"Conundrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... increase my stock of first impressions of Indian life. "Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions," Mr Aberich Mackay calls them in his "Twenty-one days in India," that most amusing Indian classic. "What is it these travelling people put on paper?" he adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic, and subjective." ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... use forces an increase in value, provided that the supply does not increase equally fast; and with silver that is an impossibility. If you think government cannot add value to a metal, consider this conundrum: What would be the present value of gold if all nations should demonetize it? It can be calculated approximately. There is on hand enough gold to supply the arts for forty years at the present rate of consumption. What, then, is the present value of a commodity of which the world has forty years' ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... of the lack of free trade in our country. The brick manufacturers must be protected, so a heavy tariff was placed on the foreign article. Our brick men, finding that they had a soft thing, tried to solve that conundrum which the Israelites gave up: "How do you make bricks without straw?" They made a patent brick, built the Howard Museum in Washington, (was it a museum or a college?) the thing tumbled down, and a Congressional committee sat among its ruins. Poor Gen. HOWARD is ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... doubtful whether good comes from the use of the Bible as a riddle-book, nor do the "Bible games" tend to develop a natural appreciation of the book. There is no new light but rather a confusing shadow thrown on the character of Joseph by the foolish conundrum concerning Pharaoh making a ruler out of him. Sending a child to the Bible to discover the shortest verse, the longest, the middle one, etc., trains him to regard it as an odd kind of book, to think of it as a dictionary, ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... this the soldier obviously set his mind at rest, in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a law which authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their descendants, and millions of men, to serve as he was doing himself, and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or conundrum on ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... association may be set free by the temperature of a burning building and get together. In respect to the old conundrum, "Will saltpetre explode?" Mr. A. A. Hayes, Prof. Silliman, and Dr. Hare's views were, as to the explosions in the New York fire of 1845, that in a closed building having niter in one part and shellac or other resinous material in another, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... tall, slim figure Detective Inspector Wessex stared with a sort of wonder. Mr. Nicol Brinn of Cincinnati was a conundrum which he found himself unable to catalogue, although in his gallery of queer characters were many eccentric and peculiar. If Nicol Brinn should prove to be crooked, then automatically he became insane. This ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... Whilst you were engaged in your grand Jenny Lind speculation, the following conundrum went the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... cinch that the answer to the conundrum lies in that silly old black bunch of feathers," declared the other, conviction in his voice. "I looked up all about ravens in our big 'cyclopaedia as soon as I got downstairs this morning; and the more I read, the stronger my mind ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... anticipated blooming out into a society blossom was a conundrum. Perhaps he had some secret method buried in the same box with his hoarded coin. His long evenings were passed reading the Family Herald and Weekly Star and the Ashcroft Journal by candle-light; for those were ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... tempted to discern some shadow before of the fatality four years later, when the patronage by Essex and his partisans of the play of Henry IV at the Globe Theatre became an article of indictment. The passage forms a conundrum to which the clue has not yet been found. If the reference be to Shakespeare's drama which Essex, Cecil, and Ralegh may have seen acted in this July, it constitutes the only ascertained association of the hand which could do all and the brain ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... He might have spared many of the details of the bath scene, which, for the rest, tallies exactly with Mr. Thackeray's account of the same process. This little man with all his long letters remains as much a conundrum to me as ever. Your account of the domestic joys at Hunsworth amused me much. The good folks seem very happy—long may they continue so! It somewhat cheers me to know that such happiness does exist on the earth. Return ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... question became more explicit, and the hypothesis of the play and the pill were excluded. 'What,' the new poster ran, 'is Ireland going to do for the Boers?' The public were not intensely anxious to find an answer to the conundrum thrust thus forcibly on their attention, but they became curious to know who the advertisers were who hungered for the information. Men blessed by Providence with sagacious-looking faces made the most of their opportunity, and informed their friends that the thing ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... dollars for her. His father was not a rich man, and he was out of business himself. And he wanted Donald to keep still too. What motive had he for wishing his proposition to be kept in the dark? His object was not apparent, and Donald was obliged to give up the conundrum, though he had some painful doubts on the subject. As he thought of the matter, he turned to observe the position of the two boats to the southward of him. Directly ahead of Laud's craft was an island which he could not weather, and he was obliged to tack. He ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... inexpressible hilarity, most exasperating to the others, who desired to sleep. Not content with upsetting the fire-irons occasionally, singing to the cat, and slamming the furniture about, this restless bird kept appearing first at one cell door with a conundrum, then at the other with a joke, or insisted on telling funny stories in her den, till the exhausted victims implored her to take an opium pill and subside before they became furious. She obeyed, and after a few relapses into wandering and joking, ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... Prince Paul had enough to do in facilitating conversation. There was no end to his politeness, but it was an impossible task for him now and then promptly to carry over a long sentence from German to Russian, and he would give it up like an invincible conundrum, with the patient smile and head-wag and hand-wave of an amiable Dundreary. Yet I began to surmise a mystery even in him. More than once he inadvertently betrayed a knowledge of Romany, though he invariably ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... cold and snow and the biting blasts of a Canadian winter, must be erected. But how? And with what materials? Tools he had in plenty, but how to construct a dwelling out of the stunted and wind-twisted trees, which were all the timber the island afforded, was a conundrum he saw no ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... criminals I am aware of in past times as having specially tormented myself—the class who have left secrets, riddles, behind them. What business has any man to bequeath a conundrum to all posterity, unless he leaves in some separate channel the solution? This must have been done in malice, and for the purpose of annoying us, lest we should have too much proper enjoyment of life when he should have gone. For nobody knows whether the scoundrel could have ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... a two-story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every original conundrum in hearing of his father. He begs the curious not to pry into the result—as it was of no consequence ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Conundrum is not allowed:—Why is Hasty Pudding like the Prince? Because it comes attended by its sweet;—nor this variation to it, to wit: Because the 'lasses ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... minerals I us'd, Incorporated in the ink and wax. Besides, he gave me nothing, but still fed me With hopes and blows: and that was the inducement To this conundrum. If it please your worship To call to memory, this mad beast once caus'd me To urge you to drown or hang yourself; I'll do the like to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... of puzzling questions and clever replies is still as favourite a mental exercise in the East as it was in middle-aged Europe. The riddle or conundrum began, as far as we know, with the Sphinx, through whose mouth the Greeks spoke: nothing less likely than that the grave and mysterious Scribes of Egypt should ascribe aught so puerile to the awful emblem of royal majesty—Abu Haul, the Father of Affright. Josephus relates how Solomon ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... coming in and risking the freshness of her draperies by contact with London top-floor grubbiness. The child was, in fact, too full of the reality of her happiness with Donal and Donal's mother to be more than faintly bewildered by a sort of visionary conundrum. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Scriptural proofs. But this polemical motive can hardly have induced him to becloud an obvious text and invent interpretations which never occurred to any other ecclesiastical writer before or after his time. The conundrum can only be solved by the assumption that Augustine believed in a plurality of literal senses in the Bible and held that over and above (or notwithstanding) the sensus obvius every exegete is free to read as much truth into any given passage as possible, and that such interpretation lay within ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... survives in such a form as, "Why does a chicken cross the road?" to which most people give the answer, "To get to the other side;" though the correct reply is, "To worry the chauffeur." It has degenerated into the conundrum, which is usually based on a mere pun. For example, we have been asked from our infancy, "When is a door not a door?" and here again the answer usually furnished ("When it is a-jar") is not the correct one. It should be, "When it ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... Where's your theory of a picture, then? I don't care what you call it. My only anxiety, when you got a plain, simple, every-day conundrum like Miss Maybough to paint, was that you would try to paint the answer instead of the conundrum, and I dare say that's the trouble. You've been trying to give something more of her character than you found in her face; is that it? Well, you deserved ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... with the other "hards." I studied the superscription at my leisure a whole day, but couldn't make it out. I then showed it to the best experts in handwriting attached to the office, and called on outsiders to test their skill; but what the writing meant, if it was writing, was a conundrum that we all gave up. Finally, in desperation, it was suggested, as a last resort, to send it to Chappaqua, which happened to be its place of destination.' Such is the literal history of the reason of an earnestly written denunciation of the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... started a conundrum: "Why is Daniel Webster like Sisera? Because he was killed by a woman," and this had almost as great a ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... thrown her, weak and ill, upon our hands, were responsible for everything. For how much more, how many other changes, she would be responsible the future only could answer. And the future would answer in its own good, or bad, time. My conundrum "What are we going to do with her?" was as much of a puzzle as ever. For my part I gave it up. Sufficient unto the day was the ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Berlin station by her mother and Cousin von Briest. While drinking tea in the mother's room Cousin von Briest was asked to tell a joke, and propounded a Bible conundrum, which Effi took as an omen that no more sorrow was to befall her. The following day began the search for an apartment, and one was found on Keith street, which exactly suited, except that the house was not finished ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... to traverse unarmed, and an encounter with an inimical wandering Indian might serve to make for his comrades' curiosity concerning his fate, when they should chance to have leisure to feel it, a perpetual conundrum. ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... own account, went about the country confronting all comers with the questions, "What are you going to make of your future?" . . . "What is the American Utopia, how much Will is there shaping to attain it?" This, he says, was the conundrum to find an answer to which he crossed the Atlantic, and he is much depressed because he failed in his search. "When one talks to an American of his national purpose he seems a little at a loss"; and when he comes to sum up his conclusions: "What seems to me ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... my intention to make some disparaging remarks about the human race; and so I kept this letter open for that purpose, and for the purpose of telling my dream, wherein the Trinity were trying to guess a conundrum, but I can do better—for I can snip out of the "Times" various samples and side-lights which bring the race down to date, and expose it as of yesterday. If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... laughing to herself and gesticulating. Sometimes she will lean back in her chair and absolutely shake with laughter, and she smiles at vacancy continually. She seems all right enough with the ex-ception of these vagaries. But she is a perfect conundrum to me." ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... likes old Jeffords, an' considers him a pleasin' conundrum. About tenth drink time he'd take a cha'r an' go camp by himse'f in a far corner, an' thar he'd warble hymns. Many a time as I files away my nosepaint in the Oriental ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... In "conundrum," Mrs. Osman was a beautiful nun; she is a charming creature, most winning countenance and manner, very desirous to improve herself, and with an understanding the extent and excellence of which I did not ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the radium in any given specimen will be transformed in about 2000 years. Half of what is left will disappear in the next 2000 years, half of that in the next 2000 and so on. The reader can figure out for himself when it will all be gone. He will then have the answer to the old Eleatic conundrum of when Achilles will overtake the tortoise. But we may say that after 100,000 years there would not be left any radium worth mentioning, or in other words practically all the radium now in existence is younger than the human race. The lead that is found in uranium ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... the answer is so plain that it is almost insulting to our readers to mention that it is "a cherry," but this is by no means the case with all Chinese riddles, many being exceedingly difficult of solution. So much so that it is customary all over the Empire to copy out any particularly puzzling conundrum on a paper lantern, and hang it in the evening at the street door, with the promise of a reward to any comer who may succeed in unravelling it. These are called "lamp riddles," and usually turn upon the name of some tree, ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... Accordingly on their next encounter Peter saw at a glance that he had now, in the interval, divined and that, to sound his note, he was only waiting till they should find themselves alone. This he had soon arranged and he then broke straight out. 'Do you know your conundrum has been keeping me awake? But in the watches of the night the answer came over me—so that, upon my honour, I quite laughed out. Had you been supposing I had to go to Paris to learn that? Even now, to see him still so sublimely on his guard, Peter's young ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... laugh with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first conundrum of the new world. Why is it better to disagree than ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... tremendous and mysterious passage, mysterious and alarming departure. No escaping it; no volition to enter it or to avoid it; no prospect of defeating it or solving it. Odd affair! Mysterious and baffling conundrum to be mixed up ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Peggy was looking at the clock, "we've got time for just one thing more before we start to get dinner. Each one of us must write a patriotic conundrum, and then we'll put them around at each other's plates, and we'll have to guess them before we can eat ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... cousins, related to her only through her stepmother, yet called kin for courtesy's sake, had given up trying to understand her complexities, as she had likewise given up trying to explain herself. If they were pleased forever to consider her in the light of a conundrum, she ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... of womankind is woman! Indeed, from being a good deal overlooked in various ways, she has come to be almost the topic of the age, and strangely enough is she considered. According to the standpoint of the observer, woman is a riddle to be solved, a conundrum to be guessed, a puzzle to be interpreted, a mystery to be explained, a problem to be studied, a paradox to be reconciled. She is a toy or a drudge, a mistress or a servant, a queen or a slave, as circumstances may decide. She is at once an irresponsible being, who must accept the destiny which comes ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... before the carriage was announced, and our travellers hastened down the lane, and found there awaiting them the evident model of the Autocrat's "One-Hoss Shay," in its last five years of senility;—to this was attached a quadruped who immediately reminded Mysie of a long-forgotten conundrum. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... dignified retreat thereinto, calculates the possibility that the unfamiliar habitation may be so narrow as to prevent the act of turning round? Does this sea-snake match its wonderful nimbleness of body with an equally wonderful nimbleness of brain? I do not presume to theorise on such a conundrum of Nature, but mention an undoubted fact for others ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... of James and of John, was dead; and he was not so constant a follower of Christ as his wife; so she is mentioned as the mother of Zebedee's children, which saying has passed into a conundrum, "Who was the mother of Zebedee's children?" Scott in his commentaries gives her name as Salome. Whatever her name, she had great ambition for her sons, and asked that they might have the chief places of honor and authority ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... to tell of here is my own personal quest, for all the time I was living with my mind turned two ways. In the morasses of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape. Nobody ever chewed a few wretched clues into such a pulp as I ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... mercy. When an American writer compares the sturdy figures of the foreign circulation with the attenuated numerals of such visible returns as reach him, he is more puzzled in his mind than surfeited in his purse. But the relation of foreign publishers to "home talent" is an ancient and honorable conundrum, which it is not for this paper or its writer ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... contributions, only a very few of which were ever used, and of fewer still was the authorship placed upon record. Early in 1843, however (p. 82, Vol. IV.), Mr. Blackwood, of Edinburgh, sent in one of the earliest of Scottish witticisms, a conundrum; Joseph O'Leary, a reporter of the "Morning Herald," is said to have contributed a poem on "The English Vandal;" and R. B. Peake, who had adapted "A Night with Punch" for W. J. Hammond, began his little series of "Punch's Provincial Intelligence," of which the most notable is a humorous report ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... conundrum we can't answer," returned Sam. "I think he was waiting around with that auto, and as soon as the fire started Crabtree saw the chance he ...
— The Rover Boys in New York • Arthur M. Winfield
... close of this remark all four came to be again on the same terms as of old; but suddenly a servant announced that the Empress (Yan Ch'un) had despatched a messenger to bring over a lantern-conundrum with the directions that they should all go and guess it, and that after they had found it out, they should each also devise one and send it in. At these words, the four of them left the room with hasty step, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... no sense of humour—never had. I am entirely destitute of it myself. Even in Scotland, even here, this family failing has been remarked—been the subject, I may say, of unfavourable comment. The Perilous of the period lost his head because he did not see the point of a conundrum of Macbeth's. We felt, some time in the fifteenth century, that this peculiarity needed to be honourably accounted for, and the family developed that story of the Secret Chamber, and the Horror in the house. ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... of Polynices, one of OEdipus's sons, means in the original "much quarrelling." In the altercations between the two brothers, in AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, this conceit is employed; and it is remarkable, that so poor a conundrum could not be rejected by any of these three poets, so justly celebrated for their taste and simplicity. What could Shakspeare have done worse? Terence has his "inceptio est amentium, non amanthim." Many similar instances will occur to the learned. It is well known that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... these travelling people put on paper? Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams up in poetical mists, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... musical setting for certain hymns—a setting not inconsistent with the spirit of the hymns themselves, but in melody agreeable to the congregation. The question which John Wesley is reported to have asked, "Why the devil should have all the good tunes," has been a favorite conundrum with ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... to secure Gudger against loss, while the mention of its existence caused the commissioner again to rub his head. Why in the world should a man——? He gave up the conundrum in despair, and applied himself ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... Andrew Lang The Chameleon James Merrick The Blind Men and the Elephant John Godfrey Saxe The Philosopher's Scales Jane Taylor The Maiden and the Lily John Fraser The Owl-Critic James Thomas Fields The Ballad of Imitation Austin Dobson The Conundrum of the Workshops Rudyard Kipling The V-a-s-e James Jeffrey Roche Hem and Haw Bliss Carmen Miniver Cheevy Edwin Arlington Robinson Then Ag'in Sam Walter Foss A Conservative Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman Similar Cases Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman Man and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... pretty far fetched," ruled the dominating Cub. "You'll have to think up an answer to your conundrum before we can consider it. Why should a college freshman be hazed in the manner that Mr. Baker's son was hazed just so that some men, confederates of the hazers, could kidnap him? And then why should one of the hazers work the kind of game that that mysterious fellow worked ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... to consider why she had gone to him and what might result from her visit; and up to a certain point, and in certain cases accurate guessing is easier than might be expected for either side to a political conundrum, in India, ample provision having been made for it ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... was pointed out as a distinguished figure, and his quaint remarks were quoted. Few of these sayings are remembered to-day, though occasionally one is still unforgotten. At a party one night, being urged to make a conundrum, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... wisdom provoked him. "Well, I've known him since we were boys at school together and I've never found him much of a conundrum. He's brilliant, and lazy, and kind. I think of all the men I've known he's the one who's most truly a gentleman; he's the one who has given most promise and who has fewest accomplishments to his credit. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... to whom it gave pleasure to deal with problematic situations, unexpected developments, and the like; but this was too much of a conundrum for him. That the man, whose address he had employed this girl to find out, should prove to be her cousin, and that she should start on her bridal trip without her husband, were points on which his reason had no power ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... had the genuine chicken cholera last season took the disease again this season and died from the effects of it? This happened on our place." I have puzzled my brains on the same thing but I am not scientific enough to explain things that I don't know anything about, so I leave that conundrum to be answered by some of the learned people who have the whole theory of chicken cholera ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... that you say? They have been to the station? You ask if I have seen three suspicious people—a man, perhaps an old man, in a dark-blue, well-cut suit, wearing a Homberg hat and goggles, a girl, and a man of whose appearance you have no knowledge? Come now, that's a conundrum! I have ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... it was she who surveyed and improved the manners of her guests by sarcastic hints or friendly admonitions; and it was she who furnished intellectual entertainment in the shape of anecdote, historical story, or excruciating conundrum. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... the Minotaur's labyrinth, when the passage knotted itself into a low-roofed room, open at both ends, save for bomb screens, with a trench leading dismally off from an opposite doorway. "When is a door not a door?" was a conundrum of my childhood, and I think the answer was: "When it's ajar." But nowadays there is a better replique: A door is not a door when it's a dug-out. It is then a hole, kept from falling in upon itself by a log of wood or anything handy. This time, the "anything ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Office could possibly be in the remotest degree connected, he would be descried sloping past and going straight into the Council Chamber, as if he had bought the place. Then out would come one of the Secretary gang. The Foreign Minister had turned up, and was setting them an entirely unexpected conundrum inside; the best thing one could do was to clear out of that, as the point which one had been summoned to give one's views about had not now the slightest chance of coming before the Cabinet ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Marquis of Dulhampton's solicitor. It reached Lake from Tom Twitters, of his club, who kept the Brandon Captain au courant of the town-talk; and it came to Dorcas in a more authentic fashion, though mysteriously, and rather in the guise of a conundrum than of a distinct bit of family intelligence, from no less a person than the old Dowager ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... conundrum, Margery,' he said; 'and I give you up for to-night. Anybody would think the devil had showed you all the kingdoms of the world since ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... two minutes,' rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently and kindly: insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum vein. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... do with the boat?" asked Jean. This was a conundrum, but the Chief, as usual, was ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... one," says Bobby, doggedly, "I never made out a conundrum in my life, except, 'What is most like ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... pretty head on one side, considering, as she looked down into the little girl's upturned face. "Is this a conundrum, Tillie? How your father be in Lancaster now and yet be home until half-past three? It's uncanny. Unless," she added, a ray of light coming to her,—"unless 'till' means BY. Your father will be home BY half-past three ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... the book complained bitterly of the "liberties" that Mr. Potter had taken with it. Those who had not read the book complained equally bitterly that Mr. Potter had not taken more of those "liberties" and made it better worth his while. To me, the book drama is a conundrum. It always has been, and now that it has nearly died out, I am still unable to solve it. When you read a book, you form mental pictures of its characters, and are generally discontented with those that ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... your plan," cried Mr. Weston. "Agreed, agreed. I will do my best. I am making a conundrum. How will ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... civil rights, without lifting themselves from their old inferiority. They do the hard work, in their own easy way, and possibly do not find life the burden they make it for the white man, whom here, as in our own country, they load up with the conundrum which their existence involves for him. They are not very gay, and do not rise to a joke with that flashing eagerness which they show for it at home. If you have them against a background of banana-stems, or low palms, or feathery canes, nothing could be more acceptably characteristic ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... works of HAWLEY SMART, the brightest of our novelists? This is not a conundrum, and, consequently, has no answer. Everybody likes the books of our literary Major, and everybody will be pleased with The Plunger. The new Story is in two volumes, and is full of incident. There is a murder, which carries one through, from the first page to the last, in a state ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... having occurred, he was able to extricate his vessels and begin his retreat down the bayou. He was somewhat perplexed by the silence of the Confederates, from whom he had heard nothing since his mortars silenced their masked batteries. The conundrum was solved by the sound of wood-chopping in the forests ahead, and the discovery shortly after of two heavy logs lying athwart the bayou, and stopping the progress of the vessels. An hour's hard work with axe and ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... The conundrum of the clock and of the two sizes of footprints in the drawing-room recurred to him. Without allowing himself to hesitate, he strode back again into the flat, with a sort of unbreathed sigh, an unuttered complaint against circumstances for not ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... of jesting, observes:—"The age in which the pun chiefly flourished was in the reign of King James the First. That learned monarch was himself a tolerable punster, and made very few bishops or privy-councillors that had not sometime or other signalized themselves by a clinch or a conundrum. It was therefore in this age that the pun appeared with pomp and dignity. It had been before admitted into merry speeches and ludicrous compositions, but was now delivered with great gravity from the pulpit, or pronounced ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... was no boy this side of the planet Mars who could be meeker, on shorter notice. So he said, "Yes, sir," with that subdued and well pleased alacrity of a boy who has just been asked to guess the answer to the conundrum, "Will you ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... what is known as 'shop,' which comes on all lawyers with the removal of the ladies, caused Chankery, a young and promising advocate, to propound an impersonal conundrum to his neighbour, whose name he did not know, for, seated as he permanently was in the background, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... profitably add To what I said in 1892. Speaking at Manchester I used these words:— "If in the inconstant ferment of their minds The KING'S advisers can indeed discover No surer ground of principle than this; If we have here their final contribution To the most clamant and profound conundrum Ever proposed for statesmanship to solve, Then are we watching at the bankruptcy Of all that wealth of intellect and power Which has made England great. If that be true We may put FINIS to our history. But I for one will never lend my suffrage ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... absolute liberty of choice. It may be a personal narrative, like Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" or Hale's "My Double, and How he Undid me;" it may be impersonal, like Mr. F.B. Perkins's "Devil-Puzzlers" or Colonel De Forest's "Brigade Commander;" it may be a conundrum, like Mr. Stockton's insoluble query, "The Lady or the Tiger?" it may be "A Bundle of Letters," like Mr. James's story, or "A Letter and a Paragraph," like Mr. Bunner's; it may be a medley of letters ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... has issued a conundrum in a volume with the title Does Protection Protect? and undertakes to prove by statistics that answer is No. These Western people are in the habit, we know, of bragging a good deal of their exploits, and so the writer referred to says ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... told in the first person as in Stevenson's Pavilion on the Links, or in the third person as in Kipling's The Bridge Builders. Yet again it may be a conundrum as Stockton's famous ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... at his companions and shook his head as if the conundrum was beyond his guessing. Captain ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to speculate rapidly on his father's enigmatic remark. All the way up in the elevator he pondered over the conundrum; and all the evening he turned it over in his mind. At last, tired with the day's activities, he went to bed, hoping that dreams might furnish him with a solution of the riddle. But although he slept hard no dreams ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... thought; "but you never noticed the difference, although you often looked. I used to wonder how you could look so intelligently and see so little"—and she glanced down at herself, so unmistakably a woman now that he knew. She had been like a conundrum, the answer to which you would never have guessed for yourself, but you see it at once when you hear it, and then it seems so simple. She was rather inclined to speak to the Tenor in a half pitying, patronizing way, as to a weak creature easily taken in; ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... man with a mild, vacuous face. For the past few minutes this young man had been sitting bolt upright on a chair with his hands on his knees, so exactly in the manner of an end-man at a minstrel show that one would hardly have been surprised had he burst into song or asked a conundrum. ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... a soul present who could answer that conundrum, and after a fitting pause the chief was forced to answer ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... conundrum, intricacy, maze, crux, riddle, rebus, poser; confusion, quandary, perplexity, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... question,' said Levi. 'Let's clear the ground first, Mr Racksole. Why did you buy this hotel? That's a conundrum that's been puzzling a lot of our fellows in the City for some days past. Why did you buy the Grand Babylon? And what is the next ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... she dally over the disembarkation, the feast, the manner in which Admiral Buzza carved the chicken-pie, and his humorous allusion to the merry thought; or dwell upon the salad compounded by Mr. Moggridge, the spider that was found in it, and the conundrum composed upon that singular occurrence; or loiter to tell how Miss Lavinia upset the claret cup over the Vicar's coat-tails, and, in her confusion, said it "did not signify," which was very amusing. On this, and more, ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... experience of life has taught him that if you have come that road, you are not the kind of man you seem; therefore, you have not come that road, or else you are another kind of man. He revolves in a maze of hopeless conjecture; he gives up trying to guess your conundrum, and reads into you the character of some Englishman of parallel tradition. If he likes you after that, you may be sure it is for yourself and not for your nation. All the same he may not know it, and may think he likes you because you are ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... close it before reaching the chapter usually devoted to fine writing. But the case of Haydn is extraordinary. One can only sustain interest in a biography of the man by an ever-present sense that he is scarcely to be written about. All an author can do is, in few or many words, to put a conundrum to the reader—a conundrum that cannot even be stated in exciting terms. This apparition and wonder-worker of the eighteenth century, Franz Joseph Haydn, is compact of paradoxes and contradictions. Born a peasant, and remaining in thought and speech a peasant all his days, he became the friend ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... Sphinx could complete his statement of the case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... however, for it was very soon thrown on the table with a look of disgust, and rising from her seat Madge walked up and down the room, and wished some good fairy would hint to Brian that he was wanted. If man is a gregarious animal, how much more, then, is a woman? This is not a conundrum, but a simple truth. "A female Robinson Crusoe," says a writer who prided himself upon being a keen observer of human nature—"a female Robinson Crusoe would have gone mad for want of something to talk to." This remark, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... life was always to be a losing game for me, let me play my cards how I will. I begin to think there is a curse upon me, and that no act of mine will ever prosper. Who was that man, in your Greek play, who guessed some inane conundrum, and was always getting into trouble afterwards? I begin to think there really is ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... avoiding the nurses on the stairs, refraining from so much as a glance at the boiled-milk preparations of the butler. "And you know," said Mrs. Barberry, recountant, "how these people have to be watched." To Mrs. Barberry she was really a conundrum, only to be solved on the theory of a perfectly preposterous delicacy. There was so little that was preposterous in Miss Livingstone's conduct as a rule that it is not quite fair to explain her attitude either by this exaggeration or by an equally hectic scruple ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... The conundrum was unanswerable. Baxter did not attempt to answer it. But there remained at the back of his mind a quaint idea that he had caught sight, as he woke, of the Honorable Frederick Threepwood, his face warningly contorted, vanishing through the doorway. Yet what could the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... vehicles, the driver expecting, as in similar cases in Paris, Berlin, or elsewhere, a trifle as a pourboire at the end of the service for which he is engaged. Where these ruinous structures which pass for public carriages originally came from is a conundrum; but there can be no possible doubt as to their antiquity. Mexican fleas, like those of Naples and continental Spain, are both omnivorous and carnivorous, and these vehicles are apt to be itinerant asylums for this pest of the low latitudes. There ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... broke the large splotchy seal bearing the coat-of-arms which Jost affected, but to which he had no more right than the man in the moon, and read what seemed to him more inexplicable than the most confusing conundrum ever invented. ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... address I was to gain his confidence. It would have a very bad appearance to go along the highwayside asking after a man of whom I could give so scanty an account; and I should look like a fool, indeed, if I were to present myself at his door and find the police in occupation! The interest of the conundrum, however, tempted me, and I turned aside from my direct road to pass by Wakefield; kept my ears pricked, as I went, for any mention of his name, and relied for the rest on my good fortune. If Luck (who must certainly be feminine) favoured me as far as to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Robert Strong thinks so too. But it is a great problem what to do for the best in this case. Mebby Solomon knew enough to grapple with the question, but Josiah don't, nor Arvilly, though she thinks she duz. Robert Strong is gittin' one answer to the hard conundrum of life, and Ernest White is figurin' it out successful. And lots of other good and earnest souls all over the world are workin' away at the sum with their own slates and pencils. But oh, the time ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... among her critics: Had she oughter?—from a moral point of view, now. From a moral point, then, let us seek from analogy some light on the question of what, from its actual, practical bearings, may be dignified by the name Conundrum. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... by that time come on deck. They were surrounded by a group of audacious male creatures, who surrounded most on the side where the Pretty Girl sat. She did not look feeble. She was like the red, red rose. It was a conundrum to me why so much greater anxiety should be bestowed upon her health than upon her sister's. It needed some moral reflection to make it out; but I concluded that pretty girls were, by some law of nature, more subject to sea-sickness than plain ones; therefore, all these ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... of this inscrutable conundrum, a lank and tall girl of some fifteen summers, arose and said, not without something of the sublime air becoming a solitary intelligence: "It's the great ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... no ordinary conundrum which vexed my mind when the house surgeon at last announced, "These Moreau patients are well enough to leave hospital," though I had realized that for good or evil the day ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... illustrations for the book, and then stopped work on it. The contract date for the issue went by, and there was no explanation of this. Time drifted along and still there was no explanation. I was lecturing all over the country; and about thirty times a day, on an average, I was trying to answer this conundrum: ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Burgoyne's force, advancing from Canada, had captured Ticonderoga, and of how Sir William had put the flower of his army on board of transports and gone to sea, his destination thus becoming a sort of national conundrum affording infinite opportunity for ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... bestowed on it, there is no denying that it demanded from its creator no depth of sentiment, no warmth of emotion, and no large understanding of human desire. There are those who would dismiss it carelessly, as making an appeal not far removed from that of the riddle and of the conundrum. There are those again who would liken it rather to the adroit trick of a clever conjurer. No doubt, it gratifies in us chiefly that delight in difficulty conquered, which is a part of the primitive play-impulse potent in us all, but tending to die out as we grow older, as we lessen in energy, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... function is lost. It is claimed by some who know more about ditch-digging than about physiology, that alcoholic beverages ruin the lining of the stomach, creating ulcers, and other disorders. This kind of teaching reminds me of a conundrum. 'Why is a scientific temperance man like a dead man in his coffin?' Who can ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... thing shut up in the Oven was Eyebright herself! And the Oven was quite different from any thing you are thinking of,—cold, not hot; wet, not dry; with a door made of green sea-water instead of black iron. This sounds like a conundrum; and, as that is hardly fair, I will proceed to unriddle it at once and tell you all ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... original conundrum which is propounded by one of our members, and which you are requested ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... water getting near the boil.' Elise rose with a strange little laugh and looked at a yellow silk stocking which dangled over the side of a wicker table. As if trying to solve a conundrum, she glanced from it to the shapely form of the young woman at her toilet. 'When the war's over,' she said ruminatingly, 'and our men find what kind of girls they married when they ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... there arrived his supreme trial of this particular morning. Arithmetic then being the order of business before the house, he was sent alone to the blackboard, supposedly to make lucid the proper reply to a fatal conundrum in decimals, and under the glare and focus of the whole room he breathed heavily and itched everywhere; his brain at once became sheer hash. He consumed as much time as possible in getting the terms of the problem ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... review, and finished a good lot of it. Mr. Stewart left us, amply provided with the history of Abbotsford and its contents. It is a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure, and I have great pleasure in it, for while it pleases a fantastic person in the style and manner of its architecture and decoration, it has all the comforts of a ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... this would make a great puzzle, truly an insoluble conundrum, to take back to bewilder his Martian friends. However, he was able to comprehend the remarks of Vigilantius, "who returned from a journey in Italy and the Holy Land disgusted with official Christianity. He protested vehemently against the idolatrous worship of images, the legacy of Paganism to ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... no accounting for it. It was a good while ago that a conservative old Pharisee thought that he had forever silenced the followers of the greatest Genius the world ever saw by putting at them the conundrum, "Can any good come out of Nazareth?" But good did come out of that barren country in spite of the conundrum! And so it keeps on doing, constantly. It comes from other places, too, and that is all right. ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... railway station or vice versa, there are also the large general express companies or carriers, which send articles all over the United States. One of the most characteristic of these is the Adams Express Company, the widely known name of which has originated a popular conundrum with the query, "Why was Eve created?" This company began in 1840 with two men, a boy, and a wheelbarrow; now it employs 8,000 men and 2,000 wagons, and carries parcels over 25,000 miles of railway. The Wells, Fargo & Company Express operates ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... is a conundrum, pure and simple!" the author protested. "It is a poor parody on the old End-man pleasantry, 'Would you rather be as foolish as you look, or look as foolish as you are?' You ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... have to put that conundrum to your brother; but doubtless the needs of the Confederate States ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... been hurt; and then came enquiries about Nutter, and there appeared to have been no one hurt, and yet the parties on the ground—and no fighting—and yet no reconciliation—and, in fact, the general was so puzzled with this conundrum, and so curious, that he was very near calling after Puddock, when they parted at the bridge, and making him entertain him, at some cost of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... bloody, desperate, kindly-mannered, urbane gentleman, who never hesitated to warn his most ruffianly enemies that he would kill them whenever or wherever he came across them next! I think it is a conundrum worth investigating. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Learned.—An infinite variety of interesting things may be learned by watching birds at their nests, or by a study of the nests themselves. How many persons have ever tried to answer seriously the old conundrum: "How many straws go to make a bird's nest?" Let us examine critically one nest and see what we find. One spring after a red squirrel had destroyed the three eggs in a Veery's {27} nest which I had had under observation, ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... "Woman is the eternal conundrum to which the wise man always leaves her herself to supply the answer. Doubtless one of these days you'll do it. Meanwhile, I'll ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Tottenham Court. On the 15th of June, 1854, I was called to see an elderly gentleman lodging on the Kent Road. Found him highly excited, with strong febrile symptoms, pulse 120, increasing. Repeated incoherently what I judged to be the popular form of a conundrum. On closer examination found acute hydrocephalus, and both lobes of the brain rapidly filling with water. In consultation with an eminent phrenologist, it was further discovered that all the organs were more or less obliterated, except that of Comparison. Hence the patient was enabled ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... to belong—to her life. A friend of mine once called her a social pirate, and there is no doubt that her method of collecting the people whom she wants is to besiege them until they eventually surrender. Why, however, Bobbie Outram is always asked to her smartest week-ends was a conundrum to me until I met her magnificently convalescing after influenza at Folkestone. For I know Bobbie, and I would run a mile or two any day to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... king sets his brick and stone up again; but if the King can touch the player after having set his brick up, he is obliged to answer a "Why," or be King instead of him. The "Why" must be proposed by the King, and it may either be a conundrum, or it may contain the reason of any thing, as, "Why does a stone fall to the ground?" "What makes the smoke go up the chimney?" If the player cannot answer the "Why," he is obliged to mind the shy and let the others ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... to myself several times. It duz seem to me that there hain't a question a-comin' up before that Conference that is harder to tackle than this plasterin' and the conundrum that is up before us Jonesville wimmen how to raise 300 dollars out of nuthin', and to make peace in a meetin' house where anarky is ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley) |
