horrible glimpse of a grotesquely twisted neck, and a tangle of thrashing hoofs as another horse plunged onto his fallen comrade. A horrible scream split the air as he, too, went down, and the sudden side-surge of the herd all but unseated the clinging girl. In ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... again, and even worse, because of their contrast with the past I'd conjured up. Grief for the death of Jimmy Beckett mingled with grief for Brian, and anxieties about money, in the dull, sickly way that unconnected troubles tangle themselves together in ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... me off. As I have said, I was an old soldier with all that that implies. He marched me up to the officer, already more or less at sea about his new duties. I asked for money. He was aware of my history but not of the tangle I was in: ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... air grew warmer. Tiny green shoots appeared in the rusty tangle of last season's mesa grasses. Imperceptibly the dull-hued mesas became fresh carpeted with green across which the wind bore a subtly soft fragrance ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... jolly-boat with the crew. I looked at them, and in my heart I could not condemn them for their sly departure; they were all there, arraiz, wife, children, and crew, so heaped together that they seemed only a meaningless tangle of arms and legs and heads; the water was half an inch from the gunwale, and the one man at the oars, hampered, paralyzed on all sides, was splashing helplessly while the craft pivoted like a top. There was no anger in my heart, yet I was not absolutely reconciled to ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... better hours! One of God's precious gifts is the luminous hour that denies the lower animal mood. Mind is not always at its best. Full oft our thought is sodden and dull. Then duty seems a maze without a clew and life's skeins all a tangle. The mind is uneasy, confused and troubled. Then men live to the eye and the ear and physical comforts; they live for houses and beautiful things in them; for shelves and rich goods upon them; for factories ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the trees in tiny shining globules of iridescent light, close by him an owl fluttered in a tangle of branches, uttering its dreadful cry of ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... as it was, I did so believe. Some voice within me, which would not be stilled or brook contradiction, cried aloud that I might have won her love, that she might have been mine, that only some devilish tangle of circumstances had circumvented the fate which originally had meant that we two should be all ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... company of an alarum clock, Jake retired to his couch, which consisted of a flax-stuffed mattress resting on a wooden bedstead, and there he quickly buried himself in a weird tangle of dirty blankets, and went ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... was true especially during the war—have surrounded themselves with a tangle of red tape which has to be unwound every time an employee (or any one else) wants to get near enough to ask a question. This is absurd. Sensible men destroy elaborate plans of management and find they get along better without them. The Baldwin Locomotive ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... their original position. Yet there was every indication of a rout. The roads were clogged by the night supply trains going forward and the rush of men trying to escape from the deadly gas. The staff officers found it impossible to straighten out the tangle, and the various regiments had to act almost as independent bodies. It was not until early the following morning, April 23, 1915, that the first reenforcements of British soldiers appeared to fill the breach. These ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... making fools of themselves. Then came Mrs. Grenville's letter. Mrs. Grenville had seen you. She had discovered that you cared for Meryl, and she told me so. I didn't stop to think then. I saw in a moment it was your business to help me help them out of the tangle. So I just sent you a telegram and asked you to ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... a tangle in all my days," continued Ryan, earnestly. "The amount of property shipwrecked is almost incredible. The man was never intoxicated in his life, and yet it may be truthfully said of him that he has let rum swallow ...
— Three People • Pansy
... produced an "Alcock's porous plaster," which he vehemently assured Vincent would be sure to burn, and was a real English medicine, imported with great trouble and expense, and certain to cure the ailment from which he was suffering. How Vincent would have got out of the tangle, or convinced the chemist's assistant that he was not in need of medical aid, is uncertain, but at that moment Irene, who was walking with Lorna in the square, spied him through the window, and brought her chum to the rescue. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... Whence had it come? Could Miss Joliffe have dropped it? No, that was impossible; she would certainly have told him if she had any information of this kind, for she knew that he had been trying for months to unravel the tangle of Martin's papers. It must have been hidden behind the picture, and have fallen out when the bottom ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... we do love you—dearly, dearly," she would sometimes say as she bent over her; but the bright eyes, too bright by far, gazed up without seeing, and the weary little head, shorn of its pretty tangle of fuzzy hair, moved restlessly on the pillow, while Hoodie kept talking about her dead bird and nobody loving her, through the slow weary hours while life and death were fighting ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... mocking-bird that trilled and trolled, and seemed trying to split its musical little throat in a honeysuckle bush before the open window of a little "two-story" log house set back from the road in a tangle of plum trees, wild rose-bushes, and sweet ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... shocks him, the idea of their being in the guest's bedchamber. He peremptorily orders them out. They do not answer him, they do not argue; in dead silence, and with one accord they fall upon him. All you can see from the bed is a confused tangle of waving arms and legs, suggestive of an intoxicated octopus trying to find bottom. Not a word is spoken; that seems to be the etiquette of the thing. If you are sleeping in your pyjamas, you spring from the bed, and only add to the confusion; if you are wearing a less showy garment, you ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... plant ages, the next inner layers of the pileus grow less rapidly, so that the white layer beneath the brown is torn up into an intricate tangle of locks and tufts, or is frazzled into a delicate pile which exists here and there between well formed tufts. While all present the same general characters there is considerable individual variation, as one can see by comparing ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... limping into cover under a tangle of gorse and blackberry bashes, that discovered to her the entrance to the series of little chambers and passages that led right through the headland to the side looking into Port Gorey. Which most satisfactory hiding-place she and Bernel turned to good account on many an occasion when ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... Vandover would exclaim, throwing down the Announcement of Courses, "I can't make this thing out. It's all in a tangle. See here, I've got to fill up my hours some way or other; you straighten this thing out for me. Find me some nice little course, two hours a week, say, that comes late in the morning, a good hour ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... garden was her kingdom and her Paradise. It was a wide, fragrant, shaded place, full of the shrubs and flowers of former days. Huge pink and white oleanders, planted in tubs, stood on either side the walks. Thick spikes of purple lavender edged the beds; the summer-house was a tangle of honey-suckle, rosemary, and eglantine. Roses of all colors abounded. They towered high above Lota's head as she walked,—twined and clasped, shut her in with perfumed shadows, rained showers of many-colored petals on the grass. An old-fashioned fairy would have delighted to dwell ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... should keep his name before the world. And on this side he hath promised Padley, if that he may but keep the rest of the estates, and have his liberty. I tell you that alone cuts all the knots of this tangle.... Can you cut them in ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... which this country, and for that matter the whole civilized world, has to deal, is the problem which has for one side the betterment of social conditions, moral and physical, in large cities, and for another side the effort to deal with that tangle of far-reaching questions which we group together when we speak of "labor." The chief factor in the success of each man—wage-worker, farmer, and capitalist alike—must ever be the sum total of his ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... cloud, that already its gloom was exchanged for that diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most difficult to ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... through some break in the upper foliage, giving a strange glory to everything it touches—projecting leaves, and beard-like tuft of moss, and snaky bush-rope. And in the most open part of that most open space, suspended on nothing to the eye, the shaft reveals a tangle of shining silver threads—the web of some large tree-spider. These seemingly distant yet distinctly visible threads serve to remind me that the human artist is only able to get his horizontal distance ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... of extricating the M.L. from the tangle of wire stays and other wreckage was a difficult one. A propeller had entwined itself and become useless (afterwards freed by going astern), the little signal topmast and yard had been broken off by a loop of wire from the gigantic envelope and the ensign ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... to have had a fine view from the pass over the trackless mountain tangle to the north, some of the peaks towering almost eighteen thousand feet into the sky, but again the clouds and mist veiled everything from sight. All the rest of the day we were making our way down the steep east ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... 'A tangle of circumstantial evidence which is supposed to be conclusive, but on which we feel confident that no English jury would convict.'—NEW ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... British Ambassador, for example, at every sufficiently important capital, and an ambassador from every important State in London, and a complex tangle of relationships, misstatements, and misconceptions arising from the ill-co-ordinated activities of this double system of agents, it is proposed to send one or several ambassadors to some central point, such as The Hague, to meet there all the ambassadors of all the significant ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the last time the sun in the heavens," to the final outburst, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" it was all as familiar to us as the sentences of the Lord's Prayer, and scarcely less consecrated. No logical unravelling of the tangle, but that burning expression of devotion to the Union, lay behind the enthusiasm with which we sprang to arms. The ghost of Webster hovered in the battle-smoke, and it was his call more than any other that rallied and kept us ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... logs that are almost immovable, and often it is just one of the worst that has to be cleared before anything else can be done. Then the men spread out and surround it, fixing their hooks wherever they can get a sight of it in the tangle, some hauling, others thrusting outward; if it is dry, they splash water over it to make it slippery. And here the poles are nowise regularly set like harp-strings, but lie crosswise at all ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... busy three days I've been having, and if I'm a bit tuckered out in body I'm still invincible in spirit. For I've already triumphed over a tangle or two and now I'm going to see this thing through. I'm going to ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... gone, and Barrington was alone, staring at the doorway through which she had passed. A tangle of thoughts was in his brain, one loose end uppermost. He had not moved when ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... she should go bravely forward—insist that the shanty was hers, and that he should go away. The mud cellar was between her and the waiting man, and as she peered closer to see if Ben were still there one brilliant tangle of hair fell over her shoulder. Ben Letts caught the movement and Tessibel ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... its old-time mosques; in this connection I would emphasize the bazars, both Turkish and Arabic. Some of the old irregular thoroughfares on which the bazars are situated radiate from the wider and more important Muski; then, again, there are narrower alley-like streets, a veritable tangle! The bazars everywhere are similarly constructed, but vary in size and importance; they are box-like in form, from four to six feet in width, and six to eight feet in height, and are raised one or two ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... quickly checked out Kit's ship as qualified for the race, and then turned, fascinated, to the tangle of pipes, cables, and mechanical gear of the reactor unit and cooling pumps. Tom and Roger were unable to figure out exactly what changes Kit had made, but Astro gazed at the new machinery fondly, almost rapturously. He tried to explain the intricate work to ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... every doom of God Hath by other dooms its way Crossed, that none may rule alone, In one speech-outstripping groan Forth had all this passion flown, Which now murmuring hides away, Full of pain, and hoping not Ever one clear thread to unknot From the tangle of my soul, From a heart of ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... came to a distinct end, and the second rose higher and more rough. Its face was torn and barren, and what timber there was grew low down almost at its foot. The valley was narrowing, and the rich prairie grass was changing to a lank tangle of weedy tufts. There was a suspicion of moisture, too, in the spongy tread. The sun further lost power here, between these narrowing crags, and, although summer was well advanced, the ground still bore the moist ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... at some time been blown down. Round their great trunks as they lay on the ground, young trees and a mass of elder-bushes and other brushwood had sprung up, making a dense thicket. The two logs lay side by side, and in between them, with the tangle of bushes all round and the branches of the other trees overhead, there was a complete ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... thread here which we had not yet grasped and which might lead us through the tangle. Cheer up, Watson, for I am very sure that our material has not yet all come to hand. When it does we may soon leave our ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... jasmine and many-hued morning-glory,—the latter making a pillar heavy with triumphal wreaths of every old stump along the plashy brink,—the former swinging from tree-top to tree-top to knit the whole tropic wilderness into a tangle of emerald chains, drooping lamps of golden fire, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the Cornishmen being giants, Josh," said Will, as he rapidly passed the long lengths of net through his hands, so that they should lie smooth in the hold, ready for shooting again that night without twist or tangle. "Old writers were very fond of ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... her heart and a keen sense of the injustice done her, Tabitha had rushed heedlessly up the hill and down through the pathless tangle of wet greasewood and sagebrush, splashing through mud and water with reckless abandon, and arriving home in a deplorably bespattered state, with feet wet and dress dripping. Aunt Maria saw her coming and met her at the door with an exclamation of horror: "Tabitha ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... the details. Hazel lit the lamp, and in its yellow glow pored over maps while Bill idly sketched their route on a sheet of paper. His objective lay east of the head of the Naas proper, where amid a wild tangle of mountains and mountain torrents three turbulent rivers, the Stikine, the Skeena, and the Naas, took their rise. A God-forsaken region, he told her, where few white men had penetrated. The peaks flirted with the clouds, and their sides were scarred with glaciers. A lonesome, brooding ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... high, the blue of the sky seemed a hundred miles in depth, and not wisp or feather of cloud in it anywhere! Where the flat fields were untilled they were very green, a green that was almost yellow, it was so bright. Within the strip of railway land a tangle of young bushes grew, and on every twig buds were bursting. About a mile back from the road, on either side, fir woods stood, the trees in close level phalanx. Everywhere over the land birds big and ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... by which every object, from a human form to a marble acanthus leaf, cast sharp-edged shadows, I soon discovered my violin on a tangle of flowering clematis, and began ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... pool. This is a pretty brace of trout, from thirty to forty ounces of thoroughbred fighting pluck, and the spirit that will not surrender. If they only knew that their strength would be doubled by acting together, they soon would tangle your line in the roots or break your rod in the alders. But all the time they are fighting against each other, making it easy to bring them up to the net and land them—a pair of beauties, evenly matched in weight and in splendour, gleaming with rich iridescent hues of orange ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... the outer city, as soon as the news had been brought through that a way to the Legations had been opened, had thrown the various units into an immense confusion. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, and the fighting trains, were all mixed in a terrible tangle. Some had come forward so rapidly, in their eagerness not to be left out of it all, that they had passed in under the walls as soon as the gates had been burst open, and had now got jammed into our narrow ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... getting sentimental? No, she was not. Indeed, precisely what his little visit had done for her was to effect her release from a tangle of taut-drawn sentimentalities. She hadn't felt as free as this, as comfortable with herself, since she came home with ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... and his advisers are involved in a tangle of miscalculations which infest the conduct of the war alike in the field of battle and the council-chamber. But no wild imaginings could encourage a solid hope that the Chancellor's peaceful professions would be taken ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... close of this long day, by sitting in our carriages, safe sheltered from the soft-falling rain, outside the great gate which divided the splendor from the darkness, for three quarters of an hour, in an inextricable tangle of carriages, until the perturbed coachmen and the sorely vexed police could evolve order from the temporary confusion, and set the hindered procession again on ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... introduced it, and it required considerable tact to allay their displeasure and induce them to support our bill." Medill McCormick, one of the leading Progressives in the Legislature, helped greatly in straightening out this tangle. He was a faithful ally of the suffrage lobby and rendered invaluable assistance. Other Progressives who gave important service were John M. Curran and Emil N. Zolla of Chicago; J. H. Jayne of Monmouth; Charles H. Carmon of Forrest, and Fayette S. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... half the Big Ravine is a narrow cut between perpendicular rock walls thickly clothed to their very summits with bamboo and a tangle of thorny vines. In the bottom of the gorge a mountain torrent foams among huge bowlders but becomes a gentle, slow moving stream when it leaves the cool darkness of the canon to spread itself ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... had just gone out, so he went to the door, where, to his astonishment, he was confronted by Baron Huchenard and Bos the dealer in manuscripts. Bos dashed into the study wildly waving his arms, while breathless ejaculations flew out of his red tangle of beard and hair: 'Forged! The documents are forged! I can prove it! ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... See, there is one of Milly's favourite views," said the laird, pulling up, and pointing with his whip to the scene in front, where a range of purple hills formed a fine background to the loch, with its foreground of tangle-covered stones; "she revels in ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... middle water rise in sandy basins; course down deeply furrowed beds of grit; and, after passing through a tangle of vegetation, a dense forest of palms, alive and dead, and open patches sown with grain, wilfully waste their treasures in the upper slope of the right bank. This abundance of water has developed a certain amount of industry; although the Bedawin tear to pieces the young male-dates, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... apt to happen. For himself he found that he had need of both his eyes with every step forward he took through that tangle, where trailing vines lay in wait to trip him up, and branches hung low as if seeking to catch in his hair, ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... pioneer line was broken down at a point about 200 Yards from Cape Grisnez, and it turned out that a Boulogne fisherman had raised it on his trawl and cut a piece away, thinking he had found a rare species of tangle with gold in its heart. This misfortune suggested the propriety of arming the core against mechanical injury by sheathing it in a cable of hemp and iron wires. The experiment served to keep alive the concession, and the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... are never supposed to stand up, but to squat in the ancient patient manner; and coast, or lake steamers are constructed with a view to render this attitude only possible. Observing an open door in the port side of the cabin, I picked my way over a tangle of bodies and limbs—among them a pair of fairy legs belonging to a dancing-girl—and found myself presently in another gangway, also roofed, and choked up to the roof with baskets of squirming eels. Exit there was none: so I climbed back over all the legs ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... Students bring their books of selections from English authors to the missionary, and ask him to clear up their difficulties. But a long and involved paragraph, with several obsolete words and obscure satire, is a tangle which it is almost hopeless to unravel satisfactorily, when you are dealing with a language so unlike in construction and modes of expression to that of the learner. Nor are some of the allusions in the selected passages particularly edifying to the Hindu mind, ready to scent evil even where ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... when the garden was bursting into bloom in the warm southern sunshine, Grandmother and Lindsay would sit in the arbor, where the vines crept over and over in a tangle of bloom, and listen to a serenade. Music, music everywhere! Over their heads, behind their backs, the little brown bees would ...
