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More "Perplexing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... divined him then. But at dinner his behaviour was perplexing. He was too cheerful. He pledged the Count. He would have the Portuguese for this and that, and make Anglican efforts to repeat it, and laugh at his failures. He would not see that there was a father dead. At a table of actors, Mr. Andrew overdid his part, and was the worst. His wife ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... struck a match, and began to light his cigar. And just then came the great engine of the express, panting its way to a halt beside them, and with it the folk on the platform began to stir, and Zillah was elbowed aside. Her situation was perplexing—was she to watch the man and perhaps lose Lauriston in the crowd already passing ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... first upon the task of solving the geographical problems of the interior of the Australian continent were doomed to meet with much bitter disappointment. The varying nature of the seasons caused the different travellers to form contrary and perplexing ideas, often with regard to the same tract of country. What appeared to one man a land of pleasant gurgling brooks, flowing through rich pastures, appeared to another as a pitiless desert, unfit for human foot to venture upon. Oxley, who traversed what is now the cream of the agricultural ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... stricken soul honor God by thus being dumb in the midst of dark and perplexing dealings, recognizing in these, part of the needed discipline and training for a sorrowless, sinless, deathless world; regarding every trial as a link in the chain which draws it to heaven, where the whitest robes will be found to be those here baptized with suffering, and bathed ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... most profound and extensive learning and knowledge of the world, is not as much designed for the professional scholar as for intelligent readers of all classes who take an interest in the history of by-gone ages, and are inclined there to seek information that may guide them safely through the perplexing mazes of modern history." ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... future was to yield to us in the form of printed matter of all sorts and degrees. But they already had their great authors, their favourite books, their rarities, in sufficient abundance. It was a narrower field, but a less perplexing one; and from the seeing-point of the amateur, pure and simple, our gain ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... Johnny's medicine; that Mrs Thorpe smelt of drink half an hour after she had got two shillings towards the rent; that Mr Hawkins had given his wife a black eye for saying that he was strong enough to go to work again. Mrs Yabsley had listened with a perplexing smile to her companion's cries ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... mistakes had made me cautious. Her manner was a sufficient warning; and I did not broach the subject a second time. One afternoon, however, I met with a great and unexpected consolation, though even this was mixed with some perplexing matters. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... thin after a while, as men filed out to feed cattle and to cook their own evening meal. Then the perplexing person got up and came over toward me, showing no fear of the Turk at all. He was tall and lean when he stood upright, but enormously strong if one could guess correctly through ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... said, "that in an affair so perplexing as this, we cannot neglect anything; we must know all, even the smallest and seemingly most futile thing concerning the victim—information apparently the most insignificant. Why do you doubt that this marriage will take place? ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... Love, and for the only time, Rowlands Madrigal. In these songs, Drayton offends least in grammar, always a weak point with him; in the body of the Eclogues, in the earlier Sonnets, in the Odes, occur the most extraordinary and perplexing inversions. Quite the most striking feature of the Eclogues, especially in their later form, is their bold attempt at greater realism, at a breaking-away from ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... star-panelling. The voussoirs of arches were cut into curious interlocking forms; doorways and niches were covered with stalactite corbelling, and pavements and wall-incrustations, whether of marble or tiling, combined brilliancy and harmony of color with the perplexing beauty of interlaced star-and-polygon patterns of marvellous intricacy. Stained glass added to the interior color-effect, the patterns being perforated in plaster, with a bit of colored glass set into each perforation—adevice not very ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... she was perfectly absorbed in amazement at the richness and splendour of the furniture. The softest and most elegant carpets, the most exquisite pictures, the costliest mirrors; articles of richest ornament, quite dazzling from their beauty and perplexing from the prodigality with which they were scattered around; encountered her on every side. The very staircase nearly down to the hall-door, was crammed with beautiful and luxurious things, as though the house were brimful of riches, which, with a very ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... he had published Fifine at the Fair, which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... far the most difficult and perplexing of all the problems connected with the administration of the national forests—Pinchot went to the Southwest and persuaded one of the most intelligent and level-headed young stockmen in the country to become head of the grazing department. A. F. Potter had been for years a cow-boy and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... Head Coach Corridan, smiling at Butch Brewster's indignation, "you are such a wonder at solving perplexing problems by your marvelous 'inspirations,' suppose you turn the scintillating searchlight of your colossal intellect upon the question that Bannister must solve, to produce ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... encourage educated Indians to further progress, and to enlighten Britons regarding the India which they are creating, is the hope of this volume. Further progress has yet to be made, and difficult problems yet await solution, and to know the history of the perplexing situation will surely be most helpful as a guide. What future is in store for India lies hidden. It would be interesting to speculate, and with a few ifs interposed, it might be easy to dogmatise. What will she become? is indeed ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Still more perplexing are the strange and interesting forms Toxodon, Macrauchenia, Typotherium, and a new Anoplotherioid mammal (Homalodotherium) which Dr. Cunningham sent over to me some time ago from Patagonia. I confess I am strongly inclined to surmise ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... following the movements of the stars of every magnitude. The history of the Jewish race, its mere preservation during the long drawn out period of suffering—sad days of national dissolution and sombre middle age centuries—is a perplexing puzzle, unless regarded with the eye of faith. But that this race, cuffed, crushed, pursued, hounded from spot to spot, should have given birth to men, yea, even women ranking high in the realm of letters, is wholly inexplicable, unless the explanation of the unique phenomenon ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... affections and previous associations were not thus involved. This does not necessarily prove their conclusions to have been false. Perhaps just this personal element is necessary to give final meaning to what otherwise is so perplexing and even contradictory. The dogmatism which shuts the door squarely in the face of spiritism is as unreasonable, as unscientific, as the credulity which opens the door wide and accepts everything ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... would be held treason. Italy was with Caesar; but the East, with its treasures, its fleets, its millions of men, this was Pompey's, heart and soul. The sea was Pompey's. Caesar might win for the moment, but Pompey might win in the long run. The situation was most perplexing. Before the fall of Corfinium, Cicero had poured himself out upon it to his friend. "My connections, personal and political," he said, "attach me to Pompey. If I stay behind, I desert my noble and admirable companions, and ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... present confines himself to abstractions, and to taste and sensibility adds creative power, is to my mind the best of the bunch: while Leger, Gris, Gleizes, and Metzinger are four painters who, if they did not limit themselves to a means of expression which to most people is still perplexing, if not disagreeable, would be universally acclaimed for what they are—four exceptionally inventive artists, each possessing his own peculiar and precious sense of colour ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... soon, and she dreaded his coming. A horrible suspicion had entered her mind that respect for her husband, confidence in him, might be lowered, and a more horrible doubt that she might lose his love. That she could not bear. And was Henderson unconscious of all this? I dare say that in the perplexing excitement of the day he did recall for a moment with a keen thrust of regret the scene of the morning-his wife standing there flushed, wounded, indignant. "I might have turned back, and taken her in my arms, and told her it was all right," he thought. He wished he had done so. But ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... answerer. She used to have great fits of crying at night, when they passed Caroline's door; and more than once she was so inconsolable, that Marian was obliged to come and stay in her room, and sleep all night with her arm clinging round her. Altogether, it was very desolate and perplexing; and Marian was grieved at herself for dwelling more on this, and on the loss of her dear companion and friend, than on the hope and happiness that ought to occupy her. How different in the two deaths she had known before, where there was none of this weary, harassed, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and I ride about again. My office here is no sinecure, so many parties and difficulties of every kind; but I will do what I can. Prince Mavrocordato is an excellent person, and does all in his power; but his situation is perplexing in the extreme. Still we have great hopes of the success of the contest. You will hear, however, more of public news from plenty of quarters: for I have little ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... truth steadfastly in your patients' thoughts, ex- plain Christian Science to them, but not too soon, - not until your patients are prepared for the explanation, - 414:18 lest you array the sick against their own interests by troub- ling and perplexing their thought. The Christian Scien- tist's argument rests on the Christianly scientific basis of 414:21 being. The Scripture declares, "The Lord He is God [good]; there is none else beside Him." Even so, harmony is universal, and discord is unreal. Christian Science de- 414:24 clares that Mind ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... collection of moral and vital truths, and these truths, apart from all history or philosophy, constitute Christianity itself. Instead, therefore, of perplexing and confounding the young with what are called the evidences of Christianity, give them Christianity itself. Begin by giving them Christianity itself, as exhibited in the life and character of the Lord Jesus, as illustrated by his simple, beautiful and touching parables, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... once more upon the witching face that long ago had so sweetly enticed him to his ruin! ... Stay! what was he thinking of? Long ago? Nay, that was impossible,—since he had only seen the Priestess Lysia for the first time that very morning! How piteously perplexing it was to be thus tormented with these indistinct ideas!—these half-formed notions of previous intimate acquaintance with persons and places he never could have ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... an incident perplexing, embarrassing, and disheartening to the supporters of the mission, but attended with results for the promotion of the gospel to which their best wisdom never could have attained. Adoniram Judson, a graduate of Brown University, having spent the long months at sea in the diligent and devout ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... magical power of "ifs," "buts," "perhaps's," "what do we know," etc., heaped together, a shapeless and unconnected system is formed, perplexing mankind, by obliterating from their minds, the most clear ideas and rendering uncertain truths most evident. By reason of this systematic confusion, nature is an enigma; the visible world has disappeared, to give place to regions invisible; reason is compelled to ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... the problems contingent upon space flight it is doubtful if any are more perplexing than the biological ones. In fact, it now appears quite likely that the limiting factor on manned space exploration will be less the nature of physical laws or the shortcoming of space vehicle systems than the vulnerability ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... short-styled flower as 100 to 75: here, then, the grains from the short-styled form were considerably smaller than those from the long-styled, which is the reverse of what occurred in the former instance, and of what is the general rule with heterostyled plants. The whole case is perplexing in the highest degree, and will not be understood until experiments are tried on living plants. The greater length, and more papillose condition of the stigma in the short-styled than in the long-styled flowers, looks as if the ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... the ground, its Government might have been thought likely to welcome any security that it should not be abandoned in its utmost need. Haugwitz, however, was at head-quarters, dictating lying bulletins, and perplexing the generals with ridiculous arguments of policy until the French actually opened fire. When the English envoy made known his arrival, he found that no one would transact business with him. Haugwitz had determined ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... his energy and bad passions under the guise of duty, is among the most perplexing of those spectacles, which, according to a greater understanding than Dante's, "make the angels weep." (Dante, by the way, has introduced in his heaven no such angels as those; though he has plenty that scorn and denounce.) Lope ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... often speculated on the probable causes through which each separate district in Great Britain came to possess in former times its own peculiar breed of cattle; and the question is, perhaps, even more perplexing in the case of Southern Africa. We now know that the differences may be in part attributed to descent from distinct species; but this will not suffice. Have the slight differences in climate and in the nature of the pasture, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... of Colonel Dewes Sybil Linforth flinched as though she had been struck. But it did not need that movement to explain to the Colonel the perplexing problem of her fears. He understood now. The Linforths belonged to the Road. The Road had slain her husband. No wonder she lived in terror lest it should claim her son. And apparently it did ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... Negroes in that city as in the case of Lewis Hayden who established a successful clothing business.[9] In New York such evidences were more apparent. There were in that city not so many Negroes as frequented some other northern communities of this time but enough to make for that city a decidedly perplexing problem. It was the usual situation of ignorant, helpless fugitives and free Negroes going, they knew not where, to find a better country. The situation at times became so grave that it not only caused prejudice but gave rise to intense opposition ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... Darwin (1859). From the new stand-point of evolution through natural selection the facts in Sprengel's work took on a most important significance. Darwin now reaffirmed the Sprengel theory so far as the necessity of the insect was concerned, but showed that all those perplexing floral conditions which had disproved Sprengel's assumption, instead of having for their object the conveying of pollen to the stigma of the same flower, implied its transfer to the stigma of another, cross-fertilization ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... sharp December drive, and a wild, glad sparkle in his eye, as Rose whispers him that Adele has become one of the household. It is no wonder, perhaps, that the latter finds the bit of embroidery she is upon somewhat perplexing, so that she has to consult Rose pretty often in regard to the different shades, and twirl the worsteds over and over, until confusion about the colors shall restore her own equanimity. Phil, meantime, dashes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... principles of his medicines, has taught him how to combine them, has from time to time offered him new remedial agencies, and so of others of his allies. But he will also tell you, if I am not mistaken, that his own branch of knowledge is so extensive and so perplexing that he must accept most of his facts ready made at their hands. He will own to you that in the struggle for life which goes on day and night in our thoughts as in the outside world of nature, much that he learned under the name ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... him he couldn't have told just whom he had expected to see when he looked up, but nothing could have startled him more than the presence of that white-haired wisp of a man with the beady eyes who fitted almost uncannily into the perplexing puzzle which had held him there at his desk until dusk. He forgot to greet the newcomer. Instead he sat gazing at him, wide-mouthed, and after Old Jerry had borne the scrutiny as long as he could he took ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... White House, with his noisy presence, for the nearly four years succeeding the death of the great and good Lincoln; and after the People, with almost unexampled unanimity, had called their great Military hero, Grant, to the helm of State; the difficult and perplexing problems involved in the Reconstruction of the Union were, at last, successfully solved by the Republican Party, and every State that had been in armed Rebellion against that Union, was not only back again, with a Loyal State Constitution, but ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... a nest of the Long-tailed Sibia from the top of a tall tree, situated at an elevation of about 4000 feet, in the neighbourhood of Rungbee, near Darjeeling. This was on the 17th June, and the nest contained five fresh eggs. The nest is as perplexing as are the eggs; for the nest is that of a Bulbul, the eggs those of a Shrike or Minivet. The nest is a deep compact cup, about 41/2 inches in diameter and 23/4 inches in depth. The egg-cavity is 3 inches across and fully 13/4 inch in depth. Interiorly the nest ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... hug it in his arms." To those of riper years the "blanket of the dark" often ushers in a season of terrors,—a time of fitful snatches of broken sleep and of tormenting dreams; of long stretches of wakefulness; of hours when all things perplexing and troublesome in one's affairs march before him in sombre procession: in endless disorder, in labyrinths of confusion, in countless new phases of disagreeableness; and at length the morning summons him to labor, far more racked and weary ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... expostulating with the father. This probably only incensed him more. He persisted. Harriet again addressed Shelley in despair, saying she would put herself under his protection and fly with him; a difficult position for any young man, and for Shelley most perplexing, with his avowed hostility to marriage, and his recent assertions that he was not in love with Harriet. But it must be put to Shelley's credit that, having intentionally or otherwise led Harriet on to love him, he now acted as a gentleman to his sister's school friend, and, influenced to some ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... Minthrops' dovecote soon settled down into a glorified routine. The elder Mrs. Minthrop returned to Boston, leaving Deena as her lieutenant, and perplexing her with the multiplicity of her charges; apparently Mrs. Ponsonby was to be Providence to her sister, with health and happiness under her control. The situation was paradoxical. Polly was to be denied nothing, but not allowed to have her own way too freely; she was ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... note of the 26th of September, which, while refusing to recognize the Indians as sovereign nations in the treaty, proposed a stipulation that would leave them in possession of their former lands and rights. This solution of a perplexing problem was finally accepted after another exchange of notes and another earnest discussion at the American hotel, where Gallatin again poured oil on the troubled waters. Concession begat concession. New instructions from President Madison now permitted ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... change; She could replace them—what would that avail?— Moved from their order they have lost their charm. While thus she strewed her way with softest words, Others grew up before her, but appeared A plenteous rather than perplexing choice: She rubbed her palms with pleasure, heaved a sigh, Grew calm again, and thus her thoughts revolved— "But he descended to the tombs! the thought Thrills me, I must avow it, with affright. And wherefore? shows he not the more beloved Of heaven? or how ascends he back to day? Then has he wronged ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... 21st, and entered at once upon his duties as Secretary of State. He disapproved of the assumption measure, but was so absorbed in the perplexing details of his new office, in correspondence, and in frequent conferences with the President on the subject of foreign affairs, that he gave the matter little consecutive thought. Moreover, he was dined every day for weeks, all the distinguished New Yorkers, from Hamilton down, vying with ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... to be by the boats of the International Steamship Company; and when, at eight o'clock in the morning, we stepped aboard one of them from Commercial Wharf, we felt that half our journey and the most perplexing part of it was accomplished. We had put ourselves upon a great line of travel, and had only to resign ourselves to its flow in order to reach the desired haven. The agent at the wharf assured us that it was not necessary to buy through tickets to Baddeck,—he spoke ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... school that morning dragged heavily. The impending meeting was perplexing the minds of not a few. The phenomenon of. Yorke's and Clapperton's names appended to the same document puzzled boys who still kept alive the animosity which had wrecked the School clubs earlier in he term and brought ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... an openly sceptical tendency. Johnson, to whom nothing could be more abhorrent than an alliance with any assailant of orthodoxy, draws no inference from his pessimism. He is content to state the fact of human misery without perplexing himself with the resulting problem as to the final cause of human existence. If the question had been explicitly brought before him, he would, doubtless, have replied that the mystery was insoluble. To answer either in the sceptical or the optimistic sense was equally presumptuous. Johnson's religious ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... a motive, other than the desire for safety, which led Marion to choose and retain this position. The borders of North Carolina swarmed with Tories, chiefly descendants of the Scotch, who constituted, on frequent subsequent occasions, the perplexing enemies with whom our partisan had to contend. It is not improbable, though history does not declare the fact, that he chose the present occasion for overawing the scattered parties, who were always stretching with lawless footsteps from Cape Fear ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... wishes, which they knew not how to overcome. He could not live on the land above two minutes at a time, nor she in the water above thrice that period. This state of things gave them much vexation, occasioning many tears to be shed by the maiden, and perplexing much her ardent lover. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... hair; "I want to know your opinion of it." Folter gave a toss of her head that seemed to say, "Have not I spoken?" but what it really did mean, how should other mortal know? for the main obstructions to understanding are profundity and shallowness, and the latter is far the more perplexing of the two. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... be brought before him as a prisoner, was indeed a circumstance equally perplexing as unpleasing, but it was one which was beyond her control, and the Douglas, into whose hands she had fallen, appeared to her to represent the deity in the play, whose entrance was almost sufficient to bring its ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... towards a personal being seemed to traverse vast gulfs, to occupy epochs. Gigantic dreams that were terrible realities at the time, left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange scenery, as if from another planet. There was a distinct impression, too, of a momentous conversation, of a name—he could not tell what name—that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten sensation of ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... not a nature to shrink from grave questions; no, she met them boldly, when once they were there, wrestled fiercely with them, was defeated, and again with a martyr's zeal rose to renew the combat. God had Himself sent her this perplexing doubt and it was her duty to bear His burden. Thus ran Brita's reasoning. In the mean while the years slipped by, and great changes were wrought in the world ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Nixon wanted to deal with the perplexing problems of our POWs and failing domestic morale, as well as take away substantial political leverage from the North Vietnamese, he directed the raid to rescue prisoners jailed just outside Hanoi. The raid itself was well ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... next year after painting the portraits of Meyer and his wife there is a sudden break in the painter's story which has always puzzled his biographers. After such a brilliant start in Basel it is perplexing to find the young man, instead of proceeding to join the Painters' Guild and take the necessary citizenship, suddenly turn his back on all these encouragements and leave the town for a long absence ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... that room sure. He had started confident. Here was a sordid crime, easily understood. But in that room he had read something which had troubled him, which had raised the sordid crime on to some higher and perplexing level. ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... dropping languages. The way in which languages are taken up or dropped is also perplexing. Keane[268] gives a list of peoples who have dropped one language and taken up another; he also gives a list of those who have changed physical type but have retained the same language. Holub[269] mentions the Makololo, who have almost entirely ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... occasion to say something about Cicero's property, a matter which is, in its way, a rather perplexing question. In the case of a famous advocate among ourselves there would be no difficulty in understanding that he should have acquired a great fortune. But the Roman law strictly forbade an advocate to receive any payment from his clients. The practice of old times, when the great noble pleaded ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... engaging smile, his voice fell like oil upon the troubled waters, and his bright face was full of the becoming bashfulness which afflicts youths of seventeen when touching upon such subjects of newly acquired interest as girls and their pleasant but perplexing ways. ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... reference to the strange creature I kept at my office. This worried me very much. And as the idea came upon me of his possibly turning out a long-lived man, and keep occupying my chambers, and denying my authority; and perplexing my visitors; and scandalizing my professional reputation; and casting a general gloom over the premises; keeping soul and body together to the last upon his savings (for doubtless he spent but half a dime a day), and in the end perhaps outlive me, and claim possession ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... of being,—its combinations, phenomena, and outcome,—but have built instead upon the sand of human reason. They have not accepted the simple teaching and life of Jesus as the only true solution of the perplexing problem of ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... did all he could to fix him, but finding that the Duke was always for delays, and for perplexing all expedients with groundless fears of invincible difficulties, he fell upon an expedient very dangerous to all appearance, but, as it usually happens in extraordinary cases, much less so than at ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... nation possessed of written records is comparatively easy; but when these are wanting, we must examine the ruins of their cities and monuments, and judge of them as a people from the size and structure of their buildings, and from the remains of art found in them. This is often a perplexing, always an arduous task; much more so is it to decipher the earth's history."[363] "The canoes, for example, and stone hatchets found in our peat bogs afford an insight into the rude arts and manners of the earliest inhabitants of our island; the buried coin fixes the date of some Roman ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... A second perplexing circumstance which happened on the same day, and which took me completely by surprise, added greatly to the sense of uneasiness that was now weighing on ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... was perplexing him, as an occurrence altogether unusual. He had known of people being killed and torn to pieces by the animal in its anger; but never of one being carried ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... self—in a quiet disbelief that angered him no longer, because he had given over all fight with it. But the great dome, flaming with its letters, AEdificabo meam Ecclesiam, shining there for ages, kindled the fight anew. And strange as it may seem, and perplexing as it was to the Doctor (when he received Reuben's story of it), he came out from his first visit to the great Romish temple with his religious nature more deeply stirred than it had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing before me, like the faces which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium—all the strange combinations, which ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... in a piece of attempted roguery, as Coleridge has wisely observed, though reasoning unwisely from it, we lay the blame, not on our own moral nature, for which we are responsible, but on our intellectual, for which we are not responsible. We do not say what knaves, we say what fools, we have been; perplexing Coleridge, who regards it as a phenomenon of some deep moral disorder; whereas it is but one more evidence of the universal fact that gifts are the true and proper object of appreciation; and as we admire men for possessing gifts, so we blame them for their ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... was Jane Allen, the darling of the gym and the record maker for basket-ball, now so prone on solving a perplexing noise mystery that her games were cancelled and even her riding hours filled in with mundane matters, while her companions flew away to gather mountain ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... the colored refugees. Soon after the slaves were set free they flocked to Kansas in large numbers, and what should be done with this great body of uneducated, untrained and irresponsible people was a perplexing question. She went into the day schools, Sunday-schools, charitable societies and all organizations for their relief and improvement. The journal shows that four or five days or evenings every week were given to this work and that she formed an ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... it as a 'Generally admitted fact, that there is a human, as well as a divine element in Scripture,' and adds, 'that this should modify our judgment in considering perplexing discrepancies and minor objections. There are spots in the sun; there are bogs on the earth; and why should the perplexities in a book, which is a multifarious collection of poetico-theological and ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... one in your place," she said, "for I feel as if you must have traveled over some long, hard path of troubles, before you could reach this feeling you have. But, 'Tana, think of brighter things; young girls should never drift into those perplexing questions. They will make you melancholy if you brood on ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... I hastily, "make tea for all." Every shade vanished from shining eyes when I produced the bottle of rum and added a spoonful of flavor to each brimming shellful. All perplexing questions were forgotten, and simple social pleasure reigned again on my paepae, while Great Fern explained to all his idea ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... fell upon Robin—unaccountable and perplexing. But the hermit soberly journeyed toward Nottingham, the two men-at-arms, with the sumpter ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... an habitual use of animal food is attended with all the perplexing, uncomfortable, and distressing difficulties that follow the giving up of an habitual use of strong drink. A change from one kind of simple nutriment to another has no such effect. It is only when ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... before the party reached the city they had begun to note the perplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time, and upon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute, as the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of the perplexing question aroused all Mr. Iglesias' loyalty towards his old employers. He saw before them the ugly possibility of failure and disgrace. The mere phantom of the thing hurt him as unseemly, as a shame ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... of the children. The independent self-support of every adult, healthy Indian, female as well as male, and the gentile relationship, which is more wide reaching and authoritative than that of marriage, have already disposed of these questions, which are usually so perplexing for the white man. So far as personal maintenance is concerned, a woman is, as a rule, just as well off without a husband as with one. What is hers, in the shape of property, remains her own whether she is married or not. In fact, marriage among these Indians seems to be but ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... their presence. It was, indeed, necessary to "make a party" in this way, as other schemers were already trying to undermine the Colombian company in influential directions. The engineer did not exaggerate when he said, "The uncertainty of transacting business in this country is perplexing beyond description." ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... demanded to examine Lord Temple: when that was granted, he asked for Lord Sandwich and Lord March. As the first had not been refused, the others could not. The Lords were adjourned till to-day @ , and, I suppose, are now sitting on this perplexing demand. If Lord Temple desires to go to the bar of the Commons, and the others desire to be excused, it will be difficult for the Lords to know what to do. Sandwich is frightened out of his senses,(1055) and March does not like it. Well! this will cure ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... aged is one of the most perplexing problems of modern life. How is the workingman with less than five hundred dollars a year, and with earning power waning as his own years advance, to provide for aged parents or other relatives in addition to furnishing ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... fashioned. Visions of Numa, the lion, straining futilely in its embrace thrilled the ape-man. He was quite content, for his hands and his brain were busy. Content, too, were his fellows of the tribe of Kerchak, searching for food in the clearing and the surrounding trees about him. No perplexing thoughts of the future burdened their minds, and only occasionally, dimly arose recollections of the near past. They were stimulated to a species of brutal content by the delectable business of filling their bellies. Afterward they would sleep—it was their ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... proud of your country; but I tell you we're going to have a race of people in these provinces such as the world has never seen before." And, as I looked at the child, I drifted into a labyrinth of insoluble enigmas and perplexing hypotheses—no new thing with me, as the sympathetic reader is by this time ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... appeared the perplexing something he could not resolve. The over-fine cloak, the horse now in good condition, might have something to do with it, contrasting as they certainly did with the purse in the last stages of emaciation. And there seemed a studying of his general appearance, of his features, even. ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... was the attitude this ruffian took with a respectable and ostensibly married woman! And she had mistaken him for a gentleman! She had even begun to feel a reluctant sort of liking for him; at any rate, an interest in his ambiguous and perplexing personality. Now—how dared he! She put it to him at ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... upon the precise step to be taken. Some advocated a protest, others a respectful refusal to do duty; and a few went in for a square mutiny. The provisions were transferred from the cutter to the ship, and the boat was hoisted up before the perplexing question could ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... was no longer in doubt concerning the place to which he had been conveyed; and the more he reflected on his situation, the more he was overwhelmed with the most perplexing chagrin. He could not conceive by whose means he had been immured in a madhouse; but he heartily repented of his knight-errantry, as a frolic which might have very serious consequences, with respect to his future life and fortune. After mature deliberation, he resolved to demean himself with ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... I am upon this Subject, I cannot forbear mentioning a Particular which is of use in every Station of Life, and which methinks every Master should teach his Scholars. I mean the writing of English Letters. To this End, instead of perplexing them with Latin Epistles, Themes and Verses, there might be a punctual Correspondence established between two Boys, who might act in any imaginary Parts of Business, or be allow'd sometimes to give a ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the Large Lady, whose black bombazine was the visible sign of a loss by death that had made it necessary for her to enter the school-room to earn a living, was finding the duties incident to the First Reader almost as strange and perplexing as Emmy Lou herself. ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... replied Philip. "I feel that I should, before this, have made you acquainted with this strange history. I will now state the whole of the circumstances which have occurred, but with little hope your advice can help me, in a case so difficult, and in a duty so peremptory, yet so perplexing." ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... spectacles, who was there every moment, and who said things to me that I did not understand. In truth, I have been on the verge of saying a final farewell to every one. Ah, my poor mother! I passed three or four days at least, of which I recollect almost nothing, as though I had been in a dark and perplexing dream. I thought I beheld at my bedside my kind schoolmistress of the upper primary, who was trying to stifle her cough in her handkerchief in order not to disturb me. In the same manner I confusedly recall ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... for her offspring twice over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon Benham's outlook. His resolution to go round the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... the inadvertencies of the scribes, and restored the purity of the text; for transcribing after transcribing had caused some errors and diversity of readings to occur, between the English and foreign codices, in spite of all the pious care of the monastic copyists; this was perplexing, an uniformity was essential and he undertook the task;[137] labors so valuable deserve the highest praise, and we bestow it more liberally upon him for this good work than we should have done had he been the compiler of crude homilies or the marvellous legends of ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... Divine gift which we may employ fearlessly—to suppose that these real 'selves,' freed from the weight of their discarded garments, would leave either their blissful repose, or, still less, their new activities, to come back to wander about, purposelessly and aimlessly, in this world, at best only perplexing and alarming such as may perceive them? Is it not contrary to all we find of the wisdom and reasonableness of such laws as we do know ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... judgment, be viewed as of minor importance. If a fund adequate to the object in view can be obtained from the lands which they cede, all the purposes of the Government should be regarded as answered. The great desideratum is the removal of the Indians and the settlement of the perplexing question involved in their present location—a question in which several of the States of this Union have the deepest interest, and which, if left undecided much longer, may eventuate in serious injury to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... 'it' that is unrevealed by the courteous Dr. Knapp? It seems to amount to the charge that Borrow is accused of gibbeting in his books the people he dislikes; this is what every great imaginative writer has been charged with to the perplexing of dull people. There are many characters in Dickens's novels which are supposed to be a presentation of near relatives or friends. These he ought to have treated with more kindliness. That heroic little woman, Miss Bronte, gave a picture of Madame Heger, who kept a school at Brussels, that conveyed, ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... a complete analysis of the facts as they appeared to me in the light of this latest bit of evidence. The result was not strikingly encouraging, yet I will insert it, if only in proof of my diligence and the extreme interest I experienced in each and every stage of this perplexing affair. It again took the form of a summary and ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... particulars about ourselves than Stewart had volunteered. And when we had been served with our simple viands, she sat composedly before us with her hands in her lap, and her eyes turned on us with an appearance of sedate scrutiny no whit the less perplexing because we knew her orbs were but fair clean window-panes shuttered ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... whimpering and cowering mood. With evil simply taken as such, men can make short work, for their relations with it then are only practical. It looms up no longer so spectrally, it loses all its haunting and perplexing significance, as soon as the mind attacks the instances of it singly, and ceases to worry about their derivation from ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... glasses and made a couple of circles as it were, slightly apart. If you have never observed on the human face the effect produced by these circumferences placed one within the other, and separated by a hollow space or line, you can hardly imagine how perplexing such a face will be to you, especially if pale, hollow-cheeked, and terminating in a pointed chin like that of Mephistopheles,—a type which painters give to cats. This double resemblance was observable on the face ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... result can be imagined. At the end of a year the boy's knowledge of Latin would be of a peculiar kind. Of grammar he would know but little; of words and phrases he would have a goodly store; and thus he was learning to talk the language before he had even heard of its perplexing rules. One example must suffice to illustrate the method. The beginner did not even learn the names of the cases. In a modern English Latin Grammar, the charming sight that meets our gaze is ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... cleaning, must have widely alarmed the country, but independently of this special cause there can be no doubt that after a few days' heavy shooting, the elephants will combine in some mysterious manner and disappear from an extensive district. In many ways these creatures are perplexing to the student of natural history. It would occur to most people that in countries where elephants abound we should frequently meet with those that are sick, or so aged that they cannot accompany the herd. Although for very many years I have hunted both in ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... the determination must be made according to the individuality of the architect, what method shall we follow? The matter is even more perplexing than the study of character. Although various authors have treated the latter subject (we have attempted it elsewhere), no one of the proposed classifications has been universally accepted. Nevertheless, despite their differences, they coincide in several points, because these have ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... our story, and she knew that the whole of the smuggled goods lay concealed in one of those numerous disused shafts of old mines which lie scattered thickly over that part of the country. Maggot's absence rendered her position still more perplexing, but she was a woman of ready wit and self-reliance, and she comforted herself with the knowledge that the brandy lay buried far down in the shaft, and that it would take the boatsmen some time to dig to it—that possibly they might give up in ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... Kanishka played for the Church of the Great Vehicle much the same part as Asoka for the Theravadins and summoned a Council which wrote commentaries on the Tripitaka. This may be reasonably held to include a recension of the text commented on but we do not know what that text was, and the brief and perplexing accounts of the Council which we possess indicate not that it gave its imprimatur to Mahayanist sutras but that it was specially concerned with the Abhidharma ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... responsibilities; but the better the man and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his personality. To have lived a generation is not only to have grown at home in that perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age has, for all but the entirely base, something of the ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Nothing could be distinctly seen in the narrow gorge, but the clash of sword blade against bayonet was heard on every side. The stormers had to grope their way between the yet standing walls in a dusk which the glimmer of the blue light only made more perplexing. But some elbow room was gradually gained, and then, since there was neither time nor space for methodic street fighting, each loaded section gave its volley and then made way for the next, which, crowding to the front, poured a deadly discharge at half ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... a controlling influence was dead. Only a very few among speculative philosophers believed in any god, except in a degrading sense,—as a blind inexorable fate, or an impersonation of the powers of Nature. The future state was a most perplexing uncertainty. Epicurean self-indulgence and material prosperity were regarded as the greatest good; and as doubt of the darkest kind hung over the future, the body was necessarily regarded as of more value than the soul. In fact, it was only the body which Paganism recognized as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... formulary was concerned; but to the entire system I had contracted an incurable repugnance, as worldly, hypocritical, and an evil counterfeit. I desired, therefore, to creep into some obscure congregation, and there wait till my mind had ripened as to the right path in circumstances so perplexing. I will only briefly say, that I at last settled among some who had previously been total strangers to me. To their good will and simple kindness I feel myself indebted: peace be to them! Thus I gained time, and repose of mind, which I ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... "This co-operation is perplexing to our enemies who, therefore, do all in their power to disrupt this union. Their endeavours are in vain. All of us believe that neither the Czech nor the Polish nation will perish, that even a great war cannot bring about their extirpation; that besides the war there is something ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... their way through to the Tonto, but might have just as many more wounded to care for, and be unable to transport them. Moreover, with so many hostiles on every side, was he justified in stripping the post of its defenders? It was no pleasant situation. It was more than perplexing. Presently he turned and, using such signs as he thought might be comprehensible, asked the impassive runner if he knew where the first fight took place, and the Hualpai, as would almost any Indian partially gathering the drift of a ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... over the quiet beauty of these fair Ohio hills and vales clothed in magnificent stretches of golden harvest field and green forest, through which lead winding roads and sinuous streams, you ask yourself this perplexing question: Where have I ever beheld a more lovely or more quiet landscape than this? To be sure it is not thrilling, but sweet and soothing, like the view you get at Intervale, above North Conway in New Hampshire. This fair picture brought to our memory the scenery among the hills and valleys ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Congress, it was occupying no less seriously leading minds in the different Colonies. All felt that the success of the experiment must chiefly depend upon the degree of security that could be given to the bills. But how to reach that necessary degree was a perplexing question. Three ways were suggested in the New-York Convention: that Congress should fix upon a sum, assign each Colony its proportion, and the issue be made by the Colony upon its own responsibility; or that the United Colonies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... better than she liked her. It was the first glimpse that Clover had ever caught of this unhappy tinge of jealousy in Imogen's mind; it grieved her, but it also explained some things that had been perplexing, and she grew very pitiful and tender over the poor girl, away from home among strangers, and so ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... gloomy forests and dense undergrowths of the Carboniferous jungles would appear unfamiliar to us could we see them as they grew, and even a botanist would find many of their forms perplexing and hard to classify. None of our modern trees would meet the eye. Plants with conspicuous flowers of fragrance and beauty were yet to come. Even mosses and grasses ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... points for the admission of light, and the sitter or object painted is between them, the light comes from all sides, so that the rays cross each other and there is no single scheme of light and shade. The rays from one side modify the shadows cast from the other side, and a perplexing and involved arrangement of values is the result. This is a favorite technical problem with painters, and its solution is splendid training; but the student who can successfully solve it is not far from the end of his ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... point that you have overlooked. Nor is it possible to go back and follow the characters who have been temporarily dispensed with. If they reappear, it must be in a scene which naturally follows, and does not come with a sense of perplexing surprise. Remember this: When characters are reintroduced they must not have been too long absent from the plot-movement, but they must have been all the time consciously or subconsciously present in the mind of the spectator as being ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... for periods not exceeding twelve months, and to "provide in such leases, or otherwise, for the employment and general welfare" of the freedmen. Most of the army officers greeted this as a welcome relief from perplexing "Negro affairs," and Secretary Fessenden, July 29, 1864, issued an excellent system of regulations, which were afterward closely followed by General Howard. Under Treasury agents, large quantities of land were leased in the Mississippi ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to her retreat was so curiously concealed by projections of rock, that she had nothing to fear but from sound. But she could not be sure of this; and she would have extinguished her fire by heaping sand upon it, and left herself in total darkness in a labyrinth which was always sufficiently perplexing, if Rollo had not held her hand. He stepped cautiously through the sand to the nearest point to the foe, listened awhile, and then smiled and nodded to Lady Carse, and seemed wonderfully delighted. This excited her impatience so much that it seemed ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... to publisher and parent, to the library's adult open shelves of current fiction enter into the problem. The children's over-reading, and their reluctance to "graduate" from juvenile books, these and many other perplexing questions grow out of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... this character a few modest postulates,—give him certain millions of years, a sufficient number of earthquakes, a whole battery of volcanoes, a few ocean deluges, and the rise and fall of half a dozen continents,—and he will frame a theory off-hand, which will account for the most perplexing phenomena. Our author is certainly entitled to take his place at the very head ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... an eventful one to Eustacia's brain, and one which she hardly ever forgot. She dreamt a dream; and few human beings, from Nebuchadnezzar to the Swaffham tinker, ever dreamt a more remarkable one. Such an elaborately developed, perplexing, exciting dream was certainly never dreamed by a girl in Eustacia's situation before. It had as many ramifications as the Cretan labyrinth, as many fluctuations as the Northern Lights, as much colour as a parterre in June, and was ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... position at once painful and embarrassing in the extreme. And Claud, especially, although he had carefully abstained from all accusations of Gaut, had taken no part in getting up the prosecution, and purposely absented himself from the trial, yet felt very keenly the perplexing dilemma into which he would be thrown, by continuing the connecting link between two such deadly foes as he now found his father, whom he could not desert, and Gaut Gurley, whom he felt conscious he could not defend. And for this reason ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... inspired that convulsive reverie; perchance it might have been remorse. Did he abandon himself to those novel sentiments which in a few brief hours had changed all his aspirations and coloured his whole existence; or was he tortured by that dark and perplexing future, from which his imagination in vain struggled ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... into a whole unlike any similar body elsewhere in the world. They, too, by the fortunes of war have lost their old rulers and guides and against their will submit their future to alien hands. To govern them or to train them to govern themselves are tasks almost equally perplexing, nor is the problem made easier or clearer by the clash of contradictory estimates of their culture and capacity which form the ammunition ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... her, and his clearer vision had just sufficed to reveal to him the ghosts, without teaching him how to master or dispel them. Thus, Cowper's sweetness, which charmed her, became to him Cowper's dejection and despairing sadness, perplexing enough to his young brain. Where she took up and fed her soul upon John Wesley's conclusions, the boy found himself involved in John Wesley's perplexities, and struggling in desperate wrestle with the haunting shapes to which John Wesley had given successful battle. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... every shift and change in the perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk a telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of a newly appointed ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... windows of the rooms shown me, in hope of seeing the little court I knew so well, and the abbe's half-open corridor, and yet in half fear, that I might, after all, be looking from the very window about which hung so perplexing mystery. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... I will not force upon your love the hardship of an explanation. I have too much respect for others, and know how perplexing it is to make an open avowal ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... for coping with the difficulty at hand. A difficulty is an indispensable stimulus to thinking, but not all difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they overwhelm and submerge and discourage. The perplexing situation must be sufficiently like situations which have already been dealt with so that pupils will have some control of the meanings of handling it. A large part of the art of instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough to challenge thought, and ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Well, the strange, perplexing change about was arranged after a while, even to the names of the lads, and Philip became plain Arthur O'Neill, and Arthur found himself Philip Alfred Reginald, ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... glancing around the littered floor, "since I am empowered to deal with this matter as I see fit, and since you are a medical man, we can devote the next half-hour, at any rate, to a strictly confidential inquiry into this most perplexing case. I propose that you examine the body for any evidences that may assist you determining the cause of death, whilst I ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... entered Washington in the fall of 1847, as junior Senator from Illinois, our troops had occupied the city of Mexico and negotiations for peace were well under way. Perplexing problems awaited Congress. President Polk sternly reminded the two Houses that peace must bring indemnity for the past and security for the future, and that the only indemnity which Mexico could offer would be a cession of territory. Unwittingly, he gave the signal for another bitter ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Jesus in wild and barbarous climes, was new and strange. To the whole matter she gave a careful and prayerful consideration. She divested the great subject as far as possible from all romantic drapery, and looked upon it in its true light. For a while her mind was in a state of perplexing doubt and fear, and the thought of leaving her own land was terrible. While considering the conflict in her mind, we should remember that the cause of missions was in its infancy; that no one had ever gone forth from our shores to preach salvation by grace in heathen countries; that ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... picture. A boy of quick and enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... innumerable tragedies of Lombardy, Romagna, and the Marches of Ancona, during the ascendency of despotic families, are far more terrible than any fiction; nor would it be easy for the imagination to invent so perplexing a mixture of savage barbarism with modern refinement. Savonarola's denunciations[1] and Villani's descriptions of a despot read like passages from Plato's Republic, like the most pregnant of Aristotle's ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... such things, and, when the logic becomes perplexing, we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as cool ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Any theory which comes in with an attempt to ignore design as manifested in God's creation, is a theory, I say, which attempts to dethrone God. This the theory of Darwin does endeavor to do. If asked how our old theory accounts for such uniformity of design in the midst of such perplexing variety as we find in nature, we reply, that this can only be accounted for on one admission, that the whole is the work of one Author, built according, as it were, to one style; that it represents the unity of one mind with the infinite power of adapting all ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Lost in perplexing debate, I saw little of the scenery of the bay; but the remembrance of Prue and the gentle influence of the day plunged me into a mood of pensive reverie which nothing tended to destroy, until we ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... than she had counted upon. For the cars were not ready at eleven o'clock the snow last night had occasioned some perplexing delays. It was not till near three o'clock, that the often-despatched messenger to the dept brought back word that they might go as soon as they pleased. It pleased Mrs. Renney to be in a great hurry, ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... experience they had of their fierceness in the battle of Mavila. They objected likewise that they saw no reason for exposing themselves to such hazards, without hope of reward, as they had found no mines in all the vast extent of country they had travelled over. This opposition was exceedingly perplexing to Soto, as he had expended the whole of his substance on the expedition, and was afraid his men would desert him if he came near the coast, when he was not in a condition to raise new forces. For these reasons he resolved to penetrate into the interior of the country; and, being ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... placing it in the secluded homes of the Hindus among women of the harems, and teaching them to read it. No commercial business is conducted with greater energy, enterprise and ability than the work of the Bible Society, in this empire, and while the missionaries have enormous and perplexing difficulties to overcome, they, too, are ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... Langham answered, smiling at her father, "except that he was very much sunburned and had most perplexing eyes." ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... now turned west, then south, and every other way, and it was exceedingly perplexing to know at once what to do in each case, especially as the waves became short and snappish under this pressure from different sides, and yet my compass quietly pointed right, with a soft radiance shining from it, and my mast-light in a brighter glow gleamed from behind ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... independent existence, it has not yet reached the condition of the adult. Here lies an inexhaustible mine of valuable information unappropriated, from which, as my limited experience has already taught me, may be gathered the evidence for the solution of the most perplexing problems of our science. Here we shall find the true tests by which to determine the various kinds and different degrees of affinity which animals now living bear not only to one another, but also to those that have preceded them in past times. Here we shall find, not a material connection ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... meeting an acquaintance in the street. He passes us, and within a hundred yards we again meet and talk with our friend. When he is of very marked appearance, or has any strong peculiarity, the experience is rather perplexing. Perhaps a few bits of hallucination are sprinkled over a real object. This ordinary event leads on to what are called "Arrivals," that is when a person is seen, heard and perhaps spoken to in a place ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... of human history there have been people who puzzled their brains about the reasons of things. Why things are as they are, whence we came, and whither we are going are some of the perplexing questions they have tried to answer. Some men have given all their lives to the study of these problems as a single occupation or profession. Among the ancient Greeks, who were a very intellectual nation, such men were quite numerous and were held in great esteem as teachers. They ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... no more; they are as if they had never been, till perhaps some accidental occurrence, some words in conversation, some object by the wayside, or some passenger in the street, attract our notice—and then, as if awaking from a perplexing trance, a light darts in upon our darkness; and we discover that thus some one long ago spoke; that there something long ago happened; or that the person, who just passed us like a vision, shared smiles with us long, long years ago, and added a double zest to ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... belt hoisted him through the tube into the central core of the ship, Jack Odin found himself worrying a bit about Nea. She had decided to go on with them. Due to her experimental interests, Jack had supposed that she would stay with Wolden. But there she was, still carrying that perplexing case of hers. Quiet and sad-eyed, a little smaller than Maya, her face a little sharper, she still looked so much like Maya that Odin couldn't get his ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord fomented, from principle, in all parts of the Empire, not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace; sought in its natural course, and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... his wife would appeal to her, though there was a certain satisfaction in the reflection that to leave her dependent upon Mrs. Hastings caused him concern. For another thing, his reserve had been at least perplexing, and it was borne in upon her that it would have cost her a more determined effort to withstand him had he spoken with fire and passion. The restraint, however, had been evident, and he could not have practised it unless there had been something to hold in check; and then it became apparent that ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... present streams are only miniature representatives of those which formerly wrought havoc here, teach lessons of patience to the restless mortals who behold them; while some of the singular formations on the cliffs present perplexing problems which Nature, as it were in mocking humor, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... people were different. But could the old interests and friendships and associations compensate her for the loss of the man that had come into her life to remain for the rest of her days whether she chose to keep him or not? These new and perplexing questions she was forced to ask herself for the first time, and she knew that there could be but one ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... and sculpturing, of engineering and obeying the vagaries of successive Popes. Therefore, when he came at last to paint the Last Judgment, he was a worn man, exhausted in services of many divers sorts. And, what is most perplexing to the reconstructive critic, nothing in his correspondence remains to indicate the stages of his labour. The letters tell plenty about domestic anxieties, annoyances in his poor craftsman's household, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... a brief outline of the principal facts known with regard to these interesting but perplexing bodies. We must be content with the recital of what we know, rather than hazard guesses about matters beyond our reach. We see that they are obedient to the great laws of gravitation, and afford a striking illustration of their truth. We have seen how modern ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... gentle Hilda, often laughed at the monstrous fictions that had gone abroad in reference to her adventure. Her two confidants (for such they were, on all ordinary subjects) had not failed to ask an explanation of the mystery, since undeniably a mystery there was, and one sufficiently perplexing in itself, without any help from the imaginative faculty. And, sometimes responding to their inquiries with a melancholy sort of playfulness, Miriam let her fancy run off into wilder fables than any which German ingenuity or Italian superstition ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the midst of these perplexing reflections and strengthened resolves, he saw that it was time for him to be off to see Duffel, as the place of meeting was some ten miles from the cave, and a part of the distance had to be gone over on foot. He reached the spot about ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... was an eventful one to Eustacia's brain, and one which she hardly ever forgot. She dreamt a dream; and few human beings, from Nebuchadnezzar to the Swaffham tinker, ever dreamt a more remarkable one. Such an elaborately developed, perplexing, exciting dream was certainly never dreamed by a girl in Eustacia's situation before. It had as many ramifications as the Cretan labyrinth, as many fluctuations as the Northern Lights, as much colour as a parterre in June, and was as ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the church wall that needed to be driven off before it spoiled the fresco, or he may have suspicion that a rat terrier is in one of the pews by the pulpit, from the fact that he saw two or three children laughing. Now, there is nothing more perplexing than a dog chase during religious services. At a prayer meeting once in my house, a snarling poodle came in, looked around, and then went and sat under the chair of its owner. We had no objection to its being ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... as swallows of chiming church-bells, they met at the station and were whirled as fast as steam could take them to new streets, lodging-houses, and theatres. To Kate this constant change was at once wearying and perplexing, and she often feared that she would never become accustomed to her new mode of life. But on the principle that we can scarcely be said to be moving when all around is moving in a like proportion, Kate learned to regard locality as a mere nothing, ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... to a terrific degree. Here was a new, strange, perplexing combination—"deny himself," and "cross," coupled with His "Follow Me." What could He mean? This was surely some of His intensely figurative language again, they think. Yes, it surely was; and it stood for a yet intenser experience. ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... had from her youth upwards been constantly in the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions, based on absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so precisely in the mould of previous ones that, not being given to syntheses of circumstances, he answered ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... well as perplexing, was this unique state of matters—wholly without precedent. For instance, Mr. Rouncival and his stud-groom could almost have sworn to the big slashing brown mare, the image of the long-lost celebrity Termagant, with the same crooked blaze down the face, ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... the perplexity of the naturalists, produce her duck-billed beavers as she may, lesser authors some may hold, have no business to be perplexing readers with duck-billed characters. Always, they should represent human nature not in obscurity, but transparency, which, indeed, is the practice with most novelists, and is, perhaps, in certain cases, someway felt to be a kind of honor rendered by them ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... about the threshhold of occult studies are more perplexing and tormenting than those which have to do with the policy of the Brothers as to what shall, and what shall not, be revealed to the outer world. In fact, it is only by students at the same time tenacious and patient—continuously anxious to get ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... of thought reflected on her face, and while these reveries occupied his mind, there was a tender look in the deep black eyes and a smile on his lips. But these pleasant memories were apparently often followed by more perplexing thoughts. One afternoon he had been standing for some time lost in a dream, while he looked with eyes that saw nothing over the heaving waters to the distant horizon, when the captain's voice at his elbow recalled him ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... an author, my way was clear, but if I could not, and if ... and if... And so on through a wearying, perplexing ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... Now, the perplexing problem arises as to how long I shall hold office. The term is for two years. The new charter comes up before the coming Legislature for approval in January, and that instrument provides for another election next fall, to fill all ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... of the two fleets or squadrons it is hard to estimate. I have already spoken of the difficulty in finding out what guns were mounted on any given ship at a particular time, and it is even more perplexing with the crews. A schooner would make one cruise with but thirty hands; on the next it would appear with fifty, a number of militia having volunteered as marines. Finding the militia rather a nuisance, they would ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... than that number of members of either University. I will fairly own that, on receiving us, he drew me quietly aside, and observed:—"Mon ami, quand vous viendrez une autre fois, ne commandez pas, je vous prie, une armee si nombreuse. Je m'imaginois encore en Egypte." What was still more perplexing, we found there a party of English as numerous as ourselves. It was thus, however, that he rebuked ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... showy technique, at others to a cold and even harsh simplicity. Yet always in the main he had color, beauty, emotion, poignance when necessary. Like his idol, de Maupassant, he had no moral or strong social prejudices, no really great or disturbing imagination, no wealth of perplexing ideas. He saw America and life as something to be painted as all masters see life and paint it. Gifted with a true vein of satire, he had not, at the time of his death, quite mastered its possibilities. He still retained prejudice of one type ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... costumes were most perplexing to good New England ears and eyes, and Rebecca knew not whether to advance or ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... the Theravadins and summoned a Council which wrote commentaries on the Tripitaka. This may be reasonably held to include a recension of the text commented on but we do not know what that text was, and the brief and perplexing accounts of the Council which we possess indicate not that it gave its imprimatur to Mahayanist sutras but that it was specially concerned with the Abhidharma works of ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... apparently endless succession, with ledges at intervals, which afford the adventurers opportunities for resting themselves and affixing their rope-ladders for the purpose of descending yet farther. What is, however, most mortifying and perplexing is to observe that these abysses are not only before, but behind you, and on every side; indeed, close within the entrance of the cave, on the right, there is a gulf almost equally dark and full as threatening as that which exists at the nether end, and perhaps contains within itself as many ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... large enough to care for the unworthy among the poor as we would care for the unworthy among our own kin, is certainly a perplexing question. To say that it should never be so, is a comment upon our democratic relations to them which few of us would ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... these perplexing thoughts, Calton went down to St. Kilda to have a talk with Madge. He intended to ask her to assist him towards obtaining the information he needed. He had a great respect for Madge, and thought her a really clever woman. It was just possible, he argued, that Brian's great ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... surrounding objects, seemed to deaden all sound also. After a moment's pause he closed the door, but did not lock it, and retreating to the centre of the room remained blinking at the two candles and plucking some perplexing problem from his beard. Suddenly an idea seized him. Rosey! Where was she? Perhaps it had been a preconcerted plan, and she had fled with him. Putting out the lights, he stumbled hurriedly through the passage to the gangway above. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... the table for supper with dried fish and punch). The younger generation have a keener sense of humour than we elder ones, HAUSTUS, and perhaps, after all, she was only a perplexing sort ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... relating to the Victualling, and thence I by hackney to the Temple to the Auditor's man, and with him to a tavern to meet with another under-auditor to advise about the clearing of my Lord Bellasses' accounts without injuring myself and perplexing my accounts, and so thence away to my cozen Turner's, where I find Roger Pepys come last night to town, and here is his mistress, Mrs. Dickenson, and by and by comes in Mr. Turner, a worthy, sober, serious man—I honour him mightily. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... in some of the parts is not a little perplexing. Hardly one of the speeches put into Caesar's mouth can be regarded as historically characteristic; taken all together, they seem little short of a caricature. As here represented, Caesar appears little better than a braggart; ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... education and citizenship none can be made to mean more than the simple proposition that natural law is as sacred as a moral principle. All who remember this "beatitude" will be helped to solve many perplexing problems of dress, diet, play, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... love of power leads to many exercises and efforts that have no ulterior result. The mathematician will turn aside from his course of study to master a problem, which involves no new principle, but is merely difficult and perplexing. The reading of books obscurely written, or in languages that task the utmost power of analysis, frequently has no other result, and probably no other object, than the trial of strength. What can be attained only by strenuous ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... took hold of the subject with such vigor as to promise relief from all these perplexing disorders, and, after much investigation and a great deal of debate, there resulted the so-called "Reconstruction Laws," which, for a clear understanding of the powers conferred on the military commanders, I deem best to ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... were characteristic of the West. They were based on a positive faith in democracy, in our constitution of government, in the American people. In that faith, likewise, he addressed himself to the problem which in his day, as before and after, was perplexing the champions of democracy and giving pause to the well-wishers of the Republic. A later generation has learned to think of that problem as the negro question, a race question; Douglas's generation thought of it merely as ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... longer than she bad counted upon. For the cars were not ready at eleven o'clock; the snow last night had occasioned some perplexing delays. It was not till near three o'clock that the often-despatched messenger to the depot brought back word that they might go as soon as they pleased. It pleased Mrs. Renney to be in a great hurry, for her baggage was in the cars she said, and it would be dreadful if she and ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... and gladly, too," muttered Mr. Smith, with a perplexing mixture of sadness and mirthful conceit. "A plague upon their nonsense! My own heart is the only really miserable one in the company; it will certainly be the death ...
— The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The metallic sulphides generally pronounced harmless, causes the writing to soften and become illegible in a short time. On the other hand, yellow prussiate of potash, with acetic acid in successive operations is of great service in treating the most perplexing palimpsests. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his mind: that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, dried his eyes, and wiped his glasses. And he could never be consoled for the loss of his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years for which he survived her, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... be discovered and arrested. Therefore she must be concealed in the house. She had gone off with Walter Franklin, and here she was under the wing of his brother George. The case grew more mysterious and perplexing as time went on. Giles did not know which way to turn, or what advantage ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... of this august body was taken up with the perplexing problem how to attract big Jewish capital into the central governments and at the same time safeguard the latter against the excessive influx of Jews, who, for the sake of settling there, would register in the first guild and, under the disguise of relatives, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... I admit. "Like for instance yesterday when we play 'A Spaceship Built for Two.' This is a song, as you know, that does not have in it many high notes, but even when you play the low notes they sound somewhat like they maybe are trying to be high notes. It is a matter which is perplexing to ...
— The Flying Cuspidors • V. R. Francis
... himself[139] who acts and who effects all that is real in the sin of the creature. This objection leads us to consider the physical co-operation of God with the creature, after we have examined the moral co-operation, which was the more perplexing. Some have believed, with the celebrated Durand de Saint-Pourcain and Cardinal Aureolus, the famous Schoolman, that the co-operation of God with the creature (I mean the physical cooperation) is only general and mediate, and that God creates substances and gives them the force they need; and ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... a disturbing element, a perplexing unknown quantity, which had somehow crept into the work, and which seriously threatened to impair the accuracy of his calculations. It was a touching sight to behold the venerable mathematician as he pleaded with me not so ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... into a whistle, many things perplexing him. "He's lucky to get away at all," he remarked at length. "From what he said, it looks like there'd be ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... estimating their rights as the law established them, said but little on the subject, and that little was rather against the propriety of annoying a man, in their brother's condition, with business of so perplexing a nature. The fact that these important personages set their faces against the scheme had due weight, and most of the relatives began to calculate the probable amount of their respective shares under the law of distribution, as it stood in that day. ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... abound, but so far as we know, this is the first attempt to confine the vast and perplexing subject within the dimensions of a small, accessible volume devoted to the principles underlying the planning of all costumes, regardless ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... heart in the delegates for the job on hand. To them, the active forces in the Convention, the Princeton president was, indeed, a man of mystery. Who could solve the riddle of this political Sphinx? Who was this man Wilson? What were his purposes? What his ideals? These questions were troubling and perplexing the delegates. Colonel Harvey, the commander-in-chief of the Wilson forces, when interrogated by us, refused to answer. How masterfully the Old Guard staged every act of the drama, and thus brought about the nomination of the Princeton president. The Convention is at an end. Wilson ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... they had never been, till perhaps some accidental occurrence, some words in conversation, some object by the wayside, or some passenger in the street, attract our notice—and then, as if awaking from a perplexing trance, a light darts in upon our darkness; and we discover that thus some one long ago spoke; that there something long ago happened; or that the person, who just passed us like a vision, shared smiles ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... queer names that made her smile: "The Cranny," "The Nook," "Snug Harbour," "Buena Vista,"—of course,—which she thought pretty, though she did not know its meaning; and another, in German, equally perplexing, "Klein aber Mein." Though the windows of these places were now boarded up, though the mosquito netting still clung rather dismally to the porches, they were mutely suggestive of contentment ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... feelings were easily roused and but indifferently satisfied; wherever the boy turned he found himself surrounded by a wonderful and would-be learned activity, to which the garish theatres presented a ridiculous contrast, and the entrancing strains of music a perplexing one. Now, to the observer who sees things relatively, it must seem strange that the modern man who happens to be gifted with exceptional talent should as a child and a youth so seldom be blessed with the quality of ingenuousness and of ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the children. The independent self-support of every adult, healthy Indian, female as well as male, and the gentile relationship, which is more wide reaching and authoritative than that of marriage, have already disposed of these questions, which are usually so perplexing for the white man. So far as personal maintenance is concerned, a woman is, as a rule, just as well off without a husband as with one. What is hers, in the shape of property, remains her own whether she is married or not. In fact, marriage among these Indians seems to be but the natural mating of ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... the special correspondent of the Court Journal arrived in due course, written on very coarse copy-paper in the King's arabesque of handwriting, in which three words filled a page, and yet were illegible. Moreover, the contribution was the more perplexing at first, as it opened with a succession of erased paragraphs. The writer appeared to have attempted the article once or twice in several journalistic styles. At the side of one experiment was written, "Try American style," ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 1870." In 1812, when Byron wrote his note to the third edition of Childe Harold, Gropius must have been barely of age, and the statement "that he has for years assumed the name of his (a noble Lord's) agent" is somewhat perplexing.