"Bungling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Review of Edwards on the Will." Fifty lines in the Iliad with Julia. Finished the Andria and to-day began the Adelphi. I am amused at comparing the comedy of that day with the modern French school. Davus in Andria is but a rough sketch of Moliere's valet, and the whole plot is so bungling in comparison. Have had very few attacks of melancholy lately; because, I suppose, my health is good ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... very pretty musical little laugh at Smellie's elaborate assumption of mock gallantry and his bungling ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... series of pictures or incidents from Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape; take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand francs to Rodolphe; or the following bit, only ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... soaring heart, Which might have made me, scarcely less than thou, A god among my brethren weak and blind,— 210 Scarce less than thou, a pitiable thing To be down-trodden into darkness soon. But now I am above thee, for thou art The bungling workmanship of fear, the block That awes the swart Barbarian; but I 215 Am what myself have made,—a nature wise With finding in itself the types of all,— With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible in the gleams ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... to puzzle the iron-master, who studied awhile upon it, and then returned to the subject of my political mission. "I suppose you speak French," said he; "it is necessary in diplomacy. I can speak it also"—which he began to do, in a bungling way. I answered in the same language, but he soon gave up the attempt and tried German. I changed also, and, finding that he had exhausted his philology, of which he was rather proud, especially as Brother Horton knew nothing but Swedish, determined to have a little fun. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... de Csar is a mutilated tragedy: it ends with the speech of Antony over the dead body of Caesar, borrowed from Shakspeare; that is to say, it has no conclusion. And what a patched and bungling thing is it in all its parts! How coarse-spun and hurried is the conspiracy! How stupid Caesar must have been, to allow the conspirators to brave him before his face without suspecting their design! That Brutus, although he knew Caesar to be his father, nay, immediately after this fact had ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... where the conversation was always moral at least, if not entertaining! Dang. Now, egad, I think the worst alteration is in the nicety of the audience!—No double-entendre, no smart innuendo admitted; even Vanbrugh and Congreve obliged to undergo a bungling reformation! Sneer. Yes, and our prudery in this respect is just on a par with the artificial bashfulness of a courtesan, who increases the blush upon her cheek in an exact proportion to the diminution of her modesty. Dang. Sneer can't even give ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... works, planting palisades, and grubbing up stumps in their bungling and laborious way, the regulars found abundant occupation. Discipline was stiff and peremptory. The wooden horse and the whipping-post were conspicuous objects in the camp, and often in use. Caleb Rea, being tender-hearted, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... back presently. If young ladies must perform practical jokes, because quizzing is the fashion, I wish they would devise something new. This locking-up is so stale a jest. To be sure it has lately to boast the authority of high rank in successful practice: but these bungling imitators never distinguish between cases the most dissimilar imaginable. Silly creatures! We have only to be ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... upon the screen two or three portraits of the King and various members of the Royal Family. This was not only by way of compliment, but also to give assurance that the machine was in proper working order. Edestone proposed to run no chances of a bungling or incomplete ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... painful smile of a dancer hissed off the boards. With the excuse that the footlights dazzled her, she was turning every moment towards the audience to look for her son. Perhaps there would be a duel with the Prince, if he was there. And all her fault—all through her stupid bungling. ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... walk backward and forward, stretching out lines and cocking his eye, make no bones with him; send for a bricklayer, and see the stumps driven into the ground yourself. The four outside lines being laid down with perfect truth, it must be a bungling fellow indeed that cannot do the rest; but if they be only a little askew, you have a botch in your eye for the rest of your life, and a botch of your own making too. Gardeners seldom want for confidence in their own abilities; but this affair of raising perpendiculars upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... are to judge nature from the standpoint of human intelligence, then we must logically decide that it is full of waste, full of bungling, full of plans that come to nothing, of ends that are never realised, of pain and misery that might have been avoided by the exercise of almost ordinary intelligence. There are few animals concerning which a competent anatomist or physiologist could not suggest some improvement in their construction ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... Children" or the "Memoirs of Mrs. Katherine Winslowe." The figure that always fixed my attention is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with his cloak about his mouth, and through all that long, bungling, vociferous hurly-burly, revolving privately a case of conscience. He would take no hand in the deed, because he had a private spite against the victim, and "that action" must be sullied with no suggestion of a worldly motive; on the other hand, "that action" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... once. I can't remain longer in uncertainty. Nothing is so bad as that. It's like a bungling execution: infinitely better for all concerned to be complete. To-morrow I take up the trail one way or ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... literary system of education was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the new policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and bungling hands of the old literati; but this was a necessary stroke of policy, for without their support the new movement would have been ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... is lucky. I'm glad I came upon you at such a time. You won't have to trust to a bungling ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... trembling little smile, and said she saw, and would do her best; but her heart sank at the prospect. What a responsibility to be put upon her ignorant shoulders. The Lord's Sabbath in her bungling hands to make or to mar for these two young souls! She must pray. Oh, she must pray continually that she might ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... any other arrangement, and that it would be considered as absurd for individuals to lay claim to forests, mines, railroads and factories as it would be for individuals to lay claim to the ownership of the sunlight that warms us or to the air we breathe. But the poor human race, in its bungling efforts to learn how to live in our beautiful world, appears destined to find out by bitter experience that the private ownership of the means of life is both criminal ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... and spent the first fifteen years of his life, on a rocky Connecticut farm not far from Cos Cob. His father was an ignorant, violent man, a bungling farmer and a brutal husband. The farmhouse, dilapidated and damp, stood in a hollow beside a marshy pond. Oliver had worked hard while he lived at home, although he was never clean or warm in winter and ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... eye on your watch, Tom," said Jack. "We don't want to make any mistake and cross the line too soon—but we don't want to be late, either. This job is too important to run any risks of bungling