— Mother Stories • Maud Lindsay
... was oppressive. Piang stumbled along through the tangle of vines and weeds, tired and foot-sore. Would he never find the path to the peak? And was there really a mysterious old man who had lived up there for over a hundred years? Sicto was somewhere on that mountain, ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone. Mariners detect the flowery perfume of land-winds far at sea, and sea-winds carry the fragrance of dulce and tangle far inland, where it is quickly recognized, though mingled with the scents of a thousand land-flowers. As an illustration of this, I may tell here that I breathed sea-air on the Firth of Forth, in Scotland, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... easy little personage of evil intent; but he symbolized the subtile principle which pares away the natural virtue of man, and substitutes an artificial polish, which is hypocrisy. It is to be observed, however, that hair can be representative of natural evil as well as of good. A tangle-headed bush-ranger does not win our sympathies. A Mussulman keeps his beard ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... around, an' sets up, an' levels down in a way that wouldn't mean a thing to brains like ours—till He's finished it all, and sort of swep' up tidy. Look at them colors, way up there to the west. Queer? Sure. Every sort o' blamed color in a tangle no earthly painter could set out. Ain't it a pictur'? It's jest a sort o' pictur' a painter feller's li'ble to spend most of his wholesome nights dreamin' about. An' when he wakes up, why, I don't guess he kin even think like it, an' ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... ground and set off for a saunter up stream, pausing here to reach for a nut, there to pluck a ripe blackberry, and again to examine a tangle of bryony, or the deep-red fruit of the honey-suckle; for almost all her waking life had been spent in towns among crowds, and these things were new and strange to her. She met no one on her way until, where the stream twisted between a double fold of green pasture slopes, she came to ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... park, and down another avenue into the thick tangle of traffic, which scared them both, and so back to the hotel, the Captain saying: "My! my! but she has grown. 'Tis twenty years since ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... tent of overlapping leaves; one must raise it, and nip off just one leaf, so that the blossoms can see out. There is another, a pink cluster, showing faintly through the dry, matted grass. You feel for the stem, pull it gently, and, lo, it is many stems, which have crept their way under the tangle, and every one is tipped with a cluster of stars or round little buds each on its long stem, fairly begging to be ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... the clear depths where the long tangle of marine plants swayed with the motion of the light current. Upon the rocky bed below she saw many ruby-coloured sea anemones, with emerald mosses, and pearly shells, and silver-scaled fish. From the water she looked to the vaulted roof. Her eyes ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... hair cut. Yuh know it?" he said, with a huskiness in his voice, and pulled a tangle playfully. Then his eyes swung round defiantly to Cash. "It's stealing to keep him, but I can't help it. I'd rather die right here in my tracks than give up this little ole kid. And you can take that as it lays, ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... the sea, to feel the fresh wind blowing through his hair, and the cradling motion of the wide swell of the waves. Early in the morning they arrived at Pittenloch. There was the brown pier, and the blue water, and the spaces of yellow sand, and the sea-weed and tangle all populous with birds whose shrill cries filled the air. There were the white cottages, and the men strolling off to the boats and the women in the ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... there be an l, as in jingle, tingle, tinkle, mingle, sprinkle, twinkle, there is implied a frequency, or iteration of small acts. And the same frequency of acts, but less subtile by reason of the clearer vowel a, is indicated in jangle, tangle, spangle, mangle, wrangle, brangle, dangle; as also in mumble, grumble, jumble. But at the same time the close u implies something obscure or obtunded; and a congeries of consonants mbl, denotes a confused ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... he wonders at himself. "What an extraordinary occurrence!" he thinks. "I've killed millions of people, of all countries and nations, without the least misgiving; and now, suddenly, one miserable soldier comes and throws all my ideas into a tangle!" ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... Did I seem cross? What a brute you must think me. But to get you into this infernal tangle!—If this old woman is out in the boat she'll have to come back some time. She can't stay out on ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... would think you were going away to stay forever," gasped Bess, as she tried to disengage herself from a tangle of bag and hat box and umbrella. "For goodness' sake, look out, Nan. We are moving." This, because Nan stuck her head far out of the window to get a last look at the dear folks ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... Pharisees ought to have known better than to try to tangle Jesus in His talk. Already they had been astonished by the wise words He said, by the unmistakable "authority" shown in His manner and teachings, by the power of His mere word over diseases and devils. These men were the devil's ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... wildernesses beyond, through the granite hills to the far-away edge of the world, where Fate sat spinning the threads of the lives of his loved ones. Threads they looked, in his gloomy survey of that night, much deformed with knot and tangle, for the Spinner cared nothing at all about them. She suffered each to wind heedlessly away; she minded not that they were ugly; she spared no strand of gold or silver from her skein of human happiness to brighten the grey fabric of them. So it seemed to Will, and his temper chimed ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... and the two highly important, because extremely wealthy, beings in the same Pullman car never suspected her—never imagined that the tangle they were already in would be further knotted, then snipped, then snarled up again, by ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... figure of little Melissa came shyly out of the dark shadows behind and drew shyly closer and closer, until she was crouched in the chimney corner with her face shaded from the fire by one hand and a tangle of yellow hair, listening and watching him with her big, solemn eyes, quite fearlessly. Already the house was full of children and dependents, but no word passed between old Joel and the old mother, for no word was necessary. Two waifs who had so suffered and who could so fight ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... knew Marakinoff had told him. But clearly Lugur had kept his information even from Yolara; and as clearly she had spoken to none of that episode when O'Keefe's automatic had shattered the Keth-smitten vase. Again I felt that sense of deep bewilderment—of helpless search for clue to all the tangle. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... rewarded the ghoul in the grave was a long tangle of black hair defiled with clay: but this was such an anti-climax that it received little attention. Suddenly, with a short exclamation and a gesture of excitement, the young man unearthed a fragment of grayish rock, and after a hurried inspection handed it up to Mr. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... was very near to the truth. Everyone has a reason for everything he does; but it by no means follows that he always knows that reason, or even could extricate it from the tangle of motives, real and reputed, behind any given act. This self-ignorance is less common among men than among women, with their deliberate training to self-consciousness and to duplicity; it is most common among those—men as well as ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... and Nancy followed willingly enough. The arbour was that sort of bower which we see in old-fashioned pictures and sing about in old songs. There had been roses climbing over it all the summer, and a few blossoms hung there still, pale and fragrant, among a tangle of clematis and everlasting peas. On the little grass plot just outside the arbour there was a stone figure, not like the nymphs and Cupids and water-carriers which we find in trim old-fashioned gardens and stately pleasure ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... he awoke. He felt hot and uncomfortable. He stretched himself and rolled over on his back. He gazed upward through the tangle of branches and tried to relax again. But the heat had become unbearable. He struggled to his feet and brushed the litter from his clothes. Away in each direction stretched the field. It was dry and dusty and covered with a short, cutting ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... smiled, but he did not offer to help his visitor out of the tangle in which he was evidently ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... some time been blown down. Round their great trunks as they lay on the ground, young trees and a mass of elder-bushes and other brushwood had sprung up, making a dense thicket. The two logs lay side by side, and in between them, with the tangle of bushes all round and the branches of the other trees overhead, there was ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... Leisewitz give us simply dynastic tragedies. In both the outlook is limited to the fortunes of a single house. In both we miss the great dramatist who looks upon life with a roving eye and intertwines his tale of private woe with the larger tangle of human destiny. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... their ghosts carefully avoid the Galleries. But beshrew your paintings! My eyes make pictures—not like Coleridge's when they're shut, but when they 're open. Who would not rather lie with me in the podere in the shade of the cypress trees, under the blue, blue sky, and behold through a tangle of olive-boughs the marvellous Dome of Florence, as satisfying as the sea, or under a starry heaven the loveliest of cities glittering like a rival firmament with answering constellations? And yet I recant. For if there is one piece ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the tangle of undergrowth, of flowering vines in which frightened mocking-birds and catbirds were darting, to the side of the island nearest the bank of ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... unable to make a plan for Toby. She was disgusted with Gaga and his sickness. She was afraid and rebellious and exasperated. And as she lay there she felt Gaga moving, and heard his faint groaning, and shook with a frenzy that was a thousand times more than irritation at the tangle in which she was placed. Like all young people, she imperiously demanded a fresh start—to cut all this mess away, and begin again as though nothing at all had happened. She tried to repudiate ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... guided only by the faint cuts at intervals on tree-trunks, all of which "bled," giving out a milky sap; and then again the sign failed. About them were the trees in endless columns, overhead was the roof of leaves, and on the ground was a tangle of undergrowth and decaying vegetation, that gave out a moist earthy smell, which set the lungs labouring for oxygen. The boys were uncomfortable. Their skins were clammy, their eyes were heavy, and their limbs languid. Mr. Hume was glad to sit down, and even Muata showed ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... will," said Miss Bailey, as she glanced down at the tangle of dark curls resting against her breast. "Morris, dear, aren't you going to say good-by ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... he ran on for a short distance; then vaulting the rail fence he disappeared into the tangle of willows beside the stream which flowed down from ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... evident soon after we began our work. This world that we had thought to be void of animal life, proved to be teeming with it. From out of the tangle of broken and harmless branches, thousands of animals appeared. The majority of them were quite large, perhaps the size of full-grown hogs, which Earth animal they seemed to resemble, save that they were a dirty yellow color, and had strong, heavily-clawed feet. These were the largest ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... none of these. It does not make men talk and sing and tell their secrets and reveal their love and their hate, and knock their heads against the stars and tangle their feet one ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... of enormous bulk, as large as polar bears, and when the salmon are spawning in the upper waters of the coast rivers, they become so fat they can hardly move. Certainly I have never been in a country where bear signs were so plentiful. The wood was an almost impassable tangle of vines and undergrowth, and the thought of really finding ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... me it comes to earning one's living in the long run," said Ann Veronica, coloring faintly. "Until a girl can go away as a son does and earn her independent income, she's still on a string. It may be a long string, long enough if you like to tangle up all sorts of people; but there it is! If the paymaster pulls, home she must ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... was trying to soothe her, she said, 'Life's so hard—it's so hard to straighten out a tangle when once you've made it. If one could just go back and do things over again!' When I asked her if I could help her, she said I couldn't. 'Nobody can,' she sobbed out on my shoulder. 'It doesn't concern me alone. I'll have to fight it ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... and two or three paths that crossed it, had become almost impenetrable. The Correrie, a species of pavilion belonging to the monastery and distant from it about three-quarters of a mile, was mossgrown too in the tangle of the forest, which, profiting by its liberty, grew at its own sweet will, and had long since encircled it in a mantle of foliage which hid ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... other and animals would come sooner or later, it could not but be so, and he imagined that time to himself and clearly pictured himself living in peace with all the animals, and suddenly he thought again of the pigs, and everything was in a tangle ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... lay the village, the end of day. The horses cautiously began the ascent, while Gordon, watching their progress, lent them the assistance of his judgment and voice. The road looped a cleared field against the mountain, on the left an icy slope fell away in a glittering tangle of underbrush. The stage turned and the ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... woods," growled the Mother Grizzly, for she knew that men carried guns. Not that she feared for herself; but the idea of such things among her darlings was too horrible to think of. She set off to guide them to the timber-tangle on the Lower Piney. But an awful, murderous ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Thompson Seton
... was given over to cutlass and fire. But again there was a halting in the affairs of man, and the rubber saplings were not planted or were smothered; and again the jungle smiled patiently through a knee-tangle of thorns and blossoms, and the charred clumps of razor-grass sent forth skeins of saws and ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... old house stood before them. It was built of black stones, rough as when dug from the ground more than a century before. At the farther end was a tower with an open belfry, choked in a tangle of vines and bushes, within which the bell was dimly visible through a crust of spiders' webs and birds' nests. Patches of moss and vegetable mold relieved the blackness of the stones, and a venerable ivy plant clung like a rotten fish-net to the wall. ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... so. The train had scarcely come to a standstill, but already he had descended. Avoiding the platform, he crossed straight on to the roadway, and was lost amidst the tangle of cabs. I turned to the girl, affecting not ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her position. If Mr. Hamilton married she could not remain in his house; no wife could brook such interference. She knows this, and it is her interest to prevent him from marrying. All this is clear enough; but in the case of poor Gladys?' But here again was the old tangle and perplexity. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... but it occurred to him that it might be wise to be cautious. The noise did not sound dangerous, but—well, he had never been up a mountain before, and there was no telling what he might find. He dropped into a crouch and crept silently up to the tangle of bushes. His heart began to pound, and he swallowed to relieve the dryness in his throat. The noise was much more distinct now, and it sounded like—like—yes, not only sounded like, ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... and booth on booth, until Nick wondered where the gardens were; and such a maze of lanes, byways, courts, blind alleys, and passages that his simple country footpath head went all into a tangle, and he could scarcely have told Tottenham Court road from the ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... travelling meant a great deal of tripping and floundering through soft mud and mire, with slippery moss-stones sandwiched in, and dwarfed bushes which ran along the ground, and twisted themselves in an almost impassable tangle. These had a knack of catching a fellow's feet, and causing him to sprawl forward on his face and hands, whereupon his knapsack would hit him an ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... to challenge her to a deliberate meeting. A certain delightful tangle of paths that followed the bank of the river had been in his mind. But the apparition of Mr. George Bonover, headmaster of the Whortley Proprietary School, chilled him amazingly. Dame Nature no doubt had arranged the meeting of our young couple, ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... garden, beautiful to his eyes beyond all words, with broad terraces and gleaming marble steps where peacocks strutted; with at one end a fountain banked in a tangle of roses, where sprays of water fell with silvery splash and tinkle; with marble seats and statues gleaming from the cool gloom of trees. Around the garden were high walls, vine-hung, with the surrounding ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... invariably become affected in time by so much bending over a hot stove, and that is easy to understand, but bending over nature ought to have quite the opposite effect, but it doesn't always. The lady gardener who laid out the garden that finally replaced our wild-flower tangle, proved that. She had a voice that would be wonderful in a shipyard, a firmness and determination that would be an asset to Congress and a very kind heart, also much taste and infinite knowledge of the preferences and peculiarites ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... individual words would be changed, and then whole sentences, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood, because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... work was concerned he could go without regrets. He left his career behind him with no frayed edges that could tangle. He had fulfilled all his ambitions. He had "bought back Kilmoriarty and got a title too," as he promised his aunt he would while still a boy in his teens. He had collected an almost unprecedented number of honours, been decorated no less than twenty-four times, eight, however, ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... easy to see she was doomed. We chopped away at the tangle of wreckage whenever we got a chance, but that wasn't often, because, in her present position, the waves raked her every second and we had to ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... seen you yet," she exclaimed with something like a smile. "I only know you as two eyes over a tangle of hair that I don't believe you ever either brush or comb. Do you know, ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... "Bailed men," as they were called, did not "peach." Their immunity from the press was too dearly bought to admit of their indulging personal animus against the officer who had taken their money. It was only through some tangle of circumstance over which the delinquent had no control that the truth leaked out. Such a case was that of the officer in command of the Mary tender at Sunderland, a lieutenant of over thirty years' standing. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... young Graham was destined to become some sort of a creative genius. He was tall and supple, with a pale complexion, large nose, full lips, jet-black eyes, and jet-black hair, brushed high and usually rumpled into a curly tangle. In temperament he was a true scientific Bohemian, with the ideals of a savant and the disposition of an artist. He was wholly a man of enthusiasms, more devoted to ideas than to people; and less likely to master his own thoughts than to be mastered by them. He had no shrewdness, ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... lay (I seemed to see or feel) that other mood all the time, the mood which had caused the girl behind the counter to say to me that he was "anxious about something." The unhappy youth, I was gradually to learn, was much more than that—he was in a tangle of anxieties. He talked to me as a sick man turns in bed from pain; the pain goes on, but the pillow for a while ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... morning, which seemed alive with pleasant things. As he stood with his head thrown back, taking a good draught of the delicious mountain air, a bluebird shot, like a bit of the sky, in and out among the solemn pines and delicate aspens. He looked down on the tangle of blossoming vines and bushes that latticed the borders of the brook, which came dashing down from the canon, still rioting on its way. The water would soon have another cause for clamor, in the big stone that had so long cumbered the road. He should presently have the fun of ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... made by little Martha and the governess had literally overwhelmed him. Just when he thought he had the end of the thread in his hand, the tangle had become worse than ever. And so it had been from the commencement. At every step he took, the problem had become more complicated than ever. At every effort he made, the darkness, instead of being dispelled, had become deeper. Not that he as yet doubted Jacques's innocence. No! The suspicion ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... twigs, strips of bark, grasses and feathers, compactly woven together and located in bushes from one to four feet from the ground. They lay from three to five plain, unmarked, pure white eggs; size .75 x .54. Data.—Wrights, Cal. Nest in a tangle of vines in a deep ravine; composed of strips of bark, moss and grasses, lined with ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... first "took up" his country and intended to push his boundary as far as this. He soon drew in his lines however on account of the rough nature of the ground. The hut was in a most picturesque spot, and although deserted, remained still in good repair. The little scrap of garden ground was a tangle of gooseberry and currant bushes among which potatoes flourished ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... powers by studying and comparing the different codes of laws that have come down to us; but in a study of the internal municipal life of these early ages, the student meets again and again with increasing discouragement, and soon finds himself almost hopelessly lost in a tangle of doubts and inferences. ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to genus and species and differentia, into formal classes, under general notions, and with—yes! ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... looking earnestly in the lad's agitated countenance, for his brow was one tangle of deeply ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... the noble master was in worse case than the man. His fine forehead was a tangle of livid cords; his baggy jowl filled out like a balloon. In another second he had abandoned his place as our host and fled the room; and in yet another we had forgotten ours as his guests and rushed headlong at ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... crossed the car tracks and entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,—the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... had not the same desperate reasons as M. le Vicomte for accepting death, I returned, after giving him a word of encouragement, to my panel, but I had made the mistake of taking a few steps while speaking and, in the tangle of the illusive forest, I was no longer able to find my panel for certain! I had to begin all over again, at ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... the heights, they cannot realize the mental act—the act of inspiration it might well be called—by which a man of genius, after long pondering and proving, reaches a theoretic conception which unravels and illuminates the tangle of centuries of observation and experiment. There are minds, it may be said in passing, who, at the present moment, stand in ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... natural, I own, that one should tremble to essay These perils, dare the lures that there waylay; But from doubt's tangle you must now break free,— Be of good cheer and follow ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... is man's soul, like a hound through the woodland, On through the tangle of trees and the green and the gold. Yes, for the senses are goads, but the lineage noble, Not for the warren or hutch to be cornered and sold, Then there is freedom and ease, and a dream that persuades one On, till the track ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... rest a moment, I had not found altogether what I should have chosen; for, unfortunately, the place most desirable for the student is not always the best for birds. They are quite apt to desert the cool, breezy heights charming to wood-lovers, to build in some impenetrable tangle, where the ground is wet and full of treacherous quagmires, where mosquitoes abound, and flies do greatly flourish, where close-growing branches and leaves keep out every breath of air, and there is no solid rest for ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... have you come back into such a tangle as this. I did my best but you see I didn't have a minute to get out and take care ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... he drove home that life had suddenly become a tangle of perplexities and complications. First there was Annette. He was genuinely distressed as he thought of the scene through which they had just passed. That he himself had anything to do with her state of mind did not ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... safety clasp from the hilt of my skean and went after him. In the dimming glow of the fire I fancied I saw luminous eyes watching me, and the skin on my back crawled. I crept up behind him and leaped. We went down in a tangle of flailing legs and arms, and in less than a second he had his skean out and I was gripping his wrist, trying desperately to force the blade away ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... behind the pulpit where the rest of the Sunday school was assembled. In front of the pulpit was a stand bearing tall white geraniums in luxuriant blossom. The light fell through the stained-glass window in a soft tangle of hues upon the floor. Salome felt a sense of peace and happiness fill her heart. Even Judith's anger lost its importance. She leaned her head against the window-sill, and gave herself up to the flood of tender old recollections that swept ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Richard bent over them, one after the other, scanning each rosy face. The baby girl lay upon her side, a round little cheek, a fringe of dark eyelashes, and a tangle of fair curls showing against the pillow. The boy was stretched upon his back, his arms outflung, his head turned toward the light so that his face was fully visible. If he had been attractive with his wonderful eyes open, he ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... sudden swirl, he was dragged under by the man-eating shark? Would he remove his long cotton shirt, velvet waistcoat and baggy cotton trousers? The latter would present difficulties, for the waist-string would tangle and the water would swell the knot and prevent the drawing ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... life's better hours! One of God's precious gifts is the luminous hour that denies the lower animal mood. Mind is not always at its best. Full oft our thought is sodden and dull. Then duty seems a maze without a clew and life's skeins all a tangle. The mind is uneasy, confused and troubled. Then men live to the eye and the ear and physical comforts; they live for houses and beautiful things in them; for shelves and rich goods upon them; for factories and large profits by them. Responsibility to God seems like the faint ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... silk cover on the top of Miss Mervyn's work-basket, and there, snugly coiled in the midst of wools, knitting, and fancy work, lay the white kitten fast asleep! This was not the worst, for it had evidently amused itself first by a game of play. All the skeins of wool were twisted up in a tangle, and a quantity of silk was wound ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... the Inspector answered carelessly. "Well, Mr. Coulson, I won't take up any more of your time. I am convinced that you have told me all that you know, and I am afraid that I shall have to look elsewhere to find the loose end of this little tangle." ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was followed by the states, on a nation-wide scale. Hours of labor were regulated, liability for accidents defined, railroad commissions given larger powers, and freight and passenger rates determined. The result was a tangle of local regulations, many of which were designed to embarrass the roads and others of which were passed with slight knowledge of the practical ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... and there is a fair harbour, where the fishing boats ride together while their sails dry in the afternoon sun. Then the hamlet is very still; for the men are sleeping off the weariness of their night work, while the children play quietly among the tangle, and the women mend the nets or bait the lines for the next fishing. A lonely little spot, shut in by sea and land, and yet life is there in all its passionate variety—love and hate, jealousy and avarice, youth, with its ideal ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... reduced me to silence because you have interrupted me. Ah! there, you have tangled my hair. How provoking you are! It will take me an hour to put it right. You are not satisfied with being a prodigy of impiety, but you must also tangle my hair. Come, hold out your hands and take ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... pale-gray auto. Away from it toddled coveys of wondering, tangle-haired, barefooted, unwashed children. It stopped before a crazy brick structure, foul ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... around the base of the hill to the street, where his house was the first upon the right-hand side. The gate creaked on its hinges and he went quickly up the walk, passing the grey tangle of last Summer's garden, where the marigolds had died ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... chapter of the children, I must mention one little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who, wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint- white hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bore across our front to the left; for on that side, paralleling our course, ran a long ravine or "dry slough." It was about ten feet deep on the average, probably thirty feet wide, and was densely grown with a tangle of willows, berry vines, creepers, wild grape, and the like. Into ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... blindness had given him the ability to judge and gauge distance from sound. At the proper instant he pounced, his hands clamping around a body, and a second body crashed into the leader. They went down in a tangle. ...
— Second Sight • Basil Eugene Wells
... and that she would do all she could for him, but he wanted more than that. He wanted to see her—to feast his hungry eyes on her—to hold her hand, to—Oh, well, what was the use? he wearily asked himself. Would the horrible tangle ever be straightened out? He shook his head and resumed his pacing of the rooms—for there were two at his disposal. He was weary to death of the dismal view to be had through the ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... was against the man who had come into her plans so unexpectedly and thrown them in a tangle, she felt that it would be wrong to her own honesty to conceal from him the knowledge of his danger. Perhaps there remained manliness enough in him to cause him to withdraw his avaricious scheme to oust Dr. Slavens in return for a service like that. She determined ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... impossible that I could not believe it, or do anything but swim in amongst the rocks where the long slimy sea-tangle was washing to and fro; but there was no fancy about it, as I found, for Bigley was standing knee-deep in the water, and ready to give us each a hand as we ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... closed quickly on the generous tip and once more he lashed his horse. For some time they continued at a rapid pace, now skirting the confines of the park, now plunging into a puzzling tangle of streets; but wherever they went, the other cab managed always to keep them in sight. It even began to creep up, nearer. From his pocket John Steele drew a weapon; his eyes gleamed ominously. The pursuing hansom drew closer; casting a hurried glance over ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... this feast with his presence, and especially honored the Chianti and Genzano wines, which were served copiously, in fiascos. When you see Ibsen, with his lion face and tangle of hair, for the first time, you are fascinated by him, knowing what a genius he is, but when you talk with him, and feel his piercing, critical eyes looking at you from under his bushy brows, and see his cruel, satirical smile, ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... report would bring spectators, and those I most particularly didn't want. Still, I could not see any means of getting the weapon into my own hands without its going off. It was impossible to "rush" him. The dozen yards which separated us was one solid tangle of scrub-bushes interwoven with brambles. It would have taken at least forty seconds to tear through them, and in that time he could most assuredly snap off all six chambers, however big a duffer he might be. This would bring up some of the ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... attention of some botanists. Nor did the efforts of the botanists afford much {10} encouragement to such work, for in spite of the labour devoted to these experiments, the results offered but a confused tangle of facts, contributing in no apparent way to the solution of the problem for which they had been undertaken. After half a century of experimental hybridisation the determination of the relation of species and varieties to one another seemed as remote as ever. Then in 1859 came the Origin ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... weight slowed it down, and the dogs stopped. "Fingerless" Fraser broke through in turn, gasping as the icy water rose to his armpits. Slowly at first the sled sank, till it floated half submerged, and this spot which a moment before had seemed so safe and solid became now a churning tangle of broken fragments, men and dogs struggling in a liquid that seemed dark as syrup contrasted with the surrounding whiteness. The lead animals, under whose feet the ice was still firm, turned inquiringly, ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... globes of the same size in coadunition to form this earth chain. To the student who is thoroughly grounded in the eastern physics this interweaving of the physical and metaphysical presents no difficulties; but to the western mind just beginning the study it is a tangle. ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... for an instant on a little window under the eaves where a jasmine vine wreathed a thick tangle of green, starred with white flowers. And as he looked a voice broke through the fragrant barrier singing a careless, broken bit ...
— The Pretty Sister Of Jose - 1889 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and massed against the shore of Honam, the suburb opposite Canton, is another tangle of sampans, with thousands of active river folk, all shouting and screaming. These yellow thousands toiling from break of day to late at night do not seem human; yet each boat has its family life. The younger children are tied so that they ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... lends it, a Russian always feels guilty. Ivanov talks all the time about being to blame in some way, and the feeling of guilt increases in him at every juncture. In Act I. he says: "Suppose I am terribly to blame, yet my thoughts are in a tangle, my soul is in bondage to a sort of sloth, and I am incapable of understanding myself...." In Act II. he says to Sasha: "My conscience aches day and night, I feel that I am profoundly to blame, but in what exactly I have done wrong ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... it down there. I will put a stone over the grave, that you may know where it lies. It must be so, the body cannot be here any longer. Take the thing, which lies there. I had tried before to cut it out for you, for you complained yesterday that your hair was all in a tangle because you had not a comb, so I tried to carve you one out of bone. There were none at the shop in the oasis, and I am myself only a wild creature of the wilderness, a sorry, foolish animal, and do not ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... consternation and amazement at the murderous outburst, blazing as it did in the dim deceitful dusk, from the unsuspected trenches. These, it must be owned, were most skilfully concealed at the foot of a series of kopjes. They were screened from sight by a tangle of brushwood and scrub, while round the glacis of the trenches was crinkled a triple line of barbed wire. When, therefore, a deadly furnace broke from this tangle, the troops were aghast. For the first moment the superb crowd, unduly huddled ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... to dessert after dinner and was kept under proper control at other times by a governess. It shocked him a little to see a girl in a tousled blue cotton frock, with a green stain on the front of it, with a tangle of damp fair hair hanging round her head in shining strings, with unabashed fearless eyes which looked at him with a ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... so beyond the river, while between the northern limits of the garrison proper and the banks of the larger stream there lay a level "flat," patched here and there with underbrush, and streaked by a winding tangle of hoof- and wheel-tracks that crossed and re-crossed each other, yet led, one and all, to the distant bridge that spanned the stream, and thence bore away northward like the tines of a pitchfork, the one ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... to meet those peering at him from the tangle of fair hair. "As I have already suggested, you might not understand me. It seems that you are determined not to understand. It would be very hard for me to have another falling out with my little girl. Maybe I should ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... I have ever posed either as a philanthropist or a saint," says he. "If I seem to have assumed a role of that sort now, it is because it has been thrust upon me, because I have been caught in a web of circumstances, a tangle of things, without purpose, without meaning. That's what life has always been to me, always will be, I suppose,—a blind, ruthless maze, where I've snatched what I could for myself, and given up what I couldn't hold. Your friend Gordon did his share in making ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... minute before the close of the fourth chukkur the score stood at four all. Both teams were playing with desperation to avoid a decider on tired ponies, when the Wanderers' third man extricated the ball from a tangle of prancing hoofs and clattering sticks, and Alec Delgrado got away with it. He thought his pony was good for one last run at top speed, that and no more. Risking it, he sprinted across two hundred yards ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the young lady about whom you inquire are involved in such a tangle of conditions as could only have occurred to the excited fancy of an old Anglo-Indian. He left about twenty lacs of rupees in various bonds—G. I. P. and others—to his nephew, Ronald Surbiton, and to his niece jointly, provided that they marry each other. If they do not, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... occurrences; but, I know not how, they seldom occur to any Editors save those of your country. At least I can answer for myself, that in my solitary walks by the sea, I never saw it cast ashore any thing but dulse and tangle, and now and then a deceased star-fish; my landlady never presented me with any manuscript save her cursed bill; and the most interesting of my discoveries in the way of waste-paper, was finding a favourite ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... of the woods Dick parted a tangle of bushes through which the trail led. Then, in a voice vibrant with agitation, ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... also read the tales to his domestic audience as fast as they were written, and benefited, perhaps, by the expert criticism of the small people. Many passages in the intercalated chapters, describing the adventures of Eustace Bright and the Tangle-wood children, are based on facts well known to his own two youngsters. And when Eustace tells his hearers that if the dark-haired man dwelling in the cottage yonder were simply to put some sheets of writing-paper in the fire, all of them ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... smothered all fear, all caution swept over her with an urge that defied resistance; and dropping to the tangle of forest wreckage she bounded to the cub's side, seized him and clasping him in one arm ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... after Reb Sender got through a celebrated tangle with me, arousing my admiration by the ingenuity with which he discovered discrepancies and by the adroitness with which he explained them away, he said: "I do enjoy reading with you. Sometimes, when I read by myself, I feel lonely. Anyhow, I love to have you around, David. ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... love this dear child as she had always loved her, even in certain evil moments of an irresistible jealousy. But she felt immensely far from Vere, distant from her as one who does not love from one who loves; yet hideously near, too, like one caught in the tangle of an enforced intimacy rooted in a past which the present denies and rejects. Directly dinner was over they parted, driven by the mutual desire ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... we must help the major straighten out this tangle, bury the dead, defend the innocent, and punish the guilty," he said gravely. "Arm yourselves and saddle, ready to take the road to Rodeo as ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... story of this tangle, of the bewilderment and dismay for all alike, and the increasing despair of the unemployed, this chronicle has but indirectly to do. Trafalgar Square was emptied at last by means already familiar to all. Beggars skulked back to their hiding-places ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... and who are ready to fall out of the race. The blue skies and green slopes beckon to them to come out and begin again. The prairie, with its peace and silence, calls to the troubled nations of Middle Europe, whose people are caught in the cruel tangle of war. When it is all over and the smoke has cleared away, and they who are left look around at the blackened ruins and desolated farms and the shallow graves of their beloved dead, they will come away from the scenes of such bitter memories. Then it is that this far country will make ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... rose-hedged path, past an old sun-dial, past a triumphant peacock strutting before his mild little mate, past a fountain whose spray flung out to them a welcome. She led the way with the accustomed step of one who knew and loved the place. They came to a marble seat, half hidden by a tangle of vines and scarlet blossoms, and sheltered by overhanging oleander branches; there she sat down and moved her skirts aside that he might sit close to her. Her brown eyes, raised now to his hungry gray ones, looked at him with the softened brilliance he had sometimes ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... in a great tangle of bedclothes, snoring hideously and making little motions with his hands and arms like a beached whale. Malone padded over to him and dug him fiercely in ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... brought us down screaming with laughter in a tangle on the slag-heap. A searchlight broke out from the back of the Hun trenches and began searching ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... suddenly bent sharply round in a south-easterly direction; the mangroves disappeared, being replaced by a thick fringe of reeds, the banks of the river gradually increased in height, and were covered to the water's edge with a thick tangle of bushes, amid which towered the outposts of a forest of magnificent trees that could be seen stretching away for miles ahead. The fugitives considered that they were now well beyond all likelihood of pursuit, and ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... this was true especially during the war—have surrounded themselves with a tangle of red tape which has to be unwound every time an employee (or any one else) wants to get near enough to ask a question. This is absurd. Sensible men destroy elaborate plans of management and find they get along better without ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... the joy of reunion with her father; for both were adepts in the fine art of loving, the touchstone of every human relation. And in talk with him she could straighten out her tangle of impressions, her secret ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... back," she said, "if I have to tie binding twine across the road to tangle up Pleurisy's long legs. He's on his way to Cowan's, I know. Ab Cowan has quinsy. Never mind, Thursa, we'll get him. I hope now that the old doctor is too full to come—oh, no I don't either, I just hope he's away and Dr. Clay ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... already its gloom was exchanged for that diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most difficult to gauge ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... appear round the corner, and of hearing them remark with an inquiring and awful politeness "I do not think I have the pleasure—?" Then the place was unchanged. I was standing in the same mysterious tangle of damp little paths that had always been just there; they curled away on either side among the shrubs, with the brown tracks of recent footsteps in the centre of their green stains, just as they did ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... murdered Christians. Could that be reconciled with what is right? A little later he saw the Kaiser once again pushing himself into Mediterranean politics, where no direct German interest lay, and endeavoring to tangle up the French developments in Northern Africa by provocative personal appearances at Morocco, and, later, by sending a gunboat to intrude upon a scene of action which had already by the Treaty of Algeciras ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... farther out. What was that he saw in the vines—not on the snow of the ground, but half way up in the tangle of small branches clinging close to the stone of the lower story, just beneath this window? He would see. Something that glistened, something that could only have got there by falling from this window. Could he reach it? No; he would have to climb up from below ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... to explore one of these minor streams in your canoe, you have no intention of epoch-making discoveries, or thrilling and world-famous adventures. You float placidly down the long stillwaters, and make your way patiently through the tangle of fallen trees that block the stream, and run the smaller falls, and carry your boat around the larger ones, with no loftier ambition than to reach a good camp-ground before dark and to pass the intervening hours pleasantly, "without offence to God or man." It is an agreeable and advantageous frame ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... a hillock, he perceived that the roadway was now a crying mass of wagons, teams, and men. From the heaving tangle issued exhortations, commands, imprecations. Fear was sweeping it all along. The cracking whips bit and horses plunged and tugged. The white-topped wagons strained and stumbled in their exertions ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... it might be," and all together we began to march again. A sharp walk carried us from the hill path through the tangle of bushes into the woods wherefrom danger first had come to us. The night had set in by this time and a clear moon was showing in the sky. Rare and beautiful, I must say, that moonlight was, shimmering through the hazy ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... shallow basin in the heart of the hills—a fitting home for the Sleeping Princess. It is hushed and drowsy and overrun by a tangle of roses. Weeping willows edge the streets, which are wide and as neglected as a country road. Open gutters carry off, or rather contain, the sewage of the town. Its altitude is lower than that of Johannesburg, ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... there was a great Bear, a little Bear, and a middle-sized Bear; and they had gone out for a walk. Goldilocks went in, and she saw"—the little girl is very still; she would not disturb that story by so much as a loud breath; but presently the comb comes to a tangle, pulls,—and the little girl begins to squirm. Instantly the voice becomes impressive, mysterious: "she went up to the table, and there were three plates of porridge. She tasted the first one"—the little girl swallows ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... stop in his flight till he reached the thicket and saw in it his hope of securer refuge. He walked round it through the pools which the frog and turtle haunted, twice before he found this path, overhung by a tangle of grapevines. There his foot by the instinct which the foot has where the eye fails of a path, divined the scarcely trodden way, and he found himself in a central opening among the thickly growing bushes. It was warm there, without the ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... which must be exterminated before the seed is sown. The strongest ploughs and the most careful harrowing are required for this work, otherwise the settler will have to face the annoyance and delay of broken ploughshares, and the disaster of a crop choked by tangle-grass and weeds. The crops to which farmers have hitherto most devoted themselves in Rhodesia are mealies (maize) and forage (oat hay). These find a ready market at all times, as they form the staple food of horses. The next most popular crop is potatoes, ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... naturally assumed that it was the one she was now pursuing in order to avoid an encounter with him. His long legs carried him speedily to the outlet and there he posted himself. He could hear her coming through the brush, although her figure was still obscured by the tangle of wildwood; the snapping of dead twigs under her feet; the scuffling of last year's leaves on the path, now wet and plastered with mud and the slime of winter; the swish of branches ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... it, Laura. No joking, now," said Coldfield, surrendering his incredulity with some hesitance. "And if the treasure involves no fighting or diplomatic tangle, count me in. Think of it, Jane," turning to his wife; "two old church-goers like you and me, a-going after a pirate's treasure! Doesn't it make ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... so goes the story, when the people were longing for a king, to their shores there drifted, on a day when the white birds were screaming over the sea-tangle and wreckage that a stormy sea, now sinking to rest, was sweeping up on the shore, a little boat in which, on a sheaf of ripe wheat and surrounded by priceless weapons and jewels, there lay a most beautiful babe, who smiled in his sleep. That he was the son of Odin they had no doubt, and ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... down again before starting on the heights of the Rockies, which is the only range most people know by name. The peaks, which rise majestically round, are often tree-clad far up; we see huge pines, centuries old, towering out of a tangle of undergrowth that has probably never been trodden by any human foot, not even those of the Indians. There is a great deal of dead wood to be seen, and this hangs out in banners of brown among the sombre green, and here and there are long strips of brilliant ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... scrambling leap out of the water to their tangle of clothing, his hand reaching for one of the Colts in the belt he had left carefully on top of the pile. All those stories of Apaches weaseling into touching distance of the guard at the Stronghold.... Why, only last year the younger ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... "for the next carriage will not only stop, but come over;" and Bessie suffered herself to be led through the little tangle of brier and fern, past the gray old gravestones with "Miss Faith" and "Miss Mehitable" carved upon them, and into the leafy shadow of ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... on these lower reaches of the river. We followed the narrow channel between Little Hurricane and the Kentucky shore, a charming run of two or three miles, with both banks a dense tangle of drift-wood, weeds and vines. Between Three-Mile Island and Indiana, is another interesting cut-short, where the shores are undisturbed by the work of the main stream, and trees and undergrowth come down to the water's edge; the air is quivering with the songs of birds, ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... a throne set. What a comfort! There is a throne. There is a centre of authority and power to our world. This Revelation is peculiarly the book of a throne. Up yonder above the moral tangle and confusion of earth is ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... hand. Giuliano looked at Simonetta, trying to recall her gaze, but she remained standing in her place, seeing nothing of her companions. She was thinking of something, frowning a little and biting her lip, her hands were before her; her slim fingers twisted and locked themselves nervously, like a tangle of snakes. Then she tossed her head, as a young horse might, and looked at Giuliano suddenly, full in the eyes. He rose to meet her with a deprecating smile, cap in hand—but she walked past him, almost brushing him with her gown, but never flinching her full gaze, threaded her way through the group ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... Whence this later tangle came, and how much of it is drawn from other sources, we can hardly hope to explain from the fragments of literature that we have. But strangely there is a parallel which is close enough to suggest that the patchwork is due to popular mythology. ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... morning Uncle John would lift Toby up and show him the garden, and Toby would slip out of his arms and walk among the trees and plants. And the place would grow bigger and bigger until it was all the world, and Toby would lose himself; amongst the tangle of trees and flowers and creepers. He would see butterflies there and tame animals, and the sky was full of birds of all colours, ugly and beautiful; but he knew that none of these was the bird, because their voices were ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... chamber is dust and ashes; The painted salons are charred with fire; The dovecot pitted with shrapnel splashes, The park a tangle of trench and wire; Shell-holes yawn in the ferns and mosses; Stripped and torn is the avenue; Down in the rose-walk humble crosses Grow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... prated in this wise with flushed face, Shibli Bagarag was smitten with the greatness of his task, and reproached his soul with neglect of it. And he thought, 'I am powerful by spells as none before me have been, and 'twas by my weakness the Queen sought to tangle me. I will clasp the Seventh Pillar and make an end of it, by Allah and his Prophet (praised be the name!), and I will reach Aklis by a short path and shave ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... doing already, it wants a man to bring his mind right down to the fact of the present case and its immediate needs. Now the present case, as the doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before,—a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his business to wind as much thread out of as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to-day? Shall it be the bit of garden underneath my window, with the tangle of pinks and roses, and the cabbages growing appetisingly beside the sweet-williams, the woodbine climbing over the brown stone wall, the wicket-gate, and the cherry-tree with its fruit hanging ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... out-of-doors; the woods and meadows and hillside pastures were their playground. Susy was thirteen when she began her diary; a gentle, thoughtful, romantic child. One afternoon she discovered a wonderful tangle of vines and bushes between the study and the sunset—a rare hiding-place. She ran breathlessly ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the next inner layers of the pileus grow less rapidly, so that the white layer beneath the brown is torn up into an intricate tangle of locks and tufts, or is frazzled into a delicate pile which exists here and there between well formed tufts. While all present the same general characters there is considerable individual variation, as one ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... semicircle of hills bend inward, the sea follows; and there is a fair harbour, where the fishing boats ride together while their sails dry in the afternoon sun. Then the hamlet is very still; for the men are sleeping off the weariness of their night work, while the children play quietly among the tangle, and the women mend the nets or bait the lines for the next fishing. A lonely little spot, shut in by sea and land, and yet life is there in all its passionate variety—love and hate, jealousy and avarice, youth, with its ideal sorrows and infinite ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... to them. They ran forward barking, on which several heads appeared above the log, and several guns were fired at him. He was slightly wounded, but escaped to the fort. Then, all around, the air rang with war-whoops, and a storm of bullets flew from the tangle of bushes that edged the clearing, and rapped spitefully, but harmlessly, against the wooden wall. At a little distance on the windward side was a log-house, to which, with adjacent fences, the assailants presently set fire, in the hope that, as the wind was ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... itself, however, has often been expressed in some mythical figure or Utopia. So to express it is simply to indulge an innocent instinct for prophecy and metaphor; but unfortunately the very innocence of fancy may engage it all the more hopelessly in a tangle of bad dreams. If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real forces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into an illusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... must cut the tangle of the involved forces. When Hood sees that his devoted troops have not totally crushed the Union left, when his columns reel back from Leggett's Hill, mere fragments, he knows that even his dauntless men cannot be asked to try again that ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... to the end of the pile of rails. His quick eye selected the one rail that was the key of the tangle, which, directed wrong, would sweep the mass with crushing force across the pinioned body of Ike. The rails were short lengths. But for this, Ralph, strong as he was, could have done little or nothing. He got a grasp upon the ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... mirage, while just behind my car I had a flashing glimpse in that lurid light of an emerald-green deluge bursting in like a dark sky of solid water, and in that split-second before a crushing blow upon my back, even through that tangle of bedclothes, knocked me into unconsciousness, I seemed to hear again the hopeless note in the voice of my friend ...
— The Undersea Tube • L. Taylor Hansen
... the bodies of the struggling sophomores. A poor thrower could not very well have missed that mark, and Ken Ward was remarkably accurate. He had a powerful overhand swing, and the potatoes flew like bullets. One wild-eyed Soph slipped out of the tangle to leap up the steps. Ken, throwing rather low, hit him on the shin. He buckled and dropped down with a blood-curdling yell. Another shook himself loose and faced upward. A better-aimed shot took him in the shoulder. He gave an exhibition of a high and lofty somersault. Then two ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... to Mr. Polly before the realisation of opulence and its anxieties and responsibilities. That only dawned upon him on the morrow—which chanced to be Sunday—as he walked with Johnson before church time about the tangle of struggling building enterprise that constituted the rising urban district of Easewood. Johnson was off duty that morning, and devoted the time very generously to the admonitory discussion of Mr. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... to the end of a play arises partly because it is everywhere easier to get things into a tangle than to get them out again; partly also because at the beginning we give the author carte blanche to do as he likes, but, at the end, make certain definite demands upon him. Thus we ask for a conclusion that shall be either quite happy or else quite tragic; whereas human affairs do not ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... be changed, and then whole sentences, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood, because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... into vaster things than we dream of; but the really important change they will bring about in the minds of men will be psychological. Men will become habituated to the thought of common action for the common good. To get so far in civil life is a great step. Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interests and competitions. The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vast turning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring them face round to the Delectable ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... rock-line is a selvage of low vegetation—ipom[oe]a, white and mauve-flowered; rushes and tangle-grass, a variety of salsolaceae, and the cyperus, whose stalk is used like the kalam, or reed-pen, further east. These growths are filmed with spiders' webs, whose central shafts lead to their nests. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... Brazier could get a sight of the reptile it had glided into the river, down among the branches of the fallen tree, as if quite used to the intricate tangle of pointed wood beneath the bank, and accustomed to use it for a home of refuge, or lurking place from which ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... the rocky shore of Devil Island. Beyond the rocks rose a high bank, upon which was a gloomy tangle of woods. There was something forbidding in the appearance of the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... at the top of the highest hill in Overstrand, the chimneys of a house showed above a thick tangle of fir-trees. Between the trees and the road rose a wall, high, compact, forbidding. Carl opened the gate in the wall and pushed his bicycle up a winding path hemmed in by bushes. At the sound of his feet ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... dejectedly as he tried to unravel this fresh tangle. Why was Jim Crow shadowing him? In the interests of the Indians? Again he pulled out his watch. And the woman beside him saw that his hand was shaking as he held it out to the light ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... apparition; for the first glance at her face told him that the original of his mysterious miniature was before him,—before him, here in the woods! Breathless and speechless in her wild affright, she pointed, with a glance over her shoulder, to a thick, high tangle of large, strongly limbed, knotty, windfallen trees, a short distance behind her, and fled past him to the rear. Looking in the indicated direction, the startled and perplexed young man distinguished the outlines of a monstrous moose madly plunging ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... the window and looked out. The moat and the tents and the besieging force were all gone—and there was the garden with its tangle of dahlias and marigolds and asters and later roses, and the spiky iron railings and the ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... then we turn, thou sadder sage, To thee! we feel thy spell! —The hopeless tangle of our age, Thou ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Formello flows. Precipitous cliffs rose from the bed of the river opposite to me, enriched with all the hues that volcanic rock assumes under the influences of the weather and the garniture of moss and lichen. A perfect tangle of vegetation crowned their tops and fringed their sides; the dark unchanging verdure of the evergreen oak and ivy contrasting beautifully with the tender autumn-like tints in which the varied spring foliage of the brushwood appeared. Bright flowers and ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... cheery and at peace. That fellow Nap is the principle obstacle. He stirs up hell and tommy wherever he goes, and he's never absent for long. Lucas himself admits that his brothers are a care to him. Oh, it's all an infernal tangle. I sometimes think family ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... who told me—a thin fellow with a shrivelled mouth, and a back bent two-double. And I heard it on the very hearthstone of the Mayor's cottage, one afternoon, as we sat and smoked in the shadow of the crumbling mud wall, with a square of blue sky for roof, and for carpet a tangle of brambles, nettles, ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... had started up to meet him; he had fancied her in bed hours ago. He came up to where she was sitting, a most sad, disconsolate little Madelon, all huddled together, her hands clasped round her knees, her eyes shining through a short wavy tangle of brown hair, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... frontiersman seize one sprawling leg and the shirt front of the struggling limp thing in his hands. He heard him plunging down through the tangle of windfall and brush. There was a bellowing howl and a splash; and Wayland being altogether human flesh and blood doubled up on the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... came for a long time, and the girls had almost forgotten their joke in a game of Letters, when "Tingle, tangle!" went the bell, and the basket came in heavily laden. A roll of colored papers was tied outside, and within was a box that rattled, a green and silver horn, a roll of narrow ribbons, a spool of strong thread, some large needles, and ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... sketched, so far merely as is necessary to account for the actions of the characters in this or that case; when also the incidents are so accumulated, that little room is left for display of character; when the plot is so wrought up, that the motley tangle of misunderstandings and embarrassments seems every moment on the point of being loosened, and yet the knot is only drawn tighter and tighter: such a composition may well be called a Play of Intrigue. The French critics have made it fashionable to consider this kind of play ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... tangle of State and private intrigues that enmeshed her, the fire burned low and the snapping of an occasional spark checked and soothed until her mind slipped into more peaceful channels. She looked about the quiet room. The firelight threw her face into relief and accentuated ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... all His joy passes into His servant's heart. I saw, not long since, in a wood a mass of blue wild hyacinths, that looked like a little bit of heaven dropped down upon earth. You and I may have such a tiny bit of heaven itself lying amidst all the tangle of our daily lives, if only we put our trust in Christ, and so get into our hearts some little portion of that joy that is unspeakable, and that peace that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... child! Did I seem cross? What a brute you must think me. But to get you into this infernal tangle!—If this old woman is out in the boat she'll have to come back some time. She can't stay out ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... I was trying to soothe her, she said, 'Life's so hard—it's so hard to straighten out a tangle when once you've made it. If one could just go back and do things over again!' When I asked her if I could help her, she said I couldn't. 'Nobody can,' she sobbed out on my shoulder. 'It doesn't concern me alone. I'll have to ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... to being the untalented son of a great man, or the unhappy author of a successful first book never equaled in later attempts. But where the bright blossoms of the Virginia raspberry burst forth above the roadside tangle and shady woodland dells, even those who despise magenta see beauty in them where abundant green tones all discordant notes into harmony. Purple, as we of today understand the color, the flower is not; but rather the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... "I've got Tangle's opinion here," answered Tom; "I won't ask you to look at it, uncle. He's dead against us. Just what you said six months back. There's no getting over that trust-deed, nor through it, nor round it, nor any way to the other side of it. I've done my d——dest, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... brief for no land That tramples on its kin; My heart once bled for Poland And groaned for Russia's sin; But, if to clear the tangle WINSTON is given his head, I feel that General WRANGEL Were ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... over and over in a confused tangle of arms and legs. Now Tom Lincoln was on top. Now it was John Carter. "Go it, Pa," Abe shouted from the fence. "Don't let that old skinflint get you down." After a few minutes. Carter lay on his back ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... a thick tangle of brambles in the ditch where we lay: and to this we owe our lives. For one of the men, coming our way, pass'd within two yards of us, with the flat of his sword beating the growth over ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... to the sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at became at once more significant to him—the tangle of tenacious roots that thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods, the swift, awkward flight of a pheasant that crossed their way with ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... which I have spoken. The hovels have disappeared, and the debris lies many feet thick over the old ground-level. But the channels are still in working order, and wherever they exist will be found rich crops, tall and stately trees, and a tangle of luxuriant vegetation. On the rocks above are the ruins of buildings and temples and walls, and in many places small shrines stand out, built on the jutting edges of great boulders or on the pinnacles of lofty crags, in places that would ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... a garden, beautiful to his eyes beyond all words, with broad terraces and gleaming marble steps where peacocks strutted; with at one end a fountain banked in a tangle of roses, where sprays of water fell with silvery splash and tinkle; with marble seats and statues gleaming from the cool gloom of trees. Around the garden were high walls, vine-hung, with the surrounding ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... ran on for a short distance; then vaulting the rail fence he disappeared into the tangle of willows beside the stream which flowed ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... not, seized hold of the twisted vine trunks of the old Virginia creeper that partly covered the house from ground to roof. Fortunately they held, and up he went like a young squirrel, his bare toes clutching like claws in the tangle of the stems and twigs. He gained the roof, crawled rapidly along, and reached the bath-room window, only to find he could barely clutch the sill with the tips of his fingers. Standing on tiptoe, he got a little grip, then his bare toes and knees started to work; inch by inch up they went ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... who paid the forfeit of their lives upon arrival in this land; of a tall house wherein lives Dr. Tozer, "Missionary Bishop of Central Africa," and his school of little Africans; and of many other things, which got together into such a tangle, that I had to go to sleep, lest I should never be able to separate the moving images, the Arab from the African; the African from the Banyan; the Banyan from the Hindi; the ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... roadside, were the dwelling-houses. Some of them were a tangle of rafters mixed up with heaps of brick and miscellaneous rubbish—stoves, pots and pans, chair-legs, pictures, bedding, boxes, and all kinds of household articles. Others had been dispersed around. Others seemed to have been tipped ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... was its spring, Charley was quicker. He dug his spur cruelly into his little pony's flank. With a neigh of pain the animal leaped forward. For a moment there was a tangle of striking hoofs and wriggling coils of the foiled reptile, while Charley leaning over in his saddle struck with the butt-end of his riding whip at the writhing coils. Though it seemed an eternity to the helpless ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... country cottage enabled her to escape from him to rabbits (figurative) and the simpler life. There, however, she fell in with Rollo, who loved her at sight, and whose daughter, Hyacinth, adored her father, but quite blandly deceived him about her own amorous adventures. A pretty tangle, you observe, and I am not sure that I can wholly acquit the author of some cowardice in her manner of cutting it. But undoubtedly Autumn remains a story ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... good days—he willed it so. The mood was not there certainly, but then, now the finishing of the book had become a pressing necessity, the mood never was there; it was like a tantalizing butterfly that flitted a second in his face and then led him a desperate chase through a tangle of undergrowth ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... strolled alone through the tangle of undergrowth, of flowering vines in which frightened mocking-birds and catbirds were darting, to the side of the island nearest the ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... a complete severance from him, formed ties that would bind her irrevocably to the life she had chosen? He turned from the picture wearily. It was all a tangle. He could only wait, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Caroline wrenched herself free from the tangle of nurses and carriages, and pushed her way through the crowd. Against the curb, puffing and grinding, stood the great red engine; on the front seat a tall policeman sat; one woman in the back leaned over another, limp against the high cushions, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... and, always threading their way amid a tangle of flowers, the children suddenly passed a corner and found themselves in a forest clearing, where there were a lot of pointed huts—the huts, as they knew at ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... come singly" had been fulfilled for her with cruel and unlooked-for plenitude. There is a turning-point in every human life—or rather several turning-points—and at each one are gathered certain threads of destiny which may either be involved in a tangle or woven distinctly as a clue—but which in any case lead to change in the formerly accepted order of things. We may thank the gods that this is so—otherwise in the jog-trot of a carefully treasured conservatism and sameness of daily existence we should become the easy prey of adventurers, ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... strong pull, and brought up a tangle of weeds. Again and again I cast out my line with aching arms, and drew it back empty. I looked at my uncle appealingly. "Try once more," he said; "we fishermen ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... three were still in the glad tangle of an embrace beginning again and again, with all sorts of little exclamations from the children, into which Aurelia broke with the inquiry for their brother. "He is much better," said Fay. "He is to get up to-morrow, and then he will ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... escape me if he had anywhere to go. Have you seen a butterfly round a candle? That's how he will keep circling and circling round me. Freedom will lose its attractions. He'll begin to brood, he'll weave a tangle round himself, he'll worry himself to death! What's more he will provide me with a mathematical proof—if I only give him long enough interval.... And he'll keep circling round me, getting nearer and nearer and then—flop! He'll fly straight into my mouth and I'll swallow ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... things call us, the living and the dead, And o'er the weltering tangle a glimmering ...
— Chants for Socialists • William Morris
... that unconventional arrangement, as if I had expected in those solitary hours of the night to get on terms with the ship of which I knew nothing, manned by men of whom I knew very little more. Fast alongside a wharf, littered like any ship in port with a tangle of unrelated things, invaded by unrelated shore people, I had hardly seen her yet properly. Now, as she lay cleared for sea, the stretch of her maindeck seemed to me very fine under the stars. Very fine, very roomy for her ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... spring: autumn left sad and leafless by the too voluptuous heat and fruitfulness of summer; spring still pale and pinched by winter, with timid nipped grass and unripe stiff buds and catkins, which never suggest the tangle of bush, grasses, and magnificent flowers and fruits, sweet, splendid, or poisonous, which the sun will make out of them. The Renaissance, in the past for Tasso, in the proximate and very visible future for Spenser, has frightened both; the cynicism and bestiality ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... in the words—though Karen's eyes, in speaking them, had also filled with tears—some hint of resistance. She looked away from the girl, keeping her hand in hers, as she said: "I could not come. I could not tell you when I was to come. There were reasons that bound me; ties; claims; a tangle of troubled human lives—the threads passing through my fingers. No; I was not free; and there I would have had you trust me. No, no, my Karen, we will speak of it no farther. I understand young hearts—they are forgetful; ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... followed it were trained to ways which no ordinary man might essay. Now, upon the lower slopes, it led through dense forests where the ground was so matted with fallen trees and over-rioting vines and brush that the way held always to the swaying branches high above the tangle; again it skirted yawning gorges whose slippery-faced rocks gave but momentary foothold even to the bare feet that lightly touched them as the three leaped chamois-like from one precarious foothold to the next. Dizzy and terrifying was the way that Om-at ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... together, falling with a slow drift toward the dark forest under us. The trees seemed huge and spindly, a porous growth something on the Martian style, with huge leaves and a tangle of matter vines. They came mounting up at us as we fell ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... complimentary visit to the Sultan whose hands were still wet with the blood of murdered Christians. Could that be reconciled with what is right? A little later he saw the Kaiser once again pushing himself into Mediterranean politics, where no direct German interest lay, and endeavoring to tangle up the French developments in Northern Africa by provocative personal appearances at Morocco, and, later, by sending a gunboat to intrude upon a scene of action which had already by the Treaty of Algeciras ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... and presently another old boot. Some hawthorn berries, some hoary clematis we notice—and then another old boot. Altogether, it may be remarked, in this walk the amateur nature-lover saw eleven old boots, most of them dropped in the very sweetest bits of hedge tangle and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... leevin' woman, and that's no a'; he didna feenish wi' ae set an' begin wi' the next, but if he didna mix them a' thegither. Fower set o' heads a' in a tangle; noo ye hae some kin' o' idea o' what a' hed tae face." And Mrs. Macfadyen paused that I ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... remained in the canyon where he might have pitched camp in spite of the danger from the prospector. But a return meant a further waste of time and he decided to risk an attempt to force his way through the tangle. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... Vittoria. These experiences in some ways warped American ideas of war and politics, and their influence perhaps survives to this day. The extent of the President's authority and his position in regard to the advice he could obtain have been explained. An examination of the tangle in which military policy was first involved may make the chief incidents of the war throughout easier ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... limping home in the morning, thinking how cold it is—until roused to action by the appearance of some unexpected insect—then, indeed, how much more cold and hollow seems the world, when, suddenly catching your tired foot in a stump or tangle of grass, you roll over on the full pocket side and hear (and feel) the boxes burst up on the unhappy moths within. I have gone through it all, and I ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... Coleridge's Friend which seems to represent the outcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of her readers:—'The tangle of delusions,' says Coleridge, 'which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a salutary ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... thought so. The train had scarcely come to a standstill, but already he had descended. Avoiding the platform, he crossed straight on to the roadway, and was lost amidst the tangle of cabs. I turned to the girl, affecting not to ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... told you, up the attic stairs rushed a strange man, who pulled Mun Bun out of the tangle of arms and legs. And Rose thought the strange man ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Uncle Fred's • Laura Lee Hope
... jewel-weed and mint, the white setter in the lead swung suddenly west, quartered, wheeled, crept forward and stiffened to a point. Behind him his mate froze into a silvery statue. But Gordon walked on, gun under his arm, and the covey rose with a roar of heavy wings, driving blindly through the tangle deep into ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... Rose's visit sped only too rapidly. There was so much that they wanted to show her, and there were so many people whom they wanted her to see, and so many people who, as soon as they saw her, became urgent that she should do this and that with them, that life soon became a tangle of impossibilities. Rose was one of those charmers that cannot be hid. She had been a belle all her days, and she would be so till she died of old age, as Elsie told her. Her friends of the High Valley gloried in her success; but all the time they had ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... through the jungle. Clear rapid streams, fern-fringed, sometimes offered us a few yards of highway, but the jungle ever grew more dense, the forest trees larger, the lianas more tangled, the streams more sunk and rocky, and though the horses shut their eyes and boldly pushed through the tangle, we were fairly foiled when within half a mile from the head of the valley. I thoroughly appreciated the unsightly leather guards which are here used to cover the stirrups and feet, as without them I could not have ridden ten yards. We were ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... them out to me every week, but we both get cross about them because they interest us so that we spend half his precious day over them! Just now I am trying to teach myself to knit, out of a book, and I'm in a dreadful tangle. I think the chamber-maid knows how, and ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... time you would not see your fish at all, but only hear the savage plunge as he swirled down with your fly. At other times, as you struck sharply at the plunge, your fly would come back to you, or tangle itself up in unseen snags; and far out, where the verge of the firelight rippled away into the darkness, you would see a sharp wave-wedge shooting away, which told you that your trout was only a musquash. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... summer the place was gorgeous in parts with a confused tangle of plants and shrubs in flower. Persian lilacs, syringas, labernums made thickets here and there and covered their heads with bloom. Passion flowers trailed their long tendrils all over the gallery, and masses of snow-white clematis towered in ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... up, in Courtier's face. She seemed to him very young, and touching, at that moment. Her eyes had a gleam of faith in them, like a child's eyes; as if she relied on him to straighten out this tangle, to tell her not only about Miltoun's trouble, but about all life, its meaning, and the secret of its happiness: And he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Makes a pretty tangle when he gets going. Just now he's dish-washer in a restaurant. Likes a good cigar. I've seen him eat in a ten-cent hash-house and pay fifty cents for the cigar he smoked afterward. I've got a couple in my pocket for ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... day dawned, the wind began to abate in its violence, and to wear away from the sou-west into the norit, but it was soon discovered that some of the vessels with the corn had perished; for the first thing seen, was a long fringe of tangle and grain along the line of the highwater mark, and every one strained with greedy and grieved eyes, as the daylight brightened, to discover which had suffered. But I can proceed no further with the dismal recital of that doleful morning. Let it suffice here to be ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... porcupine, on his open palm. "Look at it! By time, there ain't nothin' I can't do with that knife! Every time I look at it I find somethin' new. Now, I wonder what that is," pointing to a particularly large and ferocious-looking implement which projected from the steel tangle. "I cal'late I've sized up about everything else, but I can't seem to make out what that's for. What do ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... typically modern tale are very well drawn, and the author has distanced all her fellow-novelists of her own sex in the delineation of a woman whose heartlessness may be truly called devilish. The strength of this portrait is remarkable. The other woman is effective too, and the tangle of the relations of the three is put right by ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... set that she had difficulty in steering clear of them; but Prudence was obdurate and kept right on. Nor did she draw rein until the shore of the lake was reached, and then only did she do so because of the impassable tangle of undergrowth which confronted her. Just as Alice came up with her she started off again at right angles to the direction they had come, riding parallel with the bank. Alice, breathless and laughing, followed in her wake, until at length a break in the trees ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... testify to the reality of the Roman foundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories that seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues through that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And in all our speech there was no word more ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... that he had been able to forget the whole tangle, and sleep soundly, gave Richard's voice a little compunction ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... yields to the impulse to steal against his struggling will, we will fail, for we overlook the very essence of the matter—his professionalism. It is safe to say that perusal of Mr. Hapgood's book will help many a student of criminology to find his way through the current tangle of statistics, reform plans, analyses of 'graft' and what not, by the very light of humanity that is in ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... when the great morass lay in white and sinister tangle under the wild spring moon, when the dark and dreadful swamps were rife with horrible croaks and snaps, the whirring of the wings of waterfowl or the noise of a disturbed puff adder, Philip stretched himself upon the seat of the music-machine and slept through ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... it would take a modern vehicle to traverse Manhattan lengthwise, and at last we stopped at the gate of Widegables. The rambling, winged, wide-gabled, tall-columned old pile of time-grayed brick and stone, sat back in the moonlight, in its tangle of a garden, under its tall roof maples, with a dignity that went straight to my heart. There is nothing better in France or England, and I feel sure that there are not two hundred houses in America as good. I'll paint it, just like I saw it to-night, for next Spring's ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... of those peculiar old places occasionally seen in France. The environs of London have a few; America none of which I know. This house, roomy, comfortable and antiquated, was surrounded with trees and a tangle of shrubbery, vines and flowers; above it all was a high stone wall, and in front a picket iron gate. It was a mosaic—a sample of the Sixteenth Century inlaid in this; solitary as the woods; quiet as a convent; sacred as a forest; a place for dreams, and reverie, and rest. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... you keep on asking questions I'll get in such a tangle that I'll never be able to find my way out," laughed her mother. "Come, we'll get ready to go crabbing this afternoon and that will keep you so busy you ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cousin Tom's • Laura Lee Hope
... now known as The Mount. For miles the old road is now grass-grown and forms a most delightful walk, with magnificent views from the Thames Valley to the South Downs. The days of the coaches have, alas! passed, and the new road, with its tangle of telegraph wires, is beloved by every motorist and motor-cyclist who spins ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... was, that John one day slipped his foot on a tangle-covered rock, and fell into the sea. A small matter this, you will say, to a man who could swim, and in a climate so warm that a dip, with or without clothes, was a positive luxury. Most true; and had the wetting been all, Jarwin would have had nothing to annoy him; ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... lift her up and kiss her as I used to do, but I felt as if I should like to do it all the same. She was the only creature in the whole world, I think, that liked me better than Jim. I'd been trying to drive all thoughts of her out of my heart, seeing the tangle I'd got into in more ways than one; but now the old feeling which had been a part of me ever since I'd grown up came rushing back stronger than ever. I was surprised at myself, and looked ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... clear, free from the entanglements of the web and unaffected by the magnetic glamour of the Moon. And lo! the coffin is filled with stones, a symbol of death and the Moon, which is but a casket of stones. Therefore, little monad, caught in the tangle of the web of life and the glamour of earthly things, take heart, for, beyond all, is the star of your being. Call down the law of that star into yourself, and the web is broken and waves its tattered shreds in the breeze. The moonlight, the reflected light, pales as the Star-Sun of your being ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... love-making of the hero is characterized by the same irrational impulses, the same extravagant actions, as in Sult and Mysterier. But they are now less frequent and less involved. The book as a whole is toned down, so to speak, from the bewildering tangle of unrestraint in the first two. There is quite sufficient of the erratic and unusual in the character of Glahn, the hero, but the tone is more subdued. The madcap youth of genius has realized that the world ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... scales, racks, hoods and elaborate set-ups, like the articulated glass and rubber bones of some weird prehistoric monster, that demonstrated Mercer's taste for this branch of science. On the other side of the room a corresponding workbench was littered with a tangle of coils, transformers, meters, tools and instruments, and at the end of the room, behind high black control panels, with gleaming bus-bars and staring, gaping meters, a pair of generators hummed softly. The ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... of thatch roofs appeared, and in an hour the party from the Imperatrice Eugenie gained the wharf of the port. The sailors managed to steer through a tangle of shipping and dugout scows, the latter heaped high with fruits and flowers of many colors, or hides or fish of many aromas. Before the small boat could touch the worm-eaten quay, Jacqueline had poised herself on its edge, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... compared with this. The unprecedented drama was in five acts, so fierce that Aeschylus himself would not have dared to dream of them. "The Ambush!" "The Struggle!" "The Massacre!" "The Victory!" "The Fall!" What a tangle and what an unwinding! A poet who would have predicted it would have seemed a traitor. God alone could ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... learning and memory do not turn out to be able men. But this, says Whately, "is as reasonable as to wonder that a cistern if filled should not be a perpetual fountain." It is possible for one to be so lost in a tangle of trees that he ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... roving breezes, I charge you, forbear To wantonly tangle The braids of her hair; Breathe not o'er her rudely, Nor sigh on her breast, Nor kiss you the sweet lip Of her ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... have no doubt it can easily be "explained away." In fact, the rationalistic explanation of the whole thing is patent and on the surface. There is only one little difficulty, and that, I fancy, is by no means insuperable. In any case this one knot or tangle may be put down as a queer coincidence ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... to draw me into the rejoicing of her wedding feast. She led me about the garden to show me how she had from year to year planted the many trees, herbs, and bushes it contained. It had set out to be formal, but, like most efforts at taming the fierce fecundity of nature in these seas, had become a tangle of verdure, for though now and then combed into some regularity, the breezes, the dogs, the chickens, and the invading people ruffled it, the falling leaves covered the grass, and the dead branches sighed ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy. The anthem is tiresome!!! That men should set up to be wiser than their maker!!!" Then trebly underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING." Dreadful little tangle of misapprehensions and false judgments! More comforting for me to read, "D. very kind and good. He grows more thoughtful every day." I suspect ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... to climb, a tangle of tumbled boulders and fallen trunks, mantled in the soundless gloom of the fir-forest. Skilled woodsman though he was, Horner's progress was so slow, and the windless heat became so oppressive to his impatience, that he was beginning to think of giving up the idle ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... her hawse, and tore her up through her bowline-ports with a couple of thirty-two-pounders. But before we could board her she veered, lurched, and fell upon us, carrying away our foremast. We cut clear of the tangle, and were making once more to board her, when I saw to windward two French frigates bearing down on us under full ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... plunge into the pathless forest. When he was on such an expedition, and became entangled in dense brush, and maybe a network of "slash" and swamp, he was like an old wizard, as he looked here and there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a thicket, and muttering to himself, "There ain't no speckerlation there." And when the way became altogether inscrutable,—"Waal, this is a reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole." As some one remarked, "The dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the potter." ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... into it. Then he veered about to the story itself. He enlarged on the amount of wealth harbored by a national bank. He explained how this vast wealth was hoarded and protected, the massive walls, the steel vaults, the steam flood pipes, the ever-watching attendants, the tangle of articulate wires that a touch would make garrulous, the time locks, the floors of cement and railway iron, the contact mats which reported the slightest footfall ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... cross-legged on a deer skin, staring gloomily at the ragged hole left by the whale harpoon bomb. He had not yet seen Iyok-ok. He was trying now to unravel some of the mysteries which the happenings of the day had served only to tangle more terribly. He had not meant to kill the Russian, even though the Jap girl had told him to; Johnny did not kill people, unless it was in defense of his country or his life. He had been merely trying the Jap girl out. He was obliged to admit now that he had got nowhere. ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... into the shop. While he was still trying to lay hold of an end of the spinning tangle of his thoughts and draw it forth in the hope that all would follow, she returned, fright in her eyes. She clasped her hands nervously and her cheeks blanched. "Mr. Feuerstein!" she exclaimed. "And he's coming ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor—provided one can imagine those ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... time it keeps the old in a prison of loneliness and suspicion. If we worshipped life instead of metal disks, we would see that the young are not really the heirs of the old, but the old are heirs of the young. Then and there I vowed to keep myself clear of the whole wretched tangle, even if I had to carry laundry all my life, so that if any one ever tried to fetter me I could fling his words back in his face! (Uncle Richard's nerves are all on edge. A terrific storm of overbearing temper visibly gathers during this speech, and the Colonel's long habit ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... way through the dense tangle of undergrowth and entered the open, where he stood for a few minutes, cooling his eyes with the silver sparkle of flowing water and the delicate green tints of the grass, which grew thickly on the banks of the little stream. He was motionless, yet even in repose he seemed to be the ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... end of the wood, nearly half a mile from our home, the scrub was very thick. It seemed to be a tangle of briars, too thick for hounds—too thick, almost, for rabbits. Hugh and I had never been in that part of the wood before, but our guide evidently knew it well, for he never hesitated. He swung us on, panting as we were, along the clearer parts, till ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... goes, slap off the trail sideways, a-plungin' and a-clawin' through the brush like a wild man. By this time I was clean crazed; thought the whole country was full of bald-faces. Next thing I knows—whop, I comes up against something in a tangle of wild blackberry bushes. Then that something hits me a slap and closes in on me. Another bald-face! And then and there I knew I was gone for sure. But I made up to die game, and of all the rampin' and roarin' and rippin' and tearin' you ever see, ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... was a child with bare, brown legs and tattered gingham dress who limped painfully along beside the man, her sunny hair in a tangle half across her pinched ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... leaving a tangle of cliffs and ravines, he looked out across a broad stretch of nearly level snow and saw, for the first time, the men he was following. Four tiny dots, so far that they seemed motionless, strung out in single file. Instantly, he crouched behind a swell ...
— The Keeper • Henry Beam Piper
... denied my happiness, that she could live so easily and pleasantly without emotions of the devastating sort.... And now, for the first time, I was really to behold her.... Could it be Theresa, after all, this tangle of subdued turbulences? Let no one suppose that it is an easy thing to bear, the relentlessly lucid understanding that I then first exercised; or that, in its first enfranchisement, the timid vision does not yearn for ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... place where the underbrush at the side of the path was somewhat beaten aside. I thought I could distinguish where some person or animal had gone from this place, tramping a sort of barely traceable furrow through the tangle. I followed this course: it led me back to the glade. Doubtless ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... and began to tear away the sod with his hands. Jack did the same, and when they had lifted aside the tangle of roots and grass, they saw beneath it a dull gleaming red substance, ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... lamps—twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, here and everywhere, until the forest shone like the starry sky. He ran to the nearest, yes, a nest; and here and there, each different kind of lamp stood for another kind of nest. A beautiful purple blaze in a low tangle caught his eye. He ran to it, and found a nest he had never seen before. It was full of purple eggs, and there was the rare bird he had seen but once. It was chanting the weird song he had often heard, but never traced. But the eggs were the marvelous things. His old egg-collecting ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... her pink and airy bells. All down the brown roads white lady's-lace and yarrow and the stiff purple iron-weed have leaped into bloom; under its faded green coat the sugar-cane shows purple; and sumac and sassafras and gums are afire. The year's last burgeoning of butterflies riots, a tangle of rainbow coloring, dancing in the mellow sunshine. And day by day a fine still deepening haze descends veil-like over the landscape and wraps it in a vague melancholy which most sweetly invades the spirit. It is as if one ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... our diving suits, and soon we were walking the slippery decks once trodden by Spanish grandees and soldiers, and the scene of many a bloody fight I'll be bound. Their skeletons lay about the deck, wrapped in sea-tangle, and from every crevice of the galleon, tall, red, and green, and yellow, and purple weeds had sprung, that waved and shivered with the motion of the sea. Her decks were strewn with shells and sand, and in and out of her rotted ribs frightened fish ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... grey old capital of Scotland in the very nick of time. The Old Town, a tangle of narrow alleys and close courtyards, surrounded by tall houses with endless tiers of floors, was just being deserted by the rich and fashionable world for the New Town, which lies beyond a broad valley on ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... somewhat lost sight of the daily drudgery that works on character chiefly as a preventive. 'He was at the bottom of it, little as he knows it,' she said to herself as she walked up the hill. 'How much harm is done by good beginnings of a skein left to tangle.' ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mental oiling, when a new hand demanded to be put on silk-work instead of mercerized, when a consignment of skirt-material turned out to be more than usually metallic, it was in Mrs. Emma McChesney's little private office that the tangle was unsnarled. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... top of the hill was as dense as that below, and the pair had not proceeded far before they found themselves in a veritable tangle of bushes and vines. The bushes were of the thorny kind peculiar to this locality, and more than once Larry found himself caught and held as ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... broad, shallow valleys, where cactus and sage-brush covered the dry ground thickly; and the only trees that broke this dreary monotony were pita-palms, the most dismal thing in all created nature to which the name of a tree ever has been given by man. There was no trail, and travelling through this tangle of briers was very difficult. All of Rayburn's skill, which long practice had developed to a high degree, was required to enable us to pick a way through so thorny a wilderness. At times the Indians ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... fled from criminal law, steers equally clear of the civil code? What curious paradoxes, what subtleties of finesse lurk in those fine meshes of jurisprudence, ingeniously spread to succor wary guilt, to tangle and trip the careless feet of innocence! All the world knows that the dearest wish that warmed General Darrington's heart was to disinherit and repudiate his daughter, and to secure his worldly goods to his ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the midst of this white tangle of trees and bushes and vines, which were like a wild, dumb multitude of death-things pressing ever against him, trying to crowd him away. When he hit them as he passed, they swung back in his face with a semblance ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... real dangers threaten and the boys' patriotism is tested in a peculiar international tangle. The scene is laid on the South ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction." We can only praise either as it is "clothed in circumstances." Commonly we are led to praise the one by getting too much of the other. Confounded in a tangle of fussy, vexatious, perhaps malicious restrictions, men cry loudly for liberty. When people all about us are doing things by their own sweet will, we are converted to praise of regulation and discipline and ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... the Morgan Hills he had gone like the wind, but now he rushed like a thoroughbred standing a challenge in the homestretch. His nose, and his flying tail were a straight line and the flash of his legs was a tangle which no eye could follow as he shot east on the back trail, straight toward the posse. For a mile or more that speed did not slacken, and at the end of that distance he began to edge to ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... the mountain wall, dark with pine and spruce, though here and there a flaming service-berry or a hawthorn broke through the evergreens like sudden fire. The tangle of trees and shrubs seemed impenetrable, and yet Virginia had told of a trail which led from the creek not three rods from the ford—led up, up, up for five miles until it reached the Cinnamon ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... hold converse, and all His joy passes into His servant's heart. I saw, not long since, in a wood a mass of blue wild hyacinths, that looked like a little bit of heaven dropped down upon earth. You and I may have such a tiny bit of heaven itself lying amidst all the tangle of our daily lives, if only we put our trust in Christ, and so get into our hearts some little portion of that joy that is unspeakable, and that peace ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... the sea follows; and there is a fair harbour, where the fishing boats ride together while their sails dry in the afternoon sun. Then the hamlet is very still; for the men are sleeping off the weariness of their night work, while the children play quietly among the tangle, and the women mend the nets or bait the lines for the next fishing. A lonely little spot, shut in by sea and land, and yet life is there in all its passionate variety—love and hate, jealousy and avarice, youth, with its ideal ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... The day was a sunny one, perhaps that added to the lack of nervous fears they felt as they stopped the auto, and entered the place. This time they had gone to the mansion proper, having driven through what were once beautiful and extensive grounds. But they had long since fallen into a tangle of ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... destination, as the Russo-German frontier was now closed. But as it was quite as impossible to turn back I decided to push on to Berlin there to await events. So far Britain was not involved and might even keep clear of the tangle. This I might say was the general opinion on the train. The remainder of the journey to the capital was now far more exciting, and the animated conversation served to while away the tedium of the slow travelling, although ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo; ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... drawn with a view to throwing as much dust as possible in the eyes of those who would oppose the measure, and which, having been found utterly unworkable in practice, has had clauses repealed up and down it till it is now in an inextricable tangle of ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... in the gloom that no lanterns illume Stand groups of slim lilies and jonquils in bloom; On tiptoe, unseen 'mid a tangle of green, They offer the midnight their ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Strong, Professor Hemmingwell, and Dave Barret stared unbelievingly at the tangle of wires and smashed tubes on the main deck ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... state right here, though, that it is a mistake for a man to undertake to save the country and to have ideas on that subject when he tries to help another fellow win the heart of a girl and gets mixed up in the tangle that such interference is bound to bring on anybody who attempts it. I didn't know, and therefore I should have thrown up the job as soon as I began to get wound in it. You have heard that gentle hum of the buzz-saw? ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... cliffs shot up, which arched over our heads, with a fringe of ferns and bracken on either lip, so that the dark sky and the few twinkling stars were well-nigh hid. Great black rocks loomed vaguely out in the shadowy light, while in front a high tangle of what seemed to be brushwood barred our road. At a second whistle, however, a glint of light was seen through the branches, and the whole mass was swung to one side as though it moved upon a hinge. Beyond it a dark winding passage opened into the side of the hill, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not support him, a rush of blood set his face aflame. He had scarcely broken his fast for thirty hours, having eaten only a crust of bread at noon. He felt millions of pins pricking him, felt the violent beating of his heart, felt his mind becoming clouded. What was that tangle of serpents winding themselves about his feet, in the disguise of innocent grasses? And what sinister demon was that, waiting for him down there, crouching on all fours on a rock, disguised as a bush and ready to jump upon him? Were ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... disliked me, and she is jealous of her position. If Mr. Hamilton married she could not remain in his house; no wife could brook such interference. She knows this, and it is her interest to prevent him from marrying. All this is clear enough; but in the case of poor Gladys?' But here again was the old tangle and perplexity. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in a tangle of thought that he did not observe how closely Monsignor Gherardi was studying every expression of his face, and he started as if he had been awakened from a dream when Sylvie's song ceased, and Sylvie herself glanced up ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... whatever it is. I have a fortnight before me, and I need scarcely say, Major, that if I can set things right in the place, I don't mind sacrificing my holiday in the least. I'm quite prepared to turn to and straighten out any tangle that may have ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... out Kit's ship as qualified for the race, and then turned, fascinated, to the tangle of pipes, cables, and mechanical gear of the reactor unit and cooling pumps. Tom and Roger were unable to figure out exactly what changes Kit had made, but Astro gazed at the new machinery fondly, almost rapturously. He ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... Bohannan, firing again, again, into the tangle of sub-chiefs and Maghrabi men. Adams pitched forward, cleft to ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... appearances, and a ship broken up at Leith exhibited the same marvel; but he clinches the argument by a "notable example schawin afore our eyne. Maister Alexander Galloway Person, of Kynkell, was with us in thir Illis (the Hebridae), and be adventure liftet up ane see tangle, hyng and full of mussil schellis," one of which he opened, "bot than he was mair astonist than afore, for he saw na fische in it bot ane perfit schapin foule. This clerk, knawin us richt desirous ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... reality there is a curve there) and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways.... You only learn the shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD and never mind ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... prompted Rowlett, and he led the way to the back of the house where half-buried in the tangle that had overrun the place stood the ruins of a heavy and rotting ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... by his friends, who were always ready to make up his table, and relieve him without hesitation of the few hundred roubles which constituted their principal income. The old man marched on blindfold through the tangle of his pecuniary difficulties, trying to conceal them, and only succeeding in augmenting them; having neither the courage nor the patience to untie the ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... willingness of the nobles meant something; but the serf-owning caste, without openly opposing, twisted up bad consequences with good, braided impossibilities into possibilities: the whole plan became a tangle, and was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... One side of her was fiery red, with jet-black hair and green eyes and the other side of her was bright yellow, with crimson hair and black eyes. She wore a short skirt of red and yellow and her hair, instead of being banged, was a tangle of short curls upon which rested a circular crown of silver—much dented and twisted because the Queen had thrown her head at so many things so many times. Her form was lean and bony and both her faces ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... be no doubt that he had made a tangle; that the big job as a whole was not under his hand, but was just running itself as best it could. Bannon, who, since the days when he was chief of the wrecking gang on a division of the Grand Trunk, had made a business of ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... tried to trace as clearly as possible this main story as it pursues its course through the tangle of subsidiary stories. In dealing with a drama so richly stored with material, where every rift is loaded with ore, much has necessarily to be left untouched; in such a sketch as this one cannot do ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... I read this over. My mind fills in all the trains of thought of which you have the rude ends peeping out from this tangle. Make what you can of it, dear Bertie, and believe that it all comes from my innermost heart. Above all may I be kept from becoming a partisan, and tempering with truth in order to sustain a case. Let me but ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... since extinct; a curved shingle beach some fifty yards across, shut in right and left by steep rocks wooded down almost to the sea, and worn into black caves and crannies, festooned with the night-blowing Cereus, which crawls about with hairy green legs, like a tangle of giant spiders. Among it, in the cracks, upright Cerei, like candelabra twenty and thirty feet high, thrust themselves aloft into the brushwood. An Aroid {103b} rides parasitic on roots and stems, sending ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... closely set that she had difficulty in steering clear of them; but Prudence was obdurate and kept right on. Nor did she draw rein until the shore of the lake was reached, and then only did she do so because of the impassable tangle of undergrowth which confronted her. Just as Alice came up with her she started off again at right angles to the direction they had come, riding parallel with the bank. Alice, breathless and laughing, followed ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... 'Am I then so deeply in love with her already?' he asked himself. His spirit seemed imprisoned within a circle in which the phantoms of all his sensations in presence of this woman surged and wheeled around him. Suddenly there would emerge from this tangle of memory, with singular precision, some phrase of hers, an inflection of her voice, an attitude, a glance, the seat where they had sat, the finale of the Beethoven sonata, a burst of melody from Mary Dyce, the face of the footman who had held back the portiere—anything ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... clusters of odorous yellow jasmine and many-hued morning-glory,—the latter making a pillar heavy with triumphal wreaths of every old stump along the plashy brink,—the former swinging from tree-top to tree-top to knit the whole tropic wilderness into a tangle of emerald chains, drooping lamps of golden fire, and censers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... her hands. "Oh, Tabs, you make it so hard for me when you're generous. I haven't done right. I'm in a tangle. I don't know whether what I'll do in the future will be ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... was over, that Miss Nelson was going to marry the Duc de Divonne (she went out of the room to get engaged to him). For Sir Samuel, a telegram from his London solicitors advising him to hurry home and straighten out some annoying business tangle. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... rocky shore of Devil Island. Beyond the rocks rose a high bank, upon which was a gloomy tangle of woods. There was something forbidding in the appearance of the island with the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... "I was more frightened than hurt. Will you please cut that line?" she asked, pointing to the tangle of the fish ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... experiences in some ways warped American ideas of war and politics, and their influence perhaps survives to this day. The extent of the President's authority and his position in regard to the advice he could obtain have been explained. An examination of the tangle in which military policy was first involved may make the chief incidents of the war ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... symbolized the subtile principle which pares away the natural virtue of man, and substitutes an artificial polish, which is hypocrisy. It is to be observed, however, that hair can be representative of natural evil as well as of good. A tangle-headed bush-ranger does not win our sympathies. A Mussulman keeps his beard ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... some strange metal, thread by thread, To stand out from my lady's head, Not moving much to tangle me. Beata mea Domina! ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... by wild hogs? That's how them two people kept after me. You'd have thought I'd deprived 'em of their young. I didn't want to hurt 'em, but whenever I'd run they'd tangle my legs. By and by I got so short of breath that I couldn't run, so I fell on top of the man. But the woman got me by the legs and rolled me under. I busted out and hoofed it again, but they caught me and down we went, me on top. Then that man's helpmate ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... by the roadside, were the dwelling-houses. Some of them were a tangle of rafters mixed up with heaps of brick and miscellaneous rubbish—stoves, pots and pans, chair-legs, pictures, bedding, boxes, and all kinds of household articles. Others had been dispersed around. Others seemed to have been tipped up bodily, so that all their contents had been spilt into ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... femme is a French saying, which has somewhat of a cynical ring about it. The female hand has to be discovered in the family alliances of the Cavendishes and the Bentincks from which a tangle of intrigue may be unravelled. There was in the first instance that accomplished matchmaker, Bess Hardwick, a country squire's daughter, who was married four times, and from her sprang children and grandchildren ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... moved to Akut's side. Meriem was just behind them. The three stood like carved statues gazing into the leafy tangle of the jungle. The noise that had attracted their attention increased, and presently a great ape broke through the underbrush a few paces from where they stood. The beast halted at sight of them. He gave a warning grunt ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... But I saw trolley tracks uprooted, twisted fantastically. I saw wide wounds in the street. Water flooded out of one. A deadly odor of gas from a broken main swept out of the other. Telegraph poles were rocked like matches. A wild tangle of wires was in the street. Some of the wires ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... woke up it was dark. They were cold. Their legs were stiff. They lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide bed, between them a tangle of narrow sheets and blankets. Telemachus raised himself to a sitting position and put his feet, that were still swollen, gingerly to the floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teeth chattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... altered in an instant—I could see that much through my fingers and hair. He dropped on one knee beside me, parted the tangle of hair, and said, in the tenderest way: My poor girl, God knows I have not intended to pain you. How should I?—I who love you—I who have loved you for—for years ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... blame but himself, no power to accuse but his own headlong passion, and the imperious impatience that would take no gift from life but that of his own choosing. There had been a woman and a tangle of events, and his passion-blinded eyes could see no way of disentangling it, and yet how trivial and easy the unravelling appeared now. The quick—not resolve—but impulse that caught him on the crest ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... Taresevo forces. During this fight, or rather after it, the Canadians taught our boys their first lesson in looting the persons of the dead. Our men had been rather respectful and gentle with the Bolo dead who were quite numerous on the Emtsa River battlefield. Can you call a tangle of woods a field? But the Canadians, veterans of four years fighting, immediately went through the pockets of the dead for roubles and knives and so forth and even took the boots off the dead, as they ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... characters are only slightly sketched, so far merely as is necessary to account for the actions of the characters in this or that case; when also the incidents are so accumulated, that little room is left for display of character; when the plot is so wrought up, that the motley tangle of misunderstandings and embarrassments seems every moment on the point of being loosened, and yet the knot is only drawn tighter and tighter: such a composition may well be called a Play of Intrigue. The French critics have made it fashionable to consider this kind of play much below ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... what Girard would have wanted. His plots had fallen into a sad tangle, and Cadiere was in the way. Her letter enchanted him: far from being annoyed with her, he enjoined her to keep dissevered. At the same time, he hinted at the need he had for caution. He had received a letter, he said, warning ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... a bright, fairy-like little creature, with beautiful hazel eyes, and a wealth of brown hair on her tiny head that was a veritable crown of glory, reaching below her waist, and looking like a tangle of gold when the sun played upon it; and, somehow or other, she was the life and light of our home, always having a kind word for everybody, and ever acting as the peacemaker when any little difference arose between father and mother, as ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... slap off the trail sideways, a-plungin' and a-clawin' through the brush like a wild man. By this time I was clean crazed; thought the whole country was full of bald-faces. Next thing I knows—whop, I comes up against something in a tangle of wild blackberry bushes. Then that something hits me a slap and closes in on me. Another bald-face! And then and there I knew I was gone for sure. But I made up to die game, and of all the rampin' and roarin' and rippin' and ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... were in a tangle. The mystery surrounding him seemed suddenly to have deepened. For the face that he had seen at the window was that of the stranger who had stared at him so curiously—the man of the soft hat and dark mustache—who had seemed so startled ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... mouths of the spitting guns the last of the steers dropped, and the few that remained alive turned tail and fled wildly back the way they had come. In front of the trenches was a horrible tangle of trampled, wounded creatures, rearing as best they could and stabbing one another with their long, ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... dear ma'am, that's quite another thing—but Master Herbert's is always in such a tangle, there's no such thing as managing it." Again Mrs. Grace gave a desperate pull: Herbert bore it, looked up at Mad. de Rosier, and said, "Now, that was resolution, not obstinacy, ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... a third knot in the tangle and tried desperately at the last moment to recreate dissension between ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Through this tangle of intentions the writer has in the main followed Thiers, whose access to documents would seem to authenticate his details of the famous scheme for ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... occasion Joe threw open the lid of the piano with such dexterity as to tangle the cover inextricably with the lid, set up the stool with a whirl, and dashed into the midst of a composition that might have been conceived by a mad musician and wailed out on an instrument possessed, like Paganini's fiddle, one night when the demons ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... known him to fail, in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four, and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was to the boy, and as he regarded the complicated web, he found himself wondering how much of all this tangle was known to the men, and whether they were always fair to their employer. He had frequently overheard conversations at his father's when they had proclaimed how easy and care-free a life the rich led, and while they had envied and criticized and slandered the Fernalds and asserted ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... faint cloud of rose shall appear, As if in pure water you dropped and let die A bruised black-blooded mulberry; And that other sort, their crowning pride, With long white threads distinct inside, 380 Like the lake-flower's fibrous roots which dangle Loose such a length and never tangle, Where the bold sword-lily cuts the clear waters, And the cup-lily couches with all the white daughters: Such are the works they put their hand to, 385 The uses they turn and twist iron and sand to. And these made the troop, which our Duke saw ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Miss Bailey, as she glanced down at the tangle of dark curls resting against her breast. "Morris, dear, aren't you going to say ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... side of the Canyon they moved laboriously among fallen logs, boulders and driftwood, and through the tangle of vines, ferns, and foliage which also barred ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... round, and flawless. Mrs. Ambrose would have found it very dull. As it was, she had her embroidery frame set up on deck, with a little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of philosophy. She chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or yellow into the river torrent. She was working at a great design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest, where spotted deer would eventually browse upon masses of fruit, bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... seven by the Arlington Street Church clock as the cab rattled down Boylston Street. A tangle of a trolley car and a market wagon delayed it momentarily at Harrison Avenue and Essex Street. Dr. Payson, leaning out as the carriage swung into Dewey Square, saw by the big clock on the Union Station that it was 7:13. He had ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... that you shared his labours, his home, his confidence and his largess, have come to a wild and barren pasture for such sweet flowers; and yet there was love between us, love which ever radiated from him as it were sunshine and caused many a briar-rose to blossom in the thorny tangle of my life. I knew him also before you, in the summer of 1503, at Siena; and it is of certain pranks in that early comradeship that I will now write. Raphael was then a youth of scarce twenty years. He had come fresh from his apprenticeship to that old pietist Perugino, to assist ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... impatient of the old man's rigid control. Hilton is sharp and shrewd, and he guessed things were going wrong financially. He knew that his father's methods were out of date, and believed he could straighten the tangle if the reins of power were not withheld ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... paddock. It was an open one, which let him through easily. The wallabies, seeing his shining success, followed his course, and midway managed to entangle their reins, at which Wally and Harry were wildly hauling. Confusion became disorder, and the wallabies at length reduced themselves to a tangle, out of which they had to be assisted by means ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... built, his hands more like a girl's than a man's. In towns he shaved and looked fairly presentable, but once upon his travels he grew beard and moustache and would forget for weeks to have his hair cut, so that it fell in a tangle ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... and lithe do the creepers clothe Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green: Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loath, In lappets of tangle they laugh between. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... the robbers were lost in the tangle of trees and bushes and did not know where they were, or in which direction they ought to go. One said, "Go that way," pointing towards the north. And one said, "No, no! Go that way," pointing directly south. The third grumbled and said, "Ho, fellows! ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... Artaban spread a fair garden, a tangle of flowers and fruit-trees, watered by a score of streams descending from the slopes of Mount Orontes, and made musical by innumerable birds. But all colour was lost in the soft and odorous darkness of the late September night, and all sounds were hushed in the ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... very soon, don't it Eddy?" said Sue, as their heads came in contact at the unraveling of a terrible "tangle"—"I wish it would be always daylight, and then wouldn't we sit up a great many hours? I'd go to school at night instead of the daytime, and do all my errands, and go to meeting too—then we should have all day long ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... lesson," cried Helen, jumping up, for the band had slipped from the groove, and hung in a hopeless tangle—"and I fear Miss Thusa will never be willing ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... and other brushwood; and in many places so thickly was this undergrowth interwoven among the large trees, that one could not see five yards in front of the line. Yet, as we pushed on, with as good a line as possible, the thick tangle in a measure disappeared, and the woods were more open. Still, in the most favorable places, the thicket was so close as to make it impossible to manage artillery or cavalry, and, indeed, infantry found great difficulty in advancing, ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... well drawn, and the author has distanced all her fellow-novelists of her own sex in the delineation of a woman whose heartlessness may be truly called devilish. The strength of this portrait is remarkable. The other woman is effective too, and the tangle of the relations of the three is put right by ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... the Chancellor's "revelations," but dismissed them as soon as they had crept into his brain. No matter where the clue to the tangle might lie, he told himself that it was not in any act of which ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... of these incidents was, that John one day slipped his foot on a tangle-covered rock, and fell into the sea. A small matter this, you will say, to a man who could swim, and in a climate so warm that a dip, with or without clothes, was a positive luxury. Most true; and had the wetting been all, Jarwin would have had ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... but I am prevented by my sense of harmony. The individual, we know, is a creature unknown to the statistician, whereas I undertook to give the personal view of everything. So I am bound to unravel, as well as I can, the tangle of events, outer and inner, which made up the first breathless ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... birthday. It was a delightful evening, and the wide French windows which led on to the verandah were open, letting in a gentle breeze from the ocean. Outside there was a kind of screen of tropical plants, and through the tangle of the boughs the guests, seated at the table, could just see the waters of the bay glittering in the pale moonlight. Brian was seated opposite to Madge, and every now and then he caught a glimpse of her bright face from behind the fruit and flowers, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... out of the old church through a side door leading into a small green enclosure, now gloomy in the shade of the old stone walls. At one end was a tangle of briar, and here were some old graves, each with a tinsel wreath or two on the iron cross. And presiding over these was the limp figure of a one-legged man on two crutches, who saluted us. We passed along to the end of the inclosure, ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... was shocked at such a summons, and for the first time he had a sharp pang of doubt whether he was not to be awakened from a foolish dream. It was with a heavy heart that he bent his steps along the narrow tangle of streets that lay between his house and the edge of a great piece of waste ground known as Hare Street Fields, and even had he been less preoccupied he might not have noticed that he was followed by two men, who kept close to ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... machines more secure the wind shifted, and about half the total number of machines were over on their backs. One Henri Farman went up about thirty feet in the air and crashed on top of another Henri Farman in a hopeless tangle. B.E.'s of No. 2 Squadron were blowing across the aerodrome, and when daylight arrived and the storm abated, the aerodrome presented a pitiful sight. The Royal Flying Corps in the field had probably not more ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... stricken to the heart with grief intolerable. Like as two winds stir up the main, the home of fishes, even the north wind and the west wind that blow from Thrace, coming suddenly; and the dark billow straightway lifteth up its crest and casteth much tangle out along the sea; even so was the Achaians' spirit ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... letters to New York as will weaken the courage of our Northern brethren. For the militia I will give the excuse of the French menace. The good folk will laugh at me for it, but they will not take fright. God's truth, but it is a devilish tangle. I could wish I had your part, sir, and be free to ride out on a gallant venture. Here I have none of the zest of war, but only a thousand cares and the carking task of ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... broad shadow of an oak, he looked out over long stretches of forest and river, but what he saw was his home in distant Kentucky—the old farmhouse that the sun and the rain and the lichens had softened into a mottled gray. He saw the gleaming brook that wound its way through the tangle of orchard and garden, and parted the distant ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... magistrates are bound to interpose for the preservation of that uniformity and peace of the churches." [31] The desire of the Court grew in part out of the influx of new colonists, who did not like the strict church discipline, and in part out of the tangle of Church and State during the Roger Williams controversy. The Court had disciplined Williams as one, who, having no rights in the corporation, had no ground for complaint at the hostile reception of his teachings. These the authorities regarded as harmful ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... Kennedy's body had been found. It was marked by the fragment of rock which had been precipitated from the cliff above, either with the body or after it. The mass was now encrusted with small shell-fish, and tasselled with tangle and seaweed; but still its shape and substance were different from those of the other rocks which lay scattered around. His voluntary walks, it will readily be believed, had never led to this spot; so that, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a devil-fish to the crabs. Then up the gray benches of the furrowed cliffs, starred with silver lichens and stone-crop, to where ploughmen were leaving glistening furrows in the big parsnip fields. Then on through the tangle of sweet-briar, honeysuckle and wild roses, where birds nested in the perfumed foliage, until, the summit reached, surrounded by purple heather and golden gorse, he would look on the sea below, with Sark, like a "basking whale, burning ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... etc.; then individual words would be changed, and then whole sentences, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood, because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... was beating the Magister, so that the fur gown made a greyish whirl about his scarlet suit in the midst of a tangle of spun wool; spinning wheels were overset, Margot Poins crashed around upon them, wailing; the girls with their distaffs were crouching against the window-places and in corners, crying out ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... whole civilized world, has to deal, is the problem which has for one side the betterment of social conditions, moral and physical, in large cities, and for another side the effort to deal with that tangle of far-reaching questions which we group together when ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... of the path, between it and the stream, Mr. Rogers and the constable knelt together over the body of a man half hidden in a tangle of brambles. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... whole tangle of wreckage, and had straightened herself up with a long, triumphant "Ah-h!" of relief, as the current rushed it away, when a shadow fell over the mouth of the cave. Looking about in quick, instinctive fear, she saw Warren Gregory smiling ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... visited the old house as a patient, and from that along the strange road they had both come since then. He reflected, not exactly in those terms, that life, any man's life, was only one thread in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle the one thread was to interfere with all the others. David Livingstone, the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed, Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and enlivening company of an alarum clock, Jake retired to his couch, which consisted of a flax-stuffed mattress resting on a wooden bedstead, and there he quickly buried himself in a weird tangle of dirty ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... the rock behind her. Presently he freed that arm and with the ease of much usage withdrew the bodkins from her hair. The heavy coil dropped over his breast down to his knee. With delicate touches he began to free from the splendid tangle a single strand of glistening white hair. When she saw it shining like spun silver across the back of his hand, she looked up at him. With infinite care he searched her face, while she waited with questioning ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... fish hung from the fine patent rod which I carried over my shoulder. I never could undo the tangle of how it all came about; but, in my embarrassment, I must have handled things not quite so gracefully as I intended—the line had become unwound, and the hook dangling at the end of it as I attempted ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... a bow-shot from the shooting party, however, when all of a sudden, at a distance of a couple of yards from him, crouching behind a tangle of bushes, her face deathly white, and her hands struggling to adjust the fire-arm she held in such a position as to do herself some mortal injury, he espied Cleopatra,—Cleopatra ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... he discovered one, a mere trace made by wild animals through the underwood—sufficiently practicable for him, as he could work his way through any tangle of thicket. Sprawling along it, and rapidly, despite all obstructions, he at length came out on the Acapulco Road, a wide causeway, with ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... light from her eyes shone upon the tangle. 'On this road, force will avail nothing; but there are a thousand helps for him who ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... too old to move out of the house now, but Father Giacomo watered the beans lovingly, and in the soft spring air they grew rapidly, so that they soon formed a beautiful tangle, hiding the cross and even the name that still stood ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... thoughtful gaze. He was apparently watching the retreating form of the horse through the tangle of flower and ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... not equipped for it. We were travelling light, and our wives were three or four thousand miles away. No middle-aged married man gets on well with a love affair who is out of daily reach of his wife. For when he gets into the barbed wire tangle of a love affair, he needs the wise counsel of a middle-aged woman. But here we were, two fat old babes in the woods and here came the Gilded Youth, the Eager Soul and the Young Doctor—sping! like a German shell—right into our midst, ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... his heart demanded it. When the last act was over, then came a pall of eternal silence, eternal unconsciousness. Of course it was a great, grim, ghastly tragedy, but he had to accept facts as they were. There was no God, no Providence, no justice; life was a hideous mockery, a meaningless tangle. No; he would never see her again, never hear her voice again, never catch that glad flash of her eyes which he had seen during their last meeting. It seemed to him as though he had entered an inferno, over ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... slated houses passed before Mrs. Munt's inattentive eyes, a series broken at one point by six Danish tumuli that stood shoulder to shoulder along the highroad, tombs of soldiers. Beyond these tumuli habitations thickened, and the train came to a standstill in a tangle that ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... inconsequently proceeded in the tangle of her afflicted mind, supposing he had suspected it! Supposing by some queer chance, he had heard her forgotten story, and casually put two and two together! Supposing even that he were merely to mention ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... glances of pleasure as the familiar fields ranged themselves along either side of the road. Hilda too was glad to be in the free country again, and she looked with delight at the banks of fern, the stone walls covered with white starry clematis, and the tangle of blackberry vines which made the pleasant road so fragrant and sweet. She was silent for some time. At last she said, half timidly, "Farmer Hartley, you promised to tell me more about your father some day. Don't you think this would be a good time? I have been so much interested ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... buttes crested with scoria. At the ends of the valley were glades of cottonwoods with grassy floors where deer hid among the buckbrush by day, or at dusk fed silently or, at the sound of a step, bounded, erect and beautiful, off into deeper shelter. In an almost impenetrable tangle of bullberry bushes, whose hither edge was barely one hundred yards from the ranch-house, two fawns spent their days. They were extraordinarily tame, and in the evenings Roosevelt could frequently see them from the door as they came out to feed. Walking on the flat after sunset, or riding home when ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... were soon left behind, and the pathway led ever upwards, first through a tangle of heather and bilberry and gorse; then, higher still, over short, fine, slippery tracts of grass. They were reaching the upper region of the fell, where the hard rock cropped out into great splintered crags, weathered by countless winter storms, and where no bushes or softer herbage ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... out of his remoteness near to those things, a speculation worth making as to what he might do. This remained ungratified, for he never did anything. He only let it appear by the most indefinite signs possible that he saw what she saw, peering over his paling, and she in the picturesque tangle ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... had not departed wholly as yet. Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open. The only human being making use of the alley besides the Professor, coming stalwart ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Down through the hollow where they had gathered the forget-me-nots, and up the bluebell bank they struggled, with never a thought for the flowers; and they were just about to scramble over some felled trees when Raymonde, who was a yard in advance, caught her foot in a tangle of brier and fell on her hands and knees among the springing bracken. Fauvette, unable to stop herself, collided heavily and collapsed by her side. Too much out of breath to stir, the girls lay for ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... near the cove where the 'Gypsy' is," and still retaining the cushions, he started to find it. But he was a stranger to Southport Island and the farther away from the sea he got, the thicker grew the tangle of scrub spruce and briers. It was too thick to see anywhere, and after a half hour of desperate scrambling, the afternoon sun began to seem about due east! He had long since dropped the cushions, and finally, in sheer exhaustion, ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... coming back," she said, "if I have to tie binding twine across the road to tangle up Pleurisy's long legs. He's on his way to Cowan's, I know. Ab Cowan has quinsy. Never mind, Thursa, we'll get him. I hope now that the old doctor is too full to come—oh, no I don't either, I just hope he's away and Dr. Clay will have it done ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... squares; so the world of common sense is ultimately reducible to a series of static elements conditioned by the machinery of the brain. Subtle curves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that machinery cannot represent. It leaves them out. From the countless suggestions, the tangle of many-coloured wools which the real world presents to you, you snatch one here and there. Of these you weave together those which are the most useful, the most obvious, the most often repeated: which make a tidy and coherent pattern when seen on the right side. Shut up with this symbolic ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... the saints of heaven, and imploring her in their name—she who was so wise and strong—to discover some way out of this tangle in which his ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... a pace, he looked up, eagerly, into the dumfounded man's face, tail waving, dark eyes aglint with expectation. It had been hard to locate the weapon, in all that tangle of lilac-stems. It had been harder to carry the awkwardly heavy thing all the way back, in his mouth, without dropping it. But, if this was the plaything the Master had chosen, Lad was only too willing ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... went again to the dogs, straightening the leader in his traces, Howland stared back at the firelit space in the forest gloom. He could see a man adding fuel to the blaze, and beyond him, shrouded in the deep shadows of the trees, an indistinct tangle of dogs and sledge. As he strained his eyes to discover more there was a movement beyond the figure over the fire and the young engineer's heart leaped with a sudden thrill. Croisset's voice sounded in a shrill ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... to Linda's great astonishment, fitted precisely over the cotton-bound hair. Again, fifteen times, M. Joseph did this, fastening each connection with the turn of a screw. When so much was accomplished her mother's hair, it seemed, had grown fast to the ceiling in a tangle of green ends. It was the most terrifying spectacle Linda had ever witnessed. Obscure thoughts of torture, of criminals executed by electricity, froze her in ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Healy to meet us, and had been travelled no more than by their coming and going. The snow in this region had been as much lighter than usual as the snow in the Koyukuk had been heavier. Through the tangle of prostrate trunks of a burned-over forest and the dense underbrush that follows such a fire, with not enough snow to give smooth passage over the obstacles, we made our toilsome way, the labour of the dogs calling for the continual supplement ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... and noble pity, has no equal among its contemporaries. Great tragedy, it is frequently claimed with some show of justice, has perforce departed with the advance of modern life and its complicated tangle of interests and creature comforts. A highly developed civilisation, with its attendant specialisation of culture, tends ever to lose sight of those elemental forces, those primal emotions, naked to wind ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... he is doing already, it wants a man to bring his mind right down to the fact of the present case and its immediate needs. Now the present case, as the doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before,—a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his business to wind as much thread out of as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He has seen just such noses and just such eyes and just such mouths, but he never saw exactly such a face ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the blossoms can see out. There is another, a pink cluster, showing faintly through the dry, matted grass. You feel for the stem, pull it gently, and, lo, it is many stems, which have crept their way under the tangle, and every one is tipped with a cluster of stars or round little buds each on its long stem, fairly begging to be ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... who had access to his rooms often wondered how he ever got out of them looking so immaculate, for they were a perfectly impassable jungle to the stranger. Such a tangle of trunks, hand-bags, rug bundles, clothes, boots, pajamas, newspapers, scrap-books, B. & S. bottles, could hardly be found anywhere else in the world. He had a fondness for newspaper clippings, and had trunks of them, sorted into bundles or pasted in scrap-books. Old ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... at present most engages his affection is a reclaimed woodland swamp, back among some rocky hills, a mile or two from the river. A few years ago the swamp was a wild tangle of brush and stumps, fallen trees and murky pools. Now it has been cleared and drained, and the dark forest mould produces wonderful crops of celery, sweet corn, potatoes, and other vegetables. On a shoulder of rock near the swamp borders Burroughs has built ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... beauty, where the air is rife with the fragrance of birch and balsam, as you gaze at the Adirondacks that lift their startling cliffs into the air, or farther along the horizon stand bathed in a radiant glow, while a gold tangle of sunset glitters among the white birch trees or casts a soft sheen like the tints on a mourning dove's neck—pray tell me, have you ever seen anything fairer than ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... seemed that his terrors came over him, for he would have the priest enter first. Father Thomas, with a certain apprehension of which he was ashamed, walked quickly in, and looked about him. The herbage of the garden had mostly died down in the winter, and a tangle of sodden stalks lay over the beds. A flagged path edged with box led up to the house, which seemed to stare at them out of its dark windows with a sort of steady gaze. Master Grimston fastened the door ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as he tried to unravel this fresh tangle. Why was Jim Crow shadowing him? In the interests of the Indians? Again he pulled out his watch. And the woman beside him saw that his hand was shaking as he held it out to the light of ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... haste was evidently not imperative, for he followed Miss Lady through the narrow winding paths, between a tangle of shrubs and vines, into the old-fashioned flower garden. The spiraea was just putting out its long, feathery plumes of white, and the lilacs nodded white and purple ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... he's not Edith's lover. If he's not her husband, he's playing a part that she understands and approves. And this—this, my dear Carney, may account for the imaginary orphanage of Tootles. Dear me, it's quite a tangle." ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... short examination showed us that there were two peccaries within, doubtless a boar and sow. However, just at this moment the peccaries bolted from an unsuspected opening at the other end of the log, dove into the tangle, and instantly disappeared with the hounds in full cry after them. It was twenty minutes later before we again heard the pack baying. With much difficulty, and by the incessant swinging of the machetes, we opened a trail through the network of vines and branches. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... sweet-looking one too. I couldn't lift her up and kiss her as I used to do, but I felt as if I should like to do it all the same. She was the only creature in the whole world, I think, that liked me better than Jim. I'd been trying to drive all thoughts of her out of my heart, seeing the tangle I'd got into in more ways than one; but now the old feeling which had been a part of me ever since I'd grown up came rushing back stronger than ever. I was surprised at myself, and looked queer ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... of green, With her tangle of red-gold hair, In the live heart of an oak, Clytie, harbouring there, Throned there as a queen, Clytie wondering woke: Ah, child, what set thee too high for thy sweet demesne, And ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... was chiefly a torment to itself; he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle. To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do what one will; but Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven, was still too young to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... basement is a long way; but we would see the old stone bench down there where used to sit the row of black boys to answer bells from these rooms above. Just over the bench hangs still a tangle of the broken bell wires. When colonial Brandon was filled with guests, there must often have been a merry jangle above the old stone bench and a swift patter of feet on the flags. Standing there to-day, one can almost fancy an impatient tinkle. Is it ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... full of regard, of care, and of respect for her; at the time of their departure they were each about fifty and fifty-five years old. Law had made many acquisitions of all kinds and still more debts, so that this tangle is not yet unravelled by the committee of the council appointed to arrange his affairs with his creditors. I have said elsewhere, and I repeat it here, that there was neither avarice nor roguery in his composition. He was a gentle, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... while, however, the curtain went up once more, and the play proceeded in a tangle of "real Siberian bloodhounds," Gumption Cutes, Marks, Topsies, Little Evas, escaping slaves, slave hunters and general ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... break in the upper foliage, giving a strange glory to everything it touches—projecting leaves, and beard-like tuft of moss, and snaky bush-rope. And in the most open part of that most open space, suspended on nothing to the eye, the shaft reveals a tangle of shining silver threads—the web of some large tree-spider. These seemingly distant yet distinctly visible threads serve to remind me that the human artist is only able to get his horizontal distance by a monotonous reduplication of pillar and arch, placed at regular intervals, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... amazement at the murderous outburst, blazing as it did in the dim deceitful dusk, from the unsuspected trenches. These, it must be owned, were most skilfully concealed at the foot of a series of kopjes. They were screened from sight by a tangle of brushwood and scrub, while round the glacis of the trenches was crinkled a triple line of barbed wire. When, therefore, a deadly furnace broke from this tangle, the troops were aghast. For the first moment the superb crowd, unduly huddled together and helpless, ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... along the path in the direction of the fountain, he saw a blotchy drab creature, fully four inches in length, running zigzag towards him. It was a huge scorpion; but, even as he leapt forward to crush it, it turned and crept in amid the tangle of flowers beside the path, where it was ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... there was no perfectly obvious means of getting out; secondly, that she had no money. The former of these objections did not, however, appear absolutely insurmountable. Just beneath her window the wall was covered with a tangle of vines, and jessamine, and climbing roses; to a slim active child, with an unalterable purpose, the descent of even twenty feet of wall with so much friendly assistance might have seemed not unfeasible; but, in fact, Madelon's window was raised hardly ten feet above the flower-bed ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... cross to the opposite side of the street. To find out what this tangle is, it is not necessary to ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... it?" he asked, stumbling over the tangle of string-like roots that netted the ground. "Natives, travelers like ourselves, or—something else?" He spoke very low, as though aware that what had waked him still hovered close enough to ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... country is like some parts of rural England—Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleen-wort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut. This is the landscape which the two sixteenth century novelists of Siena, Fortini and Sermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of literature absorbing in itself the specific character of a country, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... running into a cow just for 'speriment. Just let him try it once. They tangle up in your bogies, all slippery bones and hide, slither along with you a yard or two, and the next thing you know is you're over an embankment and your widder is putting in for insurance. Tell your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... order of his going. Whereupon Fanny darted nimbly to one side, out of the way of boyish brown fists. In that moment she was transformed from a raging fury into a very meek and trembling little girl, who looked shyly and pleadingly out from a tangle of curls. The boys were for ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... never reaches it, but loses itself in a grubby tangle of smaller streets, thickly set with small houses, densely and untidily populated, the section known at first derisively and later in good faith as Paddy Lane. Through the intricate geography of this quarter Colonel ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... carpet, then showed its structure of red, syenite granite, similar to slabs of lapis-lazuli. On some heights the sarsaparilla abounded, a plant with fleshy tubercles, which formed an inextricable tangle. The forest, with the narrow ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... on week by week and succeeded, as I now believe, in producing absolutely the most formless and incoherent work of fiction which was ever put in type. Scores of letters were sent week by week to the editor protesting against its continuance, and at last I had worked all my characters into such a tangle that, with the exception of the hero and heroine and a few subordinates, whose fate it was not necessary to particularise, I sent them all into a coal-mine, flooded the workings and drowned the ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... lost, almost, in a deep chair, under a lime-tree. The garden was a tangle of late blooming flowers; everything growing rank and fast, as though to get as much out of the soil and the sun as possible, before the first frost made execution. It was surrounded by old red walls that held the dropping sun, and it was full of droning ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... selvage of low vegetation—ipom[oe]a, white and mauve-flowered; rushes and tangle-grass, a variety of salsolaceae, and the cyperus, whose stalk is used like the kalam, or reed-pen, further east. These growths are filmed with spiders' webs, whose central shafts lead to their nests. The highest levels, only a few feet above water, are grown with a dense bush that ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... recalling Gay's first flush of romance and devotion; her own clever, untiring methods of pushing him into the front ranks; Mary and Mary's little secret, so unsafe in Trudy's keeping; Beatrice, who did not know quite how many rings she possessed; the whole maddening and really uninteresting tangle—she wondered if she could force Gay to buy her a ring. Should she boldly order such-and-such a stone and pick out a setting and present him with the bill? Why she hesitated she did not know; she was like all her ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... be indifferent and offended. Master Humfrey might do as he chose. She did not care if he did prefer pitch and tar, and whale blubber and grease, to hawks and hounds, and lords and ladies. She was sure she wanted no more great lubberly lads—with a sly cut at Diccon—to tangle her silk, and torment her to bait their hooks. She was well quit of any ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Shall it be the bit of garden underneath my window, with the tangle of pinks and roses, and the cabbages growing appetisingly beside the sweet-williams, the woodbine climbing over the brown stone wall, the wicket-gate, and the cherry-tree with its fruit hanging red against the whitewashed cottage? Ah, if I could only paint it so truly that you could hear the drowsy ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... accompany that progress; he believed that by foresight and wise ordering many of the dangers could be averted. The fears and hopes of the citizen guided and sustained in Tocqueville a philosophical intelligence. Turning from America to France, he designed to disengage from the tangle of events the true historical significance of the Revolution. Only one volume, L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution, was accomplished. It can stand alone as a work of capital importance. In the great ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... settled himself in an old tool-shop, corn-house, or rude out-building of some sort that had belonged to the ruined cottage. Here he had set up his house-hold gods; and since no one else had ever wanted a home in this dreary tangle of berry bushes, where the only shade came from stunted pines that flung shriveled arms to the sky and dropped dead cones to the sterile earth, ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... very miserable," she wrote. "Sometimes I could almost wish to die—just to get us all out of this terrible tangle. You'd be happier—after a time, when you'd got over the first feeling of loss and loneliness; and, however lonely and unhappy you'd be without me, it would be nothing to the misery I should bring you, ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... with their handbags, started across the great square before the station. Almost at once they found themselves in a tangle of vehicular traffic that quite confused Bess, and even troubled ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... was a witching tangle of shadows, and the air was drowsy with spicy, wind-blown scents, as four motor cars swept on their merry ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... consummation being prevented by the girl's brother Pimonio, who refuses to countenance the match, and keeps dragon guard over his sister. In the meanwhile shepherds and shepherdesses assemble to honour the festival and sacrifice of Pan, which proves the occasion for the unravelling of the amorous tangle. Stellinia, wishing to rid herself of her rival in Erasto's love, induces Callinome so far to break her vestal vow as to be present at the forbidden feast. Here she is promptly detected by the offended goddess and sentenced to do battle against ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... boy answered. "The Census Inspector and I have to go to 'Frisco to straighten out a Chinese tangle over the census there. The Chinese refused point-blank to have anything to do with the census, and there ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... assented Mr. Thurston. "Remember, boys, I can't go any further until this tangle is settled. Come back ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... of course, I had missed my proper Denver connection, owing to the wreck delay. But, a passenger agent directing me, I found the evening Union Pacific train waiting at another platform. A short half-hour later the tangle of railroad yards in the river "bottoms" was left behind and the overland train was boring westward into ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... I was in my room, lying face down on my bed—seeing no hope on any side, and sobbing my heart out for what might have been but for the hard law of my religion and the cruel tangle of my fate. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... reach from it, a light burned dimly in one narrow window. I did not ask myself why I did it, but in another moment I had clambered to the place, and, standing there, I bent forward to my right, pulled away the tangle of ivy that filled half the niche, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... of a girl, who is running with all her might towards the pine trees; she disappears amongst the thick foliage of the underbrush ere the guide can come up to her, but leaping from off his horse, he follows her closely, and notes the spot wherein she has hidden herself amidst a tangle of creeping vines and maple bushes. He awaited our coming, and, motioning us to surround the place of concealment quickly, remained still as a statue whilst we arranged our little detachment so as to preclude any chance ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... or leisure. And he was intoxicated by the sunshine. When he rode through the bush his head reeled a little at the beauty that surrounded him. The country was indescribably fertile. In parts the forest was still virgin, a tangle of strange trees, luxuriant undergrowth, and vine; it gave an impression that was mysterious ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... Kabul and Kurram rivers. It is a fine pine clad chain with a general level of 12,000 feet, and its skyline is rarely free from snow. It culminates in the west near Paiwar Kotal in Sikaram (15,620 feet). To the west of the Peshawar and Kohat districts is a tangle of hills and valleys formed by outlying spurs of the Safed Koh. This difficult country is in the occupation of Afridis and Orakzais, who are under our ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... Tripp's face grew deeper. He frowned seriously from his tangle of hair. He separated his hands and emphasized his answer ...
— Options • O. Henry
... mild little mate, past a fountain whose spray flung out to them a welcome. She led the way with the accustomed step of one who knew and loved the place. They came to a marble seat, half hidden by a tangle of vines and scarlet blossoms, and sheltered by overhanging oleander branches; there she sat down and moved her skirts aside that he might sit close to her. Her brown eyes, raised now to his hungry gray ones, looked at him with the softened brilliance ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... small net so you can catch him. I'm going to shake him down as I would a ripe apple. If you catch him in the net he will tangle himself up so ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... carelessly. "Well, Mr. Coulson, I won't take up any more of your time. I am convinced that you have told me all that you know, and I am afraid that I shall have to look elsewhere to find the loose end of this little tangle." ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... than others a hint to keep their sentences straight, and to avoid the tangle of parentheses, long or short. Here, again, Mr Spurgeon gives me an admirable illustration. His sentences, never thin or weak in matter, are always straight. If any of my younger Brethren are tempted, as I confess I am, in the digressive direction, ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... black, but attentive, as always, to the sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at became at once more significant to him—the tangle of tenacious roots that thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods, the swift, awkward flight ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... a great deal of tripping and floundering through soft mud and mire, with slippery moss-stones sandwiched in, and dwarfed bushes which ran along the ground, and twisted themselves in an almost impassable tangle. These had a knack of catching a fellow's feet, and causing him to sprawl forward on his face and hands, whereupon his knapsack would hit him an ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... aunts declare it was the cousin she refused!" Willoughby's brain turned over. He righted it for action, and crossed the room to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. His ears tingled. He and his whole story discussed in public! Himself unroofed! And the marvel that he of all men should be in such a tangle, naked and blown on, condemned to use his cunningest arts to unwind and cover himself, struck him as though the lord of his kind were running the gauntlet of a legion of imps. He ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... approach to success was made by my dear friend George William Curtis of New York, who, in admirable temper, and clear voice, unraveled the tangle, as he understood it, and seemed just about to start the convention fairly on its way, when some marplot arose to suggest that some minor point in Mr. Curtis's exposition was not correct, thus calling out a tumult of conflicting statements, the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Pin was but a poor climber, and, as she clung trembling to her branch, needed so much prompting in her lines—even then to repeat them with such feeble emphasis—that Laura invariably lost patience with her and the love-scene ended in a squabble. Passing behind a wooden fence which was a tangle of passion-flower, she opened the door of the fowl-house, and out strutted the mother-hen followed by her pretty brood. Laura had given each of the chicks a name, and she now took Napoleon and Garibaldi up in her ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... drama. For her participation Edith felt she couldn't be too grateful to a relative on whom she had no urgent claim beyond the fact that she was now her only one. Aunt Emily's clear vision might, indeed, be said to have found the way through a tangle of poignant conditions in which her own poor heart had been able to do ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... gold. Down the streets went women in picturesque garb carrying on their heads baskets full to the brim of purple violets that scented the air as they passed—children ragged and dirty ran along, pushing the luxuriant tangle of their dark locks away from their beautiful wild antelope eyes, and, holding up bunches of roses and narcissi with smiles as brilliant as the very sunshine, implored the passengers to buy "for the sake of the little ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... dislike of business. I used to moon. We were so troubled with business-troubles we had no time to live. We never really got to know each other. I used to think my mother was hard and unsympathetic because her view of life wasn't mine—as if it could be. It was a miserable tangle. There was my father, whose love for us made him leave us that horrible legacy of investments. And my mother was so busy providing for us she had no leisure to love us. And my brother and I were so different in temper and age and inclination we simply ignored each ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... by, the scarlet figure of little Melissa came shyly out of the dark shadows behind and drew shyly closer and closer, until she was crouched in the chimney corner with her face shaded from the fire by one hand and a tangle of yellow hair, listening and watching him with her big, solemn eyes, quite fearlessly. Already the house was full of children and dependents, but no word passed between old Joel and the old mother, for no word was necessary. Two waifs who had so suffered and who could so fight could ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... muffled reply from the corner where a struggling tangle of clothes, hands and feet ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... did not always disturb the scholastic philosophic basis from which their work derived. For example, in his impressive De formato foetu, published in 1604, when Sir Kenelm Digby was one year old, Fabricius all too often submerges a substantial body of observations within a dense tangle of philosophical discussion. Thus, in the same treatise that contains the first illustrations and commendably accurate descriptions of the daily progress of the chick's development, Fabricius devotes an inordinate amount of space to tedious discussions of material and efficient ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... the woods, and the tree branches were so low-hanging that they were willing enough to walk their horses. Soon the tangle grew so thick they were forced to dismount and ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... and tangle of berry bushes, breaking through the wild grape vines that slapped him in the face and caught his pole; and, creeping and ducking under them, at last he struck the little path to the Cherry Brook, that gurgled its way along Farmer ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... this company now?" asked Deck, as he and his men moved out of the tangle to the sides of ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... was in a garden, beautiful to his eyes beyond all words, with broad terraces and gleaming marble steps where peacocks strutted; with at one end a fountain banked in a tangle of roses, where sprays of water fell with silvery splash and tinkle; with marble seats and statues gleaming from the cool gloom of trees. Around the garden were high walls, vine-hung, with the surrounding buildings ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... upon Coole Castle, where dwells the ogre of her house. Above Coole, and about two miles farther on, lies Aghyohillbeg, the residence of Madam O'Connor, that terrible descendant of one of Ireland's kings; whilst below, nestling among its firs and beeches, is Kilmore, where the Halfords—a merry tangle of boys and girls—may ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... windows, she found herself overlooking part of a wilderness of garden, which revealed itself through an arch in an overgrown laurel hedge. She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park beyond ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... part of nature's economy, which added much to its charm—it was the crowding abundance, the over-fulness of leaf, bud, and blossom. Nature there displayed no bare expanses of naked soil, as in some too-carefully-kept modern parterres; the dull earth was covered with a tangle of ready-growing, self-sowing, lowly flowers, that filled every space left unoccupied by statelier garden favorites, and crowded every corner with cheerful, though unostentatious, bloom. And the close juxtaposition, and even intermingling, of flowers with herbs, vegetables, and fruits gave ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... lady dozed in her brief respites from pain, she tried to carry on her lessons alone, but with indifferent success. She was too tired to concentrate her mind. Trigonometry rapidly became a hopeless tangle to her; Ancient History a stupid jumble of unrelated dates. And most of all, as the days went by, she felt the indifference of University folk. Nobody cared that she had dropped out, it seemed ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... it! I never saw anything in all my born life with so many rules attached to it as this wireless business. It is one tangle of rules, rules, rules! You might as well be tied up in a ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... sputtered and fizzed herself off up-stream. By this time it was the afternoon, and I almost despair of making you see the woodland beauty of that broad mere, fringed down to the water's edge on one side with shrubs and tangle of roses and woodbine, with ferns and every lovely green creeping thing. That was on the bank which was sheltered from the high winds: the other hillside showed the contrast, for there, though green indeed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... suppressed excitement, the cold, bitter lines about her mouth. Incongruously, the thought crossed his mind that he'd hate to have this woman against him. She looked as though she would be capable of more than he'd care to tangle with. For all her lovely face there was an edge of thin ice to her smile, a razor-sharp, dangerous quality that made him curiously uncomfortable. But now she was nervous, withdrawing a cigarette from his pack with trembling fingers, fumbling with his lighter until he struck a match ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... half the night, but without coming any nearer to solving the problem, and at last, thoroughly tired, I went to bed. Out of the whole tangle one thing only was plain—Etienne Cordel was playing a desperate game, and no scruples would prevent him from ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... road and he smiled at the recollection of his first hunt. A quail whistled from the tangle of blackberry briars by the roadside. He looked quickly and saw the bob white sitting on the top rail ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... was. That was the hard knot in my thread. Nothing wouldn't go past that. Some, when they git things in a tangle, they just reach for the shears an' cut the thread. I wa'n't brought up that way. I was taught to leave the shears alone. So I went on stringin' one year after another. But they wouldn't join on to them that went before. There was ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... the Ego, shines clear, free from the entanglements of the web and unaffected by the magnetic glamour of the Moon. And lo! the coffin is filled with stones, a symbol of death and the Moon, which is but a casket of stones. Therefore, little monad, caught in the tangle of the web of life and the glamour of earthly things, take heart, for, beyond all, is the star of your being. Call down the law of that star into yourself, and the web is broken and waves its tattered shreds in the breeze. The moonlight, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... crowned with low-growing trees and shrubs, a ruddy precipice, groups of pandanus palms, beach lined with casuarinas, banks of snow-white coral debris, ridge of sharped-edged rocks jutting out to the north-western cove and out-lying reef of coral, tangle of orchids and scrub all in miniature—save the orchids—gigantic and gross and profuse of old-gold bloom. In October and November hosts of sea-birds come hither to nest, and so also do nutmeg or Torres Straits pigeons, blue doves, peaceful ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... hurried into his clothes a strong temptation came to him to tell Bangs the whole story. Then Bangs would understand everything, and he, Laurie, would have the benefit of Rodney's advice and help in untying Doris's tangle. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... noble master was in worse case than the man. His fine forehead was a tangle of livid cords; his baggy jowl filled out like a balloon. In another second he had abandoned his place as our host and fled the room; and in yet another we had forgotten ours as his guests and rushed headlong at ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... all over creation, whirling their ropes, yelling, shooting in the air—just like you see on any well-conducted ranch. Once in a while the old lady herself, being a demon rider, would rope an animal and fetch it down; but brother and sister was very careful not to tangle their own ropes on anything. They didn't shoot their guns with any proper spirit, either; and when they tried to yip like cowboys they sounded like rabbits. And brother having to smoke brown-paper cigarettes, which he hated like poison ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... spring, Charley was quicker. He dug his spur cruelly into his little pony's flank. With a neigh of pain the animal leaped forward. For a moment there was a tangle of striking hoofs and wriggling coils of the foiled reptile, while Charley leaning over in his saddle struck with the butt-end of his riding whip at the writhing coils. Though it seemed an eternity ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... by what appears to be a daily clean up, though the writer has never met the public benefactor who makes all tidy in the early morning hours before the steamers have discharged their crowds. Possibly this is the same individual who keeps the tangle of blackberry and tamarisk pruned down so that while resting with "Sir Walter Scott" or "Shakespeare" we may duly admire ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... Joyce," I said, "we won't just bother about anything for the rest of the day. We'll be cheerful and jolly and foolish, like we were on Friday. God knows how all this infernal tangle is going to pan out, but we may as well snatch one evening's happiness out of it while we've ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... worm fence grew a stubborn tangle of briers, vines, and cane. "Mind you," I began to call after the nigger-chaser, but one of my companions spoke ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... where patches of taro spread its magnificent leaves over the earth, we slowed to a walk. The jungle tangle was all about us; a thousand bright flowers, scarlet, yellow, purple, crimson, splashed with color the masses of green; tall ferns uncurled their fronds; giant creepers coiled like snakes through the boughs, and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... she mentioned. It was woven at Adeline Carter's, one of the bitterest enemies of the Gorleys, but the sacrifice of her pride did her no good because she was long at rest before Zebbie knew. He had been greatly grieved because no stone marked her grave, only a tangle of rose-briers. So he bought a stone, and in the night before Decoration Day he and two of Uncle Buck's grandsons went to the Gorley burying-ground and raised it to the memory of sweet Pauline. Some of the Gorleys still live there, so he came home at once, fearing if ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... selected—all except Bradley. He stood watching Tippet and the bear. The man had a good start and the tree was not far away; but the speed of the enormous creature behind him was something to marvel at, yet Tippet was in a fair way to make his sanctuary when his foot caught in a tangle of roots and down he went, his rifle flying from his hand and falling several yards away. Instantly Bradley's piece was at his shoulder, there was a sharp report answered by a roar of mingled rage and pain from the carnivore. Tippet attempted to ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and addressed him. "Young man, I know you better than I did, and rate you higher. I overheard your talk with my daughter just now, as I had a right to do, and I esteem you a brave and honorable man. You have already shown that you can serve the state. If there comes a happy way out of this tangle, I shall be glad to welcome you again. But now it were ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in this bewildering tangle, with the universe filled with sound and strangeness, and the scent of wood smoke mingling with the heat of the air, and the lust of the chase in our veins, we drew to the spot where the animal was guessed to be hiding, and knew that the guess was true by the demeanour of the elephants. ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... Bell was tall and slender, with jet-black eyes and hair, the latter being pushed back into a curly tangle. He was sensitive and high-strung, very much the artist and the man of science. His enthusiasms were intense, and, once his mind was filled with an idea, he followed it devotedly. He was very little the ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... had done enormous damage to the Vulture and its attacking men. Cannon shots from the opening sally, and at such close range, had broken two of its three masts, and the decks of the Vulture were a clutter and tangle of lines, sails and splintered spars. The fact that the men of the Mirabelle were in better physical shape than the pirates stood them in good stead, for their agility and strength had carried them through the battle even against the wilier and more murderous knowledge of ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... water-bottle with him; and he knew that there was no stream to be met with in the jungle for many miles. But he was aware that the forest could supply his wants. Rising, he drew his kukri and looked around him. Among the tangle of creepers festooned between the trees he detected the writhing coils of one with withered, cork-like bark, four-sided and about two inches in diameter. He walked over to it and, grasping it in his left hand, cut it through with a blow of ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... Wherefore, whenever the camp's invaded by any over-enlightened people who's gone too far in schools for the rest of us to break even with, we ups an' plays Doc Peets or Colonel Sterett onto 'em; an' the way either of them gents would turn in an' tangle said visitors up mental don't bother 'em a bit. That's straight; Peets an' the Colonel is our refooge; they're our protectors; an' many a time an' oft, have I beheld 'em lay for some vain-glorious savant who's got ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... this matter out at last. You think I've behaved unspeakably, trailing you everywhere, and I don't deny I have, according to your point of view. But the fact is, I didn't follow you to annoy you; I'm a half-way decent fellow. You have simply got to trust me until I've seen you through this tangle. After that, if you like you need never look ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... and they walked on through Chalk Farm, through Camden Town, into the tangle of mean streets by Euston, and then across the Euston Road to Bloomsbury. They did not speak to each other until they ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