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... in civil war. In such cases there always is a main question; but in this case that question is a perplexing compound—Union and slavery. It thus becomes a question not of two sides merely, but of at least four sides, even among those who are for the Union, saying nothing of those who are against it. Thus, those who are for the Union with, but not without, slavery; those for it without, ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... door behind her, and then everything in the corridor grew clouded and confused. Who was this? A genuine fear came over him at a sudden alarming thought; was the house full of people, and was he, perhaps, the victim of some plot? Who could tell in what confusion of perplexing circumstances he might find himself involved, what importunate individuals he might come across here? These thoughts stirred a strong spirit of indignation and resistance. Was it a fool's journey he had undertaken? Not this time! He summoned all his powers of will and determination, ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... the lunar surface had interested the astronomic mind to a very high degree at their first discovery, and have proved to be very perplexing problems ever since. The first observers do not seem to have noticed them. Neither Hevelius, nor Cassini, nor La Hire, nor Herschel, makes a ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... of this most remarkable passage, which at once solves many interesting and perplexing problems, was published eighty years ago by Macpherson. But, strange to say, it attracted no notice, and has never, as far as I know, been mentioned by ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... history to a point (September 1750) where the Prince, for a moment, emerges from fairyland, and where we are not left to the perplexing conjectures of diplomatists in Paris, Dresden, Florence, Hanover, and St. Petersburg. In September 1750, Charles certainly visited London. There is a point of light. We now give an account of his actual ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... objected likewise that they saw no reason for exposing themselves to such hazards, without hope of reward, as they had found no mines in all the vast extent of country they had travelled over. This opposition was exceedingly perplexing to Soto, as he had expended the whole of his substance on the expedition, and was afraid his men would desert him if he came near the coast, when he was not in a condition to raise new forces. For these ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... time, as he went on along the difficult track, the narrow little toe-print pointed the way to him, like an arrow through the wilds. It was a pleasant thought, and yet a perplexing one. Would he have undertaken this quest just to see her? Would he be content with that if his other motive failed? For as he made his way up to the ridge he was more than once assailed by doubts of the practical success of his enterprise. In the excitement of last night, and even the hopefulness ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... young students with no a priori repugnance for the labours of external criticism, who perhaps are even disposed to like them, who yet are—experience has shown it—totally incapable of performing them. There would be nothing perplexing in this if these persons were intellectually feeble; this incapacity would then be but one manifestation of their general weakness; nor yet if they had gone through no technical apprenticeship. But we are concerned with men of education and intelligence, sometimes of exceptional ability, ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... mortal. I am sensible you have grounds to be diffident of the behaviour of a body consisting of above two hundred persons, who are neither capable of governing nor being governed. I own the thought is perplexing; but such favourable circumstances seem to offer themselves at this juncture that matters ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... beside him and did not reply. She was a woman of perplexing silences; and her pale and placid face, with its cold correct outline, gave no clue to the thoughts with which she occupied them. She sat without stirring. Durrance was embarrassed. He remembered Mr. Adair as a good-humoured ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... same sound did not usher in my day's work. The ear grew so accustomed during those weeks to the terrible roar, that when Sebastopol fell the sudden quiet seemed unnatural, and made us dull. And during the whole of this time the most perplexing rumours flew about, some having reference to the day of assault, the majority relative to the last great effort which it was supposed the Russians would make to drive us into the sea. I confess these latter rumours now and then caused me temporary uneasiness, ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... vicarious. The fault, or desertion, or death of the natural protectors, turns loose upon the desert of our streets those nomade hordes of Bedouins, male and female, whose presence is being made especially palpable just now, and whose reclamation is a perplexing, yet still a hopeful problem. In the case of the adult Arab, there is a life's work to undo, and the facing of that fact it is which makes some of our bravest workers drop their hands in despair. With these young Arabs, on ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... purposes. They abused the Warsingali for being such fools as to let me travel in their country, and said I should never cross over to them. This little incident of dropping paper, though fully explained to them, was ever afterwards brought up in accusation against me, and proved very perplexing. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... great turmoil of nations it rings with a tone peculiarly true: for Italy is the country that found herself confronted, at the outbreak of the great war, by perhaps the most perplexing situation of any of the present allies. If she had chosen to follow the way which lay open and easy before her, the war would have long since been decided in favor of the Central Powers. Italy had entered the Triple Alliance as a clean ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... her father's sake, who had been so respected in Cranford. My father and I had agreed to say as little as possible about the bank, indeed never to mention it again, if it could be helped. Some of the plans were evidently a little perplexing to her; but she had seen me sufficiently snubbed in the morning for want of comprehension to venture on too many inquiries now; and all passed over well with a hope on her part that no one would be hurried into marriage on her account. When we came to the proposal that she should sell tea, ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... times when Ruth was exceedingly disgusted with these perplexing thoughts, and wanted nothing so much as to get away from them. She resented this intrusion upon her quiet. This day was one of those in which she was impatient of all these things, and she had made her toilet with great satisfaction, and said within herself complacently: "We are to have one hour ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... Thirty-fourth Street were too many and too perplexing; for the first time in his life Hedger took a hansom cab for Washington Square. Caesar sat bolt upright on the worn leather cushion beside him, and they jogged off, looking down on ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... the palace, so that he might hear of my arrival, for he had been up that morning, and would have been glad to see me, only the boys, from fear of entering his cabinet, had forged a lie, and deprived him of any interview with me, which he had long wished to get. This ready cordiality was as perplexing as all the rest. Could it be possible, I thought, I had been fighting with a phantom all this while, and yet the king had not been able to perceive it? At all events, now, as the key to his door had been given, I would make good use of it and watch the result. Meanwhile Nasib returned from ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... and cross-ways," which are said by Camden to have existed in the Forest, and to have rendered it a place of refuge for noble fugitives, were those paths which penetrated its depths, having their direction turned and rendered perplexing through the frequent interposition of streams, bogs, and thickets. Such were the means of communication which for many generations served the purposes of the Foresters, who permitted no wheeled vehicles to enter their domain, and possessed few ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... thing was perplexing him, as an occurrence altogether unusual. He had known of people being killed and torn to pieces by the animal in its anger; but never of one being carried up ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... exclaimed Brother Bart, in dismay. "Me at a party! Sure I'd look and feel queer indeed in such a place." Brother Bart's glance turned from the fine boat to the gentleman before him; he felt the responsibilities of his position were growing perplexing. "It will be great sport for the boys, I am sure," he added; "and I don't like to say 'No,' after all yer kindness in coming for them. But how are ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... assumed in succession two distinct types, marking two eras quite dissimilar. First came the Semi-Saxon, or transition period, throughout which the old language was suffering disorganization and decay, a period of confusion, perplexing alike to those who then used the tongue, and to those who now endeavor to trace its vicissitudes. This chaotic state came to an end about the middle of the thirteenth century, after a duration of nearly two hundred years. The second era, or period of reconstruction, follows, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... luculent testimonies for that blending of fact and fancy in strictly historical times which people find it so difficult to believe, but which offers the key, and the only true key, for many of the most perplexing problems, both of history and ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... thoughts, still pondering this most perplexing situation, the hostess standing silent by the door, when suddenly Madonna ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... bold, 110 In pain and hazard toil for sordid gold? They can! for gold too oft with magic art Can rule the passions, and corrupt the heart: This crowns the prosperous villain with applause, To whom in vain sad merit pleads her cause; This strews with roses life's perplexing road, And leads the way to pleasure's soft abode; This spreads with slaughter'd heaps the bloody plain, And pours adventurous thousands o'er the main. II. The stately ship with all her daring band 120 To skilful Albert own'd the chief command: Though train'd in ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... were becoming more and more accustomed to the obscurity; and among the vague, perplexing objects which filled the corners, he ended by distinguishing some old barrels, remnants of fowl cages, and broken tools, a lot of rubbish such as is swept away and thrown to the bottom of cellars. Hanging from the rafters, moreover, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Perplexing questions these—questions which at once suggested themselves to the minds of all concerned, but which admitted of no easy solution. I could find no reply to them. Captain Prendergast had not even a suggestion to offer. Jonathan Jelf, who seized ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... authority for the legend, is perhaps the most perplexing in the list. Like twin stars that seem one to the naked eye, but resolve themselves into two beneath the telescope, so the single author of the printed text of Calderon appears distinct persons in the pages of Montalvan. He gives them thus: — "Jacobo," "Solino," with a separate reference ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... quench the Holy Spirit. He is grieved whensoever He is resisted; He may be resisted until He is quenched. It was Christ Himself who spoke of a sin against the Holy Spirit which "hath never forgiveness." Is there any more painful, perplexing, and yet more certain fact in life than this, that man can resist God? Is there any that has bound up with it more terrible and inevitable issues? "Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears," cried the martyr Stephen to his judges, "ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... authors recur to it: "All but a very small portion of the sun's heat goes day by day into what we call empty space, and it is only this very small remainder that is made use of by the various planets for purposes of their own. Can anything be more perplexing than this seemingly frightful expenditure of the very life and essence of the system? That this vast store of high-class energy should be doing nothing but travelling outwards in space at the rate of 188,000 miles per second is hardly conceivable, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Elizabeth Burton proved tedious and perplexing to the specialists who traced its origin beyond the purely physical to some unconfessed thing gnawing at the peace of her brain. Accordingly they did what they could and, having effected a temporary repair, fell ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... passed, when the prince speaks and reveals the plot; an extraordinary number of variants exist in Eastern and Western languages, the earliest written version being an Arabian text of the 10th century: a great mass of literature has grown round the subject, which is one of the most perplexing as well as ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... infantine hypotheses. A complete revolution—vital and all-embracing—has altered our modes of thought, so that the man of 1887 can scarcely bring himself to conceive the state of mind which contented the man of 1837. We have dark doubts now, perplexing misgivings, weary uncertainties, painful consciousness of limited powers; but along with these weaknesses we have our share of certainties. Are we happier? Nay, not in mind. A quiet melancholy marks the words of all the men who have thought most deeply and learned most. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... electing the president a perplexing question. b. The constitution of the electoral college, with illustrations. c. Qualifications for serving as an elector. d. The method of choosing electors. e. The time of choosing electors. f. When ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... the twentieth century, with a fine collection of microscopic animalculae; our descendants may perhaps write as much nonsense as the scientific schools of the nineteenth century have uttered on this mysterious and perplexing question. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... should indicate the connection between the activity of this apex-point of the complex vision and the various perplexing human problems round which our controversies smoulder and burn. It is advisable that I should indicate the connection between the activity of this "apex-thought" and that thing which the world has agreed to ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... she had only been provoked to curiosity by Bluebell's reserve, but now there really was food for imagination to work on, and perhaps the clue to much that was perplexing in Harry. How curiously it had ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... as the commands of a usurper and a tyrant, and they will continue to be so regarded until a general resumption of agricultural pursuits shall have brought about a practical solution o this much vexed question, which, "in abstracts," is rather perplexing. I think that if each party is compelled to remain within the bounds of justice and equity by the presence of a neutral force, i.e. United States troops, one year's experience will assign to both employers and ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... meal; fresh fish were frying on the fire, and the oat cakes toasting before it. Yet, as she moved rapidly about, she was watching her daughter and very soon she gave words to the thoughts troubling and perplexing her motherly speculations. ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... sombre and savage; he sank back in his chair motionless, a stranger to all that surrounded him, and gave himself up to some mysterious thought against which resistance seemed powerless. Suddenly he appeared to wake from some perplexing dream, and by another powerful effort aroused himself and joined in the conversation with sharp, cutting speeches; he encouraged the noisy humor of his guests, inciting them to drunkenness by setting the example himself; then the same mysterious thought would cross his face anew, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... sphere by the laws of necessity, and through the complex relations of artificial existence. In the strong language of Carlyle, I would say that 'Here is a lie standing up in the midst of society.' I would say 'Down with it, even to the ground;' for while this perplexing and barbarous anomaly exists, fretting like an ulcer at the very heart of society, all new specifics and palliatives are in vain. The question must be settled one way or another; either let the man in all the relations ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... my, outfit which the circular that accompanied my appointment demanded. This requirement was a pair of "Monroe shoes." Now, out in Ohio, what "Monroe shoes" were was a mystery—not a shoemaker in my section having so much as an inkling of the construction of the perplexing things, until finally my eldest brother brought an idea of them from Baltimore, when it was found that they were a familiar ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... were about five or six months old, St. James came to me with a troubled countenance. He was summoned away, very unexpectedly. He would probably be obliged to go as far as Texas before his return; he might be absent a month. Business of a perplexing nature, which it was impossible to explain then, called him from me, but he would shorten as much as possible the days of absence which would be dreary and joyless to him. I was overwhelmed with grief ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... all over. He uttered little guttural exclamations and tapped the desk with his finger-tips as he read, and all the time his face wore that perplexing expression ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... attracted respect. His person bore the stamp of dignity, and his manners, which possessed the exquisite polish of travel, and of society in its most refined courts, secured him universal esteem. Though little beyond fifty, various perplexing situations having distressed his youth, had not only rendered his hair prematurely gray, but by clouding his once brilliant eyes with thoughtfulness, marked his aspect with premature old age and melancholy. The baronet's ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... that angered him no longer, because he had given over all fight with it. But the great dome, flaming with its letters, AEdificabo meam Ecclesiam, shining there for ages, kindled the fight anew. And strange as it may seem, and perplexing as it was to the Doctor (when he received Reuben's story of it), he came out from his first visit to the great Romish temple with his religious nature more deeply stirred than it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... discovery which had taken place, from my cousin, Miss Drake, on Sunday morning, and came up at once from the country to be with my mother; for I know well with what sympathy she had been following Oliver's wishes and desires. It is a very painful business. I do most truly regret the perplexing situation in which you find yourself, and I am sure you will not resent it if, as Oliver's sister, I write you my views ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... silence was, however, so far acceptable, that it gave him time to bring any shadow of judgment which he possessed to council on his own situation and prospects, which would have appeared to any reasonable person in the highest degree dangerous and perplexing. ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... people cannot differ on such great and perplexing public questions without impugning each other's motives. Henry has been called a backslider because of the lenity of his counsels, but I cannot but think it is the Spirit of Christ that influences him. Garrison has been ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... they do not have to battle with the elements. In the city they work under shelter and in accordance with definite regulations. Hence it is that the problem of securing workingmen and servant girls in the country is every day becoming more and more perplexing. ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... Marchand had told and he had not understood it, and could only half believe it. Kate must know far more about all this painful business than he did, for her father's letter would tell her all he wished her to know. Therefore, why should he discuss that most distressing and perplexing subject, which he knew so little about and which she knew all about. So he merely touched upon Major Bonnet and his vessel, and hoped that she might soon write to him and tell him what she cared for him to know, what she cared for him to ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... excited, naughty. 'A man has kissed me; it was a man; it was Mr. Rogers, Daddy's cousin.... He's not my cousin exactly, but just "a man."' And she fell asleep, wondering how she ought to begin her letter to him when she wrote, but, more perplexing still, how she ought to—end it! That little backward brain sought the solution of the problem all night long in dreams. She felt a criminal, a dare-devil caught in the act, awaiting execution. Light had been flashed cruelly upon her dark, careful secret—the greatest and finest secret in ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... cure his cattle, but could not, and what was more perplexing was the fact that other people's cattle in fields adjoining suffered not at all. In a few months he was driven to extremities; he saw his chances of buying back his old home slipping through his fingers, and what maddened him most was ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... principle of opposites. "Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations, not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... remind you that as your task is yet unfinished there is no reward due you. Your success, however, warrants me in demanding further proof of your boasted ability. I would not have Azalia wed to one who was but a lucky fool." Then, unheeding the prince's rage, he continued, "Now among other things perplexing the kingdom is the completion of the palace gardens. If you will but accompany me to the top of the palace I ...
— Bright-Wits, Prince of Mogadore • Burren Laughlin and L. L. Flood
... DINNERS A perplexing problem Requisites for a well arranged menu Suggestions for preparing bills of fare Table of food analyses Fifty-two weeks' breakfasts and dinners Average cost Analysis of various bills of fare ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... sympathy; and the strength of a quiet will, which was, however, inflexible. All that was restless, uncertain, and unsatisfied in men's hearts and lives, found something in him to which they clung as if it had been an anchor of hope; and so his popularity had a very wide, and at first sight very perplexing range. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... if she had entered into your thoughts, and talked them aloud. Her mind was evidently cultivated with great care, but she was perfectly void of pedantry. A hint, an allusion, sufficed to show how much she knew, to one well instructed, without mortifying or perplexing the ignorant. Yes, there probably was the only woman my father had ever met who could be the companion to his mind, walk through the garden of knowledge by his side, and trim the flowers while he cleared ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Training in Sex-education.—The need to have the right sort of fathers as well as fit mothers requires a new training in lines of sex-education. One of the most perplexing of all educational problems is how to give the needed training in this line in the best and most effective way. In the admirable volume on Sex-Education written by Professor Maurice A. Bigelow, of Teachers ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... examinations showed Miss Sullivan, Miss Harbaugh (Mr. Gilman's head teacher), and one other, that I could without too much effort complete my preparation in two years more. Mr. Gilman at first agreed to this; but when my tasks had become somewhat perplexing, he insisted that I was overworked, and that I should remain at his school three years longer. I did not like his plan, for I wished to enter college with ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... titles among them. Those of St. Vincent's complain of the defective criminal and civil justice among them, as well as of military protection." And on the next day he writes to Mr. Jefferson: "The government of the settlements on the Illinois and Wabash is a subject very perplexing in itself, and rendered more so by our ignorance of the many circumstances on which a right judgment depends. The inhabitants at those places claim protection against the savages, and some provision for ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... certain groups of illusion, I am not unmindful of the fact that these divisions answer to no very sharp natural distinctions. In fact, it will be found that one class gradually passes into the other, and that the different characteristics here separated often combine in a most perplexing way. All that is claimed for this classification is that it is a convenient mode of mapping ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... really had arisen against Mr. Pennifeather, he (Mr. Goodfellow) would make every exertion in his power, would employ all the little eloquence in his possession to—to—to—soften down, as much as he could conscientiously do so, the worst features of this really exceedingly perplexing piece of business." ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... ideals. This young man was alien to her in birth, and his education had been along totally different lines, and logically they should not have been in sympathy one with the other, for he made her ideals seem somehow bloodless and her enthusiasms sterile and hardly worth while. It was certainly perplexing, for after three months in which she had not seen him, the attraction he exercised upon her had not noticeably lessened. She oddly felt that it would have been more considerate in Smith had he reappeared a little weaker and less vivid than ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... ringing on the pavement of the patio inside, the sentinel had his reflections and conjectures. He wondered where the colonel-commandant could have been to keep him so long absent from his command, and he had perhaps other conjectures of an equally perplexing nature. They did not much trouble him, however. What mattered it to him how the commandant employed his time, or where it was spent, so long as he got his sueldo and rations? He had them with due regularity, and with this consoling reflection he wrapped ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
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