"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... 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
... a tangle of doubt. Yet one clear thread of determination she held. She must give her confidence to somebody—she must relate her suspicions to some person who was ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... 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
... tangle of small flat-tops, crisscrossed by a network of badland washes and cut-bank draws, and for two miles he eluded the dog pack by sheer brainwork and cunning. But the hounds pressed him hard. Their speed was greater than his own and each time they lost sight of ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... 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
... 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; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... 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
... 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 Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... 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
... tangle A wanderer winging went, And with many a ruby spangle Were his tawny vans besprent. And he hovered one moment stilly O'er the thicket, her mazy bower, Then he sank to the heart of the lily, And they ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... 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
... 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 in his brain. ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 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 |
