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More "Puzzle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in one sense; but it would puzzle a Philadelphia lawyer to foreclose it. Why, the equitable interests in that town-plot, people the place of themselves. I ordered my agent to commence buying up the rights, as the shortest process of getting rid of them; and he told me in the very last letter I received, that he had succeeded in purchasing ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... manner in which Mark had treated his stepbrother, Frank may be excused for the wish to puzzle him a little. ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... of her fascination over Henry was a puzzle to observers. "Madame Anne," wrote a Venetian, "is not one of the handsomest women in the world. She is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the King's great appetite, and her eyes, which ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... office, where busy till evening, and then with Balty to Sir G. Carteret's office, and there with Mr. Fenn despatched the business of Balty's L1500 he received for the contingencies of the fleete, whereof he received about L253 in pieces of eight at a goldsmith's there hard by, which did puzzle me and him to tell; for I could not tell the difference by sight, only by bigness, and that is not always discernible, between a whole and half-piece and quarterpiece. Having received this money I home with Balty and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... ever wedded the Lady Alianora. One of the enemies of her own husband, and she herself set prisoner in his kinsman's keeping, and to wed her gaoler's cousin, all against the King's pleasure and without his licence—canst solve the puzzle?" ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... metamorphoses, and their consequences, might well puzzle a wiser head than that of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... the name in the order for the gold ring, signed "B. V. H."—a link, indeed, but a fresh puzzle. Knowing the stubborn prejudices of caste in Germany, and above all in Eastern Prussia and Silesia, I should have been compelled to accept "Otto," whose sister was in service, as himself the servant of "B. V. H.," but ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... women or women in men to admire is generally a puzzle to those who know the men and ...
— Crankisms • Lisle de Vaux Matthewman
... being is evoked from a simple germ. What mystery is there here—and how shall I proceed to enunciate the conception which I have ventured to form of what may prove to be its proper solution! It is an idea by no means calculated to impress by its greatness, or to puzzle by its profoundness. It is an idea more marked by simplicity than perhaps any other of those which have explained the great secrets of nature. But in this lies, perhaps, one of its strongest claims ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... to puzzle his brains about the meaning of this departure, another pigeon came flying in from the city of ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... has always been a marvel to me—that French language; it has always been a puzzle to me. How beautiful that language is! How expressive it seems to be! How ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... who was standing in the bows with his long leaping-pole in his hand; "I do puzzle, squire. I've been looking out for a light to show where Grimsey lies, for here, in the dark, it's watter, watter, watter, and I can't see the big poplar by Tallington's. Hi! Dave, where's Grimsey, ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... Phil, a little sadly; "there are so many things that puzzle me. I thought that perhaps, as you came from the stars, you ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... to Paris for a year? No, no!—too many of the Englishmen who went to Paris lost their individuality and became third-rate Frenchmen. He would puzzle out things for himself—stick to his own ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... morals—why his beverages should be seemly to drink on all days of the week, yet on one of them seemly but if taken behind shut doors and shielding curtains. But he adhered conscientiously to the American rule. His Lutheran pastor had once, in an effort to clear up the puzzle, explained to him that the Continental Sunday would never do at all in this land of his choice; but it left Herman still muddled, because fixed unalterably in his mind was a conviction that the Continental Sunday was the best of all Sundays. Nor was there anything the least clandestine ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... a game of dominoes, a mutilated picture-puzzle, some copies of Zion's Herald, and a pile of New York ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... succeeded by chance in saving him from sending across some stuff about the Cardinal Archbishop of CRANBERRY, instead of CHAMBERY. I got a dispatch from, him quoting the Virago of Paris—meaning the Figaro, of course. And then that Schema; a Sphinx could not have made it more of a puzzle, whether he meant that the bishops voted that the Pope should be deified, or defied, or that the de fide should ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... showed white and untanned on cheekbone and jaw, the steadfast young eyes puckered at the corners of the lids with much staring through red- hot sunshine, the slow, untroubled breathing, and the curious, crisp, curt speech seemed to puzzle him equally. He could create men and women, and send them to the uttermost ends of the earth, to help, delight, and comfort; he knew every mood of the fields, and could interpret them to the cities, ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... people often rise by their industry to great wealth in the colony; to such the preference shown to the educated man always seems a puzzle. Their ideas of gentility consist in being the owners of fine clothes, fine houses, splendid furniture, expensive equipages, and plenty of money. They have all these, yet even the most ignorant feel that something ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... thought of that. Hang it! man, you're making a bigger puzzle of it than ever. You're not insinuating that that boy murdered old Simmons, are you? I ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... puzzle the iron-master, who studied awhile upon it, and then returned to the subject of my political mission. "I suppose you speak French," said he; "it is necessary in diplomacy. I can speak it also"—which he began to do, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... surprise, because he had no key to this new puzzle, but he said: "Do wait, my boy, and have some refreshments with us. I have so much to ask you about ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the warst majority of the four millions on us is a passing their days and nites in wundering which blew side will win. Why they is both blew, puzzles me. If so be as they was both saleing boats, in course I coud unnerstand it, but, as they ain't, I gives up the puzzle, and gos a-head. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... all too great a puzzle. Benson finally decided to stop guessing until some future time. He went on with his dressing. Finally, with his blouse buttoned as exactly as ever, and his cap placed gingerly on his aching head, he opened the stateroom door, stepping out ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... motor cab, Don Luis returned to the Faubourg Saint-Germain; and it was then that an incident occurred which was to puzzle him greatly and throw a most extraordinary light on the article in ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... low-spoken and indistinct that the first two men he asked did not hear. The third man frowned and pointed to a policeman. The fourth snapped: "Take the elevated for Charlestown or the trolley-cars, either;" all of which served but to puzzle Hezekiah the more. ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... stars! Some knot!" Leila flipped the undesired net from Marjorie. Rolling it up she tucked it under her arm. "Unmasking is at nine-thirty. Let us be there. We can just make it, and it will puzzle some persons to tell who interrupted them tonight. Our talk will wait until after unmasking. Then we can dodge into one of the side rooms and have ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... would make a great puzzle, truly an insoluble conundrum, to take back to bewilder his Martian friends. However, he was able to comprehend the remarks of Vigilantius, "who returned from a journey in Italy and the Holy Land disgusted with official Christianity. He protested vehemently against the idolatrous worship of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the upstanding wing of Friar's Park, actually the house and the park were some two miles distant. Where the park ended and the woods began it was impossible to determine, yet such was my curious mood that I lingered there endeavoring to puzzle out those details which were ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... individual be chosen, results are analogous. If one takes the simplest traits, to eliminate the most chances for confusion, one finds the same conditions every time. Whether it be speed in marking off all the A's in a printed sheet of capitals, or in putting together the pieces of a puzzle, or in giving a reaction to some certain stimulus, or in making associations between ideas, or drawing figures, or memory for various things, or giving the opposites of words, or discrimination of lifted weights, or success in any one of hundreds ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... of his "apostolic succession"; and has not the slightest doubts that he can make out his spiritual genealogy, without a broken link, from the first Bishop of Rome, downwards!—though, poor fellow, it would puzzle him to say who was his great-grandfather. E——, you are aware, has long since joined the Church of Rome, and has disclosed such a bottomless abyss of "faith," that whole cart-loads of mediaeval fables, abandoned even by Romanists ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... the judicial hardening the hearts and blinding the eyes of men, who, by their former voluntary wickedness, have justly deserved to be destroyed, and are thereby brought to destruction,] is a very just one, and in him not unfrequent. Nor does Josephus ever puzzle himself, or perplex his readers, with subtle hypotheses as to the manner of such judicial infatuations by God, while the justice of them is generally so obvious. That peculiar manner of the Divine operations, or permissions, or the means God makes use of in such cases, is often impenetrable ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... mine, and yet—where had I seen him before? His gait, his stoop, the carriage of his head, all seemed familiar—but a short-sighted man is accustomed to this kind of puzzle: he is always recognising the wrong person, when he does not fail to ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... the mysterious miscarriage of his letters puzzle the ingenuous heart of poor Paul; though he had reason to suspect, from certain hints thrown out by Amanda, that she, somehow or other, was in possession of their contents. On a certain day, however, a circumstance convinced ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... he'd lost something and was wondering where it was. Ha! But—dashed funny—I mentioned something about that appalling speech that chap made in that blasphemy case yesterday.... Eh? yes, absolutely frightful, wasn't it?—well, I'm dashed if old Sabre didn't puzzle up his nut in exactly the same old way and say, 'Yes, but I see what he means.' I reminded him and ragged him about it no end. Absolutely the same words and expression. Funny ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... was not so well devised as Mary's Tea. It puzzled me for some time and left me wondering what special beverage was sold inside. I discovered at last that "Coffee" was a thoughtful translation of Cafe, a word which might have been supposed to puzzle an English soldier, though indeed very few French words puzzle ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... staggering to the powers of belief as a well-authenticated dream which strikes the bull's eye of facts not known to the dreamer nor capable of being guessed by him. If the events beheld in the dream are far away in space, or are remote in time past, the puzzle is difficult enough. But if the events are still in the future, perhaps no kind of explanation except a mere "fluke" can even be suggested. Say that I dream of an event occurring at a distance, and that I record or act on my dream before it is corroborated. Suppose, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... learned your tricks well," Sir Ralph said, good-temperedly, "and, in truth, your quick returns puzzle me greatly, and I admit that were we both unprotected I should have no chance with you, but let us see what you could do were we fighting in earnest," and he took down a couple of suits of complete body armour from ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... read some of her books, then some of Dickens and Thackeray, then occasionally a book of poems; Longfellow and Whittier, or, if we want to study harder, there is Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Shakespeare. It would be excellent discipline to try and get at the exact meaning of the authors, and puzzle out all the obscurities, it would not be long before we should feel quite rich in a literary way. In reading such works together, and talking them over, of course we make them ours as we can ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... around him, making strange, fantastic shapes in the air of the office. Malone puffed away, frowning slightly and trying to force the puzzle he was working on to make ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... his earliest work.[127] Armance, Beyle's first published novel,[128] though by no means the one which has received most attention, is certainly illuminating. Or rather, perhaps one should say that it poses the puzzle which Beyle himself put briefly in the words quoted by his editor and biographer: "Qu'ai-j'ete? que suis-je? En verite je serais bien embarrasse de le dire." To tell equal truth, it is but a dull book in itself, surcharged ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... name presents an historical puzzle to us. His biography, as we have seen, lies hid in obscurity and his books present baffling problems. There are three translations of religious classics which bear his name on the title-page, and which are introduced to the reader in Prefaces written by him, but it is far from certain that he ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... on arriving at maturity. When driven from their usual course, they must take SOME new course or die. There is nothing strange in the fact that similar beings puzzled similarly should take a similar line of action. I grant, however, that it is hard to see how change of food and treatment can puzzle an insect into such "complex growth" as that it should make a cavity in its thigh, grow an invaluable proboscis, and betray a practical knowledge of difficult ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... selfish instincts, but without the usual cruel impulses. There was little if any sign of true refinement in the features, and yet, there was a strange strength of purpose that puzzled him. As her story progressed, he solved the puzzle. She had the strength to carry out a purpose that might further her own personal interests; but not the will to endure sacrifice for the sake of another. Her sister was larger and possessed a reserve that ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... sure, that's the puzzle! And they say women don't need to know. They can't be lawyers nor doctors nor ministers, nor officers in case of ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... though by-and-by you intend to accept; or unless you mean that you do accept now, though you have no pleasure in doing so, but look forward to be more pleased by-and-by. In fact the sequence of the compound tenses puzzle experienced writers. The best plan is to go back in thought to the time in question and use the tense you would then naturally use. Now in the sentence "I should have liked to have gone to see the circus" the way to find out the proper sequence is to ask yourself the question—what is it ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Mr. Douglass in writing, is to me an intellectual puzzle. The strength, affluence and terseness may easily be accounted for, because the style of a man is the man; but how are we to account for that rare polish in his style of writing, which, most critically examined, seems the result of careful ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... we have them hewn out in the rough, so that we work the first with an intention of making them conform to a something which is to succeed; and we are so sure of our course that we have no dread of the something after,—nothing to puzzle the will, or make us think too precisely on the event. Such is the condition of mind in which we finally begin our labor. Some Wednesday afternoon in a holiday-week, when the theatres are closed, we find ourselves ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... in her own mind during these few weeks a light had been steadily growing, illuminating many things she had been wont to puzzle over or habitually to pass by as teasing and obscure. She saw the whole world constructed on one purpose, that all living creatures should love and help one another to be happy. Even such a man as Rosewarne found a place in it, as one to be pitied because he erred ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... but what escape to civilisation would be easy, but anyhow his heroism should be preserved. He was the rescuer. His thoughts of Marjory were somewhat in a puzzle. The meeting had placed him in such a position that he had expected a lot of condescension on his own part. Instead she had exhibited about as much recognition of him as would a stone fountain on his grandfather's place in Connecticut. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... that Luther, was the creature of circumstances, that there was no self- moving originality in him, but that his age made him what he was. To some modern minds these concessions remove all difficulty and mystery: but not, I trust, to our minds. For does not the very puzzle de quo agitur remain equally real; namely, why the average of Augustine monks, the average of German men, did not, by being exposed to the same average circumstances as Luther, become what Luther was? But whether we allow Luther to have been a person with an originally different ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the literature or the art which a mailable periodical disseminates."[241] In Donaldson v. Read Magazine,[242] however, the Court sustained a Court order forbidding the delivery of mail and money orders to a magazine conducting a puzzle contest which the Postmaster-General had found to be fraudulent. Freedom of the press, said the Court, does not include the right to raise money ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... though you were struck by lightning, or in the way of a 36-pounder! Ralph Waldo is death and an entire stud of pale horses on flowery expressions and japonica-domish flubdubs. He revels in all those knock-kneed, antique, or crooked and twisted words we used all of us to puzzle our brains over in the days of our youth, and grammar lessons and rhetoric exercises. He has a penchant as strong as cheap boarding-house butter, for mystification, and a free delivery of hard words, perfectly and unequivocally wonderful. ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... quite a while, sickened. I thought about the crew of 231, and the other pieces of the puzzle. One of them had to be arrogance—the natural arrogance of picked people that leads to a belief in corporeal immortality: Nothing can happen to me; you, maybe, ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... Why, if spirits like ours were not produced every now and then, the world would absolutely go fast asleep, but we rouse it by deranging the old order of things, force mankind to quicken their snail's pace, furnish a million of idlers with riddles which they puzzle their brains about without being able to comprehend, infuse some hundreds of new ideas into the heads of the great multitude, and, in short, are as useful to the world as tempests are, which dissipate ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... she murmured. "You seem to find quite a lot of time to read and do other things beside fish, Mr. Andrew," she remarked, as she looked over his bookcases. "You puzzle me very much sometimes. I had no idea," she added, looking at him hesitatingly, "that people who have to work, as you have to, for a living, understood and read books ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the coolest Cattleyas; upon the other, Odontoglossum Roezlii, a very hot species, and O. vexillarium, most decidedly warm, flourish up to the boundary. Why these should not step across, even if their mountain sisters refuse companionship with the Sophronitis, is a puzzle. Elsewhere, however, they abound. Collectors distinctly foresee the time when all the districts they have "worked" up to this will be exhausted. But South America contains a prodigious number of square miles, and a day's march from the track carries one into terra incognita. Still, the end will ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... with her numbers again! How strange it is that she should never forget a number or make a mistake in a sum! In taking away or adding together one can't puzzle her. I don't mean that I can't," she continued, apparently addressing no one in particular, "because I am a poor ignorant woman; but wiser people than I. Now, Perine, you shall have your lesson. See here, I shall ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... of humility, Dennis asked leave to venture on a guess. The perforated paper looked, as he thought, like a Puzzle. "If we wait for a day or two," he suggested, "the Key to it ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... the Aeneid immortalized the mythic voyage of the Trojan adventurer, who passed along this iron-bound coast on his way towards the mouth of Tiber. Their modern, or rather medieval name of I Galli is somewhat of a puzzle. Erudite scholars affect to derive it from Guallo, a fortress captured during a war between King Roger and the Republic of Amalfi, but this explanation, we confess, does not sound very reasonable. Others ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Philosophy enough: Let Divines puzzle themselves about these Things; let us discourse of those Matters that were first mentioned. If you would be a compleat Mother, take Care of the Body of your little Infant, so that after the little Fire of the Mind has disengaged itself from the Vapours, it may have sound and fit Organs to make ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... conundrum obtrudes itself upon me, and I ask, "Suppose Gen. TERRY had a daughter, why would she necessarily be a delightful puzzle? Obviously because she would be a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... as I said the other night, as soon as they have dammed up the river and made the lake, they then build their houses; and how they manage to work under water and fix the posts in the ground is a puzzle to me, but they do fix six posts in the ground, and very firmly, and then they build their house, which is very curious; it is in the form of a large oven, and made of clay and fat earth, mixed up with branches and herbs ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... understand what they do want,—they are the same in all histories,—like little children, they get bewildered and frightened in any trouble, and the wisest heads are needed to think for them. It is, indeed, most cruel to make them puzzle out all difficulty ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... the gossip of the king's embroilments with the Parliament—these things, it may again be said, occupied Law's mind far less than the question of gaining audience with his fair rescuer of the morn at Sadler's Wells. This was the puzzle which, revolve it as he might, not even his audacious wit was able to provide with plausible solution. He pondered the matter in a hundred different pleasing phases as he passed from the Bank of England through the ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... The puzzle does not end nor begin with him. One can name a number of literary men of great rank who have written vainly for the stage, to say nothing of others who are authors of works in the form of drama, but nevertheless, like a Shelley, Swinburne ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... former gravity of his temper and gave way, in the contrary, to a very extraordinary spirit of obstinacy and unbelief. He puzzled himself continually, and if Mr. Deval, who was then under sentence, would have given leave, attempted to puzzle him too, as to the doctrines of a future state, and an identical resurrection of the body. He said he could not be persuaded of the truth thereof in a literal sense; that when the individual frame of flesh which he bore ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... any misfortune on that ground, came forward on his personal guarantee, and became responsible until Parliament should again meet. The funds asked for by Wright, and even more, were granted; but I believe it would puzzle the committee, to this day, to find what became of them. One of the avowed objects was to purchase sheep; this, at least, was neglected. Hodgkinson fulfilled his mission zealously, and returned to Wright within as short a time as possible. But Wright lingered inactively ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... calmly. The problem did not seem to puzzle her, the problem of this feeling so ill-founded. It was so. Very well, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... they must be badly scared. The light of the lantern, striking among all these trunks and forked branches and twisted rope-ends of lianas, made the whole place, or all that you could see of it, a kind of a puzzle of turning shadows. They came to meet you, solid and quick like giants, and then span off and vanished; they hove up over your head like clubs, and flew away into the night like birds. The floor of the bush glimmered with dead wood, the way the match-box used ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... did not answer. After a moment's pause he asked again for his tea. The girl turned away impatiently. Here was a puzzle, neither the voyageurs, nor Wishkobun her nurse, nor her father would explain to her. The first had grinned stupidly; the second had drawn her shawl across her face, the ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... that Christ hath a body that is now in glory, ascended from his disciples, according to the scripture (Acts 1:3 compared with verses 9-11). But thou dost only fling up a few words into the air, that thou mightest thereby puzzle thy simple reader. But I bless God, for my part I do see thee, that thou dost, like a beguiled man, seek by all means to beguile others. And whereas thou sayest, It is sufficient to salvation, to know Christ Jesus as head in us, and over us. To this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... points in the missive which seemed of greater interest to him than others. For example, the place whence it had been addressed was an ever recurring puzzle; he also dwelt long upon the sentence which referred so delicately to a paternal relationship. The most exigent passages, however, were those relative to the time he might look for the man's coming. As specially directed, he had taken ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... modification in the final stage of its history. And now, Shiel, let us sit together and confer on this matter. From the manner in which you have expressed yourself, it is evident that there are points which puzzle you—you do not get a clean coup d'oeil of the whole regiment of facts, and their causes, and their consequences, as they occurred. Let us see if out of that confusion we cannot produce a coherence, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... will never do, they have hoisted a flag and are waiting a reply. But let me see," added Willis, rummaging amongst some stores, "here is one of our Shark's Island signals—that, I think, will puzzle the Yankee considerably." ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... big tree, and watched the old woman's antics. She kept on laughing for some time, and then she reached out for her stockings. She found the only one she had left, and put it on. Then she reached around for the other, but failed to find it, because I had it in my pocket. This seemed to puzzle her. She stood up and looked all around for her missing stocking, but it wasn't there. Then she sat down again, pulled off the stocking she had on, and put it on ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... alone in his room, he would think of the situation and try to puzzle it out. It seemed as if he and the Presence were there on a visit which neither of them enjoyed very much, and which they were enduring for the sake of his father, who seemed gratified to have his eldest son at home once more. But all the time Courtland ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Moreover, a dexterous manipulation of the position improved matters. The portion allotted to Dave was removed, ostensibly to keep it warm for him, but reproduced to do duty as a second helping for Dolly. Of course, it had to be halved again for Dave's sake, and an ancient puzzle solved itself in practice. The third halving was not worth sending to the Hospital. Even so a step too small to take was left for Achilles when the tortoise had only just started. "Solvitur ambulando," said Philosophy, and a priori reasoning ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... to show you the way, for all these mechanical matters are easy when you know how, but terribly difficult to puzzle out by yourself. ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... stone and crumbling Roman brick, digging for lost knowledge in the form of broken inscriptions, hands and heads of statues, bits of carved cornice, and a hundred buried treasures by means of which the historical puzzle-picture might gradually be matched together. Vanno became interested, and spent an hour watching and talking to the superintendent of the work, a cultured archaeologist. When he began his descent of the mountain, a train on the funicular railroad was feeling its way cautiously down the steep ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... society, and a savage thrust at those quackeries which seem to reign in this world in spite of their falsity and shallowness. It is not, I grant, easy to read. It is full of conceits and affectations of style,—a puzzle to some, a rebuke to others. "Every page of this unique collection of confessions and meditations, of passionate invective and solemn reflection," is stamped with the seal of genius, and yet was the last of Carlyle's writings to be appreciated. I believe ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... themselves in trim, for it might be severe and taxing duty. The route taken by the party was a trail, which leads direct to Rayado, and on which, just before reaching the last-named place, there are many curious piles of stones, which are scattered over the side of a mountain, and have formed a puzzle to many an inquiring mind. By some they are supposed to be Indian graves; but, by others, they are thought to have been made as a sort of landmark by the older inhabitants of the plains, when they started into New Mexico ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... him not to disgrace his name any longer by his stupidity. The appeal roused the little fellow's pride, and he set to work to show to his family that he was not the dunce they had thought him. He went at his studies manfully, mastering the tedious puzzle of the Latin verbs and nouns, and acquiring a respectable acquaintance with the grammar of that language. It was a terrible task to him, for he had no liking for the language, and did his work merely to please his father and escape ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... he was lost, and well aware that at such times it is useless to puzzle one's brains about the point of the compass, he dashed in the direction which seemed to be the right one. Of course, as in his recent experience, it proved to be wrong, and he now spurred toward the top of the ridge ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... building, it may interest the reader to know, my grandfather had himself cut out in the model; and the manner in which the courses were fitted, joggled, trenailed, wedged, and the bond broken, is intricate as a puzzle and beautiful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grand saturnalia is best when Mr. Smith goes from home for a day or two. Then I can deny myself to visitors—take full license—set the hydrant running, and puzzle the water commissioners with an extra consumption of Schuylkill. My last exploit in this way was rather disastrous; and I am patiently waiting for its memory to pass away, before I venture even to think of repeating it. Mr. Smith had business ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... perceived my state, and sometimes amused themselves by making me pass an examination, which consisted in ascertaining how many tunes I could recognise when they were played rather more quickly or slowly than usual. 'God save the King,' when thus played, was a sore puzzle. There was another man with almost as bad an ear as I had, and strange to say he played a little on the flute. Once I had the triumph of beating him in one ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... here,' said the military gentleman turning to Mrs Jarley—''pon my soul and honour I hardly know what I came here for. It would puzzle me to tell you, it would by Gad. I wanted a little inspiration, a little freshening up, a little change of ideas, and— 'Pon my soul and honour,' said the military gentleman, checking himself and looking round the room, 'what a devilish classical thing this ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... one and the same or not, the whole thing is a perplexing puzzle, and I would sacrifice a good deal to have it solved," said Mr. Palmer. "But," he added, with a sigh, "I am afraid that it never will be, for the thieves, in all probability, left New York immediately, and were sharp enough to remove the ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... a big puzzle," thought Nic. "I shan't understand it all till I've made a globe. I wish I'd studied the big one at the Friary more. ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... fox like—O'Meara, who never lets pass a flaw or a loophole for criticism; who never loses a chance to pick and torture and puzzle ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... this process of adding suitable things and rejecting discordant things which has raised those scenes of strange manners which in every part of the world puzzle the civilised men who come upon them first. Like the old head-dress of mountain villages, they make the traveller think not so much whether they are good or whether they are bad, as wonder how any one could have come to think of them; to regard them ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... person as long as men are paid for emptying garbage-barrels—now, doesn't it? And yet it is not altogether for the pay's sake I do it," he added, haltingly. "There really is a fascination about the work. You are really working out a puzzle,—like a fellow solving a chess-problem. It isn't really work, it is amusement. And when you are establishing a royal descent, and tracing back to czars and Plantagenets and Merovingians, and making it all seem perfectly plausible, the thing is sheer impudent, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... And however flimzey this title, and those of William Rufus and Stephen of Blois, may appear at this distance to us, after the law of descents hath now been settled for so many centuries, they were sufficient to puzzle the understandings of our brave, but unlettered, ancestors. Nor indeed can we wonder at the number of partizans, who espoused the pretensions of king John in particular; since even in the reign of his father, king Henry II, it was a point ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... of the name Hungerford appeared to have been lost in obscurity. According to one gentleman, whose interesting record we afterwards saw, it "has been an etymological puzzle to the topographer and local antiquarian, who have left the matter in the same uncertainty in which they found it"; but if he had accompanied us in our walk that day across those desolate downs, and felt the pangs of hunger as we did, mile after mile in the dark, he would ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... inside it I should find out from his own lips, at the point of my revolver if necessary, who he was and why he had dogged us so long. He might slip away from us in the crowd of Regent Street, but it would puzzle him to do so upon the lonely moor. On the other hand, if I should find the hut and its tenant should not be within it I must remain there, however long the vigil, until he returned. Holmes had missed him in London. It would indeed be a triumph ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... you," I shouted, stepping forward so as to get Quatermain between me and the faint angry light of the dying day, for I wanted to see if he would "wipe my eye." I knew him to be a wonderful shot, but I thought that cock would puzzle him. ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... is the Lord God Almighty."' To them the winds were brothers, and the streams were sisters—brethren in common dependence upon God their Father, brethren in common consecration to His service, brethren by blood, brethren by vows of holiness. Unquestioning faith rendered this world no puzzle; they overlooked the things of sense because the spiritual things were ever present, and as clear as day. Yet did they not forget that spiritual things are symbolised by things of sense; and so the smallest herb of grass was vital to their ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... writer, often plausible, sometimes in a measure sound, but it would defy the skill of the most synthetic genius to co-ordinate the results thus obtained, and combine them in one harmonious whole. They are like pieces of a puzzle, each of which has been symmetrically cut and trimmed, till they lie side ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... she enjoyed the lawn with its roses, and the beautiful river. Fresh from the poor little cabin on the hill-top, she nevertheless fell with the greatest ease into the ways and habits of her new life. It did not puzzle or disturb her in the least to live in large rooms, be waited on by servants, or have nice things about her; she took to all these naturally. For a few days Mr. and Mrs. Grant watched with some anxiety, fearing to discover a flaw in ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... whether the usage of many clear-thinking men for long years past may not be protecting you from difficulties which you do not foresee. Instructors and writers of text books (impressive as is the evidence to the contrary) are human, and do not invent rules to puzzle you. They do not, in fact, invent rules at all, but only make convenient applications of principles which generations of writers have found to be ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... flaming choker on, above which was a frightful large swelling. Not being a medical man, I was very much puzzled when I saw the said swelling move about like a penny roll in a monkey's cheek; presently the sympathy fled, and the puzzle was solved, as a shower of 'bacco juice deluged the floor. Poor boy! it must have taken him an hour's hard work to have got the abominable mass in, and it could only have been done by instalments: the size it had reached would have broken any jaw to remove in the lump; ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... time, thought, and money; and many times it was a puzzle to find the latter, though she had been drawing a slight advance in salary for several months, and Morton, by working in the college laboratory at odd hours, was now earning enough ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... ask through idle curiosity to know the number of the Angels; nor for the solution of a logical puzzle, nor for that of a question in metaphysics, or of a ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... and the rule held good though the family consisted of only one boy. From his earliest days Gavin thought he had been fashioned for the ministry as certainly as a spade for digging, and Margaret rejoiced and marvelled thereat, though she had made her own puzzle. An enthusiastic mother may bend her son's mind as she chooses if she begins it once; nay, she may do stranger things. I know a mother in Thrums who loves "features," and had a child born with no chin to speak of. The neighbors expected this to bring her to ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... Alan were fully occupied in trying to discover why Thomas was making so much effort to get into the ruined summer-house. It seemed a delightful thing to be mixed up in a mystery, and each hoped to have a share in solving it. Such a puzzle made constant private talks necessary, in order to think out a clue. Estelle took an almost painful interest in their conjectures, but shrank from all part in their wanderings round the ruin, or down to the ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... greatly at this, and I could think of no answer to the puzzle, save that Naomi must have won the servant's heart, as she won all hearts. Or, perhaps, he knew what it was to love, and ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... am taking too much trouble in writing these lectures. This sentence, Sec. 44, has cost me, I suppose, first and last, about as many hours as there are lines in it;—and my choice of these two words, faith and death, as representatives of power, will perhaps, after all, only puzzle the reader. ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... Cortlandt might be told. He could not imagine Edith making him the confidant of her outraged feelings. Besides, would such a strangely impassive person resent any little indiscretion in which his wife might choose to indulge? Kirk did not know—the man was a puzzle ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... message by the little hot-air balloon," Jack announced with a vein of pride in his voice, feeling delighted over having solved the puzzle that had baffled him ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... lucre; with the "Indians" of South and Central America they were always on excellent terms, and the Californians proffered divine honours to Francis Drake. These are paradoxes precisely similar in kind to those which so often puzzle amiable and mature observers of the British schoolboy to-day. Broadly, they were governed by instincts and impulses rather than by reasoned ethical theory, instincts occasionally barbaric but for the most part frank and generous; and they were sturdily loyal to the somewhat primitive ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... provide much entertainment for Christmas gatherings ... ingenious puzzles and problems invented by 'Sphinx,' the Puzzle King."—The Captain. ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless accompaniment of the river and the frogs. I learned next day that the chestnut gardens are infested by rats; rustling, chirping, and scraping were probably all due to these; but the puzzle, for the moment, was insoluble, and I had to compose myself for sleep as best I could, in wondering ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... south wall is browed right away," continued the man, after pausing for a moment to puzzle over Smilash's meaning. "I doubt if there's a stone of it ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... But puzzle over the odd accident as they might, neither Mr. DeVere, his daughters, nor Russ could understand ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... in body and mind, feel drawn to the modern arena of the great questions that puzzle. It matters not in which direction a man goes in these matters any more than the length of a step matters so much as does the direction in which the step is taken. He should seek those questions which engross his deepest interest, whether literary, musical, artistic, civic, ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... complicated jigsaw puzzle. Only by seeing all parts of this intricate picture can you begin to glimpse the reasons ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... these poor Girondins do? Speak their convictions that Louis is a Prisoner of War; and cannot be put to death without injustice, solecism, peril? Speak such conviction; and lose utterly your footing with the decided Patriot? Nay properly it is not even a conviction, but a conjecture and dim puzzle. How many poor Girondins are sure of but one thing: That a man and Girondin ought to have footing somewhere, and to stand firmly on it; keeping well with the Respectable Classes! This is what conviction and assurance of faith they have. They must ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... in, Miss Hannah, to see if there was anything wanting to be done, and I found this boy lying on the floor with the Bible open before him trying to puzzle out the letters for himself. And as soon as he saw me he up and struck a bargain with me to teach him to read. And I'll tell you what, Miss Hannah, he's going to make a man one of these days! You know I've been a colored schoolmaster, among ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... opening the British Museum to respectable people on Sunday, has lately been the subject of some discussion. I think it would puzzle the most austere of the Sunday legislators to assign any valid reason for opposing so sensible a proposition. The Museum contains rich specimens from all the vast museums and repositories of Nature, ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... call the bad people playing. The Van Dorns and the Satterthwaites will tell you that vice is the recreation of the poor. And it's more or less true." The elder man scratched his beard and faced the stars: "It's a devilish puzzle. Character makes happiness; I've got that down fine. But what makes character? Why is vice the recreation of the poor? Why do we recruit most of our bad boys and all of our wayward girls from those neighborhoods in every city where the poor live? Why does the clerk on $12 a ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... tears of queens The leaves are red with blood of kings; Unknowing what the mystery means We puzzle at ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... and threw her son out of the window, the inference is that Jove was a man, and actually did something like the thing described; certainly gods, sublimated spirits, aerial sprites, do not act after this fashion; and it would puzzle the mythmakers to prove that the sun, moon, or stars whipped their wives or flung recalcitrant young men out of windows. The history of Atlantis could be in part reconstructed out of the mythology of Greece; it is a history of kings, ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... learn in the next few minutes how great was the executive ability of Caleb Barter. He had created a mighty puzzle, each and every bit of which must fit together exactly. Time was important in making the puzzle complete—and the puzzle changed with each passing second. As the anthropoid went slowly down the face of the Clinton Building, ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... wife, with a few others whom she had met in church circles, to dinner, and manifested such an interest in the sewing society that the principal ladies of the congregation called on her in succession; and although they never got beyond an interchange of formal visits, yet it served to puzzle the gossips in the streets, and one or two who had "forgotten" to call on Mrs. McClintock when she first came to the locality paid her a formal visit; their shaky position in society being secured by ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... understand," said my friend, "but says that her people are much like human beings, and do most of the things human beings do." I asked her other questions, as to her nature, and her purpose in the universe, but only seemed to puzzle her. At last she appeared to lose patience, for she wrote this message for me upon the sands—the sands of vision, not the grating sands under our feet—"Be careful, and do not seek to know too much about us." Seeing that I had offended ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... Miss Hampden," he began, looking at me through his half closed eye-lids, "you are beginning to puzzle me strangely. Did any one ever tell you you are ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... regularly under the actual inspection of Mr. Channing, or whether Hamish went over them aloud. If only the latter, could the faults be concealed? She knew nothing of book-keeping, and was unable to say. Leaving her to puzzle over the matter, we will return to ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... treasured, for they filled her with a pleased wonder. She had seen the changes herself to which he referred; but how could a simple girl wield such an influence over the grave, studious man? That was the puzzle of puzzles. It was an enigma that she would be long in solving, and yet the explanation was her own simplicity, her truthfulness to all the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the least surprised," returned Wyley with an easy smile. "Though I admit that I am interested. A wife is sauce to any story." He looked placidly round the company. He alone held the key to the puzzle, and since he was now become the centre of attraction he was inclined to play with his less acute brethren. With a wave of the hand he stilled the requests for an explanation, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... take some of the particular facts of life that puzzle us and test them with the hypothesis of special creation, and also with the hypothesis of reincarnation, and see which can really explain them in a satisfactory manner. We will take some facts of real life. In a Massachusetts prison there is an old man whose name became familiar ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... explain his exhilaration. On the contrary, under the circumstances it seemed grotesquely unwarranted. However, it was a brief visitation and was gone before he had finished dressing. It left a little trail, the pleased recollection of it and the puzzle of it, which remained unsolved. And, in fact, waking happily in the morning is not usually the result of a drive home from a funeral. No wonder the sequence ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... anything but portrait-like. It has been objected to the great Italian landscape painters that they did not discriminate between one tree and another, but indulged in a "painter's tree." There is far more variety in those of our native artist, yet it would puzzle a critic to say what his trees really are, and to point out in his landscapes the distinctive differences between oak and beech, and elm. The weeds, too, in his foregrounds, have neither form nor species. On the margins of his brooks or pools a few sword-shaped dashes tell of reeds and ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... let me tell you of a third matrimonial proposition, which gives me more puzzle and dislike a great deal. And that is, Mr. Adams has, with great reluctance, and after abundance of bashful apologies, asked me, if I have any objection to his making his addresses to Polly Barlow? which, however, he told me, he had ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... that point puzzle you?" exclaimed Florian, greeting the allusion to Browning as the war-horse welcomes the battle. "Then you have never chanced to run across the first edition of Child's Scottish Ballads. You get the story there, of Childe Roland following ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... past, where he had been for some years trading and speculating in the various islands. He now spoke Dutch, French, Malay, and Javanese, all equally well; English with a very slight accent, but with perfect fluency, axed a most complete knowledge of idiom, in which I often tried to puzzle him in vain. German and Italian were also quite familiar to him, and his acquaintance with European languages included Modern Greek, Turkish, Russian, and colloquial Hebrew and Latin. As a test of his power, I may mention that he had made a ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... stood, till—flash! and the long pointed bill pinned a perch, a foot and a half beneath the water. He had quite made out a breakfast, when, stepping upon a tall tussock, he stood face to face with me—a human spectator! It was only for a moment that I could keep motionless enough to puzzle him. Some muscle must have twitched, for he understood and leaped into the air with a croak of ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... Aeneid immortalized the mythic voyage of the Trojan adventurer, who passed along this iron-bound coast on his way towards the mouth of Tiber. Their modern, or rather medieval name of I Galli is somewhat of a puzzle. Erudite scholars affect to derive it from Guallo, a fortress captured during a war between King Roger and the Republic of Amalfi, but this explanation, we confess, does not sound very reasonable. Others ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... here? I scarcely know myself. It's everything or nothing. The key to the puzzle. I tell you, M. Fuselier, things are becoming increasingly ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... must alter the colour of your hair, then you must have a false nose, and put a spot on some part of your face, or a wart, or a few hairs." I laughed, and said, "Help me to contrive this for the next ball; I have not been to one for twenty years; but I am dying to puzzle somebody, and to tell him things which no one but I can tell him. I shall come home, and go to bed, in a quarter of an hour."—"I must take the measure of your nose," said he; "or do you take it with wax, and I will ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... very good of you, Hunky, to take so much interest in me, and incur so much risk and trouble; but do you know," said Leather, with a look of surprise, not unmingled with amusement, "you are a puzzle to me, for I can't understand how you could tell Captain Wilmot such a heap o' lies—you that has got the name of bein' the ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... also to van Riebeek, to Jimenez and even to Ruth Ortheris, which seemed a little odd. Ruth seemed to think so, too, and Mallin hastened to tell her that Borch was with Personnel, giving some kind of tests. That appeared to puzzle her even more. None of the three seemed happy about the presence of the constabulary troopers, either; they were all relieved when ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... presents a similar puzzle on the civilian side. It is situated at the junction of two waterways, one of which leads directly from the Thames Valley to the West of England, yet it does not seem to have been of a considerable civil importance until the establishment ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... Weird, and wise, and witty as Aesop was this child, like him deformed; and to draw out his quaint remarks, read him fresh from his Maker's hand—this warped, and tiny, imperfect volume of humanity—was to me an ever-new puzzle and delight. Severity he had been used to of late, I saw plainly. He shrank with winking eyes from an uplifted hand, even if the gesture were one of mere amazement, or affection, and sat patiently, like a little well-trained dog, when he saw food placed before me, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the yard-man, with alacrity; and he went off shaking his head, as if all this was a puzzle beyond his ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... sudden impression on the mind was superstition or fancy, though it might have been thought so, had it not been proved by the event to have a real physical and moral cause. Had not the same face returned again, the doubt would never have been properly cleared up, but would have remained a puzzle ever after, or perhaps have been soon forgot.—By the law of association as laid down by physiologists, any impression in a series can recall any other impression in that series without going through the whole in order; so that the mind drops ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... was induced to forego celebrating the event on his motor horn (the very same which had tortured the New Hampshire echoes), and to assert his authority over his juniors; and finally a plan began to emerge from the chaos, and each child to fit into it like a bit of a picture puzzle. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... carefully all the way, but nowhere did we come upon any trace of the Striped Beetle. At several places they had seen the brown car go by the day before and at one place it had stopped for gasoline, but no one knew of any repairs that had been made on it. The thing began to loom up like a puzzle. If the Striped Beetle had not been delayed by accident why had not Gladys arrived in Ft. Wayne the night before ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... of the Two-Surface Flying Machine Introductory Chapter by Octave Chanute, C. E. II. Theory Development and Use Origin of the Aeroplane—Developments by Chanute and the Wrights—Practical Uses and Limits. III. Mechanical Bird Action What the Motor Does—Puzzle in Bird Soaring. IV. Various Forms of Flying Machines Helicopters, Ornithopters and Aeroplanes— Monoplanes, Biplanes and Triplanes. V. Constructing a Gliding Machine Plans and Materials Required—Estimate ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... that is as exquisite as it is indescribable—one of those vague, elusive, and yet powerful odors so characteristic of spring flowers. You will smell it—the air will be full of it—and yet it will puzzle you to locate it. The wind will blow from you and it will be gone. Then a breeze will blow your way, and the air will suddenly be overpoweringly sweet with the scent shaken free from blossoms so small as to be hardly noticeable unless one makes a careful search for them. Then, too, the fruit ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... letter, "but what shall we do, Enos, about bringing her home? Mr. Freeman truly says that, while Rose is eager to take Anne to Boston, we may feel that it would not be right for her to go. It is indeed a puzzle, is it not? Whatever possessed Anne to turn upon Amanda in such fashion, and then to run off?" and the good woman shook her ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... taxation?] What, then, are taxes? The question is one which is apt to come up, sooner or later, to puzzle children. They find no difficulty in understanding the butcher's bill for so many pounds of meat, or the tailor's bill for so many suits of clothes, where the value received is something that can be seen and handled. But the tax bill, though it comes as inevitably as the autumnal ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... or no judge, who wished to prepare an argument on one side of a question should think fit to cast that argument for convenience' sake in the form of a judicial summing-up of both sides is, and must remain, a puzzle. ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... that I know of. Come, Chief Inspector, this finessing with me is highly improper on your part—highly improper. And it's also unfair, you know. You shouldn't leave me to puzzle things out for myself like this. Really, ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... been a merry prank; he was still a prank, but not often merry. His spirit seemed to be overcast; and the terrible fact came out gradually that he was not 'nicely disposed.' His relatives failed to understand him, and they gave him up like a puzzle. He was self-contradictory. For instance, though a shocking liar, he was lavish of truth whenever truth happened to be disconcerting and inopportune. He it was who told the forewoman of his uncle's millinery ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... definite which must be laid to his account as a fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself on having written The Ring and ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... This puzzle was not on Monday night long in being resolved. Ollivarez entered, and a child in the gallery commenced crying with that persevering quality of tone which threatens long endurance. Mr. Yates could not resist the temptation; and Ollivarez, the newly-created Duke of Medina, promised ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... presented itself to Joel on the day preceding the golf tournament and the football game with Westvale. On account of the latter there had been only a half hour of light practice for the two squads, and Joel at half past four had gone to his room to study. But when it came time to puzzle out some problems in geometry Joel found that his paper was used up, and, rather than borrow of his neighbors, he pulled on his cap and ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... to interpret each other. Yet, after giving due weight to such answers, Perugino, being what he was, living at the time he did, not as a recluse, but as a prosperous impresario of painting, and systematically devoting his powers to pietistic art, must be for us a puzzle. That the quietism of his highly artificial style should have been fashionable in Perugia, while the Baglioni were tearing each other to pieces, and the troops of the Vitelli and the Borgia were trampling upon Umbria, is one of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... aisles had the usual round-headed windows, with the unusual (for England) circular windows above. There were flat buttresses; but I must reject the flying-buttresses of some restorers. The clerestory windows are a puzzle. Everybody maintains they were Pointed, and, if so, they would have been inserted at the same time as the new roof; but there seems to be no trustworthy authority for this. In Finden's engravings after Hollar they are taken ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... up and down the hall, which would be hers? There was no reasoning which could help him in the midst of that puzzle. He walked to what he judged to be the middle of the hall, turned to his right, and opened the first door. A hinge creaked, but it was no louder than the ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... doing so, but that must have been the cause of their looks of alarm. I believe that one can remain for a fortnight at this inn without payment, unless conscience interferes; and people who had stayed there told me that meat had been served to them from the monastery kitchen; so that puzzle still remains a ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... guess how she enjoyed the lawn with its roses, and the beautiful river. Fresh from the poor little cabin on the hill-top, she nevertheless fell with the greatest ease into the ways and habits of her new life. It did not puzzle or disturb her in the least to live in large rooms, be waited on by servants, or have nice things about her; she took to all these naturally. For a few days Mr. and Mrs. Grant watched with some anxiety, fearing to discover a flaw in their treasure, but no ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... imagine the whole of Europe with St. Petersburg, Paris, and London transformed into a vast rubbish-heap. How could we expect the kindlers of such a fire to retain any consciousness after so vast a devastation? He used to puzzle any who professed their readiness for self-sacrifice by telling them it was not the so- called tyrants who were so obnoxious, but the smug Philistines. As a type of these he pointed to a Protestant parson, and declared that he would ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... chin, and smooth placid cheeks were strongly expressive of quiet decision and dignified force of will. The mouth, almost always the tell-tale feature of the face, seemed in his case rather calculated to puzzle any one who would have speculated on the meanings shadowed forth by the lines of it. It was certainly, with its large rows of unexceptionably brilliant teeth, a very handsome mouth. And it was often not devoid of much sweetness. Nobody had ever imagined that they detected any ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the versifier may draw the knot of logic, yet for the ear he still leaves the tissue of the sentence floating somewhat loose. In prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot, nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear remarks and is singly gratified by this return and balance; while in verse it is all diverted to the measure. To find comparable passages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely the superior of the rival, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Natacha relapsed into dreaming and wondering how it had all happened. Not being able to solve the puzzle, she drifted into reminiscence once more. She could see him—him—and feel his impassioned eyes fixed on her face. "Oh, make haste back! I am so afraid he will not come yet! Besides, it is all very well, but I am growing old; I shall ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... of front Gerrard had not time to puzzle over at the moment, for as Sher Singh left the tent under the escort of Badan Hazari, the Rajah's minister, Diwan Dwarika Nath, appeared out of the darkness with his attendants, and cast a keen glance at the departing figure. ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... south upon the plain. These hills are of pure white sand, thrown up in ridges, and sometimes in cones, to the height of a hundred feet, and without tree, bush, or shrub, to break their soft outlines, or the uniformity of their colour. But the greatest anomaly of this geological puzzle is, that water-ponds are found in their very midst—even among their highest ridges—and this water not occasional, as from rains, but lying in "lagunas," with reeds, rushes, and nymphae growing in them, to attest that the water is permanent! The very last place where water might be ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... I mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows: {illust.} This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of "heaven" was added to that of star the picture was simplified in this way {illust.} which made it even more of a puzzle. In the same way an ox changed from {illust} into {illust.} and a fish changed from {illust.} into {illust.} The sun was originally a plain circle {illust.} and became {illust.} If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an {illust.} look like {illust.}. This system of writing ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... word of five letters find: 1st. An hour-glass puzzle, the central letters of which, read downward, signify to perform again; horizontally, a symbol often used in writing, a beverage, a vowel, a performance, to provide. 2d. A word-square containing a unit, a vehicle, an epoch. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... to think the writers donkeys. How they obtained her address was a puzzle; they stole in to comfort her slightly. They attached her to her position of Defendant by the thought of what would have been the idea of her character if she had flown—a reflection emanating from inexperience of the resources ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ample evidence of a warm and almost West Indian climate among the low basking islets of our northern carboniferous seas. Or take once more the oolitic epoch in England, lithographed on its own mud, with its puzzle-monkeys and its sago-palms, its crocodiles and its deinosaurs, its winged pterodactyls and its whale-like lizards. All these huge creatures and these broad-leaved trees plainly indicate the existence of a temperature over ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... moral—of enemy commanders. Some one else noted that the supposed speciality of the General immediately opposite us was that of making fierce attacks across impassable marshes. "Good," put in a third some one. "Let's puzzle the German staff by persuading him that we have an Etonian General in this part of the line, a very celebrated 'wet-bob.'" Which sprightly suggestion made the Brigadier-General smile. But it was my good fortune to go one better. I had to partner him at ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... lined with people they knew, servants and negroes, standing about the driveway and outside the fence, people of the village grouped along the sidewalk, everybody out upon their doorsteps to watch the coach go by, and to all the face of the bride was a puzzle and a surprise. They half expected to see another coach coming ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... as he started toward the spot where silence now reigned. "Come along after me, Jack, darlint; and please remimber that if the beast springs at me, I depind on you to knock spots out of him. Keep back, the rest of ye, now, till we solve the puzzle." ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... I think. If she doesn't deserve to be, who does?" he continued, rousing himself somewhat from his absent manner. "I suppose, now, there is no absolutely faultless woman; and yet I sometimes think it would puzzle the most fastidious critic of human nature to point out any one particular in which Miss Francie could be finer than she is; I think it would. It is not my business to find fault; I don't want to find fault; but I have often thought over Miss ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... I take off my shoes and put on a pair of zori, or straw sandals provided for me, as the rock is extremely slippery. The others land barefoot. But how to proceed soon becomes a puzzle: the countless stone-piles stand so close together that no space for the foot seems to be ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... reach to Legare Street. It runs in the family. Julian Pringle, he died in '70, he was just the same. Now why should a long nose run through a family like that, or a bad temper, or the colour of hair? I don't know. The world's a puzzle and the older one grows, the more it ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... "That's the puzzle! I do not know. I never heard of any such person in my life—not that I remember. Evidently, though, he knows enough about me to know that I own that sheep ranch, and to think that I ought to go out there and see it. I do ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... down to puzzle over those parts of her letter which he had barely skimmed; faded into insignificance for the moment before the outstanding confession that she really loved him. But they loomed larger and larger, more and more puzzling and ominous, as he read and reread them. Finally he thrust ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... as Evelyn, who was a constant puzzle to her mother, this argument had very little weight compared with her own sense of duty to her parents. Her somewhat ideal education made worldly advantages of little force in her mind, and love the one priceless possession ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the coinage, the gossip of the king's embroilments with the Parliament—these things, it may again be said, occupied Law's mind far less than the question of gaining audience with his fair rescuer of the morn at Sadler's Wells. This was the puzzle which, revolve it as he might, not even his audacious wit was able to provide with plausible solution. He pondered the matter in a hundred different pleasing phases as he passed from the Bank of England through the crowded streets of London, ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Kamtchatka and Korea, Arabia and the Indian Peninsula all point south? South America, Africa, and Australia are drawn out into wedges narrowing southwards. They are like stalactites in a grotto. But however much you may puzzle over the globe, and however much you may question learned men, you will never know why the earth's surface has assumed exactly the form it has and ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... been the reasons for my fellow-traveller's anxiety about my name and occupation, I knew not, yet could not help feeling gratified at thinking that as I had not given my name at the coach office, I was a great a puzzle to ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... sense, the Bible of the Greeks, and as society improved in morals, and thought was directed more and more fearlessly towards religious questions, the puzzle as to the immoralities of the gods became acute. The religious and intellectual developments of the sixth century B.C. led to various ways of explaining the old stories. Sophocles is conciliatory, conceiving ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... we were desirous of obtaining. We got Murden's consent to act in the plot, and by the aid of a wig his disguise was complete. As for Steel Spring, he was to remain as he was, without disguise, but was to vehemently deny his cognomen, and puzzle Mr. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... finds myself tacklin this hopeless puzzle from every angle I could think of. I tried 'phonin' to Claire's old street number. Nothin' doin'. They didn't know anything about ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... absolution, and offered him the book at an immense loss on the sale price. 'If you were,' replied the doctor, 'to bring the book at my door for nothing, I would take it with a pair of tongs and drop it into the gutter.' It was a puzzle to everyone what the little doctor did with all his purchases, which were limited chiefly to classical books. At his death, however, it transpired that he bought for the various Universities of the United Kingdom. The doctor's son, a poor curate, entered his ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... "bookworm" could gloat, a chest of secret drawers into which the curious delight to pry, a difficult problem in Euclid for the mathematician to solve; and an unreadable book for the author. A conglomeration of languages for the scholar, a puzzle for the historian, and a subject for the novelist. These are points which it is not the object of this book to attempt to clear up and settle; all it aims at, as in the case of my "Cry of the Children from the Brick-yards ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... the instance of that boy of Dalhem is perplexing. Whether it was the spirit of the child that returned into his body to animate it anew, or the demon who replaced his soul, the puzzle appears to me the same; in all this circumstance we behold only the work of the evil spirit. God does not seem to have had any share in it. Now, if the demon can take the place of a spirit in a body newly dead, or if he can make the soul by which it was animated ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... jar of Holland blue, Which he carefully carried to its place. Then, with a smile on his aged face, He drew up a chair to the open space 'Twixt table and chimney. "Without preface, Young man, I will say that what you see Is not the puzzle you take it to be." "But surely, Sir, there is something strange In a shop with goods at so wide a range Each from the other, as swords and seeds. Your neighbours must have greatly differing needs." ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... which divided their lives. To the son the shock was scarcely less violent than to the father. The Seder, which the day's unwonted excitement had clean swept out of his mind, recurred to him in a flash, and by the light of it he understood the puzzle of his father's appearance. The thought of explaining rushed up only to be dismissed. The door of the restaurant had not yet ceased swinging behind him—there was too much to explain. He felt that all was over between him and his father. It was unpleasant, terrible even, for it meant the annihilation ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... after Rome had been taken by the Gauls, the senate, on a sudden emergency, armed ten legions, 3000 horse, and 42,000 foot; a force which the city could not have sent forth under Augustus, (Livy, xi. 25.) This declaration may puzzle an antiquary, but it is ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Mount Desert'—F. E. Church, N. A. A puzzle. We are glad once more to welcome to a public gallery a significant work by this widely known and much admired artist. Of late, the exhibition of such works (in so far as we know) invariably alone, may perhaps have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... endless devices to make the noonday siesta full of contentment—he followed the back track a little way, stepping carefully in his own footprints; branched off on the other side of the trail, and so circled swiftly back to join his little flock, leaving behind him a sad puzzle of disputing tracks for any ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... the strange condition that her father Pelias had laid upon all suitors, he was heavy-hearted. Only that man who should come to woo her in a chariot drawn by a wild boar and a lion might ever marry Alcestis; and this task was enough to puzzle even a king. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... the place where he boarded we learned that he got a letter from Arizona—trust the average landlady to look at postmarks—that he seemed greatly agitated all that day, and left that night. No one has seen him since. Why he went is a puzzle. Where, we don't care. So long as he keeps out ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... this phenomenon categorically to the old man, who only smiled meaningly by way of answer. His superior smile led the young scientific man to fancy that he himself had been deceived by some imposture. He had no wish to carry one more puzzle to his grave, and hastily turned the skin over, like some child eager to find out the ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... an unusual dovetail joint, which, when put together properly is a puzzle. The tenon or tongue of the joint is sloping on three surfaces and the mortise is cut sloping to match. The bottom surface of the mortise is ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... deserted his work and was frantically dashing out on to the veldt. They uttered shrill cries as they ran, and every man had some sort of weapon in his hand, either a tomahawk, a billet of wood, or a rock. With marvellous celerity they formed a huge circle, though what they were after was a puzzle to me. I fancied for awhile that one of their number must have run "amuck," and the rest meant to send him to slumber. Quickly they narrowed the circle, the whole body of them moving as if linked together and propelled by unseen mechanism. When the circle got about the third the size of ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... scene of The First Person Singular shifts between the kinetic panorama of modern New York and the somewhat stultifying quietude of a small Pennsylvania town. A mysterious Mrs. Ventress is the centre of its rapidly unfolding series of peculiar situations. Mrs. Ventress is a puzzle to the townspeople. They believe odd things about her. The particular family in Tupton with which she comes in contact is an eccentric one. The father is a recluse—for reasons. His adopted daughter, Bessie Gedney, is an odd character among young girls in fiction. Dr. Gedney's ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... carefully. Under a cairn exterior he concealed a throbbing heart, for in that valise was the Doctor's pistol, upon which he relied in anticipation of future dangers. The officials opened the valise. It was apparently a puzzle to them. They found but little clothing. On the contrary, a very extensive assortment of articles wrapped in paper and labelled very neatly. These they opened one by one in the first ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... Let us concern ourselves about the past only as that past shall contribute to a more glorious future. It is not mounds, pyramids, or bronze tablets we should be building for later generations of archaeologists to puzzle their ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... imperfect language. But from the man who dared to interpose a human comment on the Scripture, I most rigidly demanded a clear, single, self-consistent sense. If he did not know what he meant, why did he not hold his peace? If he did know, why did he so speak as to puzzle us? It was for this uniform refusal to allow of self-contradiction, that it was more than once sadly predicted of me at Oxford that I should become "a Socinian;" yet I did not apply this logical measure to any compositions but those which ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... him "Cat-thumper," after the Indian fashion of christening a child from some marked exploit or incident in his career. This became contracted to "Thumper," an appropriate title, for, with the fat pickings of the restaurant, his bearship grew with a rapidity that made it a puzzle how his ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... 42. 280.).—The following additional specimen of this once popular form of numerical puzzle is not, I think, unworthy a corner in "N. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... woman. His wife died and he went into contented mourning, and out of gratitude to his satisfied melancholy, swore that he would pay his rent, but failed. Upon the Major he held a strong hold, and this was a puzzle to his neighbors. Their characters stood at fantastic and whimsical variance; one never in debt, the other never out of debt; one clamped by honor, the other feeling not its restraining pinch. But together they would ride abroad, laughing along the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... regards the comet as a great terror and a great foe; and the heart of humanity sits uneasily when one blazes in the sky. Even to the scholar and the scientist they are a puzzle and a fear; they are erratic, unusual, anarchical, monstrous—something let loose, like a tiger of the heavens, athwart an orderly, peaceful, and harmonious world. They may be impalpable and harmless attenuations of gas, or they way be loaded with death and ruin; but in any ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... orderly asked himself this question and found no answer to it, how much more did the matter puzzle the other men and officers of the Second Grenadiers, and, gradually, as the change in Brodsky and his regiment became known, the entire camp? To the Colonel's relieved astonishment, he met with neither avoidance nor taunts from his superiors; nor yet any special disdain from his inferiors. Ivan, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... head sadly, for he knew that the villain was only crushed for the moment, and that he would shortly be revenging himself upon them. No, the only way every to get any peace and quiet was to render the Tanuki harmless for ever. Long did the old man and the hare puzzle together how this was to be done, and at last they decided that they would make two boats, a small one of wood and a large one of clay. Then they fell to work at once, and when the boats were ready and properly painted, ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... didn't seem to have any relations except us. This used to puzzle Claude and me. Everybody on the mainland had relations; why hadn't we? Was it because we lived on an island? We thought it would be so jolly to have an uncle and aunt and some cousins. Once we asked Father about it, but he looked so sorrowful all of a sudden that we wished we hadn't. He said it was ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... forms the common food of the people of Cuba. Twice in the day food was brought us. It was both abundant and good, so that we had no reason to complain of the way the pirates treated us. The great puzzle was to discover why it was that they were so civil. Had they kept us on bread and water, and spared our lives, we should have had reason to be grateful; as the usual mode of proceeding of such gentry, we ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... I think every man who lives in Montana ought to know it by heart. Yes, or in America. I'd rather puzzle it all out, up in here, than read anything else that ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... enough to puzzle the wisest man. David himself was put to a stand by beholding the quiet death of ungodly men. 'Verily,' says he, 'I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency' (Psa 73:13). They, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... beauty, who may usually be heard bellowing inconsolably in the background. A small but increasing per-centage have already had as much liquid refreshment as is good for them, and intend to have more. Altogether, the scene, if festive, might puzzle an Intelligent Foreigner who is more familiar with Continental ideas ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... gave their evidence freely enough at the inquest. I have not yet fitted the pieces of the puzzle into one another, but I am certain the lot are connected from their use of the perfume. Also, as this man who has been caught was passing false money, and as Maraquito and probably Mrs. Herne are surviving members of the Saul family who practised coining, I should not be ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... part of the Landes there were human habitations to be found. Stalking along with giant strides on the highest part of some rising ground not very far off was a grotesque figure, clearly defined against the bright eastern sky, which would have been a puzzle to a stranger, but was a familiar sight to de Sigognac—a shepherd mounted on his high stilts, such as are to be met with everywhere throughout ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... chance for a grand saturnalia is best when Mr. Smith goes from home for a day or two. Then I can deny myself to visitors—take full license—set the hydrant running, and puzzle the water commissioners with an extra consumption of Schuylkill. My last exploit in this way was rather disastrous; and I am patiently waiting for its memory to pass away, before I venture even to think of repeating it. Mr. Smith had business in New ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... Vivien answered smiling saucily: 'Ye have the book: the charm is written in it: Good: take my counsel: let me know it at once: For keep it like a puzzle chest in chest, With each chest locked and padlocked thirty-fold, And whelm all this beneath as vast a mound As after furious battle turfs the slain On some wild down above the windy deep, I yet should strike upon a sudden means To dig, pick, open, find and ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... It seemed to Granny that Bowser the Hound had become very smart, smarter than she had ever known him to be before. Do what she would, she couldn't fool him. Not one of all the tricks she knew, and she knew a great many, fooled him at all. They didn't puzzle him long enough for her to get ...
— Old Granny Fox • Thornton W. Burgess
... infernally busy mopping up. What, bother about a little dinkum dinkus like this, with Russia mad, Germany ugly, France grumbling at England, Italy shaking her fist at Greece, and labour making a monkey of itself? Nay! I'll shift the puzzle so you can read it. When the yacht was released from auxiliary duties she was without a crew. The old crew, that of peace times, was gone utterly, with the exception of four. You had the yacht keelhauled, gave ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... threatened to dislocate the young man's shoulder. "My boy," he cried, laughing and crying at the same time, "forgive me—forgive me. I was hasty. I should have let you speak, first. God be praised, everything is well. De Grissac—think of it—they will puzzle their brains over that cipher for weeks and weeks and they will discover nothing—nothing! Is it not splendid!" He grasped the Ambassador's hand and embraced ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... for me, A laatle prattler on my knee! What tales I have to listen tea! But just at fost there's sike to-dea As niver was. Each laatle dot Can fain agree for t' fav'rite spot. Sike problems they can set for me 'T wad puzzle waaser heeads mebbe. An' questions hawf a scoor they ask, To answer' em wad prove a task; For laatle thowts stray far away To things mysterious, oot o' t' way. An' then sike toffer(2) they torn oot, ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... Donald dozen did live in such a small tenement that it was a puzzle how they ever could all get ...
— Harper's Young People, August 31, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... variety is the "logogram'' (Gr. logos, word), a versified puzzle containing several words derived from recombining the letters of the original word, the difficulty lying in the fact that synonyms of the derived words may be used. Thus, if the original word be "curtain,'' the word "dog'' may be ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... saw what I had done. But the weakling of the pair still defended the position he had reluctantly abandoned on terra firma; he was all for returning while there was time; and there were fragments of the broken argument that were beginning to puzzle me when a soft oath from the man in front proclaimed the discovery of the open ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... you've made. You make 'em right along. If it wasn't for him helpin' you out and coverin' up your mistakes, this firm would be in hot water with its customers two-thirds of the time and the books would be fust-rate as a puzzle, somethin' to use for a guessin' match, but plaguey little good as straight accounts of a goin' concern. Now what makes you act this ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... railway-laborers, has been transmogrified into navigator. We believe that more people could tell why the month of July was so called than could explain the origin of the names for our days of the week, and that it is oftener the Saxon than the French words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern reader.] ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... the beetles. A good-sized fly (Tabanus) was extremely numerous, and tormented us by its painful bite. The common horsefly, which is so troublesome in the shady lanes of England, belongs to this same genus. We here have the puzzle that so frequently occurs in the case of musquitoes — on the blood of what animals do these insects commonly feed? The guanaco is nearly the only warm-blooded quadruped, and it is found in quite inconsiderable numbers compared with the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Burgos and Valladolid; and that one column, five thousand strong, had been very severely mauled, and forced to fall back. This confirmed the statements that we had before heard, from the peasantry and the French deserters. Now there is a chance of penetrating the mystery, which has been a profound puzzle to us here, and indeed ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... not be called a trial, consisted of a vast series of rambling and tangled interrogatories reaching over a space of forty years without apparent connection or relevancy, skipping fantastically about from one period to another, back and forthwith apparently no other intent than to puzzle the prisoner, throw him off his balance, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Irish servant class. Larry Donovan, who was English-born, used on occasions an exaggerated Irish dialect that was wholly different from the smooth liquid tones of Bates. But more things than his speech were to puzzle me in ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... this delicate political hint. In fact, anything fine or keen is sure to puzzle your woman ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... surfaces, so that to celestial eyes the stones on which we tread are written with our deeds, and the leaves of the forest are but undeveloped negatives where our summers stand self-recorded for transfer into the imperishable record? And what a metaphysical puzzle have we here in this simple-looking paradox! Is motion but a succession of rests? All is still in this picture of universal movement. Take ten thousand instantaneous photographs of the great thoroughfare in a day; every one of them will be as still as the tableau in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... Adeline Northwick sat crying over the paper that Elbridge Newton had pushed under the door that morning. It was limp from the nervous clutch and tremor of her hands, and wet with her tears; but she kept reading her father's letter in it, and trying to puzzle out of it some hope or help. "He must be crazy, he must be crazy," she moaned, more to herself than to Suzette, who sat rigidly and silently by. "He couldn't have been so cruel, if he had been in his right mind; he couldn't! He was always so good to us, and so thoughtful; he must have known ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... all. That is, there was no reason for it. The room was brightly lighted and, anyhow, she wasn't afraid of "things." She thought that at any minute she must cry like that baby. After a little she felt better; rather the unhappiness changed to wanting. What she wanted was a puzzle; but nothing else would satisfy her. It might be a necklace of little pearls, but it wasn't. It might be—. Now it was twelve o'clock. Dear, dear, why didn't she ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... large parts of Switzerland where glaciers do not now exist, and huge blocks which could only have been carried by ice, and which are called "erratic blocks," some of them as big as cottages, have been left scattered over all the northern part of Europe. These blocks were a great puzzle to scientific men till, in 1840, Professor Agassiz showed that they must have been brought by ice all the way ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... place—at least not its proper place; that which shall not be may yet come to a bad pass, and the blind race of man watches helpless the trammels it could shake off did it but greatly dare. My business, ladies and gentlemen, now is, as I have just explained to you, to attempt to puzzle your eyes by the quickness of my fingers. Yours, on the other hand, will be to detect the way—or modus operandi, as old Simon Magus used to say—in which I perform my little wonders—if you can. Will any gentleman lend me a helmet—I mean ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... passion can die, In this prosaic meeting we had! Now, ought we to laugh or to cry— Was it sorrowful, or was it sad? 'Tis a puzzle not worthy our time, So let's ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... "I didn't speak your language before I arrived here, and I had to learn it and become accustomed to its use through analyzing what you just said. I really didn't mean to puzzle you or make you ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... do come here," said Amelia, in her liveliest tone, as soon as the men made their appearance above. "I've been waiting for you this half-hour. I've got such a puzzle for you." And she made way for him to a chair which was between herself and the wall. Cradell looked half afraid of his fortunes as he took the proffered seat; but he did take it, and was soon secured from any ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... himself facing a seated figure, done in bronze, loosely wrapped in a mantle which, covering the body and the head, throws into strong relief a face of singular fascination. Whether man or woman, it would puzzle the observer to say. The eyes are half closed, in reverie rather than in sleep. The figure seems not to convey the sense either of life or death, of joy or sorrow, of hope or despair. It has lived, but life is done; it has experienced all things, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... French and on her father's English; from her mother she got the technique of her stories, the light-hearted boldness of her conversation and her extraordinary devotion to her family. She was always something of a puzzle to English women because she was a great deal more domestic than most of them and yet bristled with theories about morals and life in general that had nothing whatever in common with domesticity. Some one once said of her that "she ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... with one sleeve missing. As Dan went on he discovered that he was thinking of the handsome man in the red shirt and wondering how he had lost his missing sleeve. He pondered the question as if it were a puzzle, and, finally, yielded ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... in the Madonna picture—into Morus. So far it seems to have clung to some English tradition. But when Morus got changed to Moro it was but natural for an Italian to think of Ludovico Sforza, "Il Moro." Long before this Holbein had become Olbeno; and thereafter a puzzle. When the portrait was labelled Sforza, however, who could its obviously great painter be but Leonardo? Et voila! Thus the work passed to the Gallery and Catalogue of the Royal Collection at Dresden. And thus it long remained, as if to attest the ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... was as quick at figures as th' iddycated pig they showed in th' tint las' week in Haley's vacant lot, and in joggerphy, asthronomy, algybbera, jommethry, chimisthry, physiojnomy, bassoophly an' fractions, I was often har-rd put mesilf to puzzle him. I heerd him gradyooate an' his composition was so fine very few cud ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... to introduce here the continental Liberalism," said the great personage. "Now we know what Liberalism means on the continent. It means the abolition of property and religion. Those ideas would not suit this country; and I often puzzle myself to foresee how they will attempt to ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... taught him much more simply. For the lessons in that world, my child, have no such hard words in them as the lessons in this, and therefore the water babies like them better than you like your lessons, and long to learn them more and more; and grown men cannot puzzle nor quarrel over their meaning, as they do here on land; for those lessons all rise clear and pure, out of the everlasting ground ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... level again could he solve the puzzle. Then he perceived that the way in which the cliff bulged out on both sides prevented the ledge from becoming evident in profile, whilst, seen en plein face in the glare of the sunlight, it suggested nothing more ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... gentle manner in which the young rhymester addressed the author of the hated embargo. The following orthographic puzzle went the rounds of the Federalist papers. By beginning at the central letter, the phrase "Embargo will ruin us" may be read in ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... what is the matter with you? If advanced people like ourselves believed in any such nonsense, I should be inclined to say that you had seen a ghost; but I suppose it's only that silly fourth dimension puzzle that's worrying you. Now, look here, you must really take your whisky and go to bed. If you go on bothering any longer about 'N to the fourth,' you will have one of your bad headaches to-morrow and won't be able to finish your address for ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... you about the novices. They often say: "You have an answer for everything. This time I thought I should puzzle you. Where do you find all that you teach us?" Some are even simple enough to think I can read their souls, because at times it happens I discover to them—without revelation—the subject of their thoughts. ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... horror upon the recital of its aims and purposes—and, indeed, the whole organization, as formidable as it was in numbers, was soon in the most terrible condition, and died in great agony. The complications of the disease of which the order came to its death, would puzzle the most profound pathologist. It might, perhaps, be set down as a disease of the heart, induced by corrupt morals, with the following complications: Softening of the brain from the study of State sovereignty; extreme nervous debility ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... castle than the ruins of a city," said Denham. "It's a puzzle, and it must be very, very old; but I say bless the people who built the place, for it's a regular haven of refuge for us. Why, we could hold these old walls against the ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... joint had started, the hickory of shafts and spokes still seemed tough as hammered steel. These carriages are roomy enough, and fairly comfortable, when you are in them, but that same entrance is apt rather to puzzle a stranger. The fore and hind wheels are nearly the same height, and set very close together; even when the fore-carriage is turned so that they nearly lock, the space left for ascent between them is narrow indeed; this same arrangement renders, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... remains a puzzle—why do the stories of the remotest people so closely resemble each other? Of course, in the immeasurable past, they have been carried about by conquering races, and learned by conquering races from vanquished peoples. Slaves carried far from home brought their ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... be common enough everywhere, but as I never happened to hear them before, they have for me all the freshness of originality. You know that it has always been one of my pet rages to trace cant phrases to their origin; but most of those in vogue here would, I verily believe, puzzle Horne Tooke himself. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... a puzzle," I admitted. "I suppose they might very well be father and daughter. It is certain that she is fresh from some convent boarding-school. I don't like the way she looks at the man, do you? ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her numbers again! How strange it is that she should never forget a number or make a mistake in a sum! In taking away or adding together one can't puzzle her. I don't mean that I can't," she continued, apparently addressing no one in particular, "because I am a poor ignorant woman; but wiser people than I. Now, Perine, you shall have your lesson. See here, I shall stand ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... the powers of belief as a well-authenticated dream which strikes the bull's eye of facts not known to the dreamer nor capable of being guessed by him. If the events beheld in the dream are far away in space, or are remote in time past, the puzzle is difficult enough. But if the events are still in the future, perhaps no kind of explanation except a mere "fluke" can even be suggested. Say that I dream of an event occurring at a distance, and that I record or act on my dream before it is corroborated. Suppose, too, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... him to embrace her as he had greeted the other sisters, and then squirming out of his arms, she backed into a corner, where she frowned impartially on the excited group, all talking at once, while she tried to puzzle out how this man could be "Grandpa" when all her own relatives had long since been ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... "Not these puzzle the will; Not these the yet unanswered question urge. But the unjust stricken; but the hands that kill Lopped; ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... gave them the greatest trouble. The opening by which they entered the hollow was about four feet high and a foot and a half across, and both boys looked at it a long time before they could see a way to solve the puzzle. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... best of all that word of his about his cousin's helping him?" said Judge Dennison. "It was plucky in the boy to keep working, and it took brains to study out that puzzle; but that little touch which showed that he was not going to accept the least scrap of honor that did not belong to him was what caught me. You have reason to be proud of your son, Mr. Hamlin."—Pansy, by permission of Lothrop, Lee ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... cannot you be open and frank with me?" She allowed her hand to lie soft and inert in mine, sighing the while, her gaze still fixed beyond as though her thoughts were far away. "I love you," I whispered. "Cannot you see how you puzzle me?—for you seem to be my friend at one moment, and at the next ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... earth and fix them on this truth just under your nose; and Andrew Undershaft's views will not perplex you in the least. Unless indeed his constant sense that he is only the instrument of a Will or Life Force which uses him for purposes wider than his own, may puzzle you. If so, that is because you are walking either in artificial Darwinian darkness, or to mere stupidity. All genuinely religious people have that consciousness. To them Undershaft the Mystic will be quite intelligible, and his perfect comprehension of his daughter the Salvationist ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... and sometimes amused themselves by making me pass an examination, which consisted in ascertaining how many tunes I could recognise when they were played rather more quickly or slowly than usual. 'God save the King,' when thus played, was a sore puzzle. There was another man with almost as bad an ear as I had, and strange to say he played a little on the flute. Once I had the triumph of beating him in one of ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... that too was impossible. Then she understood that the will had already lost touch with the body, that the crumbling world had receded to an infinite distance—that was as she had expected, but what continued to puzzle her was that her mind was still active. It was true that the world she had known had withdrawn itself from the dominion of consciousness, as her body had done, except, that was, in the sense of hearing, which was still strangely alert; ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... which had pounded herself to death upon the strand near Kitty Midget's Hammock. How curiously those white-haired children watched the man who had come so far in a paper boat! "Why did not the paper boat soak to pieces?" they asked. Each explanation seemed but to puzzle them the more; and I found myself in much the same condition of mind when trying to make some discoveries concerning Kitty Midget. She must, however, have lived somewhere on Clark's Beach long before the present proprietor was born. We spent ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... Loria also, when they met—as secretly as if the bond between them had been a forbidden love. But if the truth about the yachting trip had been told, even he had no solution ready for the puzzle. ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... expense. I am going to take the case largely because it has interested me, and it will be a pleasure to work it out, not only on your daughter's account, but on my own. You know, to me, such matters are of absorbing interest, like the solving of some complex and baffling puzzle." ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... six-and-twenty. It's particular attention that's been paid to your education, I perceive; you've nothing to unlearn anyhow, that's something. Now, sir, do you think that a classical scholar and a gentleman born, like me, is to demane myself by hearing you puzzle at the alphabet? You're quite mistaken, Mr Keene, you must gain your first elements second-hand; so where's Thimothy Ruddel? You, Timothy Ruddel, you'll just teach this young Master Keene his whole alphabet, and take care, at the same time, that you know your own lessons, or it will end in ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... invaluable study to every person who wishes to gain a wide command over his mother tongue. Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. "There is not," he truly says, "in 'The Pilgrim's Progress' a single expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, that would puzzle the rudest peasant." We may, look through whole pages, and not find a word of more than two syllables. Nor is the source of this pellucid clearness and imaginative power far to seek. Bunyan was essentially ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... The police were coming out, walking toward him. He smiled. He had said everything he intended to say. It was a good little paradox he had coined. They would puzzle over it, remember it. ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... 'westerly' i' stead o' 'yeasterly,'" cried Jem, "boh yo puzzle a mon so wi' your lawyerly questins, that he dusna knoa his ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... American child is not) but not retentive, and they can keep up a steady, even pull at regular tasks, especially in routine work, at which American children usually rebel. In fact, they prefer routine work to variety, and grow discouraged quickly when they have to puzzle out things for themselves. They will faithfully memorize pages and pages of matter which they do not understand, a task at which our nervous American children would completely fail. They are exceedingly sensitive to criticism, and respond quickly to praise. ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... Renown's tonnage he had to go into Conception Bay, one of the many great sacks of inlets that make the island something that resembles nothing so much as a section of a jig-saw puzzle. The harbour of St. John's could float Renown, but its narrow waters would not permit her to turn, and the Prince had to transfer his Staff and baggage to Dragon in order to complete the next stage of ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... themselves in moderation, as befits sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician. For Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quibbling puzzle of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow. Poor Diodorus went home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died in despair, leaving five "dialectical daughters" behind him, to be thorns in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as "emancipated women;" a class ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... the good man's face remained a puzzle to me until some of the congregation asked me on the train in the morning, in a confidential kind of way, where the game was, and how high was the ante. The explanation that ensued was not a success. I think that it shook the confidence of the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... The unsolved puzzle, however, was Sal Karone. It was obvious that the Id was sensitive to the gauche ways of the Master, yet his equally obvious devotion ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... with the crossing-sweeper. He too looked strangely disturbed, pacing up and down an adjoining street, more than once, before he could make up his mind to ring a well-known bell. Verily Miss Bruce seemed to be one of those ladies whose destiny it is to puzzle, worry, and interest every man with whom they ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... said that for men who did, intend that the people of the Territory should have the right to exclude slavery absolutely and unconditionally, the voting down of Chase's amendment is wholly inexplicable. It is a puzzle, a riddle. But I have said, that with men who did look forward to such a decision, or who had it in contemplation that such a decision of the Supreme Court would or might be made, the voting down of that amendment would be perfectly ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... through our consciousness of good and evil. Good and evil do not exist in God's eyes as in our eyes, for he is the author of all, but it may be that our sense of good and evil was given to us by him as a token of our divine nature. If this be true, why should we puzzle and fret ourselves with distinctions like Mathias? It were better to leave the mystery and attend to this life, casting out desire to know what God is or what nature is, as well as desire for particular things in this world which long ago ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... "I've been trying all night to puzzle out what you meant by all that, yesterday—about my wanting your Aunt Polly's hand and heart here all those years. What ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... he remembered everything which had been a puzzle to him. Being still weak, he now grew as much excited as before he had been apathetic, and had his uncle been at home he would have gone to him with the whole story at once. But the sheikh was away, superintending the drill of certain European ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... I know. It isn't worth while till the gentlemen come in," she said. "I know that—now. It used to puzzle me at first; but I know now. You English are so—funny! In America a girl is quite content to sing to her lady friends; but here—well, only men count as audience. They will all wake up when the men appear. I have learned that. Or perhaps ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... board 2 inches broad and 3 inches long has holes bored into it in the design herewith illustrated. Nails are stuck loosely in all of these holes, excepting the centre one. The puzzle is to jump all of the nails off the board so that only one nail is left, and that in the centre-hole on the board. The nails are jumped off in the same manner that men are jumped in the game of checkers. ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... human being is a puzzle to every other. With what is it occupied when left to its own devices? There is, in Barwood's handwriting,[1] proof that his brain was filled with a procession of changing activities and impressions which were for the most part melancholy,—aspirations for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... there so familiar in that lad's yellow face? Entrenched and quaking behind the flimsy desk, he never looked up. His heavy, lowered eyelids gave me suddenly the clue of the puzzle. He resembled—yes, those thick glued lips—he resembled the brothers Jacobus. He resembled both, the wealthy merchant and the pushing shopkeeper (who resembled each other); he resembled them as much as a thin, light-yellow mulatto lad may resemble a big, stout, middle- aged white man. It ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of sculptured lace by Colonban. There is a legend about it which I will tell you some evening when you cannot sleep. You will see there the tombs of Marguerite de Bourbon, Philippe le Bel, and Marguerite of Austria. I will puzzle you with the problem of her motto: 'Fortune, infortune, fort'une,' which I claim to have solved by a Latinized version: 'Fortuna, in fortuna, forti una.' Are you fond of fishing, my dear friend? There's the Reissouse at ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... there in a meaningless sort of way—I hardly knew why. To me it was a puzzle. When I asked Hilda, she shook her head with her sibylline air and answered, confidently: "You do not understand Sebastian as well as I do. We have to wait for HIM. The next move is his. Till he plays his piece, I cannot tell how I may have to ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... wrenched his thought from his present urgency, and brought it to focus upon a puzzle which now seemed oddly like an echo from a ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Sundays in spite of hard times and poor crops and debt were the wonder of the whole congregation, and in Mrs White's case the wonder was mixed with scorn. "Peter's the only one among 'em as is good for anything," she sometimes said, "an' he's naught but a puzzle-headed sort of a chap." Peter was the farmer's only son, a loutish youth of fifteen, steady and plodding as his plough horses and almost ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... regard, reason being little or no guide to us; and that within the same language the conventions are always changing. You may easily nonplus even a good grammarian by asking him suddenly, "What preposition should you use in such-and-such a context?" just as you may puzzle a man by asking him to spell a word which, if he wrote it without thinking about it, would present no difficulty to him. Some very good American writers always say, "at the North," and "at the South," where an Englishman would certainly say "in." "At," to ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... and they wouldn't be flattered by our comparison. They are yelling what, in United States, would be 'extra!' I'll get a paper and see if I can puzzle out some of the French," and he strolled down to intercept one of ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... Joan smiled at him; "I think I puzzle you terribly, but some day I am going to explain everything. All my life I have been, as I am now, in a narrow little room—peeping out and never touching others any more than I am touching"—she pointed to the right and left—"my neighbours, here. But we were all listening to ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... unnecessary, as Martha troubled herself to little purpose. Be it in religion, humanity, magic, philosophy, policy, any action or study, 'tis a needless trouble, a mere torment. For what else is school divinity, how many doth it puzzle? what fruitless questions about the Trinity, resurrection, election, predestination, reprobation, hell-fire, &c., how many shall be saved, damned? What else is all superstition, but an endless observation of idle ceremonies, traditions? What is most of our philosophy but ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... "Yes; watchin' the guests, to see they don't carry off each other. It is the new ones that puzzle us for a while," he added. "Now, there is a lady acting very mysteriously over there." His eye swept over the room and then visited, in that casual way it had, some one in the corner across the room. "I don't just seem to make her out. ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... monomania about a non-existent trouble. Dear, dear,' the doctor shook his head sadly, 'I shall never understand human nature; there is always an abyss below an abyss, and the firmest seeming ground is usually quagmire when you come to step on it. George Pendle is a riddle which would puzzle the Sphinx. Hum! hum! another fabulous beast. Well, well, I can only wait and watch until I discover the truth, and then—well, what then?—why, nothing!' And Graham, having talked himself into a cul-de-sac ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... cried Elizabeth, with some warmth, "you puzzle me exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can appear to you in the form of encouragement, I know not how to express my refusal in such a way as may convince you ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... scout did not long walk alone. Roy, visibly affected, limped ahead, rapped him on the shoulder without saying a word, and hobbled along at his side. And presently Warde Hollister, quiet, thoughtful, and always somewhat a puzzle to the other scouts, joined them. "I'm with you, Kiddo," he said. Pee-wee did not appear to care who was with him and who was not. His own stout little scout heart was with ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... His great puzzle was the Anglo-Saxon, cold, austere and uncomplaisant. This Caucasian, fair of skin, with smooth and wavy hair, small cheekbones and elevated forehead, appeared a worshipful master whose station, under God, was of preordained ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... sign. Each time he gave me fruit, he said 'Sahib Brooke,' pointed outside, and waved his arms about; but I could not make head or tail of what he meant. Why he should keep on repeating my name, each time he gave me the fruit, was a complete puzzle for me. As to the signs that he made, it seemed to me that he had gone off his head. I have been too weak to think it over, so I gave up worrying about it; and it never once struck me that it was you who sent ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... and you forget them, or at least you do not think of them. What does it all matter when you are alone in Edfu? Let the antiquarian go with his anxious nose almost touching the stone; let the Egyptologist peer through his glasses at hieroglyphs and puzzle out the meaning of cartouches: but let us wander at ease, and worship and regard the exquisite form, and drink in the mystical spirit, ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... evolution here as well as in science. The artist must hunt out new forms of expressing his world-old emotions, or he will not impress his hearers, and there is no gainsaying Beck's thesis that the Chinese puzzle of to-day will be the antique simplicity of a later epoch. But it must never be forgotten, that art should be complex only to avoid the greater evils of inadequacy and triteness. A high simplicity of plan and an ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... thought is usually clear, yet his brilliant but erratic mind was impelled to clothe this thought in the most bizarre garments. Literary paradox he loved; his mind turned naturally to metaphor, and despite the protests of his closest friends he continued to puzzle and exasperate the public. He who could have written the greatest novels of his age merely wrote stories which serve to illustrate his theories of life and conduct. No man ever put more real thought into novels than he; none had a finer eye for the beauties of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... this question, looked so bitterly reproachful (as if he were saying, "Do you wish to see me hanged?"), while his eyes took a form which reminded me so of the Sawyer in a furious puzzle, that it was impossible for me to answer as lightly ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... things that puzzle me more and more about him,—things that used to amuse me at first, because I didn't actually believe that they could be, and that I felt like defying afterwards. But now I can't bear up against them. They frighten me, and ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... give him another opportunity to talk to her alone during the rest of the evening, but she contrived to tantalise and puzzle him further, nevertheless. She pleaded tiredness when he asked her to dance after dinner, but danced with other men, and she was unusually affectionate in her manner towards Tony when she thought Don Carlos was watching her, which ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... my own opinion to the best of my judgment and belief; and if in any of those opinions I have erred, I have not the least shadow of doubt upon my mind that a wise, just and beneficent Creator and father of all, will pardon my errors. I do not feel the least disposed now to investigate, or puzzle myself, in my last moments, in a vain endeavour to enquire whether I have been right or wrong; the Lord's will be done, say I, and may he in his goodness assist you to continue an honest and an upright man amongst your fellow ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... little convalescent looked with grave curiosity. Such antics he had surely never seen. Pale and silent, as he sat on Jim's big knee one evening, he watched the men intently, their crude attempts at his entertainment furnishing an obvious puzzle to his tiny mind. Then presently he looked with wonder and awe at the presents, unable to understand that all this wealth of bottles, cubes, tops, balls, ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... orchestra and its leader. Others than these have not been seen or heard, and so perhaps are given no consideration. Who the "others" may be, or if there are any others, and of what their services to and interests in the show may consist, would puzzle many theatre-goers to determine with any ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... comprehends. Long after the heathen know that to break the sixth, eighth, even the ninth and tenth Commandments is wrong, and can understand and practically recognise it to be so, the seventh is a puzzle to them. At the best they only believe it because we say that it is a Commandment of God. Look at the Canons of the early Church on the question; look how Luther sanctioned the polygamy, the double marriage, of the Landgrave ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been objected to the great Italian landscape painters that they did not discriminate between one tree and another, but indulged in a "painter's tree." There is far more variety in those of our native artist, yet it would puzzle a critic to say what his trees really are, and to point out in his landscapes the distinctive differences between oak and beech, and elm. The weeds, too, in his foregrounds, have neither form nor species. On the margins of ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers. It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among the dead, and the immortal Moliere among the sweepings of attorneys' offices. As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their trivialities—the exercises of men who neglect ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... I do not think, so far, the argument could be improved on; [16] but now comes a puzzle. What of people who have got the knowledge and the capital [17] required to enhance their fortunes, if only they will put their shoulders to the wheel; and yet, if we are to believe our senses, that is just the one thing they will not do, and so their knowledge and ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... that had sprung up between the taciturn bookkeeper and the loquacious ex-pugilist was both a puzzle and a delight to Bobby, and it was one of his great joys to see them together, they not knowing why they liked such companionship, not having a single topic of conversation in common, but unconsciously enjoying that vague, sympathetic man-soul they ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... a lift, though it is so closely joined to the rest of the room that without the change in colour it might puzzle you to find the division. It is made to run either horizontally or vertically. This line of knobs represents the various rooms. You can see 'Dining,' 'Smoking,' 'Billiard,' 'Library' and so on, ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... spoke, she betook herself into Tai-y's apartments. Contrary to her expectation Tai-y was not at this time in her own room, but in Pao-y's; where they were amusing themselves in trying to solve the "nine strung rings" puzzle. On entering Mrs. Chou put on a smile. "'Aunt' Hseh," she explained, "has told me to bring these flowers and present them to you to wear ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... a word puzzle. You sit staring at it, looking for more spaces to print letters into, and suddenly you realize that there are no more, that the puzzle is done. That was how the space-battle of Marduk, the Battle off ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... was then reading the Anglo-Saxon Gospels. I think it was fully half-an-hour before Tom rose and gently approached my place. I had not been uneasy about the experiment after ten minutes had passed, and after that time was doubled, I felt certain of some measure of success. This may possibly puzzle my reader; but I will explain. It was clear that Tom did not understand the sonnet at first; and I was not in the least certain that he would come to understand it by any exertion of his intellect, without further experience. But what I was delighted to be made sure of was that Tom ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... unconscious life, by a theory of a double human spirit, one associated with the heart and the other with the shadow. The psychology is rudimentary, still it is interesting as an attempt to solve problems which still puzzle civilised man. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... of the Old Testament, how good men come to be troubled, and how bad men come to be prosperous. And although we Christian men and women are a great deal too apt to suppose that we have outlived that rudimentary puzzle of the religious mind, yet I do not think by any means that we have. For we hear men, when the rod falls upon themselves, saying, 'What have I done that I should be smitten thus?' or when their friends suffer, saying, 'What a marvellous thing it is that such a good man ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... body must have been left in two pieces, to puzzle the ingenuity of those gentry to unite. Yet, venerable and learned as they were, I doubt not they ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... give three cheers for the doctor?" Off came every cap, and three rousing hurras filled the air, bringing tears to our eyes, through which we took our last look at the beautiful ship Archer. Then we turned with curiosity to see these islands, so new and strange. I was in quite a puzzle to know how we were going through the surf without upsetting our boat, but there was a break in the coral reef which afforded us a safe entrance. On the wharf were a good many people watching our approach, and we recognized the familiar faces ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... would hardly come tomorrow, perhaps the day after. It was a puzzle to know why the boy had asked—the pair of them, father and son, did not usually ask about his stores until they brought ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... enigmas to most of us—I don't include you, dear Constance!—and every now and then puzzle us by acts so strangely out of keeping with all that we had predicated of them, as to leave no explanation within our reach, save that of evil fascination, or temporary loss of reason. We see their feet often turning aside into ways that we know lead to wretchedness, and onward they move persistently, ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... dismal, wretched, man-forsaken stretch of country it beats anything I ever saw," Walter exclaimed in disgust. "The river itself is about a half mile wide, but it twists, turns, and forks every few yards so as to puzzle a corporation lawyer. The shores for half a mile back from the water are nothing but boggy marsh, with here and there a wooded island. Ugh, the sight of it is enough to ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... wanted a bunch of flowers on the table. Poor mother! Poor son! And poor little proper, perplexed half-sister, looking on, and trying to make peace. Nannie's perplexities had begun very far back. Of course she was too young when her father married his second wife to puzzle over that; but if she did not, other people did. Why a mild, vague young widower who painted pictures nobody bought, and was as unpractical as a man could be whose partnership in an iron-works was a matter of inheritance—why such a man wanted to ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... evidently without fear of theft. There was a looser feeling regarding debts to traders, which we were told were sometimes ignored, partly, perhaps, owing to the traders' heavy profits, but mainly through failure in the hunt and a lack of means. But theft such as white men practice was a puzzle to these people, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... the other night, as soon as they have dammed up the river and made the lake, they then build their houses; and how they manage to work under water and fix the posts in the ground is a puzzle to me, but they do fix six posts in the ground, and very firmly, and then they build their house, which is very curious; it is in the form of a large oven, and made of clay and fat earth, mixed up with branches and herbs of all sorts; they have three sets of rooms one above the ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... why he is so secretive about this business. Evidently he knows all about it, so why shouldn't he come right out and tell what he knows. It's a puzzle," said Garry reflectively. ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... you puzzle me, boy, for you are anything but an angel in pantaloons. I have occasionally thought to remark in you a hint of unplumbed deeps—of passions as ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... that had two sheets on it. In those days there were not many buildings there, and room was very precious. There were seven other boys in the same room with me; most of them, however, students who had been there for some time. The sheets were quite a puzzle to me. The first night I slept under both of them, and the second night I slept on top of them; but by watching the other boys I learned my lesson in this, and have been trying to follow it ever since and to teach it ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... greater portion of the Park was a mass of this abominable grass, and there was no chance of getting the elephants in any other position, this serving them at the same time for both food and shelter. How they can eat it is a puzzle; it is as sharp as a knife, and as coarse as a file, with a flavour of the most ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... fellow. Poor lad!—poor lad! Suppose he thought it wasn't the straight thing to bind a girl of ours till he was in a better position—it'd be just like him. Well—but Mary, of all people!" (This was the puzzle to all.) "It must have been the baby. She certainly did dote on that child, and 'love me, love my dog'—eh? But to think of her keeping it so close all that time! Afraid I'd make a fuss, I suppose. You could have told her, Deb, that I don't stand in my children's way for the sake of ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... Robert Turold succeeded in fitting together the last pieces of the puzzle which had eluded him for so long. Simon Turrald, the brother, had fled to Cornwall, where he had married a Cornishwoman who had brought him two sons. The elder, Simon, had taken religious vows, and established a priory at St. Fair, a branch of the great priory of St. Germain. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... was an aunt of Mother's; and once she had the jaundice, and it seems to me she was always yellow after that. But that was not all, Hilda. There was an old handbook of botany among Father's books, and I used to read it a great deal, and puzzle over the long words. I always liked long words, even when I was a little wee girl. Well, one day I was reading, and Aunt Caroline happened to come in. She despised reading, and thought it was an utter waste of ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... fond passion can die, In this prosaic meeting we had! Now, ought we to laugh or to cry— Was it sorrowful, or was it sad? 'Tis a puzzle not worthy our time, So let's give it up—with ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... schoolmasther, he was as quick at figures as th' iddycated pig they showed in th' tint las' week in Haley's vacant lot, and in joggerphy, asthronomy, algybbera, jommethry, chimisthry, physiojnomy, bassoophly an' fractions, I was often har-rd put mesilf to puzzle him. I heerd him gradyooate an' his composition was so fine very few cud make out what ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... soule may lye obscure, and sleepe a while within this house of flesh. Those strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes, turn'd my Philosophy into Divinity. There is in those workes of nature, which seeme to puzzle reason, something Divine, and [that] hath more in it then the eye of a common spectator ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... her wildness, her invention. Her dress was uniform, her manner much subdued. Her chief interest seemed to be now in her studies, and in music. Her companions she never sought; but they, partly from uneasy, remorseful feelings, partly that they really liked her much better now that she did not puzzle and oppress them, sought her continually. And here the black shadow comes upon her life, the only stain upon the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... also appeared to be in high spirits, never tired of glancing at Aglaya and the prince, who were walking in front. It was evident that their younger sister was a thorough puzzle ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Bad in itself, but represented worse. Raised in extremes, and in extremes decryed, With oaths affirmed, with dying vows denied; Nor weighed nor winnowed by the multitude, But swallowed in the mass unchewed and crude. Some truth there was, but dashed and bruised with lies, To please the fools, and puzzle all the wise. Succeeding times did equal folly call. Believing nothing, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... laughing. Of course they understood things better than Baby, for even Denny, the youngest next to him, was nine, that is twice his age, which by the by was a puzzle to Denny herself, for Celia had teased her one day by saying that according to that when Baby was eighty Denny would be a hundred and sixty, and nobody ever lived to be so old, ...
— The Adventures of Herr Baby • Mrs. Molesworth
... these letters I write, after I have done; for, looking over thus much, I found two or three literal mistakes, which should not be when the hand is so bad. But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend: but methinks, when I write plain, I do not know how, but we are not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug, it looks like a PMD.(7) We have scurvy Tatlers of late: so pray do not suspect me. I have one ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... of the basement of this hotel was a private electric light plant. In charge of the plant was an old Scotch engineer delightful for his wise sayings and quaint philosophy. The fireman, a young man named T., was rather a puzzle to us. He had all the marks of unusual mechanical ability, and yet he seemed to take only the slightest interest in his work, and was constantly being reproved by his chief for laziness, irresponsibility, and ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... hue, was really becoming discoloured. To upbraid him would be cruel. Richard lifted his head, surveyed the position, and exclaiming "Here!" dropped down on a withered bank, leaving Ripton to contemplate him as a puzzle whose every new move ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... self-evident fact that the Bible story of creation was the work of unscientific men of strong imagination into a far-fetched and unsatisfactory puzzle of symbol and allegory? It would be just as easy and just as reasonable to take the Morte d'Arthur and try to prove that it contained a veiled revelation ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... satire in the form of a romance, the "Adventures of Eovaai" (1736), the authoress dropped entirely out of sight. For six years no new work came from her pen. What she was doing during this time remains a puzzle. She could hardly have been supported by the rewards of her previous labors, for the gains of the most successful novelists at this period were small. If she became a journalist or turned her energies toward ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... characters, motives which we ourselves have never made completely real by imagination are realised for us by the dramatist. Intimations of humanity which in our own minds have lain jumbled fragmentary, like the multitudinous pieces of a shuffled picture-puzzle, are there set orderly before us, so that we see at last the perfect picture. We escape out ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... statistics. We admit honestly that we know no more to-day than when Paul de Decker discussed Quetelet's labors in statistics of morality in the Brussels Academy of Science, and confessed what a puzzle it was that human conduct, even in its smallest manifestations, obeyed in their totality constant and immutable laws. Concerning this curious fact Adolf Wagner says: "If a traveler had told us something about some people where a statute determines ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... boys, the puzzle was more than just an interesting problem to be solved. If some enemy really had penetrated the project and somehow caused disruption of the scientists' brains, then the people nearest and dearest to both of them were also in jeopardy. Spindrift now ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... Jasper. I am not cunning. If people think I am, it is because, being made up of art themselves, simplicity of character is a puzzle to them. Your women are ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Graf was a puzzle to all who knew her. She was a puzzle even to herself, and was wont to say, indifferently, that the problem was not worth a solution. For this beautiful girl of fifteen was somewhat bitter and misanthropic, a condition ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... and orts, scraps, or leavings; but no one unfamiliar with the language of that time could have solved the puzzle. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... those sons of war, Cantabrian, Scythian, each intend, Disjoin'd from us by Hadria's bar, Nor puzzle, Quintius, how to spend A life so simple. Youth removes, And Beauty too; and hoar Decay Drives out the wanton tribe of Loves And Sleep, that came or night or day. The sweet spring-flowers not always keep Their bloom, nor moonlight ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... thought points the way out of another contradictious puzzle, that which confronts my argument from the ears of an ass. It roams treeless deserts where no foe can approach unseen. Thistles make no sound. Why should it be adorned with ears which in their amplitude are scarcely surpassed by those of the rabbit and the hare. There ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... this is true, admitting the place of religion in Greek life, do we not end, after all, in a greater puzzle than we began with? For this, it may be said, whatever it may be, is not what we mean by religion. This, after all, is merely a beautiful way of expressing facts; a translation, not an interpretation, of life. What we mean ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the table the sophomore officers presented each freshman with a small booklet bound in the freshman green, on the front cover of which, in letters of sophomore scarlet, was the cryptic legend: "Puzzle—name the girl." This was explained, however, by the inside, where appeared a small and rather cloudy blue-print, showing the back view of a girl in shirt-waist and short skirt, with a pile of books under her arm, and the inevitable ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... have squabbled over these famous "Pillar Towers of Ireland," but the general trend of scientific opinion is that they are of early Christian origin. Father Matt Horgan, a famous Munster antiquary, humorously started the theory that they were built to puzzle posterity, which they have very successfully done. Lucan is a health resort, possessing a sulphur spa, and situated in a well-wooded country above the Liffey. The Hydropathic stands well sheltered and commanding a splendid view. The drives in the district are many, and the antiquarian will ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... and listened, his jaws set hard together. Fast as the man talked the thoughts of Lance flew ahead, snatched at the significance of every detail, every bit of evidence. Some things puzzled Burt Brownlee, but Lance knew the answer to the puzzle while Burt talked and talked. Finally he laid his hand over the finely traced maps that showed secret trails, unguessed, hidden little draws where stolen stock had been concealed, all the fine threads that would weave the net close around ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... little child without speaking, while he cautiously manipulated his arms and interested himself in the puzzle of his own anatomy. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... clothes-line presented charming evidence of still another occupant; and here, though so far easy to read, came in something of a puzzle. Who in this humble out-of-the-way cottage could afford to wear that exquisite cambric petticoat edged with a fine and very expensive lace? And surely it was on no country legs that those delicately clocked and open-worked silk stockings walked invisible ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... mind—the puzzle about Cap'n Abe's chest—but it did not come to her lips. Looking across the table that evening, after the store was closed, as they sat together under the hanging lamp, she wondered that Cap'n Amazon did not speak of it if ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... heredity do not explain all the puzzle of any single man's mind and character, but they form co-efficients in the making of him which can be no longer disregarded. The chief point to be noticed in reference to Cavour is that he was the outcome of a mingling of race which was not only transmitted ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... time, two champions contend with fists for the smiles of beauty, who may usually be heard bellowing inconsolably in the background. A small but increasing per-centage have already had as much liquid refreshment as is good for them, and intend to have more. Altogether, the scene, if festive, might puzzle an Intelligent Foreigner who is more familiar with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... principle of franchise. "The question of female suffrage," said he, "had not then been much agitated, and I knew the community had not thought sufficiently upon it to be ready to introduce it as an element in our political system. While I am aware of that fact, I think it will puzzle any gentleman to draw a line of demarcation between the right of the male and the female on this subject. Both are liable to all the laws you pass; their property, their persons, and their lives are affected by the laws. Why, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... She was a puzzle to all who knew her. Meanwhile, in her own soul she was waging a battle with her desires, to which she knew not how to give a definite form. She asked herself why she lived. She buried herself in books, but found no comfort there. She felt that she must find ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... a good many small pieces," explained the kangaroo; "and whenever any stranger comes near them they have a habit of falling apart and scattering themselves around. That's when they get so dreadfully mixed, and it's a hard puzzle to put them ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... said on the previous night, that in the presence of this man he felt himself brought face to face with some indescribable wickedness, I could not but be surprised at the coincidence. The whole story seemed to me now to resemble one of those puzzle pictures or maps which I have played with as a child, where each bit fits into some other until the outline is complete. It was as if I were finding the pieces one by one of a bygone history, and fitting them to one another until some terrible whole should ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... a woman's part, and that is the final record of boys masquerading as women in the English theatre. I believe the practice now survives nowhere except in Japan. This mode of representation has always been a great puzzle to students of Elizabethan drama.[17] Before, however, Pepys saw Shakespeare's work on the stage, the usurpation of the boys ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... indeed, uncertain in its completeness; it is precisely to answer it that we study ethics. Or if we mean, "What is the psychology of happiness?" the answer is as yet dubious; but it is irrelevant. Whatever its psychological conditions and the means to attain it, we know happiness when we have it. The puzzle is not to recognize it, but to get it. By happiness we mean the steady presence of what we have called intrinsic goodness and the absence of intrinsic badness; it is as indefinable as any ultimate element of experience, but as well known to us as blackness and whiteness or light ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... a Sir, to give me a bit of bread.' Now, if you take time to reflect a little on this matter, you will never be puzzled for a moment by those detached words, to suit which grammarians have invented vocative cases and cases absolute, and a great many other appellations, with which they puzzle themselves, and confuse and bewilder and torment those who read their books."—Ib., Let. xix, 225 and 226. All this is just like Cobbett. But, let his admirers reflect on the matter as long as they please, the two independent nominatives it and state, in the text, "It being, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... The suggestion which was given through the so-called muscular sense had operated in a subject to whom the muscular sense, as tested in other ways, seemed to be wholly lacking. As soon as Adrienne could be communicated with, it was possible to get somewhat nearer to a solution of this puzzle. Lucie was thrown into catalepsy; then M. Janet clenched her left hand (she began at once to strike out), put a pencil in her right, and said, "Adrienne, what are you doing?" The left hand continued to strike, and the face to bear the ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... mind; I won't say it. Still, you used to be a puzzle to me, Greenacre; now I feel as if I was beginning to understand you ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... Ugly—who, after a very short experience, had learned not to waste his time in vain digging—turn toward us with a waddling, disconsolate trot, and having approached a few rods, stop and sit down to revolve the puzzle over in his mind. He would look where the rabbit had housed himself, then drop his head, cock up an ear, and cast an inquiring glance toward us, as much as to say: "Why, do tell Ugly why you did not shoot that old lap-ears? ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... himself. When you write a symphony, you do it out of yourself, but not by yourself. You do it by the exact rules that somebody else before you has laid down. You can have just so many themes and so many episodes, though it would puzzle the Concertmeister of the heavenly choir to tell where the themes leave off and the episodes begin. You know you have got those rules to hang on to, and they are a great support in seasons of mental famine. Two themes and a subsidiary, and a lot of episodes for padding: that's ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... as much to secure men from mistakes in matters of belief, as God hath afforded to keep men from sin in matters of practice. He hath made no effectual and infallible provision that men shall not sin; and yet it would puzzle any man to give a good reason why God should take more care to secure men against errors in belief than against sin and wickedness ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... to stand it, Thor. I have to stand it day and night, without ever getting away from the thought of it. I have to go back and puzzle and wonder and speculate as to why you did what you've done to me. I see things this way, Thor: There was a time when you thought you might come to care for me. You really thought it. And then—something happened—and you were not so sure. Later, you felt that you couldn't—that you ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... me, Pa?" Le Croix's brow grew darker, but he tried to conceal his vexation, and quietly said, "Darling, never mind. Don't puzzle your little head about matters you cannot understand, and which our wisest ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... diffuse and playful. When the nightingale sings, in Paradise Lost, "Silence was pleased." When Adam begs the Angel to tell the story of the Creation, he adds, "Sleep, listening to thee, will watch." Either of these paradoxes would have been tormented and elaborated into a puzzle by ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... physically, of course, the regulated exercises may be far superior to the haphazard work in sport. To solve picture puzzles, even if they absorb the attention for a week, can never have the same effect as a real interest in a human puzzle. There is a chance for social work for every woman and every man, work which can well be chosen in full adjustment to the personal preference and likings. Not everybody is fit for charity work, and those who are may be entirely unfitted for work in the interest of the beautification ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... is a tradition that a mob of meddling Martians once stopped on Earth long enough to give the foolish humans false ideas about architecture and many other matters. But I soon forgot everything in my interest in the people. Such a poor puzzle-headed lot they are. One's heart goes out to them at once as they push and jostle one another this way and that, with no conceivable object other than to get anywhere but where they are in the shortest time possible. One longs to help them; to call a halt upon their senseless struggles; ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... poured out everything there was in his seething brain. He told of the scheme of Martin Leland and Sledge Hume, for Garth Conway had dropped an incautious word and the shrewd brain of Ettinger had worked out the puzzle. He told how the three men were trying to do this very thing, how they had planned on getting the water themselves, how Martin Leland had tied up thousands in options and purchases, how Ettinger had been one too many for them and had beat them to Shandon. ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... the spinal cord; whether it is purely a muscular or purely a nervous lesion, or a compound of both—it still continues, if an etiologist is bound to possess universal knowledge within the scope of his special studies, to be his reproach and his puzzle. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... as Mat was naturally closely studied. The combined intelligence of the outfit was trained upon him, for some time without result. He was the knottiest puzzle that ever hit Cross Canon. At first he was suspected of religious scruples and nicknamed "Circuit Rider." But presently it became apparent that he owned ability and will to curse a fighting outlaw bronco till ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... bend in the tortuous mountain road, both drew up sharply, with a gasp of astonishment. For a long time neither spoke, their bewildered minds struggling to comprehend the vast puzzle that confronted them. Even the fagged horse pricked up his ears and looked ahead with interest. Not three hundred yards beyond the bend stood the ruins ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... my "Pilgrimage." Between this point and Ras Za'farnah, higher up, the wind seems to split: a strong southerly gale will be blowing, whilst a norther of equal pressure prevails at the Gulf-head, and vice vers. Suez, indeed, appears to be, in more ways than one, a hydrographical puzzle. When it is low water in and near the harbour, the flow is high between the Straits of Jobal and the Daedalus Light; and the ebb tide runs out about two points across the narrows, whilst the flood runs in on a line parallel with it. Finally, when ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... morning, by a mysterious messenger, a curious document; it looks like a series of carriage-wheels, but it is a cipher from Prince Metternich, who is in Bordeaux, and is dated the 1st of May. It took me a long time to puzzle it out: "Vous conseille de partir; pire viendra. Pauline a Vienne; moi triste ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... asked the priest, M. La Perruque, the meaning of certain expressions the voice had used. For example, he did not understand the wild frenzy of France [le delvie de la France] nor the evils to which she would fall a victim [elle serait en proie]. But there is nothing that need puzzle us in such ignorance, if it really existed. Martin may well have remembered the words he did not understand and which he afterwards attributed to his Archangel still ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... the puzzle of my informant's relation to the man who was his wife's father-in-law, for suddenly I saw the man himself, and knew that I was meeting a personage. Kahauiti was on the veranda of a small hut, sitting Turk fashion, and chatting with another old man. Both of them were striking-looking, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... with the old lawyer, Katherine was forced back again upon misunderstanding. She went carefully over the records of her father's department, on file in the Court House, seeking some item that would cast light upon the puzzle. She went over and over the indictment, seeking some loose end, some overlooked inconsistency, that would yield ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... know that Glinda is the most complete mistress of magic who has ever existed, and she was wise enough to guess that the clever but evil magician who had enchanted Prince Bobo had used a spell that would puzzle any ordinary wizard or sorcerer to break; therefore she had given the matter much shrewd thought and hoped she had conceived a plan that would succeed. But because she was not positive of success she would have no one present ...
— Rinkitink in Oz • L. Frank Baum
... his vain efforts to find out what it was. He could talk of nothing else, and asked endless questions about it, and they told him that this strange thing was nothing but the Mirage, but of course that was not telling him enough, so that he was left to puzzle his little boy-brains over this new mystery, just as they had puzzled before over the mystery of the echoes. Now this Mirage was a glittering whiteness that looked just like water, always shining and dancing before him and all round him, on the dry level plain where ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... in the position of a man who might solve a puzzle by hard, painstaking experiment and inquiry, but rather hoped that some brilliant flash of inspiration or luck might give him the key that would fit it together at ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... to exclude slavery. And I have argued and said that for men who did intend that the people of the Territory should have the right to exclude slavery absolutely and unconditionally, the voting down of Chase's amendment is wholly inexplicable. It is a puzzle—a riddle. But I have said that with men who did look forward to such a decision, or who had it in contemplation, that such a decision of the Supreme Court would or might be made, the voting down of that amendment would be perfectly rational and intelligible. ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... said the military gentleman turning to Mrs Jarley—''pon my soul and honour I hardly know what I came here for. It would puzzle me to tell you, it would by Gad. I wanted a little inspiration, a little freshening up, a little change of ideas, and— 'Pon my soul and honour,' said the military gentleman, checking himself and looking round the room, 'what a devilish ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... plentiful in it, often cemented together with veins of gypsum. Both these pits are mentioned in the Government Geological Survey (pp. 152, 153) of “The country around Lincoln.” Close by the latter pit the writer once found a curious fossil, which was for some time a puzzle to all who saw it. It is now in the British Museum, and was pronounced to be an Echinus crashed into ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... ought to be able to sue B, since performance or readiness to perform was all that was necessary to give him that right, and conversely the same might be said of B. On the other hand, considering either B or A as defendant, the same facts would be a complete defence. The puzzle is largely one ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... a stiff game; but 'Scruff' Mackenzie maneuvered cunningly, with an unconcern which served to puzzle the Sticks. He took great care to impress the men that he was a sure shot and a mighty hunter, and the camp rang with his plaudits when he brought down a moose at six hundred yards. Of a night he visited in Chief Thling-Tinneh's ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... worry, or frighten yourself. Of course no one is to blame if it is a case of sleep-walking,—only it will be a great anxiety for the future. You had better get up now and dress. I will take these things down; they may help to explain what is such a puzzle to us all, and to relieve ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... he is one of the few Irish poets we have who is always thinking as he goes along. He does not rebel against love because he is not himself sweet at heart, for the best thing in the book is its unfeigned humanity. So we have a personal puzzle to solve with this perplexing writer which makes us all the more eager to hear him again. A man might be difficult to understand and the problem of his personality might not be worth solution, but it is not so with James Stephens. From a man who can write with ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... inquired innocently. Her mind was occupied with the puzzle of the income which, womanlike, engrossed her ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... permanently across the sky, and now and then broken by the black shadow of the planet itself as it came between them and the sun. However, we must begin at the beginning, and find out about Saturn himself before we puzzle ourselves over his rings. Saturn is not a very great deal less than Jupiter, though, so small are the other planets in comparison, that if Saturn and all the rest were rolled together, they would not make one mass so bulky as Jupiter! Saturn is so light—in other words, his density is so small—that ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... my lad," he said. "We're working wrong way on. These great places would puzzle a monkey, and we shan't find the hole unless we come by daylight, and leave a boat off-shore to signal to us till ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... every yearling on the place, and they were inimitably told. It was with great reluctance that Hamilton found himself obliged to head off the man's eloquence and make him stick to hard facts. An inquiry as to the number of eggs sold was somewhat of a puzzle, but the farmer's wife knew the amount of the "trade" she had received at the grocery store in the nearest town in return for eggs, and at an average sale price of nine cents a dozen, this was easily computed. She was also the authority on the amount ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... 'Coast Scene, Mount Desert'—F. E. Church, N. A. A puzzle. We are glad once more to welcome to a public gallery a significant work by this widely known and much admired artist. Of late, the exhibition of such works (in so far as we know) invariably alone, may perhaps have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers. It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among the dead, and the immortal Moliere among the sweepings of attorneys' offices. As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their trivialities—the exercises of men who neglect Moliere's ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... observation, delicate tact, and rare knowledge of the human heart. I think it will take a place in our literature among the highest efforts of what may be called the Tragic Muse of fiction. You are, intellectually speaking, quite a puzzle to me. How comes it that with so thoroughly healthy an organization as you have, you have such a taste for the morbid anatomy of the human heart, and such knowledge of it, too? I should fancy from your books that you were burdened with secret sorrow; that you had some blue chamber in your ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... "Inghilterra, touching at Lisbon and Gibraltar," all regions beyond distrust, as to the plague, and all happening, at that moment, to give clean bills of health. But the name of the craft herself had been given in a way to puzzle all the proficients in Saxon English that Porto Ferrajo could produce. It had been distinctly enough pronounced by some one on board, and, at the request of the quarantine department, had been three times slowly repeated, very much after ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... I said. 'He wouldn't leave anything he valued in a place like this. That sort of fellow doesn't take risks. If he wanted to hide something there are a hundred holes in this Chateau which would puzzle the best detective.' ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... the point," said Phil, struggling into a white, medallioned blouse that fastened as intricately as the working of a prize puzzle. "I've taken such a dislike to her, and ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... and lifted the shadow of her big garden sun-bonnet—and then he stiffened suddenly and grew very pale. He was a little behind the other two, and they observed nothing, but Sabine saw the change of color in his healthy handsome face, and the look of surprise and incredulity and puzzle which grew in his ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... passages almost ever since, and could not guess what it was that offended his lordship in either of them. Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough acquainted with lord Halifax, to know his way yet; that I need not puzzle myself about looking those places over and over when I got home. 'All you need do,' says he, 'is to leave them just as they are; call on lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... highly of him to suppose that," said Mrs Clagget; "though, to be sure, I do wish he would talk more about himself. I like a person to be communicative; those reticent people always puzzle me." ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... familiar to casual readers from its being appended to one or two of his aphorisms which are sometimes reproduced in odd corners of popular periodicals; but who he was, when he lived, and what he wrote, are questions which would probably puzzle not a few, even of those who consider themselves as "well read," to answer without first recurring to some encyclopaedia. Yet Saadi was assuredly one of the most gifted men of genius the world has ever known: a man of large and comprehensive intellect; an original ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... little coz, and they wouldn't be flattered by our comparison. They are yelling what, in United States, would be 'extra!' I'll get a paper and see if I can puzzle out some of the French," and he strolled down to intercept one of the ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... successful thieving being the result of mental training. It is not necessary to follow him to his most famous doctrine, namely, that of doing nothing, by which means, he declared, everything could be done, the solution of which puzzle of left everybody to find out for himself. Among his quaint sayings will be found several maxims of a very different class, as witness his injunction, "Requite evil with kindness," and "Mighty is he who conquers himself." Of the latter, the following illustration ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... impossible to observe all these miscellaneous movements going on all around us without being struck by the similarity of aim between them; each seems to form part of a common plan, which, like the separate pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, convey no meaning, but when fitted together make up a perfectly clear design. That there is somewhere in the background a point of contact is suggested by the fact that we find members of the different groups playing a double and ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... on the post at the opposite side. He was beginning to take an interest in the talk, for the boy plainly thought before he spoke, and tried to answer truly. 'It appears you have a taste for feeling good,' said the Doctor. 'Now, there you puzzle me extremely; for I thought you said you were a thief; and ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an inscrutable woman allows her to dominate us too commandingly. So the lordly mind takes her in a hard grasp, cracks the shell, and drawing forth the kernel, says, "This was all the puzzle." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in our hair, then they ought to be burned. It is true that some of us may get pleasure from searching novels for solecisms and collecting evidence by which shall be guessed the originals of the novelist's characters, just as others extract amusement from puzzle pictures. But book-worming has the same relation to literature, even when it is done by a learned doctor in the Bodleian, as flies in a dairy with our milk supply. If most of the books in the British Museum were ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... my hand's in, let me tell you of a third matrimonial proposition, which gives me more puzzle and dislike a great deal. And that is, Mr. Adams has, with great reluctance, and after abundance of bashful apologies, asked me, if I have any objection to his making his addresses to Polly Barlow? which, however, he told me, he had not mentioned to her, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... Boswell's hero, who will, perhaps, be reprobated as the profane utterer of these idle words: 'Suppose I know a man to be so lame that he is absolutely incapable to move himself, and I find him in a different room from that in which I left him, shall I puzzle myself with idle conjectures, that perhaps his nerves have by some unknown change all at once become effective? No, sir, it is clear how he got into ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... mechanical principles more widely known than that of so-called centrifugal force; an action which, though still a puzzle to students, has long been thoroughly understood. It is, however, comparatively recently that it has been applied in practice. One of the earliest examples was perhaps the ordinary governor, due to the genius of Watt. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... inseparable." The opposition to the court measures appears to have been uncommonly spirited during the course of this session. The minister's motions were attacked with all the artillery of elocution. His principal emissaries were obliged to task their faculties to their full exertion, to puzzle and perplex where they could not demonstrate and convince, to misrepresent what they could not vindicate, and to elude the arguments which they could not refute. In the house of commons, lord Hervey, lately appointed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... present quite an interesting pitching problem, the puzzle being to find out which of the above pitchers did the best work in the box in every respect, not only in pitching, but by his batting, fielding and base running. In percentage of victories pitched in, Meekin took the lead. In the number of batsmen struck ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... all general purposes, miracle followed as an occasional auxiliary. The former served to bewilder the mind, the latter to puzzle the senses. The one was the lingo, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of Leyden!" he soliloquized, restraining his impulse while he puzzled the problem out. "That's no mystery; suspense knocked him out when I got here first. That's no puzzle either. But how in thunder did Leyden get so solid with the little ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... was all about. She herself had done nothing to merit such treatment from people whose names she did not even know. She rode for a long time without speaking, trying, in her tragic bewilderment, to puzzle it out. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... again, sir? Well, it'll be strange if in all this great mountainy place we can't puzzle those ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... in their present form. They are the offspring of other stories which were sun-myths; they are stories which conform to the sun-myth type after the manner above illustrated in the paper on Light and Darkness. [Hence there is nothing unintelligible in the inconsistency—which seems to puzzle Max Muller (Science of Language, 6th ed. Vol. II. p. 516, note 20)—of investing Paris with many of the characteristics of the children of light. Supposing, as we must, that the primitive sense of the Iliad-myth ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... the difficulty of securing necessary materials and devices. To-day the experimenter may buy wire, springs, insulators, batteries, and almost anything that might be useful. Morse, with scanty funds and limited time, had to search for his materials and puzzle out the way to make each part for himself with such crude tools as he had available. Need we wonder that his progress was slow? Instead we should wonder that, despite all discouragements and handicaps, he clung to his great idea ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... attitude towards his own sex—although marked by a freedom that often reached the verge of indiscretion—conveyed the least suggestion of passion or sentiment. The consul, more perceptive than analytical, found her a puzzle—who was, perhaps, the least mystifying to others who were content to sum up her eccentricities under the single vague epithet, "fast." Most women disliked her: she had a few associates among them, but no confidante, and even these ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... said Barby. "It would puzzle anybody to spell much more out of it than pork and ham. There's plenty of them. I sha'n't starve this ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... to summit, with boldly executed figures of men, women, and animals, which, when his admiration had passed sufficiently to enable him to study them in detail, seemed to Stukely to tell some sort of a story. But what the story was he was quite unable to puzzle out, for there were hunting episodes depicted, and also scenes which seemed to represent some sort of religious ceremonial, while others, again, might be interpreted as representing either a human sacrifice, or, possibly, the execution of a criminal; for they represented ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... of running the braize—it was so pronounced in the west county—has long been a puzzle to antiquarians. Probably it is the survival of a custom practised by our Scandinavian forefathers. A Scandinavian hero or warrior considered it beneath his dignity to court a lady's favour by submitting the matter of marriage to her decision. When he saw or heard of ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... the ax. There were vague misgivings in him which he was not able to realize. The state of his own mind was fast becoming a puzzle ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... Blackie would dissent, and would say that the great improvement of teaching, on which the salvation of classical study now hangs, is to make it a teaching by the ear. But, says Professor Price: "A Greek or Latin sentence is a nut with a strong shell concealing the kernel—a puzzle, demanding reflection, adaptation of means to end, and labour for its solution, and the educational value resides in the shell and in the puzzle". As this strain of remark is not new, there is nothing new to be said in answer to it. Such ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... you like to do?" I asked, when we had partaken of tea. "Shall we put the jig-saw puzzle together; or should you prefer to have ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... learned to use the names belonging to childhood and infancy in their solemn record, the generation which docks its Christian names in such an un-Christian way will bequeath whole churchyards full of riddles to posterity. How it will puzzle and distress the historians and antiquarians of a coming generation to settle what was the real name of Dan and Bert and Billy, which last is legible on a white marble slab, raised in memory of a grown person, in a certain burial-ground in a town in ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this, and what does Mr—Mackintosh—of Inveraray—want with Carlos, I wonder?" mused the young man, as he strode off across the Park. He considered the matter carefully for a few minutes, and presently snapped his fingers as he felt that he had solved the puzzle. ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... certain points in the missive which seemed of greater interest to him than others. For example, the place whence it had been addressed was an ever recurring puzzle; he also dwelt long upon the sentence which referred so delicately to a paternal relationship. The most exigent passages, however, were those relative to the time he might look for the man's coming. As specially ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... have been a theme upon which a "bookworm" could gloat, a chest of secret drawers into which the curious delight to pry, a difficult problem in Euclid for the mathematician to solve; and an unreadable book for the author. A conglomeration of languages for the scholar, a puzzle for the historian, and a subject for the novelist. These are points which it is not the object of this book to attempt to clear up and settle; all it aims at, as in the case of my "Cry of the Children ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... of Craythorpe." The father consents to their union. The real character of the husband appears early; his fond love soon dwindles to painful neglect: how truly does the writer observe, "the rapidity with which love may glide from the heart of man is a moral phenomenon for which it would puzzle philosophers to account. The brief space of a few months not unfrequently converts the devoted into the unkind, or to a delicate mind still worse—the neglectful husband." The wayward Huntley breaks off church-going; he refuses ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... wouldn't be surprised, if you had the opportunity of examining our friend's hands, if you found them rather inked than horny. Still, I shall vote for him, and say something, if not exactly in his favour, at least a few words that will puzzle our fellows and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... and Frohman had come to some understanding, because she had gone to see him the day the play was delivered. No, that could not be, for he found her at home when he returned. He could not find a piece to fit into the puzzle at this point. He went over their joint work on the book—her book. He understood, now, how she was so sure of every move, why she knew her characters so well. What a blind fool he had been not to see that Francesca was herself! How she had played with him about that, ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... be subjected to critical analysis by future Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous—and that all the more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative brains. What will they make two thousand years hence, of the landing at Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger facts still, but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... discarnin' eye in yer head—ye an' the skipper," he said. "However the skipper kep' himself away from Chance Along for t'ree entire days, wid herself a-singin' an' a-flashin' her eyes right in his own house, bes a puzzle to me. Aye, sure it do, for didn't I see her put the spell o' women on to him the very first minute she opened her eyes at him on the fore-top o' ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... his deeds and of his strange gospel were floating through Cuckoo's mind as fragments of broken wood float by on a stream, fragments of broken wood that were part of a puzzle, that should be rescued by some strong hand from the stream, and fitted together into ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... got her, Jack—remember that; won't you? If I hadn't I'd been burning the midnight oil yet, I reckon. 'Taint safe to make me a present of a puzzle, because I'm just dead sure to nearly split my poor weak brain trying to figger it out. And Jack, I'll never be happy till I know what was in those boxes; and why did that sly little professor believe someone wanted to steal his thunder ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... in the descriptions given by them of what had been done to them; and they introduced, in addition, quite a new vocabulary on the subject. The minute and detailed descriptions of the sexual act given by chits of 10 and 11 would do credit to the pages of Mirabeau. At first sight it is a puzzle to see how children so young obtained their information." "About the use of the word 'seduced,'" the same writer remarks, "I wish to say that the class of women from amongst whom the great bulk of these cases are drawn seem to use it in a sense altogether different ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a little sorting about. The pieces of the puzzle were all there. Hazel Ripwinkley settled the first little bit in the right place. She asked her mother one night, if she didn't think they might begin their beehive with a fire-fly? Why couldn't they ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... and looked at Chloe, who could do nothing but weep. There were many words in the prayer which conveyed to her no meaning; and why she was accursed on account of the sin of Ham remained a perplexing puzzle to her mind. But she felt as if she must, somehow or other, be doing something wicked, or the minister would not come and pray for her in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... is too old in Cornwall to have originated in any theory about the Phœnicians and the tin trade of the Cassiterides, for it is found in times when no one troubled himself about either, but its origin is decidedly a puzzle. ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... said, 'I'm heart-broken,' in response. Then, as fast as her mischievous little feet could carry her, she raced down one hill and across to the other. Very stealthily she advanced till she found the boy bent over a puzzle on the back stoop, and—and he was ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... command car and waited while one of his majors dashed into the woods along the path that led to the attack group's staging area. Less than a minute later he returned, followed by a colonel. They jumped into the command car which roared off immediately. As the captain was trying to puzzle out the incident's meaning, three of his runners came out of the woods ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... that time, so I said 'You bet.' 'That's not right,' said he. 'Give the countersign.' I hadn't heard anything about a countersign, so I told him not to be a damned fool, and that I'd break his head if he said I wasn't a loyal man. That seemed to puzzle him a bit He got out a notebook and read a page or two, looking at me and the car every now and then as if he wasn't quite satisfied. I felt pretty sure, of course, that he was the man I wanted. He couldn't very well be anyone else. So by way of cutting the ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... ply a good knife and fork, that I will say for thee." Here the farmer turned round, and gazed on Kenelm with deliberate scrutiny. That scrutiny accomplished, his voice took a somewhat more respectful tone, as he resumed, "Do you know that you puzzle me somewhat?" ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... defection and opposition of its own supporters, are disposed to be patient and moderate; that is, the more sagacious of them are; but they are always in danger of being prematurely urged on by the violence and impetuosity of their tail. Such is the state of parties at the present moment, and it would puzzle the most sagacious observer and most experienced actor in political life to predict the result of the ensuing session. There is quite enough, however, in the general aspect of affairs both at home and abroad to moderate the ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... ungovernable dependencies; the Prussians in the blasphemous necromancy of receiving crowns for their kings direct from God; and all in some shape or other professing devotion to human liberty, and doing every thing in their power to subvert it. Truly it is enough to puzzle one who seeks for truth amid the prevailing fogs of error that seem to have descended upon mankind. If there be any degree in honesty, I really think the Emperor of Russia is entitled to the palm of being the most sincere in ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... discover why, if he was entitled to the horse's keep at all, he was not entitled to it, whether he had paid me half or the whole of the money? He seemed to think, that he for once had been duped; and very luckily his rage was averted from me to the daroga, who he very freely accused of being a puzzle-headed fool, and one who had no more pretension to law than he ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... sky, and perceived that that too was impossible. Then she understood that the will had already lost touch with the body, that the crumbling world had receded to an infinite distance—that was as she had expected, but what continued to puzzle her was that her mind was still active. It was true that the world she had known had withdrawn itself from the dominion of consciousness, as her body had done, except, that was, in the sense of hearing, which was still strangely alert; yet there was still enough memory to be ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... by Christ was really historical, or merely attributed to Him by His biographers after His death. If Christ knew that the facts were not due to devils, He may also have known it was best to fall in with current theory, rather than to puzzle the people with a lecture on pathology. If He did not know, why should He, if He had previously 'emptied Himself' of omniscience? In either case, if He had denied the current theory, He would have been giving evidence of scientific knowledge or of scientific intuition beyond ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... indelicate or even loud. And she was certainly very interesting. How did it come to pass that she was so completely alone, so poor, so unfriended and yet possessed of such gifts? There certainly was a mystery, and it would certainly be his fate, and not the fate of Dick Shand, to unravel it. The puzzle was much too delicate and too intricate for Dick Shand's rough hands. Then, giving his last waking thoughts for a moment to Hester Bolton, he went to sleep in spite ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... upper-maid found my book, and showed it to my mistress, who told me, that wenches like me might spend their time better; that she never knew any of the readers that had good designs in their heads; that she could always find something else to do with her time, than to puzzle over books; and did not like that such a fine lady should sit up for her ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... almost frightened at his own conclusion. The clean, shiny mess plate and the phrase out of that letter seemed to fit together like the sections of a picture puzzle. The black spot and the match-end (if there was any match-end) meant just nothing at all. The dim light out in the passageway down below hardly ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... these precautions, Lapo seems to have gained the ear of Michelangelo's father, who wrote a scolding letter in his usual puzzle-headed way. Michelangelo replied in a tone of real and ironical humility, which is exceedingly characteristic: "Most revered father, I have received a letter from you to-day, from which I learn that you have been informed by Lapo and Lodovico. I am glad that you should rebuke ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... evening's contest a young girl from some few miles' distance, Ellen Kingsbury, the only child of a substantial farmer, had been the very last to sit down, after a prolonged effort on the part of Mr. Horner to puzzle her, for the credit of his own school. She blushed, and smiled, and blushed again, but spelt on, until Mr. Horner's cheeks were crimson with excitement and some touch of shame that he should be baffled at his own weapons. At length, either by accident or design, Ellen missed ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... speaking, quite a puzzle to me," his friend George Hillard wrote to him, once. "How comes it that, with so thoroughly healthy an organization as you have, you have such a taste for the morbid anatomy of the human heart, and such a knowledge of it, too? I should fancy, from your books, that you were ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... than the air by itself. One would think that by adding water vapor which, while light, still has weight, the total weight would be the sum of both. It really is so, notwithstanding the above figures, and the explanation of the puzzle is that there was an increase in pressure with expansion, so that the volume of the air and saturated vapor was greater than one cubic meter. Since then a cubic meter of air and saturated vapor weighs less than a cubic meter of dry air at freezing temperature, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... [Here is an example of suspended meaning, where the suspense intensifies the effect, because each particular is vividly apprehended in itself, and all culminate in the conclusion; they do not complicate the thought, or puzzle us, they only heighten expectation]. In such an age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior. At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies. ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... follow Houssaye's solution of this puzzle as the least unsatisfacty, but it does not show why Napoleon should have been so perplexed. D'Erlon debouched from the wood of Villers Perwin exactly where he might have been expected. Was Napoleon puzzled because the corps was heading ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... runs by Tollsworth Farm over the summit of White Hill, and is actually marked "The Pilgrims' Way" twice on the sign posts, so sure are the local painters of what they have to point out. East from White Hill you may follow a single track, sometimes grass, sometimes modern road. There is a puzzle at Godstone Quarry, where the chalk pits have cut the hill to pieces, and the tiny path which perhaps still keeps the line across the pits is a perilous slippery place in the rain. On the far side of to-day's road by the chalk pit you may pick up the green track again, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... piece together the bits of pasteboard, for I knew pretty well what I should find. Completed, the puzzle read, "Mr. Esper Indiman," and in pencil, "Call at 4020 Madison Avenue ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... has turned out pretty lucky for me," he thought to himself. "All the same, it is a puzzle where those bonds came from. Congreve wouldn't go and give them to Harry? No, of course not! Well, the best I can do is ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... manner were frequently in odd dimensions; and the machinery was necessarily placed in diversified arrangement, calling forth a similar degree of wasted skill as that used in making a Chinese puzzle conform to its given boundaries. Their area depended upon the topography of the site, and their height upon the owner's pocket book. There was in Massachusetts a mill with ten floors, built on land worth ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... here there was nobody to ask. Nurse would only say, 'If you ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.' Somehow whenever she said that, Lois fancied it meant that nurse was not very sure of the answer herself. She had already asked Aunt Isabel in church that same morning, when the puzzle began; and Aunt Isabel's answer about 'a halo' had left the little girl more ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... chicanery, and a respect amounting to veneration for written documents, red tape, and sealing-wax. Master Pothier's acuteness in picking holes in the actes of a rival notary was only surpassed by the elaborate intricacy of his own, which he boasted, not without reason, would puzzle the Parliament of Paris, and confound the ingenuity of the sharpest advocates of Rouen. Master Pothier's actes were as full of embryo disputes as a fig is full of seeds, and usually kept all parties in hot water and litigation ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... blight, especially on our crosses of Castanea mollissimax seguini. This is not surprising since C. seguini comes from a warmer region in China, but why these attacks should occur during a mild winter is a puzzle. Evidently other factors, such as the drought of the preceding fall, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... bed with the puzzle still unsolved, and the morning yielded no solution. Mr. Wiggett appeared to have forgotten the previous night's proceedings altogether, and steadfastly declined to take umbrage at a manner which would have chilled a rhinoceros. He told several fresh anecdotes of himself ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... simple yet powerful water-press invented by Bramah, without which it would have been a puzzle to float the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... quadruplex, battery key system, in Fig. 8, and refer the reader to the above or other text-books if he desires to make a close study of its intricate operations. Before finally dismissing the quadruplex, and for the benefit of the inquiring reader who may vainly puzzle over the intricacies of the circuits shown in Fig. 8, a hint as to an essential difference between the neutral relay, as used in the duplex and as used in the quadruplex, may be given. With the duplex, as we have seen, the current on the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of her face, the rather odd trick she had of shaking back the straying tresses of her dark, glossy hair, and, above all, that quick smile with which she greeted any flash of humor, and which produced a fascinating dimple in her cheek, all served to puzzle and stimulate him; while admiration of her so apparent womanliness began as instantly to replace the vague curiosity he had felt toward her as an actress. She was different from what he had imagined, with absolutely nothing to ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... do," I told myself. "I am used to fresh air, and sunshine, and the sound of voices, and I must live amongst all these as usual if I am to puzzle out this riddle. The answer, the key, if it comes at all, will arrive in a snap and a sudden, and won't be got at by tedious pondering in ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... again in the door of the cabin. "The mate understands," he said, "and the crew will obey. I told them that the Admiral was going out with us to inspect the lock. But the presence of a woman aboard will puzzle them. I have placed the Princess in the mate's cabin so no one can molest her. We have other things to keep ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... man ... before you married that bounder, Dene." Brett spoke very quietly, like a man communing with himself, fitting together the pieces of a puzzle. ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... unusual dovetail joint, which, when put together properly is a puzzle. The tenon or tongue of the joint is sloping on three surfaces and the mortise is cut sloping to match. The bottom surface of the mortise is the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... for he knew that the villain was only crushed for the moment, and that he would shortly be revenging himself upon them. No, the only way every to get any peace and quiet was to render the Tanuki harmless for ever. Long did the old man and the hare puzzle together how this was to be done, and at last they decided that they would make two boats, a small one of wood and a large one of clay. Then they fell to work at once, and when the boats were ready ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... this, Daisy," said the doctor. "You are a psychological puzzle to me. For the matter of that, now I think of it, you always were. When you went to visit Molly Skelton, and carried rose-bushes round the country in your pony-chaise, just as much as now. You are not ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... generation of the clergy. I much doubt if he could have passed what would now be called a creditable examination in the Fathers; and as for all the nice formalities in the rubric, he would never have been the man to divide a congregation or puzzle a bishop. Neither was Parson Dale very erudite in ecclesiastical architecture. He did not much care whether all the details in the church were purely gothic or not: crockets and finials, round arch and pointed arch, were matters, I fear, on which he had never troubled his head. But ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... got up from the stool on which she had sat the long night through. There was a strange look on her face. During the heavy hours she had revolved within herself a dark problem which to her was unsolvable, and the puzzle was still printed on her face. Drawing the girl aside, she said in ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... on the second day of Miss Liston's visit, and she lost no time in beginning to study her subjects. Pamela, she said, she found pretty plain sailing, but Chillington continued to puzzle her. Again, she could not make up her mind whether to have a happy or a tragic ending. In the interests of a tenderhearted public, ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... him, for it was moulded in a stern pattern. One had guessed him a martinet until his amiable opinions and easy-going personality were manifested. The old man was not vain; he knew that a world very different from his own extended round about him. But he was puzzle-headed, and had never been shaken from his life-long complacency by circumstances. He had been disappointed in love as a young man, and only married late in life. He had no son, and was a widower—facts that, to his mind, ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... investigations were necessary for the scheme he had in view, so he became for some time quite a familiar figure in the dusty deserted streets and in the meadows by the river. His continual visits to Caermaen were a tortuous puzzle to the inhabitants, who flew to their windows at the sound of a step on the uneven pavements. They were at a loss in their conjectures; his motive for coming down three times a week must of course be bad, but it seemed undiscoverable. And Lucian on his side was at first a good deal put out ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... this had always been some way part of his destiny,—the imposition of his will over the beasts of the forest. He had never tried to puzzle out why, knowing that such trial would be unavailing. He had instinctively understood such creatures as these. To-day he felt that he knew the wild, fierce heart beating in the lean breast as a man might know his ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... so in this case. They had lost their mother years before, and Colonel Wyatt's sister had since kept house for him. As a housekeeper she was an efficient substitute, as a mother to the boys she was a complete failure. How she ever came to be Colonel Wyatt's sister was a puzzle to all their acquaintances. The Colonel was quick and alert, sharp and decisive in speech, strong in his opinions, peremptory in his manner, kindly at heart, but irascible in temper. Mrs. Troutbeck was gentle and almost timid in manner; report said that she had had a ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... walk the whole length of it, to the last inch, keeping in the centre of the path, it's exactly two miles and half a furlong. Now, while you find out the length and breadth of the garden, I'll see if I can think out that sea-water puzzle." ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... no answer to this, puzzle over it as he did, and he gave it up. His whole desire now was to get on the trail of the thieves, and he had strong hopes, after the clew Mr. Damon had given him. The latter was waiting for him on the point, and so nimble was the owner of the auto, in spite of ...
— Tom Swift and his Motor-boat - or, The Rivals of Lake Carlopa • Victor Appleton
... outsides, too, to women's in some respects. Why all human beings—since they have no coats of their own, and are obliged to buy them—do not buy handsomely marked furs whilst they are about it, is a puzzle to a cat. As to the miserable stuff ladies cover themselves with in an evening, there is about as much comfort and softness in it as in going to sleep on a duster. Men's coats are nothing to boast of, either to look ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... later, then, we get this introduced matter to be non-living (as we may call it) and the puzzle is how to get it living again. For we strenuously deny equivocal generation. When matter is living we contend that it can only have been begotten of other like living matter; we deny that it can have become living from non-living. Here, however, within the bodies of ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... said Lord Huntinglen, "and let old Heriot and I puzzle this scent out. He is about to ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... little talk of this, it was plain that all the town could not be told to say that the fisher was drowned on such a night, and Hodulf would leave naught undone to find the truth of the matter. So the puzzle became greater, and the one thing that was clear was that Grim was in sore ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... almost altogether wanting. As we see them to-day, the windows are in almost inextricable confusion. At some time or another, perhaps at the Reformation, or during the Civil Wars, the glass has been removed from its setting, and afterwards carelessly pieced together. It is now in the condition of a puzzle wrongly arranged. Outlines of figures have been filled with scraps of different colours, male heads fitted to female bodies, or inserted alone in incongruous surroundings, and glass of one period mixed with glass of another. Add to this that the glass was generally renewed ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... And Dane, thinking of that mist-born thing at the swamp's edge, shivered. He could believe Tau's explanation of the drug which produced hallucinations back on the mountain side. But how that likeness fashioned of phosphorescence had been sent by an absent man to hunt his enemies was a eerie puzzle. ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... strange one. Indolent and energetic by turns, restless and intriguing, quarreling with all with whom he came in contact, burning with righteous indignation against corruption and misdoing, generous to a point which crippled his finances seriously, he was a puzzle to all who knew him, and had he died at this time he would only have left behind him the reputation of being one of the most brilliant, gifted, and honest, but at the same time one of the most unstable, eccentric, and ill regulated spirits ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... betook herself into Tai-yue's apartments. Contrary to her expectation Tai-yue was not at this time in her own room, but in Pao-yue's; where they were amusing themselves in trying to solve the "nine strung rings" puzzle. On entering Mrs. Chou put on a smile. "'Aunt' Hsueeh," she explained, "has told me to bring these flowers and present them to you to wear in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... put on it, and, in short, the whole party looked as if they had been at an Irish funeral and nearly been made 'cold corpuses' themselves. After a long hunt, they at last found Titehugge stuck fast where the fox had left him, and now the puzzle was to get him out. The three brothers all tried in vain, and at last Grumpy-growly caught hold of Titehugge's tail, Longclawse of Grumpy-growly's, Stubtail of Longclawse's, and Bushyball of Stubtail's, and they all pulled ...
— Red, White, Blue Socks, Part First - Being the First Book • Sarah L Barrow
... insistent, and by strolling up the street in which she lived in the evening he might easily have met her, by chance as it were, returning from her shop, but he would not do that. An enterprise of this kind seemed to him like one of those puzzle-games in which if a right move is made at first the game may be won, however many blundering moves may follow; but if the first move is wrong, then by no possible skill and care can ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Boston Latin School, and appealed to him not to disgrace his name any longer by his stupidity. The appeal roused the little fellow's pride, and he set to work to show to his family that he was not the dunce they had thought him. He went at his studies manfully, mastering the tedious puzzle of the Latin verbs and nouns, and acquiring a respectable acquaintance with the grammar of that language. It was a terrible task to him, for he had no liking for the language, and did his work merely to please his ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... said Burney simply. 'It's always been a bit of a puzzle to me how a chap like you came to be a Tommy in this outfit. With your education, you ought to be an ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... and shut in by those rhododendron thickets, a long, rambling pile of building, which had been added to, and altered, and taken away from, and added to again, like that well-known puzzle in mental arithmetic which used to amuse us in our childhood. It was all gables, and chimney-stacks, and odd angles, and ivy-mantled wall, and richly-mullioned windows, or quaint little diamond-paned lattices, peeping ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... a little in her puzzle, "that song is true enough, about the mountains and the valleys and the sea—the river, that is,—but what do we get out of the marsh? You can't even go in there with ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... wearisome, and it is thought an appropriate birth-day present for young people of both sexes. I dare say these books are harmless enough, but their success is wonderfully disproportioned to their merits. They must be such easy writing, too, for you need never puzzle yourself as to whether it would be natural or consistent for such a character to steal, or for another to murder. 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,' and the novelist at least takes no pains to ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... and redder in the face than ever. What was the 'juste milieu'? Often and often afterwards did she puzzle ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... attention was arrested by two words "Logs Wanted." He read the article through which told how the price of lumber had suddenly advanced, and that logs were in great demand. When Stephen laid down the paper and went into breakfast, the puzzle had been solved. What about that heavy timber at the rear of their farm? No axe had as yet rung there, no fire had devastated the place, and the trees stood tall and straight in majestic grandeur. A brook flowed near which would bear ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... various pieces of the puzzle which he had fitted into places to his satisfaction suddenly seemed inadequate to fill the places he had assigned to them. To-night he had discovered a depth in Frina Mavrodin the existence of which he had ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... judge breeding by little conventional rules not observed by the American Colonel. He had a slight nasal twang, and introduced "sir" with redundant ceremony in addressing Englishmen, however intimate he might be with them, and had the habit (perhaps with a sly intention to startle or puzzle them) of adorning his style of conversation with ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this Pavilion would puzzle Quintilian, Daymosthenes, Brougham, or young Cicero; So heavenly Goddess, d'ye pardon my modesty, And silence, my ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... nose, and put a spot on some part of your face, or a wart, or a few hairs." I laughed, and said, "Help me to contrive this for the next ball; I have not been to one for twenty years; but I am dying to puzzle somebody, and to tell him things which no one but I can tell him. I shall come home, and go to bed, in a quarter of an hour."—"I must take the measure of your nose," said he; "or do you take it with wax, and I will have a nose made: you can get a flaxen ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... that one edge of the strip sticks out all round, while the other is inside. To the edge that sticks out I sew on the sole, drawing my threads so tight that when I pare the edges off smooth, it will look like one piece, and puzzle anybody who did not know how ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... answered Michel Ardan, who had never been able to make a correct addition in his life, and who thus defined the rule: "A Chinese puzzle, by which you can obtain ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... hollow, because it gives its whole mind to what it is about. These rural sinners make terrible work with the middle of the Decalogue, when they get started. However, I hope I shall live through my year's school-keeping without catastrophes, though there are queer doings about me which puzzle me and might scare some people. If anything should happen, you will be one of the first to hear of it, no doubt. But I trust not to help out the editors of the "Rockland Weekly Universe" with an obituary of the late lamented, who ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... asked about him, because he lived like the rest of the world. But that two men should come into a strange country, and partake of none of the country diversions, seek no acquaintance, and live entirely recluse, is something so inexplicable as to puzzle the wisest heads, even that of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... were a reproach to him; they had haunted him through the wakeful hours of two succeeding nights, and now, under the light of that laggard letter, they blaze with a new and an appealing tenderness. His fingers still puzzle wearily with that tangle of the fringe. The noon passes. The aunt advises a little broth. But no, his strength is feeding itself on other aliment. The Doctor comes in with a curiously awkward attempt at gentleness and noiselessness of tread, and, seeing his excited condition, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... more was to be heard, but a few of these mysterious rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless accompaniment of the river and the frogs. I learned next day that the chestnut gardens are infested by rats; rustling, chirping, and scraping were probably all due to these; but the puzzle, for the moment, was insoluble, and I had to compose myself for sleep as best I could, in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... though Eugenia could not conceal from herself the fact, that she stood very much in fear of the latter, whose keen black eyes seemed to read her very thoughts. How such a man came to marry Ella Grey, was to her a puzzle; and if occasionally she harbored the thought that Eugenia Deane was far better suited to be the mistress of Howard Hastings's home than the childish creature he had chosen, she was only guilty of what had, in a similar manner, been done by more than one New York belle. ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... Unable to solve the puzzle, I could only give my unstinted attention to the boy and girl. If only our armor of ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... desirous of obtaining. We got Murden's consent to act in the plot, and by the aid of a wig his disguise was complete. As for Steel Spring, he was to remain as he was, without disguise, but was to vehemently deny his cognomen, and puzzle Mr. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... opinion, any answer would entail the risk, in the event of war, of partly divulging the plan of campaign. It seemed doubtful to him, therefore, whether he would be able to give a reply. This way of speaking was perfectly clear in its ambiguity. It did not puzzle Sir Edward Grey for a moment. On the following day he declared to the German Ambassador that the reply of the German Government was a matter of very great regret. Belgian neutrality, he pointed out, was highly important in British eyes, and if Belgium was attacked, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers. It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsene Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among the dead, and the immortal Moliere among the sweepings of attorneys' offices. As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their trivialities—the exercises ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... detectives' motor cab, Don Luis returned to the Faubourg Saint-Germain; and it was then that an incident occurred which was to puzzle him greatly and throw a most extraordinary light on the article in the ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... "Ess" bouquet, which appears to puzzle some folk, is but a mere contraction of "essence" ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... phantom bird upon which his imagination loved to dwell. Emerson told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. But how such a haunter of woods escaped identifying the bird is a puzzle. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... or woman? Impossible to tell till I overtake it. The February fog deepens the darkness, and the faces one passes are indistinguishable. As for the numbers of the houses, no one thinks of looking for them. If you know the quarter you count doors from the corner, or try to puzzle out the familiar outline of a balcony or a pediment; if you are in a strange street, you must ask at the nearest tobacconist's—for, as for finding a policeman, a yard off you couldn't tell ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... him to suppose that," said Mrs Clagget; "though, to be sure, I do wish he would talk more about himself. I like a person to be communicative; those reticent people always puzzle me." ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... ties of long acquaintanceship; but the homogeneousness of the people, complete and thorough as it was, was not marked by any monotony. On the contrary, character and individuality ran riot, appearing in such strange and attractive shapes as to puzzle and bewilder even those who were familiar with the queer manifestations. Every settlement had its peculiarities, and every neighborhood boasted of its humorist,—its clown, whose pranks and jests were limited by no license. Out of this ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... man you have never seen. As far as I know, Strachey has not been got at by any of my personal enemies. He hates Kruger and his party even more than he does me. It's a most disagreeable and distracting puzzle. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... tears. Still, in the midst of his self-accusation, the flattering voice made itself heard in his soul: "It is only to preserve your master from sorrow, and it is nothing wrong that you are asked to do." And each time that his inward ear heard these words he began to puzzle his brain to discover in what way it might be possible for him to tempt the Emperor, at the hour named, down from his watch-tower in the palace. But he could hit ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bows of his pudgy little person, and Laverick was left with another puzzle to solve. He was not in the least conceited, and he did not for a moment misinterpret this woman's interest in him. Her invitation, he knew very well, was one which half London would have coveted. Yet it meant nothing personal, he was sure of that. It simply ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... man and the greatness of God. Half the wonder, half the mystery of creation is lost, when we fail to recognize the truth that it is governed by eternal laws springing from an Almighty Intelligence. Take the Creator out of creation, and it becomes a hopeless puzzle—a dreary problem, incapable of solution. But we restore to it all its brightness, all its beauty, all its charm, when we are able to lift up our hearts with the Psalmist and to say: "Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... entanglement of military operations at this time formed a puzzle that, had the British not been too gravely interested, would have afforded them entertainment. The rules of no known military war game could be applied to the situation, and its uniqueness was a matter as incomprehensible to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... line, he thought. Still, Cliff had said he had friends there, which did not sound like danger. They had considered it worth fifteen hundred a week, though, to fly across these fifteen miles into Mexico and back again. Johnny shook his head slowly, gave up the puzzle, and took out his wallet ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... deal of diligence before I can spring anything to my mind, whereas in town, whilst I am following one character, it is ten to one but I am crossed in my way by another, and put up such a variety of odd creatures in both sexes, that they foil the scent of one another, and puzzle the chace. My greatest difficulty in the country is to find sport, and in town to chuse it. In the mean time, as I have given a whole month's rest to the cities of London and Westminster, I promise myself abundance of new game upon my ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... would puzzle a commentator: the men have certainly buskins of the most beautiful texture, but the ladies (to whom the above is supposed to be addressed) have nothing under their little yellow boots and slippers but a well-turned and sometimes very white ankle. The Arnaout girls are much ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... can't be any worse! Feel under the mattress and you'll find money enough to last three or four years. It's all she'll ever get, for she hasn't a soul now to look to for help. That's the way we human beings arrange things,—we, or the Lord, or the Evil One, or whoever it is; we bring a puzzle into the world, and then leave it for other people to work out—if they can! Who'll work out this one? Who'll work out this one? Perhaps she'll die before the money's gone; let's ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a chance still that the ship will pick her up," observed Tom. "We want his help to take care of the poor blacks, and to look after these Arabs. How to feed them all will be a puzzle." ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... I went back to the paper again. The only other word likely to serve as a street remaining in the puzzle ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... it, and the cause why most men are born to it; as for the second, it would be treason for thee and me to do more than whisper it here, and sigh for it when none are listening; but the third need hardly puzzle thee; thy hookah[4] is bright with it; all thy jewels are set in it; gold is inlaid in the ivory of thy bath; thy cup and thy dish are of gold, and golden threads are wrought ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... brushmaker. But the spirit Of Christmas does strange things. That very evening, while the Portier was roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the Portier's wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded at last there was a picture of ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... understand them too well," said Virginia. "It's like solving a puzzle. There's no more fun in it, when it's finished. But you wish me to be ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... read, is not to reason with them on the advantages of it, but to put it simply on the ground of authority. "It is very irksome, I know, but you must do it. When you are at play, and having a very pleasant time, I know very well that it is hard for you to be called away to puzzle over your letters and your reading. It was very hard for me when I was a child. It is very hard for all children; but ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... must not think it is anything so serious as that. You will soon pick up from the ladies you will meet some notion of how you differ from them; and if you should startle or puzzle them a little at first by talking about the chances of the fishing or the catching of wild-duck, or the way to reclaim bogland, you will ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... condensation in their shell boxes under the change of heat and cold. Still they did very well and I think seldom failed to burst when set the right distance. I say the right distance because this at first was a slight puzzle to us, the subject of height in feet above the sea-level of course never having before presented itself to us as altering very considerably the setting of the time fuse; and I don't think that a table of correction for this exists ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... to run up to town on Friday and forgot your letter. The x is a puzzle—I will stick by the ship as long as you do, depend upon that. I fear we can hardly expect to see dear old Tyndall there again. As for myself, I dare not venture when snow is on the ground, as on the last two occasions. And now, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... he answered; "I promised to burn a blue light as soon as you were safe on board, when they were immediately to shove off. It may puzzle the Spaniards somewhat to know what it means; but as they are not fond of turning out of their beds, we shall be away long before they come ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... grew sometimes rather troubled in his mind. He could not understand his wife. Her nature was an enigma to him; her mind was a puzzle which would not be pieced together with the rectangular correctness of ordinary life. He had known her from a child, had loved her from a child, and had committed a mean and cruel crime to obtain her; but having got her, he was no nearer to the mystery of her than ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... It wasn't much use looking about, for there was nothing to guide us. We tried to track your pony's footmarks, but as there had been more snow in the night, and it had now set in to thaw, we could see nothing anywhere in the way of footmarks to trust to. Certainly it was a regular puzzle, for we hadn't the slightest idea which way to turn. 'Well, Harry?' I said. 'Well, Master Walter?' he said in reply; but that didn't help us forward many steps. 'Let us ride on till we get to some house where we ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... were still living, and if I had met her, would she have treated me as this woman had treated me? Never! It was an injury to "Mary" to think even of that heartless creature by her name. Why think of her at all? Why degrade myself by trying to puzzle out a means of tracing her in her letter? It was sheer folly to attempt to trace a woman who had gone I knew not whither, and who herself informed me that she meant to pass under an assumed name. Had I lost all pride, all ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... got it into my head that the appearance of the printed characters must be due to a kind of mental obliquity, and that I must be rapidly going mad! Even Yamba could not sympathise with me, because the matter was one which I never could have made her understand. I tried to put this strange puzzle out of my head, but again and again the accursed and torturing passage would ring in my ears until I nearly went crazy. But I presently put the thing firmly from me, and resolved to think ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... cloister a covered way of some kind was erected here. Marks can also be seen, in the masonry, which indicate that the building once had three gables. Two of the Norman buttresses of the south nave aisle have very curious terminations, which might well puzzle any observer. They are fireplaces for the use of plumbers. Passing through the Norman doorway at the north-western corner of the Laurel Court, we come into a narrow passage leading ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... which immediately occurs to the mind. This Latin expression means a fuller; a person who kneads and presses cloth under a stream of water, making it flexible and ridding it of the asperities of weaving. What connection has the subject of this chapter with the fuller of cloth? I may puzzle my head in vain: no acceptable reply ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... across, back he came again, not paying the least attention to my scolding. I went back with the raft, which drifted a good way down stream, and caught the rascal and started him over again, but when I got half way across he jumped and played the same joke on me again. I began to think of the old puzzle of the story of the man with the fox, the goose and a peck of corn, but I solved it by making a basswood rope to which I tied a stone and threw across, then sending the pony over with the other end. He staid this time, ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... own initiative. Take the book and puzzle it out, even if you make a few mistakes," urged Miss Teddington. "Nothing but practice can give you the right feel of your tools; you'll learn more from a couple of failures than from a week's work with a teacher at your elbow the whole time, ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... her waist. Well, this was not unnatural. Would they not be soon man and wife? The puzzle was that she had no feeling of response. She would rather that he did not embrace her. She did not want to be noticed. Yet she could not find it in her heart to be unkind, so she allowed him to draw her nearer, to let her head droop on his shoulder. She tried to ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... seems to split: a strong southerly gale will be blowing, whilst a norther of equal pressure prevails at the Gulf-head, and vice versa. Suez, indeed, appears to be, in more ways than one, a hydrographical puzzle. When it is low water in and near the harbour, the flow is high between the Straits of Jobal and the Daedalus Light; and the ebb tide runs out about two points across the narrows, whilst the flood ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... was a stone tablet, bearing the name,—River's Cottage. There was a little garden between the road and the house, across which there was a straight path to the door. In front of one window was a small shrub, generally called a puzzle-monkey, and in front of the other was a variegated laurel. There were two small morsels of green turf, and a distant view round the corner of the house of a row of cabbage stumps. If Trevelyan were living ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... a gender of the doubtful kind; A something, nothing, not to be defined; 'Twould puzzle worlds its sex to ascertain, So very ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... have the puzzle!" replied the man Krail, his accent being an unfamiliar one—so unfamiliar, indeed, that those unacquainted with the truth were always placed in doubt regarding ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... utmost extent artists could ask, for the study of figures. Beauty had the advantage of the fine curves of full inhalations of the air that circulated along the dusty paths between the sea and the mountains. It is a puzzle that the artists of Japan have not better improved the unparalleled privilege of field and wall sketching, that they enjoy to a degree not equalled within the permission of the conventional construction of that which is becoming in the absence ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... we looked at it, and those black unloving eyes gazed straight back into ours. Why did those eyes, unless they moved, which they didn't, always look back into ours no matter in what part of the room we stood?