"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the froth of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Poins 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 each one ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... writhed and flicked a tangle of tentacles; serpentine, whiplike. Silvery white, they were dyed with the scarlet and orange flaming of the surface now hidden from my eyes; reflected those sullen and angry gleamings. Vermiceous, coiling, they seemed to drop from every inch of the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... was a flat-topped mesa eroded to fantastic mockery of some bastioned fort. In the round-topped hills behind it was Noches, fifty miles away. Beyond lay the tangle of hills, rising to the saw-toothed range now painted with orange and mauve and a hint of deepening purple. For dusk was already slipping down ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... 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 Own, insisted on parading his battalion ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... to get quit of such selfreproaches. He found himself in a tortuous tangle of roads, and as the dusk was coming on, emerged, not at Petworth but at Easebourne, a mile from Midhurst. "I'm getting hungry," said Mr. Hoopdriver, inquiring of a gamekeeper in Easebourne village. "Midhurst a mile, and Petworth ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... threaten and the boys' patriotism is tested in a peculiar international tangle. The scene is laid on the South ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... 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. Polly's ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... been as inseparable as their respective duties to husband and grandfather allow. And so the web of life is woven, the puzzling strands resolving themselves out of what has seemed to be a hopeless tangle into ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... was still high in the heavens, far to the northward, they faintly heard or thought they heard two rifle shots. At four o'clock, as they toiled through a tangle of rock and stunted pine, Arnold, riding well to the front, came suddenly out upon a bare ledge from which he could look over a wild, wide sweep of mountain side, stretching leagues to north and south, and there his keen and practiced eye was greeted by a sight that thrilled him with dread ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... more fatal tone with Ruth at that moment. All the afternoon she had been a complicated tangle of fretted nerves. Her quarrel with Kirk, Bailey's visit, a conscience that would not lie down and go to sleep at her orders, but insisted on running riot—all these things had unfitted her to bear up amiably ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... she was ready, the same weakness that she had encouraged in him was helping take him away from her. And the pitiful tragedy of it was that Peter was helping too, and then challenging her to accept still graver dangers through him. It was a pitiful tangle, and yet one that she must allow ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... powerless you are? I have but to will you to kill him and your first cursed failure on Malabar Hill will be washed out with his infidel blood. You will do well to yield peaceably. The thread of your very existence passes through my hands, to cut or tangle it as I list—yield you must!' With this he strode frantically from the room, leaving me more dead than alive. As he disclosed his fiendish secret something about my heart kept tightening with every word till, at length, it seemed as if it must burst, so terrible was the pressure. I could ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... only seas possible for summer," he replied— "With the winter one goes south, as a matter of course, though I'm not sure that it is always advisable. I have found the Mediterranean tiresome very often." He broke off and seemed to lose himself for a moment in a tangle of vexed thought. Then he resumed quickly:— "Well, next week, then. Rothesay ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... found myself wondering if the dawn were coming; the tri-night hour was long since passed; the auroral lights as I could sometimes see them through the tangle of vegetation overhead, were low in the sky. Insects—and sometimes larger beings—leaped and slithered unseen before my advance. But I did not heed them. Eyes may have peered at me as I stumbled through the blackness of the undergrowth; ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... "Mr. Tangle," says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something restless under the eloquence of that ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... know only his private part in the struggle down in the murky tangle of the scaffold base. But there was fighting up on the Platform itself. A savagely grinning Mohawk wrestled furiously with a man on one of the rocket tubes. An incendiary device in the saboteur's pocket ignited, and it flamed red-hot and he screamed as it burned its way out of his garments. The ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... could an automobile be doing in that unfrequented lane, and where was the owner of it? Fearfully she entered the ravine, and ventured a few steps toward the green tangle that hid the ruined cabin. When she came in sight of it, panic conquered curiosity, and she turned to run. It was very dark and ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... a'm a 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 might ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... was 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 island with ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... 