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More "Unravel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... guise of a respectable boarding-house, No. 5 had been used as the headquarters of the gang, and the operations had been so widespread, so all-embracing in the field of crime, that after the raid many mysteries which the police had failed to unravel were credited to Randall. Many of these he could have had nothing to do with, but he had quite enough to answer for. He seems to have exercised a kind of terrorism over his subordinates, or he would surely have ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... the relationship of such races to ours must be very remote. We are concerned here with veritable races or sub-species, or at least with very constant and accentuated varieties. It is true that it is difficult to unravel the almost inextricable confusion of human races; but we may be certain that the savage races and varieties remote from ours, and even certain less-remote races such as the Mongols and Malays, are, phylogenetically speaking, infinitely ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... away colored passengers, he was not regarded with so much favor. But it was evidently me whom they looked upon as the chief culprit, alone possessing a knowledge of the history and origin of the expedition, which they were so anxious to unravel. They accordingly went to work very artfully to worm this secret out of me. I was placed in charge of one Orme, a police-officer of Georgetown, whose manner towards me was such as to inspire me with ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... To unravel the threads of the story is a task very difficult. My table is strewn with pamphlets, papers, genealogies, essays; the authors taking opposite sides as to the question, Was Jeanne d'Arc burned at Rouen on May 30, 1431? Unluckily even the most ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... much as wou'd make half a dozen modern Romances; But I was advised, by some Dramatick Friends, not to let it appear too soon. For Love, in a Farce, they said, was generally very dull, and what the English Audience always Complain'd of. But now we are come to unravel the Plot— It must be known, that Lady Lucy, Mr. Hydra, Sir Eternal, Miss Brilliant, and all the Characters, have a most Passionate Tendre for each other, and have Privately agreed that this shall be the Happy Night. And, as to a Wedding, I have taken ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas;—these I had set down as irrefragable, orthodox truths, until perusing your book shook my faith.—In short, Sir, except Euclid's Elements of Geometry, which I made a shift to unravel by my father's fire-side, in the winter evening of the first season I held the plough, I never read a book which gave me such a quantum of information, and added so much to my stock of ideas, as your "Essays on the Principles of Taste." One thing, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of resolution, and the miracle is done. Who would take me for thirty now? From this moment I abjure pessimism and cynicism in all their forms, put from my mind all considerations of the complexities of human life, unravel all by a triumphant optimism which no statistics can abash or criticism dishearten. I likewise undertake to divest myself entirely of any sense of humour that may have developed within me during the baneful experiences of the last ten years, and, in short, will consent ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... and they are all on top of him before one can say "knife"! Then one has to rush in with the whip—and everyone of the team of eleven jumps over the harness of the dog next to him, and the harnesses become a muddle that takes much patience to unravel, not to mention care lest the whole team should get away with the sledge and its load, and leave one behind.... I never did get left the whole of this depot journey, but I was often very near it, and several ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... with good intentions—came forward, who, now that the matter was in good train, advised us to put it in the hands of learned men. This brought on trouble enough; for some of those who helped me agreed to do so; and this plot of Satan was one of the most difficult of all to unravel. Our Lord was my helper throughout. Writing thus briefly, it is impossible for me to explain what took place during the two years that passed between the beginning and the completion of the monastery: the last six months and the first ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... down beforehand the precise limits of possible knowledge, the problem of physical science would be already half solved. But the question to which the scientific explorer has often to address himself is, not merely whether he is able to solve this or that problem; but whether he can so far unravel the tangled threads of the matter with which he has to deal, as to weave them into a definite problem at all ... If his eye seem dim, he must look steadfastly and with hope into the misty vision, until the very clouds wreathe themselves into definite forms. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... would it take a man to unravel that nest, wisp by wisp, and resolve it into a loose pile of materials? Certainly not less than an entire day. Do you think that even your skilful fingers,— unassisted by needles,—could in two days, or in three, weave ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... which have reached us, the whole subject lies in confusion. It is scarcely possible to unravel the tangled mesh. Sometimes it seems to be taught that Ahriman was at first good, an angel of light who, through envy of his great compeer, sank from his primal purity, darkened into hatred, and became the rancorous enemy ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... fear for her cause. She had all her wits about her instantly; and under a pretence of repeating what she had already told the first men, she gave them such a mixture of descriptions that the negro was called up to unravel it. She made out that they were trying to reach the big river by a certain road, and marched in the night as well as in the day. She admitted that she had never been on that road but once. And when she was taken along with them a mile or two to the ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... not as simple an affair to unravel as that; for I can tell you one of the things, at least, which was apparently occupying her thoughts at the time, yet I can't quite see why or how it could have much to do with you. You remember, perhaps, that you came while we were at luncheon the day after our ride into the Valley ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... owed him nothing but a little gratitude for having delivered her from the men in black, who wished to carry her off, and that she had promised him nothing. He considered himself an outraged, betrayed, and ridiculed lover. Blood and anger mounted to his face; he was resolved to unravel the mystery. ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... had found a treasure in his new acquaintance, returned to the charge; but I was not more docile. A few days after, I was surprised by an attack of the same kind from M. de Beauvilliers. How or when he had formed an intimacy with Maisons, I have never been able to unravel; but formed it, he had; and he importuned me so much, nay exerted his authority over me, that at last I found I must give way. Not to offend M. d'Orleans by yielding to another after having refused to yield ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... allow of no description, and of such things a true Roman carnival is one. You might as well seek to analyze champagne, or expound the mystery of melody, or tell why a woman pleases you. The strange web of colour, beauty, mirth, wit, and folly, is tangled so together that common hands cannot unravel it. To paint a carnival without blotching, to touch it without destroying, is an art given unto few, I almost might say to none, save to our own wondrous word- wizard, who dreamt the "dream of Venice," and told it waking. For my ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... rough-hewn corner-stone of Time. We know Thy practised love enfolded Antony; And that around the heart of Hercules' Descendant, threading through and through, Like the red rivers of its life, in tangled mesh No circumstance could e'er unravel, thou Didst coil,—the dreamy, dazzling "Serpent of The Nile!" Thy sins stick jagged out From history's page, and bleeding tear Fair Judgment from thy merits. We perchance Do wrong thee, Isis; for that coward, History, Who binds ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... back slowly; but at length he shook himself, and stood erect at his full, immense height. He had given the wolf-pack something tricky in the way of trails to unravel, but he knew what he had taught them too well to build too much on that. And he was right, for presently, from far, far across the water, came the unutterably terrible baying clamor of the pack, moving ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... in Hodder's ears, in his very soul. How was he or any man to estimate, to unravel the justice from the injustice, to pass upon the merit of this woman's punishment? Here again, in this vitiated life, was only to be seen the remorseless working of law—cause and effect. Crooked! Had not the tree been crooked from the beginning—incapable of being straightened? She ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... old conventional designs then in use have, with very little modification, persisted up to the present day. Probably the playing cards in common use were printed by the same crude method as were the images, and unfortunately history has failed to unravel just what that method was. They may possibly have been stenciled. All we have been able to learn is that cards, images (which were in reality religious pictures), and stenciled altar cloths—the first primitive printing on cloth—all appeared ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... the road would be called hard rather than difficult work; that is difficult which involves skill, sagacity, or address, with or without a considerable expenditure of physical force; a geometrical problem may be difficult to solve, a tangled skein to unravel; a mountain difficult to ascend. Hard may be active or passive; a thing may be hard to do or hard to bear. Arduous is always active. That which is laborious or toilsome simply requires the steady application of labor or ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... eyes glittering with excitement. "That is an inspiration. I imagine that if anyone can unravel the mystery, ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... doing or dissipation.... Cruelty in the penal code and the tendency to exaggerate punishment are sure signs of a low civilization and of an imperfect educational system.... It seems to me that we can no more expect to unravel the mechanism of associative memory by histological or morphological methods than we can expect to unravel the dynamics of electrical phenomena by microscopic study of cross-sections through a telegraph ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... Ramsay [his brother the admiral] made a capital speech." On March 5, 1841, it is noted, Bishop Walker died—"a good man. His mind cast in a limited mould of strong prejudices; but a fair man, strictly honest in all his ways. He was not fitted to unravel difficulties in his episcopate, and scarcely suited to these times. He had been a furious opponent of the old evangelicals. A constant and kind friend to me. May his memory be honoured. Bishop Terrot elected bishop. I am very grateful to think that in all ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... nature-myths, symbols and parables, resulting in Chaldea in the highly artificial system which has been sketched above—(see Chapters V. and VI.)—a system singularly beautiful and deeply significant, but of which the mass of the people did not care to unravel the subtle intricacies, being quite content to accept it entire, in the most literal spirit, elementary nature-gods, astronomical abstractions, cosmogonical fables and all—questioning nothing, at peace in their mind and righteously self-conscious if they sacrificed at the various time-honored ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... none equal proofs of thoughtfulness in return, he should not more frequently have broken out into such sallies against the absent and "unreplying." For myself, I can only say that, from the moment I began to unravel his character, the most slighting and even acrimonious expressions that I could have heard he had, in a fit of spleen, uttered against me, would have no more altered my opinion of his disposition, nor disturbed ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... ruins, and to form and regulate sound opinion upon the ancient inhabitants of that quarter, and their state of arts. There can be no doubt that evidences exist in buried antiquities which will tend to connect the arts and religion, mythology and astronomy of the eastern and western hemispheres—to unravel the difficulties in the way of comparative philology, and to reconstruct and connect the links in the broken chain of ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... demand. To do this with profit to himself, he must study this crop from beginning to end, he must learn the nature of the Peanut plant fully and correctly, and discovering how to increase the yield per acre to its maximum, unravel the secret of how to grow it at the least cost ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... Founder said cost him enormous labour to discover and to possess. We shall gain so much and no more of the same spiritual substance as we put the same kind of energy in motion. In order that we may unravel the complexities of our day, a spirit similar to his spirit must become ours. When such a spirit ceases to exist, Christianity will become merely a [p.179] name; its power will have disappeared, and men can delude themselves into believing that they possess ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... Jenny's dream; and this trifle was her dream come true. It melted in the mouth; its flavours were those of innumerable spices. She was transported with happiness at the mere thought of such trifle. As her palate vainly tried to unravel the secrets of the dish, Keith, who was closely observant, saw that she was lost in a kind of fanatical ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... rhetoricians, painters, and musicians; but to Lacedaemon for legislators, magistrates, and generals of armies; at Athens they learned to speak well: here to do well; there to disengage themselves from a sophistical argument, and to unravel the imposture of captious syllogisms; here to evade the baits and allurements of pleasure, and with a noble courage and resolution to conquer the menaces of fortune and death; those cudgelled their brains about words, these made it their business ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... moment. It was evening. I was returning with Tom to Lizard Town from Dead Man's Rock, where we had been basking all the sunny afternoon, Tom reading, and I simply staring vacantly into the heavens and wondering when the time would come that should set me free to unravel the mystery of this ill-omened spot. Finally, after taking our fill of idleness, we bathed as the sun was setting; and I remember wondering, as I dived off the black ledge, whether beneath me there ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... every one. You have had your reward. You live happy in the esteem and love of all who know you, and I drag on the life of a miserable impostor, indebted for the marks of regard I receive to a tissue of deceit and lies, which the slightest accident may unravel. He has produced me to his friends, since the estate opened to him, as a daughter of a Scotchman of rank, banished on account of the Viscount of Dundee's wars—that is, our Fr's old friend Clavers, you know—and he says I was educated ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... perhaps may be more fitly taken in the sense in which we talk of a 'dear' bargain, meaning to imply how much it has cost us; and who shall say how many sleepless nights it has cost me to endeavor to unravel (a most appropriate verb) ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... stands on the same level with any authentic history, much less with the Bible record; inasmuch as the discovery of a single new fact may overturn the whole theory. "It furnishes us with no clew by which to unravel the unapproachable mysteries of creation. These mysteries belong to the wondrous Creator, and to him only. We attempt to theorize upon them, and to reduce them to law, and all nature rises up against us in our presumptuous rebellion. A stray ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... the liberty, confirmed the safety, and secured the heart of his charming Aurelia, now found leisure to unravel the conspiracy which had been executed against his person; and with that view commenced a lawsuit against the owner of the house where he and his mistress had been separately confined. Mr. Shackle was, notwithstanding all the submissions and atonement which he offered to make, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... tells us that these Diurnals differ from a Mercurius Aulicus (the paper of his party),—"as the Devil and his Exorcist, or as a black witch doth from a white one, whose office is to unravel her enchantments." ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... fluttering in the pure breeze, and the blue waves were dancing and sparkling in the bay, and white sails were moving rapidly about, and from the windows two beautiful islands were visible with their summer verdure, and the bewildered mother pressed her hand to her forehead, as if trying to unravel the mystery, when Mr. Bond's fat and merry face peered in at ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... whole Kwanto; confiscated manors of his enemies; recompensed meritorious deeds liberally, and granted pardons readily. In fact, he presented to public gaze precisely the figure he desired to present, the strong ruler who would unravel the perplexities of a distraught age. From all quarters the malcontent bushi ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... confounded, and rendered incapable of coming to any regular conclusion. None but a judge, a man that has from his infancy been accustomed to decide intricate cases, is equal to such a difficult task. If we even suppose the jury sufficiently enlightened to unravel those knotty points, yet there remains an insuperable objection. In State libels, their passions are frequently so much engaged, that they may be justly considered as parties concerned against ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... with its varying attraction, first on one and then on the other, complications are introduced that only the most masterly minds can follow. Introduce a dozen or a million bodies, and complications arise that only Omniscience can unravel. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... interesting study; as a rule, people do not recognize that every place-name has a meaning or reference to some outstanding peculiarity or characteristic of the place, and that much history can be gathered from interpretation. In cycling, it is one of the many interests to unravel these derivations; merely as an instance, I may mention that in Dorset and Wilts the name of Winterbourne, with a prefix or suffix, often occurs; of course, "bourne" means a stream, but until one knows that a "winterbourne" is a stream that appears ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Truax up on the telephone. The commission merchant had read about the express robbery, and had connected the man in the red car with it, but promised to say nothing about it until Ted had had an opportunity to unravel the mystery. ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... They showed us the process of deciphering the papyri, which is very ingenious. The manuscript (which is like a piece of charcoal) is suspended by light strings in a sort of frame; gum and goldbeater's skin are applied to it as it is unrolled, and, by extreme delicacy of touch, they contrive to unravel without destroying a great deal of it, but probably they have been discouraged by the small reward which has attended their exertions; for there are several black-looking rolls which have never yet been touched, and very few men at work. The gentlemen ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... over the back of a chair, and so often looking up to revel in the contemplation of Harry's face, that her skein was in a wild tangle, which she studiously concealed lest the sight should compel Richard to come and unravel it with those wonderful fingers ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one main theme to make clear to his hearers and must respect the modern canons of the Story-telling Art. Among the many things therefore he could tell, an he would, he selects that only which will unravel a particular thread of fate in the tangle of endless consequences; which will render plausible the growth of passions on which, in a continuous life-drama, is based ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... singular circumstance of the morning, and demanded an explanation. Her wonder was as great as his own, however; and she remained silently gazing at the sunset, and pondering. A shake of the head betrayed her want of success in this attempt to unravel the mystery, especially the lawyer's indignation at ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... without and around, to dive into the profoundest abysses of character, trace the affections where they lie hidden like the ocean springs, wind into the most intricate involutions of the heart, patiently unravel its most delicate fibres, and in a few graceful touches place before us the distinct and visible result,—to do this demanded power of another and ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... thou grant me, O God? Lo, this is the prayer of my travail— Some well-being; and chance not very bitter thereby; Spirit uncrippled by pain; and a mind not deep to unravel Truth unseen, nor yet dark with the brand of a lie. With a veering mood to borrow Its light from every morrow, Fair friends and no deep sorrow, Well could man ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four, and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he could not unravel. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... nepardonebla. Unpleasant malplacxa. Unpolished (surface) malglata. Unpretending neafektema, simpla. Unprincipled malhonesta, senprincipa. Unproductive senfrukta. Unpublished neeldonita. Unquiet malkvieta. Unravel maltordi. Unrecognisable nerekonebla. Unremitting sencxesa. Unreserved nerezerva. Unrestrained nedetena, libera. Unroll malruli, malfaldi. Unroof maltegmenti. Unruffled trankvila, nemaltrankvila. Unruly malgxentila. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Nellie Mason was wonderfully remarkable. If it was untrue, then Mrs. Richard Stone was the most remarkable character I had ever met. I promised to call again in a day or so, and hastily withdrew to strengthen or unravel the nicely-woven fabric Mrs. Stone ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... his devices to a task in his art, a fallacy is included which is radical and mischievous beyond measure. We have, as yet, no calculus for the variable elements which enter into social problems and no analysis which can unravel their complications. The discussions always reveal the dominion of the prepossessions in the minds of the disputants which are in the mores. We know that an observer of nature always has to know his own personal equation. The mores ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... and, in spite of his illness, he hurried to town. It is impossible to describe his astonishment and distress at the sight which met his eyes. In the presence of the clerks he held anxious consultations with the detectives, who assured him that they had already taken the first steps to unravel the mystery, and that every possible effort would be made to discover the criminals. In the privacy of his own office he explained to the reporters that he had left in the bank four hundred thousand dollars in cash and bonds, every farthing of which ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... perplexed mothers, children and veterans, poured their griefs and fears, their hopes and disappointments, into the listening ear of sympathy, knowing that the clear judgment of this little woman could unravel much that seemed to be ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Broussy-le-Grand, we came upon the scene of an action in which the casualties had been exceedingly heavy. The neighborhood was absolutely deserted and as the wounded had been removed and there were no peasants about we could find no one to elucidate for us what had taken place. The action was not easy to unravel and the following conclusions were unverified by ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the connection between its several parts. I am myself as little able to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, as those critics found themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according to my own original design, and then leave the reader ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... great deal at the store on credit. On the other hand the men had done a considerable amount of carpenter work and hauling for the Trustees and for others. The account on the books at the Trustees' store was all in confusion, and as everybody at the store claimed to be too busy to unravel it, Spangenberg obtained permission to do it himself, and found that in addition to the bonds, (60 Pounds and 226 Pounds 13 Shillings 9 Pence,) the Moravians had taken supplies to an amount which gave them a total debt of some 500 Pounds ($2,400.00). Against this they had ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... have said, you are quite mistaken. There's a mystery somewhere. Keep his letter and show it to me. I may, perhaps, be able to unravel the tangle. I'm more than ever convinced that what I said to you last night was perfectly true. We will save him ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... on all these years in such a quiet, unnoticeable way—that Mrs. MacDougall could seem so exactly like a mother to them, and yet not be one. He was in a state of bewilderment, in which he could neither believe nor disbelieve, and so he went to sleep with a weary sigh, and left the mystery to unravel itself. ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... the first time with the thought that it is not easy to find the ideal modern life, even when one is anxious to conform to it, began tugging at all the strands of difficulty at once, not seeing them very clearly, but still with no notion but that if he set his strength to it, he could unravel them all in the half-hour's walk that lay between him and ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... expression. Belief in the divine right of his kingship gave him power over the minds of men, and he took his duties on him in this hour without weakness or failing, grasping with his human hand the obscure spiritual web of man's destiny, and with his limited intelligence trying to unravel the dark threads here and there, on which hung the healing and destruction of millions. In such moments a whole people will become united into one being, swayed by the mastery of a single mind, and await the commands of a single will. It comes, no one knows from ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... from me. Still, I hardly cried. All the way up in the train, whenever I was awake, an idea had been haunting me—a possible clue to this trickery of Lord Southminster's. Petty details cropped up and fell into their places. I began to unravel it all now. I had an inkling of a plan to set Harold ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all His works With feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, characterises the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar—this is the character and privilege of genius. And it is the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... endeavoured to prevent my entrance. The Thikadar told me he had no authority for this, but had done it "Zubbur-dustee." They also say that the occupant of the Barahduree has just come from England. He is a being shrouded in mystery, and I shall endeavour to unravel it. My first step will be to report the occurrence to the officials at S—— when I get there. I took a swim in the Jhelum, whose course I have now followed for eighty-four crooked miles, and on whose bosom I ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... not work, will not strip to the long, patient, delving drudgery necessary to unravel, separate, analyze, weigh, measure, estimate and count, and come to like work for work's sake, and so grow to do the best and most work. They deal a few heavy blows, scatter things, pick up a ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... problems of eternal justice, the worth of upright living, and even the existence of God; for an unjust, ruthless, almighty being is no God. But by means of the theophany—which is to be understood merely as a process in his own heart, and which clearly shows him the impotence of feeble man to unravel the world-enigmas—he attains to insight; not, indeed, of a positive kind such as a knowledge of the ways of God would confer, but negative insight by means of that resignation which flows from excess of pain. It is thus ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... expulsion in 1945. Although Communist, his new government successfully steered its own path between the Warsaw Pact nations and the West for the next four and a half decades. In the early 1990s, post-TITO Yugoslavia began to unravel along ethnic lines: Slovenia, Croatia, and The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia all declared their independence in 1991; Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. The remaining republics of Serbia and ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... with numerous other incidents, which the boys could not understand, or unravel, made such an impression on them, that they were determined to devote their energies to ferret out the inexplicable things, and the earnestness of John was a great incentive ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... some supper, too, Louisa Helen," said Everett quickly, and a smile lifted the corners of his mouth as the situation began to unravel itself to his sympathetic concern. "I guess I could take the bouquet and veil, too," he added to himself ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... offspring resembles the parents, I answer: Is not that a greater wonder still? A wonder which all the discoveries of the scalpel and the microscope have been as yet unable, and will be, I believe, to the last unable, to unravel, even to touch? A wonder which can be explained by no theories of vibratory atoms, vital forces, plastic powers of nature, or other such phrases, which are but metaphysical abstractions, having no counterpart in fact, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... unravel the whole thing afore noon," said he, "and I'd about as lief see him this minute as I would see Lew. Let me get a better glimpse of his face. I didn't suspect him being a Huron when he jumped up just now, or I'd noticed his features. It don't look like Oonamoo, to see ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul of things—and to release a suffering human soul in the process—was with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... even to the naked eye through the ports of the supply-ship the enemy rockets had become visible. They were a thin skein of threads of white vapor which seemed to unravel in nothingness. The vapor curled and expanded preposterously. It could just be seen to be jetting into existence from four separate points, two a little ahead of the others. They came out from Earth at a rate which seemed remarkably deliberate ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... came. He was an inoffensive young man, and he set to work to unravel the mystery of the ha'nt with visible delight at the unusual nature of the job. Radnor received him in a spirit of almost anxious hospitality. A horse was given him to ride, guns and fishing tackle were placed at his disposal, a box of the Colonel's best cigars stood on the table of his room, and ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... exclaimed Sir Rowland, looking at Lord Strathern. "If a lady contrived this plot, I shall never unravel it; so you must ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... But me and the bicycle he cannot "size up" so readily. He never saw the like of us before, and we are beyond his Teutonic frontier-like comprehension. He gives us up; he fails to solve the puzzle; he knows not how to unravel the mystery; and, with characteristic Teutonic bluntness, he advises us to push on through fifteen miles of rocks, sand, and darkness, to Wadsworth. The prospect of worrying my way, hungry and weary, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... mistake then," said Becker; "the traces are self-evident. This is altogether a circumstance calculated to give us serious uneasiness. Nevertheless, we must view the matter calmly, and consider what steps we should take to unravel the mystery." ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... this people is just as strange as they are themselves. It is based on euphony, from which cause it is very complex, the more especially so as it requires one to be possessed of a negro's turn of mind to appreciate the system, and unravel the secret of its euphonic concord. A Kisuahili grammar, written by Dr. Krapf, will exemplify what I mean. There is one peculiarity, however, to which I would direct the attention of the reader most particularly, which is, that Wa prefixed to the essential word of a country, means men or people; ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... unpleasant thoughts, Grayson sat at his desk in the office of the ranch trying to unravel the riddle of a balance sheet which would not balance. Mixed with the blue of the smoke from his briar was the deeper azure of a spirited monologue in which Grayson ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to unravel that," chuckled the other. "Here he comes back already. His interview must have ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... blush before her own child, to weep while taking from him the right to console her, was more than she could do. No, there was nothing for her but death. To die as soon as possible, to escape shame by a complete disappearance, to unravel in this way an inextricable situation. But where to die! How? There are so many ways of departure! And she called them all up mentally while she walked. Life flowed around her, its luxury at this time of the year ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... catalogue of this interesting collection.” “Banded mail,” as it is called, has been one of the archæological difficulties “of the past and present generations, and the late Mr. Burges took great trouble in endeavouring to unravel the mystery of its construction . . . having casts made from the only four then known . . . effigies (with it) at Tewkesbury, Tollard Royal, Bedford, and Newton Solney; but . . . he had to confess, in the end, that he could make nothing satisfactory of it. Here, at Kirkstead, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... too some fear of this quiet, soft-spoken frontiersman. All Arizona knew not only the daredevil spirit that fired his gentleness, but the competence with which he set about any task he assigned himself. She did not see how he could unravel this mystery. She had left no clues behind her, she felt sure of that, and yet was troubled lest he guessed at her secret behind that mask of innocence he wore. He did not even remotely guess it as yet, but he was far closer to the truth than he pretended. The ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... apparent that he did not live up to this profession. In the first place, the work is not scientific, facts are not "observed and noted with scrupulous care," and conclusions are drawn without warranted data to support them. On the whole then, one must say that this work fails to unravel some "knots in this tangled skein of human endeavor and error." When after a survey of the history of the Negro during the last fifty years an investigator concludes that the Negro has shown an incapacity for commerce and finance, and that he must not struggle to equip ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... wrinkle in a shoe, or the color of a ribbon! How they are worried if something gets untied, or hangs awry, or is not nicely adjusted! With a mind capable of measuring the height and depth of great subjects; able to unravel mysteries; to walk through the universe; to soar up into the infinity of God's attributes,—hovering perpetually over a new style of mantilla! I have known men, reckless as to their character, and regardless of interests ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... lies somewhere between these two extremes; the fact being that the personal and social causes of poverty act and react upon each other, changing places as cause and as effect, until they form a tangle that no hasty, impatient jerking can unravel. The charity worker and the settlement worker have need of each other: neither one can afford to ignore the experience of the other. Friendly visitors and all who are trying to improve conditions in poor homes should welcome the experience of those who are studying trade conditions and ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... in the ears and lips of the people to the words of particular ballads came long after the transcribing of the words themselves. There are other elements of perplexity and difficulty in ballad music which require an expert to unravel and explain, and which cannot be entered into here. The subject is referred to only because, in the eyes of the original composers and singers at least, to dissever the words from the tune would have seemed like parting soul from body; ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... shucks around the spindle to slip it off easy. I have seen big balls this big (2 ft. in diameter) down on the floor and mama, knitting off of it right on. When the feet wore out on socks and stockings, they would unravel them, save the good thread, and reknit the foot ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... actually took the next table, and in a few moments swords were drawn, and Le Monnier was killed. Why Canu and his nine accomplices were pardoned is one of the mysteries of the Fierte which I suppose no one will ever be able to unravel. ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... never before found a job we couldn't finish successfully," said the old detective. "But how we are to unravel the mystery of this man's death is beyond my ...
— The Bradys Beyond Their Depth - The Great Swamp Mystery • Anonymous
... this minute and clean the lamps. Your father's out pulling up the floor-boards in the barn and Mr. O'Neill's digging up the lilac bush for the third time. And that's enough. It beats me how Mr. O'Neill can go on rememberin' so much now he's got his memory started. He just seems to unravel things out of it overnight. It keeps me all worked up. I feel as if I ought to whisper when I speak and every night the minute I get to sleep I find myself diggin' in first one outlandish place and then another. And if I'm not diggin' in my ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... give back his life! Raise him up from this bed of illness, that he may unravel the web of mystery that entangles the fate ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... first place, Mrs. Capella is leaving London for the North. She must not be regarded in our operations. The woman is weighted with a secret. I am sorry for her. I prefer to allow events as supplied by others to unravel the skein. Secondly, Jiro and his wife, and all who visit them, or whom they visit, must be watched incessantly. Get all the force required for this operation in its fullest sense. You, with one trusted associate, must keep a close eye on No. 37 ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... therefore said smilingly; "let me unravel this excellent-finality song of yours; ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... troubles, was in a complacent state of mind himself. He liked life—even its very difficult complications—perhaps its complications best of all. Nature was beautiful, tender at times, but difficulties, plans, plots, schemes to unravel and make smooth—these things were what ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... he had his vanity in pronounced degree. He saw himself now, the dominant figure in this city of thirty thousand people, the man who had been selected by the chief of police as the one able to unravel the web of mystery surrounding this startling murder. The thought pleased him, and he smiled. He began to think about himself and about life as a ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... with sleep, could not unravel the memories of the night. He knew only that he had had unpleasant dreams; perhaps he had wept. The one thing he could recall was a pale face, rising from among the black veils of unconsciousness, around which all his dreams were centered. It was ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... At length, Richard having taken possession of his lodging, there was nothing to prevent our departure. He could have gone with us at that time of the year very well, but he was in the full novelty of his new position and was making most energetic attempts to unravel the mysteries of the fatal suit. Consequently we went without him, and my darling was delighted to praise ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... distinguished from a professional fisherman who fishes for fish—and you get into a rowboat that you undertake to pull yourself and that starts out by weighing half a ton and gets half a ton heavier at each stroke. You pull and pull until your spine begins to unravel at both ends, and your palms get so full of water blisters you feel as though you were carrying a bunch of hothouse grapes in each hand. And after going about nine miles you unwittingly anchor off the mouth of a popular garbage dump and everything you catch ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... correct inductive generalisation is either a law of nature, or a result from one, the problem of inductive logic is to unravel the web of nature, tracing each thread separately, with the view, 1, of ascertaining what are the several laws of nature, and, 2, of following them into their results. But it is impossible to frame a scientific method of induction, or test of inductions, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... experiments with the Zancigs I came to the conclusion that although the alleged transmission of thought might possibly depend on a code or codes which I was unable to unravel, yet their performance was of such a nature that it was worthy of serious scientific examination. On the assumption that they possessed genuine telepathic powers it would be a pity that the opportunity of investigating their claim should be missed. I therefore set ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally
... of his machine, he determined so to complicate it as that neither the President nor Congress should be able to understand it, or to control him. He succeeded in doing this, not only beyond their reach, but so that he at length could not unravel it himself. He gave to the debt, in the first instance, in funding it, the most artificial and mysterious form he could devise. He then moulded up his appropriations of a number of scraps and remnants, many of which were nothing at all, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... we cannot but feel that, in spite of the magnificent diction and poetic imagination of the one, and the homely picturesque genius of the other, the grand themes treated of are degraded if not vulgarized, without our being in any way helped to unravel their essential mysteries. In point of individual personal interest, "The Holy War" contrasts badly with "The Pilgrim's Progress." The narrative moves in a more shadowy region. We may admire the workmanship; ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... and more, the winds, the vapours, the waves. Nothing is so logical and nothing appears so absurd as the ocean. Self-dispersion is the essence of its sovereignty, and is one of the elements of its redundance. The sea is ever for and against. It knots that it may unravel itself; one of its slopes attacks, the other relieves. No apparition is so wonderful as the waves. Who can paint the alternating hollows and promontories, the valleys, the melting bosoms, the sketches? How render the thickets ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... duty. Since his struggle with Kansas Shorty he had repeatedly weighed every word this rascal had spoken and adduced from it that something most dishonorable must have been Jim's fate, and the oftener he attempted to unravel the mystery that lay concealed behind the ill-omened remarks made by this scoundrel, the more morose he became from the constant strain, for his troubled conscience caused him to feel that he was equally to be blamed for any ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... Balaam is so perfectly natural, and yet of a kind so very difficult to unravel and explain, that if the story was invented by man, as poems or novels are, it must have been invented very late indeed in the history of the Jews; at a time when they had grown to be a far more civilised people, far more experienced in the cunning tricks of the human heart than they ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... Mr. Franklin! my view of the case has been proved to be all wrong, I admit—but, as things are now, my advice may be worth having for all that. I tell you plainly, we shall be wasting our time, and cudgelling our brains to no purpose, if we attempt to try back, and unravel this frightful complication from the beginning. Let us close our minds resolutely to all that happened last year at Lady Verinder's country house; and let us look to what we CAN discover in the future, instead of to what we can NOT discover in ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... he knew "all about" Coryndon; he knew at least, that the Government of India looked upon him as the best man they had to unravel the most intricate case that murder or forgery, coining or fraud of any sort, could tangle into mysterious knots. Coryndon had intuition and patience, and once he undertook a case he followed it through to the ultimate conclusion; and so it was that Coryndon ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... being, almost threatening to dispel the drowsy mist then pervading my brain. The slow thought waves gradually ceased their surging, and after a slight pause began to collect round the offending mystery, as if seeking to unravel it in a half-hearted sort of way. They gave me to understand that the "something" recurred at intervals, and even suggested that it might be a voice, though from which side of the elastic dividing line it emanated they ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... through the air, but went out like a human being. It is a plot, that is clear. They are conspiring with the Electoral Prince, and profit by the mask to obtain safe access to the castle; or it may be Nietzel, come to confess what he has done to the Prince—maybe even to bring him a remedy. I must unravel it! I am sure the illusion succeeded so well last night that the apparition will be repeated. I shall make my regulations accordingly, and if it is so, then let the White Lady beware of me, for I am a good conjurer. I shall go to the castle myself to-night, and ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... vermilion fill up the details; and on each side there is a confessional wherein all members, whether large or diminutive, whether dressed in corduroy or smoothest, blackest broad cloth, in silk or Surat cotton, must unravel the sins they have committed. This confession must be a hard sort of job, we know, for some people; but we are not going to enter upon a discussion of its merits or demerits. Only this may be said, that if there was full confession at every place of worship in Preston the parsons would never ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... vehemently agitated than before, "think you that you shall carry on with others an enterprise which I have refused?—No, by every heathen and every Christian god!—Hark ye, Christian, I will arrest you on the spot—I will, by gods and devils, and carry you to unravel your plot at Whitehall." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... depravity of the aboriginal Australian when first seen by white men, will make it impossible hereafter for anyone whose reasoning powers exceed a native Australian's to maintain that it was the whites who corrupted these savages. It takes an exceptionally shrewd white man even to unravel the customs of voluntary or obligatory wife sharing or lending which prevail in all parts of Australia, and which must have required not only hundreds but thousands of years to assume their present extraordinarily complex aspect; customs which form part and parcel ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... had she gone in the story of the world's first civilization; but she had gone further in her friendship with Michael Amory and in her knowledge of things Mohammedan. He had helped her to unravel the skein of difficulties which Egypt's three distinct and widely-different civilizations had presented to her—the period of ancient Egypt, the period which we now call Coptic or Early Christian and the period of the Arab invasion, with its importation ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... case remains yet undecided and I know not that it ever will be. There is a strange mystery surrounding the business which I am not able to unravel. The court is now in session in Boston which is expected to decide the case. In a few days we shall be able to determine what we have to expect from this case. If we lose it, your mother and I have made up our minds to sit down contented ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... An earthquake story might be as complicated as one pleased, for all the superfluous people could be killed off at the crucial moment, while legal papers and wills could disappear, so that one could not even be expected to unravel the mystery! She hovered uncertainly between three sensational titles—"A Hopeless Quest," "For Ever Hidden," "In the Twinkling of an Eye!"—and plunged boldly into the first sentence of the synopsis without having the faintest ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... herniae, which may occasionally give a good deal of trouble. Symptoms of strangulation have been well marked, yet when the sac is opened nothing is to be seen except a mass of omentum, perhaps tolerably healthy-looking. To reduce this en masse would be very unsafe; it is necessary carefully to unravel it, and disengage the knuckle of bowel which is almost certainly included in it, and which has given rise ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... open, disclosed one of her sweetish caps, side by side with a card of gingerbread. The carpet was woven of every color, in every form, but without any definite figure, and promised to be another puzzle for my curious eyes to unravel; it seemed to have been just thrown down with here and there a tack in it, only serving to make it look more awry. While amusing myself with this carpet, it recalled an incident that a roguish cousin of mine once related ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... many a double meaning. There is, in fact, no lyric song describing natural scenery that may not have beneath it some implied, often indelicate, allusion whose riddle it takes an adroit and practiced mind to unravel. ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... answered, "but I know I would cheerfully pay that sum to anyone who could unravel the mystery ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... pocket? Because,—so Mr. Grey thought,—Augustus would not trust his own father. The creditors, if they could get hold of Mountjoy when his father was dead, and when the bonds would all become payable, might possibly so unravel the facts as to make it apparent that, after all, the property was Mountjoy's. This was not Mr. Grey's idea, but was Mr. Grey's idea of the calculation which Augustus was making for his own government. According to Mr. Grey's reading of all the facts ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... new to it, and ignorant of the historical and other facts necessary to disprove the reverend author's bold assumptions. At last I burst into tears, and kneeling down, exclaimed, "O Lord, I cannot unravel this web of iniquity: enable me to cut it in twain." I was answered; for after a little more thought, a broad view of the whole scheme of man's salvation as revealed in the holy Scriptures appeared to me the best antidote for this insidious ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... thoughts had come to this stage. "The lurid tragedy of the honeymoon pair cannot compare in interest to anything connected with my sweet Ethelrida, for me, so it is your duty to put that horribly wise, cynical brain of yours to work and unravel me this mystery. Look, here is Mr. Markrute coming in—let ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... as is No. 27, The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico, by Severini, there are some vital bits, excellent modelling, striking detail, though as a whole, it is hard to unravel; the point d'appui is missing; the interest is nowhere focussed, though the dancer woman soon catches the eye. No doubt a crowded supper room in a Continental cafe, the white napery, variegated ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... knowledge that she had voluntarily appealed to him, that she had come to him secretly with her trouble, brought strange happiness. Moreover his former acquaintance with Mrs. Dupont gave him a clue to the mystery. Yet how was he going to unravel the threads, discover the motive, find out the various conspirators? What were they really after? Money probably, but possibly revenge. What did the woman know which enabled her to wield such influence over McDonald? What was the trap they proposed springing? ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... bringing him to so desperate a state. At that time by far the most popular form of light literature was the Romances of Chivalry,—huge interminable fictions, filled with the most extravagant visions that ever visited the slumbers of a mad poet. Merely to unravel the story of one of these gigantic romances is a task which would tax the strongest brain. They dealt with the adventures of Knights-Errant, who wandered about the earth redressing grievances and succoring the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... or Bel Bree, was glad to come into this nest-warm pleasantness, when the mother must leave it for a while. It was not an irksomeness flung by, like a tangled skein, for somebody else to tug at and unravel; it was ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... this nest of boxes, Keepers of these golden legends, To the table in my cabin, Underneath the painted rafters, In this house renowned and ancient? Shall I now these boxes open, Boxes filled with wondrous stories? Shall I now the end unfasten Of this ball of ancient wisdom, These ancestral lays unravel? Let me sing an old-time legend, That shall echo forth the praises Of the beer that I have tasted, Of the sparkling beer of barley. Bring to me a foaming goblet Of the barley of my fathers, Lest my singing grow too weary, Singing from the water only. Bring me too ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... time, his essais and his omelettes. In his seclusions the Vin de Bourgogne had its allotted hour, and there were appropriate moments for the Cotes du Rhone. With him Sauterne was to Medoc what Catullus was to Homer. He would sport with a syllogism in sipping St. Peray, but unravel an argument over Clos de Vougeot, and upset a theory in a torrent of Chambertin. Well had it been if the same quick sense of propriety had attended him in the peddling propensity to which I have formerly alluded—but this was by no means the case. Indeed to say the truth, that trait of mind ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the place where he had seen the mysterious figure of the cliffs. He had thought often of her, and had so longed to return to that part of the coast that only a strict sense of duty had prevented him. Now that he was free to unravel the mystery if he could, he was as excited as a ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... hold that the dissenters are right. People with the necessary metaphysical faculty may understand and passionately enjoy their Browning, but only too many simple souls have inflicted miserable suffering on themselves by trying to unravel the meaning of verses at which ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... before he reached the valley. He could not unravel the warp and woof of his life. The gossamer threads of the webs he had begun to weave about himself so lightly in the heyday of his youth and prosperity and happiness had thickened into cables and petrified; it was impossible to break through the coil of them or find a way out of it. Roland Sefton ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... In particular, that potent instrument called the infinitesimal calculus, which Newton had invented for the investigation of nature, had become so far perfected that Laplace, when he attempted to unravel the movements of the heavenly bodies, found himself provided with a calculus far more efficient than that which had been available to Newton. The purely geometrical methods which Newton employed, though they are admirably adapted for demonstrating in a general way the ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... clayey soil of the hill on which the observatory was situated. Other defects also existed, which seemed to preclude the likelihood that the future work of the instrument would be of a high class. I had also found that very difficult mathematical investigations were urgently needed to unravel one of the greatest mysteries of astronomy, that of the moon's motion. This was a much more important work than making observations, and I wished to try my hand at it. So in the autumn I made a formal application to the Secretary of the Navy to be transferred from the observatory to the Nautical ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... noble one, and is worthily treated. * * * Mr. Motley has had the patience to unravel, with unfailing perseverance, the thousand intricate plots of the adversaries of the Prince of Orange; but the details and the literal extracts which he has derived from original documents, and transferred to his pages, give a truthful color and a picturesque effect, which ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... concise journal, narrating events as they occurred, and drawing hopes and suggestions from each of them. Eugene was full of faith. He described Prince Louis Bonaparte to his father as the predestined necessary man who alone could unravel the situation. He had believed in him prior even to his return to France, at a time when Bonapartism was treated as a ridiculous chimera. Felicite understood that her son had been a very active secret agent since 1848. Although he did not clearly explain his position in Paris, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... outcasts; she in the heyday of youth and flowing over with wealth, I an old hag and poor as a barren rock, save for this bit of gold. The goddess is no respecter of persons. What can be the sin of this golden-haired beauty? Mine I know. I will unravel hers. Where does she go, I wonder? And with Chios? And he gave her the richest flowers. I will follow far behind. My sight is keen. I will ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... down and across lots and on the bias until the whole thing is so hopelessly mixed and tangled up that if the mystery of a woman's ways, or the fate of Charlie Ross were solved upon one of these cards all the "experts" in the world could not unravel it. A penny saved may be as good as a penny earned, and I have no objections to your saving it in a legitimate way, but when it comes to saving it at the expense of my time, patience, and eye-sight, I object most decidedly. Hereafter I will not answer postals; ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... was completed; and I looked forward to the fresh enterprise of new rivers and lower latitudes, that should unravel the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... which has passed for true metal. But no student of Napoleon's "Correspondence," of the "Memoirs" of Marmont, and of the recitals of Augereau, Dumas, Landrieux, Verdier, Despinois and others, can hope wholly to unravel the complications arising from the almost continuous conflicts that extended over a dozen leagues of hilly country. War is not always dramatic, however much the readers of campaigns may yearn after thrilling ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... not know how to unravel the thread. How fast he talks to the Colonel Sahib!' Mahbub Ali chuckled. 'By Allah!' the keen eyes swept the veranda for an Instant—'thy lama has sent what to me looks like a note of hand. I have had some few dealings ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... him plunged in despair, or whether, indeed, his frigid indifference was not altogether assumed to serve a peculiar purpose, it was nevertheless certain that he bestowed not the slightest attention upon any of his questioners, not even upon Doe, who had previously endeavoured to unravel the riddle by seeking the assistance of Ralph Stackpole,—assistance, however, which Ralph, waxing sagacious of a sudden, professed himself wholly unable to give. This faithful fellow, indeed, professed to be just as ignorant ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... he had recovered were things that at the moment did not exercise my mind—nor have I since been at any pains to unravel the mystery of it; but there he was, and for the moment that fact was all-sufficing. What complications would come of his presence ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... might have happened under a Parliamentary government. But, then, many members of Parliament, the entire Opposition in Parliament, would have been active to unravel the matter. All the principles of finance would have been worked and propounded. The light would have come from above, not from below—it would have come from Parliament to the nation instead of from the nation to Parliament But exactly the reverse ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... and romantic, so fruitful in incident and rich in experience, that it excites curiosity and invites speculation. It is a life difficult, if not impossible, to understand. Herein lies its peculiar and engrossing fascination. It is a curious web to unravel, a riddle to solve, a problem at once stimulating and baffling. Like the history of the times, it is full of puzzling contradictions and striking contrasts. The daughter of a provincial notary, Madame Recamier was the honored associate of princes. A married woman, she was a wife ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... separated, and Adam Adams watched the young man disappear down the road, the latter feeling that he ought not to interfere with the work of the man he had engaged to unravel the mystery. In deep thought the detective went back to the neighborhood of the mansion and stationed himself where he could get a look at the ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... examination of the different branches of this labyrinth. Now my customary road was no longer practicable, and another was to be carefully explored. For this end, on my next journey to the mountain, I determined to take with me a lamp, and unravel this darksome maze: this project I resolved to execute the ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... which I have detailed to you. A person observing the occurrence of certain facts and phenomena asks, naturally enough, what process, what kind of operation known to occur in nature applied to the particular case, will unravel and explain the mystery? Hence you have the scientific hypothesis; and its value will be proportionate to the care and completeness with which its basis had been tested and verified. It is in these matters as in the commonest affairs of practical life: the guess of the fool ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... De Skirlaw. "I will not be the one to try to unravel it. Let us away to the king and say ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... a born detective—a regular Sherlock Holmes in real life. I have tested him several times with extraordinary results. I have given him the most difficult cases to unravel. He has found the ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... the bonnet, and was chased into the back-yard; but, as it had swallowed the ribbon without being able to swallow the bonnet, it carried that with it. The boy who specially owned the goat ran it down in a frenzy of horror and apprehension, and managed to unravel the ribbon from its throat, and get back the bonnet. Then he took the bonnet in and laid it carefully down on the table again, and decided that it would be best not to say anything about the affair. But such a thing as that could ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... Charlie. This anecdote brings before the mind very vividly the character of Sir Walter's parents. The eager curiosity of the active-minded woman, whom "the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie" had been able to keep upright in her chair for life, but not to cure of the desire to unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing glimpse; the grave formality of the husband, fretting under his wife's personal attention to a dishonoured man, and making her pay the penalty by dashing to pieces the cup which the king's evidence had used,—again, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... redemption within the limits of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered, unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... The result of all this manipulation defies description. Throughout the series of correlated institutions loans and deposits are multiplied in such an intricacy of duplication that only a few able experts, employed by the "System" because of their mathematical genius, are able to unravel the tangle to the extent of approximating the proportion the legitimate funds bear to those which have been created by the financial ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... imaginative on my part. This is the first spring in years we have resided here. It is really our summer home. I am not more than normally timorous. Some one we do not know enters the house at will. How or why I can't unravel. Nothing has ever disappeared, either money, jewels, or silver, though I have laid many traps. There is the huge fireplace in the library, and my room is above. I have heard a tapping, like some one hammering gently on stone. I have examined ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... else," said the excellent Mrs. Willett, with the air of one assisting to unravel ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... my history must remain in the shade, because time alone can unravel the mystery by which I am surrounded; and many important passages in my life, prudence forces me to conceal. But, my dear fellow, if my trials and sufferings will in any way reconcile you to your lot, and enable you to bear with fortitude your own, your ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... ambassadors to the pope, to the emperor, and to other Christian lords, accusing each other of breach of faith, and treachery. The ambassador carrying the letters of the prince was the clever Mikolaj of Rzeniewa, a man of great ability who could unravel the thread which was woven by the artifice of the Knights of the Cross, convincingly demonstrating the great wrongs done to the ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... and began to unravel the tangle of the day's events. He could remember voices which had circled around him, babbling endlessly; two negroes who had taken off his wet clothes, put him in dry things and wrapped him in blankets; and Matty, the cook, who had soothed ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... epithet 'dear' must be taken as conventional only, or perhaps may be more fitly taken in the sense in which we talk of a 'dear' bargain, meaning to imply how much it has cost us; and who shall say how many sleepless nights it has cost me to endeavor to unravel (a most appropriate verb) that ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... as to seem not only conclusive, but to preclude any other theory," says Alexander Humboldt, who, in his Examen Critique, made an exhaustive research into the Vespucci letters. Humboldt completely vindicated the character of Vespucci, leaving no shade of doubt upon his integrity, but he did not unravel the mystery. ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... Would she marry him? "My family," said he, "is respectable, and as it is not wealth we seek, I have an independence, at least equal, I should hope, to our wishes; but anything else which you may think mysterious about me I cannot unravel until you are indissolubly mine." It was a point of no slight difficulty; Emily entrusted its decision entirely to her mother. Her mother saw that the stranger was inflexible in his purpose, and she saw also that her child's happiness was inextricably linked ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... have got to unravel in this tangle. First off, there's your little girl, to find if she is still alive. Second, we must locate Dave Henderson or his grave. Third, there's something due the scoundrel who is responsible for this. Fourthly, brethren, there's that map section to find. And lastly, ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... the commander pressed forward and began to question her, she forgot her own terror in fear for her cause. She had all her wits about her instantly; and under a pretence of repeating what she had already told the first men, she gave them such a mixture of descriptions that the negro was called up to unravel it. She made out that they were trying to reach the big river by a certain road, and marched in the night as well as in the day. She admitted that she had never been on that road but once. And when she was taken along ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... Nature; he feeds on ideas; he feeds, through art, science, literature, and history, on the acts and thoughts of other minds; and could we take the mightiest intellect that ever awed and controlled the world, and unravel his powers, and return their constituent particles to the multitudinous objects whence they were derived, the last probe of our analysis, after we had stripped him of all his faculties, would touch that unquenchable fiery atom of personality ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... promises to give the public his nut-cracker if I do not, before the Budget is concluded, "unravel" the paradox, which is the mathematico-geometrical nut he has given me to crack. Mr. Smith is a crack man: he will crack his own nut; he will crack my shell; in the mean time he cracks himself up. Heaven send he do not crack himself into lateral ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... a strain cunningly calculated to flatter a deep, subtle spirit like that of Odysseus. To know all! to read all secrets, and unravel the tangled skein of human destiny! What a bribe was this to this restless and eager mind! Then the voices of the witch-women were so liquid, and the music so lovely, that they took the very air with ravishment, and ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... and so violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with registering the routine of consciousness but endeavours to trace its hidden mechanism and to unravel its physical causes, is driven to use the most frankly mythological language. The physiological processes concerned, though presupposed, are not on the scale of human perception and not traceable in detail; and the moral action, though familiar in snatches, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... astonishing how soon the whole conscience begins to unravel, if a single stitch drops; one little sin indulged makes a hole you could put ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... his high Displeasure with Mr S A for stiring up his Countrymen to attend to the Importance of our retaining a Common Right to the Newfd Ld fishery. Many wonderful Tales are & will be told, some of which a Sight of the secret Journals of Congress would unravel. I think the sooner those Journals are publishd the better. The People at large ought to know what that illustrious Body has been doing for them and the Part each Member has acted. We are now at Peace, God be thanked, ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... he cried. "I will answer for her innocence with my life. She could not do it. Your Majesty's patience is abused. It is Jennet who has done it—not she. But I will unravel the terrible mystery. You have the other two wretches prisoners, and can ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Although Communist, his new government successfully steered its own path between the Warsaw Pact nations and the West for the next four and a half decades. In the early 1990s, post-TITO Yugoslavia began to unravel along ethnic lines: Slovenia, Croatia, and The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia all declared their independence in 1991; Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. The remaining republics of Serbia and ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... intelligent inventor, we nevertheless parted in a wilderness of doubt. There was a mystery in the matter,—a surprise for the world or a surprise for ourselves,—which time, it would seem, with its busy thumb and finger, must be left to unravel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... not scientific, facts are not "observed and noted with scrupulous care," and conclusions are drawn without warranted data to support them. On the whole then, one must say that this work fails to unravel some "knots in this tangled skein of human endeavor and error." When after a survey of the history of the Negro during the last fifty years an investigator concludes that the Negro has shown an incapacity for commerce and finance, and that he must not struggle to equip himself in the same way ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... was for this," I said to myself—"it was to hear such propositions as this that I came to Sicily! That Polizzi is simply a scoundrel, and his son another; and they made a plan together to ruin me." But what was their scheme? I could not unravel it. Meanwhile, it may be imagined how discouraged ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many a Knot unravel'd by the Road; But not the ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... cried Hempstead, his eyes glittering with excitement. "That is an inspiration. I imagine that if anyone can unravel the mystery, it is ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... courageous as science—"ignorance pour laquelle concevoir il n'y a pas moins de science qu'a concevoir la science." And a propos of the immense traditional evidence which weighed with such men as Bodin, he says—"As for the proofs and arguments founded on experience and facts, I do not pretend to unravel these. What end of a thread is there to lay hold of? I often cut them as Alexander did his knot. Apres tout, c'est mettre ses conjectures a bien haut prix, que d'en faire cuire un ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... for full fifteen years, The war-torch has continued burning, yet No rest, no pause of conflict. Swede and German, Papist and Lutheran! neither will give way To the other, every hand's against the other. Each one is party and no one a judge. Where shall this end? Where's he that will unravel This tangle, ever tangling more and more; It must be cut asunder; I feel that I am the man of destiny, And trust, with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... the sun and the rain, The sweetness, the strife, the thing we call pain, And then unravel life's tangle again? ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... have embarked for America. He describes him in general terms, as the most incomprehensible and formidable among men; as engaged in schemes, reasonably suspected to be, in the highest degree, criminal, but such as no human intelligence is able to unravel: that his ends are pursued by means which leave it in doubt whether he be not in league with some infernal spirit: that his crimes have hitherto been perpetrated with the aid of some unknown but desperate accomplices: that he wages ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... there of all students of the German race. In France, nevertheless, his position as a saint was still obscure and doubtful, when Louis XI., towards the end of the fifteenth century, by some motive now difficult to unravel, but probably in order to take from his enemy, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, who was in possession of the fairest provinces of Charlemagne's empire, the exclusive privilege of so great a memory, ordained ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... money must ultimately come out of his own pocket? Because,—so Mr. Grey thought,—Augustus would not trust his own father. The creditors, if they could get hold of Mountjoy when his father was dead, and when the bonds would all become payable, might possibly so unravel the facts as to make it apparent that, after all, the property was Mountjoy's. This was not Mr. Grey's idea, but was Mr. Grey's idea of the calculation which Augustus was making for his own government. According to Mr. Grey's reading of all the facts of the case, such were the suspicions ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... be complete without reviewing his actions and estimating the results of his work in all these directions. But the difficulty of describing and judging him goes deeper. His was a singularly complex nature, a character hard to unravel. His individuality was extremely strong; all that he said or did bore its impress. Yet it was an individuality so far from being self-consistent as sometimes to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united in a single person. He might with equal truth be ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... her, a Mrs. Brown. Zoe was now free of the housework. She had a companion when I was away on my work about the farm. And I felt relieved. But my mind and heart were full of problems. There was always Zoe! There was always Lamborn, skulking in the shadows of my speculations. How would I unravel this tangle ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... for which we strive. Mortal conflict sanctified by religion, devastation idealized by literature, pillage justified by patriotism, fellow-destruction ennobled by self-sacrifice—these form a complex of contradictory emotions from which men are as yet unable to unravel the one essential characteristic of war; namely, the attempt to dispense justice in a trial by battle, and make it stand out in its revealed inconsistency, dissociated from its traditional concomitants of which it is neither part nor parcel. The romance of knighthood and chivalry still appeals ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... ague. All cases of ague are cases of a certain kind. Therefore it is best in all cases to give the patient water." Philotas having propounded his argument in this way, challenged the physician to point out the fallacy of it; and while the physician sat perplexed and puzzled in his attempts to unravel the intricacy of it, the company enjoyed a temporary ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... ordinary gentleness could be here to-night, faced even by so great exposure, yet be so solicitous for him as she had been and then at the same time be plotting against him. I gave it up, determining to let Kennedy unravel it in ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... hope to unravel the lines of his ancestry. In all the wonderfully mixed and varied dog-tribe I never saw any creature very much like him, though in some of his sly, soft, gliding motions and gestures he brought the fox to mind. He was short-legged ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... discovery, but now that I looked down upon the great inland sea lying nestled in the very heart of Africa, and thought how vainly mankind had sought these sources throughout so many ages, and reflected that I had been the humble instrument permitted to unravel this portion of the great mystery when so many greater than I had failed, I felt too serious to vent my feelings in vain cheers for victory, and I sincerely thanked God for having guided and supported us through all dangers to the good end. I was about 1,500 feet above the lake, ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... had not been in his power to look upon the young lady without being dazzled; and the uneasiness he felt at following the muleteer at a distance, and the fear lest any accident might happen by the way that should deprive him of his conquest, taught him to unravel his thoughts. He was more than usually delighted, when, being arrived safe at home, he saw the chest unloaded. He dismissed the muleteer, and having caused a slave to shut the door of his house, opened the chest, helped the lady out, gave ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... Could not give him greater knowledge. Savage mind could not unravel All the meaning of this marvel. Fear forbade him touch the arrow Lest he should destroy the green shoot; So he left the tender leaflets Reaching upward to the sunlight, Sought again the lifeless maiden For whose love his soul had hungered; Knelt beside her in the forest, With the awe of death ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten
... too, even to the naked eye through the ports of the supply-ship the enemy rockets had become visible. They were a thin skein of threads of white vapor which seemed to unravel in nothingness. The vapor curled and expanded preposterously. It could just be seen to be jetting into existence from four separate points, two a little ahead of the others. They came out from Earth ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... only to escape the intricate tangle of life's demands that enmeshed him, and which in his present condition he was unable to unravel. He had gone to Joseph Alexeevich's house, on the plea of sorting the deceased's books and papers, only in search of rest from life's turmoil, for in his mind the memory of Joseph Alexeevich was connected with a world of eternal, solemn, and calm thoughts, quite contrary to the restless confusion ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... steamship, and the practical projects that loom so large to the unreflecting, are but the result of the application of thought to things. The mechanical powers and forces of Nature are open secrets for all who will undertake to unravel the mystery. And so it is with essential and moral principles. The one who will have himself rooted and grounded in the fundamental principles of things can look with complacence upon the panorama of the world's progress. The Negro should plant one ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... heavy with sleep, could not unravel the memories of the night. He knew only that he had had unpleasant dreams; perhaps he had wept. The one thing he could recall was a pale face, rising from among the black veils of unconsciousness, around which all his dreams were centered. It was not Josephina; the face ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the Padre does not know how to unravel the thread. How fast he talks to the Colonel Sahib!' Mahbub Ali chuckled. 'By Allah!' the keen eyes swept the veranda for an Instant—'thy lama has sent what to me looks like a note of hand. I have had some few dealings in hoondis. The Colonel ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... occasionally give a good deal of trouble. Symptoms of strangulation have been well marked, yet when the sac is opened nothing is to be seen except a mass of omentum, perhaps tolerably healthy-looking. To reduce this en masse would be very unsafe; it is necessary carefully to unravel it, and disengage the knuckle of bowel which is almost certainly included in it, and which has given rise to ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... phonetic laws of each language had been more carefully elaborated, it was but too frequently forgotten that words have a history as well as a growth, and that the history of a word must be explored first, before an attempt is made to unravel its growth. Thus it was extremely tempting to derive paradise from the Sanskrit parade{s}a. The compound para-de{s}a was supposed to mean the highest or a distant country, and all the rest seemed so evident as to require no further elucidation. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... think. How came it that the side of the book which showed my takings was so clear and easily to be understood, but the side which showed their takings wrapt in mystery and hieroglyphics such as not even the world's leading financiers and mathematicians could hope to unravel? My subaltern, being consulted, agreed with me; I would have had him carpeted by the C.O. at once if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... he explored the wondrous zone of the Milky Way, gauged its depths, measured its dimensions, and, in attempting to unravel the intricacies of its structure, penetrated its recesses far beyond the limit attained by any other observer. Acting on the assumption that the stars are uniformly distributed throughout space, Herschel, ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... morning he had been talking with some one in the office about it, and had been laughingly informed that there was a method that could bring back to his memory that which he desired so ardently to recollect. "If you will tell me how to unravel this tangle that is in my brain, you will have my everlasting ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... it seems essential that the St. Petersburg Cabinet, whose desire to unravel this crisis peacefully is manifest, should immediately give their adherence to the British proposal. This proposal must be strongly supported at Berlin in order to decide [Secretary of State] Von Jagow ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... minute and clean the lamps. Your father's out pulling up the floor-boards in the barn and Mr. O'Neill's digging up the lilac bush for the third time. And that's enough. It beats me how Mr. O'Neill can go on rememberin' so much now he's got his memory started. He just seems to unravel things out of it overnight. It keeps me all worked up. I feel as if I ought to whisper when I speak and every night the minute I get to sleep I find myself diggin' in first one outlandish place and then another. And if I'm not diggin' ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Shem in their own places. Would Noah, who was so much disgusted at his son Ham as to curse him, permit the children of his other sons, whom he blessed, to have any communication with his children? Bishop Cumberland, in the last century, took some pains to unravel this, and concluded that the marginal translation in our bibles is the right one—that in the text being, "Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh", &c.; that in the margin, "And he [Nimrod] went out ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... marvelling more and more at the atrocious nature of our crime which could thus avail to intercept even his last adieus. I, for my part, never saw him again; nor, as I have reason to think, did Lord Westport. Neither did we ever unravel the mystery. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... recruit from distant Australia, by name Richard Hodgson. Hodgson, unlike Sidgwick and Myers and many others of his associates, had not engaged in psychical research from the hope that the truths of the Bible might thereby be demonstrated. His motive was that of the detective eager to unravel mysteries. From his boyhood he had had a singular fondness for solving tricks and puzzles of all sorts; and when, in 1878, he came to England to complete his education at Cambridge, he naturally gravitated into the company of Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, as men busied ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... perceived," observes an author by no means friendly to the Huguenots, "that the accident (of Conde's death) had happened only in order to reveal in all its splendor the merits of the Admiral de Chatillon. The admiral had had during his entire life very difficult and complicated matters to unravel, and, nevertheless, he had never had any that were not far below his abilities, and in which, consequently, he had no need of exerting his full capacity. Thus those qualities that were rarest, and that exalted him most above others, remained hidden, through lack of opportunity, and ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... healest all imperfect sight, Thou so content'st me, when thou solv'st my doubt, That ignorance not less than knowledge charms. Yet somewhat turn thee back," I in these words Continu'd, "where thou saidst, that usury Offends celestial Goodness; and this knot Perplex'd unravel." He thus made reply: "Philosophy, to an attentive ear, Clearly points out, not in one part alone, How imitative nature takes her course From the celestial mind and from its art: And where her laws the Stagyrite unfolds, Not many leaves scann'd ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... doing so. The complicated state of foreign politics made it imperative that there should be no friction between the Powers. Yet here a great number of them were in perhaps as embarrassing a position as ever diplomatists were called upon to unravel. When nine dogs are assembled round one bone, it is rarely on the bone alone that teeth-marks are found at ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... Commission of 1867-'68 did prepare the way for the great Pacific Railroads, which, for better or worse, have settled the fate of the buffalo and Indian forever. There have been wars and conflicts since with these Indians up to a recent period too numerous and complicated in their detail for me to unravel and record, but they have been the dying struggles of a singular race of brave men fighting against destiny, each less and less violent, till now the wild game is gone, the whites too numerous and powerful; so that the ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... all time, but there was no room in his brain for an impure thought. Notwithstanding he was still a young man, being but fifty years of age, nevertheless he had attained distinct success and fame as a musician, composer, scientist, inventor, architect, and athlete. He endeavored to unravel all the mysteries of nature which attracted his attention. One of the many occult forces he experimented with was human magnetism. It was his belief that man could preserve himself indefinitely, either in a state of animation or suspended vitality, by the ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... battle-fields; dark of counsel, and terrible of execution; him to whom in after years the Empress Sophia sent word that he was more fit to spin among maids than to command armies, and he answered, that he would spin her such a thread as she could not unravel; and kept his word (as legends say) by ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... if the golden age was dawning: the human mind seemed to be awakening from the slumber of centuries to con the world, to unravel the mysteries of life, and to discover the secrets of the universe. Confident that only a little thought would be necessary to free the world from vice, ignorance, and superstition, thinkers now turned boldly to attack the vexing problems of religion and morality, to criticize state, society, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... though one may be as early as 1348; there are others of a religions nature which belong to the author's later years. The allusions in these poems are so obscure that it would in most cases be hopeless to seek to unravel the meaning had not the author left us a key in a letter to Martino da Signa, prior of the Augustinians. Many of the subjects are purely conventional, such as those of the early poems on the loves of the shepherds, the historical panegyrics ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... still appears most wise, And rolls at church her saint-like eyes; Talks very much, plays idle tricks, While rising stock [Footnote: South Sea, 1720.] her conscience pricks; When being, poor thing, extremely gravel'd, The secrets op'd, and all unravel'd. But on she will, and secrets tell Of John and Joan, and Ned and Nell, Reviling every one she knows, As fancy leads, beneath the rose. Her tongue, so voluble and kind, It always runs before her mind; As times do serve, she slyly pleads, And copious tears still show her needs. With promises ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... existence of deaf relatives. It is unfortunate that in these returns it is impossible to distinguish between degrees of relationship, but in such an extensive compilation it was doubtless impracticable to attempt to unravel the intricacies of consanguinity. Judging from the returns of the Census of Ireland we may assume that about half of the cases returned ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... merely feel for them, but feel with them. He does not merely describe their actions from the outside, attributing them arbitrarily to motives which are pretty sure to be the lowest possible, because it is easier to conceive a low motive than a lofty one, and to call a man a villain than to unravel patiently the tangled web of good and evil of which his thoughts are composed. He has attempted to conceive of his characters as he would if they had been his own contemporaries and equals, acting, speaking in his company; and he has therefore thought himself bound ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... terminate in the second Empire. The letters constituted a sort of concise journal, narrating events as they occurred, and drawing hopes and suggestions from each of them. Eugene was full of faith. He described Prince Louis Bonaparte to his father as the predestined necessary man who alone could unravel the situation. He had believed in him prior even to his return to France, at a time when Bonapartism was treated as a ridiculous chimera. Felicite understood that her son had been a very active secret agent since 1848. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... back on his pillow and seemed trying to unravel the tangled thoughts which perplexed him. Once more the dame came and brought him a cooling drink. He drank it, thanked her, and fell back with ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... states of Europe, as Britain, as France, as Spain, and jealously ever since have we individually regarded any infringement on our integrity. That, and not the mere tangle of race that in time must unravel itself, is the question of the age. Long ago it was said that our people, holding it by transmission, never having struggled for it, would some day cease rightly to value the one chief bulwark of liberty. Nothing is more true. They of the North will lose it, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Vettorio Ghiberti's drawing of a bell, the rim of which is covered with similar hieroglyphics. The artist has transcribed in plain writing a pleasant Latin motto which one may presume to be the subject of the inscription. If this were accurately deciphered a clue might be found to unravel this ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... he do to assist her? The very knowledge that she had voluntarily appealed to him, that she had come to him secretly with her trouble, brought strange happiness. Moreover his former acquaintance with Mrs. Dupont gave him a clue to the mystery. Yet how was he going to unravel the threads, discover the motive, find out the various conspirators? What were they really after? Money probably, but possibly revenge. What did the woman know which enabled her to wield such influence over McDonald? What was the trap they ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... the murder. Unfortunately, when I had read a few pages more, I found that I had picked the wrong person. Then I accused another character on perfectly good circumstantial evidence, and he was not the man. After that I decided to withdraw from the detective business and let Miss SILBERRAD unravel her mystery for herself. If you are of the opinion that a woman cannot keep a secret read The Mystery of Barnard Hanson and become convinced that Miss SILBERRAD at least is an exception. If I have ever read a more perfectly sustained mystery novel I cannot recall it. There is just a chance ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... mystery, and we determined to wait patiently for its developement. "If," said I, "it bodes us good, time will unravel it." "And if," said my husband, "it bodes us evil, some d—d good-natured friend will tell ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... possession of his lodging, there was nothing to prevent our departure. He could have gone with us at that time of the year very well, but he was in the full novelty of his new position and was making most energetic attempts to unravel the mysteries of the fatal suit. Consequently we went without him, and my darling was delighted to praise ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... constant forces. When another body, however, is introduced, with its varying attraction, first on one and then on the other, complications are introduced that only the most masterly minds can follow. Introduce a dozen or a million bodies, and complications arise that only Omniscience can unravel. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Capella is leaving London for the North. She must not be regarded in our operations. The woman is weighted with a secret. I am sorry for her. I prefer to allow events as supplied by others to unravel the skein. Secondly, Jiro and his wife, and all who visit them, or whom they visit, must be watched incessantly. Get all the force required for this operation in its fullest sense. You, with one trusted ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... the illustrated catalogue of this interesting collection.” “Banded mail,” as it is called, has been one of the archæological difficulties “of the past and present generations, and the late Mr. Burges took great trouble in endeavouring to unravel the mystery of its construction . . . having casts made from the only four then known . . . effigies (with it) at Tewkesbury, Tollard Royal, Bedford, and Newton Solney; but . . . he had to confess, in the end, that he could make nothing satisfactory of it. Here, at Kirkstead, is the fifth known ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... old man. "You're beginning to use your brain a little. You're beginning to realize the value of money—and you don't like it. Well, you can unravel your own tangle. Don't ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... original has "the daemon" ([Greek: daimonion]), which is Fortune, as the context shows. It is not very easy to unravel all the ancient notions about Fortune, Nemesis, and the like personifications. The opinion that the deity, or the daemon, looks with an envious eye on a man's prosperity and in the end pays him off with some equivalent loss, is very common ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... egress, he passed onward with a graceful gesture of acknowledgment. He had taken but a few steps, when the thought occurred to me that he must have come from within the perplexing structure by some secret door, and that he could unravel its mystery. I was impelled to follow him, and proceeded hastily to do so, when the indelicacy of my intrusion on one evidently connected with the grief which the monument was designed to commemorate, flashed upon me, and I suddenly paused. He probably observed my rapid footsteps ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Unpack elpaki. Unpardonable nepardonebla. Unpleasant malplacxa. Unpolished (surface) malglata. Unpretending neafektema, simpla. Unprincipled malhonesta, senprincipa. Unproductive senfrukta. Unpublished neeldonita. Unquiet malkvieta. Unravel maltordi. Unrecognisable nerekonebla. Unremitting sencxesa. Unreserved nerezerva. Unrestrained nedetena, libera. Unroll malruli, malfaldi. Unroof maltegmenti. Unruffled trankvila, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... though some secret foe were nigh, He spake: "Mac Kyle! a counsel for thine ear! A man of counsel I, as thou of war! The people love this stranger. Patrick slain, Their wrath will blaze against us, and demand An ERIC for his head. Let us by craft Unravel first HIS craft: then safe our choice; We slay a traitor, or great ransom take: Impostors lack not gold. Lay me as dead Upon a bier: above me spread yon cloth, And make your wail: and when the seer draws nigh Worship him, crying, 'Lo, our friend is dead! Kneel, prophet, ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... has to be based largely on conjecture. The author of this bit of fun-making, which is couched in old-time slang, died without making known the key to his cipher, and no one whom the present writer has met with is able to unravel its full meaning. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... finally stir the filaments of the retina. The motion thus imparted is transmitted with measurable, and not very great velocity to the brain, where, by a process which the science of mechanics does not even tend to unravel, the tremor of the nervous matter is converted into ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... answer to all the questions that may arise from the reading of the Bible, and the finite mind should not be discouraged if it fails to fathom the reasons of the Infinite Intelligence. If there are mysteries in the Bible that we cannot unravel they are not greater than the mysteries in nature with which we must deal whether ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... have, with very little modification, persisted up to the present day. Probably the playing cards in common use were printed by the same crude method as were the images, and unfortunately history has failed to unravel just what that method was. They may possibly have been stenciled. All we have been able to learn is that cards, images (which were in reality religious pictures), and stenciled altar cloths—the first primitive printing on cloth—all appeared ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... made use of this to bring about a marriage between the young king, Francis Phoebus, and Joanna Beltraneja, Isabella's former competitor for the crown of Castile, notwithstanding this princess had long since taken the veil in the convent of Santa Clara at Coimbra. It is not easy to unravel the tortuous politics of King Louis. The Spanish writers impute to him the design of enabling Joanna by this alliance to establish her pretensions to the Castilian throne, or at least to give such employment ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... you're sore as a thumb with a bone felon. Take yore time, son. Don't go off half-cocked." The little Captain rose and put his hand on the shoulder of the boy. "I reckon things have got in a sort of kink for you. Give 'em time to unravel, Tex." ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... sixteenth of a hint to rush armed with full fervour into the mysteries of his system. Mrs. Gunilla took up a packet of old gold thread, which she set herself to unravel, whilst the ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Dowdeswill said: "On the repeal of the Stamp Act, all America was quiet; but in the following year you would go in pursuit of your peppercorn—you would collect from peppercorn to peppercorn—you would establish taxes as tests of obedience. Unravel the whole conduct of America; you will find out the fault is at home." Pownall, former Governor of Massachusetts and earnest advocate of American rights, said: "The dependence of the colonies is a part of the British Constitution. I hope, for the sake of this country, for the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... however, Mr. Orr, who entered the council some time after the rupture, produced his appointment, which, unlike certain others, was expressed in the legal form. Thus again all the previous proceedings were quashed; and the governor, unable to unravel the difficulty, dismissed the council, to await instructions from Downing-street, or a warrant for the nominees under the sign-manual of the Queen (July, 1847). Thus during 1847 there was no legislature sitting, ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... "absorbing" story, in which the excitement and expectation are sustained up to the very last scene, but be sure that the theme is essentially such that in the last scenes, if not before, your action will unravel the knot that has become so tantalizingly tangled as the play proceeded. No matter how promising a theme may be in other respects, it is foredoomed to failure if from it comes a plot of which the spectator will say as he goes ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... Sally, it is true, a woman with a wounded heart to nurse, an aching misery to bear; but she left her with a sanity of purpose which can take up the tangled threads and, however blinded be the eyes with weeping, with fingers feeling their way, can unravel the knotted ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... considerable preamble, Sinkum began the following remarkable tale, all told in such strange Chinkee patter, and with so much self-praise interspersed, that it took the listeners' whole attention to unravel it. ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... superiority of his reason and logic. After long and patient meditation on the subject, we have been forced to the conclusion, that the only way to repel the argument of the sceptic, and cause the intrinsic lustre of man's free-agency to appear, is to unravel and refute ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... and the changing moon have power over us—why not? Do they not have influence over the rest of nature? But we can only unravel their more august and hidden secrets, by giving full wing to the creative spirit which first taught us their elementary nature, and which, when released from earth, will have full range to wander over their brilliant fields. ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... still about it. One day he was boasting to one of his neighbors, and he said, "The girl is so clever that not even the King himself could ask her a question she couldn't answer, or read her a riddle she couldn't unravel." ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... be able to prove; but what this will amount to, he knows not. And next, that he hath taken money for several bargains that have been made with the Crown; and did instance one that is already complained of: but there are so many more involved in it, that, should they unravel things of this sort, every body almost will be more or less concerned. But these are the two great points which he thinks they will insist on, and prove against him. Thence I to the Chapel, and there heard the sermon and a pretty ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... first man bold enough to wish to go out and unravel the mystery of the west now walked in chains from a Spanish ship to a Spanish prison! It was monstrous ingratitude, all declared; and they did not hesitate to show their sympathy. The story of his disgrace traveled rapidly, and everywhere it brought out the better nature of ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... representations. This new application of chemistry is a most interesting one, which shows that we do not stand still, and as long as arts and science are permitted to be practised by us we are not intended to stand still, but to exercise our minds to the utmost to unravel those mysteries of nature that are ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... designs in gold and azure and vermilion fill up the details; and on each side there is a confessional wherein all members, whether large or diminutive, whether dressed in corduroy or smoothest, blackest broad cloth, in silk or Surat cotton, must unravel the sins they have committed. This confession must be a hard sort of job, we know, for some people; but we are not going to enter upon a discussion of its merits or demerits. Only this may be said, that if there was full confession at every place of worship in Preston ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... together with numerous other incidents, which the boys could not understand, or unravel, made such an impression on them, that they were determined to devote their energies to ferret out the inexplicable things, and the earnestness of John was a great incentive ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... Oliver, to think, or rather to unravel my own entangled thoughts. Do not suffer me to continue in a state of delusion, if thou perceivest it to be such. Be explicit; tell me if thou dost but so much as forebode: for at moments I myself despond; though at others ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... such a pungent odour of truth. The Dangerous Age contains pages dealing with women's smiles and tears, with their love of dress and desire to please, and with the social relations between themselves and the male sex, which will certainly irritate some feminine readers. Let them try to unravel the real cause of their annoyance: perhaps they will perceive that they are actually vexed because a woman has betrayed the freemasonry that exists among their own sex. We must add that we are dealing here ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... he passed the next-door building, that the distracted Jew was no longer visible. It seemed plain that the person or the event he had awaited with such obvious nervousness had arrived and passed; one more of the problems, anxieties or crises that join and unravel moment by moment in the human ant-hill of London, had perhaps closed for good or ill within the past half-hour; perhaps it ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... rapidly back to San Pasqual, and such was his perturbation that he sought to have "Doc" Taylor unravel ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... gems between London and Amsterdam in a singularly audacious manner. My second was the case of the celebrated Russian swindler, who called herself the Countess Demikoff. This case alone took me nearly six months to unravel, but I did not grudge the time, seeing that I was well paid for my labours, and that I managed to succeed where the police had failed. From that time forward I think I may say without boasting that I have been as successful as any man of my age has a right to expect ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... single moment did a weak or yielding desire creep around his heart. Subtly as the scheme was varnished, and scarce a tithe of its comprehensive enormity unfolded, the strong and acute mind of one long accustomed to unravel sophistry and gaze on the loveliness of truth, saw at once that the scheme proposed was of the most unmingled treachery and baseness. Sick, chilled, withering at heart, Glendower leaned against the damp wall; as every word which ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The author confessed it, indeed, on his last page. "There seems to be little ground for hope that we shall be ever able to gain a perfectly true insight into the history of the epoch with which we have attempted to deal, or to unravel the meshes of so tangled a web." He felt his task, as he put it, to be not unlike that of gathering up the broken pieces of pottery from some ancient tomb, with the hope of fitting them together so as to make one ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... one in the wide world from which she has been so long excluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities". Poe's commentary is most to the point: "Why do some persons fatigue themselves in endeavours to unravel such phantasy pieces as the 'Lady of Shallot'? As well unweave the ventum textilem".—'Democratic Review', Dec., 1844, quoted by Mr. Herne Shepherd. Mr. Palgrave says (selection from the 'Lyric Poems of ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... secluded men, he had his vanity in pronounced degree. He saw himself now, the dominant figure in this city of thirty thousand people, the man who had been selected by the chief of police as the one able to unravel the web of mystery surrounding this startling murder. The thought pleased him, and he smiled. He began to think about himself and about life ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... respectfully. Care and hard work had already imprinted their insignia upon his fresh young face; for evidently he had not been in the Service for nothing. As a matter of fact, his greatest joy was to labour at a tangled case, and successfully to unravel it. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... had a dim hope that Mr. Corbin might in some way manage to unravel the mystery, and yet she could not see that he had anything more tangible to work upon than she ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... and in the hall said: "I will continue to watch you unravel the threads of this mystery, if ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... indefinable, yet persistent "something" came into being, almost threatening to dispel the drowsy mist then pervading my brain. The slow thought waves gradually ceased their surging, and after a slight pause began to collect round the offending mystery, as if seeking to unravel it in a half-hearted sort of way. They gave me to understand that the "something" recurred at intervals, and even suggested that it might be a voice, though from which side of the elastic dividing line it emanated they were ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... destiny, and for the furtherance of his education, he inhabited for two memorable weeks. He learned there more lessons than a few, and encountered more tangled skeins of destiny than he is ever likely to unravel. The matter has so direct a bearing, both on the subject of architecture and of democracy, that it is worth ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... closed her book. "I was quite prepared to hear it," she said; "all the unpleasant complications since your Divorce—and Heaven only knows how many of them have presented themselves—have been left for me to unravel. It so happens—though I was too modest to mention it prematurely—that I have unraveled this complication. If one only has eyes to see it, there is a way out of every difficulty that can possibly happen." She pushed the book that she had been reading across the table to Catherine. "Turn ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... Resolved to unravel by himself the tangled thread of this mystery, the detective determined to keep his conjectures to himself; for the same reason he was silent as to the interview which he had overheard between Madeleine ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links of the connection between its several parts. I am myself as little able to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, as those critics found themselves to unravel my logic. Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case. I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according to my own original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far this design is kept in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... second volume, or Geoffrey would be sure to run away with it. If Edward was in a hurry to go out, Geoffrey would hide his cap, and keep him a quarter of an hour hunting for it. The girls dared not leave their worsted-work within his reach for a moment; for he would unravel the canvass, or chop up the wool, or go on with the work after a pattern of his own composing, so that they would be obliged to spend half an hour ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... blessing, or more grandly drawing St. Peter's in fire upon the wild gloom of a March night, and in vast procession of two or three thousand marching down the narrow Corso singing a national song to the Pope—all this, if you can unravel it, paints for the eye what can never be seen at home. "I pack my trunk and wake up in Naples," and find myself, for which I am grateful; but I also find Italian beauty, which is like American as oranges are ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... was immersed during his last years are difficult to unravel and still more difficult to illuminate, for they had their dim origin in the secret thoughts and wavering purposes of ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... through the book is so disjointedly arranged, mixed up with doctrinal parts, and repeated, that it is not easy to unravel it. The following summary of it is contained in a letter to Colonel John Wentworth of Chicago, signed by Joseph Smith, Jr., which was printed in Wentworth's Chicago newspaper and also in the Mormon Times and Seasons of March ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... resort to dream analysis instead of taking the history of the case in the usual way. In all cases the patient should be permitted to tell her story in her own way. This method of procedure, with cross questioning, may and should indeed be sufficient to unravel the case for us in most cases. But if we find that we have not gained the confidence of the patient and have not that condition of being en rapport with the patient which is essential for progress and success in the analysis, one may resort to dream analysis, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... witness's mind, but only a conventional symbol of that impression. Written documents, then, are not, as material documents are, valuable by themselves; they are only valuable as signs of psychological operations, which are often complicated and hard to unravel. The immense majority of the documents which furnish the historian with starting-points for his reasonings are nothing else than traces ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... him to fail, in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four, and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he could not unravel. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... never try to read it," said Sir Norman. "I am about tired of this labyrinth of mysteries, and shall save time and La Masque to unravel them at their leisure." ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... seems essential that the St. Petersburg Cabinet, whose desire to unravel this crisis peacefully is manifest, should immediately give their adherence to the British proposal. This proposal must be strongly supported at Berlin in order to decide [Secretary of State] Von Jagow to take real action at Vienna capable of stopping ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... fate first to attempt to unravel the tangles of this attractive web. In the course of our readings, in 1865, our attention had been drawn to a passage in the life of Nelson by the Laureate of England, Robert Southey, [132] and enlarged on by Lamartine in the pleasant sketch he gave of the naval hero. Our investigations ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... 1880, and are suitably exposed in the illustrated catalogue of this interesting collection.” “Banded mail,” as it is called, has been one of the archæological difficulties “of the past and present generations, and the late Mr. Burges took great trouble in endeavouring to unravel the mystery of its construction . . . having casts made from the only four then known . . . effigies (with it) at Tewkesbury, Tollard Royal, Bedford, and Newton Solney; but . . . he had to confess, in the end, that he ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... up before he reached the valley. He could not unravel the warp and woof of his life. The gossamer threads of the webs he had begun to weave about himself so lightly in the heyday of his youth and prosperity and happiness had thickened into cables and petrified; it was impossible to break through the ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... upon their trial. Therefore, they had arranged this farce, for so it would seem to them, whereby both the offenders might escape the legal consequences of their offence, trusting, doubtless, to accident and the future to unravel this web of forced marriage, and to free Aziel from a priestly rank which he had not sought. It was only necessary that Elissa should formally choose him as her husband, and that Aziel should go through rite of throwing a few grains of incense upon ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... related to me, during the long winter days and evenings spent of necessity by the fire, stories drawn from his campaigns in the Netherlands and France and Scotland, speaking freely and most instructively. But he had never helped me to unravel the mystery why he, so unlike other soldiers in habits and tastes, should have chosen the profession ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... will be your engaging task to unravel, and to this end will be your opportunity of closely watching Fuh-sang's unsuspecting movements in my ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... golden age was dawning: the human mind seemed to be awakening from the slumber of centuries to con the world, to unravel the mysteries of life, and to discover the secrets of the universe. Confident that only a little thought would be necessary to free the world from vice, ignorance, and superstition, thinkers now turned boldly to attack the vexing problems ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... winding one of Blanche's silks over the back of a chair, and so often looking up to revel in the contemplation of Harry's face, that her skein was in a wild tangle, which she studiously concealed lest the sight should compel Richard to come and unravel it with those ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... defend 'penny dreadfuls.' Chesterton assumes this role. He defends them on their remarkable powers of imagination. One has only to study Sexton Blake to discover the intricate psychology of that wondrous personality who can solve the foulest murder or unravel stories that the divorce ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... and power to charm—she gave no hint. She was still absorbing, sifting and digesting the welter of impressions. She had been overpowered, smothered by the innovation; and she now found her thoughts a tangled jumble, which she strove incessantly to unravel and classify according to their content of reality, as judged by ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... return, it has not so much as appeared that he remembers anything of what he has done; and I acknowledge I have a curiosity to know what it is has changed him so: it would not be very difficult for me to unravel this affair," added she; "the Viscount de Chartres, his intimate friend, is in love with a lady with whom I have some power, and I'll know by that means the occasion of this alteration." The Queen-Dauphin spoke with an air of sincerity ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... Breslau. A more incongruous collection I never saw, and I am sure that had it not been for the train of thought I was pursuing when the director called upon me, I should have returned the papers to him without troubling my head with any attempt to unravel the man's story. ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... Things to him, that might (if Love had not made him blind) have reclaimed him from the Pursuit of his Ruin. But whatever they trusted him with, she had the Art to wind herself about his Heart, and make him unravel all his Secrets; and then knew as well, by feign'd Sighs and Tears, to make him disbelieve all; so that he had no Faith but for her; and was wholly inchanted and bewitch'd by her. At last, in spite of all that would have opposed it, he marry'd this famous Woman, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... dinner-table is set diagonally in the long dining-room, and to-morrow, at least, the guests will have to take two turns at filling its twenty seats, while the children go through the same manoeuvre in the pantry. Where they will all sleep to-night is a mystery which none can unravel save the busy, hospitable "lady of the manor;" but it makes little difference, for there will be little sleeping done. The day passes in riding-parties and rowing-parties and similar amusements, as each ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... though well aware that I can only imperfectly and unworthily do so. To treat the subject in the detail it merits would be a task beyond my opportunities; for, in spite of every endeavour, I have not been able to see several works and documents, without which it is useless to try and unravel the earlier history of the sanctuary. The book by Caccia, for example, published by Sessali at Novara in 1565, and reprinted at Brescia in 1576, is sure to turn up some day, but I have failed to find it at Varallo, Novara ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... as handsome men have on good women: they would like to touch them. Well! if fear had not kept her back, Gervaise would have liked to have handled death, to see what it was like. She became so peculiar at times, holding her breath, listening attentively, expecting to unravel the secret through one of Bazouge's movements, that Coupeau would ask her with a chuckle if she had a fancy for that gravedigger next door. She got angry and talked of moving, the close proximity of this neighbor was so distasteful to her; and yet, in spite of herself, ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... of the student of human evolution to unravel the tangled threads of human histories. The task is relatively simple when it is concerned with recent times where the aid of written history may be summoned but when the events of remote and prehistoric ages are ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... If the great mass of people only knew how strong is the net woven by the theologians, how difficult it is to break the threads of it, how much erudition has been spent upon it, and what a power of criticism is required to unravel it all.... I have noticed that some men of talent who have set themselves too late in life the task have been taken in the toils and have not been able ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... That will be best; send him back to the Brothers and to the wise Bishops. They can unravel this tangle. I cannot; I cannot be sure of ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... It is a book among books. It is a phenomenon among phenomena. Its origin and growth in this world can be studied as those of any other natural object can be studied. The old apple-tree growing in my garden is the witness to me of some transcendent truths, the shrine of mysteries that I cannot unravel. What the life is that was hidden in the seed from which it sprang, and that has shaped all its growth, coordinating the forces of nature, and producing this individual form and this particular variety ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... conception, the big, tall man contemplating thus reverently, with bared head, the tender epitome of life. The dog, with head upraised, points a comprehending nose in the direction of his poet-master's find, and looks as if he longed to help him unravel the mystery. MacDowell would adore this piece of sculpture, for he sought the secret of life in flower and brook and landscape, in mountain and ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... experienced adversary, who had the advantage of knowing in advance just what his witness would testify. It was for him to lead a stubborn and unwilling witness through the mazes of a well-prepared story, to unravel, if possible, some of its well-planned knots and convince the jury if he could that the witness was not reliable and ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... have detailed to you. A person observing the occurrence of certain facts and phenomena asks, naturally enough, what process, what kind of operation known to occur in Nature applied to the particular case, will unravel and explain the mystery? Hence you have the scientific hypothesis; and its value will be proportionate to the care and completeness with which its basis had been tested and verified. It is in these matters as in the commonest affairs of practical life: the guess ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... for Christians to "test" where they cannot understand? "Ye are my friends," said the blessed Lord, "if ye do whatsoever I command you." Obedience will solve difficulties that reasoning cannot unravel. ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... soldiers and the citizens, nearly a third part of the city was consumed to ashes. A few incendiaries fell a sacrifice to the rage of the soldiers, and many individuals were arrested on suspicion, but no clue was found to unravel the mystery, though no doubt can exist that the fearful deed was committed by order of the American general. The act has been applauded as one emanating from stern patriotism and self-devotion, but it appears rather to have proceeded ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... our sharp points, and unravel the complications of things; we should attemper our brightness, and bring ourselves into agreement with the obscurity of others. How pure and still the Tao is, as if it would ever ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... the ideal modern life, even when one is anxious to conform to it, began tugging at all the strands of difficulty at once, not seeing them very clearly, but still with no notion but that if he set his strength to it, he could unravel them all in the half-hour's walk that lay between him ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... meant nothing, and only bodily suffering obtruded on a still partially clouded mind. Fragmentary waves of thought, disconnected and transitory, passed through his brain, leaving no permanent impression, and he made no effort to unravel them. Effort of any kind, mental or physical, seemed for the moment beyond him. He was too tired even to open his eyes, and lay with them closed, wondering feebly at the pain and discomfort of his whole body. He had the sensation of having been battered, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... revealed in the insulting mandate of the empress Sophia, "that he should leave to men the exercise of arms, and return to his proper station among the maidens of the palace, where a distaff should be again placed in the hand of the eunuch." "I will spin her such a thread as she shall not easily unravel!" is said to have been the reply which indignation and conscious virtue extorted from the hero. Instead of attending, a slave and a victim, at the gate of the Byzantine palace, he retired to Naples, from whence (if any credit is due to the belief of the times) Narses invited ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... companion so uncommunicative, Elfric remained silent, trusting that a few minutes would unravel the mystery. ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... secrets, Lady Penwether, which people do like to unravel, but which the owners of them sometimes won't abandon." Then there was nothing more said on the subject. Lady Penwether did not smile again, and left him to go about the room on her business as hostess, as soon as the dance was over. But she was ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... envoy into Arcadia to dissuade her from a proposed alliance with Athens, and there had to contend with the Athenian orator Callistratus. The complicated relations of the different Grecian States now became so complicated, that it is useless, in a book like this, to attempt to unravel them. Negotiations between Athens and Persia, the efforts of Corinth and other cities to secure peace, the ambition of Athens to maintain ascendency on the sea, the creation of a Theban navy—these and other events must ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... to sum up our conclusions respecting the origin and development of this literary phase. Difficult as it is to unravel the tangled network of obscure influences which surrounded its birth, I venture to think that a sufficiently complete disproof of that extreme theory, which would ascribe it entirely to Guevara's influence, has been offered. Guevara, in the translation of Berners, undoubtedly took the field early, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... with the same eye and in the same spirit the happenings of his youth. All this is only too certain: when he wrote, it was as a Christian he judged himself, and not as a cold historian who refuses to go beyond the brutal fact. He tried to unravel the origin and to trace the consequences of the humblest of his actions, because this is of the highest importance for salvation. But however severe his judgment may be, it does not impair the reality of the fact itself. Moreover, in natures like his, acts which others would hardly think ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... her condition. And now there was nothing to prevent their living together, and Nekhludoff had not prepared himself for that. And, besides, what of her relations to Simonson? What was the meaning of her words yesterday? If she consented to a union with Simonson, would it be well? He could not unravel all these questions, and gave up thinking about it. "It will all clear itself up later on," he thought; "I must not think about it now, but convey the glad news to her as soon as possible, and set her free." He thought that the copy of the document he had received would suffice, so when he ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... might have brought her a heavier cross than marrying a handsome millionaire, even though considerably her senior. I'm probably a conceited fool for thinking it any very great burden at all. But how, then, can I account—? Well, well, time alone can unravel this snarl. One thing is certain: she will do nothing that she does not believe right; and after what Mrs. Yocomb said I would not dare to wish ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... covers, 8 will be a good number, and use double wool. Make 1 by passing the wool round, seam 2 together, repeat; both rows are done in this manner: when sufficient fringe is done, cast off 4 stitches, take out the other pin, and unravel ...
— Exercises in Knitting • Cornelia Mee
... contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all His works With feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, characterises the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar—this is the character and privilege of genius. And it is the prime ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... what it meant. She could not keep it nor use it. She could not unravel its message nor rest upon its strength. It was gone almost while it came, but it did something for the lady of the feathers. It gave to her the little seed of expectation that, quite alone in a weary desert, yet makes of that desert ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... been in his power to look upon the young lady without being dazzled; and the uneasiness he felt at following the muleteer at a distance, and the fear lest any accident might happen by the way that should deprive him of his conquest, taught him to unravel his thoughts. He was more than usually delighted, when, being arrived safe at home, he saw the chest unloaded. He dismissed the muleteer, and having caused a slave to shut the door of his house, opened the chest, helped the lady out, gave her his hand, and conducted her to his apartment, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... one of the twelve? It is not necessary to find a satisfactory answer to all the questions that may arise from the reading of the Bible, and the finite mind should not be discouraged if it fails to fathom the reasons of the Infinite Intelligence. If there are mysteries in the Bible that we cannot unravel they are not greater than the mysteries in nature with which we must deal whether we ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... or less changed in the manner described, the beds may become tangled together like the rumpled leaves of a book, or even with the complexity of snarled thread. All these changes of condition makes it difficult for the geologist to unravel the succession of strata so that he may know the true order of the rocks, and read from them the story of the successive geological periods. This task, though incomplete, has by the labours of many thousand men been so far advanced that we are now able to divide the record ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... murder. Unfortunately, when I had read a few pages more, I found that I had picked the wrong person. Then I accused another character on perfectly good circumstantial evidence, and he was not the man. After that I decided to withdraw from the detective business and let Miss SILBERRAD unravel her mystery for herself. If you are of the opinion that a woman cannot keep a secret read The Mystery of Barnard Hanson and become convinced that Miss SILBERRAD at least is an exception. If I have ever read a more perfectly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... these were more or less cleared up after the assembled wit and wisdom of the community had frowned and bitten their nails over them for several hours. Others were of a nature which it passed the wit of man—Eskimo man at least—to unravel. A few of these, like the watch, had some light thrown on them by Nazinred, who had either seen something like them in use among the fur-traders, or whose sagacity led him to make a shrewd ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... to look back on the time that followed, all is confusion. I cannot unravel the threat of events clearly in my own mind, and can only describe a few scenes that detach themselves, as it were, from a back-ground of reports, true and false, of alarms, of messages to and fro, and a horrible mob surging backwards and ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her religions as far as any Englishman dare say he knows anything about that unfathomable country—yes! Mam! religions—Hinduism—Brahminism—Buddhism—why, I've passed the best part of my life trying to unravel certain physical and psychical threads knotted up in India; but the years are slipping by, and time is getting shorter and shorter, and but a tithe done out of all there is to do; but thanks be, my boy has inherited my love for this work, and will carry ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... But I would not seek to unravel it, Angelique," remarked Amelie, "I feel there is sin in it. Do not touch it: it will only bring mischief upon you ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... hope that Mr. Corbin might in some way manage to unravel the mystery, and yet she could not see that he had anything more tangible to work ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... a mystery," said De Skirlaw. "I will not be the one to try to unravel it. Let us away to the king and say what ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... Padre does not know how to unravel the thread. How fast he talks to the Colonel Sahib!' Mahbub Ali chuckled. 'By Allah!' the keen eyes swept the veranda for an Instant—'thy lama has sent what to me looks like a note of hand. I have had some few dealings in hoondis. The Colonel ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... with great eyes, but agreed at once, and they appointed time and place. He then bade her good night, and the moment she left him lay down on the bed to think. But he did not trouble himself yet to unravel the plot against him, or determine whether the violence he had suffered had the same origin with the poisoning. Nor was the question merely how to continue to serve his sister without danger to his life; for he had just learned what rendered it absolutely ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading, by which your reverence knows I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... am trenching upon debatable ground, and have no desire to enter an argument upon the subject. It is doubtless better to believe the tenets taught us in our childhood, than to seek at mature age to unravel a mystery which it is self-evident the Great Creator never intended that man in this state of existence should become acquainted with. However, I'll say no more on such a subject, it is quite foreign to the matter of my travels, and does not ease my fever in any way—in ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... passage of time to the next period of darkness, when it was fitting and right for Guineveres to seek their small meed of sustenance, to grow to frog's full estate, and to fulfil as well as might be what destiny the jungle offered. To unravel the meaning of it all is beyond even attempting. The breath of mist ever clouds the mirror, and only as regards a tiny segment of the life-history of Guinevere can I say, "There is no need to wipe ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... circumstance, but by her own deliberate preference; and yet he was certain that she was glad that he loved her. What did that mean? He had so seen her life that he knew she was incapable of vanity or selfish satisfaction; when she was glad it was because it was right to be glad. Caius could not unravel this, and yet, deep within him, he knew that there was consistency in it. Had she not said that love in itself was good? it must be good, then, both to the giver and receiver. He felt a certain awe at finding his own poor love embraced in such a doctrine; he felt ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... to find out where the buried treasure lays hid—I mean hidden," said Roy. "We're going to unravel the mystery, as Pee-wee would say. 'Twas on a dark and ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... nearer, or very little nearer, to our goal. So carefully had my friend Nayland Smith excluded the matter from the press that, whilst public interest was much engaged with some of the events in the skein of mystery which he had come from Burma to unravel, outside the Secret Service and the special department of Scotland Yard few people recognized that the several murders, robberies and disappearances formed each a link in a chain; fewer still were aware that a baneful presence was in our midst, ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... doubt, this might have happened under a Parliamentary government. But, then, many members of Parliament, the entire Opposition in Parliament, would have been active to unravel the matter. All the principles of finance would have been worked and propounded. The light would have come from above, not from below—it would have come from Parliament to the nation instead of from the nation to Parliament But exactly the reverse happened in America. ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... the hands of any other Arab. Luck had helped Ahmed Ben Hassan even as she herself had unknowingly played into his hands when he had captured her first. Fate was with him. It was useless to try and struggle against him any more. Her brain was a confused medley of thoughts that she was too tired to unravel, strange, conflicting ideas chasing wildly through her mind. She did not understand them, she did not try. The effort of thinking made her head ache agonisingly. She was conscious of a great unrest, a dull aching in her heart and a terrible depression that was altogether ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... His memory was clear and comprehensive. While governor—he was elected by the Republicans in 1868—and before his impeachment and removal from office by the Democratic legislature of 1870, he sought to unravel the mysteries of the Kuklux brotherhoods; and tried in every way to discover the perpetrators of the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... heart. Sire, those who are in favor of a timid and vacillating policy, who would like to negotiate and compromise, who still believe in the possibility of a reconciliation with France, who still think that the pen should smoothen the rugged path before us, or unravel the knot of our difficulties—those cowardly, grovelling hearts are the real enemies of our cause, and more dangerous than Napoleon with all his armies. For they are weighing down our courage, paralyzing ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... past. At this moment I stand in imminent peril of becoming again the wretched thing I was when I fled from that den of all the devils. It is to guard me against this that I have come to you. I want you to unravel the tangled thread which threatens to drag me to my doom,—and, when unravelled to sunder it—for ever, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Jacques is the victim of an abominable intrigue; and we must unravel it. We have cried ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... unfriended, With sophistry blended, Deep science in Chaos had slept; Its limits were fettered, Its voters unlettered, Its students in movements but crept. Till, despite of great foes, Great WALSH first arose, And with logical might did unravel Those mazes of knowledge, Ne'er known in a college, Though sought for with unceasing travail. With cheers we now hail him, May success never fail him, In Polar Geometrical mining; Till his foes be as tamed As his works are far-famed ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... as a rule, people do not recognize that every place-name has a meaning or reference to some outstanding peculiarity or characteristic of the place, and that much history can be gathered from interpretation. In cycling, it is one of the many interests to unravel these derivations; merely as an instance, I may mention that in Dorset and Wilts the name of Winterbourne, with a prefix or suffix, often occurs; of course, "bourne" means a stream, but until one knows that a "winterbourne" is a stream that appears in winter only, and does not exist ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... Maria's category of sins dancing, card playing and theatre-going rank side by side with lying, stealing and idolatry. As I sat there I tried to reconcile my opinion of these worldly pleasures with the conduct of my new friends. The tangle is too complicated to unravel at once. I could feel blushes of shame staining my cheeks as the game progressed. What would Aunt Maria say, what would daddy say, what would even tolerant Mother Bab say, if they knew I sat passively ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... it is true, a woman with a wounded heart to nurse, an aching misery to bear; but she left her with a sanity of purpose which can take up the tangled threads and, however blinded be the eyes with weeping, with fingers feeling their way, can unravel the knotted ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... the quadrangle is a small cabinet containing the inevitable relics of the Prophet. Three separate guides have accumulated at my heels since entering the gate, and now a fourth, ancient and hopeful, appears to unravel, for the Sahib's benefit, the mysteries of the little cabinet. Unlocking the door, he steps out of his slippers into the entrance, stooping beneath an iron rail that further ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... biographers of Knox, have not taken the trouble to unravel this question of the treaty of July 24. But the behaviour of the Lords and of Knox seems characteristic, and ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... could say "with what words." Some had been baptized by a woman, some by a fisherman. Painful it was to witness, or be certified of, such complications and irregularities, more so to be in any degree answerable for them, most of all to be expected to unravel and rectify them in one visit of a few hours' duration, knowing too that they must all be renewed and repeated. This is the only harbour in White Bay where there are any French, and these, it is worthy of notice, have come here within the last five years, since the ...
— Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the "Hawk," 1859 • Edward Feild
... blame him. He probably has something more important to do than to unravel the meaning of a flag in ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... distracted Jew was no longer visible. It seemed plain that the person or the event he had awaited with such obvious nervousness had arrived and passed; one more of the problems, anxieties or crises that join and unravel moment by moment in the human ant-hill of London, had perhaps closed for good or ill within the past half-hour; ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... Illinois. This last is like a "shipwreck on the coast of Bohemia." There is, too, a memorial of the Greek Revolution which tells its own story, —Scio-and-Webster! We could hardly wish the awkward partnership dissolved. But who will unravel the mysteries of New-Design and New-Faul? and can any one tell us whether the fine Norman name of Sanilac is really the euphonious substitute for Bloody-Pond? If there be in America that excellent institution, "Notes and Queries," here is matter for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... of forty, sirs, a native of East Haddam, And have some reason to surmise that I descend from Adam; But what's my pedigree to you? That I will soon unravel; I've sucked my Haddam-Eden dry, therefore desire to travel, And, as a natural consequence, presume I needn't say, I wish to write some letters home and have those letters p—— [I spare the word suggestive ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... took him away from me. Still, I hardly cried. All the way up in the train, whenever I was awake, an idea had been haunting me—a possible clue to this trickery of Lord Southminster's. Petty details cropped up and fell into their places. I began to unravel it all now. I had an inkling of a plan ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... cut from a bundle. But there are a thousand ways! Now we proceed with this. Later we probe down gas jets, water spouts and outlets, empty lamp reservoirs, unscrew the backs of mirrors, search key holes, unravel carpets——" ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the knot of these difficulties save only thy Wazir Haykar; and now that none shall offer an answer save Nadan, the son of his sister, whom he hath informed with all his subtilty and his science. Therefore, do thou summon him and haply he shall unravel for thee a tangled skein so hard to untwist." Sankharib did as they advised, and when Nadan appeared in the presence said to him, "Look thou upon this writ and comprehend its contents." But when the youth read it he said to the Sovran, "O my lord the King, leave alone this folk for ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... ceased to be a pupil. Students bring their books of selections from English authors to the missionary, and ask him to clear up their difficulties. But a long and involved paragraph, with several obsolete words and obscure satire, is a tangle which it is almost hopeless to unravel satisfactorily, when you are dealing with a language so unlike in construction and modes of expression to that of the learner. Nor are some of the allusions in the selected passages particularly edifying to the Hindu mind, ready to scent evil even where it does ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... body on the soul and of the soul on the body. It came upon me with a shock of surprise that while these things are the most serious realities in the world, and undoubtedly more important than any other thing, little attempt is made by humanity to unravel or classify them. I cannot here enter into the details of these instructions, which indeed would be unintelligible, but they showed me at first what I had not at all apprehended, namely the proportionate importance and unimportance of ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... any thing, a little commonplace—in fact, "he never seemed to have any diffeeculties in his discoorses: an' if he had, he aye got ower them by sayin' plump oot that they were mysteries he did na pretend to unravel!" ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... by my kind friend, whose memory I have always held, and ever shall hold, in the highest veneration, Mr. Evans slightly apologized for having asserted that he had proof of my guilt; saying in excuse that it was his duty to do every thing in his power to unravel the mystery. "You may go Master Hunt," said Mrs. Evans; and in the kindest possible manner she endeavoured to console me for the injustice I had suffered, by telling me that the thief would certainly be found out, and then those that had accused ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... so logical and nothing appears so absurd as the ocean. Self-dispersion is the essence of its sovereignty, and is one of the elements of its redundance. The sea is ever for and against. It knots that it may unravel itself; one of its slopes attacks, the other relieves. No apparition is so wonderful as the waves. Who can paint the alternating hollows and promontories, the valleys, the melting bosoms, the sketches? How render the thickets of foam, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... d'Architecture Musulmane," after attempting to unravel the influences which went to the making of the mosque of Kairouan, the walls of Marrakech, the Medersas of Fez—influences that lead him back to Chaldaean branch-huts, to the walls of Babylon and the embroideries of Coptic Egypt—somewhat despairingly sums up the result: "The principal elements ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... of this people is just as strange as they are themselves. It is based on euphony, from which cause it is very complex, the more especially so as it requires one to be possessed of a negro's turn of mind to appreciate the system, and unravel the secret of its euphonic concord. A Kisuahili grammar, written by Dr. Krapf, will exemplify what I mean. There is one peculiarity, however, to which I would direct the attention of the reader most particularly, which is, that Wa prefixed to the ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Vernee, and her confession. It was like the revolving whirl of a pinwheel, this series of events: continuous and mystifying, but without beginning or end. Surely, somewhere in the procession of horrors, there would be a loose end to cling to. Some loose end that would eventually unravel the pinwheel! ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... swallow. It is the great boast of eloquence and philosophy, that they first congregated men dispersed, united them into societies, and built up the houses and the walls of cities. I wish they could unravel all they had woven; that we might have our woods and our innocence again instead of our castles and our policies. They have assembled many thousands of scattered people into one body: it is true, they have done so, they have brought them together into ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... soft-spoken frontiersman. All Arizona knew not only the daredevil spirit that fired his gentleness, but the competence with which he set about any task he assigned himself. She did not see how he could unravel this mystery. She had left no clues behind her, she felt sure of that, and yet was troubled lest he guessed at her secret behind that mask of innocence he wore. He did not even remotely guess it as yet, but he was far closer to the truth than he pretended. The girl knew she ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... time, but there was no room in his brain for an impure thought. Notwithstanding he was still a young man, being but fifty years of age, nevertheless he had attained distinct success and fame as a musician, composer, scientist, inventor, architect, and athlete. He endeavored to unravel all the mysteries of nature which attracted his attention. One of the many occult forces he experimented with was human magnetism. It was his belief that man could preserve himself indefinitely, either in a state ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... play. But I mustn't let on that I've guessed the riddle, for I don't understand why they're at daggers' points—what has Owen done—why did he skip down the river without even his gun? H'm, there's lots to unravel even here, and perhaps I'd better get Chum Owen to confide in me ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul": this tells it all. The spring of heart to heart that we call affinity, the knitting no hand can ever afterward unravel—these experiences have been granted to us all through our work together, and ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
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