—a perpetual puzzle to our ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... however, from what is usually heard here, that every one looked round in surprise, and above all Holzbauer. He said to me, "If I had known you were coming, I would have put out another mass for you." "Oh!" said I, "to puzzle me, I suppose?" Old Toeschi and Wendling stood all the time close beside me. I gave them enough to laugh at. Every now and then came a pizzicato, when I rattled the keys well; I was in my best humor. Instead of the Benedictus here, there is always a voluntary, so I took the ideas of the Sanctus ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... and dismal little village, in which I officiate for a man with a rich wife who likes the climate of Italy. My congregation works in the fields all the week, and naturally enough goes to sleep in church on Sunday. I have had to counteract that. Not by preaching! I wouldn't puzzle the poor people with my eloquence for the world. No, no: I tell them little stories out of the Bible—in a nice easy gossiping way. A quarter of an hour is my limit of time; and, I am proud to say, some of them (mostly the women) do to a certain extent keep awake. If you and the other ladies ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... relation. To Swift it was the most secluded thing in the world. "I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters, except MD's;" "I ought to read these letters I write after I have done. But I hope it does not puzzle little Dingley to read, for I think I mend: but methinks," he adds, "when I write plain, I do not know how, but we are not alone, all the world can see us. A bad scrawl is so snug; it looks like PMD." Again: "I do not like women so much as I did. ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... resumed our journey, and after a long day of toiling through treacherous marshes and tangled brushwood came at sunset upon an object whose presence there was a wonder, and its past a puzzle,—a ridge or embankment of ten or twelve feet elevation, which, to our astonishment, ran high and dry through the swampy lowlands. In the heart of an interminable forest it stretches along one side of the tangled trail, in some places walling it in, at others crossing ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... world talk if thou wilt,' answered the gladiator, gaily; 'but not till thou art a slave no more. Beneath thy own roof, my father, thou shalt puzzle this dull brain all day long, ay, and all night too, if it give thee pleasure. Oh, such a spot as I have chalked out for thee!—it is one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine shops of old Julia Felix, in the sunny part ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... half-starved, having been fighting all night with nothing to eat except reserve rations. Some had been longer with only such rations as they took from their dead comrades. The need was most urgent, but the puzzle was how to get there. The roads had been shelled and ploughed by explosives until there was no possible semblance of a way, and there were no conveyances to be had. The Zone Major had gone back for supplies, telling the girls to get the first conveyance possible going up the road. That was ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... it puzzled Jerome, who had a secret sense of superiority to his tenderer brother. And after about two hundred miles of it, it got to displease him as well as puzzle him. But he tried to check this sentiment as petty and unworthy. "Souls differ like locks," said he, "and preachers must differ like keys, or the fewer should the Church open for God to pass in. And certes, this novice hath the key to these northern ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a poor way enough—I must think well of her also. Wherefore, being obliged thus to think of one another, it would be likely enough that there would be pretence of love on both sides—and so things would be bad. Whereupon the puzzle in my mind grew more tangled yet, and I waxed savage, ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... realise who and where he was; all he could remember, however, went into a single sentence and kept repeating itself on the waves of his singing, dancing blood: "Clock's stopped, clock's stopped,—stopped clocks, stopped clocks...!" till it sounded like a puzzle sentence—then ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... ways certain that some of these sneakin' Injuns don't see my signal before one of the garrison does, in which case we won't have to puzzle our heads about gettin' into the fort; but if they should jump on me, you'd best take to your heels. There's a bare chance you might give 'em the slip in the squabble, for I shouldn't knock under while there was any fight ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... did Lorna puzzle over this idiosyncrasy of her father. She retained vague memories of her early childhood, when he had surely been utterly different and would come into the nursery to romp with her. It had not been altogether her mother's death; ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... course! How stupid of me! Another cup of tea, with a thin slice of lemon in it, and then, dear Mr. Fortescue, please explain my absurd little puzzle. One can't help believing gentlemen with Roman noses, even if ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Edmund, "is the fact that they should have established any chronological measure at all. It would puzzle some of our metaphysicians on the earth to account for the origin of their sense of time. To me it seems evident that the consciousness of duration is fundamental in all intelligent life, and does not necessarily demand natural recurrences, ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... found a refuge, this is all that remains to attest their presence—intellectual tombstones over a lost and forgotten race, yet sufficient after twenty-six centuries of silence to solve in some measure the ethnic puzzle of the lost tribes of Israel. In regard to this second hypothesis, it is certainly more plausible and cannot be so curtly disposed of as the Spanish theory.... So far from being copied one from the other, they are in fact independent and original versions of a once common legend, or series ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... animal forms, and other similar things. It was known, positively, that these objects had been found in Egypt, but it was impossible to assign them a place in the known periods of Egyptian art. The puzzle was increased in difficulty by certain plates of slate with hunting and battle scenes and other representations in relief in a style so strange that many investigators considered them products of the art ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... family groups, stiffly armoured for the weekly penance to a bewildering puzzle of mortality. Ceremonious greetings were exchanged with these. The day was bright and the world all fair, but there could be no levity, no social small talk, while this grim business was on. They reached the white house of worship, impressive under its heaven-pointing steeple, ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... always studying women. Years before, Grace Ferrall had snapped her slim fingers in his face; and here, at Shotover, the field was limited. Mrs. Vendenning had left; Agatha Caithness was still a pale and reticent puzzle; Rena, Katharyn, and Eileen tormented him; Marion Page, coolly au fait, yawned in his face. There remained Sylvia, who, knowing nothing about his species, met him half-way with the sweet and sensitive deference due a somewhat battered and infirm gentleman of forty-eight—until a sleek aside from ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... not the king who has answered your questions,' observed the aunt, when he had told his story. 'He is far too stupid ever to have done that! The person who has found out the puzzle is the son of a poor woman, who, if he lives, will become King of Hungary. Therefore, if you want the crown yourself, you must get him here and ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... "I tell you, Deb, I only wish I was a man! I would take the great two- handled sword, and fight in the very front rank for our Church and our King! You would soon see what a brave cavalier's daughter—son I mean," said Lucy, getting into a puzzle, "could do." ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a great puzzle to our friends, who, on reflecting that its bewildering categories had relation to breakfast alone, had an uneasy prevision of an encyclopedic dinner list. They found a great deal of entertainment at the hotel, an enormous wooden ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... and at the end come five or six long folded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes of lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called "smoothed curves" set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae—and things like that. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with the suspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the author does not understand it either. But really you know many of these scientific people understand the meaning of ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... it seems to have clung to some English tradition. But when Morus got changed to Moro it was but natural for an Italian to think of Ludovico Sforza, "Il Moro." Long before this Holbein had become Olbeno; and thereafter a puzzle. When the portrait was labelled Sforza, however, who could its obviously great painter be but Leonardo? Et voila! Thus the work passed to the Gallery and Catalogue of the Royal Collection at Dresden. And thus it long remained, ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... and wiser than myself. I cannot feel sure that they are mistaken, unless you will tell me so. And I think—I cannot know for certain—but I THINK—that if I were an author, I would rather that the humblest student of my works should apply to me directly in a difficulty, than that she should puzzle too long over adverse and probably ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... creeps in and often is dominant. The bourgeois in American literature is a special variety that must not be too quickly identified with the literary product that bears the same name in more static civilizations. It is nearly always clever. Witness our short stories, which even when calculated not to puzzle the least intelligence nor to transcend the most modest limitations of taste, must be carefully constructed and told with facility or they will never see the light. And this literature is nearly always true to the superficies of life, to which, indeed, it ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... start under new management. They walked over every opponent they tackled for the first few weeks, then began to slip and it required herculean efforts to keep them in the first division at the finish. The Chicago team always was a puzzle to all parties to ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... Sybarite sat pondering with vacant eyes; and the wounded boy stared upward with a frown, as though endeavouring to puzzle the answer to this riddle out of the blankness of ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... Sunny Boy had to see all the toys before he could settle down to choosing gifts for Ruth and Nelson. Finally, by Mother's advice, he settled on a quaint little painted music box for Ruth that played four different tunes, and a picture puzzle game for Nelson, who liked to put things together. These were sent home to the hotel so that Sunny Boy and Mother would not have to carry packages with them the rest ...
— Sunny Boy in the Big City • Ramy Allison White
... argued and said that for men who did, intend that the people of the Territory should have the right to exclude slavery absolutely and unconditionally, the voting down of Chase's amendment is wholly inexplicable. It is a puzzle, a riddle. But I have said, that with men who did look forward to such a decision, or who had it in contemplation that such a decision of the Supreme Court would or might be made, the voting down ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... whispered Cousin Helen, as she bent forward to kiss her. "And one last word, Katy. In this school, to which you and I belong, there is one great comfort, and that is that the Teacher is always at hand. He never goes away. If things puzzle us, there He is, close by, ready to explain and make all easy. Try to think of this, darling, and don't be afraid to ask Him for help if the lesson ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... dignity between the one Sunday and the other. Mr. Randolph fancied sometimes when she was looking down, that he saw the signs of sadness about her mouth; but whenever she looked up again, he met such quiet, steady eyes, that he wondered. He was puzzled; but it was no puzzle that Daisy's cheeks grew every day paler, and ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... after I dropped the senseless lump on the floor, and before I made another movement, it would puzzle me to say. Twice I stirred a foot as if to run out at the door. Then, changing my mind, I stepped over the mastiff, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... pacified—trouble was a false note. Later he was on the point of asking her how she knew the objects she had mentioned were not in the house; but he let it pass. The subject was a profitless riddle—a puzzle that grew grotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity seen in the darkness, as one opened one's eyes to it. He closed his eyes—he wanted another vision. Besides, she had shown him that she had extraordinary senses—her explanation would have been stranger than the fact. Moreover ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... him cover, when he ran right upon a broad cattle trail. Like a road it was, more than a trail, and the cattle tracks were fresh. What surprised him more, they were wet! He pondered over this feature. It had not rained. The only solution to this puzzle was that the cattle had been driven through water, and water deep enough ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... manifest even to the foreign offices most concerned. They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never permit them to solve. "God save us," they may very well pray, "from our own cleverness and sharp dealing," and they may even welcome the promise of an enlarged outlook that the entry ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the whole tale is a parable, which takes upon it purely legendary drapery, and ridding ourselves thus of all the questions which puzzle Sunday-school scholars and theologians, we are ready to read the meaning of the parable. God is not the God of any one race or religion. He cares for Gentile as for Jew. He sends a prophet of Israel to bid a pagan city repent, that ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... seemed that their presence meant very little, a fact which caused him to puzzle, to chafe and, finally, as was fairly natural, to grow irritated. After he and Janet had explored the house and garden, there seemed nothing left to do for Oliver but to stroll up and down the drive, stare through the tall gates ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... a little startled at the spectral name of this entertainment, and began to puzzle myself whether the Doctor gave a levee to rapping spirits, or moralized over the skulls in his collection, like Hamlet in the church-yard. Miss Hurribattle seemed wandering in the mazes of a similar perplexity, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... since we do not find either in the sonnets to Lady Rich or in those to Lady Arabella any special tone of sincerity that leads us to have confidence in our conjecture, we shall be compelled to leave this puzzle unsolved. ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... that there are mysteries in the figures and figuring of statistics. We admit honestly that we know no more to-day than when Paul de Decker discussed Quetelet's labors in statistics of morality in the Brussels Academy of Science, and confessed what a puzzle it was that human conduct, even in its smallest manifestations, obeyed in their totality constant and immutable laws. Concerning this curious fact Adolf Wagner says: "If a traveler had told us something about some people where a statute determines exactly ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... during the Republic!) and Monsieur Makarov, under whose command they all left for Tobolsk. I had to buy a map. Sorry to ascertain it, but I have always mixed up Tomsk, Tobolsk and Yakutsk. Which was which was a puzzle to me. We Russians must be proud of our perfect ignorance ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... find it very dull here with all of us grown-up people, dears, so run away now. Therese," she added with a smile to her granddaughter who had risen obediently, "there is a splendid new puzzle in the library; you ought to try it ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... erratic mind was impelled to clothe this thought in the most bizarre garments. Literary paradox he loved; his mind turned naturally to metaphor, and despite the protests of his closest friends he continued to puzzle and exasperate the public. He who could have written the greatest novels of his age merely wrote stories which serve to illustrate his theories of life and conduct. No man ever put more real thought into novels than he; ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Why had they both been so strangely moved at meeting? I longed to ask a question; but I could not find my voice. I longed for John to speak, and tell me something—anything at all that he liked; and were it the strangest puzzle that ever failed to be unriddled, I swore to my own heart that I would ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... highly delighted with these pictures, and, of their own accord, require an explanation of the subjects. Nay, they will even ask questions that will puzzle the teacher to answer; and although there is in some minds such a natural barrenness, that, like the sands of Arabia, they are never to be cultivated or improved, yet I can safely say, that I never knew a child who did not like the pictures; and as soon as I had done explaining one, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... number of minute and tedious details. "Had I," he said, "been able to lend myself to the idea of mere gain, I could formerly have sent such things anonymously into the world, with the aid of Lenz and others—nay, I could still, as would astonish people not a little, and make them puzzle their brains to find out the author; but after all, they would ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... big a puzzle for me," he answered. "Five minutes ago I would have said three hundred at the utmost, but I ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... the distance, and softens magically all harsh details beneath the starry vault—she slipped out to the summit of the ridge in the big pasture, climbing lightly, with the springy ease born of the vigor her nineteen outdoor years had stored in the strong young body. She wanted to be alone, to puzzle out what the coming of this man meant to her. Had he intended anything by that last drawling remark of his in the store? Why was it that his careless, half insulting familiarity set the blood leaping through her like wine? He lured her to the sex duel, then trampled down her ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... not his face, nor his figure, nor his clothes. Unfortunately, the translation of these writings is no easy task. Those of Central America are still an unsolved riddle. Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like a puzzle, a puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able thought. Yet they are not fully understood. In Egypt we have had the luck to stumble on a clew, the Rosetta Stone, which makes the ancient ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Friar's Park, actually the house and the park were some two miles distant. Where the park ended and the woods began it was impossible to determine, yet such was my curious mood that I lingered there endeavoring to puzzle out those details which were ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... fingers were particularly cold, she would puzzle Robert and her father with questions as to why this should be so. Mr. Holt once told her that the prevailing wind came from the north-west across a vast expanse of frozen continent and frozen ocean. Also that James's Bay, the southern tongue of Hudson's, was apt to get ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... affair presented itself to his fancy in the guise of a puzzle-picture, which, though you study it never so diligently, remains incomprehensible, until by chance you view it from an unexpected angle, when it reveals itself intelligibly. It had not yet been his good ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... William, where she sang again. And William's heart was throbbing with happiness, for, from the night in the Variety, when he had first seen her on the stage, he had placed this lovely lady in a niche of his heart next to that occupied by the mother to whom he was an unsolvable puzzle. He would have followed her to fifty meetings that night had she been going to that many, but his happiness was the more nearly perfect because the lady and Gaston were going to the only other Duggan meeting together, and he would be able to worship her, and listen in ecstasy ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... and very cold in winter. But she was glad to be well above the sleeping house, and to be able to look from her window across the wide country, over the dark bulb gardens—laid out like a Chinese puzzle with their eight-foot hedges—to the lights of the town on the one hand, and, better still, to the dim curve of the Dunes on the other. It is to be feared she sometimes spent a longer time at her window than was wise, seeing ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... Mrs. Field and Lois to take tea with her the next afternoon, and had hinted there might be other company. "There's a good many I should like to ask," she had said, "but I ain't situated so I can jest now, an' it's a dreadful puzzle to know who to leave out without offendin' them. I'm goin' to have the minister an' his wife anyhow, an' Lawyer Tuxbury an' his sister. I should ask Flora, but if she comes the children have got to, an' I can't have them anyhow; they're the worst-actin' young ones at the ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... been enlarged by conceitedness; furthermore, she was a person of selfish instincts, but without the usual cruel impulses. There was little if any sign of true refinement in the features, and yet, there was a strange strength of purpose that puzzled him. As her story progressed, he solved the puzzle. She had the strength to carry out a purpose that might further her own personal interests; but not the will to endure sacrifice for the sake of another. Her sister was larger and possessed a reserve that might have been mistaken for deepness. He felt that she was hardly in sympathy with the motives ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... Quincey gets into a curious puzzle about Landor's remarks in his essay on Milton versus Southey and Landor. He cannot understand to which of Wordsworth's poems Landor is referring, and makes ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... utter contempt for the ordinary rules and scruples that curb even adventurers into a seeming of honesty and virtue, appeared in some way to justify these reports. But, at times, flashes of sudden and brilliant magnanimity broke forth to bewilder the curious, to puzzle the examiners of human character, and to contrast the general tenor of his ambitions and remorseless ascent to power. His genius was confessed by all; but it was a genius that in no way promoted the interests of his country. It ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to have been a sad puzzle to the hunters, who hardly knew how to come at so valuable a piece of game. Some described the horn as movable at the will of the animal, a kind of small sword, in short, with which no hunter who was not exceedingly cunning in fence could have a chance. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... brows, "is still a mystery and a fairly deep one. There is something uncommonly strange about those tracks on the lower borders of the pool and I confess they puzzle me. Only one explanation occurs to me now and that is not pleasant to think of. We have some clues to work with however, and we ought not to be long in getting at the truth. If I had had your chance of examining the cave on the day of the crime," he added, ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... to be considered is the derivation of the word mandragora. Dr. Mingana tells me it is a great puzzle to discover any adequate meaning. The attempt to explain it through the Sanskrit mand, "joy," "intoxication," or mantasana, "sleep," "life," or mandra, "pleasure," or mantara, "paradise tree," and ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... Preface (Ben Jonson, Mr. Greenwood thinks, {298b}) speaks only of a single author, who has written other admirable comedies. "When he is gone, and his comedies out of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new English Inquisition." Why? The whole affair is a puzzle. But if the author of the Preface is right about the single author of Troilus and Cressida, and if Shakespeare is alluded to in connection with Cressida, in Histriomastix (1599), then it appears to me that Shakespeare, in 1598-9, after Chapman's portion of the Iliad appeared, was ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... two maids—since setting foot in Chagford," continued his brother, "and it would puzzle the devil to say which ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... no time to lose. He said, "Nothing partickler," and hurried off, leaving the negro to puzzle over ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... the Irish character would puzzle a Philadelphia lawyer. Spinning along the lane to Killaloe, with Mr. Beesley, of Leeds, and Mr. Abraham Keeley, of Mallow, balanced on opposite sides of a jaunting car, we came on a semi-savage specimen of the genuine Irish sort. Semi-savage! he was seven-eighths ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... pretended to produce perfectly literal translations. Her version of Lavater's "Physiognomy," now unknown, was but an abridgment. She purposely "naturalized" the "Elements of Morality," she explains, in order not to "puzzle children by pointing out modifications of manners, when the grand principles of morality were to be fixed on a broad basis." She made free with the originals that they might better suit English readers, and this she frankly confesses in her Prefaces. Her translations are, in consequence, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... observe all these miscellaneous movements going on all around us without being struck by the similarity of aim between them; each seems to form part of a common plan, which, like the separate pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, convey no meaning, but when fitted together make up a perfectly clear design. That there is somewhere in the background a point of contact is suggested by the fact that we find members of the different groups playing a double and a treble ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... altogether mistaken," I told her. "I can't say that my mind is in a state of distrust, but I own that you puzzle me." ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... only a moment's sober thought, once satisfied she was alone, to suggest as one reasonable solution to the puzzle that the owners had fled town for the week-end, leaving the establishment in care of untrustworthy servants, who had promptly elected to ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... of hope was closed. Egbert had not taken the bonds, and how they came into his possession was still as great a puzzle as ever. And the time—the time was growing so short. On Wednesday Kent had promised to send his brother-in-law eight hundred dollars. It was Saturday when Bradley's letter came. Each evening George stopped at the Minot place to ask what progress ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... penny, exhibit the mast-house, the Thames and shipping, the place where the men used to hang in chains, and other interesting sights, through a telescope, are asked questions about objects within the range of the glass, which it would puzzle a Solomon to answer; and requested to find out particular houses in particular streets, which it would have been a task of some difficulty for Mr. Horner (not the young gentleman who ate mince-pies with his thumb, but the man of Colosseum ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
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