it. I'd hate to think that I'd been trusted with something really big for the first time and then ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... had said as the door had closed behind him. But the very truth of the words had left a wound,—a clean-cut wound however. There was never any bungling where Doctor ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... smiled as if she had been given a peculiarly acceptable present. She was so used to being underrated, that she had become in a measure immune to criticism, and besides criticism from her adored Mrs. Edes was even a favour. She took another bungling stitch in the petal of a white ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... made the penalty for women in cases of high or petty treason. E. S. S. W.'s informants are wrong in supposing that the criminals were burnt whilst living. The law, indeed, prescribed it, but the practice was more humane. They were first strangled; although it sometimes happened that, through the bungling of the executioner, a criminal was actually burnt alive, as occurred in the celebrated case of Katherine Hayes, executed for the murder of her husband in 1726. The circumstances of this case are so remarkable, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... vortex—new. There might be a hundred of them, scattered over a radius of two hundred miles. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family—the hellish spawn of that accursed Number Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent bungling ass had tried to blow up.... Into his mind there leaped a picture, wire-sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it, and simultaneously an idea hit him like a blow from ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... gluttons these Romans are! They have no real taste for art, for beauty. They cannot even conduct a murder, save in a bungling way. They have to call in us Hellenes to help them. Ha! ha! this is the vengeance for Hellas, for the sack and razing of Corinth and all the other atrocities! Rome can conquer with the sword; but we Greeks, though conquered, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... absolutely impossible to be known, except by overt action; founded on suspicion or conjecture of men's thoughts. "That thou and the Jews think to rebel!" There was no pretence that they had rebelled. There is no need to begin the lie in so gross and bungling a manner; it was bad enough to set the conjecture of an intention in motion. Whoever took that report to the king would be sure to ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to kill John Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such fashion that I should not look back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling, and I hate brutality. To me there is something repugnant in merely striking a man with one's naked fist—faugh! it is sickening! So, to shoot, or stab, or club John Claverhouse (oh, that name!) did not appeal to me. And not ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... of excuse of my bungling half-English horrid French, talked over me and at me, forgot me, and recollected me, all within a minute, and fished poor Temple for intelligible replies to incomprehensible language in the same manner, then threw her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that the truth had come back upon him as a new blow. Through such dreams there seems to exist a double memory, and a second identity. The misery of his isolated position never for a moment left him; and yet there were repeated to him over and over again those bungling, ill-arranged, impossible pictures of trivial transactions about the place, which the slumber of a few seconds sufficed to create in his brain. "Mr. Ralph, you must go to bed;—you must indeed, sir," said the old butler, standing over him with a candle ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... blundering, good-natured, meddlesome young man, very inquisitive, too officious by half, and always bungling whatever he interferes in. Marplot is introduced by Mrs. Centlivre in two comedies, The Busy Body ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... JOANNA's freak. Her husband had slain her. That was all. She with her flashes, her gaiety, her laughter, was consigned to dust. But in Sir JOHN's note-book it was written that, "The hob-nailed boot is but a bungling weapon. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... into a more consequential whiffet than ever, by being taken into the confidence of a haughty young nobleman; while, on the other side, the stultifying effects of Bertram's pride are seen in that it renders him the easy dupe of a most base and bungling counterfeit of manhood. It was natural and right, that such a shallow, paltry word-gun should ply him with impudent flatteries, and thereby gain an ascendency over him, and finally draw him into the crimes and the shames that were ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... irritating methods of collecting the taxes; the interior customs lines, preventing the easy passage of goods from one part of France to another; the extravagance of the king's household; the pensions granted to undeserving persons; every evil of the bungling, iniquitous old rgime was brought under the scrutiny of the new thinkers, who tested the existing system by the light of reason and the welfare of the great mass of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... toilette failed, and she decided not to accompany her husband to the Review at all. Her husband, the Distinguished Visitor, did desire to see the cavalry go past at the gallop, and so the Chief Commissioner's Distinguished Visitor's wife's maid's bungling had a tremendous influence upon the fate of Damocles de Warrenne, as will ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... Europe, Peter gave considerable attention to the economic condition of the monarchy. He strove, though often in a bungling manner, to promote agriculture and to improve the lot of the peasantry, who still constituted the overwhelming bulk of forms of the population. He certainly deprived the nobles of many of their former privileges and sought to rest ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... first two would be for Clough and for her Master; but the third—'the biggest widow's cap of all'—would be for Aunt Mai. She did well to be angry; she was deserted in her hour of need; and after all, could she be sure that even the male sex was so impeccable? There was Dr. Sutherland, bungling as usual. Perhaps even he intended to go off one of these days, too? She gave him a look, and he shivered in his shoes. No!—she grinned sardonically; she would always have Dr. Sutherland. And then she ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... I know it, but it's true. It's the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the operation terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me afresh with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our ignorant, bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas, and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I understood this superior and diabolical method. Yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and ideas of evil and tragedy ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... seven minutes from leaving the coach, to the signal given for striking the stage. As the machine was new, they were not ready at it: his toes touched it, and he suffered a little, having had time, by their bungling, to raise his cap; but the executioner pulled it down again, and they pulled his legs, so that he was soon out of pain, and quite dead in four minutes. He desired not to be stripped and exposed, and Vaillant promised him, though his clothes must be taken off, that his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... indication of the humour which possessed him, when he formulated his subject and put it in writing. With his temper vexed by the persistent neglect and insult cast upon him by the Milanese doctors he would naturally sit down con amore to compile a list of the errors perpetrated by the ignorance and bungling of the men who affected to despise him, and if his object was to sting the hides of these pundits and arouse them to hostility yet more vehement, he succeeded marvellously well. He was enabled to launch his book rather ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... aim, that the murderer made sure of hitting him—at a fairly long range, too. How many men were there in Roxton and Easton this morning—was there even one woman?—capable of sighting a rifle with such calm confidence of success? Mind you, Fenley had to be killed dead. No bungling. A severe wound from which he might recover would not meet the case at all. Again, how many rifles are there in the united parishes of Roxton and Easton of the type ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... is a truthful description of what can be witnessed at the seances of mediums who are artists. None of your bungling, amateur work here. The work of such a medium is always satisfactory for the reason that if a man feels SURE that the medium is a fraud, he has been so well entertained that he does not regret the money paid for the opportunity ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... (wretched, bungling Hortensio Borgis!) reduced the great Koh-i-noor from its primitive weight—nine hundred carats—to two hundred and eighty. Tavernier saw this celebrated jewel two hundred years ago, not long after its discovery. It came into the possession ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... a possibility of establishing one, and his too steadfast opposition to the harmless expedient of the Sub-treasury. The Sub-treasury system has now been in operation for a quarter of a century. Call it a bungling and antiquated system, if you will; it has nevertheless answered its purpose. The public money is taken out of politics. If the few millions lying idle in the "Strong Box" do no good, they at least do no harm; and we ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... will tell that story to you—you, Peter Moore, the most fortunate man in all China this hour. Think, before I begin, of that mandarin, that bungling Javanese merchant, who, also, are about to die. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... turn, he named two famous battles, in each of which he had lost half an ear, a fighting like a true man against traitors and rebels. But the hangman showed them the two cuts were made at one time, and by measurement. ''Tis no bungling soldiers' work, my masters,' said he, ''tis ourn.' Then the burgomaster gave judgment: 'The present charge is not proven against thee; but, an thou beest not guilty now, thou hast been at other times, witness thine ears. Wherefore I send thee to ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... chose to make the harshness of their creed felt all over the country. Never was nation in a more tractable humour; La France, like a tired woman, was ready to agree to anything; never was mismanagement so clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have forgiven wrongs more easily than bungling. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... "It's all the fault of the men who made the carburetor. They did a bungling bit of work, and ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... my name; indeed, I have never done any thing to disgrace me. I have never indulged in low company, nor profligate debauchery: whatever I have executed by way of profession, has been done in a superior and artistlike manner; not in the rude, bungling way of other adventurers. Moreover, I have always had a taste for polite literature, and went once as apprentice to a publishing bookseller, for the sole purpose of reading the new works before they came out. In fine, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for others!" Wilcox interrupted sharply. "I am aware of the propaganda work. It was by my order that the facilities were extended to you. I am also aware that the princess escaped from Joro's palace. An amazing piece of bungling! Did she really escape or is Joro forwarding ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... take his place in the world from which he had these many weary months been excluded. There was no bitterness in his heart toward any one, even Moxlow's harsh denunciation of him was forgotten; the law through its bungling agents had laid its savage hands on him, that was all, and these agents had merely done what they ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... sitting up and gently chafing his wrists and ankles, and attempted to put to him the question which Dick had suggested. But he found that the words would not come to him; he felt that he knew but could not remember them; and after two or three bungling attempts he was obliged to give ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... very sincere admiration for the British form of government, the people of Holland cannot easily overcome a feeling of vague distrust that the nation which in the past has so often abused them cannot entirely be counted upon to treat them justly this time. Incidentally, I may say that the bungling of Mr. Churchill in Antwerp, which we know much better than do the people of England, is another reason why we are a bit afraid of the island across the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... from the former parts of the book the individual processes and operations, help you to marshal these, in order and proportion, so as to use them to the greatest advantage and with the best results. And truly our stained-glass methods are most wasteful and bungling. The ancient Egyptians, they say, made glass, and I am sure some of our present tools and apparatus date from ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... not but regard with a jealous and distrustful eye. From time to time, by way of giving him a piece of his mind, he would cast side-long at his master a look of severe reproach, unqualified disapprobation. Plain was it that to his dogship's way of thinking it was a very bungling fashion of doing business, thus to suffer this red barbarian to pass from under their hands, untouched by tomahawk or tooth—betraying, as it did, a weakness of feeling altogether unbeseeming warriors of the first blood like themselves. ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... but with a certain percentage of native malcontents, who hated the war and sneered among themselves at the other dupes who believed that it was a war for freedom. It was a capitalists' war. They considered the state as an instrument of oppression, as a bungling interference with liberty and labor; they felt that wealth inevitably brought depravity. They committed both open and overt acts against discipline, and found in their arrest and imprisonment renewed ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... cougar alive but twice, and both times by chance. On one occasion one of my men, Merrifield, and I surprised one eating a skunk in a bull-berry patch; and by our own bungling frightened it away from its unsavory repast ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... have mended her idol discreetly and permanently, so that for the outward world it would still present the same uncompromising surface, so that no inquisitive or bungling touch could bring to light the grim, disfiguring fracture which it had sustained, it is probable that she would have chosen this part, and hidden the grief of her life from the eyes of all save those who were so inseparably connected with the tragedy ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... with two cabins of matting, one in the prow and the other in the stern. She was built of planks sewn together in a very bungling manner. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... some old author, as a radiance of the soul. The literature of all countries can, at the close of the Middle Ages, show single attempts to lay down theoretic principles of beauty; but no other work can be compared to that of Firenzuola. Brantome, who came a good half-century later, is a bungling critic by his side, because governed by lasciviousness and not by ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... women. They would be there until the early morning, many of them, and it was possible that then the bread would not be sufficient. And this not from any real lack, but simply from the mistakes of a bungling, peculating Government. No wonder that ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... sent word to her son that there had been a terrible accident, but she was safe—the intent of her letter being to let him know that she understood the matter perfectly, and while she could not admire the job, it was so bungling, yet she would forgive him if he would not try ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... they occur, and it is only by reading works where they are lacking that we realize all their importance. But here, as soon as we reflect, we are astonished to perceive that this great emotion is expressed in language strong, confident, and correct, with no hesitation and no bungling. The lively sequence of these complaints implies that they were poured forth all at once, in a single outburst; and yet the perfection of the style seems impossible of attainment without some study and some retouching. It is ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... all worked up about it. He said the man had suffered death the first time to "all intents and purposes," so that fulfilled the requirements of the law, and they were wrong when they hanged him again. Laddie said it was a piece of bungling sure enough, but the law said a man must be "hanged by his neck until he was dead," and if he weren't dead, why, it was plain he hadn't fulfilled the requirements of the law, so they were forced to hang him again. Father said ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... unfortunate bungler, who had been in love with Norah since he had worn knickerbockers, and Norah held her own head higher in the air. And she let Mr. Williamson, the new book-keeper at Conner's (he who would have mortgaged two farms for her), take her to the ice-cream table, leaving the bungling lover (christened Patrick Maurice, his surname being Barnes), to jostle dismally over to the apron table, where ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... those who can contribute towards their maintenance. The asylums for the insane are also admirably managed. I have heard that the plan for relieving the poor is much better systematized here than in England. Well! I fear, and I say it with shame, that it could not be much worse or more bungling anywhere. Our wretched system of miscalled Workhouses or Unions is utterly unworthy of us; some of these places, in fact, are abominably demoralizing and degrading. We clothe the poor in a dress ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... bungling effort to catch the heavy receptacle that fell following Jack's warning, but in the darkness he failed, and it crashed down ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... had been frightened. But now everything was calm and peaceful. The glass hung in fragments about the leaden sashes; the chair and priere-dieu of the lady abbess had altogether an innocent and comfortable air, and the images, of which there were several, as horrible as a bungling workman and a bloody imagination could produce, though of a suffering appearance, were really insensible to pain. While we were making this reconnoissance a bugle sounded on the main, and looking out, we saw the Oberwinter postilion coming round the nearest ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Ludwig Stern. As I do not know whether you are familiar with the Exchange, I will tell you that Stern is an eminent coffee-merchant in Hamburg, who always employed Last and Co. Quite accidentally I found that out—I mean that bungling business of Busselinck and Waterman. They had offered to reduce the brokerage by one-fourth per cent. They are low fellows—nothing else. And now look what I have done to stop them. Any one in my place would perhaps have written to Ludwig ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... to have been a very bungling piece of work, but this man's life was given to evil doing, and the great number of crimes confessed and committed by him would seem to say that he was not deserving of any more sympathy than which he got. This was ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... color are not unlike what words and sentences and what we call style are in literature. Even if a writer has good and beautiful ideas, much of the pleasure we might derive is lost when the words are ill chosen, the sentences are bungling, perhaps even ungrammatical, and the whole ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... the floor or upon the ground, he avoided bringing his toes in contact with the surface, as if they were too tender or delicate for such coarse uses, but sat upon the hind part of his feet. Said toes had a very bungling, awkward appearance at such times; they looked like hands encased in gray woolen gloves much too large for them. Their round, flattened ends, especially when not in use, ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... is why I prefer not to be quoted against him," said Davies, quietly. And mentally kicking himself, as he expressed it, for making such a "break" as in his bungling half allusion to the exception, Gray hastened away to tell of it. His story came to ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... and it was important that it should not do so. The same was true of Kentucky and Maryland. It is easy to see, upon reading Fremont's proclamation, that it is the work not of a soldier, but of a politician, and a bungling politician at that. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... to get out some bungling description when Cyrus joined him shortly afterwards, but the American had had a lively time of it while recovering his jack-light and righting the canoe on mid-pond. He was ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... the final outcome of your aerial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs, Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard earnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness—the deep, deep pain—of that bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ... she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayed the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king named Galba, a ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... imitation of nature, my spirits fell many degrees, and I felt humbled and unhappy." He need not have done so, for the man who thus distrusts his own work is always the truest workman; it is only fools or poor creatures who are pleased and self- satisfied with their own first bungling efforts. But the great enjoyment of Rome to Gibson consisted in the free artistic society which he found there. At Liverpool, he had felt almost isolated; there was hardly anybody with whom he could talk on an equality about his ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... The principal feat, however, in which this fervent votary of Plutus appeared before the public, was his nearly fatal affair with Mary Benson, otherwise Mrs. Maria Theresa Phepoe. In April 1795, this ill-fated-woman projected a rather bungling scheme, in order to frighten her old acquaintance and visitor, Courtois, out of a considerable sum of money. One evening, when she was certain of his calling, she had her apartment prepared for his reception in a species of funereal style—a ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... a revenue or of enforcing its legislative decrees. Under such a government the difficulty of insuring concerted action was so great that, but for the transcendent personal qualities of Washington, the bungling mismanagement of the British ministry, and the timely aid of the French fleet, the war of independence would most likely have ended in failure. After the independence of the colonies was acknowledged, the ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... not mature well. Soon, as Bradford says in his now famous Log-Book, in his picturesque and forcible English, "the grim and grizzled face of starvation stared" at them. The readiest supply to replenish the scanty larder was fish, but the English made surprisingly bungling work over fishing, and soon the most unfailing and valuable supply was the native Indian corn, or "Guinny wheat," or "Turkie wheat," as it was ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... inside the mountain were in the midst of one of those experiences which make the romance and terror of coal-mining. One of the boys who were employed underground, in violation of the child labour law, was in the act of bungling his task. He was a "spragger," whose duty it was to thrust a stick into the wheel of a loaded car to hold it; and he was a little chap, and the car was in motion when he made the attempt. It knocked him against the ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... as a leader. No one would have mentioned him, if he hadn't constantly committed fresh blunders. A few, who were quite sensible, sometimes said perhaps it was lucky for Fumle-Drumle that he was such a bungling idiot, otherwise Wind-Rush and Wind-Air would hardly have allowed him—who was of the old chieftain stock—to remain with ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... were doing what would have cost them their heads if Elizabeth had known it—corresponding, as Essex was accused of doing, with Scotland about the succession, and possibly with Spain. But they were playing cautiously and craftily; he with bungling passion. He had been so long accustomed to power and place, that he could not endure that rivals should keep him out of it. They were content to have their own way, while affecting to be the humblest of servants; he ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... '44.