"Knotty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and the moment he dared to do so, he tried mental diversion; he brought me books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study them; and out of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty points on physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which the current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... just trying to solve that problem in my mind, and it is a knotty one. I must have more time to think it over," replied ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... unheard-of mishaps, slaying some dozen giants, vanquishing wicked enchanters, not to say a word of dwarfs, hippogriffs, and fiery dragons. On a similar principle did I cunningly lead my readers, at the first sally, into two or three knotty chapters, where they were most woefully belabored and buffeted by a host of pagan philosophers and infidel writers. Though naturally a very grave man, yet could I scarce refrain from smiling outright ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... the sand falling in an hour-glass presents, in its straight sides, the simplest result of such a condition; and any heap of sand thrown up by the spade will show the slopes here and there, interrupted only by knotty portions, held together by moisture, or agglutinated by pressure,—interruptions which cannot occur to the same extent on a large scale, unless the soil is really hardened nearly to the nature of rock. As long as it remains incoherent, every ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... eyes did not even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass—which often groped about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass for his lips. Two or three times, the matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp headgear as no words can describe; which were made the more ludicrous by ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... by the wayside, to take a pebble from his shoe, when he saw, at some distance, a beggar approaching him. He had on a loose sort of coat, mended with different-colored rags, among which the blue and russet were predominant. He had a short, knotty stick in his hand, and on the top of it was stuck a ram's horn; he wore no shoes, and his stockings had entirely lost that part of them which would have covered his feet and ankles; in his face, however, was the plump appearance of good ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... onslaught on poor Davidson. They had been hired, some at five shillings, some at ten, and the leader, Mrs Duncan, at twenty shillings, and came prepared with their aprons full of stones and other missiles, and Mrs Duncan had in addition a large knotty stick. When Davidson came in sight he saw the trap that was laid for him, and drew up for breath before he came within the enemy's reach. The fearful rush and the unearthly appearance of Davidson took his enemies by surprise; their missiles ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... in every reddish dust-coloured hair in his shock of hair, there was a marked distrust of Wegg and an alertness to fly at him on perceiving the smallest occasion. In the hard-grained face of Wegg, and in his stiff knotty figure (he looked like a German wooden toy), there was expressed a politic conciliation, which had no spontaneity in it. Both were flushed, flustered, and rumpled, by the late scuffle; and Wegg, in coming to the ground, had received a humming knock on the back of his devoted head, which caused ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Mr. Pole broke the silence. He had returned from business, humming and rubbing his hands, like one newly primed with a suggestion that was the key of a knotty problem. Observant Adela said: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... taking up what belongs to all knowledge, it seems to rise above the matter of knowledge to the region of pure form; it demands, therefore, a peculiar subtlety of handling, and may easily land us, as we are all aware, in knotty ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Garay paled again, and he gazed at Robert in a sort of dazed fashion. The imagination of young Lennox was alive and leaping. He had found what seemed to him a happy solution of a knotty problem, and, as usual in such cases, his speech ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... character; to all others whom he met he was simply a distinguished English civil servant of blameless life and very solid judgment. The heads of his department placed the most implicit trust in Trevennack's opinion; there was no man about the place who could decide a knotty point of detail off-hand like Michael Trevennack. What was his poor wife to do, then? Was it her place to warn Eustace that Cleer's father might at any moment unexpectedly develop symptoms of dangerous insanity? Was she bound thus to wreck her own daughter's happiness? Was she bound to speak out ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... very essential quality, it may be said to equal the most agreeable towns of Flanders and Holland. My first visit was to the Neapolitan consul, when I found there was some difficulty about the Turkish tobacco which I had in my possession. As this knotty affair could not be arranged, it was decided we should remain one day more; and I engaged myself to dine at the palace. As the Malta gazette did us the honour to publish a detailed account of the festivities of that day, ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... it?" Their minds immediately flew to knotty points at issue. Was it about the finances of the provinces? Could it be a Censor had denounced some one and enquiries ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... Princess on one side of him and the waiting-maid on the other; but she was so dazzled that she did not recognize the Princess in her glittering garments. Now when they had eaten and drunk, and were merry, the old King asked the waiting-maid to solve a knotty point for him. "What," said he, "should be done to a certain person who has deceived everyone?" and he proceeded to relate the whole story, ending up with, "Now what sentence should be passed?" Then the false bride answered: "She deserves to be put ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... fire. It's a fire. It warms your body, at least in front in extreme weather. But it's more than a fire. It's a stimulus to thought. It refreshes your spirit, and rests your tired nerves, and it is a wonderful thing to help you unravel knotty problems. So he poked the fire and thought, while she, quite unconscious of his embarrassment, went on sipping her ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... Cutler died in 1907, but most of the others are still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, now in Cutler's place at the head of the New York Company, has been the operating chief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a president of the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes to the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg to see the steel business at its best; just as they go to Iowa and Kansas to see the New Farmer, so they make pilgrimages ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... great Chinese artist, leered at him with its everlasting grin. The young man smiled. "Perhaps that is the likeness of a mandarin—bulbous nose, hanging cheeks, moustaches drooping like plumes, a peaked head, knotty hands—a regular deformity. Reflecting on the ugliness of that idiotic race, there is much to be urged by way of excuse for people ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... of Betty Cruise occurred the second day after her baby was born. In a way, this lamentable occurrence solved a knotty problem and pacified two warring sexes, so to speak. For, be it known, the women of the Doraine took a most determined stand against the manner in which the men, viva voce, had arrogated unto themselves the right to name the baby. Not that any one ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... snowstorm. There are other plains, equally large, where no sand appears, but brown barren earth utterly destitute of vegetation. There are others, again, on which grows a stunted shrub with leaves of a pale silvery colour. In some places it grows so thickly, interlocking its twisted and knotty branches, that a horseman can hardly ride through among them. This shrub is the artemisia—a species of wild sage or wormwood,—and the plains upon which it grows are called by the hunters, who cross them, the sage prairies. Other plains are met with that present a black ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... so that Mr Wakefield sent him back for ablutions before he would communicate with him. And in the interval he fortunately discovered his error, and instead of taking up the imposition with his clean hands, he delighted the master with a knotty inquiry as to one of the active tenses of the Latin verb ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Simplicity of manners and living was carefully inculcated. At first the ministers had almost entire control. A church reproof was the heaviest punishment, and knotty points in theology caused the bitterest discussion. A pillion was the grandest equipage, and a plain blue and white gown, with primly starched apron, was the common attire of the New ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... the young stranger appeared much better disposed to partake of the good cheer, with which he had been so providentially provided, than to take up the cudgels of argument on this, or on any other of the knotty points which are so apt to furnish the lovers of science with the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in the ancient proclamations for taking the order of knighthood. If MR. NICHOLS, in addition to this, will show also wherein the knights of this equestrian quality differed from such persons as were distrained "ad se milites faciendos," he will solve a number of knotty difficulties in heraldic literature, and will enable the public generally to understand that there are many more chivalrous rights and privileges inherent in the subject than what is dreamt of in the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... the distance. If the Missouri Compromise were repealed, would not the original laws of Louisiana, which legalized slavery, be revived? How then could the people of the Territories be free to legislate against slavery? It was a knotty question, testing the best legal minds in the Senate; and it was dispatched only by an amendment which stated that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise should not revive ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... sat on the piazza of his hardware store, his shoes on the planking beside him, and his pudgy toes wriggling like the trained fingers of an eminent pianist. It was a knotty problem. An ordinary problem Scattergood could solve with shoes on feet, but let the matter take on eminent difficulty and his toes must be given freedom and elbow room, as one might say. Later in life his wife, Mandy, after he had married her, tried to cure him of this habit, ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... It was a knotty point to decide. Should the judges believe the woman's word, or the emphatic denials of the debtors that they had ever received a kreutzer? The seven looked hopelessly at each other, and then wisely retired to the seclusion of a private room, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... combed one auburn whisker with knotty fingers. "Haven't been able to get a man that was any good since. It's nothing but worry, worry, worry in business. And where might you have come across him, captain, if it's fair ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... he would have some devilish shrewd scheme?" he said enthusiastically to Alice. "Write her a letter! What could be better? Poetry, by Gad!" His face clouded. "But what would you say in it? That's a pretty knotty point." ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... fell silent and knit his brow, as though he were thinking of some knotty point: but in a while his face cleared, and he said: "If I durst, I would ask thee thy name, ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... lessons of Pythagoras or Socrates. In poetry, it may produce effusions from persons of quality, devoid of wit, but it never could have pointed the satire of Pope. In the mechanic arts it may contrive a balloon, but never could invent a steam-boat. In religion, it stumbles at a thousand knotty points in metaphysical theology, but it never led the soul to intercourse with heaven, or to ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... armed round about In trusty plate, with fierce and dreadful look; At first approach against Argantes stout Headed with poignant steel a lance he shook, No casting engine with such force throws out A knotty spear, and as the way it took, It whistled in the air, the fearless knight Opposed his ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... pool, and near it then Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen, It was nor overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely then along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leaved flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush. But here well-ordered was a grove with bowers, There grassy plots set round about with flowers. Here you might through the water see the land Appear, strowed o'er with white or yellow sand; Yon deeper was it, and the wind by whiffs Would make ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... quickness of apprehension, and vivacity of understanding, which easily took in and surmounted the most subtile and knotty parts of mathematicks and metaphysicks. His wit was prompt and flowing, yet solid and piercing; his taste delicate, his head clear, and his way of expressing his thoughts perspicuous and engaging. I shall say nothing of his person, which yet was so well turned, that no ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... guard. Without ammunition, the shot-gun was but a bar of iron. How could they cope with the bullets in the automatics? Undoubtedly every smuggler carried a revolver, and would use it in a pinch; possibly some might not wait until the pinch came. It was a knotty problem. The drops oozed out on Jim's forehead as ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... brake and broad-leaved forest grass. The trees that spring from the top of this wall have their roots pressing close to the rock, so that there is no soil between; they cling powerfully, and grasp the crag tightly with their knotty fingers. The trees on both sides are so thick, that the sight and the thoughts are almost immediately lost among confused stems, branches, and clustering green leaves,—a narrow strip of bright blue sky ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... would cleave to his mouth in a woman's presence, let alone his lying to her. That was the real Tim—the rare Tim. To my eyes he was but a small boy; to my mind he was a mighty man. The first reader that presented such knotty problems to his intellectual side was but part of the impedimenta of his youth, and was no fair measure of his real size. That very day he had fought with me and for me; not because I was in the right, but because I was ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... bones of the head are not only disunited, but are more or less overlapped at birth, in consequence of the largeness of the Caucasian child's head and the smallness of its mother's pelvis, giving the head an elongated form, and an irregular, knotty feel to the touch. The negro infant, however, is born with a small, hard, smooth, round head like a gourd. Instead of the frontal and temporal bones being divided into six plates, as in the white child, they form but one bone in the negro infant. The head is not only smaller ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... very old. Her entire feather outfit was ice-gray, without any dark streaks. The head was larger, the legs coarser, and the feet were more worn than any of the others. The feathers were stiff; the shoulders knotty; the neck thin. All this was due to age. It was only upon the eyes that time had had no effect. They shone brighter—as if they were younger—than any ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... soft hat back on his head, and sat drumming on the oak table with his knotty fingers. He was a strong man, thickset and healthy, with grizzled hair and an intensely black beard. His wife was fat, and purple about the jaws and under the ears. She stood with her back to the hearth, looking at him, with a wooden ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... then be more than fifteen miles from Washington, and he could make the remaining distance under the cover of darkness. He followed a narrow road between two fields, in one of which he saw a farmer ploughing, an old man, gnarled and knotty, whose mind seemed bent wholly upon his work. He was ploughing young corn, and although he could not keep from seeing Harry, he took ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... A knotty point for Venters was the fact that the cattle tracks all pointed west. The broad trail came from the direction of the canyon into which the rustlers had ridden, and undoubtedly the cattle had been driven out of it across the oval. There were no tracks pointing the other way. It had been in his ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... see the business has come. Can you be comfortable in your mousehole? Let us have the business, my dear. If it is knotty perhaps it will make me ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... a knotty problem. Our text-books tell us that all spheres are similar, and that similar solids are as the cubes of corresponding lengths. Therefore, as the circumferences of the two phials were one foot and two feet respectively and the cubes of one and two added together make nine, what ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... waist with a great handkerchief, and attired thus, with a fur cap pulled down over his ears, and with heavy mittens on his hands, ploughed through the deep snow to the church, and in the same dress preached his long, knotty sermon in his pulpit, while fierce wintry blasts rattled the windows and shook the turret, and the eight godly, shivering souls wished profoundly that one of their number had "lain at home in a slothfull, lazey, prophane way," and thus permitted the seven others and the ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... great perturbation of mind and disorder of dress. He had no flower in his button-hole; his yellow kid gloves were certainly two days old. He had not above three of the ten chains he usually sports, and his great coarse knotty-knuckled old hands were deprived of some dozen of the rubies, emeralds, and other cameos with which, since his elevation to fortune, the poor fellow has thought fit to ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sends up a spirt of lava and a volley of pebbles. His theories of gastro-enteritis, of irritation and inflammation as the cause of disease, and the practice which sprang from them, ran over the fields of medicine for a time like flame over the grass of the prairies. The way in which that knotty-featured, savage old man would bring out the word irritation—with rattling and rolling reduplication of the resonant letter r—might have taught a lesson in articulation to Salvini. But Broussais's theory was languishing and well-nigh become ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... petrified. Then, having cast upon us that look which struck us like a blow, he turned his eyes once more to the limitless ocean, and gazed upon it, in spite of its dazzling light, as eagles gaze at the sun, without lowering his eyelids. Try to remember, dear uncle, one of those old oaks, whose knotty trunks, from which the branches have been lopped, rise with weird power in some lonely place, and you will have an image of this man. Here was a ruined Herculean frame, the face of an Olympian Jove, destroyed by age, by hard sea toil, by grief, by ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... pale than flushed; his nose—if a sketch of his features be de rigueur for a person of his pretensions—was artistically beautiful enough to have been worth doing in marble by any sculptor not over-busy, and was hence devoid of those knotty irregularities which often mean power; while the double-cyma or classical curve of his mouth was not without a looseness in its close. Nevertheless, either from his readily appreciative mien, or his ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... a little pebble from his shoe, when he saw, at some distance, a beggar approaching him. He had on a loose sort of coat, mended with different-coloured rags, amongst which the blue and the russet were the predominant. He had a short knotty stick in his hand, and on the top of it was stuck a ram's horn; his knees (though he was no pilgrim) had worn the stuff of his breeches; he wore no shoes, and his stockings had entirely lost that ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... through the identical lane in which she had met the fairy. Wonderful to relate, there, on the very same stone and in precisely the same attitude, sat the old lady, peering out from under her poke-bonnet, and resting her knotty old hands on ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... stories stood higher buildings, with fronts of brown stone, cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies and cat-haunted grass-patches behind twisted railings. These houses too had once been private, but now a cheap lunchroom filled the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster of refuse-barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its curtainless windows, ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... will give some idea with what facility the whole thing is put through. Common merchantable pine lumber is used for the body of the case. The first workman draws a board of the stuff on a frame and by a movable circular saw cuts it in proper lengths for the sides and top. The knotty portions of it are sawed in lengths suitable for boxing the clocks when finished, and but little need be wasted. The good pieces are then taken to another saw and split up in proper widths, which are then passed through the planeing machine. Then another workman puts them through the ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... Mr. Charles G. Harper has solved the knotty point in his valuable book The Old Inns of Old England. He comes to the conclusion, by a process of elimination, that the "Waggon and Horses" at Beckhampton, which exists to-day, nearly realises the description of the inn given in the story. "It is," he says, "just the house a needy bagman ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... Though he had never been a close friend of Leland's, the two had worked on many a knotty problem together and were in daily contact during the nearly ten years that the other man had worked in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... Ford had been scheming and planning for a year and more to find a way of escape; not for himself, but for the discredited Plug Mountain line. It was proving a knotty problem, not to say an insoluble one. Ford had attacked it with his eyes open, as he did most things; and he was not without a suspicion that President Colbrith, of the Pacific Southwestern, had known to the full the hopelessness of the mountain line when he dictated the letter ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... of engaging further, where trouble begins to mix with it. We are to reserve so much employment only as is necessary to keep us in breath and to defend us from the inconveniences that the other extreme of a dull and stupid laziness brings along with it. There are sterile knotty sciences, chiefly hammered out for the crowd; let such be left to them who are engaged in the world's service. I for my part care for no other books, but either such as are pleasant and easy, to amuse me, or those that comfort and instruct me how to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... castles in the air—in imagination. But now and then she wanted another opinion, there were knotty points to decide. As 'all roads,' according to the old proverb, 'lead to Rome,' so all Celestina's meditations ended in the old cry, 'If only mother ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... I have seen him, at a time when he was so much taken up with the affairs of his master, that nobody could expect any thing from him but what related to his ministry, and his profound capacity to manage the most knotty negotiations; yet all the weight of his employment diminished nothing of his inimitable pleasantness, which charmed his friends, and was agreeable even to those barbarous nations with whom that great man did treat. After ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... of demons at an early date of the christian era; and it was not until a much later period of Christianity, that a more decided doctrine relative to their origin and nature was established. These tenets involved certain very knotty points respecting the fall of those angels, who, for disobedience, had forfeited their high abode in Heaven. The gnostics of early christian times, in imitation of a classification of the different orders of spirits by Plato, had attempted ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... been quite equalled—no, not in Rasselas itself or the Fool of Quality. But if anybody, who has the necessary knowledge to understand, and therefore the necessary patience to tolerate, these knotty knarry envelopes, insertions, and excrescences, will for the moment pay no attention to them, but merely strip them off, he will find the carcass of a very tolerable novel left behind. The first plot of Philautus—Euphues—Lucilla, and the successive jilting of the two friends for each ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand) You shall find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L.B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That is his ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the cunning which of years is born. Alas, from out the black and threat'ning sky, One star alone of all the eyes of Night Doth faintly pierce the gloom and light our way To safe solution of the knotty point. If but the Captain wear a stately mien And walketh deck with slow and kingly tread, Lieutenants skilled, by filthy lucre bribed, May box the compass and so save the ship. But who shall Captain be? Ah ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... Alec snatched the knotty bundle and glanced at the paragraph so eagerly that Philippa looked at him in surprise. She was still more surprised to see a deep flush spread over his face, as he tore the newspaper off the shoes and glanced ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... grateful to Nan for these hints, and was quite willing to follow her guidance in all such matters; but when Nan proposed once sending for Dick to ask his opinion on some knotty point that baffled their women's ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... ft. high and 9 in. across, young plants being broader than high; the sides split up into about twenty ridges, which are again divided into knotty tubercles or waves. The spines are remarkable for their size and strength, those on large plants being 4 in. long by 1/2 in. broad at the base, gradually narrowing to a stiff point; there are four central spines of this ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... goddesses and Athenian philosophers were judged the most fitting to stand before the English court. In scene after scene fair ladies talk of love, reverend sages display their readiness in solving knotty problems, lovers sigh into the air long rhapsodies over the charms of their mistresses, sharp-tongued (but rarely coarse) serving-boys lure fools into greater folly or exchange amusing badinage at the expense ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... it is generally found in the state of a hard lump or knot, varying in its size, it is loose and moveable, without pain or discolouration of the skin. It may continue in this state for many months, or even years; it then enlarges, the surface of the tumour becomes more or less knotty or uneven; it becomes hot and painful, and the pain is of a peculiar darting, piercing nature, or what the faculty technically call lancinating; and the patient's health, which had hitherto continued tolerably well, now begins to suffer from the irritation of the disease. In process ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... them, because they fill with ink, which afterwards dries and produces a thicker layer of black sediment than those elsewhere. The variations of pressure upon the pen can be easily noticed by the alternate widening and narrowing of the band between these two furrows. The tracing appears knotty and uneven when made by an untrained hand, while it appears uniformly thin, and generally tremulous or in zigzags when made by a weak ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... girl was flattered by the deference shown her, and gradually threw herself into the little plot. How to set up a meatless day for the household, minus the Squire, and not be found out; how to restrict the bread and porridge allowance, while apparently outrunning it—knotty problems! into which the twins plunged with much laughter and ingenuity. At the end of the discussion, Elizabeth said with hesitation, 'I don't like not ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... there, erect and sturdy, in his shiny leather apron, hammer in hand, with the firelight upon his venerable head, strong arms bared to the elbow, and the square paper cap pushed back from a thoughtful, knotty brow, he stirs strange fancies. One half expects to see him fashioning a gorget or a sword on his anvil. But his is a more peaceful craft. Nothing more warlike is in sight than a row of brass shields, destined ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... at home, stimulating the new plant and technology that can make our goods more competitive, is also the key to the international balance of payments problem. Laying aside all alarmist talk and panicky solutions, let us put that knotty ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... clowdily formed and expressed that few could understand them,"[25] and the modern reader, however much time and patience he bestows upon Vane's books, is forced to agree with Baxter. Vane acknowledges himself that his {275} thought is "knotty and abstruce." In religious matters his mind was always labouring, without success, to find a clear guiding clue through a maze and confusion of ideas, which fascinated him, and he allowed his mind ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... a notable exception. He gave me one technical principle, expressed in a few simple exercises, which I have never heard of from any one else. The use of this principle has helped me amazingly to conquer many knotty passages. I have never given these exercises to any one; I am willing however, to ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... knotty bole, The fresh'ning of the sap; When timid spring gave first small dole, Of sunbeams thro' bare boughs that stole, I saw the bright'ning blossoms roll, From summer's high ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... observer could trace the series of developments that had taken place since they had left Hill's Crossing. Yet the full gray beard with the broad shaved upper lip still gave the Chicago merchant the air of a New England worthy. And Alexander, in contrast with his brother-in-law, had knotty hands and a tanned complexion that years of "inside business" had not sufficed to smooth. The little habit of kneading the palm which you felt when he shook hands, and the broad, humorous smile, had not changed as the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Marquise will find a relish for them," he said pointedly at me. He, the natural son of King Louis, had played the part between La Pompadour and myself in the grave matter of which I spoke. "She loves deciding knotty ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... everything else has been rejected as irrelevant. We are not concerned in this place with the general reputation of the Sheffield Scientific at home and abroad. Singling out only one of its many merits, we can point to it with pride as the first institution to solve effectually the knotty problem of discipline. The means of its success are anything but occult. It has made its pupils feel from the moment of entrance that they were young men, and must act as such. It has refused to encumber itself with expensive and useless dormitories, and the faculty has in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... I touch her it'll wake her up with a start," said her grandfather anxiously. But before they had settled the knotty point, the engine-driver, growing tired of waiting, let off a shrill whistle from his engine and with the sound the little sleeper stirred, opened her eyes, and sat up suddenly. The porter hastily disappeared from ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... good cook had gone to speak with Mrs. Drane, Mike repaired to the woodshed, where, picking up an axe, he stood for some moments regarding a short, knotty log on end in front of ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... tranquillized the nation. But two great questions now occurred. 1st. What proportion shall the number of deputies of the Tiers Etat bear to those of the Nobles and Clergy? And, 2nd. Shall they sit in the same or in distinct apartments? Mr. Necker, desirous of avoiding himself these knotty questions, proposed a second call of the same Notables, and that their advice should be asked on the subject. They met, November 9, '88, and, by five bureaux against one, they recommended the forms ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of the chinquapin, He looks into its knotty eyes And sees its heart; and, deep within, Its soul that ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... of the kind, since the marriage of Giles Dauber to Madge Newsome of the Deercote, in which the discussion of a point so knotty and important had occurred. Giles dreamt not of the vast difference that exists in the nature and docility of divers women. He heard with a sort of incredulous surprise the first incipient grumblings in contravention of his authority; ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the cloudiness and the barrenness from many a life; and its mutual recognition—and action based upon it—would bring order and sweetness and mutual gain in vast numbers of instances in family, in business, in community life. It would solve many of the knotty problems in all lines of human relations and human endeavour, whose solution heretofore has seemed well-nigh impossible. It is the telling oil that will start to running smoothly and effectively many an otherwise clogged and grating system ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... thinking, the captain, mate, and passenger looked at each other in a bewildered fashion, as if each were endeavouring to solve some knotty conundrum, and had ultimately come to the ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... the captain was testy, petulant, and unhappy. The prophecy of Cochran had taken a stronger hold on his mind than he was willing to acknowledge. I was called upon to read aloud chapters in the Bible, and especially in the Book of Revelation, Knotty passages in the pamphlet I was also required to read from time to time. But the oftener they were read, and the more closely they were examined, the greater was the puzzle, the more complete ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... onions; he said that this was good for the digestion. This man fancied himself the hero of the day. Puffed up with pride, he stood near the engine, called it his foster-child, and stroked the rusty iron walls with his black, knotty hand, that sounded as if two graters were rubbed together. With a great show of foreign words he explained to every one who came near him the inner arrangement of the "lookmanbile," as he called his foster-child, ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... small gallies of a side in an artificial basin of fresh water. These gallies I suppose were not so large as common fishing-smacks, for they were moved by two, three, and four oars of a side according to their different rates, biremes, triremes, and quadriremes. I know this is a knotty point not yet determined; and that some antiquarians believe the Roman gallies had different tires or decks of oars; but this is a notion very ill supported, and quite contrary to all the figures of them that ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... taken, they sent to propose it to the Commandant, who rejected it with a menace to chastise them if they did not obey in a very short time, which he prefixed. {75} The Sun reported this answer to his council, who debated the question, which was knotty. But the policy of the old men was, that they should propose to the Commandant, to be allowed to stay in their village till harvest, and till they had time to dry their corn, and shake out the grain; on condition each hut of the village should pay him in so many moons ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... No knotty theories He offers to the listeners who attend, Or generalities, Which glitter with the gilt that fine words lend; He sets forth what he sees So simply that who hears ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... the rusticity of 'Wuthering heights,' I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have ...
— Charlotte Bronte's Notes on the pseudonyms used • Charlotte Bronte
... the giants of these wilds, whose stature is so wonderful that the eye never becomes tired of admiration. Often have I halted on my journey to ride around and admire the prodigious height and girth of these trees. Their beautiful proportions render them the more striking; there are no gnarled and knotty stems, such as we are accustomed to admire in the ancient oaks and beeches of England, but every trunk rises like a mast from the earth, perfectly free from branches for ninety or a hundred feet, straight as an arrow, each tree forming a dark ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... was peinted a forest, In which ther wonneth neyther man ne best, With knotty knarry barrein trees old Of stubbes sharpe and hidous to behold; In which ther ran a romble and a swough, As though a storme shuld bresten every bough." The ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... illustrations for the mere sake of rhetorical effect. He rather makes every figure of speech to arise as it were by a natural sequence in the course of his reasoning, and few men have a greater facility for making "crooked paths straight, and rough places plain." The most abstruse and knotty points he makes so obvious and clear that his hearers are inclined to wonder why they did not think of them in that light before—giving to themselves, or to the merits of the question in hand, a credit that is only due to the preacher whose discernment has removed the lions of ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... Dunfer—or, as he was familiarly known in the neighborhood, Whisky Jo.—was a very important personage in those parts. He was apparently about forty years of age, a long, shock-headed fellow, with a corded face, a gnarled arm and a knotty hand like a bunch of prison-keys. He was a hairy man, with a stoop in his walk, like that of one who is about to spring ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... editions of Homer. He was not one of your ignorant collectors who know only the outside of what they buy. He had read over the whole forty-eight books of the text again and again, and could discuss knotty passages in most interesting and original fashion. His memory was evidently an excellent one. He informed me that most of his reading was done in the early morning, and that he found five hours' sleep ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... was not listening; he had fallen into a brown study, turning the piece of metal in his skilful, wonted, knotty fingers, with their ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... similar to those which are not altogether unknown in more civilized society, and I make no hesitation in offering to our legislators the example of my friend the Cree as tending to simplify the solution, or rather the dissolution, of that knotty point, the separation of couples who, for reasons best known to themselves, have ceased to love. Whether it was that the Cree found in Victoria a lady suitad to his fancy, or whether he had heard of a war-party against the Sircies, I cannot ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... have evidently met with no resistance, or the sheaths would have been turned inside out, or crumpled out of shape, or wrinkled at least. Without harming the jointed or knotted covers, the contents, of equal volume and equally knotty, have slipped out as easily as though they were smooth, slippery objects sliding out of a loose sheath. The method of extraction is still more astonishing in the case of ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... uncanonically condemned the successor of Peter—how could it be infallible? and when should its legislation in any other particulars be indisputable? On the other hand, if the deposition was a valid one, with what consistency could the French continue to regard Eugenius as their legitimate pastor? It was a knotty dilemma. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... left his nephew sadly perplexed as to the knotty question from which their talk on the future had diverged—viz., should he write to the Parson; and assure the fears of his mother? How do so without Richard's consent, when Richard had on a former occasion ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... gray in color,—like brown hair that has silvered in many winters. His huge head was lowered between his high, rocking shoulders, his forelegs were simply great, knotty, cast-iron bunches of fiber and tendons; his long claws—worn down by digging in the rocks for marmots—were like great, curved fingers. As he stepped, his forefeet swung out, giving to his carriage an arrogance and a swagger that would have been amusing if it hadn't ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... take a child's part on't if you have so much courage, for Hector has challenged the toughest of the Greeks; and it is in dispute which of your two heads is the soundest timber. A knotty piece of work ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... this heavenly treatise.' Such, in substance, is the author's interesting account of the circumstances under which he wrote this book. He adds, with humility, that the men of this world would laugh, in conceit, that one so low, contemptible, and inconsiderable should busy himself with so hard and knotty a subject, but humbly hopes, that though but a babe in Christ, these truths were revealed to him. To the real followers of the lowly Jesus, the poor carpenter's son, 'who had not where to lay his head'-of whom the Jews said, 'How knoweth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... discuss these knotty points of honor and expediency together, do you, as a recreation from the Greek syntax? I ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... and knotty hands trembled too much, and so did his wife's withered ones; so Aunt ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... the day was none of the finest, having elicited a repartee of quite the contrary, the various knotty points of meteorology, which usually form the exordium of an English conversation, were successively discussed and exhausted; and, the ice being thus broken, the colloquy rambled to other topics, in the course of which ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... uninterrupted, and she had gained many pounds of flesh. All apprehensions concerning her health had about disappeared. The Count continued his medical studies and investigations with unabated zeal and interest. The action of the infinitesimal dose was a knotty question. He could not deny the fact that they exhibited marvelous power over disease, but their immateriality staggered his faith at times, in spite of all that he had seen and experienced. But there came a time when he stepped ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... bulky affair, composed of grasses, knotty roots mixed with mud, and lined with fine dry grass, horse hair, or sheep's wool. The eggs are light greenish or smoky blue, with irregular lines, dots and blotches distributed over the surface. The eggs average four to six, though nests have been ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... head, whilst the bark of the tree was regarded as a sovereign remedy for the ringworm. [18] Its leaves, too, when bruised and moistened with vinegar were used for ear-ache. For scrofulous glands, the knotty tubers attached to the kernel-wort (Scrophularia nodosa) have been considered efficacious. The pith of the elder, when pressed with the fingers, "doth pit and receive the impress of them thereon, as the legs and feet of dropsical persons do," Therefore the juice of ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... all the twigs examined he found its grub, the cause of a misunderstanding at the beginning of his researches. But he did not, could not see the audacious insect at work. It is one of the Chalcididae, about one-fifth or one-sixth of an inch in length; entirely black, with knotty antennae, which are slightly thicker towards their extremities. The unsheathed ovipositor is implanted in the under portion of the abdomen, about the middle, and at right angles to the axis of the body, as in the case of the Leucospis, the pest of the apiary. Not having taken the precaution ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... Young Silvia beats her breast, and cries aloud For succor from the clownish neighborhood: The churls assemble; for the fiend, who lay In the close woody covert, urg'd their way. One with a brand yet burning from the flame, Arm'd with a knotty club another came: Whate'er they catch or find, without their care, Their fury makes an instrument of war. Tyrrheus, the foster father of the beast, Then clench'd a hatchet in his horny fist, But held his hand from the descending stroke, And left his wedge within ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... see in Miss Howe's letter, how different the expression of the same impatience, and passionate love, is, when dictated by the gentler mind of a woman, from that which results from a mind so boisterous and knotty as thine. For Mrs. Lovick will transcribe it, and I shall send it—to be read in this ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... was lying by the roadside ready to be taken away. I had wanted to get the lady a chip from this, thinking it looked as if it would lend itself more easily to the design, but she said it would not do. They have a new cross every year, and they always select a hard knotty uncompromising piece of wood for the purpose. The old is then taken ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... passed away since the time of Sam's youthful adventure, and the snows of many a winter had grizzled the knotty wool upon his head. He perfectly recollected the circumstances, however, for he had often been called upon to relate them, though in his version of the story he differed in many points from Peechy Prauw; as is not unfrequently the case with authentic historians. As to the subsequent ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... he did with his might. He was keenly interested in whatever he took up, showing a tendency, indeed, to ride his hobbies to death. He had a particular penchant for puzzles of all kinds, and many a knotty problem brought to him as a last court of appeal received a surprisingly rapid and complete solution. His detractors, while admitting his ingenuity and the almost uncanny rapidity with which he seized on the essential facts of a case, said he was lacking in staying power, ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... Gailey's bowed head, but little greyed, beneath the ray of the lamp, and at her shrivelled, neurotic, plaintive face in shadow, and at her knotty hands loosely clasped, she contrasted her companion and the scene with the youthfulness and the spaciousness and the sturdy gay vigour of existence in the household of the Orgreaves. She thought, with a renewed sense of the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... rectilinearity, and dub it a priggish, stuck-up, arrogant upstart among cities. What business had it to be so straight and clean and airy? Fain would I shake the dust off my feet in testimony against it; but here was the trouble. How to get away—that was a knotty problem. The railway had been torn up for months, and the armour-vested locomotives were rusting on the sidings at Hendaye. The dirty hot little tug, the Alcorta, that plies between the quay and Socoa, had left; and I grieved ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... at intervals by a red puggree and flashing bayonet wherever a jail sepoy kept his 'lonely watch.' Near it, sheltered in a grove of shady trees, were the court houses, where the collector and magistrate daily dispensed justice, or where the native moonsiff disentangled knotty points of law. Here, too, came the sessions judge once a month or so, to try criminal cases and mete out ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... supper, and helping what they could. There was a very small squirrel on her shoulder, sitting up, as those creatures do, and turning a rocky fragment of prehistoric chestnut-cake over and over in its knotty hands, and hunting for the less indurated places, and giving its elevated bushy tail a flirt and its pointed ears a toss when it found one—signifying thankfulness and surprise—and then it filed that place off with those two slender ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... length of certain months, as prevailed among the Cakchiquels; we are in the dark about the significance of the names of many days and months; we cannot see why the nations chose to begin the count of the year at different seasons; and there are ever so many more knotty problems about this remarkable ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... powers of general scholarship, he can easily master a knotty passage in Eschylus or Aristotle; and quote Juvenal and Horace as readily as the junior lads at Eton quote their 'As in praesenti:' moreover, he can enter, with equal ardour, into a minute discussion about the romance literature ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and peered over them at Silas Harper, her husband, who had just entered her room and stood with his hat in his hand. He was low of stature, small and very bow-legged. A short white beard graced his chin, while his upper lip was kept clean shaven. His head was covered with the proverbial knotty, wool-like hair, which was now the scene of a struggle for the mastery between the black and gray. Since the moment that the news was brought to him that Bud was accused of Alene's murder he had ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... learned, and not wanting the countenance of Cicero, is confuted by the larger experience of New England. On the whole, I think it safer to apply here the rule of interpretation which now generally obtains in regard to antique cosmogonies, myths, fables, proverbial expressions, and knotty points generally, which is, to find a common-sense meaning, and then select whatever can be imagined the most opposite thereto. In this way we arrive at the conclusion, that the Greeks objected ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... surveyed them with grim determination as she might have a knotty problem in mathematics. She would not give heed to the small voice within her that counseled care. Miss Baxter never gave heed to anything ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... of a man, lean and knotty, all of whose joints formed protuberances, proceeded at an easy pace down the ravine, searching at every opening through which a passage could be effected with the cautiousness of a fox. Then, suddenly, ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... explanation. We doped out before, you know, that the force is something like magnetism, and is generated when the coil causes the electrons of this specially-treated copper to vibrate in parallel planes. The knotty point was what could be the effect of a weak electric current in liberating the power. I've got it! It shifts the plane ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... their creed. Learning, as they called it, was a bewilderment to them; and yet some of those eccentric, half-savage beings could be entrusted with valuable property, and the negotiation of business involving most intricate handling. Sometimes in the settlement of knotty questions they used their own peculiar persuasiveness, and if that was not convincing, they indicated the possibility of physical force—which was usually effectual, especially with Levantines. Here is ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... limbs and her wit) one expects to hear the merry note of a horn; the moralizing Duke would come striding thoughtfully through the thicket down by the tiny pool (or shall we call it a mere?). He would sit under those two knotty old oaks and begin to pluck the burrs from his jerkin. Then would come his cheerful tanned followers, carrying the dappled burgher they had ambushed; and, last, the pensive Jacques (so very like Mr. Joseph Pennell in bearing and humour) ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... unfortunate misunderstanding would assuredly be smoothed away now, for it was only separation and existence apart from each other that would, he conceived, be able to foster it. Hubert took up the steel tongs which stood near the fire-grate, and as he proceeded to break up a knotty piece of wood that would only sweal, not burn, and to rake the fire together better, he said to V——, "You see what a good-natured fellow I am, Herr Justitiarius, and that I am skilful in all domestic matters. But Wolfgang is full of the most extraordinary prejudices, ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... did not take herself off. She squinted at the gold, at the gold tied together hanging on the walls, at the gold wire the wife was drawing out with all the strength of her little arms, at the gold links lying in a heap under the husband's knotty fingers. And she thought that the least bit of this ugly black metal would suffice to buy her a good dinner. The workroom was as dirty as ever, full of old iron, coal dust and sticky oil stains, half wiped away; but ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... and had previously worked in the Seven Mines, had been killed by a mysterious shot, fired from the depths of Chicago River, they turned to Johnny, as the one who could best aid them in solving the knotty problem of ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... have the right to object." Of this Bloomington speech, Herndon says: "It was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, integrity, truth, and right. The words seemed to be set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by a great wrong. The utterance was hard, knotty, gnarly, backed ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... Sponge and half to his fine wife, 'Then (puff—wheeze) I'll just (puff) on and get Mr. (wheeze) Sponge's room ready.' So saying, he gave the old nag a hearty jerk with the bit, and two or three longitudinal cuts with the knotty-pointed whip, and jingled away with a bevy of children shouting, hanging on, and dragging behind, amidst exclamations from Mrs. Crowdey, of 'O Anna Maria! Juliana Jane! O Frederick James, you naughty boy! you'll spoil your new shoes! Archibald John, you'll be kilt! you'll be run over ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... juniors, or the shaking of anything which did not need shaking, but only helped them to clear their ideas and brains as to what they were talking and thinking about, and gave them glimpses—soon clouded over again, but most useful, nevertheless—of the truth; that there were a good many knotty questions to be solved before a man could be quite sure that he had found out the way to set the world thoroughly to rights, and heal all the ills that flesh ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... began to dance. There was no use taking offense at this simple soul. After all he was not a servant, but a loyal follower whose brain was not quite up to the job of coping with the knotty problem of bringing two of his friends together in matrimony. "Does he? I'm sure I'm gratified," she murmured, busy with her ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... I had to put my best efforts to the test to make a complete success out of a knotty problem. I spent a week in perfecting my sketches. After completing the cards, I called up Dr. Shannon to come and see if all was to his satisfaction. I placed the cards before him on the desk and awaited his approval. It was some minutes before he spoke. He looked up and said quietly, "I guess I'll ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... increasing, it was soon found that better facilities for instruction were required. It was therefore decided to take steps to erect a better, a more permanent building than the one then occupied. Just how this was to be done, was, for a while, quite a knotty problem with this enterprising little band of teachers. Its solution was attempted finally by one of their number, Mr. George L. White, in this wise: He had often been struck with the charming melody of the "slave songs" that he had heard sung by the children of the school; ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... not mov'd, when all the sway of earth Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero, I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds 5 Have riv'd the knotty oaks, and I have seen Th' ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam, To be exalted with the threatening clouds; But never till to-night, never till now, Did I go through a tempest dropping fire. 10 Either there is a civil strife in heaven, Or else the world, too saucy with the gods, Incenses ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... old barrel of trash, he made a splendid "find." It was two old law books. He read and re- read them, got all the sense and argument out of their dry pages, blossomed into a debater, began to dream of being a lawyer, and became so skilled in seeing through and settling knotty questions that, once again, New Salem wondered at this clerk of Offutt's, who was as long of head as of arms and legs, and declared that "Abe Lincoln could out-argue any ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... in its slippers and diplomacy in its dressing-gown. Statesmen who had just been outwitting each other at the hazard of European politics laughed good-humoredly as they laid their gold down on the color. Rivals who had lately been quarreling over the knotty points of national frontiers now only vied for a twenty-franc rosebud from the bouquetiere. Knights of the Garter and Knights of the Golden Fleece, who had hated each other to deadliest rancor with the length of the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... which was covered with triumphal stelae, on which the sailors or troops going up or down the river could spell out as they passed the praises of the king and his exploits. A few feet of shore on the northern side, covered with dry and knotty bushes, affords in winter a landing-place for tourists. At the spot where the beach ends near the point of the promontory, sit four colossi, with their feet nearly touching the water, their backs leaning against a sloping wall ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... been observed, in the Tower for his practices against the present order of things, he being an advocate of extreme democratic principles; and he was there instructed in knotty points of law by Judge Jenkins, to enable him to torment and baffle the party in power. It was Jenkins who said of Lilburne that "If the world were emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John, and John with ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... him some sawdust brains the last time I fitted his head with new ears," explained the Wizard. "The sawdust was made from hard knots, and now the Sawhorse is able to think out any knotty problem he meets with." ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... countries which were on his body it was winter, and in others it was early harvest." Many broad rivers flow over his back, and he is covered with forests and hills, as is indicated in his name, which means "the rugose or knotty-backed beast." In this group of conceptions may be seen the origin of Sindbad's great fish, which lay still so long that sand and clay gradually accumulated upon its back, and at last it became covered with trees. ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... varying thoughts she allowed her softening eyes to wander from him toward the trees above and the straggling brush beneath their knotty limbs. A suppressed scream called the Captain's attention to her staring eyes. They were ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... succeeded long stretches of odorous pines interspersed with Mediterranean heath (brayere), which here grows to a height of twelve feet; one thinks of the number of briar pipes that could be cut out of its knotty roots. A British Vice-Consul at Reggio, Mr. Kerrich, started this industry about the year 1899; he collected the roots, which were sawn into blocks and then sent to France and America to be made into pipes. This Calabrian briar was considered superior to the French kind, and Mr. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... isolating and impermeable, there will be no interest in raising the electrodes sensibly above its lower edge. Now, the nearer together the electrodes are, the more it is necessary to lower the partition. The extension of the electrodes and the bringing of them together is the knotty part of the question. This will be shown by a very ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... of feculent matter deadens the sensibility of the intestine, so that great stimulation is required to provoke it to action. The contents become dry, solid, knotty, and hard, and very difficult to evacuate. If drastic, irritating physic be taken, only temporary relief is afforded, and it must be repeatedly resorted to, and the dose increased, to obtain the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce |
