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More "Baffled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strongly disposed to account for the sudden appearance of a stupendous genius by the cheap and easy method of pointing to some distinguished ancestor and talking pompously of the laws of heredity, in Wagner's case we are baffled and beaten. He came like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky. We must be content with the fact that he came. His father and grandfather were state or municipal officials both; and bearing in mind Wagner's frank ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... never troubled with personal violence from Barker or any other boy. But rancor smouldered deep in the mind of the baffled tyrant, and, as we shall see hereafter, there are subtler means of making an enemy wretched ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... she possessed an executive ability brought into constant prominence by her work as secretary of the society. She was a teacher, an inspirer, a comforter, and, in the best sense, a friend of many and many a lonely and baffled life."[23] ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... and that on the table there lay a gold watch and appendages. Nobody was in the apartment: the gentleman who occupied it had only a few moments before gone to his bed-chamber for a brief space. Quick as lightning a diabolical thought flashed through the brain of the villain, who had been baffled in his original intentions. He recollected that he had seen a trunk in Harvey's room, and that the keys hung in the lock. An inconceivably short space of time served for him to seize the watch, to deposit ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... led her to the nuptial couch; Her Lord she follow'd; and while there reclin'd Upon the richly-inlaid couch they lay, Atrides, like a lion baffled, rush'd Amid the crowd, if haply he might find The godlike Paris; but not one of all The Trojans and their brave allies could aid The warlike Menelaus in his search; Not that, for love, would any one that knew Have screen'd him from his anger, for they all Abhorr'd him as the shade of death: then ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... for a moment or two. Benson, his face marked with baffled desire and scarcely controlled fury, glared at the others. Blake's expression was pitiful, but his lips were resolutely set; and Harding's eyes were very ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... lightning, Which clear'st all up at once! I, wretched madman! How senseless was I, and by pride how blinded To sons of earth my eyes I never lower'd. Ah! is my proud solicitude thus baffled? But she can only ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... just now, compassed his undertaking merely by the interpretation of a name. He had besieged the strong city of Tyre, and for several weeks battered it with all his power; but all in vain. His engines and attempts were still baffled by the Tyrians, which made him finally resolve to raise the siege, to his great grief; foreseeing the great stain which such a shameful retreat would be to his reputation. In this anxiety and agitation of mind he fell asleep and dreamed that a satyr was come ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... resoundingly and with tears, for the "strange people" down under his bended knees, while out on the boiler deck the disputation concerning them steadily warmed and spread, the committee of seven feeling themselves for the moment baffled but by no means beaten—baffled, for their casual brush with Ramsey had most surprisingly, not to say unfairly, discredited their cause. "Gideon Hayle's daughter" had become as universally known by sight as "John Courteney's son," and all about ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... the elements of which the planets and satellites of our system are composed, we, however, find ourselves baffled, for the simple reason that these bodies emit no real light of their own. The light which reaches us from them, being merely reflected sunlight, gives only the ordinary solar spectrum when examined with the spectroscope. ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... and admiration of those around them,—a singular fact, as indicative equally of the modesty, the good sense, and the superior intrinsic worth of both of these distinguished persons. In the case of Marion, his want of education neither lessened his energies, his confidence in himself, nor baffled any of his natural endowments. On the contrary, it left his talents free to their natural direction. These, it is probable, were never of a kind to derive, or to need, many advantages from a very superior or scientific education. His mind was rather practical than subtile—his genius prompted him ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... farm-house. The hickory fire Laughed and leaped in the chimney's hold, And baffled, with its warm mirth, the frost, As he pried at the panes with ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... countrymen and their national ideal, and declined it, thereby increasing the tension. Thus, as the time for the election drew near, the French were still further hardening their hearts against the governor-general of United Canada, and Sydenham, his patience now exhausted, could but exclaim in baffled anger, "As for the French, nothing but time will do anything with them. They hate British rule—British connection—improvements of {97} all kinds, whether in their laws or their roads; so they will sulk, and will try, that is, their leaders, to do ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... man away and walked up and down the apartment, his hands behind his back, his lips hard-set. He was face to face with a crisis which baffled him completely, and yet which he felt to be wholly unworthy of his powers. His brain had never been keener, his sense of power more inspiring. Yet he had never felt more impotent. It was woman's hysteria against which he had to fight. The ordinary weapons ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in his ability by choosing him as surgeon to the wounded gladiators shortly after his return to his native city. In these duties his knowledge of anatomy aided him greatly, and he is said to have healed certain kinds of wounds that had previously baffled ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... toward the ships; uprais'd, the dust 175 Stood o'er them; universal was the cry, "Now clear the passages, strike down the props, Set every vessel free, launch, and away!" Heaven rang with exclamation of the host All homeward bent, and launching glad the fleet. 180 Then baffled Fate had the Achaians seen Returning premature, but Juno thus, With admonition quick to Pallas spake. Unconquer'd daughter of Jove AEgis-arm'd! Ah foul dishonor! Is it thus at last 185 That the Achaians on the billows borne, Shall seek again their country, leaving ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... charges against the prisoner." The distinguished scarlet mask suddenly changed tune. While the hideous face within the close-fitting hood glared fiendishly at Marjorie, the real face behind it wore an expression of baffled anger. The unruly prisoner seemed in possession of an inner force that forbade molestation. Then, too, she was unafraid and all ready ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... overflowed so with oddity, that business was out of the question. Every three minutes produced an explosion of the most extravagant kind—often full of humour, sometimes witty, always coarse. It was in vain that my friend now urged, and now insinuated the subject of the stage; Whiteley baffled him with a joke or a jeer, or a story—and sometimes with a transition so extreme, rapid, and unconnected, that it was impossible to do any thing with him. My singing was adverted to. "Ay," said Whiteley, "I suspected he was one of your squallers; I thought from his chalky face and lank carcase ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... towns—or rooms even,—just before we arrive, leaving us with an inexplicable feeling of having been cheated of something that was rightfully and divinely ours. That's the way I still feel about little Miss By-the-Day. Perhaps you, too, have been baffled by the will-o'-the-wispishness of that whimsical young person. Perhaps you, too, tried to ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... prospect yet more glowing is that after this empire of right and reason is thus established it will stand for ever. Force and corruption attempting its downfall shall equally be baffled, and all other nations, struck with wonder and admiration at its happiness and stability, shall follow the example; and thus the whole earth shall at last be happy, and live ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... hopes, or make us fancy that future success is impossible where past failures frown. Ebenezer was a field of defeat before it rang with the hymns of victory. And there is no place in your past life where you have been shamefully baffled and beaten, but there, and in that, you may yet be victorious. Never let the past limit your hopes of the possibilities and your confidence in the certainties and victories of the future. And if ever you are tempted to say to yourselves, 'I have tried it so often, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... feeling herself baffled, sat for some time wondering how to find fault politely with the young man before her. Her mind was full of subject-matter, but the politeness easily eluded her. She threw out after a time the suggestion that ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... looking away toward the fields. The sun was dipping now into the forest cresting the hills; the white rooster was pacing the outside of the wire enclosure from which he had escaped, in frantic search of an opening to admit him to his perch, his proud head all rumpled in his baffled eagerness, ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... despair. She was baffled at every turn. The only ray of sunshine that she could see was in Mr. ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... king, Abul Hassan, returned, baffled and disappointed, from before the walls of Alhama, and was received with groans and smothered execrations by the people of Granada. The prediction of the santon was in every mouth, and appeared to be rapidly ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... twinkling of an eye, he turned on his enemies, with his fist, knife, and feet, so tiger-like, that he actually put four or five men to flight, his master among the number. His enemies thus suddenly baffled, John wheeled, and, as if assisted by an angel, strange as it may appear, was soon out of sight of his pursuers, and securely hid away. This was the last hour of John Henry's slave life, but not, however, of his struggles and sufferings ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... rearguard action against baldness, was an indeterminate mousy gray-brown. It was one of his professional assets that nobody ever noticed him, not even in a crowd of one; when he wanted it to, his thin face could assume the weary, baffled expression of a middle-aged book-keeper with a wife and four children on fifty dollars a week. Actually, he drew three times that much, had no wife, admitted to no children. During the war, he and Kathie had kept the Tri-State Agency in something better than ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... While on a visit to the king of France, Helena, a physician's daughter, cured the king of a. disorder which had baffled the court physicians. For this service the king promised her for husband any one she chose to select, and her choice fell on Bertram. The haughty count married her, it is true, but deserted her at once, and left for Florence, where he joined the duke's army. It so happened ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... commander, like the rider of some unmanageable steed, to whose humors he is obliged to submit, was hurried away in a direction contrary to his wishes. It was the fate of Blasco Nunez to have his purposes baffled alike by his friends and his enemies. On arriving before San Miguel, Gonzalo Pizarro found, to his great mortification, that his antagonist had left it. Without entering the town, he quickened his pace, and, after traversing a ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... trying places. Perhaps the heart has become wrong in some matter where temptation has been allowed to overcome, or at least to turn it aside from its singleness unto God; and the conflict is a terrible one as it seeks to adjust itself and be right with God, and finds itself baffled by its own spiritual foes, and its own helplessness, perplexity and perversity. How dark and dreary the struggle, and how helpless and ineffectual it often seems at such times! It is almost sure to strive in the spirit of the law, and the ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... above medal is the Lobster, though doubtless it had an allusion to some topic or scandal of the day; whoever can elucidate it will render good service to Medallic History, for hitherto it has baffled all commentators and collectors of medals. The windmill (indicative of the poplar fable that the Prince was the son of a miller), and the Roman ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... provincial tradesman. And Philip Beaufort, in the prime of life, was possessed of most of the qualities that dazzle the eyes and many of the arts that betray the affections. It was suspected by some that they were privately married: if so, the secret had been closely kept, and baffled all the inquiries of the stern old uncle. Still there was much, not only in the manner, at once modest and dignified, but in the character of Catherine, which was proud and high-spirited, to give colour to the suspicion. Beaufort, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... with Napoleon to reduce Europe to slavery. Napoleon thought in that, as well as in all other circumstances, to succeed in blinding a man by a false representation of his interest; but he encountered conscience, and his calculations were entirely baffled; for that is an element, of the strength of which he knows nothing, and which he never allows ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... only, appear. It is a duel between Jehovah and the arrogant heathen who had despised Him. Jerusalem appears for a moment, in a magnificent piece of poetical scorn, as despising and making gestures of contempt at the baffled would-be conqueror, as Miriam and her maidens did by the Red Sea. The city is 'virgin,' as many a fortress in other lands has been named, because uncaptured. But she, too, passes out of sight, and Jehovah ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... baffled rage on the man's dark face did not lighten. He had been beaten again. His revenge had been snatched from him almost at the moment of triumph. If that mad dog had not come round the corner just when it did, he would have evened the score between him and Dillon. June had seen the whole thing. ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... couldn't do that, so long as her kits were in danger," Jack told him. "If we still mean to advance there's only one way to do it. We can't fly over, and consequently it's up to us to go around, or else turn back and acknowledge ourselves baffled." ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... the means by which such a right may by any mediums be exercised, or in effect be indirectly acquired. Else it is very obvious that the intention of the law in refusing that right might be entirely frustrated, and the whole power of the legislature baffled. If there be no certain, invariable rule of eligibility, it were better to get simplicity, if certainty is not to be had, and to resolve all the franchises of the subject into this one short proposition,—the will and pleasure of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and most unpleasant surprise, for he had no difficulty in recollecting this man's remarkable features. The change, however, from George Robertson to Sir George Staunton, baffled even the penetration of Ratcliffe, and he bowed very low to the baronet and his guest, hoping Mr. Butler would excuse his recollecting that he ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... sententious—But I wonder Old Syphax comes not; his Numidian genius Is well disposed to mischief, were he prompt And eager on it; but he must be spurr'd, And every moment quicken'd to the course. Cato has used me ill; he has refused His daughter Marcia to my ardent vows. Besides, his baffled arms, and ruin'd cause, Are bars to my ambition. Caesar's favour, That show'rs down greatness on his friends, will raise me To Rome's first honours. If I give up Cato, I claim, in my reward, his captive daughter. But ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... of humour, the command of the forces still continued vested in count Thaun, who endeavoured to pass the Alps, and penetrated into Dauphine; but the duke of Berwick had cast up intrenchments in the mountains, and taken such precautions to guard them, as baffled all the attempts of the Imperial general. Spain was much more fruitful of military incidents. The horse and dragoons in the army of king Charles, headed by general Stanhope, attacked the whole cavalry of the enemy at Almennara. Stanhope charged ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... this was the case, there was but one resource left, and that was the Ordeal—the appeal to the judgment of God. Such are the devices of inexperienced nations, who have no skill in sifting out the truth, and are baffled by contending testimony. Nothing can better illustrate the stage of our national progress in the times which produced the literature which we ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... thrown much light upon a problem which long baffled the palaeontologist, namely, the origin of the elephants. (C.W. Andrews, "On the Evolution of the Proboscidea", "Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc." London, Vol. 196, 1904, page 99.) Early representatives of this order, Mastodons, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... tree, all my blissful raptures turned to a great despondence. Would it always be thus—would she continue to embrace me, and speak words that simulated passion while no such feeling touched her heart? Such a state of things could not endure, and my passion, mocked and baffled again and again, would rend me to pieces, and hurl me on to madness and self-destruction. For how many men had been driven by love to such an end, and the women they had worshiped, and miserably died for, compared with Yoletta, were like creatures of clay ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... Baffled in this direction, the new commander-in-chief, General Gage, resolved to accomplish the desired end by an expedition from Fort Pitt. Pontiac, however, was known to be still plotting vengeance at that time, and it seemed advisable to break the way ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... combustible substance called Greek fire. It was this Greek fire that, in the end, turned the scale of victory, for it caught in the lower court of the castle, where it burned so furiously that it baffled all the efforts of the besieged to extinguish it, and at length they were compelled to surrender. Edward made the principal commanders prisoners, but he let the others go free. The castle itself ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... came partly, I think, through the very sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable. Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate nobleness ...
— Progress and History • Various
... quite aware of this fastidious dislike on Michael's part. It was, therefore, in pure malice that he had asked that question about 'Elia'; but Michael's matter-of-fact answer had baffled him, and the sole result had been to start a delightful discussion on the writings of Charles Lamb and his contemporaries—a subject on which all three men talked ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... enemy, in order to join him, had been ineffectually attempted; and when night came on without his making his appearance, the uneasiness of his adopted father was at the height. "Eugene and the army of Italy, and this long day of baffled expectation, had they then terminated together?" Only one hope remained to Napoleon; and that was, that the viceroy, driven back towards Smolensk, had there joined Davoust and Ney, and that the following day they would, with united ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... like mica discs—with curiosity—though he tried to keep up a bit of superciliousness. At first I was astonished, but very soon I became awfully curious to see what he would find out from me. I couldn't possibly imagine what I had in me to make it worth his while. It was very pretty to see how he baffled himself, for in truth my body was full only of chills, and my head had nothing in it but that wretched steamboat business. It was evident he took me for a perfectly shameless prevaricator. At last he got angry, and, to conceal a movement of furious annoyance, ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... gentle, but perfectly firm. Mrs. Ebley could not get her to tell her anything about her acquaintance with this dreadful foreigner. She became silent after she had refused point blank to discuss him. At last the baffled and exasperated older lady got up ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... a young brother hanging on to her, with no home but hers, an inquisitive young intelligence, always in the way, was a difficulty which anybody could perceive at a glance) what was it? But Lucy baffled altogether this much experienced ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... their infinite depths. And then the vastness of the problem enunciated by her demand loomed before him. What, after all, did he know about Jesus? Had he not arrived in Simiti in a state of agnosticism regarding religion? Had he not come there enveloped in confusion, baffled, beaten, hopeless? And then, after his wonderful talk with Rosendo, had he not agreed with him that the child's thought must be kept free and open—that her own instinctive religious ideas must be allowed to develop normally, unhampered and unfettered by the external warp ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... keenness, an imagination of a poet, and the unflinching questioning of the philosopher. Maeterlinck says: "Hamlet thinks much but is by no means wise." How does Hamlet show he had not the wisdom of life? Maeterlinck, no doubt, would dwell on his varying moods, his subtle melancholy, his nature baffled by a supernatural command. If he was not wise how strange he should have said so many words of truest wisdom both of Life and Death, "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all." We feel ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... not think it necessary further to prosecute this vindication of his memory, we yet think it our duty, when writing a memoir of him, thus briefly to set aside the groundless accusation, whether it be adduced by prelatic or Erastian writers,—his baffled antagonists when living, his impotent ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this purpose. Their pronunciation was quick, and the words they uttered, not having any apparent connection with visible objects, I was unable to discover any clue by ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... of respect. Bessie did not hear, and sped on till she reached the tree-stump where Mr. Phipps was resting, and touched it—the game was "tiggy-touch-wood." There she halted to take breath, her round cheeks flushed, her carnation mouth open, and her pursuers baffled. ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... happy family was on this wise. When Leonard came home with his unpresentable face, he baffled all Ave's anxious questions, and she was only enlightened by Henry's lamentations, in his absence, over the hopelessness of a brother who was so low and vulgar as to box! Her defence being met by a sneer, she flew to tell Leonard ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ne'er be still Though oft its hopes be baffled, It will succeed though victims bleed And ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... Greece had up-risen, And baffled the Mahomet crew; We rejoiced in the glorious issue, That Greece ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... all the valleys not a drop of blood was shed; justly exasperated though the Waldenses were, they contented themselves with sending to the government a list of the names of the baffled conspirators. ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... leaders, including Pym and Hampden. Warned in time, they made their escape, and Charles did not find them in the chamber of the Commons. "Well, I see all the birds are flown," he exclaimed, and walked out baffled. The king's attempt to intimidate the Commons was a great blunder. It showed beyond doubt that he would resort to force, rather than bend his neck to Parliament. Both Charles and Parliament now began to gather troops and ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... contributors and its scores of workmen, while constantly liable to arrest and imprisonment. Diderot worked indefatigably also with his pen; writing articles on all sorts of subjects,—philosophy, arts, trades, and manufactures. To learn how things were made he visited workshops and handled tools, baffled at times by the jealousy and distrust of the workmen, who were afraid of his disclosing their secret processes, or of his giving information ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... was no sound but their labored breathing; and not until Haig opened his eyes and looked at her, with a hunted, baffled, and still defiant expression in their somber depths, did Marion break down. Then suddenly, after a premonitory quivering of her chin, she buried her face in her hands, and wept without more effort at restraint, in ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... had been taken away, and no trace of them could be discovered, a great excitement was gotten up. That very day had been appointed for their seizure by the authorities, and the authorities had been completely tricked and baffled. ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Noll journeyed to Denver. Major Davis, of the Seventeenth Cavalry, also traveled from his post, for the trial of the baffled men who had attempted to rob the United States mail was on in the United States District Court. These men, too, were sent away to the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... characters on one side the mysterious events on the other, and would prefer the more single- eyed treatment of the short tale. Wonder, too, is a very tender and short-lived emotion, and sometimes perishes after a few pages. Curiosity is tougher; but that too may be baffled too long, and end by tiring of the pursuit while it is yet in its early stages. Many excellent plots, admirable from the constructive point of view, have been wasted by stringing them out too far; the reader recognizes ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... fear that, after all, we should be baffled, and I knew the sad fate which awaited Dio, should he be carried back to his former master. We had two prisoners, to be sure, but I felt very certain that Mr Bracher would not give up his slave for the sake of recovering them, indeed he would be well aware that we could not keep them in ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... property belonging to suitors in the former court amounted to nearly forty millions of pounds.[1] The simplest case might require a dozen years for its settlement, while difficult ones consumed a lifetime, or more, and were handed down from father to son,—a legacy of baffled hopes, of increasing expense, of mental suffering worse than that of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... veiled, the sky superb or shrouded, Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and foiled, Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed with fire or clouded, Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents coiled. Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with wrath and weary, Blown for ever back by winds that rock the bird: Winds that seamews breast subdue the sea, and bid the dreary Waves be weak as hearts made sick with hope deferred. Let the clarion ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the trail he never left it, but with an instinct incomprehensible as it was powerful, he continued to track the woods, lingering long on spots where the wanderers had left any signs of their sojourn; he had for some time been baffled at the Beaver Meadow, and again where they had crossed Cold Creek, but had regained the scent and traced them to the valley of the "Big Stone," and then, with the sagacity of the bloodhound and the affection of the terrier he had, at last, discovered the objects of ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... seek an explanation of the universe. So it was in the childhood of philosophy. The first essays of human thought were, almost without exception, discourses peri physeos (De rerum natura), of the nature of things. Then the rebound of baffled reason from the impenetrable bulwarks of the universe drove the mind back upon itself. If the youth can not interpret nature, he can at least "know himself," and find within himself the ground and reason of all existence. There are "ideas" in the human mind which are ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... soon as light came, was to the town, where we inquired at the few hotels, and put questions to the police. Nobody answering the description of Bedr and his two companions had been seen in Medinet, and we had to go back to camp baffled. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... and that breast throbbing with the fiery passions of republican Italy, while behind the throb beat the measure of a poetic soul impelled to tune the wide, variegated cacophony. Proud, passionate, and baffled, the man Dante deeply swayed the poet. Much of his verse is directly woven out of his indignations and burning personal griefs. At times, contemporaneous history tyrannized ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... conducted with honor to the Red Tower. For since it was in virtue of my hereditary office that I had obtained the great deliverance, I dared for the present seek no other dwelling-place. For Helene's sake, indeed, I should have felt safer elsewhere. Besides, desperate and full of baffled hatred as I knew Duke Otho to be, I did not believe that he would dare to molest us—for some time at least. The rage of the people, their unbounded jubilation at the deliverance of their Saint Helena from the jaws of death on ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... powder-blue and gold, 'laborious Orient ivories,' a gorgeous hanging that had been the coat of a proud mandarin, three Chinese mats, aged and flawless, a set of silken doilies—each one displaying a miniature landscape limned with a subtlety that baffled every eye—one by one these ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... butler to Charles with baffled hatred in her eyes. But she knew the game was lost, and she walked out of the room and up-stairs without another word, but with a bitter consciousness in her heart that she had not played her cards ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... with unabating vigour and dexterity, and at length, though he could not convince, he so entirely baffled him, that Sir Philip was self-compelled to be quiet-which, with a very good ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... was confined, by severe indisposition, almost entirely to the house. The obstinate nature of my disease baffled the skill of a very clever medical attendant, and created alarm and uneasiness in my family: and I entertained small ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... of Lady Arabella's fear of the mongoose, but he steadily pursued his course in being prepared to act whenever the opportunity might come. He was in his own mind perpetually casting about for information or clues which might lead to possible lines of action. Baffled by the killing of the mongoose, he looked around for another line to follow. He was fascinated by the idea of there being a mysterious link between the woman and the animal, but he was already preparing a second string to his bow. His new idea was to use the faculties of Oolanga, ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... still the fullest confidence in Johnston. They knew that for more than two months he had baffled Sherman in spite of his overpowering force of two to one, and had inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, with small loss to his own army either in men or material. They idolized Johnston and were ready to fight, whenever Johnston was ready. They believed "Old Joe" knew ...
— A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. • George Little
... as the declaration passed her lips, a sigh almost buried the last word. Go when she would, she must leave Constantine behind, leave him without an expectation of beholding him more—without a hope of penetrating the thick cloud which involved him, and with which he had ever baffled any attempt she had heard to discover his birth or misfortunes. She wept over this refinement on delicacy, and "loved him dearer ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... had betrayed him—of course she had had a lover! What other explanation was there of her turning against him?—of her flight from his house? But she had been clever enough to hide all the traces of it. He recalled his own lame and baffled attempts to get hold of some evidence against ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... without intermediates. He is tantalised by the hope of getting hold of sub-groups of sufficient size that shall contain no individuals except those belonging strictly to the same species, and he is almost constantly baffled. In the end he is obliged to exercise his judgment as to the limit at which he should cease to subdivide. If he subdivides very frequently, the groups become too small to have statistical value; if less frequently, the groups will be less ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... come across Claudet, also returning home from paying his court to Reine Vincart; and the unhappy Julien would scrutinize his rival's countenance, seeking eagerly for some trace of the impressions he had received during the loving interview. His curiosity was nearly always baffled; for Claudet seemed to have left all his gayety and conversational powers at La Thuiliere. During their tete-a-tete meals, he hardly spoke at all, maintaining a reserved attitude and a taciturn countenance. Julien, provoked ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... hot, whiter and whiter, Contracts tighter and tighter, Until I stifle with the will Long forged, now used (Though utterly strained)— O pounding heart, Baffled, confused, Heart panged, head singing, dizzily pained— To do ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... its course and said to be navigable for small steamers for a hundred and fifty miles. It is an exceedingly crooked stream, heading beyond the upper Columbia lakes, and, in its mazy course, flowing to all points of the compass, it seems lost and baffled in the tangle of mountain spurs and ridges it drains. Measured around its loops and bends, it is probably more than five hundred miles in length. It is also rich in lakes, the largest, Kootenay Lake, being upwards of seventy miles in length with an average width of five miles. A short ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... admission. This movement proved barren, because the two houses of Congress were divided in sentiment. Meanwhile, President Pierce recognized the bogus laws, and issued proclamations declaring the free-State movement illegal and insurrectionary; and the free-State party had in its turn baffled the enforcement of the bogus laws, partly by concerted action of nonconformity and neglect, partly by open defiance. The whole finally culminated in a chronic border war between Missouri raiders on one hand, and free-State guerrillas on the other; and it became necessary ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... was followed by a more substantial success. Early in September Abercromby's melancholy camp was cheered with the tidings that the important French post of Fort Frontenac, which controlled Lake Ontario, which had baffled Shirley in his attempt against Niagara, and given Montcalm the means of conquering Oswego, had fallen into British hands. "This is a glorious piece of news, and may God have all the glory of the same!" ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... as Wagner assured everybody, were added those of diplomacy. But Haytian diplomacy he had yet to master. At the seaport in Scotland where he had served as vice-consul, law and order were as solidly established as the stone jetties, and by contrast the eccentricities of the Black Republic baffled ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... William Follett, without being conscious of having sustained a grievous, if not an irreparable, loss. Where was he whose name was so lately a tower of strength to suitors; whose consummate logical skill—whose wonderful resources—taxed to the uttermost those of judicial intellect, and baffled and overthrew the strongest who could be opposed to him in forensic warfare? Where, alas, was Sir William Follett? His eloquent lips were stilled in death, his remains were mouldering in the tomb—yes, almost within the very walls of that sacred ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... family—the murder of the husband, the dishonor of the wife, and the blinding of those two innocent children. I was hunted like a wild beast from city to city; large rewards were offered for my apprehension, and minute descriptions of my entire person flooded every part of the country. But my cunning baffled them all; for two months I lived in the woods, in an obscure part of New Jersey, subsisting upon roots, and wild herbs, and wild berries, and crawling worms, which I dug from the earth. One day in my wanderings, I came across a gang of counterfeiters, who made ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... servant of Jesus Christ; and therefore God will not hold him guiltless, that breaks this vow. The solemnity and weightiness of covenant-taking consisteth in three things. 1. Because it is made with the glorious majesty of heaven and earth, who will not be trifled and baffled withal; and therefore, what Jehoshaphat said to his judges, "Take heed what ye do: for ye judge not for men, but for the Lord, who is with you in the judgment. Wherefore now, let the fear of the Lord be upon you," the like I may say to every one that ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... conquer ten millions of people united in solid phalanx against us, powerfully aided by Northern sympathizers and European allies. We must have scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers, and choppers, from the blacks of the South—whether we allow them to fight for us or not—or we shall be baffled and repelled. As one of the millions who would gladly have avoided this struggle at any sacrifice but that of principle and honor, but who now feel that the triumph of the Union is indispensable not only to the existence of our country, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... months were a period in Trent's life that he has never since remembered without shuddering. He met Mrs Manderson half a dozen times, and each time her cool friendliness, a nicely calculated mean between mere acquaintance and the first stage of intimacy, baffled and maddened him. At the opera he had found her, to his further amazement, with a certain Mrs Wallace, a frisky matron whom he had known from childhood. Mrs Manderson, it appeared, on her return from Italy, had somehow wandered into circles to which he belonged by nurture and disposition. It came, ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... narrows of a channel, and particularly applied to the Strait of Dover, still called La Manche by the French. When Napoleon was threatening to invade England, he was represented trying to get into a coat, but one of the sleeves utterly baffled him, whence the point: "Il ne peut ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... that baffled Crown'd and mitred tyranny: They defied the field and scaffold, For their birthright—so ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... the details of his life is baffled by the general ignorance about the man—his antecedents, his parentage, the date of his birth, his early training and education, his work as a professor in the Jardin des Plantes, the house he lived in, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... even more alarming. The once quiet little stream, with its stretch of meadowland reaching to the foot of the steep hills, was now a swirl of angry reddish water careering toward the big culvert under the "fill." There it struck the two flanking walls of solid masonry, doubled in volume and thus baffled, shot straight into and under the culvert and so on over the broad ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... be here," he went on, "at a time when a dreadful calamity befalls us—when we are in need of the utmost sympathy and consideration. Here is an obscure and terrible affliction, which has baffled the best physicians in the country; but this ignorant farmer's wife considers that she knows all about it. She proceeds to discuss it with every one—sending your poor aunt almost into hysterics, setting the nurses to gossiping—God knows ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... stiff, foully murdered. Maid Marion approached at her call. She wrapped him in her cloak, and—a young wife of those times alone would do it—put him in the saddle before her: the good mare Maid Marion alone knows the rest. In the early gray dawn, from one highway there rode into the town the baffled pursuers, from the other the grandmother's grandmother, clasping the corpse of her husband with arms as stiff as his own; loving him, so the grandmother used to say, with a love which, if ever love could do so, ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... Heartsick and baffled at last he took his way slowly, looking back many times, and leaving many messages for Sam. He felt as if he simply could not go hack to even so uncomfortable a bed an he called his own in his new lodgings without having found some ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... replied Mustapha, as the pain occasioned by the working of the poison distorted his face. "Yes, I had forgotten," continued Mustapha, who, certain that his own end was approaching, was furious as a wild beast, with pain and baffled ambition. "Yes, I had forgotten. Guards, seize ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... the brilliant attractions with which the city abounded, he gave himself diligently to his business, as clerk in the banking house. His diligence and faithfulness gained for him the esteem of his employers. He soon mastered the business. No accounts baffled him. And, on arriving at manhood, he became a thorough financier. The most important duties were now entrusted to him; and he soon became the travelling agent of the bank; which enabled him also to gratify his taste for the arts and sciences. He made ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... the multiplied delinquencies which we have proved, from the highest degree of tyranny to the lowest degree of sharping and cheating, and then judge, my Lords, whether the House of Commons could rest for one moment, without bringing these matters, which have baffled all legislation at various times, before you, to try at last what judgment will do. Judgment is what gives force, effect, and vigor to laws; laws without judgment are contemptible and ridiculous; we had better have no laws than laws not enforced by judgments and suitable penalties ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... of the scholar who loved truth better than fortune dropped baffled; for he could not afford to surrender the favor of the Senate which promised him means to achieve in his own special field; and he groaned in spirit while the wide halls of the Frari, with their treasure of ancient ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Swiftly she smote the door twice with her hand and instantly the portal opened as far as the chain would allow it. Count Herbert noticed that in the interval, three other chains had been added to the one that formerly had baffled his sword. The girl, like a woodland pigeon, darted underneath the lower chain, and although the prisoner took a rapid step forward, the door, with greater ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... from the common duties of your life?" said Mr Goodwin, in a kind voice. "It's a very poor sort of talent that wants petting and coaxing like that. Those great souls in the past who have taught us most, have done it while reaching painfully up to their vision through much that thwarted and baffled them. Their lives teach us as well as their art, and believe me, Delia, when the artist's life fails in duty and devotion, his art fails too ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... the water and was gone. The tiger cat, forced to relinquish its hold or drown, swam hurriedly back to the bank below the encampment, where it roared and spat and squalled in a blood-chilling paroxysm of baffled fury. And though every man was awakened, not one left the flimsy shelter of his net. Nor did anyone so much as speak until Tim, wearying of the noise, announced his intention to "go bust that critter in the nose and give him somethin' ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village. I could not find my way. I hurried towards the broken end of a street, where the sunshine and the olive trees looked like a mirage before me. And there above me I saw the ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... suppressed giggle that added the last spark to Oliver's kindling anger. He was fond of his Cousin Jasper, he was troubled concerning him, and disturbed by the haunting feeling that something was wrong in the big house. Yet baffled anxiety often leads to irritation, and irritation, in Oliver's case, was being tactlessly pushed into rage. He said little, for he was a boy of few words, nor, so he told himself, could he really be rude to Cousin Jasper no matter how foolishly ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... he had told Ray, and all that we already know, while Amos Palmer listened with wonder to the unfolding of the bold and cunning scheme which had so baffled the police and the best detectives in ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... quoth the desperado, "and I'll send ye a maukin[111] the morn, man." I am not sure whether it was at these assizes or the next in the same town, that he had less success in the case of a certain notorious housebreaker. The man, however, was well aware that no skill could have baffled the clear evidence against him, and was, after his fashion, grateful for such exertions as had been made in his behalf. He requested the young advocate to visit him once more before he left the place. Scott's curiosity induced him to accept this invitation, and his friend, as soon as they were alone ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... her that every thing had been as amicable as could be; and his ministerial friends said that every thing had gone on as smoothly as possible at the house: of what had passed between Mr. Wharton and Vivian in the coffee-room nobody could give her an account. Baffled, but not satisfied, the anxious mother sent to the hotel where Mr. Russell lodged, to inquire whether he was returned to town, and to beg to see him immediately. From him, she thought, she should learn ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the Self is a matter by no means easy to compass. We have all probably at some time or other attempted to fathom the deeps of personality, and been baffled. Some people say they can quite distinctly remember a moment in early childhood, about the age of THREE (though the exact period is of course only approximate) when self-consciousness—the awareness of being a little separate Self—first dawned in the mind. It was generally ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... sometimes by lying on the sward, now by standing back a little way, or crossing to the opposite shore. A spot where the sunshine sparkles with dazzling gleam is perhaps perfectly inpenetrable till you get the other side of the ripple, when the same rays that just now baffled the glance light up the bottom as if thrown from a mirror for the purpose. I convinced myself that there was nothing here, nothing visible at present—not so ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... into the hands of the Moors again, but she righted immediately, and once more skimmed away from her pursuers. In the excitement of the moment the Moorish steersman attempted the same manoeuvre. If he had succeeded he would probably have run down the cockle-shell that had baffled him so long. But at that moment a violent squall struck his ship with its full force, and her mainmast snapped a few feet above the deck. The three fugitives jumped to their feet and cheered, and then calmly ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... did not wish to be braced. Bingley suited my mood. It was grey and dark and it rained all the time, and the sea slunk about in the distance like some baffled beast...." ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... pilot as Paddy might thrust a ship. The great black wall of rock loomed up by their side, grim and pitiless as doom—a very door of adamant closed against all hope. Nearer and nearer they drew, until the roar of the baffled Pacific was deafening, maddening, in its overwhelming volume of chaotic sound. All hands stood motionless, with eyes fixed in horrible fascination upon the indescribable vortex to which they ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... as all who work for those who sin and suffer must often stand, baffled by evil's resistance. Saddened by somewhat of a divine sadness, Mary went across to the rendezvous where her faithful Anna awaited her and left ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... home. The wind was rising, coming in sudden, angry gusts; the storm was at hand, but we reached shelter before it broke. Just as I shut our door behind us it smote the house with the roar of a baffled beast. I thanked God that we were not out in it, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... substances that contain the elements of caloric appear to sympathize with the prevailing state of the atmosphere, and to contribute to render that which is already too cold for comfort, even colder. So it was now; notwithstanding the preparations that had been made. Baffled twice in his expectations of procuring a blaze, Stephen stopped and took a drink of the hot coffee. As he swallowed the beverage, it struck him that it was ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... as from the quips and cranks of his jesters. At last Dante wore out his welcome, as he did everywhere until the patient earth gave him an abiding-place at Ravenna. His whole life of disappointed ambition, unrecognized patriotism, unspoken love, baffled hatred, lonely rangings in awful spheres, banishment, poverty, mortification, unrest, inspiration, conscious immortality, passes before one in this spot, which he must have crossed and recrossed innumerable times, and his presence even in the marble makes it all his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... had blown down, and which spread before him a mass of roots and earth eight or nine feet high. He gathered all his strength, bounded into the air, and cleared it, while a yell of wonder rose from the baffled Indians behind him. A little later he came upon General Madison of Kentucky sitting on a log, so spent with the day's work and loss of blood from a wound, that he could no longer walk, and waiting for the Indians to come up and kill him. Kennan ran back and caught a horse which he had seen ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... maddening love, was the voice of revenge speaking loudly in his soul. That man, his instrument, now his master, Paul Lowther, must be brought down, and his time-serving sponsor with him. But how? There was but one way—by denouncing himself. Yes, that was the sole outlet for his outraged and baffled spirit. He must go to the proper quarter and say, "I have perjured myself, and sworn away my brother's liberty. The man who was condemned as Paul Drayton is Paul Ritson. I did ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... a risk Clara ought not to run. His antagonists were getting stronger, and if they meddled and baffled him, the company would fail. Its bankruptcy would not ruin his wife, but she would feel the loss of her money, and he was not going to use Clara for a shield against Ellen Seaton's attacks. The thing was shabby. All the same, the situation was humorous, and he ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... makes science in any proper sense powerless. She can deal only with classes, only with general laws; and so long as these classes are constantly reduced to "species of one," and these laws are set at nought by incalculable and singular influences, she must be constantly baffled and find all her elaborate plant of formulas and generalisations useless. Of course, there are generalisations possible in literature, and to such I may return presently; but scientific criticism ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... some secret contempt but considerable interest, as she sewed on her roses where her mother had pinned them. Honour was learning lessons which ran counter to every maxim that had influenced her hitherto, and baffled all her efforts to reconstruct her vanished world. Those were the days when phrenology was considered an indispensable aid to instructors of youth, and a professor of the science had duly felt Honour's bumps, and recorded, for the guidance of her cousins, his mature opinion that, "though this young ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... there are such cases, certainly. There was the Burdell mystery in New York, and, later, the Nathan affair—By the way, I've satisfactory theories of my own touching both. The police were baffled, and remain so. But, my dear sir, observe ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... shot at him a look of perplexed and baffled wonder. That brown, indomitable face, back of which was so much strength of purpose and so much keenness of apprehension, began to fill him with alarm. This man let no obstacles stop him. He would go on till he had uncovered the whole tangle ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... the eagle drooped; the gathering storms baffled his sunward flight. Even with Washington in the van, the column wavered and halted—states straggling to the rear that had hitherto been foremost for permanent union, under an efficacious constitution. ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... others do in unfathomable abysses. It descends to the very roots of life. It springs from the original reservoirs of life. It has depths which no mental logic can sound; and it has horizons in the presence of which the mind stops baffled. When we use the term "the beautiful" to indicate the nature of what it reveals, we are easily misled; because in current superficial speech—and unless the word is used by a great artist—the term "beautiful" ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... was no ship expected, and any other wreck in the mean time would only add to their difficulty. You may be surprised, though I was not, that the difficulty was mostly with the yacht-owners, and above all with Mrs. Thrall, who had baffled every effort of the authorities to reduce what they considered ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... Plantagenet. He felt in an instant the injudiciousness of fostering by his conduct the latent jealousy which always lurked at the bottom of his mother's heart, and which nothing but the united talent and goodness of Lady Annabel could have hitherto baffled. So he rejoined in a kind yet playful tone, 'If you will be good, I will give you a kiss for a Christmas-box, mother; and the parrot shall go inside ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Agatha was baffled by the very simplicity and directness of Mrs. Stoddard's words, even though she felt that her own texts might easily be turned against her. But she had no heart for argument, even if it would lead her to verbal triumph over her companion. Instinctively ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... performance for several minutes, the rapid movement of the horses causing him to shift his position once or twice from one side of the house to the other. Finally, one of the Sioux saw how idle their pursuit was, and, angered at being baffled, deliberately raised his ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... know what these practicers thought of their own arts. Certainly some of them accomplished cures. Mental troubles that baffled the ordinary physician would offer the "good witch" a rare field for successful endeavor. Such would be able not only to persuade a community of their good offices, but to deceive themselves. Not all of them, however, by any means, were self-deceived. Conscious ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... fit of brooding gave way to one of sullen fury against his wife, himself, but most of all against his dead father. Drunk with excitement, rage, and baffled avarice, he seized and candle and staggered up to the room where the corpse had been laid, launching imprecations as he went at his dead father's head. But when he came face to face with that dread Presence his passion died, and a cold sense of the awful quiet and omnipotence ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... combustion of fuels purchased by the Government, the equipment consists of two Heine, water-tube boilers, each of 210 h.p., set in Building No. 13. One of these boilers is equipped with a Jones underfeed stoker, and is baffled in the regular way. At four points in the setting, large pipes have been built into the brick wall, to permit making observations on the temperature of the gas, and to take samples of ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... individuality endured. The thought that it might not survive death, made him shrink back from establishing a closeness of emotional dependence on another, the loss of which would be intolerable. The natural flame of the heart seemed quenched and baffled by that cold thought. It was the same instinct that made him, as a boy, refuse the gift of a dog, when a pet collie, that had been his own, had been killed by an accident. The pain of the loss had seemed so acute, so irreparable, that he ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I may as well admit that there was a time during the rather funny affair of Rockmetteller Todd when I thought that Jeeves was going to let me down. The man had the appearance of being baffled. ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... said Mr. Sanders, pacing the room, "a lamentable business, indeed! I confess I am completely baffled. Mr. Weston, I look to you for assistance. Can you form any idea how this matter has come about? Have you suspicion ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... unblemished traditions. Hereditary instincts inbred and powerful were arrayed against him in the hearts of six of his judges; in the seventh, Count Sagan, he had to encounter the ill-blood of a profoundly vindictive nature whose purposes he had crossed and baffled, and who harboured towards him a savage ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... learn that thus it fares with age, When pleasure, wealth, or power the bosom warm; This baffled hope might tame thy manhood's rage, And disappointment of her sting disarm. But why should foresight thy fond heart alarm? Perish the lore that deadens young desire! Pursue, poor imp, the imaginary charm, Indulge gay hope, and fancy's pleasing fire: Fancy and hope too soon shall ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... he could not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; triumphantly and softly she looked at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... to you the hopes of preferment, entertained by the Chevalier de La Luzerne. They have been baffled by events; none of the vacancies taking place which had been expected. Had I pressed his being ordered back, I have reason to believe the order would have been given. But he would have gone back in ill humor with ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... destined to bear poisonous fruit. Luis Cervantes determined to play turncoat; indeed, mentally, he had already changed sides. Did not the sufferings of the underdogs, of the disinherited masses, move him to the core? Henceforth he espoused the cause of Demos, of the subjugated, the beaten and baffled, who implore justice, and justice alone. He became intimate with the humblest private. More, even, he shed tears of compassion over a dead mule which fell, load and all, after a terribly ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... commissary, taking a large amount of clothing and provisions and wantonly destroying the rest. They then made their escape on horses belonging to the guards. As soon as their absence was discovered, bloodhounds were put upon the trail which led towards the interior. The dogs were soon completely baffled, however, for the fugitives had evidently taken to water whenever they came near a pond or creek. This ruse, as well as the whole uprising, is believed to have been the headwork of 'Indian Charley,' one of the escaped ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... his equestrian comrade only remained in the field, or rather the road. The former sprang at once on his horse; the latter was not long in following the example. But the policeman, who, it has been said, baffled in detaining the fugitives of the hedge, had leaped back into the road, was not idle in the meanwhile. When he saw Clifford about to mount, instead of attempting to seize the enemy, he recurred to his pistol, which in the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... trampled despot's fate Forewarn the rash, misguided band To sue for mercy, ere too late, Nor scatter ruin o'er the land. The baffled traitor, doomed to bear A people's hate, his colleagues' scorn, Defeated by his own despair, Will curse the hour ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... explained to Gerard and me, to get the wind, which generally blows off that coast when the north-east trade failed us; and to avoid the equatorial calms, in which, away from the land, vessels are often baffled for days together. I found, after I had been some time at sea, "That the longest way round is often the shortest way there," as the saying is. In tropical latitudes, winds from different quarters blow with great regularity in different places at certain seasons of the year. The great object of ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... shelves and hunted them over; there were not many, certainly, but they made up by their quality and toughness for their want of number: not a word on the subject in question could he find. For many an hour and for many a day did he search, for he was not a man to be baffled by a knotty point or by an enemy for want of exertion on his part, though at last he had to confess that in this matter he was beaten. He therefore sent for Paul Pringle, and told him that though he could bury all the ship's company, and could ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... on she made, charming as she was, more and more friends, and that it regularly befell that these friends were sufficiently also friends of his to bring him up in conversation. It was odd that without belonging, as it were, to the same world or, according to the horrid term, the same set, my baffled pair should have happened in so many cases to fall in with the same people and make them join in the funny chorus. She had friends who didn't know each other but who inevitably and punctually recommended him. She had also the sort of originality, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... formall thing Courtwell; I would [not] call him Gentleman; but that I ha baffled him You need no other witnes but his sword With that ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... the window at the back, I was unable to see Sam. My adroit move, I took it, had baffled him. I had left ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... and faulty approximations are displayed in succession; but the absolute perfection in that country or river's scenery—its type—is withheld: We go away from such places in part delighted, but in part baffled; we have been puzzled by pretty things; we have beheld a hundred different inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty; but the rememberable idea, the full development, the characteristic individuality of it, we ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... that, if you are to be candid, you will admit that the fault lies rather with yourself than with the book. Your knowledge of natural history is so superficial that you are constantly baffled by terms of which you do not understand the meaning, and in which you consequently lose all interest. I admit, however, that the book is hard and laborious reading; and, moreover, that the writer appears to have predetermined from the commencement to ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... adjoining the tower, and thus the enemy was compelled to withdraw. Meantime, behind the burning ruin, the citizens constructed a new defensive work, and both here and in the breach offered so brave a resistance, that the foe, after repeated attempts, was once more baffled ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... shall I find a means to convey us? Some little time ago I had remarked to our young friend here that free hydrogen was evolved from the geyser. The idea of a balloon naturally followed. I was, I will admit, somewhat baffled by the difficulty of discovering an envelope to contain the gas, but the contemplation of the immense entrails of these reptiles supplied me with a solution to ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the clutch of the dogs without a scamper for life. The coon was almost always near the woods, and this gave him a chance of escape. As soon as a yelp was heard from the dogs, we knew the fun had begun, and pushing forward in the direction of the noise, we were pretty sure to find our dogs baffled and jumping and barking around the foot of a tree up which Mr. Coon had fled, and whence he was quietly looking down on his pursuers from a limb or crutch. Our movements now were guided by circumstances. If the tree was not too large, one of us would climb ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness, which she unwisely endeavoured to suppress or conceal at the price of much future suffering. With no pretensions to beauty then, or at any time, her face was one that attracted, but baffled physiognomical art. 'She escaped the reproach of positive plainness, by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by her sparkling, busy eyes, which, though usually half-closed from near-sightedness, shot piercing glances at those ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... forgot the child and sat frowning into space, her mind groping restlessly for ways and means to find herself and get friends of her own, independence, work and gaiety, a chance to grow and "be somebody here!" She had her angry, baffled moods. ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... stood on the summit of a great mountain peak, seamed with deep cañons, bordered with rugged rocks, and clothed with great forests of pine and spruce; while far away on the plain at the foot of the mountain—so far that he could scarcely discern them—were his baffled pursuers, and beside him stood Qastcèëlçi. The latter pointed out to him many familiar places in the distance—the valley of the San Juan, and Dsilyi'-qojòni (Beautiful in the Mountains), where he and his people first lived. ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... and in a minute the place was a shambles. Before Maxim and Lee-Metford were too hot to touch, before the baffled foe fell back, those who surged in through the gate climbed, not over a wall of dead, but up on to a platform of dead, a plateau through which ran a valley literally blasted out by ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... appeased. Sometimes he would come across Claudet, also returning home from paying his court to Reine Vincart; and the unhappy Julien would scrutinize his rival's countenance, seeking eagerly for some trace of the impressions he had received during the loving interview. His curiosity was nearly always baffled; for Claudet seemed to have left all his gayety and conversational powers at La Thuiliere. During their tete-a-tete meals, he hardly spoke at all, maintaining a reserved attitude and a taciturn countenance. Julien, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... cynical, West baffled his every effort to reach the inner man. His silence clothed him like armour, and he never really emerged from it save when a fiendish sense of humour tempted him. This, and this alone, so it seemed to Babbacombe, had any power to draw ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... should be safe, I sprang to the lever and threw the valve wide open. With snorts and shrieks of defiance to our enemies, the old engine obeyed me, soon gaining a rate of speed which I knew would out-distance the baffled outlaws, whose yells I could still hear above ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... moments for him; but the hearts of the boys did not palpitate. Each time the search party came forth with looks of baffled disappointment. Each time the Lord of Mortimer's face was dark and gloomy. He had reckoned somewhat confidently on finding the fugitive in one of these known hiding places. He had hoped Sir Oliver would profess an ignorance of at least one of the two. ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 'Baffled! baffled!' hissed Madame, when she had read the note; 'God deliver me from my friends!' She paced up and down the room several times, and at last began to mutter to herself, as people often do in moments of strong emotion: 'Bah! ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... take advantage of their rights, although sometimes large bodies have banded together and travelled down to Chihuahua to make their complaints, and have always been helped out—for the time being. The efforts of the Government to enlighten the Indians by establishing schools are baffled by the difficulty in finding honest and intelligent teachers with a knowledge of ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... called, but no reply came back, and baffled, as well as frightened, she ran to the house, in through the hall, her dripping garment leaving a path of water as she went, until she ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... armaments, expensive and ineffectual, were prepared, for the destruction of the common enemy; who reserved his courage to encounter those dangers which his policy could not prevent or elude. The designs of the Roman government were repeatedly baffled by his artful delays, ambiguous promises, and apparent concessions; and the interposition of his formidable confederate, the king of the Huns, recalled the emperors from the conquest of Africa to the care of their domestic safety. The revolutions of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... person of the royal hunter the slayer of the champion of Gath, and he immediately seized David, bound him neck and heels together, and laid him beneath his wine-press, designing to crush him to death. But, lo, the earth became soft, and the Philistine was baffled. Meanwhile, in the land of Israel a dove with silver wings was seen by the courtiers of King David fluttering about, apparently in great distress, which signified to the wise men that their royal master was in danger of his life. Abishai, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... among those Children of the Sun, The cipher of my nature,—the release Of baffled powers, which else had never won That free fulfillment, ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... laughed and submitted. Then, after a silent excursion to the other side of the ship, he would return and renew his one-sided quarrel. Staniford seemed to forbid the interference of the crew, and alternately soothed and baffled his tedious adversary, who could still be heard accusing him of slinging criticism, and challenging him to combat. He leaned with his back to the rail, and now looked quietly into Hicks's crazy face, when the latter paused in front of him, and now looked down with a worried, wearied ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... and there every device was practised to induce him to, at least, receive letters calculated, if discovered in his possession, to compromise him. But this nobleman, sagaciously penetrating the design, baffled it by his reserve. Being liberated from confinement shortly after, he communicated what had happened to a friend, a member of the French Senate, who traced the matter home to some of Fouche's creatures, and congratulated Lord Elgin ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... Hal and Noll journeyed to Denver. Major Davis, of the Seventeenth Cavalry, also traveled from his post, for the trial of the baffled men who had attempted to rob the United States mail was on in the United States District Court. These men, too, were sent away to the penitentiary for ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... simple. It struck out of Mrs. Wix that this lady still believed her moral sense to be interested and feigned; so what could be such a gage of her sincerity as a peep of the most restless of the passions? Such a revelation would baffle discouragement, and discouragement was in fact so baffled that, helped in some degree by the mere intensity of their need to hope, which also, according to its nature, sprang from the dark portent of the absent letter, the real pitch of their morning was reached ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... anything else: but they saw, on the other side of the river, about a hundred Indians, who, all fleeing, escaped. Some few pirates leaped into the river to cross it, and try to take any of the Indians, but in vain: for, being much more nimble than the pirates, they not only baffled them, but killed two or three with their arrows; hooting at them, and crying, "Ha, perros! a la savana, a la savana."—"Ha, ye dogs! go to the plain, ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... even,—just before we arrive, leaving us with an inexplicable feeling of having been cheated of something that was rightfully and divinely ours. That's the way I still feel about little Miss By-the-Day. Perhaps you, too, have been baffled by the will-o'-the-wispishness of that whimsical young person. Perhaps you, too, tried to find ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... exclaimed the baffled Cruickshanks, "you're aye quoting Scripture. How do you no ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... in a terrific confusion, as baffled by certain inconsistencies displayed by her own nature as overwhelmed by her disgraceful predicament. For she was certainly sincere in her craving to be as debonairly "athletic" as Tess; yet, during that ghastly moment when ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... wrote pieces on subjects so heavy that you could break up coal with them. But I never saw him so earnest in debate as he was the night he talked old Bill Morrison into letting him drive his hack for him all evening. He told me he had driven every hack in town but Bill's, and that Bill had baffled him for two years. It cost him four dollars to turn the trick, but he was happier after it than he was when he won the Siwash-Muggledorfer debate. Said he was ready to graduate now—college held nothing ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... pursued him with unabating vigour and dexterity, and at length, though he could not convince, he so entirely baffled him, that Sir Philip was self-compelled to be quiet-which, with a very ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... had aided him to lose those pursuing vultures. The last of them fell off, baffled,—or afraid to go deeper into France. Now he emerged again into the clear air and the starlight. The land beneath him was a scudding blur, with a dark-green mass in its center, the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... more intricate than any that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private enterprise. For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... found something haunting and bewildering in the lines; they drew, and yet they baffled us, with their suggested echoes luring only to betray. Hannah never wrote anything else, but we always cherished the belief that she could do "'most anything" with words and their possibilities. Still, we accepted her one crowning achievement, and never urged ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... thought, evidently did not seem to him a matter of any moment; perhaps because he had since then become a professional killer of men. After planning exactly how she should meet any contingency that might arise, she found herself baffled. She had not expected to meet this attitude. She was not prepared to meet it. She had taken it for granted that Art Osgood would shun a meeting; that she would have to force him to face her. And here he was, sitting on the porch rail and swinging one spurred ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... widow, whom Ralph Roister Doister wishes to marry, but he is wholly baffled in his scheme.—Nicholas TJdall, Ralph Roister ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... too they greeted the efforts of their assailants to cross the palisade and break their line. At last the Norman infantry fell back broken and baffled, having suffered terrible loss, and now the knights and horsemen, who formed the backbone of William's army, rode up the hill. The duke himself, as well as his brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeau, who fought beside him, had laid aside ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... "Wile baffled wile, and strength encountered strength, Thus long, but unprevailing—the event Of that portentous fight appeared at length. Until the lamp of day was almost spent It had endured, when lifeless, stark, and rent, Hung high that mighty serpent, and at last ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... which had joined the king. [Sidenote: Siege of the Piraeus and Athens.] Sulla then began two sieges, that of the Piraeus where Archelaus was, and that of Athens defended by Aristion. Archelaus had before shown himself an intrepid soldier, and he baffled all Sulla's efforts with equal ingenuity and courage. After an unsuccessful attempt to storm the walls, Sulla retired to Eleusis and Megara, thus keeping up his communications with Thebes and the Peloponnese, and set to work constructing catapults and other engines, and preparing an earthwork from ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... like a dream. Chauvelin!—the most deadly enemy he, Armand, and his sister Marguerite had in the world. Chauvelin!—the evil genius that presided over the Secret Service of the Republic. Chauvelin—the aristocrat turned revolutionary, the diplomat turned spy, the baffled ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... provoking of late. Phoebe greatly dreaded a change, both from her love for her governess, and alarm lest a new duenna might be yet more unwelcome to Mervyn, and she was disappointed to see that Robert caught at the hope that the whole scheme might be baffled ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... human wolf. Webster could not with equal propriety have put into the mouth of Flamineo such magnificent lyric poetry as seems to fall naturally, however suddenly and strangely, from the bitter and blood-thirsty tongue of Bosola. To him, as to the baffled and incoherent ruffian Romelio in the contemporary play of "The Devil's Law-case," his creator has assigned the utterance of such verse as can only be compared to that uttered by Cornelia over the body of her murdered son in ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was of fear; all voiced disappointment, the passion of baffled fury. Angrily a boiler-shop clatter of machine-guns vomited ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... impassable wall of cliff. This curt arrest to his progress was just what was needed to stiffen his wavering resolution. He understood the defiance which his ready fancy had found in the stare of the eagle. Well, he had accepted the challenge. He would not be baffled by a rock. If he could not climb over it, he would go round it; but he would find ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... and had carried them out with such consummate artifice and attention to detail, that as Ned turned over in his mind scheme after scheme for the recovery of the ship, it was only to realise that each had been anticipated and provided against. At length, baffled and in despair, he gave up, temporarily, all hope of effecting a recapture, and allowed his thoughts to turn in another direction. "What was to become of the passengers?" True, Williams had guaranteed for ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... and sixty-five thousand dollars was the modest spoil, and Pinkerton and his men were gallantly defied. A hasty trip to Canada still further perplexed the pursuers, and if we may believe Moore, he not only baffled the great detective, but persuaded the Express Company to dispute his claim. Moore, in fact, took a sportsman's as well as an artist's pleasure in the game. After the discomfiture of his enemies, he loved nothing better than a neat job. He professes a frank delight in explaining how once upon a ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... This great establishment, richly endowed, was thus a magnificent piece of homage by the Scottish King to a principle which, especially under the bold and uncompromising guidance of its great advocate, had solely perplexed and baffled his royal neighbor on the English throne, and boded future trouble and humiliation to all thrones and temporal dignities. Much antiquarian speculation has been exerted, but without very obvious success, to fathom the motives for this act of munificence. William had invaded ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... descended on the elephant's left hinder leg; then springing on one side the black inflicted another tremendous gash on the right. The monster staggered on, and was about to seize the Arab with its trunk, when, uttering a shriek of pain and baffled rage, down it came with a crash ...
— Ned Garth - Made Prisoner in Africa. A Tale of the Slave Trade • W. H. G. Kingston
... in making his mind over, in drilling it into not-thinking, into not-inferring things, into not-knowing anything he does not know all of? And yet here he is and here is his whole life—does it not consist in being baffled by germs and bacilli, crowed over by atoms, trampled on by the stars? It is getting so that there is but one thing left that the modern, educated scientific mind feels that it knows and that is the impossibility of knowledge. Certainly if there is anything in this wide world that can possibly ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... he owned with a laugh: "but I have never known him so baffled to all appearance. The fact is, she cannot be roused to any interest in herself. Of others she never ceases to think. It was she, for instance—when I could not afford to buy myself a gown for ordination—who ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... there was only one problem that baffled her, a new problem: Mag Henderson. It was difficult to arrange a future ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... bedded in the sands. It had lain since the days of Arundel's Rebellion. The Londoner vowed to build a new church there on the towans, where the songs of prayer and praise should mingle with the voice of the waves which God had baffled for him. The people warned him of the sand; but he would not listen to reason. He built his church—a squat Perpendicular building of two aisles, the wider divided into nave and chancel merely by ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was just setting. Jonathan went to the great ash-tree, behind the barn, fell upon his knees, and covered his face, and the sense of an exceeding bitter cry filled his heart. All the suppressed and baffled longing, the want, the hunger, the unremitting pain of years, came upon him and were crowded into the single prayer, "Come, David, or I die!" Before the twilight faded, while he was still kneeling, an arm came upon his shoulder, and the faint touch of another cheek upon his own. It was hardly ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... cravat played perhaps an obtrusive part, completed the conditions of his identity. We have approached him, perhaps, at a not especially favorable moment; he is by no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the aesthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly ...
— The American • Henry James
... I called upon the girl, and she, to my chagrin, received me with an air of having danced with me some five or six times the night before; our conversation was at first trivial and, on her part, dishearteningly cordial; and, in fine, she completely baffled me by not appearing to expect any least explanation of my discourteous neglect. This, look you, when I had been at pains to prepare a ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... said:—"Our duty is very discouraging. We are hindered and baffled on every side by the people, whose sympathies are always against the law. Now in England your sympathies are with the law, and the people have the sense to support it, knowing that it will support ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... non-committal eyes his own fell baffled. He was more irritated than he cared to own. Could she not see that he was prepared for anything, that his self-control was as great as her own? She treated him like a child; those professional reserves, necessary, doubtless, ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... opportunity to ask Count de Chaumont if her lands were recovered. A baffled look troubled ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Lemaitre's genius took a new development in creating the part of Mephistopheles. The feature of the part which balked and baffled him was the infernal laugh indicated by Goethe. By every expedient that mimicry could suggest day after day he studied to give forth that terrible laugh, but all his efforts were useless: he could ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... all with tar-paper outside. But Gringo was learning "pen-traps." He did not break the door that he did not see through, but he put one paw under and heaved it up when he had finished the bait. Thus he baffled them and sported with the traps, till Kellyan made the door drop into a deep groove so that the Bear could put no claw beneath it. But it was cold weather now. There was deepening snow on the Sierras. The Bear sign disappeared. The hunters knew ...
— Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac • Ernest Thompson Seton
... hills and hearts informed and sworn to bitter duty, Man, at last, had found his chance. Again Liberty, in robes white as snow and sweet as the morning, beckoned to her lover. Another king was come with his armies to keep them apart. The armies being baffled, Satan had come also and spread his hidden snares. Could Satan prevail? Was the story nearing another failure—a tragedy dismal and complete as ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... was a big broad-shouldered man, a giant of a fellow. He knew all the trappers on this part of the coast, and where their trapping grounds lay. One of his neighbors, whom he spoke of as "Si," trapped in the neighborhood where the baffled men now ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... to be somewhat baffled. "Well," she said. "Well, you better put this poem in your ole newspaper if you want to have anyhow one thing in it that won't make everybody sick ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... trembling, expecting another opportunity at a better and more private leisure, when his fancy shall be better composed, than to make himself perpetually miserable for having misbehaved himself, and being baffled at the first result. Till possession be taken, a man that knows himself subject to this infirmity, should leisurely and by degrees make certain little trials and light offers, without attempting at once to force an absolute conquest over his own mutinous and indisposed faculties; ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... was the case, there was but one resource left, and that was the Ordeal—the appeal to the judgment of God. Such are the devices of inexperienced nations, who have no skill in sifting out the truth, and are baffled by contending testimony. Nothing can better illustrate the stage of our national progress in the times which produced the literature which we ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... was military commander at this time, was driven nearly out of his senses. A foe like the French, who would stand and do battle, he could fight; but this phantom foe, that vanished like mist through the woods, baffled the English soldier. In less than six months two thousand whites had been slain; and Amherst could not even find his foe, let alone strike him. "Can we not inoculate them with smallpox, or set bloodhounds to track them?" ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... Frost Spirit comes! Let us meet him as we may, And turn with the light of the parlor-fire his evil power away; And gather closer the circle round, when that firelight dances high, And laugh at the shriek of the baffled Fiend as ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... in the above medal is the Lobster, though doubtless it had an allusion to some topic or scandal of the day; whoever can elucidate it will render good service to Medallic History, for hitherto it has baffled all commentators and collectors of medals. The windmill (indicative of the poplar fable that the Prince was the son of a miller), and the Roman Catholic symbols, are ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... living: there is a poor specimen of a bird which to my unornithological eyes appears to be a happy mixture of a lark, pigeon and snipe (No. 710). Mr. MacLeay himself never imagined such an inosculating creature: I suppose it will turn out to be some well-known bird, although it has quite baffled me. I have taken some interesting Amphibia; a new Trigonocephalus beautifully connecting in its habits Crotalus and the Viperidae, and plenty of new (as far as my knowledge goes) saurians. As for one ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Mexico was dreamed of at Miramare: now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among women looks down distraught from those high windows, and finds in the helpless sail and impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I think though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we pity the Mexicans to whom her dreams ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... time to receive the felicitations of his friends on this score, before an accident happened to him, which demanded a much more than equal share of condolance from them.—His son, his only son, the darling of his heart, was seized with a distemper in his head, which in a very few days baffled the art of medicine, and snatched him from the world.—What now availed his honours, his wealth, his every requisite for grandeur, or for pleasure?—He, for whose sake chiefly he had laboured to acquire them, was no more!—no second self remained to enjoy what he must one ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... piercing, suspicious gaze. At once I saw, behind that look, a jealousy that pounced on every object that came into its view, and studied it with a hope that feared and a fear that hoped. When her eyes had toured the room, they paused upon him, seemed to be saying: "You've baffled me again, but I'm not discouraged. I ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... new ministry of England, none the less every capital of Europe came presently to know John Law, gambler, student and financier. Before every ruler on the continent he laid his system of financial revolution, and one by one they smiled, or shrugged, or scoffed at him. Baffled once more in his dearest purpose, he took again to play, play in such colossal and audacious form as never yet had been seen even in the gayest courts of a time when gaming was a vice to be called national. ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... review. The past was a crescendo, solitude growing louder each night, poverty growing louder, obstinacy growing louder, Mrs. Brigg growing louder. What an orchestra! Cuckoo had not seen Julian once. She had seen the doctor, to be told of his baffled efforts, of Julian's escape from all his friends, of Valentine's declaration of the stone going down in the sea, of utter deadlock, utter stagnation. For the doctor treated Cuckoo frankly as a brave woman, not deceitfully as a timid child to ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... failed through the watchfulness of the English, the naval victory of Nelson at the Nile, and the defence of Acre by Sir Sidney Smith. It was the dream of Napoleon at that time to found an empire in the East, of which he would be supreme; but he missed his destiny, and was obliged to return, foiled, baffled, and chagrined, to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... scoffer!" cried the baffled priest, "Thou 'lt yet the gallows see." "Who's born to be hanged will not be drowned," ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... anew, but our strength and ingenuity were not sufficient for the purpose. We tried afterwards to find shelter under the canoe (the rain pouring in torrents), but the crew were already in possession, and so closely packed, that not an inch was unoccupied. Thus baffled on every hand, we passed the night completely exposed to the "pelting of the pitiless storm," learning a lesson of practical philosophy which I have not ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... before the detectives and questioned, with swift sternness, it was his own questions that demanded answer—and got it. The men gathered in the library, baffled by the search, and asking futile, dreary questions, learned to wait in amusement for the quick, searching gestures flung at them and the eager face that seemed to drink their words. Gradually they came to understand—the Greek was learning the science of kidnapping—its ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... they are incredibly prolific. All they write is poor, and the spiteful fairy, spiteful to us, has granted them the faculty to write thus, without any trouble, for ever. Up to this day Lydgate's works have baffled the attempts of the most enterprising literary societies; the Early English Text Society has some time ago begun to publish them; if it carries out the undertaking, it will be a ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... graded and graced and pathed like a cemetery, wherein nymphs trod daintily in elaborate morning-costume. Everything took pattern and was elaborate. Nothing was left to the imagination, the taste, the curiosity. A bland, smooth, smiling surface baffled and blinded you, and threatened profanity. Now profanity is wicked and vulgar; but if you listen to the reeds next summer, I am not sure that you will not hear them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... yourselves and your sister, to boot; for indeed there appeareth no cause [of offence] such as calleth for slaughter, and it may not be denied that this incident is a thing the like whereof may well betide and that he may well have been baffled by the like of this chance." Then he turned to me and questioned me of my lineage; so I set forth to him my genealogy and he said, "A man of equal rank, honourable [and] understanding." And he offered me [his daughter in] marriage. I consented to him of this and marrying ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... was to be built at Jerusalem; and the Samaritans saying that it was to be built at Gerizzim. They desired therefore the king to sit with his friends, and hear the debates about these matters, and punish those with death who were baffled. Now Sabbeus and Theodosius managed the argument for the Samaritans, and Andronicus, the son of Messalamus, for the people of Jerusalem; and they took an oath by God and the king to make their demonstrations according to the law; and they desired of Ptolemy, that whomsoever ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... hounds across the sky, The white clouds scud before the storm; And naked in the howling night The red-eyed lighthouse lifts its form. The waves with slippery fingers clutch The massive tower, and climb and fall, And, muttering, growl with baffled rage Their curses on the ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... in air unseen, some hovering hand, 10 Some chaste and angel friend to virgin fame, With whisper'd spell had burst the starting band, It left unblest her loathed dishonour'd side; Happier, hopeless Fair, if never Her baffled hand, with vain endeavour, 15 Had touch'd that fatal zone to her denied! Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name, To whom, prepared and bathed in heaven, The cest of amplest power is given: To few the godlike gift assigns, 20 To gird their blest prophetic loins, And gaze her visions ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... Beaurepaire was sad, and weighed down with presentiments. She felt as soldiers sometimes feel who know the enemy is undermining them; no danger on the surface; nothing that can be seen, met, baffled, attacked, or evaded; in daily peril, all the more horrible that it imitates perfect serenity, they await the fatal match. She imparted her misgivings to Aubertin; but he assured her she exaggerated ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... an aged man, but through all, from birth to death, from the cradle to the grave, I had felt myself doomed. All efforts I had previously made to secure my freedom had not only failed, but had seemed only to rivet my fetters the more firmly, and to render my escape more difficult. Baffled, entangled, and discouraged, I had at times asked myself the question, May not my condition after all be God's work, and ordered for a wise purpose, and if so, Is not submission my duty? A contest had in fact been going on in my mind for a long time, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... to compare with his free-and-easy manners of other times. To make matters worse, he had promised to be tall, and had not kept his promise. He was neat, and slim, and well made; but he wasn't by an inch or two up to the middle height. In short, he baffled me altogether. The years that had passed had left nothing of his old self, except the bright, straightforward look in his eyes. There I found our nice boy again, and there I concluded ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... reports of his speeches are mere skeletons, which give but a faint idea of them. Even the few rhetorical passages that are retained have lost much of their original form and beauty. The professional stenographers confessed themselves utterly baffled in the attempt to report him, and he was quite as unfitted to report himself. Indeed, he complained that he never could reproduce the best thoughts, still less the exact ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... He had always been in the habit of playing with the rest of the girls, so thinking that Ling Kuan was like the others, he felt impelled to draw near her and to entreat her, with a forced smile, to get up and sing part of the "Niao Ch'ing Ssu." But his hopes were baffled; for as soon as Ling Kuan perceived him sit down, she impetuously raised herself and withdrew from his side. "I'm hoarse," she rejoined with a stern expression on her face. "The Empress the other day called us into the palace; but I couldn't ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... is sometimes grave, And deepest when 'tis calm. And I am joyful If it be joy, this long forbidden hall Once more to pace, and feel each fearless step Tread on a baffled foe. ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... coort-room th' scene baffled description. It was an inspirin' sight f'r th' judges, whin they were awake. Row on row iv journalists, sharpin' pencils an' slappin' each other's faces, r-rose to th' ceilin'. Here an' there cud be ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... Arthur. She had never returned to the card-playing incident; but as time went on a number of others equally distressing presented themselves. Having constituted herself his special protectress and the saviour of his reputation she tackled each of them with courage. In every case she found herself baffled by the fact that arguments which seemed to her unanswerable made no appeal to him, not because he wasn't anxious to see things with her eyes, but because they came within the area of a kind of blind-spot in his brain. She soon found that she couldn't appeal on moral grounds ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... mother, Eleanor, plunged into intrigue for the forward party (Prince Charlie's party), distrusted by James at Rome. 'She is a mad woman,' said James. She and Carte, the historian, were working up an English rising to join the Prince's Scottish adventure, but were baffled by James's cautious, helpless advisers. Then came the Forty-Five. Eleanor was not subdued by Culloden: the undefeated old lady was a guest at the great dinner, with the splendid new service of plate, which the Prince gave to the Princesse de Talmond and his friends in 1748. He was braving all ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... increased with such violence that she was already partially delirious. The next day Dr. Barvis[7], from Devizes, attended her and pronounced her in considerable danger. I mounted my poney, rode back with him, and soon returned again with the medicine he had prescribed; but my mother's disorder baffled all their skill and attention. My poor father was distracted; he never quitted her bedside for a moment; all his large farming concerns were left to the care of the servants; he desired me to go to them on the Monday morning, the day after my mother was taken ill, and to request them all ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the meek and the unborn; And a question that has held us heretofore without an answer May abide without an answer until all have ceased to mourn. For the children of the dark are more to name than are the wretched, Or the broken, or the weary, or the baffled, or the shamed: There are builders of new mansions in the Valley of the Shadow, And among them are the dying and the blinded and ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... agitation, and terror were such that Arthur found it impossible to do anything but soothe and hush him, as best might be, till his sobs subsided gradually, still heaving his little chest even after he fell asleep in the arms of his unaccustomed nurse, who found himself thus baffled in using this last and only opportunity of trying to strengthen the child's faith, and was also hindered from pursuing Yusuf, who had left the tent. And if it were separation that caused all this distress, what ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had arrived. It was this reply that lay on the table—a brief, formal note, setting forth Miss Boyd's absolute refusal to accept any portion of the money. This was a development which Bill had not foreseen, and he was feeling baffled. What was the next step? He had smoked many pipes in the endeavour to find an answer to this problem, and was lighting ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... to be able to answer him. Even Staupitz, who was responsible to the others for this gathering of the company, was baffled. He had been told to supply nine swords, and he had supplied them. He had been told by his employer the purpose for which the nine swords were wanted—he had been told by AEsop against whom those nine swords were to ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... by famine and cold, the most miserable modes of death." Those who were experienced in the events which had occurred in Spain, added, that "he would not have to engage with Caius Nero, the general, as an unknown person, whom, when accidentally caught in a difficult defile, he had eluded and baffled like a little child, by drawing up fallacious terms of peace." Under the dictation of fear, which always puts the worst construction upon things, they magnified all the advantages which the enemy possessed, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... the 26th) I shall, unless baffled or delayed by ice or weather, be with you at Richmond Hill. I will not bid you adieu till the Friday preceding. In the interim, we shall often in ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Khan told us. Have you forgotten? He is to go to Eton and Oxford. He'll see something of England. He will learn—" and Major Dewes stopped short, baffled by the look of hopelessness upon the Political ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... was only to give one last fatal proof of their incapacity that these unhappy men appeared once more on French soil. Within three weeks after their landing, in a region where for years together the peasantry, led by their landlords, baffled the best generals of the Republic, this invading army of the nobles, supported by the fleet, the arms, and the money of England, was brought to utter ruin by the discord of its own leaders. Before the nobles had settled who ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... though he had been exempted from them. One man, from a complication of causes, is exposed to temptations of which another is ignorant; and in this case he needs much sympathy, which he seldom meets with; while they, who are severe on him are liable to be baffled in another way, which, for want of coincidence in habit, temperature, and situation, he is equally prone to disregard. Thus Christians are often led reciprocally to censure, suspect, or dislike each other, on those very grounds ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... my ability to do so?" he put in. "Oh—well—yes—of course you do; and why shouldn't you? Nevertheless, I have noticed this: At times when I have been baffled in my work a mere hint from another, from one who knew nothing of my work, has carried me on to a solution of my problem. I have read most of your writings, and I have thought over some of them many ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... Ghosts Present at a Hanging A Cold Greeting A Wireless Message An Arrest Soldier-Folk A Man with Two Lives Three and One are One A Baffled Ambuscade Two Military Executions Some Haunted Houses The Isle of Pines A Fruitless Assignment A Vine on a House At Old Man Eckert's The Spook House The Other Lodgers The Thing at Nolan The Difficulty of Crossing a Field An Unfinished ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... and he baffled Jessamine. Indeed, his eagerness with her parcels, his assistance in checking her trunk, his cheerful examination of check and ticket to be sure they read over the same route, plainly failed to ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... Oliver appeared. His long face was distressfully haggard; about his temples and across his forehead, what had been merely lines before were now deep grooves. Yet the fierce, baffled look that had been in his eyes since the escape was entirely gone. He smiled at the group most tenderly, and his moustache wiggled in a ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... He had baffled with his bemuddled brain, to recall the conversation he had held with his wife since his return home to marry her, and every innocent word she had uttered in jest had seemed guilty and foul. "You've been nothing ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... practices, and with the same views of preventing a government of concord, which they foresaw would be republican, and of forcing: through anarchy their way to monarchy. But the mass of that convention was too honest, too wise, and too steady, to be baffled and misled by their manoeuvres. One of these was a form of government proposed by Colonel Hamilton, which would have been in fact a compromise between the two parties of royalism and republicanism. According ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Sphinx—which has baffled all inquisitive inquirers for centuries without number, stands in the sand only a. short distance from Cheops. Imagine, if you can, with what feelings one gazes upon it. It is as old as the Pyramids, perhaps older, and ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... Russians consisted in cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his marshals—and that aim was not merely frustrated but all attempts to attain it were most shamefully baffled—then this last period of the campaign is quite rightly considered by the French to be a series of victories, and quite wrongly considered victorious by ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... example. Ordering them to sheathe their bayonets, he sat on the snow at the edge of slope, and pushing himself by his hands, he slid to the bottom of the valley....All our soldiers, in fits of laughter, did the same, and in no time the whole battalion was gathered together, out of the range of the baffled Austrians. This method of descent, used by the peasants and mountain guides of Switzerland, had surely never before been used by a battalion of troops of the line. I have been assured by generals who were in Massna's division at the time that this incident actually occurred, and, nine ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... Castro, I had forgotten him. I raged at the deception of my thirst, exploring with my tongue the rough surface of the stone till I tasted my own blood. Only then, raising my head to gasp, and clench my fists with a baffled and exasperated desire, I noticed how profound was the silence, in which the words, "Take away his sting," seemed to pronounce themselves over the ravine in the impersonal austerity of the rock, and with the tone ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... were, undoubtedly, aware of the misfortune of admitting under one general government, and on terms of equality, two mutually invasive and destructive social ideas and their corresponding systems of labor. But they were baffled at the time by what appeared to be a political necessity, and so met the grand emergency of the age by concession and a spirit of conciliation. Many of them, indeed, desired on economic as well as on moral grounds the abolition of slavery, and probably ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... the celebrated Duke of Newcastle, and adapted to the stage by the pen of Dryden. The piece turns upon the schemes formed by a clever and intriguing valet to facilitate the union betwixt his master and the heroine of the scene, all of which are successively baffled and disconcerted by the bustling interference of the lover himself. The French original has infinitely the superiority; the character of the luckless lover is drawn with an exquisitely finer pencil. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... as it were from the grave. Not aware of the danger she ran into, she did not think of it till she perceived she had caught the fever. It made such an alarming progress, that she was prevailed on to send for a physician; but the disorder was so violent, that for some days it baffled his skill; and Mary felt not her danger, as she was delirious. After the crisis, the symptoms were more favourable, and she slowly recovered, without regaining much strength or spirits; indeed they were intolerably low: she wanted ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... surprised to see that she had moved as far as the next pillar, following the sunshine. This time, however, she addressed me with some trivial salutation, civilly enough conceived, and uttered in the same deep-chested, and yet indistinct and lisping tones, that had already baffled the utmost niceness of my hearing from her son. I answered rather at a venture; for not only did I fail to take her meaning with precision, but the sudden disclosure of her eyes disturbed me. They were unusually large, the iris golden like Felipe's, but the pupil at that moment so distended ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... believed curative of an oriental disease known as beri-beri. This disease is common in Japan, the Philippines and other lands where the diet consists mainly of rice, and while the disease itself was well known its cause and cure had baffled the medical men for many years. Today in magazines, newspapers and street car advertisements people are urged to use this or that food or medicament on the plea of its vitamine content. In less than ten years the study of ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... hither, come hither," 'gan Florice call; And the urchin left his fun; So from the hall of poor Sir Paul Retreats the baffled dun; So Ellen parts from the village ball, Where she leaves a heart ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... meet and are baffled 'mid tempest and wrath, Breezes are skirmishing, angry winds roar, While poised on some desperate plunge of our path We count up the blackening wrecks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... much in this it might appear; since unfortunately, these hoof-marks can be distinguished no farther than to the summit of the sloping bank. Beyond they are covered up, as elsewhere, by the mud. But Gaspar's keen eye is not to be thus baffled; and a joyful ejaculation escaping his lips tells he has discovered something which gives him gladness. On Cypriano asking what it is, ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... thoroughly satisfied with herself that it never occurred to her that any one whom she honoured with her liking could do aught but be devoted to her in return. And against the granite of her self-sufficiency the iron of the girl's proud anger broke until at length, baffled by the other's conceit, Noreen drifted back into the semblance of her former friendliness. And Ida ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... where you never yet trod towards the point whence your instincts have warned you, there a spectre will seize you. 'Tis Death! I see a ship—it is haunted—'tis chased—it sails on. Baffled navies sail after that ship. It enters the region of ice. It passes a sky red with meteors. Two moons stand on high, over ice-reefs. I see the ship locked between white defiles—they are ice-rocks. I see ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... glared at our hero. He was baffled and did not know what to do next. Presently a crafty look came ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... construction. I was in rapture as I gazed upon the principal fountain which rises in the middle of it. It is easier to imagine than to describe what I felt at that moment, standing opposite the sources which had baffled the genius and courage of the most celebrated men for ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... I ask you questions surely you can answer them," said Mary Grey, who, though very anxious for information later than that afforded by Mrs. Wheatfield's letter, was not ill-pleased at the devotion which baffled her curiosity. ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... 1889 a public meeting was held to form a Women's Suffrage League, which set to work holding meetings and collecting signatures to petitions under the guidance of its Hon. Secretary, Mrs. Mary Lee. The efforts of the parliamentary friends were thrice baffled—in 1890, 1891 and 1893—by the necessity for a majority of the whole House, which stopped further immediate progress though each time the Bill had passed second reading. The growth of support ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... her eyebrows. She looked always by nature for the intricate and concealed motive, so that conduct which sprang from a reason, obvious and simple, was likely to baffle her. She was baffled now by Durrance's resolve to remain in town. Why did he not travel at once to Donegal, she asked herself, since thither his thoughts undoubtedly preceded him. She heard of his continual presence at his Service Club, and could not understand. She did not even have a suspicion ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... Doctors' Commons show, letters of administration on his goods and chattels were granted to Mary Brooks, widow, a creditrix, after summoning in official form the next of kin to appear. Now, if Defoe had been driven from his home by imaginary fears, and had baffled with the cunning of insane suspicion the efforts of his family to bring him back, there is no apparent reason why they should not have claimed his effects after his death. He could not have died unknown to them, ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... following, Mr. Fox and others commenced digging in the cellar, but as the house was built on low ground and in the vicinity of a stream then much swollen by rains, it was not surprising that they were baffled by the influx of water at the distance of three feet down. In the summer of 1848, when the ground was dry and the water lowered, the digging again commenced, when they found a plank, a vacant place or hole, some bits of crockery, which seemed to have been a washbowl, ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... can get in and trail them down it will be the biggest feather you ever wore in your cap. But let me tell you, it's a dangerous job. Several of our men have mysteriously vanished. Two we know were assassinated; the others have been done away with. My reputation is at stake. Thus far I have been baffled." ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... ranks military daring had reached, perhaps, its very highest point. And yet the sailors inside that ring of crumbling wall won! At Acre Napoleon experienced his first defeat; and, years after, at St. Helena, he said of Sir Sidney Smith, the gallant sailor who baffled him, "That man made me miss my destiny." It is a curious fact that one Englishman thwarted Napoleon's career in the East, and another ended his career in the West, and it may be doubted which of the two Napoleon hated most—Wellington, who finally ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... One of our most inveterate relic-hunters had his hammer with him, and tried to break a fragment off the upright Needle and could not do it; he tried the prostrate one and failed; he borrowed a heavy sledge hammer from a mason and tried again. He tried Pompey's Pillar, and this baffled him. Scattered all about the mighty monolith were sphinxes of noble countenance, carved out of Egyptian granite as hard as blue steel, and whose shapely features the wear of five thousand years had failed to mark or mar. The relic-hunter ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... prophets and sibyls! Never did the always-baffled, always reaespiring hope of the finite to compass the infinite find such expression, except in the sehnsucht of music. They are buried in the volume. They cannot believe that it has not somewhere been revealed, the word of enigma, the link between the human and ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... warn him at once," replied Agias. "Any premature attempt on his life will certainly fail. But it is not Ahenobarbus that I fear; it is Pratinas. Pratinas, if baffled once, will only be spurred on to use all his cunning in a second trial. We must enmesh the conspirators so completely that when their stab is parried, not merely will their power to repeat it be gone, but they themselves will be in danger ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... its granite hardness. But Bellenger's passed from shade to shade of baffled confidence; recovering only when the ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... a stubborn resistance and fought with great bravery when there was no alternative. Once the Union forces were ready to advance, their rapid movements and forced marches took the Germans by surprise in the midst of their preparations, and baffled and bewildered them. Cut off entirely from help from the outside, and running short of ammunition which could not be replaced, their struggle could only ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... theory, but its realization in practice presented considerable difficulties. The police had (presumably) searched for this person and failed to find him. How was I, untrained in methods of detection, to succeed where the experts had been baffled? I considered my resources. They consisted of a silver teapot and a salver which had been handled by the murderer and which, together, yielded a complete set of finger-prints, and the wisp of hair that I had taken from the hand of my murdered wife. It is true that the police also had finger-marked ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... taken notice of in a weekly paper, the Observator, published at that very time, 23d of August, 1682. Party zeal is capable of swallowing the most incredible story; but it is surely singular, that the same calumny, when once baffled, should yet be ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... am of the fact that he strove to secure me for that purpose, from the first expanding of those faculties which evidently lie exposed to his observation and open to his attacks, as far as God permits him to work. Can I feel all this, and not bless the Lord, who so far baffled these designs, and deigned to appoint my field of labor within the sacred confines ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... Psmith diffidently. "Well, well, perhaps you are right, perhaps you are right. Did you notice the hired ruffian in the flannel suit who just passed? He wore a baffled look, I fancy. And hark! Wasn't that a muttered 'Failed!' I heard? Or was it the breeze moaning in the tree-tops? To-night is a cold, disappointing night for Hired ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... inefficient commander, soon deserted him. Charles V., as soon as he could gather forces, laid siege to Metz, but, after nearly three months of late autumnal operations, was fain to break up and withdraw, baffled and with loss of half his army, across the Rhine. Though some success attended his arms on the northern frontier, it was of no permanent value; the loss of Metz, and the failure in the attempt to take it, proved to the worn-out Emperor that the day of his power and opportunity was ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... perhaps, at any other time since the gold standard was firmly established. Thrown completely out of gear by the premium of 3-1/2 per cent. a day for currency during the panic time, the exchange markets for some time would rise and fall several cents in the pound on the same day. Completely baffled by this erratic movement, many bankers temporarily withdrew entirely from ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... day Eric was never troubled with personal violence from Barker or any other boy. But rancour smouldered deep in the mind of the baffled tyrant, and, as we shall see hereafter, there are subtler means of making an enemy wretched than striking ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... consequently will not interfere with the law of gravitation. In relation to the numerous questions that will spring up from such a position, it is sufficient here to say, that it is believed all objections can be satisfactorily answered; while, by this light, a long range of phenomena that have hitherto baffled the sagacity of the wise, come out ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... ways, now far apart in the glad bright summer, now drawing together in the moonlight of the winter's night. At times the makers of the trails had watched each other in secret, shyly, inquisitively, at a distance; but always fear or cunning had kept them apart, the boy with his keen hunter's interest baffled and whetted by the brutes' wariness, and the wolves drawn to the superior being by that subtle instinct that once made glad hunting-dogs and collies of the wild rangers of the plains, and that still leads ...
— Northern Trails, Book I. • William J. Long
... and although he searched long and carefully he could not find it. Late that night the baffled hunter returned ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne
... alien power has been at work, even that wicked enchanter Friston; he it is who has changed those giants into windmills to rob me of the honor of their defeat. But in the end all his evil devices shall be baffled by my good sword." ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... repeated), when Duncan himself appeared, out of breath indeed, and with all the symptoms of having run for his life, but laughing, and in high spirits at the success of the stratagem by which he had baffled his pursuers. This indeed Waverley could easily conceive might be a matter of no great difficulty to the active mountaineer, who was perfectly acquainted with the ground, and traced his course with a firmness and confidence to which ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... fertility of resources, his unflagging energy, and his amazing genius in overcoming difficulties won for him the admiration of that class who idolize strength and success; so that he stands out in history as a struggling gladiator who baffled all his foes,—not a dying gladiator on the arena of a pagan amphitheatre, but more like a Judas Maccabaeus, when hunted by the Syrian hosts, rising victorious, and laying the foundation of a powerful monarchy; indeed, his fame spread, irrespective of his cause and character, from one end of Christendom ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... internal, to their essential nature, he is equally at fault. Though he may succeed in resolving all properties of objects into manifestations of force, he is not thereby enabled to realise what force is; but finds, on the contrary, that the more he thinks about it, the more he is baffled. Similarly, though analysis of mental actions may finally bring him down to sensations as the original materials out of which all thought is woven, he is none the forwarder; for he cannot in the least comprehend ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... mayor's office. Found him as usual in a back street in a shabby office up shaky wooden stairs. The mayor knew nothing of any road to Berane; so baffled, we again found the street. We went to the shabby Turkish shops of the bazaar ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... was the repeated burden of the great men of Israel. They lived in the midst of national calamities and distresses. They were defeated, puzzled, baffled. The way looked dark. Then they fall back on the one great re-establishing thought: after all, it is God's world. It is not going to ruin. Changes which seemed tremendous are not fatal or final. Israel dwells in safety, for God holds us ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... men a sense of quality, a power of divination in regard to value which, on occasions when they are confronted by a stranger whose worth they do not know, informs them immediately of the comparative rarity or commonness of his type. This sense may at first be baffled by the delusive disguises in which men sometimes present themselves, but as a rule a chance word, an artless gesture, or even a glance, quickly corrects the initial error of the eye, and in a moment the ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... talking about that? I would have saved her at the last, and tried hard enough, but the storm was too much for me. After all that, you baffled me and got on shore; the fiends must have guided that pilot boat. I got frightened too. It was not a part of my programme to ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... resented this discountenance to his ambitious projects that, in conjunction with other chiefs, he had the presumption 5 even to weave nets of treason against the Emperor himself. Plots were laid, were detected, were baffled; counter-plots were constructed upon the same basis, and with the benefit of the opportunities thus offered. Finally, Zebek-Dorchi was invited to the imperial lodge, 10 together with all his accomplices; ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... at first surrounded by a mere collection of militia companies. As the pursuit ceased on the evening of the 19th the baffled Americans withdrew from the range of the guns of the fleet. As well as they could they gathered into their organizations and made some kind of a camp, sleeping either out of doors, or in convenient houses. A watch was set at Charlestown Neck, and at Roxbury Prescott of Pepperell ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... far she of the sunny paths could penetrate an unlighted country. He looked at her—peered at her, fairly—trying to decide. But he could not decide. Katie baffled him on that. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... argument. Before Esther's face of quiet confidence he felt himself baffled. If she were wrong, he could not prove her wrong. Uneasy and worsted, he gave up the discussion; but thought he would not have any more letters ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... seem so poor, so low, The hearts which are so cramped and dull, The baffled hopes, the impulse slow, Thou takest, touchest all, and lo! ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... what the book might be, or what it was about, It would go in at one ear,—at the other 'twould come out! So in his laboratory, baffled Cyrus sitting lone, Strives to correct the sad ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... day of her whole life. She saw in anticipation the happiness of that household broken up. She pictured his coming, but she could not picture his departure. For she had never seen him baffled and defeated. ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... way in which he was being baffled by the superior skill of his adversary, the baron's attack was growing wild as well as fierce; and, savagely determined to end all by a furious onslaught, he made a series of quick feints, letting his point play about Sir Robert's ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... moreover, whose effect on the nerves was nil, and on the mucous membrane was not to soothe it, but plough it and harrow it; "and did not that open her eyes?" He then reminded her that all these doctors in consultation would have contrived to agree. "But you," said he, "have baffled the collusive hoax by which Dox arrived at a sham uniformity—honest uniformity can never exist till scientific principles obtain. Listme! To begin, is the pashint ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... I think, and have good reason for thinking, that the Goth is already on her way to Constantinople, but I have no certainty of it. The one thing I do surely know, is that you are hoodwinked and baffled ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... repute cast upon his father's name. The sun of the yesterday had shone through cloud; the sun of the day rose in a clear firmament. Even Tostig recognised the superiority of his brother; and after a strong struggle between baffled rage and covetous ambition, yielded to him, as to a father. He felt that all Godwin's House was centred in Harold alone; and that only from his brother (despite his own daring valour and despite his alliance with the blood of Charlemagne and Alfred, through the sister of Matilda, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... trial Hal and Noll journeyed to Denver. Major Davis, of the Seventeenth Cavalry, also traveled from his post, for the trial of the baffled men who had attempted to rob the United States mail was on in the United States District Court. These men, too, were sent away to the ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... which we call diseases, in the stereotyped manner known as "orthodox;" after endless complications, infinite "specializing"—in itself a futility—and unblushing complicity with the powers that be, we find them now at length, baffled, discredited, but unashamed, cast back, discomforted, upon Mother Nature's kindly breast, their victims humbly seeking healing in simple ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... marble monuments at Persepolis, near the site of the ancient Susa, and on the faces of rocks in other places formerly ruled over by the early Persian kings. But for thousands of years they had been mere unintelligible enigmas to the curious but baffled beholder: and they were often referred to as instances of the folly of human pride, which could indeed write its own praises in the solid rock, but only for the rock to outlive the language as well as the memory of the vain-glorious ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... boat put out to the rescue she knew that she was discovered. Too late to do it now, she thought, and, holding both children, swam quickly back to the shore. A made-up story about having fallen into the water satisfied the boatman, and Barbara returned home dripping and baffled. But little Sarah did not recover from the shock, and after a few weeks her short life ended, and she was laid in ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the stalwart farmer lift his prisoner bodily, he heard a yell and then a splash, and saw the baffled swindler land waist-deep in the ditch, deluged, silk hat, white choker and dress coat, in a cascade of ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... garden door and stood staring in the empty oval. How distracted, how violent he looked, balked of his prey! He was stalking the garden, beating the bushes, walking up and down. All at once he stopped and raised a white baffled face to her window. She shrank away. She was in peril of Harry now. He knew her no longer innocent. She had held the ring against him in the face of the fact he had told her it was stolen. And he must guess her motive. He must ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... arrival he found that the police had already drawn a cordon around it with cords. Groups of morbid curiosity-seekers hung about it in twos and threes, some of them in fours and fives. Policemen were leaning against the fence in all directions. They wore that baffled look so common to the detective force of the metropolis. "It seems to me," remarked one of them to the man beside him, "that there is an inexorable chain of logic about this that I am unable to follow." "So do I," ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... brooding over the days and nights of their married life. Baffled and puzzled, his mind would come back with everlasting persistence to the strange feeling that held him to Ruth—a subtle and sweet mystery, the most intimate relation the soul and body can ever bear on earth, the union in love in ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... angry farmers enraged by the 'bedivilment' of their stock, shot at with silver slugs, and identified next morning with some dreaded hag or other lying groaning and wounded in her bed—of calves' hearts burnt at midnight with awful ceremonies, while the baffled witch outside flung herself in rage and agony against the close-barred doors and windows—of spells and wise men—these things had sent chills of pleasing horror through the boy's frame. They were altogether new to him, in this vivid personal guise ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... paying his court to Reine Vincart; and the unhappy Julien would scrutinize his rival's countenance, seeking eagerly for some trace of the impressions he had received during the loving interview. His curiosity was nearly always baffled; for Claudet seemed to have left all his gayety and conversational powers at La Thuiliere. During their tete-a-tete meals, he hardly spoke at all, maintaining a reserved attitude and a taciturn ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... childhood others whose nature was far stronger than mine yield and recoil at yours; I had seen the giant and bold strength of Gerald quail before your bent brow; I had seen even the hardy pride of Montreuil baffled by your curled lip and the stern sarcasm of your glance; I had seen you, too, in your wild moments of ungoverned rage, and I knew that if earth held one whose passions were fiercer than my own it was you. But your passions were sustained even ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... utter it. The saddest part of it all is, the deeper we delve the less we are satisfied in our intellectual natures. We merely succeed in learning that we are the veriest pygmies. Men like Mr. Wynkoop are simply driven back upon faith as a last resort, absolutely baffled by an inpenetrable wall, against which they batter mentally in vain. They have striven with mystery, only to meet with ignominious defeat. Faith alone remains, and I dare not deny that such faith is above all knowledge. The pity of it is, there are some minds ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... the party reached Fowler's Bay in the great Bight of South Australia. The map shows that a journey of more than 200 miles must have been made before the point was reached. Thence they attempted to make their way round the head of the Bight, but were twice baffled by want of water. Nothing daunted, Eyre made a third attempt, and succeeded in penetrating fifty miles beyond the head of the Bight. But the result was achieved only at a cost which the little party could ill ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... eyes the holy apparitions bless; The stately light of their divinity Hath oft but shone the brightest on the blind;— And their choice spirit found its calm recess In the pure childhood of a simple mind. Unask'd they come—delighted to delude The expectation of our baffled Pride; No law can call their free steps to our side. Him whom He loves, the Sire of men and gods, (Selected from the marvelling multitude,) Bears on his eagle to his bright abodes; And showers, with partial hand and lavish, down The minstrel's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... jaws, armed with a deadly array of tusks; but half a dozen lances were hurled at him, some entering his mouth from a distance of five or six paces. At the same time several men threw handfuls of sand into his enormous eyes. This baffled him more than the lances; he crunched the shafts between his powerful jaws like straws, but he was beaten by the sand, and, shaking his huge head, he retreated to the river. During his sally upon the shore two of the hunters had secured the ropes of the harpoons that had been fastened in his ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... these names?" The lady smiled at the question, and proceeded. He was so pleased, I say, that he resolved to make his addresses to her directly. He did so accordingly, and that with so much warmth and briskness, that he quickly baffled her weak repulses, and obliged the lady to refer him to her father, who, she knew, would quickly declare in favour of ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... will can ne'er be still Though oft its hopes be baffled, It will succeed though victims bleed And die upon ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... that has so often worked what seemed to them miracles,—and ask of it miracles indeed! I tried to explain to her the continued existence of her mother, and she listened to it as if her eyes drank in all that I could say, and more. But the apparent distance between earth and heaven baffled her baby mind, as it so often and so sadly baffles the thoughts of us elders. I wondered what precise change seemed to her to have taken place. This all-fascinating Laura, whom she adored, and who had yet never been to her what ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... farmer, to a great extent, the master of his vocation. With a sloppy, drenched, cold, uncongenial soil, which is saturated with every rain, and takes days, and even weeks, to become sufficiently dry to work upon, his efforts are constantly baffled by unfavorable weather, at those times when it is most important that his work proceed without interruption. Weeks are lost, at a season when they are all too short for the work to be done. The ground must be hurriedly, and imperfectly prepared, and the seed is put in too late, often to rot ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... the baffled spirit of youth with its forceful flood of being continued until it seemed that Emilia was lifted through the fiery circles into daylight; her last cry being as her first: "I have ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a rare one. The boy was a deaf-mute, but not blind. His very beautiful eyes—; his father's eyes—seemed to be perpetually interrogating the world about him, and perpetually baffled. He cried—a monotonous wailing sound—but he never smiled. He was capable of throwing all his small possessions into a large basket, and of taking them out again; an operation which he performed endlessly hour after hour; but of purpose, or any ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... passed the gates, I saw Montrecour borne in, wounded. The spirit of the insulter was in him still. He ordered the soldiers to bring his litter near me, and in a voice faint through pain, but bitter with baffled revenge, he murmured—'Countess, you shall not have long to indulge in your caprices. My hurts are trifling. You are still in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... moment the baffled lynx recovered himself, and faced the girl with so menacing a snarl that she hesitated to follow up her advantage, but paused, holding the axe in ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... lesson. Had he agreed at once to go from her, she would have balanced her own account within her own breast, and have kept to herself all her sufferings. There would have been no outward show of baffled love,- -none even in the colour of her cheeks; for such was the nature of her temperament. But she did suffer for him. Day by day she began to think that his love, though boisterous as she had at first ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope
... now bestowed upon him a glance of hasty and furtive recognition. Curiosity induced Sampson to move Silvertail a little more in advance, in order to be enabled to obtain a better view of the prisoners; but the latter, turning away his head at the moment, although apparently without design, baffled his penetration. Still he had a confused and indistinct idea that the person was not wholly unknown ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... play; unlike the average of children, she was at times much given to retiring within herself, and trying to search out the hidden meanings of the deep things that make the puzzle and pathos of human existence, and in all the ages have baffled the inquirer and mocked him. As a little child aged seven, she was oppressed and perplexed by the maddening repetition of the stock incidents of our race's fleeting sojourn here, just as the same thing has oppressed and perplexed maturer minds from the beginning of time. A myriad of men ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... roadway, bordered by an asphalt pavement on either side, then the high impenetrable oak paling, which had baffled Dominic Iglesias' maiden effort at participation in the amusements of the rich. From Poppy's balcony, however, the palings offered no impediment to observation. All the green expanse of the smaller polo-ground was visible. So was the whole height of the grove of majestic elms on the right and the ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... know what it is," said Andrew J. Burris, Director of the FBI. He threw his hands in the air and looked baffled and confused. ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the battle of Preston, did not double the above numbers, the Prince descended upon the Lowlands, having baffled the attempts of General Cope to intercept his march—occupied the city of Perth and the town of Dundee, and finally, after a faint show of resistance on the part of the burghers, took possession of the ancient capital of Scotland, and once more established a court in the halls of Holyrood. ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... not what he had expected. Not in the least. As he hung up the receiver he was conscious too of a baffled feeling that Becky had, in a sense, held the reins of ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... "Baffled and beaten she turned to the shore, ran hard aground near Tarquino Point, fifty miles from Santiago, and then hauled ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... turn out. Baffled in their game of robbing old men who have all left the city, they have begun to work the chance for blackmail. I will advise Van Cleft to pay them, and then we will follow the money. Here is the mansion and I will be out ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... the full history of that life, its joys and its sorrows, its aspirations, its baffled hopes, its compensations that didn't compensate, the bareness of the life, the dagger-sharp trials with what is called small things, the wild heart struggles veiled by the New England coldness of expression, some as her sharp crags and stuns are covered with the long reign ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... on board just in time, for the baffled shark made one terrific jump out of water as they reached the deck, the gangway having been opened, and banged his nose against the plankshire, falling back into the sea with ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... Barker, whose sturdy simplicity was not to be baffled or disconcerted either by the cunning of Miss Burrage, or by the imposing manner and awful name of Lady Diana Chillingworth. "Insult her! why, 'tis she insults us; she won't ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... virtue of settlements made before the attainders. The result was that a certain number of Irish estates were added to the possessions of a certain number of English families. But Munster was not planted. Burghley's policy, and Walsingham's resolution, and Ralegh's daring inventiveness were alike baffled by the conditions of a problem harder than the peopling of America or the conquest of India. Munster could not be made English. After all its desolation, it reverted in the main ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... enjoyment from the report. He liked the substance of it, and above all, he was tickled by the bitter tone of frustration which characterized it. Oakes was baffled, and his knowledge of Oakes told him that the sensation of being baffled was gall and wormwood to that high-spirited young man. Whatever might be the result of this investigation, it would teach him ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... become of me after the remaining one hundred and seventy-five dollars was spent. It was several weeks before the performances, and Wagner had given strict orders that no one, without exception, should be admitted to the rehearsals. But I was not to be so easily baffled, and one afternoon I sneaked into the lobby and succeeded in catching some wonderful orchestral strains by applying my ear to a keyhole. But my pleasure was short-lived. An attendant espied me and summarily ordered me off the premises, despite my humble entreaties ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... to the edge of the bank, carried on by the dog's momentum. In another moment the thick heavy body of the beaver had slipped like oil from under Kazan and Broken Tooth was safe in his element, two holes bitten clean through his fleshy tail. Baffled in his effort to get a death-hold on Broken Tooth, Kazan swung like a flash to the right. The young beavers had not moved. Astonished and frightened at what they had seen, they stood as if stupefied. Not until they saw Kazan tearing ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... him to lose those pursuing vultures. The last of them fell off, baffled,—or afraid to go deeper into France. Now he emerged again into the clear air and the starlight. The land beneath him was a scudding blur, with a dark-green mass in its center, the forest ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... also surveyed. Here Barbara was baffled by the determination on the part of both of them that she should talk, should think, should dream about all the things concerning which she could not talk, think nor dream. "How to grow up into a nice little girl," "How ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... retard your fall. In vain you try, in vain you struggle, in vain you invoke the angels and call God to your aid; there comes a time, a moment, a minute, a second, in which all your life of struggles and efforts is lost. The angry flesh subdues you in its turn, baffled nature revolts, and the Creator, whose laws you have not recognized, abandons the worthless creature and lets him roll over, falling ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... first aspect is that of a place of torture, a hell of the intellect, in which reason is to be racked for ever by a tribe of sphinx-like monsters, themselves despairing. Good and evil inhabit there, confronting each other, for ever unreconciled: there is omnipotent power baffled, and omnipotent mercy unexercised. Is the will strong enough to hold on through this baffling and monstrous world, and not to shrink back and bid the vision vanish? Can we still resolve to say, 'I believe, although it is impossible'? Is the will to assert our own moral nature—our own birthright ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... discussions with the Canadian always baffled me. I didn't want to restrict my companions' freedom in any way, and yet I had no desire to leave Captain Nemo. Thanks to him and his submersible, I was finishing my undersea research by the day, and I was rewriting my book on the great ocean depths in the midst of its very element. Would I ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... A baffled, desperate note rang in Kathryn's voice. It was not for Northrup, but for her first sense of failure. Then she looked up. All the resentment gone from her face, she was the ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... conspire with his lack of courage to assault and wobble him—at that precise moment his conscience flares into function, and so finishes his business. First he sees difficulty, then he sees the danger, then he sees wrong. The result is that he slinks off in trepidation, and another vampire is baffled of her prey. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... my comrades greeted me as I rose and left the ground; but at the same moment the attention of all was taken from myself and the baffled Misconna by the arrival of the scout, bringing us information that a party of Chipewyans were in the neighbourhood. In a moment all was bustle and preparation. An Indian war-party is soon got ready. Forty of our braves threw ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... hidden by the loose, dark curls which fell across it. Her hair was short and thick and parted on the side, giving her a youthful, boyish look that was in odd contrast to the sudden terror in her eyes, and for the first time I saw how slight and frail she was, saw that about her which baffled and puzzled me, and which I could not analyze. She wore no hat, and the red scarf around her neck was the only touch of color in her otherwise dark dress. The lips of her large, sweet, sensuous mouth were as colorless as ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... find the escape and the freedom it was so eagerly seeking. Better to be completely changed into foam and spray by one single leap of six hundred feet into empty space, the river seems to say, than be forever baffled and tortured and torn on ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... before long, the organs of the human body; that a light has been found which can penetrate, so as to make a photographic record, through everything from a purse or a pocket to the walls of a room or a house, is news which cannot fail to startle everybody. That the eye of the physician or surgeon, long baffled by the skin, and vainly seeking to penetrate the unfortunate darkness of the human body, is now to be supplemented by a camera, making all the parts of the human body as visible, in a way, as the exterior, appears certainly to be a greater blessing to humanity than even the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... locked. She pressed the secret spring in vain. Was she doomed to be baffled, after all? She remembered that her own bureau was identical with his Highness's. Resolutely, with that patience which is born of hazardous undertakings, she glided away through the arras door, through the black gallery, and ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... hours to a vain effort to work it out. Heaven knows—it had to be simple, yet I could not make head nor tail of it. And simple it proved to be, when I learned it; and simplest of all proved the trick they employed which had so baffled me. Not only each day did they change the point in the alphabet where the code initialled, but they changed it every conversation, and, often, in the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... so many actors in the story that the reader is baffled, and each of them is beautifully drawn, so that their characters stand out clearly and consistently. It appears that the action of the story was set ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... fuels purchased by the Government, the equipment consists of two Heine, water-tube boilers, each of 210 h.p., set in Building No. 13. One of these boilers is equipped with a Jones underfeed stoker, and is baffled in the regular way. At four points in the setting, large pipes have been built into the brick wall, to permit making observations on the temperature of the gas, and to take samples of the gas for ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... of the day before which quite baffled me. I had proved that there were, indeed, two women, and I believed them to be mother and daughter, but I could not in the least understand why the younger one had so completely broken down after the departure of the elder with Miss Holladay. ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... had nothing farther to expect than the occupation of tilling the earth, a dull hopeless toil; then it was that the Gitanos paid tribute to the inferior ministers of justice, and were engaged in illicit connection with those of higher station and by such means baffled the law, whose vengeance rarely fell upon their heads; and then it was that they bid it open defiance, retiring to the deserts and mountains, and living in wild independence by rapine and shedding of blood; for as the law then stood they ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... Completely baffled, I descended into the room again and turned on the current. Immediately the shadow appeared on the film, and this time, in consequence of the room now being quite dark, I noticed that it was surrounded by a ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... (which, by the bye, is what young men know least about), but the subject he was studying puzzled him; Miss Edwards evinced such a mixture of penetration and simplicity that he could not understand how both could exist together. This sort of character has baffled many wiser persons than Mr. Ashburner, who have investigated it with the same interest. The study of young ladies is dangerous at all times to a young man, and most particularly when he does it from philosophical motives; and if any caste of character is more dangerous than another, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... anyone that might have shared his fear and discussed it, and all the while he had had to navigate his ship, which even at sea is an arduous responsibility. These things had fretted the calm of that clear judgment that had once baffled five navies. Therefore he cursed the oxen and ordered them rum, and Smerdrak had said "Aye, aye, sir," ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... curds-and-cream: his partner assented; but alas! in Harteneck no particle of curds or cream was to be had. Schiller then made offer for a quarter-cake of cheese; but for this four entire kreutzers were demanded, leaving nothing whatever in reserve for bread! Twice baffled, the little gastronomes, unsatisfied in stomach, wandered on to Neckarweihingen; where, at length, though not till after much inquiry, they did obtain a comfortable mess of curds-and-cream, served up in a gay platter, and silver spoons to eat it with. For all this, moreover, they were charged ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... believing such a thing, Maurice started in to explain. He told of finding something of value on the boat that belonged to George Stormway's wife, Bunny Badgeley that was—how the man with the red-top had tried to steal the packet and was baffled by reason of Thad's cunning trick; how his chum had seen him just outside the hamlet of Morehead Landing, the tracks on the road, and finally the figure seen ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... felt the vast change that had come over his armament during the few weeks since he sailed down among the Western Isles, conquering and winning to his side the island princes as vassals of his flag. He returned as a baffled invader, and encountered many severe rebuffs from the islanders as well as further disasters from the winter storms. The fatigues of that expedition and his bitter disappointments sank deep into ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
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