—It is much beyond my expectation that Newman should have taken my letter so kindly; it seemed to me so like the operation of a clumsy, bungling surgeon upon a sensitive part. I cannot well comment upon his meaning, for as you may easily judge, what with cabinet, board, and Oak Farm, I have enough in my head to-day—and the subject is a fine ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... transformed. Doffing his habit, Sir John Finett stood confessed before them. He knelt penitently before the king, humbly assuring his Majesty that he had been preparing this device, and many others, to please and surprise him; but that, through the bungling of some, and the bashfulness of others, he was obliged to enact the parts himself. This excuse the king was graciously pleased to accept, commending him for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... either. You must excuse me, Miss Knowles. There was something about your voice and face—rather threw me off my balance. If you'll kindly overlook the bungling start-off! I'm greatly pleased to meet you. My wife will be, too. May I ask you to step aboard the car?—No, here she ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... bygone, when each man cut his quill, With little Perryan skill, What horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade Appeared the writing implements home-made! What Pens were sliced, hewed, hacked, and haggled out, Slit or unslit, with many a various snout, Aquiline, Roman, crooked, square, and snubby. Stumpy and stubby; ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... became so delicate and confusing that I felt I should go dizzy if it stayed; so I tried the one great trick cousin Secord taught me, making to run him through, as a last effort. The thing went wrong, but checking off my blunder he blundered too,—out of sheer wonder, perhaps, at my bungling,—and I disarmed him. So droll was it that I laughed outright, and he, as quick in humour as in temper, stood hand on hip, and presently came to a smile. With that my cousin Secord cried: 'The king! the king!' ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... slipped the handkerchief into his pocket and stared at her with a glint of anger in the blue-gray of his eyes. He lifted his broad shoulders. "Or wise man enough to do my own work when needs be, and when I'd have no bungling? I'm going to square with you, girl. Square with you for meddling, for a bullet-hole in each shoulder. If there's a fool in our little junketing party, it's a girl who thought she could ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... no matter by whom sold, that have not these words printed on the title-page are printed on the bungling plates made by the late ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... tight, bound his arms to his side. Again and again he repeated this operation till Cameron stood swathed in the coils of the rope like a mummy, inwardly raging, not so much at his captor, but at himself and his stupid bungling of his break for liberty. His helpless and absurd appearance seemed to ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... deliberately and slowly evacuated part of Hill 72, but most of it we unexpectedly managed to hold, and are likely now to stick to. Had we thoroughly defeated the Turks, as we should have done had there been no bungling, the end of this part of the campaign might have been in sight, but now we are held up, and how we are to get out of the fix will sadly baffle ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... fell. Crass thought that the principal piece of bungling in this affair was Hunter's failure to secure possession of the Coroner's certificate after the inquest, but he was afraid to ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the chimney, which, our readers are aware, is generally built on the outside of the structure, in Virginia, was a small window, one-half of which, in the decay of the glass panes, had been boarded up to exclude the wind and the rain. The job had evidently been performed by a bungling hand, and had never been more than half done. The wood was as rotten as punk; and without difficulty, and without much noise, the fugitive succeeded in removing the board which had covered the lower part ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... should be shot who would try to brain one. It is an impertinence even to write about Christmas. Christmas is a matter that humanity has taken so deeply to heart that we will not have our festival meddled with by bungling hands. No efficiency expert would dare tell us that Christmas is inefficient; that the clockwork toys will soon be broken; that no one can eat a peppermint cane a yard long; that the curves on our chart ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... whiskey after dinner. Perhaps the frequent libations he had taken increased his zeal, but they diminished his discretion in a corresponding ratio. He had begun his work too soon, and had done it in a very bungling manner. If whiskey was a curse to him, it was a blessing to me, for in his sober senses he would not have exposed himself and his plans by robbing my valise so early ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... swollen but not by the pox, as I am sure by the description he gave me of the cause of the swelling. The mercury mounted to his esophagus and, being able to swallow neither solids nor fluids, he died the 23rd June of positive famine . . . . The interest of the bungling surgeon is to say that he died of the pox. This is not true, I beg, you to give the lie to anyone you hear saying it. I have before my eyes four hundred and sixty of his letters over which I weep and which I will burn. I have asked ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... his patience, whether it was in bungling, in harvesting his graft, or whether it was a form of slackness. Nor could they help doing so, for patience, a wonderful purposeful patience, was his greatest characteristic. Every other feature of his personality was subservient to it, and ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... comment—nay, was he safe from the clutch of the law? Of these things he had not troubled to think, so assured was he that the mere threat would suffice. From his present point of view it was easy enough to see that the plot had been a wretched piece of bungling; in failing of its end it became the project of a simpleton. Had the girl herself been cool enough to see this? Did she defy him in knowledge of the weakness of his position? Probably not; in that case she would have spoken ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... with," he said quietly, and he handed it to the prosecuting attorney. The fact was plain; it was a bungling job and better proved the Red Fox's guilt. Moreover, there were only two such big rifles in all the hills, and it was proven that the man who owned the other was at the time of the murder far away. The days of brain-storms had ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... as she sweetened it. Crimes which escape social vengeance are many enough, and as a rule they are of this order—to wit, murders committed without any startling sign of violence, without bloodshed, bruises, marks of strangling, without any bungling of the business, in short; if there seems to be no motive for the crime, it most likely goes unpunished, especially if the death occurs among the poorer classes. Murder is almost always denounced by its advanced guards, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... now, and never noticed any friendliness towards us. Should the necessity of looking for allies arise, it is nearly certain that both Italy and Spain would be disposed to range themselves on our side. It will be a pity if diplomatic bungling occurs to alter this satisfactory ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... gives an impression of such ease as to make his accomplishment seemingly require no skill, a bungler makes himself and every one watching him uneasy if not actually fearful of his awkwardness. And as inexpertness is quite as irritating in personal as in mechanical bungling, so there is scarcely any one who sooner or later does not feel the need of social expertness. Something, some day, will awaken him to the folly of scorning as "soft," men who have accomplished manners; ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... has been taken under the wing of our commander-in-chief, and his lips will be sealed by the time we get out—if ever we get out. With an official history and a discreet independent version, no one will ever understand what bungling there has been, and what culpability. It is our chicken-hearted chiefs, and they alone, who should be discredited. With a few exceptions, they are more afraid than the women, and never venture beyond the British Legation. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... unavoidable. It is sincerely to be regretted that the art of stimulating the nations—about which the delegates were so solicitous—to enthusiastic readiness to accept the Council as the "moral guide of the world" should have been exercised in such bungling fashion. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... let me see his insolent rubbish. Where are your eyes? You bungling louts ought to protect me against the foul brood that peoples this city, and their venomous jests. Past grievances are forgotten. Set the painter's father and brother at liberty. They have had a warning. Now I want something new. Something new, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a fortunate man; and his good fortune has survived him. Few, indeed, in the long line of English authors whom he loved so well, have been equally happy in a biographer. Most official biographies are a mixture of bungling and indiscretion. It is only in virtue of some happy coincidence that the one or two people who alone have the requisite knowledge can produce also the requisite skill and discretion. Mr. Trevelyan is one of the exceptions to the rule. His book ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... house. There must be at the head of everything a large organizing brain capable of introducing and enforcing thorough system, and of skilfully directing labor and investment, so as to secure the most from the least outlay. A farm such as we have just seen would be like a bottomless pit for money in bungling, ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... headlong—dropped and missed again! As he rushed past he saw the face of Ostrog's aeronaut confident and cool and in Ostrog's attitude a wincing resolution. Ostrog was looking steadfastly away from him—to the south. He realized with a gleam of wrath how bungling his flight must be. Below he saw the Croydon hills. He jerked upward and once more he ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... and being appointed to the team. The despatch with which the aspirants were made up into squads and tried out against each other was a joy to witness. The energetic director weeded out the defective players in short order. His searching eyes missed not a movement, clever or bungling. The five girls finally picked to play on the official freshman team were a survival of the fittest. Among them was Phyllis Moore. Further, she was given the position of center and roundly complimented by the director ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... who was present, saw the Boers, in some instances, filling their bandoliers from these cases on the plausible excuse that they were only using our own ammunition. Such cartridges should never have been permitted to go up. But in spite of instances of bungling, the evidence shows that every effort has been made to keep the war as humane as possible. I am inclined to hope that a fuller knowledge will show that the same holds good for our enemies, and that in spite of individual exceptions, they have never systematically used anything except what ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... race. When they are once gone, my jaws will clap together like two doors, the upper lip will grow just thrice as long, and again one can't tell what sort of a face will come of it. Time, my dear young friend, is, as somebody found out many many years ago, a bungling workman; he makes a creature pretty enough; then he daubs and trims and pares and pulls and squeezes the thing about, draws the nose and chin out of their sheaths, knocks in the cheeks, eats ruts into the forehead, till he has turned it into a scarecrow; and then at last he gets ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... happened? I saw the poor woman's pride and happiness hung on her faith in that picture. I tried to make her understand that it was worthless—but she wouldn't; I tried to tell her so—but I couldn't. I behaved like a maudlin ass, but you shan't pay for my infernal bungling—you mustn't buy ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... had enough of bungling accomplices that night. Grim hadn't gone fifty paces, keeping well in the middle of the road, when a solitary shadow began stalking him, and doing it so cautiously that though he had to cross the circles of street lamplight now and then neither ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... I have these people in so strong a hold. You see, Ephraim got himself into trouble trying to pull off one of those bungling, amateurish burglaries that his kind go in for so extensively; he wanted the money to buy things for a pretty woman. And he was already a married man. You can see how Mrs. Clover felt about it. She—ah—cut up rather nasty. When she got through with the other woman, no one would have ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... beds over and over again; chairs with carved backs; and all manner of old world curiosities; family pictures, and samplers, and embroidery; fragments of tapestry; an inlaid floor; everything having a story to it, though, to say the truth, the possessor of these curiosities made but a bungling piece of work in telling the legends connected with them. In one or ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... places persons who know least about them, for they have the most to learn; and inasmuch as such persons, before having acquired the necessary knowledge, skill, and experience, will inevitably do the public business in a bungling manner, and therefore at much inconvenience and loss to the people, they should, in justice to the taxpayers, instead of drawing salaries, pay something for the instruction they receive. For as soon as they have learned enough really to earn a salary, they will have to be turned ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... I added to myself, "that the real inamorato keeps his bungling foot out of this till I get clear!" And I reflected with much comfort that he was hardly likely to make an attempt upon premises so brilliantly ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Devoile—ambitious as it is, is not fatuous. It is a human heart in a singularly morbid condition which is unveiled: but as, if I remember rightly, either Goethe or Schiller, or both, saw and said near the time, there is no charlatanery about the unveiling, and no bungling about the autopsy. Restif has been compared, and not unfairly, to Defoe, as well as to Rousseau; in a certain way he may be likened to Pepys; and all four share an intense and unaffected reality, combined, however, in the Frenchman's case with a sort of exaggeration ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... "I'm bungling it," thought Jeff, uncomfortably, and stood still, waiting. "Perhaps I ought to have let Evelyn tackle the ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... notice of the suggestion; floundered along, bungling terribly. Committee tried to help him out; that didn't help matters much. To have a Member in one part of the House filling up an awkward pause by suggesting "dried fruit," another "coffee," a third ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... immediately evaporated—surged up in him now. His fear was lest the charged atmosphere of the banker's presence might deflect his own hitherto clear perception of true worth. He dreaded, once in the midst of those disturbing currents, a bungling presentation of the cause which inspired him, and which he knew ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... moment had been given her. She was letting it slip away. She had her reward in her hand for the mere pulling of a trigger and no incrimination for the result. For a bit of human sentiment she was bungling the situation unpardonably, fatally. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Grex asserted confidently. "We are at least beyond reach of these bungling English spies. There is no further fear of eavesdroppers. We are entirely alone. Each may speak his own mind. There is nothing to be feared in the way of interruption. I trust, Monsieur Douaille, that ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flutter to the Baron, and attempted some innocent and bungling measures. "He still breathes," he kept saying. "All is not yet over; he is not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... persistently disregarded the wishes of the people, and the best interests of the entire community; and we have at last reached a point where to stand still is as ruinous as to go on—as we are going—to certain destruction and annihilation. Look at the finances, entirely destroyed by the bungling and injudicious course of the honorable Mr. Memminger, who has proceeded upon fallacies which the youngest tyro would disdain to refute. Look at the quartermaster's department,—the commissary department,—the State department, and the war department, and you will ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... everything else that otherwise I might have told you about myself. If one has to tell such things at all, it is better to be silent about them. As to the Carlsruhe plan you are probably sufficiently enlightened. Devrient has thought it desirable to make an excuse for the bungling and neglectful way in which he has taken up the idea of a first performance of "Tristan" at his theatre, by saying that it is impossible to execute the work. To that ALSO I do not reply. Why should I speak? I know my fate and my position, and ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... bungling," Cobo broke out at him, wrathfully. "God! I've a mind to toss you into that fire." He turned his attention once more to Rosa, and with a jerk that shook her into fuller consciousness repeated: "Where are ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... the Tower. The two Catholic priests, less fortunate, were executed with the usual atrocity; and Lord Cobham and two others were pardoned on the scaffold. His Sowship thought it wonderfully knowing in him to surprise the people by pardoning these three at the very block; but, blundering, and bungling, as usual, he had very nearly overreached himself. For, the messenger on horseback who brought the pardon, came so late, that he was pushed to the outside of the crowd, and was obliged to shout and roar out what he came for. The miserable Cobham did not gain much by being spared that ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... provocation the architect of BOOTH'S Theatre may have had, but certain it is that he entertains a horrible spite against musicians. He may have been distracted by diabolical hand-organs, or driven wild by bungling buglists, but why should he include worthy and unoffending artists in his hatred? The revenge of a BORGIA was not more terrible or cruel than that of this architect. He has put the orchestra so far below the stage that no part of the latter is visible ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... Drake's conscience had anything to do with the bungling manner in which he made this first attempt at piracy, we cannot say, but he soon gave his conscience a holiday, and undertook some very successful robbing enterprises. He received information from some natives, that a train ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... anecdote, but, for my own part, I felt feverish to the tips of my claws, as I thought of the miserable creature who had usurped the place I wished to fill, and who might be the means of my having to fall back after all on the Deserted Cats' Fund. What bungling puss had had him under her paws, and allowed him to escape with a torn ear and the wariness of experience? Let me but once catch ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... and sung his pieces in the manner of his predecessors, despairing of being able to accomplish any improvement in the Roman theatre, but that one day being surrounded by the multitude and excessively fatigued, he called a slave to relieve him while he recovered his breath. Displeased with the bungling manner in which the slave performed this new task, Livius rebuked him very severely, the slave justified, the master replied, and a dialogue ensued which the spectators imagining to be a part of the plan of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... Constitution—if any State, upon its own mere motion, with cause or without cause, can withdraw from the Union as a partner may dissolve a copartnership—then the Constitution itself is a stupendous failure, the men who made it were bungling journeymen and not master-mechanics, and to institutions of our country, so far from deserving our gratitude and admiration, are worthy only of our contempt. The hour has come, and the men have come, to settle these issues, fraught ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... grotesqueness only, for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my knowledge of it was nothing. The bizarre conceit, submitted to the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to surprising and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... by bad mill management probably than by bad mining, though every experienced man must have seen in his time many most flagrant instances of bungling in the latter respect. Shafts are often sunk on the wrong side of the lode or too near or too far away therefrom, while instances have not been wanting where the (mis) manager has, after sinking his shaft, driven in the opposite direction to that ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... Outside of our plantations, the people for once are excited with good reason. In the most awkward, incomplete, bungling way the negroes are allowed to preempt twenty and forty acre tracts; so everybody is astir, trying to stake out claims and then to get their claims considered by the Commissioners. These gentlemen meanwhile ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... have the rest of the money when I have seen his body. No, I don't want any bungling and that's the ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... saw the real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night, and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German Chancellor. As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demonstrations" did not begin in any perceptible form until the bungling hand of Prince von Buelow betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti and the politician's intention of defeating the Salandra Government in its preparations for war became evident. At no time did the rioting in the streets equal the violence of what ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... put up the wire itself, and this was done in rather a bungling manner, if this wire were compared with that of ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton
... of bungling and robbery, was placed in the same financial position as the United States after a period of war. In one case, as in the other, taxation was the only remedy. But the Heligolanders did not like their medicine, and, like children, protested that they were quite well. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... he was bungling it, but at last he brought them to the thought of their father in Paradise, because the dear Lord loved ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... absolutely necessary, and we mentioned L50,000. This is every day a greater and greater omen of ruine. God fit us for it! Sir J. Minnes and I home (it raining) by coach, calling only on Sir G. Cartefet at his lodging (who is I find troubled at my Lord Treasurer and Sir Ph. Warwicke bungling in his accounts), and come home to supper with my father, and then all to bed. I made my brother in his cassocke to say grace this day, but I like his voice so ill that I begin to be sorry he hath taken this order ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Galin it is really amazing that such a bungling, unscientific way of expressing silence should have been tolerated so long. Compare these "pot-hooks and trammels," dotted and double-dotted, with Galin's symbol of silence, the cipher (0)! This is all, and yet it expresses every length of rest, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... his fiendish instructions the bungling executioner was a long time mangling the wrist of Hackston's right arm before he succeeded in separating the hand. Hackston quietly advised him to be more careful to strike in the joint of the left. Having been ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... The nut issued spontaneously from the right side. In the afternoon the auditory canal was found excoriated and red, and deep in the meatus the kernel was found, covered with blood. The patient had been so excited and pained by the bungling attempts at extraction that the employment of instruments was impossible; prolonged employment of injections was substituted. Discharge from the ear commenced, intense fever and delirium ensued, and the patient had to be chloroformed to facilitate the operation of extraction. The nut, when taken ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... see where the bungling comes in," Littleson answered. "I offered her a hundred thousand dollars for that paper. She took the tip and got it somehow. How could I tell that she had another scheme ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... him as chief), he might secure to himself a long and honourable possession of power. Then it is said he can't whistle off these men merely because it is convenient, but he had better do that than keep them on bungling through all the business of the country. Besides, I have some doubts of ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... et venus, aut ego fallor, Ut jam nunc dicat, jam nunc debentia dici Pleraque differat, et praesens in tempus omittat. An under workman, of th' Aemilian class, Shall mould the nails, and trace the hair in brass, Bungling at last; because his narrow soul Wants room to comprehend a perfect whole. To be this man, would I a work compose, No more I'd wish, than for a horrid nose, With hair as black as jet, and eyes as black ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... earth. That I had had anything to do with this, I should even now have denied to God or man with complete conviction. I had no interest in the causes of her descent, only in the fact of it. And all that time of bungling dressing for dinner I kept thinking, not that I should help her look for a new heaven, but that I must try, as her true friend, to get her back into her old one. At that time John Fulton had no better friend than I. It seemed to me really terrible that things ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... I recalled a crowd of scoundrels who were not a patch upon me, and yet were rolling in money. There was I in serge, and they in velvet; they leaned on gold-headed canes, and had fine rings on their fingers. And what were they? Wretched bungling strummers, and now they are a kind of fine gentlemen. At such times I felt full of courage, my soul inflamed and elevated, my wits alert and subtle, and capable of anything in the world. But this happy turn ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... in a woman's eyes a man need only do his stupid bungling best. But it is doubtful whether Wentworth had a best of any ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... stared and stared. Blue looked around at her inquiringly, reproachfully. Billy Louise sent him slowly forward and stirred up the huddled little bunch. She read the brand on each one; read the story they shouted at her, of bungling theft. She could not believe it. Yet she did believe it, and she went hot with anger and disappointment and contempt. She sat and thought for a minute or two, scowling at the cattle, while she decided ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... It was executed promptly, skilfully. There was no bungling, not a wrong motion or an unnecessary one, as they went through the movements of loading, sighting and firing the guns. It was easy to see why French artillery has won its renown. The training of the French artilleryman is twice as severe as that of the infantryman. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Tom Slade awoke to the realization not only that he was a hoodlum, but that he was out of date with his vulgar slang and bungling, unskilful tricks. ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... ruthless financial war, trying to defeat all his operations, and losing very considerable sums at the game, because he had against him his own excitable nature, his adversary's cool-headedness and the bungling of Paganetti, whom he used as a man of straw? In any event, the star of gold had turned pale. Paul de Gery learned as much from Pere Joyeuse, who had entered the employ of a broker as book-keeper, and was thoroughly posted on matters connected ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... one who charges high is not learned. Look at Dr. Guevara; after performing a bungling operation that cost the life of both mother and child, he charged the widower fifty pesos. The thing to know is ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... fact remains that your word alone is law. Therefore I am about to ask you to forget that I am a bungling diplomat and do a kind act. For once you would be able to be ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... purpose, the two prime causes of misfits, have many different ways of bungling people into the wrong job ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Laugh at him and make fun of him as you will, he was a scout. He was at once the littlest scout and the biggest scout that ever scouting had known. He boasted and bungled, but out of his bungling came triumph. He fell, oh such falls as he fell! But he always landed right side up. He could save the world with a blunder. And ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... extremities as here. And the good, honest woolen stuffs of one kind and another that fill the shops attest the need and the taste that prevail. They had a garment when I was in London called the Ulster overcoat,—a coarse, shaggy, bungling coat, with a skirt reaching nearly to the feet, very ugly, tried by the fashion plates, but very comfortable, and quite the fashion. This very sensible garment has since become well ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... and had always lived there. She had never known anyone by the name of Weltz. This was just what I had expected. The man for whom we are searching is shrewd almost beyond belief, and if we succeed in finding him it will not, we may be assured, be the result of any bungling on ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... knew that he was making a mighty effort to restrain comment on the bungling amateur detective work of ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... That's not the point," insisted Davies, with a sense of giddy bungling. "That's really not the point. I just mentioned it because I—because I couldn't help thinking of it, that's all. I couldn't help thinking of myself from the moment I saw you out there, free, with the game at stake, making ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman |
