"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but loses itself in a grubby tangle of smaller streets, thickly set with small houses, densely and untidily populated, the section known at first derisively and later in good faith as Paddy Lane. Through the intricate geography of this quarter Colonel Everard's only openly declared enemy might have been seen making a hasty ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... a tangle of mercurial moods, the neuropath being passionate but loving, sullen one moment, overflowing with sentimental affection the next, vicious a little while later, quick to unreasoning anger, and as quick to repent ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... a tangle of wild cats springing straight at a broad-tired cart; a grappling of track-lines and handle-bars; a whirl down the wooden incline, Tod following with the quickly lighted lanterns; a dash along the runway, the sand cutting their cheeks like grit from a whirling stone; over the dune, the men bracing ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... smell, Jode's sustained and haughty indignation, the extraordinary assurance of Lusk, all this had ended by turning every one restless and eccentric. A citizen came down the street with an umbrella. In a moment the by-standers had reduced it to a sordid tangle of ribs. Old Judge Burrage attempted to address us at the corner about the vast progress of science. The postmaster pinned a card on his back with the well-known legend, "I am somewhat of a liar myself." And ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... time the noble master was in worse case than the man. His fine forehead was a tangle of livid cords; his baggy jowl filled out like a balloon. In another second he had abandoned his place as our host and fled the room; and in yet another we had forgotten ours as his guests and rushed headlong ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... daughters are to pass into life under the scarification of a disreputable ancestor. He is drinking up their happiness, their prospects for this life, and, perhaps, for the life to come. Sometimes an appreciation of what he is doing comes upon him. His nervous system is all a tangle. From crown of head to sole of foot he is one aching, rasping, crucifying, damning torture. Where is he? In hell on earth. Does ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... face grew deeper. He frowned seriously from his tangle of hair. He separated his hands and emphasized his ...
— Options • O. Henry
... down the room—the familiar action recalling vividly to Robert the Sunday afternoons of bygone years—he began to put questions with a clearness and decision that made them so many guides to the man answering, through the tangle of his ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... solemn as he promised to behave himself, but there was a twinkle in his eyes as he flew toward the Old Briar-patch. There he hid in a thick tangle of vines. Now it happened that Peter Rabbit had gone over to the sweet-clover patch, and little Mrs. Peter was quite alone. Somehow she got to thinking of her old home, and for the first time she began to feel just a wee, wee bit homesick. It ...
— Mrs. Peter Rabbit • Thornton W. Burgess
... about and crawled through this tangle, until at last I came out, scratched and dishevelled and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... know something about all this tangle of politics. There's Breckinridge, Douglas, Bell and Lincoln—four candidates. Uncle Jim gets almost cross when I ask him what they all stand for. Mr. Rivers told me to be thankful I have no vote. If there is to be war, have I no interest? ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... mountains below the Iron Gate is the Balkan Range. But excepting for the plains of Thrace, lying south of the Balkans, over toward the Black Sea and above Constantinople, the rest of the peninsula is almost entirely one confused tangle of craggy mountains, interspersed throughout with small, fertile valleys and plateaus. This roughness of surface becomes especially aggravated as one passes westward, and over toward the Adriatic coast, from Greece up into the Austrian province of Dalmatia, the country ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... to the Indian nature worship, of which something is said in the opening chapter. Both the title and a small part of the matter are reprinted from an article which I contributed last year to the New York Evening Post. Attention is called to the tangle in the names of glaciers and the need of a definitive nomenclature. As to the name of the Mountain itself, that famous bone of contention between two cities, I greatly prefer "Tacoma," one of the ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... pillars of the porch and wide, hospitable rooms were of tree-trunks with the bark on them. With a little work it could be made roughly but artistically habitable. Gardley had it cleaned up, not disturbing the tangle of vines and shrubbery that had had their way since the last owner had left them and which had made a perfect screen from the road ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... you need a hair cut. Yuh know it?" he said, with a huskiness in his voice, and pulled a tangle playfully. Then his eyes swung round defiantly to Cash. "It's stealing to keep him, but I can't help it. I'd rather die right here in my tracks than give up this little ole kid. And you can take that as it ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... drooped dejectedly as he tried to unravel this fresh tangle. Why was Jim Crow shadowing him? In the interests of the Indians? Again he pulled out his watch. And the woman beside him saw that his hand was shaking as he held it out to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... or ever having had the experience of salvation, Frank did not know how to unravel the tangle of thought that he had woven within Edwin's mind, and he was at a loss ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... unsteadily. "Don't! I know it's bad enough. Perhaps you're right—I oughtn't to have spoken to Diana, I hoped things would right themselves eventually, but you and Baroni have put another complexion upon matters. It's all an inextricable tangle, whichever way one looks at it—come good luck or bad! . . . I suppose I was wrong—I ought to have waited. But now . . . now . . . Before God, Adrienne! I can't, give ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... spirit, the Ego, shines clear, free from the entanglements of the web and unaffected by the magnetic glamour of the Moon. And lo! the coffin is filled with stones, a symbol of death and the Moon, which is but a casket of stones. Therefore, little monad, caught in the tangle of the web of life and the glamour of earthly things, take heart, for, beyond all, is the star of your being. Call down the law of that star into yourself, and the web is broken and waves its tattered shreds in the breeze. The moonlight, the reflected light, pales as ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... course of time read them all. As we traced the fortunes of those early adventurers who dreamed and sailed towards an unknown continent, pictured to ourselves the lives of the tribes who wandered about in the big tangle of forest growth between the Atlantic and the Pacific, as we landed on the bleak New England shores with the early Pilgrims, then fought with Washington, then studied the perilous internal struggle culminating with Lincoln and the Civil War, then the dangerous period of reconstruction ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... looking earnestly in the lad's agitated countenance, for his brow was one tangle of ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... regular pass—a fortunate thing for him, as it afterwards turned out, for he thus escaped falling into an ambush of five hundred Cherokees who were encamped along it.[62] After in vain trying to penetrate the tangle of gloomy defiles and wooded peaks, he returned to the middle towns at Canucca on September 18th. Here he met Williamson, who had just arrived, having been delayed so that he could not leave Fort Rutledge until the 13th.[63] The South Carolinians, two thousand strong, had crossed the Blue ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,—the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding villages ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the morning after the arrival of the motor girls at Crystal Bay, house, tent and bungalow were deserted—it was all a matter of motor boat. Moored to the brand new dock, at Tangle Turn, a brand new motor craft heaved with the incoming waves and tugged at its ropes whenever a sufficiently strong motion of the water gave it excuse ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... impatient of the old man's rigid control. Hilton is sharp and shrewd, and he guessed things were going wrong financially. He knew that his father's methods were out of date, and believed he could straighten the tangle if the reins of power were not ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... the land in that direction could be made out than the unfavourable position of the ice would permit at our last visit. The Fury then made sail and stood to the eastward, encountering the usual strength of tide off the southwest point of Tangle Island, and soon after a great quantity of heavy drift-ice, apparently not long detached from ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... left them for the quietude of the garden. Back and forth upon the path, bordered by wee budding tulips, he walked with springing steps. His gaze was in the laced branches overhead, a tangle that broke the calm flood of moonlight into silver patches and scattered them over the ground. Back and forth across these he strode—one moment in sharp outline, the next obscured—thinking, dreaming. He would not stop to hear ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... of it brought us down screaming with laughter in a tangle on the slag-heap. A searchlight broke out from the back of the Hun trenches and began searching ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... fields o' green, Cow-bells jingle, jangle, An' the kids thayre on the swing In the tree-tops' tangle! Wushin' fer to be a boy Whayre no sorrows fun destroy, An' the rain-bows ring the medders with ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... all dreadfully mixed up," sighed Cora, "and I believe it will take your father, Belle, to straighten out some of the tangle. Meanwhile, I suppose I'd better put these papers in the safe," for Inez had thrust them into Cora's ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... pavements. An Indian killed Pontiac between Cahokia and Prairie du Pont. When he rose from his body and saw it was not a British knife, but a red man's tomahawk, he was not a chief who would lie still and bear it in silence. Yes, I have heard that he has been seen walking through the grapevine tangle, all bleached as if the bad redness was burned out of him. But the priest will tell you better, my son. Do not believe ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... when despair was his only hope, to ship as a sailor on board some man-of-war. He would at other times return to his first love, and vow he would be a painter; then music would solicit him; medicine next, and then surgery would tangle his eyes. These excursions, which commonly lasted three months each, were not fruitless; they increased his stock of information, and supplied him with some of his most striking images. He became joyous about this period, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... doing already, it wants a man to bring his mind right down to the fact of the present case and its immediate needs. Now the present case, as the doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before,—a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his business to wind as much thread out of as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He has seen just such noses and just such eyes and just such mouths, but he ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... answered carelessly. "Well, Mr. Coulson, I won't take up any more of your time. I am convinced that you have told me all that you know, and I am afraid that I shall have to look elsewhere to find the loose end of this little tangle." ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... we loitered ashore, the murderers had stolen our boat and vanished, leaving us there helplessly marooned. All this was plain enough now, when it was already too late to remedy the evil. The struggling girl emerged through the tangle of shrubs, and paused suddenly at my side, her lips giving utterance to a ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... Hills he had gone like the wind, but now he rushed like a thoroughbred standing a challenge in the homestretch. His nose, and his flying tail were a straight line and the flash of his legs was a tangle which no eye could follow as he shot east on the back trail, straight toward the posse. For a mile or more that speed did not slacken, and at the end of that distance he began to edge to ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... intuitively known better than to tell a sick person that he is looking worse, but they have not always known why. They have known that a fit of anger is apt to bring on a headache, but they have not stopped to look for the reason, or if they have, they have often gotten themselves into a tangle. This is because there has always been, until recently, a missing link. Now the link has been found. After the last chapter, it will not be hard to understand that this connecting link, this go-between of body and mind, is nothing else than the subconscious mind. When we remember ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... grew warmer. Tiny green shoots appeared in the rusty tangle of last season's mesa grasses. Imperceptibly the dull-hued mesas became fresh carpeted with green across which the wind bore a subtly soft fragrance ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... upon to fathom. Once only had I known him to fail, in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four, and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... rewarded the ghoul in the grave was a long tangle of black hair defiled with clay: but this was such an anti-climax that it received little attention. Suddenly, with a short exclamation and a gesture of excitement, the young man unearthed a fragment of grayish rock, and after a hurried inspection handed it up to Mr. Porfer. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... for hooking 'em after this infernal stir-up! Take me half an hour to get my tackle out of tangle, and then it'll be close on to shutting-up time. One big 'un and two or three little ones not much to return with. Look at those impudent young rascals chyiking us from the banks! Oh, for heaven's sake, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... The expectations of the young lady about whom you inquire are involved in such a tangle of conditions as could only have occurred to the excited fancy of an old Anglo-Indian. He left about twenty lacs of rupees in various bonds—G. I. P. and others—to his nephew, Ronald Surbiton, and to his niece jointly, provided that they marry each ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... way was hard, rough with stones and choked by a tangle of rank growth, the three in the coulee made fast progress over the first two miles. Charley led. After him came Marylyn, to whom the loathed split in the plain was become a place of refuge. In the rear, covering her sister against possible ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... parish church up at Doogalville have been getting rather into a tangle in the last six months. The people of the church were specially anxious to do something toward the general public subscription of the town on behalf of the unhappy Armenians, and to that purpose they determined to devote the collections taken ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... pinned to the wet earth by a limb that had fallen partly across him. Fortunately, the storm had been unable to twist it entirely from the tree. Only the outer end of the limb had struck him, but the tangle of leafy boughs above him was too thick to creep through. His clothes were drenched, and on the ground beside him, beaten flat by the storm, lay the bunch of Alpine roses he had climbed so ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... moved on. She ran out then to the park gate. Once through that she felt safe; her husband, she knew, was working in his room; the girl somewhere invisible; the old governess still at her housekeeping; Mrs. Doone writing letters. She felt full of hope and courage. This old wild tangle of a park, that she had not yet seen, was beautiful—a true trysting-place for fauns and nymphs, with its mossy trees and boulders and the high bracken. She kept along under the wall in the direction of the river, but came to no gate, and began to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... twilight. But I saw trolley tracks uprooted, twisted fantastically. I saw wide wounds in the street. Water flooded out of one. A deadly odor of gas from a broken main swept out of the other. Telegraph poles were rocked like matches. A wild tangle of wires was in the street. Some of the wires ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the blood of murdered Christians. Could that be reconciled with what is right? A little later he saw the Kaiser once again pushing himself into Mediterranean politics, where no direct German interest lay, and endeavoring to tangle up the French developments in Northern Africa by provocative personal appearances at Morocco, and, later, by sending a gunboat to intrude upon a scene of action which had already by the Treaty of Algeciras been allotted to France. How could an honest German whose mind was undebauched by a ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... stream in front appears, A venerable Chief advanc'd in years; His hoary head with water-lilies crown'd, His manly leg with garter tangle bound. Next came the loveliest pair in all the ring, Sweet Female Beauty hand in hand with Spring; Then, crown'd with flow'ry hay, came Rural Joy, And Summer, with his fervid-beaming eye: All-cheering Plenty, with her flowing horn, Led yellow ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... squelching slush of a water-logged meadow a weary, bedraggled, but unbeaten fox stiffly picked his way, climbed a high bramble-grown bank, and flung himself into the sheltering labyrinth of a stretching tangle of woods. The pack of fierce-mouthed things that had rattled him from copse and gorse-cover, along fallow and plough, hedgerow and wooded lane, for nigh on an hour, and had pressed hard on his life for the last few minutes, receded suddenly into the background of his experiences. The cold, wet ...
— When William Came • Saki
... walk, or a random scoot,"—the latter being a plunge into the pathless forest. When he was on such an expedition, and became entangled in dense brush, and maybe a network of "slash" and swamp, he was like an old wizard, as he looked here and there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a thicket, and muttering to himself, "There ain't no speckerlation there." And when the way became altogether inscrutable,—"Waal, this is a reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole." As some one remarked, "The dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... found her, slew the giant, and bore her off. But the assiduous giant had bound back the locks of the maiden, tightly twisting her hair in such a way that the matted mass of tresses was held in a kind of curled bundle; nor was it easy for anyone to unravel their plaited tangle, without using the steel. Again, he tried with divers allurements to provoke the maiden to look at him; and when he had long laid vain siege to her listless eyes, he abandoned his quest, since his purpose turned out so little to his liking. But he could ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... political power, was merely a theoretical political ring for the theoretical political conflicts of German agitators and dreamers, and was composed of the representatives of this tangle of powerless, but vain and self-conscious little states. This Holy Roman Empire, with an Austrian at its head, and aided by France, strove to prevent the development of a strong German state under the leadership of Prussia. After Napoleon's day it became a struggle between Prussia and Austria. Austria ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... and they arose together, and she said: O friend, I fled from thee once and left thee lonely of me because I deemed need drave me to it; and I feared the strife of friends, and confusion and tangle. Now if thou wilt avenge thee on me thou mayest, for I am in thy power. Yet will I ask thee what need will drive ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... that," she ended simply, "for months before he died." She sank into the corner of a sofa by the window, as though relaxing her body after an effort. For a few moments both were silent. Trent was hastily sorting out a tangle of impressions. He was amazed at the frankness of Mrs. Manderson's story. He was amazed at the vigorous expressiveness in her telling of it. In this vivid being, carried away by an impulse to speak, talking with her whole personality, ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... residence segregation, from "Jim-Crow" cars to a "Jim-Crow" army draft—all this history of discrimination and insult festered to make men think and willing to think that the venting of their unbridled anger against 12,000,000 humble, upstriving workers was a way of settling the industrial tangle of the ages. It was the logic of the broken plate, which, seared of old across its pattern, cracks never again, save along ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... themselves along either side of the road. Hilda too was glad to be in the free country again, and she looked with delight at the banks of fern, the stone walls covered with white starry clematis, and the tangle of blackberry vines which made the pleasant road so fragrant and sweet. She was silent for some time. At last she said, half timidly, "Farmer Hartley, you promised to tell me more about your father some day. Don't you think this would be a good time? I have been so much interested ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... French soldier of the days of the Empire lying with crossed hands, the head and feet cutting the sky-line sharp and clear, or the bolder outlines of blue Mount Ory or cloud-capped Pieter Both. Our path always lies through a splendid tangle of vegetation, where the pruning-knife seems the only gardening tool needed, and where the deepening twilight brings out many a heavy perfume from some hidden flower. Above us bends a vault of lapis-lazuli, with globes of light hanging in it, and around us is a heavenly, soft and balmy air. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Anderson's Brigade of South Carolinians came up, and three regiments, led by Colonel Jenkins, made a flank movement, and by a desperate assault, took the redoubt on the left, with six pieces of artillery. When Rhodes' North Carolina Brigade got sufficiently through the tangle and undergrowth and near the opening as to see their way clear, they raised a yell, and with a mad rush, they took the fort with a bound. They were now within the strong fortress on the left and masters of the situation. Colonel Jenkins was highly complimented by ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... to all these truisms—for I felt conscience-stricken. I knew I had always depended in all my housekeeping emergencies too much on my "talent for improvising," as Kate Wilson merrily entitles my readiness in a domestic tangle and stand-still. I had been in the habit of letting things go on as easily as possible, scrupulously avoiding domestic tempests, because they deranged my nervous system; and if I found a servant would not do a thing in my way, I would let her accomplish it in her own manner, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... quenchless force, Lighting Pain to its mad source, Scaring Fear till Fear escapes, Shot through all its phantom shapes. Then your spirit will perceive Fleshly seed of fleshly sins; Where the passions interweave, How the serpent tangle spins Of the sense of Earth misprised, Brainlessly unrecognized; She being Spirit in her clods, Footway to the God of Gods. Then for you are pleasures pure, Sureties as the stars are sure: Not the wanton beckoning flags Which, of flattery and delight, Wax to the grim Habit-Hags Riding souls ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bench, which was instantly metamorphosed into one of the rustic seats she had arranged against the wall along the side of some of the bigger tables in the marble worker's court, was ostensibly the cause of the disturbance in her cardiac region. She had, it seemed, in the interminable tangle of nightmare, given Molly and Dolly and the Alma Tadema girl instructions to throw out the unwelcome guest, and she was standing by with Michael, who was assuring her that the big blonde was "certain a grand bouncer," when she was smitten ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... contribute half a million. [To GERALD, who enters, left.] Hello, Gerald... how are you? Make yourself at home. [To CALKINS.] I attribute the present desperate situation to the anarchical struggles of rival financial interests. I am assuming control, and straightening out the tangle as rapidly as I can. The worst of the crisis is over... the opposition is capitulating, and I expect soon to order a general resumption of industry. Prepare me an address of five hundred words... sharp and snappy. Then see the head of ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... sister presently, of whom I make but passing mention here. She was our flower, our pearl, our little ewe-lamb—the loveliest and the last—and I must not trust myself to linger with her memory now, or I shall lose the thread of my story, and tangle it with digression. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... oily, easy little personage of evil intent; but he symbolized the subtile principle which pares away the natural virtue of man, and substitutes an artificial polish, which is hypocrisy. It is to be observed, however, that hair can be representative of natural evil as well as of good. A tangle-headed bush-ranger does not win our sympathies. A Mussulman keeps his beard ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... you," Brooks answered. "Jordway has killed himself, and the affairs of the firm are in a hopeless tangle." ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... the hill. When the rush came, one German officer told me, he, in his short sector of the line alone, had three machine-guns all hard at work. The attack reached the remnants of the German wire. Some brave men picked a path through the tangle, and, in spite of the cross-fire, managed to reach the German trench. They were very few. We have since discovered men in the craters even beyond the front German trench. The German officer told me that his men had afterwards found an Australian who had been lying in a crater in ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... whether a man should be true to one woman, whether women should be the victims of a double standard, and all the other complicated issues which we must in time confront. Such a picking to pieces of the tangle is simply the method of scientific thought, and in this case, at least, has the advantage of making it possible to begin to do something, rather than saw the air ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... hire. We must recover your father's immense fortune, and find out how it was possible for them to divert it to their own channels. There is Mr. Hamilton to be thought of, too—his injury, his kidnaping! If we can succeed in unraveling this mysterious tangle of events without recourse to the fact of our knowledge of the murder, well and good. If not, we must make use of whatever has come to our hand. With the rest of the malefactors brought to justice, you can afford to be magnanimous ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... candle may go dark to bed,— Must you be therefore proud and pitiless? Why, what means this? Why do you look on me? I see no more in you than in the ordinary Of nature's sale-work:—Od's my little life, I think she means to tangle my eyes too!— No, faith, proud mistress, hope not after it; 'Tis not your inky brows, your black silk hair, Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream, That can entame my spirits to your worship.— You foolish shepherd, wherefore do you follow her, Like foggy south, puffing with wind and ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the explorers had to walk through a tangle of vines and Cap'n Bill, who went first, stumbled and ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... wasteful. Here is the poignant biography of a boy who loves his environment even when it slays him, plus a collection of prose idylls, plus a group of poems, plus a good piece of special reporting, plus an assortment of brilliant letters; and imbedded in the mass, like a thread of gold in a tangle of yarn, as fresh and exquisite a love-story as we have had in recent English. Of course I do not mean that all these elements cannot be woven into, made relevant to, a theme, a story. Stendhal, himself a romantic, as these men are romantics, could do it. But our romantics do not so weave them; ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... laboratory of unusual size in which Randall found himself, one in which every variety of physical and electrical apparatus seemed represented. Three huge dynamo-motor arrangements took up the room's far end, and from them a tangle of wiring led through square black condensers and transformers to a battery of great tubes. Most remarkable, though, was the ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... few evergreen shrubs and an iron railing; but it was picturesque, nevertheless, with creepers—magnolia, wisteria, and ivy—clustering on the dark red bricks. At the back there was a good garden, and in front, across the road, were green meadows with hedgerows—a tangle of holly, hawthorn, and bramble—and old trees, surviving giants of a forest long uprooted and forgotten. It was a rich and placid scene, infinitely soothing to one fresh from the turmoil of the city, and weary of the tireless motion, the incessant sound and tumult of the sea. When Beth looked ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... wide and three miles long, covered with fertile fields, peach and apricot orchards. It even contained a few fig trees. Below the village the canyon narrowed to a hundred yards, with a level bottom, covered with a tangle of wild grape vines, cactus, and cottonwood trees. This section contained the two largest falls, and came to an end about four miles below the first fall. Then the canyon narrowed, deep and gloomy, until there was little room for anything but ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... read or sung slowly and softly, in the manner of lustful, insinuating music. Scornfully, gaily The bandmaster sways, Changing the strain That the wild band plays. With a red and royal intoxication, A tangle of sounds And a syncopation, Sweeping and bending From side to side, Master of dreams, With a peacock pride. A lord of the delicate flowers of delight He drives compunction Back through the night. Dreams ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... an instant—I could see that much through my fingers and hair. He dropped on one knee beside me, parted the tangle of hair, and said, in the tenderest way: My poor girl, God knows I have not intended to pain you. How should I?—I who love you—I who have loved you for—for years ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... sunlight. The beds of the brooks in the valleys that cut their way through the hill-clefts were dry and dusty; and the sole shade visible lay upon the orchard floors, where the thick branches above cast blue-black shadows upon the golden tangle of grasses at their feet. A soft murmur of hidden creature-things rose like an invisible haze from earth, and nothing moved in all the horizon save the black kites high in the blue air and the white butterflies ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... or through the swamps, still keeping, however, the same general direction, and preserving always the requisite level or down grade. Radway had no vantage point from which to survey the country. A city man would promptly have lost himself in the tangle; but the woodsman emerged at last on the banks of the stream, leaving behind him a meandering trail of clipped trees that wound, twisted, doubled, and turned, but kept ever to a country without steep hills. From the main road he purposed arteries to ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... used to this curious inversion it is as if the mist was no longer a wall but a growth; the garden is the heart of a jungle bleached by enchantment and struck with stillness and cold; a tangle of grey; a muffled, huddled and stifled bower, all grey, and ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... resigned the Governorship of East Africa, was Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University. Equally admired are his researches into Chinese linguistics and his monograph, the first in the language, on that most obscure subject, Finnish grammar.[88] Will it be believed that in her account of the Balkan tangle Miss Durham does not quote Sir Charles Eliot, but Mr. Horatio Bottomley? It seems that Mr. Bottomley has not devoted much attention to the Balkans, since in November 1920 he poured the vials of his wrath upon the Serbs, who, according to his "latest ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... huge figs, feathery bamboos, strange yellow-stemmed trees, low trees with enormous leaves, tall trees with foliage as delicate as lace, trees with buttressed trunks, trees with boles rising smooth and straight to lofty heights, all woven together by a tangle of vines, crowded down to the edge of the river. Their drooping branches hung down to the water, forming a screen through which it was impossible to see the bank, and exceedingly difficult to penetrate to ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... made a grievous tangle in his day's work. Arrived at the store he flew about in eager haste, and then rushed with more than usual speed to the bank. Just five minutes too late; the last shutter was being closed as he ...
— Three People • Pansy
... falling through some break in the upper foliage, giving a strange glory to everything it touches—projecting leaves, and beard-like tuft of moss, and snaky bush-rope. And in the most open part of that most open space, suspended on nothing to the eye, the shaft reveals a tangle of shining silver threads—the web of some large tree-spider. These seemingly distant yet distinctly visible threads serve to remind me that the human artist is only able to get his horizontal distance by a monotonous reduplication of pillar and arch, placed at regular intervals, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... then we turn, thou sadder sage, To thee! we feel thy spell! —The hopeless tangle of our age, Thou too hast scanned ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... entered, a glance of admiration tempered with the consideration that in spite of her grace and beauty, she was probably older than himself. Then he continued to gaze furtively at the young girl who sat demurely, with eyes downcast beneath a soft, wild tangle of dark hair, against which some pink roses and a blue feather on her hat showed fetchingly. She was very well dressed, evidently a well-guarded young thing from one of the summer colonies. The mother, high corseted, and elegant in dark blue lines, which made only a ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... was alone, staring at the doorway through which she had passed. A tangle of thoughts was in his brain, one loose end uppermost. He had not moved ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... lounge smoking he watched her lazily. She handled his books with a great deal of awe. She opened one of them and sat on the floor in the childlike way she often had. She read several sentences aloud. It was a tangle of technical words on the ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... long period." For a number of years, perhaps half a century, the moon would seem to be running ahead, and then she would gradually relax her speed and fall behind. Laplace suggested possible causes, but could not prove them. Hansen, it was supposed, had straightened out the tangle by showing that the action of Venus produced a swinging of this sort in the moon; for one hundred and thirty years she would be running ahead and then for one hundred and thirty years more falling back again, like a pendulum. Two motions of this sort were combined together. They ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... very good reason for not telling me!" Farland accused. "It is the truth, isn't it, that Prale does not know a single thing about it. You are afraid to tell me because I may inform him of what you say, and we may straighten out the tangle? I can see through you, sir, as easily as through a ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... before, and gave it up because of the tangle," said Lucian with quiet irony. "And unless you discover more than I have done, you will dismiss the matter again as impossible. So far as I can see, the mystery of Vrain's death is more of a mystery than ever, and will never ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... mossy bank close by, there where the marble terrace yielded to the encroaching shrubbery: a tangle of pale pink monthly roses made a bower overhead. She was just sufficiently conscious to enable him to lead her to this soft green couch. There he laid her amongst the roses, kissed the dear, tired eyes, her hands, her lips, her tiny ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... than our great cities do. It is a forest of brick and stone of the most stupendous dimensions, and one traverses it in the same adventurous kind of way that he does woods and mountains. The maze and tangle of streets is something fearful, and any generalization of them a step not to be hastily taken. My experience heretofore had been that cities generally were fractions that could be greatly reduced, but London I found I could not simplify, and ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... was still wide and white and placidly impressed by the slow passage of Kingsborough feet. Beyond the court-house the breeze blew across the green, which was ablaze with buttercups. Beneath the warm wind the yellow heads assumed the effect of a brilliant tangle, spreading over the unploughed common, running astray in the grass-lined ditch that bordered the walk, hiding beneath dusty-leaved plants in unsuspected hollows, and breaking out again under the horses' ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... young people who are emerging from a theater with the magic of the play still thick upon them. They look up and down the familiar street scarcely recognizing it and quite unable to determine the direction of home. From a tangle of "make believe" they gravely scrutinize the real world which they are so reluctant to reenter, reminding one of the absorbed gaze of a child who is groping his way back from fairy-land whither the story has completely ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... long Gascon summers, the warmth of Burgundian suns, and the delicate flavor of Xeres. Never had epicures so enjoyed themselves at Washington, and they rejoiced when they contrasted his dispensation with the barbaric repasts of former years, when "hog and hominy" was the principal dish, and tangle-foot whisky punch ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... church harmonized perfectly with the poetic tangle of the humble exterior, the luxury and art of which was bestowed by Time, for once in a way charitable. Within, the eye first went to the roof, lined with chestnut, to which age had given the richest tints of the ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... ruling powers by studying and comparing the different codes of laws that have come down to us; but in a study of the internal municipal life of these early ages, the student meets again and again with increasing discouragement, and soon finds himself almost hopelessly lost in a tangle ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... and up the bluebell bank they struggled, with never a thought for the flowers; and they were just about to scramble over some felled trees when Raymonde, who was a yard in advance, caught her foot in a tangle of brier and fell on her hands and knees among the springing bracken. Fauvette, unable to stop herself, collided heavily and collapsed by her side. Too much out of breath to stir, the girls lay for ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... emergencies. But a Chinaman's idea of watching cattle is to wedge them into a solid body, and hold them huddled together like a mob of frightened sheep, riding incessantly round them and forcing back every beast that looks as though it might extricate itself from the tangle, and galloping after any that do escape with screams of ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... my eyes upon the spot, when out through a tangle of wild grapevine he wound, stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his heels into the dirt, and flew up the road below ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... the same weakness that she had encouraged in him was helping take him away from her. And the pitiful tragedy of it was that Peter was helping too, and then challenging her to accept still graver dangers through him. It was a pitiful tangle, and yet one that ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... think of somebody besides yourself. You're not the only miserable person in this city. I've all the misery I can carry at present; and if you wish to help me, don't make any demands on me until I'm clear of the tangle that's choking me." ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... now centred rather in the sayings of the wise than in the deeds of the mighty. The "crude apple that diverted Eve" was indeed a simple theme compared with the profound topics that are treated in Samson Agonistes. The dark tangle of human life; the inscrutable course of Divine providence; the punishment so unwittingly and lightly incurred, yet lying on a whole nation "heavy as frost, and deep almost as life"; the temptation presenting itself in the guise neither of pleasure, nor of ambition, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... cannot bear to hear it mixed with that of others—perhaps drowned; and then our bashfulness tongue-ties us in the hush expectant of our "golden opinions," when all eyes are turned to the speechless "old man eloquent," and you might hear a tangle dishevelling itself in Neaera's hair. But all alone by ourselves, in the country, among trees standing still among untrodden leaves—as now—how we do speak! All thoughts—all feelings—desire utterance; left to themselves they are not happy till they have evolved into words—winged ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... she looked with the drops trembling on those long, golden lashes, and staining the warm flush of her cheeks! One arm, from which the muslin sleeve had fallen back, lay under her head, half-buried in a tangle of curls; sobs broke at intervals through her parted lips, ending in long, ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... was more discussion of the strange tangle of events, which now seemed to be about to be cleared up. Indeed, it took many days for them to thrash the subject out completely, but it would hardly do to write another book on matters now essentially explained so we must leave those details to the ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... refusing to be put out of countenance, "I have submitted all these cases to a comprehensive survey, which hitherto no one else had done. This enabled me to discover their general meaning, to put aside all the tangle of embarrassing theories and, since no one was able to agree as to the motives of all this filthy business, to attribute it to the only class ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... Bare-headed, tangle-haired, his clothes torn, no collar, blood on his shirt, on his hands, on his face, blood everywhere, a wound in his neck, another on his lip, unrecognizable, horrible to look at, but magnificent in energy, heroic and triumphant: such ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... believe that within touch of the mess-room there were the quarters of nearly three hundred men. But once in a while something like a whisper came from the jungle, suggesting the passing through its dense tangle of some prey-seeking, cat-like creature. But no one spoke; though, in a half-drowsy way, those seated by the window and a couple of dark figures outside in the veranda were straining their ears and trying to make out what caused the distant ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... is a thread here which we had not yet grasped and which might lead us through the tangle. Cheer up, Watson, for I am very sure that our material has not yet all come to hand. When it does we may soon ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... she closed the door behind her, and stepped quickly forward to the bedside. For a moment she stood looking down at the recumbent figure; at the matted tangle of gray-streaked brown hair that straggled across a pillow which was none too clean; at the heavy-lensed, old-fashioned, steel-bowed spectacles, awry now, that were still grotesquely perched on the woman's nose; at the sallow ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... darke to bed: Must you be therefore prowd and pittilesse? Why what meanes this? why do you looke on me? I see no more in you then in the ordinary Of Natures sale-worke? 'ods my little life, I thinke she meanes to tangle my eies too: No faith proud Mistresse, hope not after it, 'Tis not your inkie browes, your blacke silke haire, Your bugle eye-balls, nor your cheeke of creame That can entame my spirits to your worship: You foolish Shepheard, wherefore ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... caitiff murmurs. 'This is the annual fancy dress ball at Brookwood Asylum. You and I and the doctors and attendants are the only sane people in the place. By-and-by the country gentry will be admitted, and then the tangle will be hopeless, for even in everyday life it's impossible to know who's mad and who ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... it will take the Shawnees an' the Miamis to straighten out that tangle about the great war trail?" asked the shiftless ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the situation. There was much fine writing last year in regard to the sin and shame of cutting down the pretty, wild growth of shrubs, vines, and flowers along the wayside, so picturesque to the summer tourist. The tangle of wild grape, clematis, and woodbine is certainly pretty, but underneath is sure to be found a luxuriant growth of thistle, wild carrot, silk weed, mullein, chickweed, tansy, and plantain, which, if allowed to seed and disseminate themselves, ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... of Maryland, however, by his great speech, of April 5th, in the Senate, did much to clear the tangle in the minds of some faltering Union statesmen on this ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... disrepair, and oozed beneath the weight of the car, a few boards thrown higgledy-piggledy across in places representing the local effort to preserve the roadway from the invading marshes. The little canal quay—a wooden one—was a tangle of rotting boards and loose piles, and the stagnant green water of the shallow canal was abandoned to a few grey geese, which honked angrily at the passing car. There was no sign of life in the village street, and no sound except the autumn wind moaning across the marshes and the boom ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... the tangle and must have been looking directly at the bird several seconds before cutting it out from the stalks and branches. It was a least bittern, a female. She was clinging to a perpendicular stem of elder, hand over hand, wren fashion, her long neck thrust straight into the air, absolutely stiff ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... trained champion. Then there was the amazing enthusiasm, experience, and skill of Father Robert, as he called himself; who knew human nature as an anatomist knows the structure of the human body; to whom the bewildering tangle of motives, good, bad and indifferent, in the soul, was as plain as paths in a garden; who knew what human nature needed, what it could dispense with, what was its power of resistance; and who had at his disposal for the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... through the mowing field, The headless aftermath, Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew, Half closes the garden path. And when I come to the garden ground, The whir of sober birds Up from the tangle of withered weeds Is sadder than any words. A tree beside the wall stands bare, But a leaf that lingered brown, Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought, Comes softly rattling down. I end not far from my going forth By picking ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... simple, that spoke to the hearts of these sons of the forest. "The broad woods," he pursued, "would stretch beneath their eyes, when the mountain summits were gained, one extended tuft of blossoms. The cane was a tangle of luxuriance, affording the richest pastures. The only paths through it were those made by buffaloes and bears. In the sheltered glades, turkeys and large wild birds were so abundant, that a hunter could supply himself in an hour for the wants of a week. They would not be found ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... there is another entrance leading down to the terrace by a long flight of stone stairs, the balustrades of which are covered by a tangle of clematis and roses. When I come walking down those steps and see the peacock strutting about in the park, and the old sundial, and the row of beeches in the distance, I feel a thrill of something ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... than the valley through which the Formello flows. Precipitous cliffs rose from the bed of the river opposite to me, enriched with all the hues that volcanic rock assumes under the influences of the weather and the garniture of moss and lichen. A perfect tangle of vegetation crowned their tops and fringed their sides; the dark unchanging verdure of the evergreen oak and ivy contrasting beautifully with the tender autumn-like tints in which the varied spring foliage of the brushwood appeared. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... a place, an hour, The worst that e'er the tempter's power Could tangle me or you in; Sweet Nea, let us roam no more Along that wild and lonely shore. Such walks ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... him then and went upstairs to her own room where for a little she tried to concentrate her wandering thoughts upon a book. But in the end she flung the volume aside impatiently and went to her window, staring down into the neglected tangle of the front yard and the glimpse of the street through the straggling branches of the pear trees. She tried to see only that men like Kid Bedloe and Buck Thornton were not to be thought of as men, but rather as some rare species of clear-eyed, unscrupulous, conscienceless ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... summer's day. The garden was her kingdom and her Paradise. It was a wide, fragrant, shaded place, full of the shrubs and flowers of former days. Huge pink and white oleanders, planted in tubs, stood on either side the walks. Thick spikes of purple lavender edged the beds; the summer-house was a tangle of honey-suckle, rosemary, and eglantine. Roses of all colors abounded. They towered high above Lota's head as she walked,—twined and clasped, shut her in with perfumed shadows, rained showers of many-colored petals on the grass. An old-fashioned ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge |