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 ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Mexico needed a wise and clever ruler to straighten out the tangle into which its affairs had fallen, and it was supposed that Maximilian, backed by his beautiful and clever wife, would be just the man for the post. As Mexican affairs were in a very turbulent state, Napoleon promised Maximilian that he would keep a ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1. No. 23, April 15, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... desk, addressed to his creditors. It expresses regret for their losses, and promises, if his life is spared, and fortune favors him, to do all in his power to make them good. No one doubts Mr. Fielding's integrity, and regrets are expressed that he did not remain in the city and help unravel the tangle in which his affairs are involved. He is a man of ability, and as he is still in the prime of life, it may be that he will be able to redeem his promises and pay his debts in full, if ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... skin, blinded by the deluge of torrential rain, thoroughly confused beyond all recognition of his whereabouts in the tangle of bush through which he was thrusting his way, all his senses dazed by the fierce overhead detonations, and the streams of blazing fire splitting the black vault above, Big Brother Bill beat his way along the path of least ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... still another the seven beads or 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
... were young, the Deckers had lived in a sagging old frame house (from which the original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten, russet-apple tree in the yard, an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front porch, and an uncut brush of sunburned ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... Boeufs and Gueudecourt were renewed, in conjunction with French operations against the Sailly-Saillisel heights and St. Pierre Vaast Wood. Considerable further progress was achieved. Our footing at the crest of Le Transloy Spur was extended and secured, and the much-contested tangle of trenches at our junction with the French left at last passed definitely into our possession. Many smaller gains were made in this neighborhood by local assaults during these days, in spite of the difficult conditions of the ground. In particular, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... sparrow-hawk, and jay, Built, those far ages gone, in this year's way. And the first man who walked the cliffs of Rame, As I this year, looked down and saw the same Blotches of rusty red on ledge and cleft With grey-green spots on them, while right and left A dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying, Wheeling and crossing and darting, crying and crying, Circling and crying, over and over and over, Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover. And below on a rock against the grey sea fretted, Pipe-necked and stationary and silhouetted, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... the tangle of pedestrians and into the entrance of a corner candy-shop. "Aw, now, what's your hurry?" he insisted, regarding her with smiling, ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... 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
... cafe! He himself half determined, in his hours of depression, when despair was his only hope, to ship as a sailor on board some man-of-war. He would at other times return to his first love, and vow he would be a painter; then music would solicit him; medicine next, and then surgery would tangle his eyes. These excursions, which commonly lasted three months each, were not fruitless; they increased his stock of information, and supplied him with some of his most striking images. He became joyous about this period, and his hilarity broke out all at once. One ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... had been lifted off her mind. At last they stopped at a little station called Whiteford. An old-fashioned carriage was waiting for them; they entered it and the driver, whipped up his horses. A drive of a half mile brought them to an ideal white cottage surrounded by porches and hidden in a tangle of vines. The door was opened for them by the Rev. John Langdon in person. He seemed a preternaturally grave young man to Anna and his clerical attire was above reproach. Any misgivings one might have had regarding him on the score ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... in the sorry tangle! She had always known vaguely that Billy was one with her, that his heart was the ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand; he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and stalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... 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 ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... herselfe with white, Whose cheekes are naturally mixt with redd, Either because she thinks pale-lookes moves most: Or of an answereable nice affect To other of her modest qualities; Because she wood not with the outward blaze Of tempting beauty tangle wanton eies; And so be troubled with their tromperies: Which construe as thou wilt, I make it knowne, That thy free comment may examine it, As willinger to tell truth of my Neece, Then in the least degree ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... literature, if he is so inclined, after he has ceased to be a pupil. 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 ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... reaction to this speech she could not help hearing; and inwardly, at least, her feeling must have been similar to Stanton's. She forgot the object of this climb and looked off to her right at the green level without really seeing it. A vague sadness weighed upon her soul. Was there to be a tangle of fates here, a conflict of wills, a crossing of loves? Flo's terse confession could not be taken lightly. Did she mean that she loved Glenn? Carley began to fear it. Only another reason why she must persuade Glenn to go back East! But ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... lunch at the Corridor Restaurant Elaine had returned to Manchester Square (where she was staying with one of her numerous aunts) in a frame of mind that embraced a tangle of competing emotions. In the first place she was conscious of a dominant feeling of relief; in a moment of impetuosity, not wholly uninfluenced by pique, she had settled the problem which hours of hard thinking ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... a fine tangle in law, Polly," remarked Mr. Latimer. "You see, Montresor made you his sole heiress, so the mine is yours, not only by inheritance, but also by rediscovery after it was lost in ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... 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, which do well, ...
— 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
... wife that I had found the place where we were going to live, and that sick-room was filled with the scent of spring flowers and of balsam and pine as the children listened and cheered with their feeble little voices. The very next week I picked out the lots I wanted. There was a tangle of trees growing on them that are shading my study window now as I write. I did not have any money, but right then an insurance company was in need of some one to revise its Danish policies, and my old friend General C. T. Christensen thought I would ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... think I never worked harder in my life than I did setting things to rights after our centennial; but I had one consolation through it, and that was the happiness of the two young things, who had had indirectly their love tangle smoothed out by it. ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... reefs; monuments of misdirected literary energy, which leave upon the mind of the reader no effect but that of a multiplicity of words and the suggested vignette of a lusty old gentleman scrambling among tangle. It is to be remembered that he came to engineering while yet it was in the egg and without a library, and that he saw the bounds of that profession widen daily. He saw iron ships, steamers, and the locomotive engine, introduced. He lived to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the 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 come and ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... knotless thread, please," she continued, having decided upon a thimble after much careful thought. "Oh, no—not that! I don't mean the kind that won't take a knot at the end; what I want is the kind that won't tangle and snarl, even if a child's fingers are tired. There, that's it!" and she tucked a smiling little spool into ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... sentences he explained to the inspector the facts about the letter and the cipher. MacDonald sat with his chin on his hands and his great sandy eyebrows bunched into a yellow tangle. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... just above a balcony, and almost beyond 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 was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... regiments, led by Colonel Jenkins, made a flank movement, and by a desperate assault, took the redoubt on the left, with six pieces of artillery. When Rhodes' North Carolina Brigade got sufficiently through the tangle and undergrowth and near the opening as to see their way clear, they raised a yell, and with a mad rush, they took the fort with a bound. They were now within the strong fortress on the left and masters of the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... sat looking earnestly in the lad's agitated countenance, for his brow was one tangle of ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... 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 in ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... the hard road with the shock of a railway collision; rolled over and over like dogs in a scrap, only there wasn't any growling or yelping. It was deadly quiet; not for an instant could you tell which was which, or whether the whirling, pelting tangle of arms and legs was man, beast or devil. That's why, even when I got near enough, I didn't dare plant a large, ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... think of it, if I ever have time to think of anything beyond this tangle. But now, it must be au revoir. Save me, save Raoul, if you can, Ivor. What you can do, I don't know. I'm groping in darkness. Yet you're my one hope. For pity's sake, come to my house when the play's over, to tell me what you've ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... the others, so that its features remained comparatively perfect, and about them hung a tangle of golden hair. Moreover, a broad battle-axe ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... conflict. Swede and German, Papist and Lutheran! neither will give way To the other; every hand's against the other. Each one is party and no one a judge. Where shall this end? Where's he that will unravel This tangle, ever tangling more and more It must be cut asunder. I feel that I am the man of destiny, And trust, with your assistance, to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the sun here was of almost midsummer strength. There was no sound. The great house seemed asleep. There was nothing but the droning of a few insects. Even the birds were songless. The walls were covered with drooping clematis and roses, roses that twined over the balustrades. Below them was a tangle of mimosa trees and rhododendrons, and further below still the blue Mediterranean. She sank into ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... waters, 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: ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... been shocked at the waste of good money had she seen them—and launched into his sea dreams, Again I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, colored and distorted by that which he had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like the muttered song through a City telephone in the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... rides as fast as the thick standing trunks, and tangle of undergrowth will allow. The darkness also obstructs him; for it is night. Withal he advances rapidly, though cautiously; at intervals glancing back, at longer ones, delaying to listen, with ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... magnificent railway station late that night—true American rain was descending in sheets—I was carrying away with me an impression, as it were, of a gigantic plantation of public edifices in a loose tangle and undergrowth of thoroughfares: which seemed proper for a legislative and administrative metropolis. I was amused to reflect how the city, like most cities, had extended in precisely the direction in which its founders had never imagined it would extend; and naturally ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... sir;" and the boy led the way rapidly through what looked like a pathless tangle, until below a sharp ledge of rocks they struck a little stream by whose side they found a narrow but easy passage into the very heart of ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... fall impotently on the body of the man who now grappled with him, face to face, Hector Hall throwing himself into the tangle from the rear. Mackenzie, seeing his assault shaping for a speedy end in his own defeat, now attempted to break away and seek shelter in the dark among the bushes. He wrenched free for a moment, ducked, ran, only to come down in a ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... steadily forward. It was only 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, and ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... exposed to their artillery fire was crowded with the white tents of a numerous army. In the hollows and on the middle slopes canvas villages gleamed like patches of snowdrops. The iron bridge across the Blue Krantz River lay in a tangle of crimson-painted wreckage across the bottom of the ravine, and the railway ran over an unpretentious but substantial wooden structure. All along the line near the station fresh sidings had been built, and many trains concerned in the business of supply occupied ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... twisted the course of true love This ditty explains, No tangle's so tangled it cannot improve ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... have 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
... the maid of the loch which rose before him struck him as no unpleasant one. He remembered for one thing how the sun shone through the tangle of her hair. But he had quite forgotten, on the other hand, at what part of his exegesis he had left off. It was, however, a manifest impossibility for him to slip out again. Besides, he was in mortal terror lest Mr. Welsh should ask for his Hebrew Bible, or offer to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... 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
... direction, with seeming aimlessness. Heavily barbed it was, and bad stuff to get caught in. One of the great reasons for the preliminary bombardment that usually precedes an attack is to cut this wire. If charging men are caught in a bad tangle of wire they can be wiped out by machine gun-fire before ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... he?" she said. "It is so difficult for an American to understand these things. We are supposed to have the peerage by heart; but we haven't. It's all a mystery and a tangle to us, even the best of us. But I try not to make mistakes. And now I want you to tell me that we are friends. That ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... steepest incline a tumult arose as men and dogs struggled together in an effort to free themselves from overturned sleds. Above the cursing in French and English—but not in Indian—rose the howling of the dogs as lead-loaded lashes whistled through the frosty air. One wondered how such a tangle could ever be unravelled, but soon all was ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... in my account of this experiment, for the reason that it illustrates very aptly the inextricable tangle of truth and error which most 'spirit communications' present. It typifies in little the elusive problem of spirit identification which many a veteran investigator is still at work upon, after years of study. Maxwell gives a case of long-continued unintentional and unconscious ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... cancer deep into the ground, lingering hidden until suspicion has passed; then it asserts itself in a new outbreak in places least suspected. When it is all over the region lies desolate for years. It becomes a waste, a tangle of briers—pitiful upstarts of trees and ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... 3 had glimpsed a bevy of angry train officials eddying around a sturdy figure in the center, whose strong, lean head rose confidently above the press. There was the momentary whirl of a scuffle, out of the tangle of which shot a brakeman as if propelled from a catapult. The circle parted, brushed aside by a pair of lean shoulders, muscular and broad. Yet a few moments and the owner of the shoulders led down the aisle to the vacant ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... Philip took instant advantage of her condition. Without a moment's hesitation he passed his arm firmly through hers, and before she could protest she was inside the place, being led to a table, seated there with her back to the wall, with a confused tangle of words still in her throat, unuttered. Then two great tears found their way into her eyes. She said nothing because she could not. Philip was busy talking to the waiter. Soon there was a cocktail by her side, and ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... similar misfortune 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 purple of ancient Orientals. On cool, cloudy days the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... certainly possible 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 passage of one of my own novels wrapt round ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... the wild gooseberry add to the tangle of the chaparral. The gooseberries when ripe are very red, as are the currants, but they are armored with a tough skin completely covered with sharp, hairy thorns. In Southern California all the fruit of the wild ribes have the thorns, but they do not compare in penetrating ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... applicant was a man of remarkable appearance. A fierce bull-dog face was framed in a tangle of hair and beard, and two bold, dark eyes gleamed behind the cover of thick, tufted, overhung eyebrows. He saluted and stood sailor-fashion, turning his cap ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to tangle her desires By wailful sonnets whose composed rime Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . . Say that upon the altar of her beauty You sacrifice your ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... moments before her rider saw the dark shadow of the woodlands come at him with a rush, and he plunged headlong into the gray twilight of their virgin depths. He had just time to crouch down in the saddle, with his face buried in the tangle of the creature's flying mane, when the drooping boughs, laden with their sad foliage, swept his back. He knew there were only two courses open to him. Either he must sit tight and chance his luck till the mad frolic ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... room, leaving Katharine a prey to a curious tangle of emotions. She watched him almost feverishly until he had disappeared, listened to his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the front door. Then she hurried to the window, watched him descend ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... courage to crouch among the charred stumps, enmeshed in that cruel tangle of wire, while the night was stabbed by daggers of fire and while the trocha awoke to the wild alarm. From somewhere in the distance came a shouted command and the sound of running feet, suddenly putting an end to further inaction. Antonio began to hack viciously with his machete, in an effort ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... falling away at the neck to reveal the soft, full curves where they flowed down to the swell of her bosom. She shook down her hair and gathered it loosely in a knot, leaving it as the wind and rain had tossed it into a bewildering tangle of ringlets about her face. One glance she threw at her mirror. Never had she appeared more lovely. The dead ivory of her skin, relieved by a faint flush in her cheeks, the lustrous eyes, now aglow with passion, all set in the frame ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... hearers and must respect the modern canons of the Story-telling Art. Among the many things therefore he could tell, an he would, he selects that only which will unravel a particular thread of fate in the tangle of endless consequences; which will render plausible the growth of passions on which, in a continuous life-drama, is based ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... 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 ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... impressed by the slow passage of Kingsborough feet. Beyond the court-house the breeze blew across the green, which was ablaze with buttercups. Beneath the warm wind the yellow heads assumed the effect of a brilliant tangle, spreading over the unploughed common, running astray in the grass-lined ditch that bordered the walk, hiding beneath dusty-leaved plants in unsuspected hollows, and breaking out again under the horses' hoofs in ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... he was puzzled. The sun, when it shone, was larger and fiercer than he had ever seen it, but it shone only for an instant. Blankets of cloud and fog hid it from view. Rain fell incessantly. Lush, rank vegetation covered the ground and rose in a tangle far overhead. The Jovians emerged from the space ship, the prisoners in their midst. A huge lizard, a hundred feet long, rushed at them but a flash of the disintegrating tubes dissolved it into dancing motes of light. The Jovians ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... so largely on the profuseness of their shaggy coats, but there is a general tendency to overdo it. A good stiff pair of dandy brushes give the best results, but the coats must not be allowed to mat or tangle, which they have a tendency to do if not properly attended to. Mats and tangles, if taken in time, can generally be teased out with the fingers, and it is the greatest mistake to try and drag them out with combs. These last should be used as little as possible, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... 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
... canoe, or pirogue, as it is called in the vernacular, we paddled out into the tangle of water-paths. The green carpet, studded with yellow and white, that we saw from the shores, resolved itself into a marvellously beautiful and varied vegetation. From the tangle of curious forms the eye selects ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... said Dan, pointing to a wild tangle of spare oars and dory-roding, all matted together by ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... possibly overestimate the ultimate importance of my adventure, for Mr. Adams, our minister of the court of St. James, seems to have failed to record it, or, at least, there is no allusion to it in his biography. In the perplexing tangle of the diplomacy of the darker days of our civil war, many strange stories must have passed unrecorded, but surely none of those remembered and written were more singular than the occurrences which disturbed the quiet of my uneventful official life ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... of that tangle, all of you," ordered Tom Craig, after pulling himself out of the squirming heap of boys. "It's against the rules to smother the referee to death. He has ...
— The Grammar School Boys of Gridley - or, Dick & Co. Start Things Moving • H. Irving Hancock
... quiet man, dressed in dark clothes, with a large limp straw hat; with something almost military in his moustache and whiskers, but with a quite unmilitary stoop and very dreamy eyes. He was gazing with a rather gloomy interest at the cluster, one might almost say the tangle, of small shipping which grew thicker as our little pleasure boat crawled up into Yarmouth Harbour. A boat entering this harbour, as every one knows, does not enter in front of the town like a foreigner, but creeps round at the back like a traitor taking the town in the rear. The passage ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... me 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
... Raphael's infallible instinct as a composer. He grows tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left something in ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... 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 ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... looked quite solemn as he promised to behave himself, but there was a twinkle in his eyes as he flew toward the Old Briar-patch. There he hid in a thick tangle of vines. Now it happened that Peter Rabbit had gone over to the sweet-clover patch, and little Mrs. Peter was quite alone. Somehow she got to thinking of her old home, and for the first time she began to ...
— Mrs. Peter Rabbit • Thornton W. Burgess
... shades of green from top to bottom. Black oak trees in their fresh, new garbs of early summer, intermingled with stately pines. All space between these trees was filled with a rich growth of all the flowering shrubs known to our California mountains. In the damper places a wild tangle of ferns and vines and bracken entirely hid the earth from view. Lilacs, white and purple, in full bloom emitted a fragrance which rendered the air intoxicating and nearly overpowered one's senses. ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... the only Englishmen there; the rest were of the races which do not fight bare-handed. The big Greek flashed a smile through the black, shining curls of his beard, and continued to smile without speaking. Through the tangle of incomprehensible conventions, he had arrived at ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... quick, but it was hard work to get the line free from the tangle that it had dragged ashore. There was no other line handy, and it began to seem as if the brave young fellow, who was a favourite with all but Terry, would be carried off to sea to a horrible lingering death, for all knew ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... prospect in the opposite direction, and taking wing, he started up the river. Following the channel, he winged his flight for miles over the cool sparkling water, between the tangle of foliage bordering the banks. When he came to the long cumbrous structures of wood with which men had bridged the river, where the shuffling feet of tired farm horses raised clouds of dust and set the echoes ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... love's sweetness and pain, of summer and its delights, of winter and its woes, now of joy and happiness, again of ill-starred fortunes. And what is the burden of the exiled Hebrew's song? Mysterious allusions, hidden in a tangle of highly polished, artificial, slow-moving rhymes, glorify, not a sweet womanly presence, but a fleeting vision, a shadow, whose elusive charms infatuated the poet in his dreams. Bright, joyous, blithe, unmeasured is the one; serious, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... machine and examined it in fascination. A powerful diesel generator stood nearby with banks of complicated electrical equipment, amid a spider-web tangle of wiring. Tom assumed this gear was for timing and synchronizing the shock waves. Evidently the whole setup was operated from a single control panel in the wall, studded with ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... huge trees had 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
... 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, where lay a chance ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... 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; while he lost his ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... that!—being much the same shade as her hair—with brown for her hat too, and the veil encircling the small crown thereof, and brown again for the stout, high, laced boots which protected her from the wet tangle underfoot. Who could have expected so dashing a young person as this to do any real work at painting? Yet she did, narrowing her eyes to the finest point of concentration, and applying herself to the task in hand with a persistence which I found, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... 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 ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... coat must always cause the Maltese dog to be admired; but the variety has never been commonly kept in England—a fact which is, no doubt, due to the difficulty of breeding it and to the trouble in keeping the dog's long jacket clean and free from tangle. Thirty or forty years ago it was more popular as a lap dog than it has ever been since, and in the early days of dog shows many beautiful specimens were exhibited. This popularity was largely due to the efforts of Mr. R. Mandeville, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... English to tangle everything up so that a man can make neither head nor tail of it. They know their story by heart,— the history of every statue, painting, cathedral, or other wonder they show you. They know it and tell ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... then disappeared within. I waited patiently, knowing that if she failed to discover the housekeeper, she would give some signal. Meanwhile I watched the weed-grown area about me carefully in search of any skulker observing our movements. I could see little through the tangle, yet succeeded in convincing myself that I was alone, and free to begin my explorations. Yet I faced this work with less enthusiasm than I felt when first proposing it. The knowledge that Philip Henley was alive; that any discoveries ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... Liverpool of medieval times. The Lynn of older days, later known as "King's Lynn," with its little crowded market shut in between Guildhall and Church, the booths then as now leaning against the church walls, and a tangle of narrow lanes leading to the river-side, was in no way fit for the great demands of an awakened commerce; its life went on as of old, but the sea was driven back by a vast embankment, and the "Bishop's Lynn" rose on the newly-won land ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... silence—trying to 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 to ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... you, child,' she said, as we were parting, 'and you must pray for me. I find that the habits of a lifetime are not easily uprooted; if I get into a tangle, I shall send for my little minister ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... jagged stumps and ploughed earth; against the yellow sky, the yellow glare of guns that squat like toads in a tangle of wire and piles of brass shell-cases and split wooden boxes. Long rutted roads littered with shell-cases stretching through the wrecked woods in the yellow light; strung alongside of them, tangled ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... through the needle, care being taken not to tangle the piece of "rope" from which they have been detached. There need be no waste if this operation is carefully done, as good silk will always divide into strands ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... 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 like wharf-rats to the rotten piles that shelter ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... "'Tis a tangle, and a tight one, my boy. Yet, by God's blessing, we may see our way out. Let us take one point at a time. These debts of yours—will you tell me, are they 'debts ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... Kafir lad called a "forelooper," who tugs at a rope fastened to the horns of the leading oxen, and in moments of general confusion invariably seems to pull the wrong string and get the whole team into an inextricable tangle of horns and yokes. Sometimes of a quiet Sunday morning these teams and wagons I see "out-spanned" on the green slopes around Maritzburg, making a picturesque addition to the sylvan scenery. Near each wagon a light wreath of smoke steals up into the summer ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... barrack-lanterns were lighted before the sunset gun. The sergeant himself and several of the guard had been called inside to the prison room by the commanding officer and his staff. There was a maze of brick and wooden buildings in front of the guard-house, and a perfect tangle of dense shrubbery only fifty yards away to the west. It was into this that most of the fugitives dived and were instantly lost to sight, while others had doubled behind the guard-house and rushed ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... get only disappointment.... Partly this is because our needs are the things we hide most jealously from each other, partly because we only see needs subjectively ... this is the explanation of most of the sex muddles that tangle life." ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... thou sadder sage, To thee! we feel thy spell! —The hopeless tangle of our age, Thou too ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... There is a 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 ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the quick change in the silhouette as he wheeled to retrace his beat. But there was no noise, not even the sound of his footsteps reaching us. Even as I gazed, lying nearly full length upon my horse, we had crossed the open, and a perfect tangle of low bushes hid us as completely as if we had entered the ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... those investigations in hybridisation which were occupying the 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 ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... tangle we were next morning extricated by news from the south ports of our coast—news so ill that sentimental tears and wishes were of a sudden forgot; being this: that the smallpox had come to Poor Luck Harbour and was there virulently raging. By noon of that day the doctor's ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... 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, and the climate very relaxing. ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... one, the second; and a little way the third. On the haystack, maybe you hit a soft spot, and maybe you struck a rock. Sometimes if you got smart, and tried a new place, and your feet caught in a tangle of weeds and stuck, you came up straight, pitched over, and landed on your head. THEN if you struck a rock, you were still, quite a while. I was once. But you never dared let mother see you—on the sofa, I mean; she didn't care about ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... way through the dense undergrowth of the lower slopes. Every kind of thorn-bush lay in wait for my skin, creepers tripped me up, high trees shut out the light, and I was in constant fear lest a black mamba might appear out of the tangle. It grew very hot, and the screes above the thicket were blistering to the touch. My tongue, too, stuck to the roof of my ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... to pick up his end of the canoe, and they went cautiously down through the tangle of grasses to the stream. The buoyant craft rested lightly on its surface; they stepped aboard, Henry Burns in the bow, his companion, Jack Harvey, in the stern, dipped their paddles joyously together, and went swiftly ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... 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. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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 late roses, and the spiky iron railings and the quiet ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... The McCallum house—her father's—stood at the other end of the row of maples on the same side of the street as the meeting house and a hundred yards or so distant. There was quite an expanse of greening lawn in front and to the south, whereon stood the summerhouse, and a tangle of rose bushes hid the decaying board fence which marked the southern boundary. Along the brick sidewalk stretched a line of ageing wooden pickets and about midway in their extent hung the wooden gate with the screak. The house was frame, low and wide-stretching, with an inviting verandah about ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... far West to Gaspe, while dealing indirectly with the three maritime provinces and all the troubles that proved too much for their own lieutenant-governors. There was no chance of concentrating on one thing at a time. Nothing would wait. The governor had to watch the writhing tangle as a whole during every minute he devoted to any one kinked and ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... when the mist was thickest, about two that morning. The Red Un was thrown out of his berth and landed, stark naked, on the floor. The Purser's boy was on the floor, too, in a tangle of bedding. There was a sickening silence for a moment, followed by the sound of opening doors and feet in the passage. There was very little speech. People ran for the decks. The Purser's ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... astonished at himself. For the dejection in her attitude and gait began to weigh upon him; he felt a warm desire to sustain and comfort her. More and more thought, more and more contrivance did he throw into the straightening out of this tangle between two excitable women, not, it seemed, for Lady Henry's sake, not, surely, for Miss Le Breton's sake. But—ah! those two poor, dead folk, who had touched his heart long ago, did he feel the hovering of their ghosts beside ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Tripp's face grew deeper. He frowned seriously from his tangle of hair. He separated his hands and emphasized his answer with one ...
— Options • O. Henry
... full of Arizona tangle-foot, to have fired as wild as he did," I ejaculated, and walked over to where the mail-car had stood, to see just how bad the shooting was. When I got there and faced about, it was really impossible to believe any man could have done so badly, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... made it almost impossible to see beyond a few yards ahead, but then the German trench was not more than fifty yards off and the space between was criss-crossed and interlaced and a-bristle with the tangle of barb-wire defences erected by both sides. For the twentieth time the look-out peered and twisted his head sideways to listen, and for the twentieth time he was just lowering his head beneath the sheltering parapet when he stopped and ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... in regard 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 ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... but he believed that she had paid homage to the complexity of life. For her, at all events, the expedition was neither easy nor jolly. Beauty, evil, charm, vulgarity, mystery—she also acknowledged this tangle, in spite of herself. And her voice thrilled him when she broke silence with "Mr. Herriton—come here—look ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... 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 ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... to 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
... strode through flowery tangle and woody thicket like a giant in sudden strength, snapping all that offered to detain his feet. He sought, he knew not why, the murmur and the motion of the river; and where young trees stood thickest, as spearsmen to guard the loneliness of its ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... that 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 adopted son; and yet because a sheet of paper expressing that desire could not be produced ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... 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, sometimes ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... 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 Everard's only openly declared enemy might ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... time when a man should pray," he said to himself, "but my thoughts tangle and my ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... cat's-claw bush at whose base lay a tangle of dead leaves. With a bit of stick, he scattered this litter, struck the ground several good blows and returned with a string of fat desert mice. With infinite care Cesca kindled a fire so tiny, so clear, that ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... 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
... flitter closer to the ground so that when a domed structure arose out of a tangle of overgrown shrubs and trees they were not more than fifty feet above it. There was no sign of life about the dwelling, if dwelling it was, and the unkempt straggle of growing things suggested that it had been left to itself through more than one season. Lablet wanted to ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... not for me to suggest it. I feel like asking Mrs. T. what all these complications mean, and why she does not straighten them out: she is Clarice's relative and hostess, and head of the house when I am away. But it will straighten itself pretty soon now, and a new tangle will begin for the predestined victim. Wild man of the woods, your hour will soon strike, and the grim executioner in the black mask will prepare to take your head off. You will see a hand not clearly visible to ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... wrung 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 ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... 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 ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... 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 got ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... still delayed, and the delegates of the Cotton States sat sullenly through a tangle of routine voting. Finally, the question was renewed on Butler's proposition to adopt the Cincinnati platform pure and simple. This was the red flag to the mad bull. Mississippi declared that the Cincinnati platform was a great political swindle on one half the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay |
