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More "Baffling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as numerous as the marks on china or silver, and the absence of marks confronts the hunter of signs with baffling blankness, as is the case of many very old wares, whether china, silver or tapestries. Also, late work of poor quality is unmarked. Having thus disposed of the situation, it remains to identify the marks when they exist. The exhaustive works of the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... blue-black hair, just now hanging in a heavy plait to her knees. Her eyes, large and velvety as Ivan's own, were, however, of a shade indescribable, chameleon-like: one day varying between beryl and aqua-marine, anon of a light hazel, and finally, in moments of excitement, grief, or joy, of a deep, baffling black. Hitherto, Ivan had been undecided about their color; but to-night, as he saw them run their gamut from light to that tender dark, he felt a strange, quivering half-fear, half-joy, stirring his heart; and in one moment it ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... It was baffling, puzzling, unbelievable, bordering, indeed, on the miraculous—herself, everything about her, her acts, her methods, her cleverness, intangible in one sense, were terrifically real in another. Jimmie Dale shook his head. The miraculous ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... some of the missionary's own language. The baffling I had been treated to by Scipio melted to nothing in this. Did living men petrify, I should have changed to mineral between the sheets. The Doctor got out of bed, lighted his lamp, and found a book; and the two retired ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... papers word How General Mack and eighty thousand men Have made good speed across Bavaria To wait the French and give them check at Ulm, That fortress-frontier-town, entrenched and walled, A place long chosen as a vantage-point Whereon to encounter them as they outwind From the blind shades and baffling green defiles Of the Black Forest, worn with wayfaring. Here Mack will intercept his agile foe Hasting to meet the Russians in Bohemia, And cripple him, if ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... I stood, a straggling shrub, the only one for rods, hung over the brink. I silently sank to a seat behind it, lest I disturb the singer, and remained without movement. The baffling carol went on for some seconds, and for the only time in my life I wished I could put a spell upon brook-babble, that I ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... the complexity of a written language. I dare say our use of it is quite baffling to him. And if he thinks of symbols as being unable to convey much information, then he might not be able to learn to read at ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... suffered, what he suffers day by day only those can understand who have had the privilege of access to this hero: the most sensitive and the gentlest of men, silent and reserved; a man of controlled emotions, modest with a timidity that is at once baffling and delightful; loving his people less as a father loves his children than as a son loves his adoring mother. Of all that cherished kingdom, his pride and his joy, the seat of his happiness, the centre of his love and his ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... out. And, for three weeks in this fierce necessity of being speedy, he cannot get one right stroke at the Austrians; who sit inexpugnable upon their Eckart's Hill, bristling with cannon; and can in no way be manoeuvred down, or forced or enticed into Battle. A baffling, bitterly impatient three weeks;—two of them the worst two, he spends at Weissenberg itself, chasing Pandours, and scuffling on the surface, till Keith and the Magazine-train come up;—even writing Verses now and then, when the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... the situation in which the squirrel was. It was evident he regarded the trees at some distance with a wistful and anxious look; for, although he had succeeded so far in baffling his enemy, he still appeared to suffer ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... All is avowed, and as I smote I stand With foot set firm upon a finished thing! I turn not to denial: thus I wrought So that he could nor flee nor ward his doom, Even as the trammel hems the scaly shoal, I trapped him with inextricable toils, The ill abundance of a baffling robe; Then smote him, once, again—and at each wound He cried aloud, then as in death relaxed Each limb and sank to earth; and as he lay, Once more I smote him, with the last third blow, Sacred to Hades, saviour of the dead. And thus he fell, and as he passed ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... in pain, the appetite failed, and a little bit of meat caused violent diarrhoea, whilst the mind, sorely depressed, reacted on the body. All the traders were returning successful: I alone had failed and experienced worry, thwarting, baffling, when almost in sight of the end ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... was utterly baffling. He walked to the door of the barn and gave a prolonged, low whistle. Then he ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... baffling than this simple, ever-recurring one: What am I? If I should decide what I am to-day, I discover that yesterday I was quite a different person. To-day I may be six feet in height, and climb the Alps; yesterday I lay helpless in swaddling clothes. Yesterday I was a thing of laughter ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... graceful silhouette of slenderness, but as they passed through the brighter zones about the great opals swung from the lamp pillars, the dimpled little chin and small nose revealed themselves in a sort of baffling warfare of sauciness and dignity. Paul knew that there were well-held frontiers of reserve and self-containment in this woman's nature, but that back of it lay an alluring ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... lengthening story short, She never saved it. Made the sport Of evil spirits and baffling wind, She was always before or just behind, One day too soon or one day too late, And the sun, meanwhile, would never wait. She had two Eighths, as she idly lay, Two Tenths, but never a NINTH of May; And there she rides through two hundred ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... the business as an agreeable excitement and a welcome relief from the monotony of his official life. He never hurried Morrison's visits, but amused himself by treating him with the most flattering distinction, and baffling his arrogance by immediate concession. But this morning, when Morrison came back with a front of uncommon fierceness, he merely looked up from his newspapers, to which he had recurred, and said coolly. "Oh, Mr. Morrison! ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... death, disappearance,—gone! Astounding development! Mysterious and hapless arrival, tremendous and mysterious passage, mysterious and alarming departure. No escaping it; no volition to enter it or to avoid it; no prospect of defeating it or solving it. Odd affair! Mysterious and baffling conundrum to ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... the Stewart River and launched out into the amazing chaos of the region where Surprise Lake lay. And all of the spring and half of the summer had been consumed in futile wanderings, when, on the verge of turning back, they caught their first glimpse of the baffling, gold-bottomed sheet of water which had lured and fooled a generation of miners. Making their camp in the old cabin which Smoke had discovered on his previous visit, they had learned three things: first, heavy nugget gold was carpeted thickly on the lake bottom; next, the gold could be dived ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... way through the stormy November Atlantic, toiling painfully over the broad convexity of the planet, like a plodding insect, toward the regions of the sun. After a voyage of fifteen days, wrestling with all manner of baffling winds, and with storms attended, I suppose, with some danger, though, from a happy incapacity of apprehending peril at sea till it is over, I suffered no disquiet from them, we came in sight of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the custom officer. "I shall be glad to listen to any evidence you may offer. This is a very baffling case. The government is losing thousands of dollars every month, and we can't seem to stop the smugglers, or get much of a clew to them. This one is the best we ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... the honor of Shakspeare, that he should have been able to discern the true coloring of this most original character, under the smoke and tarnish of antiquity. It is no less to the honor of the great triumvir, that a strength of coloring should survive in his character, capable of baffling the wrongs and ravages of time. Neither is it to be thought strange that a character should have been misunderstood and falsely appreciated for nearly two thousand years. It happens not uncommonly, especially amongst an unimaginative people like the Romans, that ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Regimental Hospitals as long as they could, and, when compelled to cooperate in a General Hospital, made the institution as like as possible to a group of Regimental Hospitals,—resisting all effective organization, and baffling all the aims of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... vigor. A powerful squadron under Admiral Cervera, which had assembled at the Cape Verde Islands before the outbreak of hostilities, had crossed the ocean, and by its erratic movements in the Caribbean Sea delayed our military plans while baffling the pursuit of our fleets. For a time fears were felt lest the Oregon and Marietta, then nearing home after their long voyage from San Francisco of over 15,000 miles, might be surprised by Admiral Cervera's fleet, but their fortunate arrival dispelled these apprehensions ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... West, then almost unexplored, began to develop, and has continued to do so until now it is studded with proud cities, teeming with throbbing life, growing like the grass of the prairies in spring-time, advancing like the steam-engine, baffling distance like the telegraph, and spreading the pulsations of their mighty hearts to the uttermost parts of the world. There they stand with their echoing marts of trade, their stately spires of ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... of Champlain were; it having been the scene of frequent British operations in previous wars. Owing to this, "the Maria, because of her distant situation (from which the Inflexible and Carleton had chased by signal) when the rebels were first discovered, and baffling winds, could not get into close action."[13] For the same reason the Inflexible could not support the Carleton. The Americans, in the aggregate distinctly inferior, were thus permitted a concentration of superior force upon part of their enemies. It is needless ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... demanded the widest possible culture for all. Wherever known, he is estimated as a pillar in the temperance cause. Gentle, modest, courteous and benignant, he combines, in a remarkable degree, strength and tenderness, courage and sympathy. At one time, holding at bay the powers of evil and baffling the most determined opponents by his manly adherence to right; at another he may be found yielding to impressions bidding him to seek the source of some hidden private sorrow, and with delicate touch, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... George Vancouver, on his way to America, came to the southern shore, and found and named King George's Sound. He landed and examined the country, but saw nothing of any consequence, and, after a short stay, sailed away to the eastward, intending to follow the coast line, but was prevented by baffling winds. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... not, and he did care much that the object of his admiration had not waited to hear him. The Contessa found the greatest amusement in his boyish sulk and resentment, and the rest of the evening was passed in baffling the questions with which, now that Bice was gone, her friends overpowered her. She gave the smallest possible dole of reply to their interrogations, but smiled upon the questioners with sunshiny smiles. "You must come and ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... glided across the lagoon, I gave myself up to reverie; and revolving over all that the men of Amma had rehearsed of the history of Yillah, I one by one unriddled the mysteries, before so baffling. Now, all was made plain: no secret remaining, but the subsequent event of her disappearance. Yes, Hautia! enlightened I had been ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... America the war came to its crisis. In the earlier part of the year the British at New York and the French at Newport continued to watch one another. In April the British admiral Arbuthnot did indeed succeed in baffling an attempt of the French to carry reinforcements to the American cause in Virginia. The action he fought off the capes of Virginia on the 16th of April was ill conducted, but his main purpose was achieved. Washington, who was wisely anxious to concentrate attack on one or other of the centres ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a baffling smile, and turned the subject. "Wouldn't you like something to drink before ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... late years in protracting and interrupting negotiations. Hence the cunning measure of appointing as ambassador some political pettifogger skilled in delays, sophisms, and misapprehensions, and dexterous in the art of baffling argument; or some blundering statesman, whose errors and misconstructions may be a plea for refusing to ratify his engagements. And hence, too, that most notable expedient, so popular with our government, of sending out a brace of ambassadors, between whom, having each an individual ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... am in Ireland now; now I am at a third Remove. Not but in all removes I can Kind love both give and get. Only what word Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven's baffling ban Bars or hell's spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard, Heard unheeded, leaves me ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... her home-voyage: at first indeed Thro' many a fair sea-circle, day by day, Scarce-rocking, her full-busted figure-head Stared o'er the ripple feathering from her bows: Then follow'd calms, and then winds variable, Then baffling, a long course of them; and last Storm, such as drove her under moonless heavens Till hard upon the cry of 'breakers' came The crash of ruin, and the loss of all But Enoch and two others. Half the night, Buoy'd upon floating ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... him briefly, inquiringly. What a baffling light it was that played in the depths of his eyes! What manner of being was he, after all? She could not tell. And yet she felt she could trust him—she certainly knew not why. Despite his ways of raillery she ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... ceremony," purred Marjorie, highly delighted with the new venture. "And of course we'll arrange a password and signals, and I don't see why we shouldn't have a cryptogram, and write each other notes. It would be ever so baffling for the rest to find letters lying about that they couldn't read. They'd be ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the Junta's plans had leaked out, and that determined efforts to upset them were being made, efforts which necessitated the greatest care on his part. This, of course, whetted the girl's curiosity; but to her most artful queries he opposed a baffling silence. When Philadelphia, Washington, then Baltimore, and finally Richmond were left behind, Miss Evans was, in truth, ready to explode, and her two companions were in a similar ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... by crushing the Lombard League. This was a fatal bar to the policy of a papal state in Central Italy, inaugurated by Innocent III. No less imminent was the danger from the success of Frederick in baffling the papal schemes for the separation of the Sicilian and German crowns. It was becoming apparent that only by the extinction of the Hohenstaufen line could the papal policy be ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... interpretation. And she was too nice a girl to compromise herself in the slightest degree. Although he told himself that a business reason had prompted her, and reflected that the business methods of women are baffling to the mind of mere man, his reasoning quite failed to reconcile him to the situation. In the end he had to acknowledge that he did not like the look ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... when he next visited me: "What could I have done to help you? If the men in this State whose business it is to run these institutions cannot manage you, I am at a loss to know what to do." True, he could have done little or nothing, for he did not then know the ins and outs of the baffling situation into which the ties of blood ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... wearisome one, unrelieved by even a transitory gleam of order or prosperity. At last it becomes almost a relief when we reach the name of Roderick O'Connor, and know that before his death fresh actors will have entered upon the scene, and that the confused and baffling history of Ireland will, at all events, have entered upon a ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... anecdote, describes his disorder as an acrid humour, distilling itself on his nerves, and baffling the skill of his physicians; the sciatica, rheumatism, in a word, a complication of maladies attacked him, sometimes successively, sometimes together, and made of our poor Abbe a sad spectacle. He thus describes himself ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... away because they were frightened at the bellowing of the cattle which Thorfin had brought with him in the ships. But what in the world could a Greek slave know of that affair? I wandered up and down among the streets trying to unravel the mystery, and the more I considered it, the more baffling it grew. One thing only seemed certain and that certainty took away my breath for the moment. If I came to full knowledge of anything at all, it would not be one life of the soul in Charlie Mears's body, but half a dozen—half a dozen several and separate ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... being forward, weightily pondering what she might say. "Should he dismiss his attendants and let her speak with him in the presence of fewer listeners?" the Grand Turk asked her kindly.' Again came an uncourtly monosyllabic 'No,' followed by another baffling silence. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... favorite pipe, selected from a row of about ten that were hanging on a nearby home-made pipe holder. This might be said to be an eventful day for Dave Morgan. Only the day before, he and his partner, Detective Sergeant Tierney, had completed the solving of a baffling case and placed the criminal behind the bars. Now he had a well-earned and long-awaited "day off," and he was going to devote it to the restful pursuit ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... Bascomb rushed in, but Merriwell was light as a feather on his feet, and he danced nimbly about, tapping the other fellow now here, now there, smiling sweetly all the while, and showing a skill that was very baffling to Bascomb. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... who travels about, or who drops into churches wherever he happens to be from Sunday to Sunday, is almost sure to find in every city of considerable size at least one imperious capable baffling clergyman. If one is strictly honest and fair toward him, to say nothing of being a well-meant and hopeful human being who is living in the same world with him and who feels very imperfect too, finding any serious and honest fault with the sermon, or at least laying one's finger upon what ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... with Storri in these reconnoiterings. But she made the mistake of construing preparations to abduct as arrangements to elope. As the San Reve read the portents, Storri planned to meet Miss Harley that very night; they would fly together, the Zulu Queen offering a sure means of baffling pursuit. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... discovered this way of preventing the lower classes, by their number, from acquiring an overwhelming superiority in the government of the state. He achieved as great a good for his country by so doing, as by baffling Hannibal after the battle of Cannae. But for that circumstance the Roman constitution would have become, after the change of Appius Claudius, a mere prototype of the American democracy; a government constantly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... clear French that I wasn't familiar with his language; but he didn't seem to understand me, and the situation grew rather baffling. ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... himself—there was no one else for him to talk to—"why is it that when a man is sure of his meals every day he has endless invitations to dine out, but that when those events are matters of uncertainty he gets not a bidding to the feast?" This question, not a new one, baffling in its mystery and chilling to the marrow, George Henry classed with another he had heard somewhere: "Who is more happy: the hungry man who can get nothing to eat, or the rich man with an overladen table who can eat nothing?" The two problems ran together in ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... and cattle, which was rather wasted. She was as miserly about her master's money, as if it had been her own, and by dint of making good bargains, of getting high prices for all their produce, and by baffling the peasants' tricks when they offered anything for sale, he at last entrusted her with buying and selling everything, with the direction of all the laborers, and with the quantity of provisions necessary for the household, so that in a short time she became ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... which he was actually waiting for, or if his corporal had returned sooner than I anticipated, there might have been trouble. But even then," he added with his usual careless insouciance, "I should have thought of some way of baffling those brutes." ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... speak craniologically, by an extraordinary development of the passion for delitescency! I the rather suspect some natural disposition of this kind; for, from the instant I perceived the extreme curiosity manifested on the subject, I felt a secret satisfaction in baffling it, for which, when its unimportance is considered, I do not well ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... and raised her eyes to meet his glance. They were strange, light eyes,—not beautiful, but very rare in their peculiar tint of green-gray glass. They looked straight before them, brilliant and baffling. "Not always," she said, with lingering ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... beset with sorrow until we know how to tune in with the Divine Will, whose 'right course' is often baffling to the egoistic intelligence. God bears the burden of the cosmos; He alone ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... know. It's apt to be a very baffling time at the best. All the men that you like are taken up with their own people, and even the men that you don't like overvalue themselves, and think they're doing you a favor if they give you a turn at the Gym or bring you ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... each brow is lifted high, No petulant pusillanimity Makes poor this last parade of stout defenders, Or shames this most unwilling of surrenders. Six lingering years, and more, of hot attack, By confident cool valour beaten back! Six baffling years of sortie, and of sally, Sudden alarum, stubborn stand, stout rally! How the besiegers in their bannered host Banded at first around this bastion'd post, In sanguine, fierce assault, and shook ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... extraordinary continuation of calms, baffling winds, and neap tides, the enemy's ships never got within our bar till the 27th of June, and on the following morn, the memorable 28th, they weighed anchor on the young flood, and before a fine breeze, with top gallant sails, royals, and sky ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... first time the root it had taken in Gaston's nature. To act like a man the hope of the Proberts must pull up the root, even if the operation should be terribly painful, should be attended with cries and tears and contortions, with baffling scruples and a sense of sacrilege, the sense of siding with strangers against his own flesh and blood. Now and again he broke out: "And if you should see her as she looks just now—she's too lovely, too touching!—you'd see how right I was originally, ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... marriage was growing from a mere untoward incident of a night's carouse into a baffling thing which hung over him like an impending doom. He was not the sort of man who marries easily. It seemed incredible that he could really have done it; more incredible that he could have done it and then have wiped the slate of his memory clean; ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... my friends. Hum: well thought upon! I shall leave her joyes without any bound to entertaine me if I first beat this foolish rivall of mine and present her with his sword. She assures me he dares not fight: it shall be so. Thus with one baffling and disarming him I shall secure my Mistresse and get the reputation of a fighting Cavallier, which may save me many a knock hereafter among men of strong faith that shall heare how much honour I have elsewhere taken ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... what I go after—sometimes," answered the man meeting her gaze with a flash of the baffling grey eyes. A subtle something, in look or words, seemed a challenge. Instinctively she realized that despite his rough exterior here was a man infinitely less crude than the other. An ordinary cowpuncher, to all appearance, and yet—something ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... been in part at least the victims of their own delusions. But beside these there has always been a numerous class of men, who, with minds perfectly disengaged and free, have applied themselves to concert the means of overreaching the simplicity, or baffling the penetration, of those who were merely spectators, and uninitiated in the mystery of the arts that were practised upon them. Such was no doubt the case with the speaking heads and statues, which were sometimes exhibited in the ancient oracles. Such was the ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... marched on. The Sixth Corps encamped at 10 P.M. near Rice's Station, about three miles from the battle- field. Other corps on different lines were kept to their work, and their operations also contributed towards baffling ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... to warn you that the early chapters of The Moulding Loft (METHUEN) are liable to plunge you into some mental agitation, due to the author's deliberately baffling method of starting her plot. The hero, for example, is introduced to us abed, and semi-delirious, waited upon by a pale and sinister young female whom he detests. He appears to be in a house strange to him, which contains also an unpleasant old woman and a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... drawing-room seemed to be different from ordinary rooms, though one hardly knew in what; partly from the absence of superfluities; and somehow after many a triumph over the bewilderment of a sulky yet dazzled decorator, Bertha had contrived, in baffling him, to make the house look distinguished without being unconventional; dainty without being artificial; she had made it suit her perfectly and, what was more, the atmosphere was reposeful. Her husband always besought ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... guessed the President's underhand manoeuvres with the Blandureaus, and his object in baffling old Blondet's efforts, but she saw nothing to be gained by opening the eyes of father or son to the perils of the situation; she was enjoying the beginning of the comedy; she knew about the proposals made by Chesnel's ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... dark as her own, its cheeks as dusky red, but in it was a baffling something that held her quick tongue mute, a look as of great depth, of wondrous strength, and yet of fitful tenderness,—the one playing through the other as flame about black marble, and with the rest ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... out two cigars, offered one to his officer, after a brief but baffling examination to discover which was the ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... smash that impassive, metallic monster passed from Phobar as quickly as it came. He was helpless. Sick and despairing, he felt the cold, baffling-colored metal close around him again; once more he was borne aloft for the journey to the laboratory, from there to be ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... after him. As Anita gave Broussard her hand, a great wave of delicate color flooded her face. This quickened the beating of Broussard's heart—Anita did not blush like that for everybody. She had a gentle aloofness generally toward men which was a baffling mystery to her mother. ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... of adventure occurred, and not of a kind pleasant to recall, even on this short voyage. The passage to Dublin from the Head is about sixty miles, I believe; yet, from baffling winds, it cost us upwards of thirty hours. On the second day, going upon deck, we found that our only fellow-passenger of note was a woman of rank, celebrated for her beauty; and not undeservedly, for a lovely creature she was. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... weakest place and carry it deeper than Spencer did. But in fact, the exact limits he should assign to religious beliefs as an evolutionary function were still indeterminate in his system. He, like all cosmic philosophers, found this the most baffling and elusive of all his problems. Meantime, here in this little country church, he was to witness the supreme rite of the supreme religious belief. There was some compensation for his enforced attendance in that thought. He looked about him with genuine and candid interest. The hush, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... was that sixty miles of peaceful water that had so long remained hidden from European explorers, baffling the anxious gaze of Cabrillo, the faithful explorations of Ferrelo, the eagle eyes of Drake, and the earnest ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... me Shirley (there's a dear fellow) and send it soon. We sadly want books, and this will be readable again and again, and pay itself. Tell Emma I grieve for the poor self-punishing self-baffling Lady; with all our hearts we grieve for the pain and vexation she has encounterd; but we do not swerve a pin's-thought from the propriety of your measures. God comfort her, and there's an end of a painful necessity. But I am glad ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... veterans of Europe, commanded successively by the first captains of the age. That, with no lieutenant of eminent valor or experience, save only his brother Louis, and with none at all after that chieftain's death, William of Orange should succeed in baffling the efforts of Alva, Requesens, Don John of Austria, and Alexander Farnese—men whose names are among the most brilliant in the military annals of the world—is in itself, sufficient evidence of his warlike ability. At the period of his death he had ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was forcing itself upon him, so that any humour there might have been in the situation died suddenly and the difficulties of the undertaking soared. The Mother Superior smothered a sigh. His attitude was baffling, his expression inscrutable. Had her words touched him, had she said what was best for the welfare of the girl who was so dear to her, and whose departure she felt so keenly? How would she fare at this man's hands? What lay behind his stern face and sombre ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... are all the elements of interest and curiosity. Happy are the citizens who watch from day to day the fight that never before has been fought on the same terms. And yet more strangely baffling than the city are the citizens. Who are they, and of what blood and character? What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... state juggler, Oliver Cromwell, excelled in this species of eloquence; his speeches are models in their kind. Count Cagliostro, and the Countess de la Motte, were not his superiors in the power of baffling the understanding. The ancient oracles, and the old books of judicial astrologers, and of alchymists, were contrived upon the same principles; in all these we are confounded by a multiplicity of words ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... hear or read of a case which contains any baffling features, I am apt to feel some hidden chord in my nature thrill to one fact in it and not to any of the others. In this case the single fact which appealed to my imagination was the dropping of the stolen wallet in that upstairs room. Why did the guilty man ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... his wife heard him moving about, or letting himself out of the house. He must have been careful. He must have crept about like a cat. Do you feel as I do, Murch, about all this; that it is very, very strange and baffling?' 'That's how it looks,' agreed ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... mail, rushed with uplifted weapons towards Pratarddana, covering him with showers of arrows. Encompassing him with innumerable cars, O Yudhisthira, the Vitahavyas poured upon Pratarddana showers of weapons of various kinds like clouds pouring torrents of rain on the breast of Himavat. Baffling their weapons with his own, prince Pratarddana endued with mighty energy slew them all with his shafts that resembled the lighting fire of Indra. Their heads struck off, O king, with hundreds and thousands of broad-headed arrows, the warriors of Vitahavya fell down with blood-dyed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of his tone proved startling to her by virtue of its unusualness. What might it portend, she wondered, and sought with grave eyes to read his baffling countenance; and then a wild alarm swept into her and shook her spirit in its grip; there was something of which until this moment she had not thought—something connected with the fateful matter of ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... section which provided the penalty of reduction of representation in Congress for states depriving Negroes of the ballot, they saw themselves written out of the Constitution by the words, "male inhabitants" and "male citizens," used to define legal voters. It was baffling to be kept from their goal by a single word in a provision which at best was the unsatisfactory compromise arrived at by radical and conservative Republicans and which sincere abolitionists felt was unfair to the Negro. That it was unfair to women, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... most baffling one," continued the financier. "I suppose, Mr. Carson," he added, "that if we do put it in and pass around a subscription paper, we can count on you for—say two hundred ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... neighbourhood of which station I expected my principal supply. We had a fresh gale easterly, till two o'clock in the afternoon, when, being about a league from the bay, the wind suddenly died away, and was succeeded by baffling light airs from every direction, and calms by turns. This lasted about two hours. Then we had sudden squalls, with rain, from the E. These carried us before the bay, where we got a breeze from the land, and attempted in vain to work in to gain the anchoring-place. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... letter which he had recently dispatched to the prefect at Naples had not yet been answered. As far as his knowledge just yet was concerned, the whole thing had gone into a more impenetrable mystery than ever, and the principals in this case, after committing atrocious crimes, after baffling the police of different nations, seemed to have vanished into the profoundest obscurity. But on this occasion he reiterated that determination which he had made before of never losing sight of this purpose, but keeping at it, if need were, for years. He would write to the police, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... stanch friend, and trusted Him implicitly. Often, when perplexed and troubled, a half-hour's quiet talk with Him close shut behind her own door would give her wisdom and strength for the baffling question, and when she again appeared among them the girls wondered at her serene expression and winning smile, for in that half-hour's seclusion she had managed to remove all trace of the soil from the "slough," and, refreshed and strengthened by an unfailing help, could ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... difficulty—what he saw was not the measurable mask but the ambiguous meaning. He had taken things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things there—except that he couldn't catch them—which he had not hitherto counted in or presumed to handle. This baffling effect, eminently in the line of the mystifying, so familiar to Nash, might have been the result of his whimsical volition, had it not appeared to our artist, after a few hours of the job, that his sitter was not the one who enjoyed it most. He was uncomfortable, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... old, he presented them with such rarities there, as he never shewed them in their own country. And is there nothing now to be seen by them that are not yet delivered from that oppression, that may give them occasion to stay themselves and wonder! What, is preservation nothing? What, is baffling and befooling the enemies of God's church nothing? In the Maryan days here at home, there was such sweet songs sung in the fire, such sweet notes answering them from prison, and such providences, that coals of burning fire still dropped here and there upon ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... general which I am not at liberty to repeat. The idea of a third conference at The Hague may have seemed beautiful to them, but it looked as if they felt that it was lacking in actuality. Possibly I did not understand them. That was just the trouble—I could not. It was all puzzling, baffling, mysterious. ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... to adapt the framework of the administrative system to the fast changing conditions of a rapidly growing population Parliament piled act upon act, the result being a sheer jungle of interlacing jurisdictions alike baffling to the student and subversive of orderly and economical administration. It is computed that in 1883 there were in England and Wales no fewer than 27,069 independent local authorities,[257] and that the rate-payer was taxed by eighteen different ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... announcement had been so sudden and so amazing that she didn't know what she had said in response to it, and she was quite sure that she hadn't done at all what Jean expected. Then this confirmation of her suspicions about Jean gave her an uneasy feeling about Georgia. That baffling young person was just leaving the gym as Betty got back to it, and the sight of her surrounded by a bevy of her admiring friends reassured Betty wonderfully. Nevertheless she decided to go and see Miss Ferris. There was something she wanted to ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... individual human mind have taken care of these things and slowly steered man, with all his passions and caprices, toward his own better welfare. It is only in moments when we long to understand and justify our ideals, or when some unusually baffling problem arises, that we need to calculate and weigh relative advantage and disadvantage. And that is what, in such situations, most ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Ballard these things could not be said at once. In spite of her simplicity and frankness, there was about her a baffling atmosphere. She was like a still pool with the depths as yet unsounded, an uncharted sea—with its mystery of ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... cut a calf away from its mother. The gray brutes boldly trotted to within a few yards of him, and slyly looked at him, with pale, fiery eyes. They had already scented his captive. Precious time flew by; the situation, critical and baffling, had never before been met by him. There lay his little calf tied fast, and to the north ran many others, some of which he must—he would have. To think quickly had meant the solving of many a plainsman's problem. Should he stay with his prize to ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... feeling of helplessness. Tony eluded reproof with a skill that was altogether baffling. Now, as usual, having said what he wanted to say, he retreated ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... Musset, himself in early life a prominent figure among the French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and contradictory definitions of the word romantisme that were current in the third and fourth decades of this century.[18] Two worthy provincials write from the little town of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre to the editor of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the silent theatre of our own minds, we always take care that we get the best of the situation and the dialogue. The dramas of real life are apt to end differently. The coveted occasion finds us incapable; a baffling scepticism of our own powers leaves us impotent; the part that ran so easily, with such unanimous applause, when we were both the dramatist and the actor, suddenly bristles with a hundred unsuspected difficulties. For the first time, ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... at last. I now can master what you are and see What you have been. You cannot rout me now, Or put me in the wrong. Out of old wounds, Remembrance of your baffling days, I take great strength and show you Where you have been untruthful, where a hater, Where narrow, bitter, growing in on self, Where you neglected us, Where you heaped fast destruction on our father— ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... to be affectionate to this sister, who was good, and who, in her way, he knew, loved him. But, somehow, she grew less herself as the years went by, and more and more baffling. It was the hard work, the many children, and the nagging of her husband, he decided, that had changed her. It came to him, in a flash of fancy, that her nature seemed taking on the attributes of stale vegetables, smelly soapsuds, and of the greasy dimes, nickels, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... from those he had known long ago in his childhood, before there were factory performances and improvements. As a doctor accustomed to judging correctly of chronic complaints, the radical cause of which was incomprehensible and incurable, he looked upon factories as something baffling, the cause of which also was obscure and not removable, and all the improvements in the life of the factory hands he looked upon not as superfluous, but as comparable with the treatment ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... lost all heart when on the crest we stood And saw it spent in mist below! Yet ever surer was its flow, And, ever gathering to its own New springs of which we had not known, To fairer meadows Swept exultant from the woodland shadows; And when at last upon the baffling plain We thought it scattered like a ravelled skein,— Lo, tranquil, free, Its longed-for home, the ...
— Songs of Two • Arthur Sherburne Hardy
... The baffling part of the new schoolmate was that her powers of acting were so highly developed that it was impossible to tell whether she was serious or playing a part. She "took in" her teasers times out of number, and in fairness they ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... a higher ledge beyond this upthrust a huge dome of dull gold, Cyclopean, striking eyes and mind with something unhumanly alien, baffling; sending the mind groping, as though across the deserts of space, from some far-flung star, should fall upon us linked sounds, coherent certainly, meaningful surely, vaguely familiar—yet never to be translated into any symbol or thought of our ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... the above definitions, the more baffling they become. Try as I may, I have not been able to fit them, not only to the facts of my own experience, which may not be strange, but I cannot reconcile them even to each other. There seem to me inherent ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... affectedly and self-consciously with tea-urn and sugar-tongs and had palavered in empty nothings with a troop of overdressed and overmannered feather-heads? She was still graceful, still fluent, still endowed with that baffling little air of distinction; but she knew where things were—down to the last strainer or nutmeg-grater—and she knew how to use them. She was completely at home. And ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... but after a glance at the account he smiled and said he supposed I knew how much the sum was? I answered, Yes; it was eleven pounds nine shillings, was not it? But I owned at the same time that I never was good at figures, and that I found English money peculiarly baffling. He laughed now, and said, It was eleven shillings and nine pence. In fact, after all those charges for composition, corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies, there was a most ingenious and wholly surprising charge of ten per cent. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... conditioned by the author's idiosyncrasies that it was quite plainly impossible to imitate it, or even to learn from it. This is still more the case with the later works of Sologub, like the charming but baffling and ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... Columbus, surveyed and sold town lots on public account, and built two school houses with the proceeds. He then moved up the river to engage anew in the Indian trade with a partner who soon proved a drunkard. He and his wife there took a fever which after baffling the physicians was cured by his own prescription. He then moved to Cotton Gin Port to take charge of a store, but was invalided for three years by a sunstroke. Gradually recovering, he lived in the woods on light diet until the thought occurred to him of carrying a company of Choctaw ball ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... came to know about that necklet, and to appropriate two of the stones, we only discovered much later. I will not here anticipate that disclosure. One thing at a time is a good rule in life. For the moment he succeeded in baffling ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... contained in it, its contradictory and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, months, years spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing! It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough to hold its striking groups, its endless subjects! ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Figaro, with a strong likeness to Balzac himself. He is continually on the stage, and keeps the audience uninterruptedly amused by his wit, good-humour, hearty bursts of laughter, and ceaseless expedients for baffling his creditors. The action of the play is simple and natural, and the dialogue scintillates with bon mots, gaiety, and amusing sallies. The play had been conceived and even written in 1839 or 1840, and never did Balzac's imperishable youth shine out more brilliantly than in ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... alone the ascertained limits of the system have been widened by a thousand millions of miles, with the addition of one more giant planet and seven satellites to the ancient classes of its members, but a complexity has been given to its constitution baffling description or thought. Five hundred circulating planetary bodies bridge the gap between Jupiter and Mars, the complete investigation of the movements of any one of which would overtask the energies of a lifetime. Meteorites, strangers, apparently, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... I won't distress you too much," the detective apologized grimly, "if I ask you a few questions. Fact is, I must. I'm investigating the circumstances surrounding what may turn out to be a baffling crime, and, irrespective of your personal wishes, Mr. Sloane, I can't let go of it. This ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... vessels edged round the north end of Portlock Reef. Thence the monotonous record of soundings, shoals, reefs seen and charted, passages tried and abandoned, in the prolonged attempt to negotiate a clear course through the baffling coral barrier, is relieved by the story of one or two sharp brushes with armed Papuans in their long, deftly-handled canoes. On September 5th, while boats were out investigating a supposed passage ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... got the anchor on board; and by the time O.P. and I had done sluicing the hawser clean of the mud it brought up, we were working down the Hamoaze with a light and baffling wind, but carrying a strong tide under us. Evening fell with a warm yellow haze: the banks slipping past us grew dim and dimmer: here and there a light shone among the long-shore houses. I felt more confident, and no longer concealed myself as we tacked under the sterns of the ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... yet unseen, beaming across the ages, Brimful of fun And wit and wisdom, baffling all ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... the bar of politics, Octavio's conduct is unimpeachable. He does his duty in baffling a powerful traitor in the most effective way. It is not his fault that Wallenstein is deceived in him, and nothing requires that he go and undeceive him. He resorts to no tricks, he feigns no sentiments ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... broken-down horses and two dogs over the pass to the west side of the Great Divide. The mountains rose precipitously on each side; but when the trail began dropping down westward, the weather moderated, though the snow grew deeper; and in the third week of January Thompson came on the baffling current of the Columbia. He camped there for the remainder of the winter, near the entrance of the Canoe River. Why he went up the Columbia in the spring, tracing it back to its source, and thence south ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... Tom's morbid senses an inspiration that he acted upon without second thought. It was the best thing he could have done with Polly in this baffling mood. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... represent warriors, courtiers, captives, men of every nation, among whom may be easily distinguished the negro from the centre of Africa. Inscriptions abound, in that strange arrow-headed or wedge-shaped character,—one of the most ancient and difficult of all,—which, after long baffling the learning of Europe, has at last begun yielded to the science and acuteness of the present century. One of the inscriptions copied from these walls was read by ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... barren hills whose blue masses were darkly silhouetted against the western sky. Upon every side of them extended the treeless wilderness, the desolate loneliness of bare, brown prairie, undulating just enough to be baffling to the eyes, yet so dull, barren, grim, silent, and colorless as to drive men mad. The shimmering heat rose and fell in great pulsating waves, although no slightest breeze came to stir the stagnant air, while thick clouds of white dust, impregnated ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... the most paralyzing and baffling thing; nothing seemed to be of any avail against it, now that it had finally gained the upper hand. There had been dark times, no doubt, in the old days in Washington; times when the tragedy of her husband's death had ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Towards midnight, the breeze almost failed and became baffling, and when the day dawned the officer of the watch reported that it was ahead. The pursuing ship, though still in sight, was luckily so far astern and to leeward as to prevent any danger from a visit by boats, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Virtue and Religion sit, Enthroned with heavenly Wit! Look where you see The greatest scorn of learned vanity! (And then how much a nothing is mankind! Whose reason is weigh'd down by popular air, Who, by that, vainly talks of baffling death; And hopes to lengthen life by a transfusion of breath, Which yet whoe'er examines right will find To be an art as vain as bottling up of wind!) And when you find out these, believe true Fame is there, Far above all reward, yet to ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... early period of his administration, Fonseca appears to have made some attempts to thwart the admiral's wishes, attempts which Columbus, now at the zenith of royal favour, had no difficulty in baffling. As regards the household, for instance, Fonseca demurred to the number of footmen which the admiral proposed for his domestic establishment. The admiral appealed to the sovereigns, who allowed his claim, and reproved ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... for luxuries, and dead to the softer senses, she abandoned to him readily the larger share of their plunder. Under a variety of names and disguises, through a succession of frauds, some vast and some mean, but chiefly on the Continent, they had pursued their course, eluding all danger and baffling all law. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... entreat you, friends, below! The angry storm begins to blow, For the weather changes with the moon. All this morning, until noon, We had baffling winds, and sudden flaws Struck the sea with their cat's-paws. Only a little hour ago I was whistling to Saint Antonio For a capful of wind to fill our sail, And instead of a breeze he has sent a gale. Last night I ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... table, his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness of the landscape, but his thought elsewhere. It wandered over the years already lived through, wandering backwards even to the days when existence, opening before the child eyes, was a baffling and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was but just in time to avoid a blow aimed at him with the former of these weapons, and to make a hasty escape to the house of a friend in the neighbourhood; where, concerting the best means of baffling pursuit, he decided upon an instant flight to London. The letters, which I am about to give, were written, immediately on his arrival in town, to some friends at Southwell, from whose kind interference in his behalf, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... sentiments, he was too much under the control and at the mercy of his colleague to resist or refuse his application for her person; and though for a long time baffling, under various pretences, the pursuit of that ferocious ruffian, he felt that the time was at hand, unless some providential interference willed it otherwise, when the sacrifice would be insisted on and must be made; or probably her safety, as well as his own, might necessarily ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... sailed by Salisbury spire, calculating that a few minutes' run, at two or three miles a minute, would bring them to their destination on the outskirts of Portsmouth. But a few miles south the baffling mist had made its appearance, and Smith found himself bereft of landmarks, and compelled to tack to and fro in utter uncertainty of his course. He was as much at a loss as if he were navigating a vessel ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... in the cutter's wake, carried on a desultory. Jerky conversation anent the many baffling aspects of the case in hand. Gully's name came up. His strange personality was discussed by them from every angle; impartially by ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... the full confidence of always being able to keep his seat; but when at Paris he met with a master who could not only defy any horse to throw him, but under all circumstances could always preserve a graceful position, even while baffling every attempt of a horse to floor him. In order to try the capabilities of Mr. W., the French master placed him on all kinds of horses, and amongst the rest those which had been taught all sorts of tricks ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... engag'd, and finely treated. The Syren with her false deluding Arts, her Force of Words and seeming to comply, has drawn me to declare my Passion for her; now rallies and despises all I said, and hugs her self in baffling my Design. ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... the China Sea on the first of the southwest monsoon. At that period of the year, however, the monsoon is weak and unsteady; and after clearing the northern end of Luzon the Retriever kicked round in a belt of light and baffling airs for a week. Then the monsoon freshened somewhat and the Retriever once more rolled lazily away on her course, with young Matt Peasley humming chanteys on her quarter-deck and pondering the mystery that confronts all mankind in their first adventure ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... had distrusted and despised him, but by some means this attitude of his had become very materially modified. He greeted Saltash now with the hand of friendship which Saltash on his part was always ready to accept with a baffling smile that was not wholly without irony. He was wont to say that any man could make an enemy of him, but no man could keep him as such. Perhaps it was that very volatility of his which made anything of the nature of prolonged enmity an impossibility. He ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... own happiness? Leonardo da Vinci might have painted her, less sensual and cruel than his women, more restless and disharmonic, but physically, spiritually enticing, and, by her refusals to surrender either to her spirit or her senses, baffling her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... its successes, by its regrets rather than its hopes; enthusiasms die out, illusions vanish, belief in the perfectibility of ourselves and of others fades, as we learn to realize the shortness of life, the waywardness of human nature, the baffling power of circumstances, too easily allowed; but in their place, a humble faith in a more perfect and satisfying hereafter, which shall be the complement of our existence here, the fulfilment of our unfinished efforts, our many shortcomings, springs ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... must pass before the decree for your Divorce can be pronounced, and the care of the child be legally secured to the mother. The only doubt and the only danger are there. If you are not frightened by the prospect of a desperate venture which some women would shrink from, I believe I see a way of baffling the spies." ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... excellent show of not understanding the matter, thinking by this seriousness to confound them; but they pursued their discourse in such sort that she saw that all was discovered. So she immediately devised a means of baffling them, for, having lost honour and conscience, she would in no wise take to herself the shame that they thought to bring upon her. On the contrary, like one who set her pleasure before all earthly honour, she neither ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... child, and which, even in the days of their greatest poverty, her father had never allowed her to part with. What strange hours it had often measured for her. Age-long hours of grief, weary days of illness and pain, times of eager expectation, times of sickening anxiety, times of mental conflict, of baffling questions and perplexities. How the hands seemed to creep on this afternoon, at ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... preciousness has been drawn. From the south wind that breathed a century and a half over the green wheat; from the perfume of the growing grasses waving over heavy-laden clover and laughing veronica, hiding the green finches, baffling the bee; from rose-lined hedge, woodbine, and cornflower, azure blue, where yellowing wheat stalks crowd up under the shadow of green firs. All the devious brooklets' sweetness where the iris stays the sunlight; all the wild woods hold of beauty; ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... denied, but after enjoying for a moment the baffling of the old man's intentions, ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... Battista, before we can appreciate the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing but illimitable air between ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... last regarded him at least as one who neglected his opportunities, but his great laugh at their callow jests and their advice to him was so frank and indifferent a thing that they found it singularly baffling. 'Twas indeed as if a man of ripe years and wisdom had laughed at them with good-nature, because he knew they could not understand the thing experience had ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... said to her, as they discussed the case alone, "we're not making our usual rapid headway this time. Rather baffling, ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... he was harboring dangerous characters. Both Barrington and Seth had been careful to leave and return to their lodgings cautiously, and by a roundabout route, and were convinced that if they were watched they had succeeded in baffling the spies in discovering their hiding place. Barrington was therefore rather startled one afternoon when, as he returned from his daily walk past the wine shop, a man suddenly came from a doorway and spoke his name in a ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... wrath, dispelled with his arrows that thick shower. Then he of a hundred sacrifices beholding that shower baffled, once more caused a thicker shower of stones. But the son of the chastiser of Paka (viz., Arjuna) gratified his father by baffling that shower also with his swift arrows. Then Sakra, desirous of smiting down the son of Pandu, tore up with his hands a large peak from Mandara, with tall trees on it, and hurled it against him. But Arjuna divided that mountain-peak into a thousand pieces ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... strict line as now exists between reputable physicians and quack doctors separated the "good witches" from the regular practicers of medicine. It was so customary in Elizabethan times for thoroughly reputable and even eminent medical men to explain baffling cases as the results of witchcraft[37] that to draw the line of demarcation between them and the pretenders who suggested by means of a charm or a glass a maleficent agent would be impossible. Granted the phenomena of conjuration and witchcraft as facts—and no one had yet disputed them—it ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... current which sets continually towards the east. The 7th July we fell in with the island of San Thome [280], where we wished to come to anchor; but the wind coming about we again made sail. From that time till the 13th we were tossed about by baffling winds, and that day fell in again ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... bag. In this scene she seemed to demand the actor's intentions toward the daughter, and again overwhelmed him with confusion, as Parmalee had been overwhelmed when she revealed her true self under the baffling disguise. The wager of a kiss was prettily paid. This much of the drama he knew. And there was an affecting final scene on ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes— ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... night, and we had a succession of rain and baffling winds for six or seven days, during which I had no opportunity of hearing the remainder of the boatswain's history. We joined the fleet off Toulon, closed the admiral's ship, and the captain went on board to pay his respects. When he returned, we found out, through ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... alone, I read the book. Never shall I forget the effect it produced on me. I seemed to be holding communion with Satan himself, robed as an angel of light, the transparent drapery revealing his hideous form but baffling my endeavors to rend it away. Such sophistry, such impudence of unsupported assertion, such distortion of truth and gilding of gross falsehood, I never met with. I tried in vain to find an answer to things that I saw and ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... our lives are made up of small things. We must break wholes up into fractions, and then seek their common multiple. Only thus can we deal with them. We deal with God by limiting Him and breaking Him up into his attributes, or by conceiving Him under the figure of the Trinity. He is thus less baffling to us. We can handle Him the better. We make a huge man of Him and then try to dodge the consequences of our ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... off in her reading. But often she laid the book absent-mindedly in her lap to listen with an ear turned toward the bed, and often, too, she looked out into the spreading softness of golden-green laced through by dove-gray and sepia-brown branches on which played baffling reflexes of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... in deep waters. He began to talk, to assert himself, to prove himself cock of his own walk. And Maule suavely encouraged him to lay down the law on things Australian, while Lady Bridget withdrew into herself, baffling and enraging McKeith still more hopelessly. He did not seem now to know his wife! A catastrophe had happened. What? How? Why? .... Nothing was the same, or could ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... In the pale moonlight, 'Mid sunshine and storm on they sail'd; Baffling winds and still calms Caused our friends no alarms, For Faith ever ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... the attention of the reader from the very start. It is full of action, presenting a baffling situation, the solving of which carries one along in a whirlwind of excitement. Through the story runs a love plot that is interwoven with the mystery ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... note that the most remarkable criminal case in which the famous French detective, Paul Coquenil, was ever engaged, a case of more baffling mystery than the Palais Royal diamond robbery and of far greater peril to him than the Marseilles trunk drama—in short, a case that ranks with the most important ones of modern police history—would never have been undertaken by Coquenil (and ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... gathered about us. They voiced their amazement when Tatini announced our wish to find a navigator and vessel to Tautira. They all said it was impossible, that the coast to Pari, with the submerged reef of Faratara, was too rough now for any but a large power boat, and the wind would be baffling and threatening. But as fear of the sea was unknown to them, they expressed a will to make the attempt. We launched a large canoe, and two sturdy natives, relations of Tatini, took the paddles. They had made the journey more than once, but not ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Champneys, a newer and better personality dominating that old, unhappy, ignorant self. If at times the man glimpsed that other shadowy self of hers, it was part of her mysterious appeal, her enthralling, baffling charm. It invested her with a shade of inscrutable, prescient sorrow, as of old unhappy far-off things. He hadn't the faintest idea of Nancy Simms, a creature utterly foreign to his experience. And because she did ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... leave the baffling earthly prize, Which fails the earthly weak endeavor, To gaze into those holy eyes And ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... it doesn't matter," spoke up Tom Reade. "We have just one move more to make in this baffling game, and then I fancy we shall have won. When Mr. Sambo Ebony, as I have nicknamed him, is safely jailed I think we shall find ourselves undisturbed in the future. We shall then be permitted to go ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... in truth is more distinct to me than the tune to which they were, without exception, at their ease on such ground—unless it be my general dazzled, humiliated sense, through those years, of the common, the baffling, mastery, all round me, of a hundred handy arts and devices. Everyone did things and had things—everyone knew how, even when it was a question of the small animals, the dormice and grasshoppers, or the hoards of food and stationery, that they kept in their desks, just as they kept in their ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... wonderful capacity for minute observation of the elder persons about them, which is one among the many baffling mysteries presented by the minds of children, Zo had long since discovered that the member of the household, preferred to all others by Carmina, was the good brother who had gone away and left them. In his absence, she was always talking of him—and ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... for refreshments, and learned that a steamboat called periodically at Luss. We left this favourite resort by the Dumbarton road, walking alongside Loch Lomond—one of the finest walks we ever took and quite baffling description. It was rather provoking, therefore, when darkness came on just as we reached the widest part of the Loch where quite a number of islands could be seen. The road still continued beautiful, being arched over ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the horses and cattle, which was rather wasted. She was as miserly about her master's money, as if it had been her own, and by dint of making good bargains, of getting high prices for all their produce, and by baffling the peasants' tricks when they offered anything for sale, he at last entrusted her with buying and selling everything, with the direction of all the laborers, and with the quantity of provisions necessary for the household, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective, conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an exploration. A point arises; the question takes a problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... watched her in the light of the electric candle-lamps on the table, which, sending their shaded light upwards reflected from the white cloth, made her face luminous in the shadow of her cloudy hair, he was struck again by a baffling resemblance to someone he had known. Now and again during the months since they had known each other her face had seemed familiar; then the likeness had disappeared; he had forgotten to be curious about it. At this moment the ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... woman and her party. Being almost the last, it will be understood that they created no little sensation as she led them down the thronged room to her table. She was wearing an evening gown of lustrous black with the apparently simple lines that are so baffling to any but the expert maker, with a black picture hat that suited her no end. I saw more than one matron of the North Side set stiffen in her seat, while Mrs. Belknap-Jackson and Mrs. Effie turned upon her the chilling ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... "It's a most baffling one," continued the financier. "I suppose, Mr. Carson," he added, "that if we do put it in and pass around a subscription paper, we can count on you for—say two hundred ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... make her out? It cannot be; I've seen no rag of canvass on the sea." "Belike," said Ben, "you might not from the bay, But from the bluff-head, where I watched to-day, I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind Was light and baffling."—"When the Sun declined Where lay she? had she anchored?"—"No, but still 510 She bore down on us, till the wind grew still." "Her flag?"—"I had no glass: but fore and aft, Egad! she seemed a wicked-looking ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... serving the food as assistant butler in Ben's absence. In the kink of his hair, the bulge of his smiling lips, the spread of his nostrils, the whites of his rolling eyes, he saw the Slave. He saw the mystery, the brooding horror, the baffling uncertainty, the insoluble problem of such a man within a democracy of self-governing freemen. He stood bowing and smiling over his guests, in shape a man. And yet in racial development a million years behind the wit and intelligence of the ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... arrived for the introduction of the witnesses, the court room again filled up; but he no longer looked for faces he knew. He held himself sternly aloof, as if he feared his reason might leave him if he continued to strive against those baffling eyes, who knew him and did not know that they knew him, but who looked at him as if trying to penetrate a mask when he wore no mask. Occasionally his counsel turned to him for brief consultation, in which his part consisted generally of a nod or a shake of the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... The winds were baffling and light, so we made but slow progress. Fortunately frequent rains, with sometimes a genuine tropical downpour or cloud-burst, gave us an opportunity of replenishing our water casks, and by spreading the awnings we were able to get a good supply. I found on inspection ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... adverse, baffling, contrary, perverse; petulant, peevish, cynical, surly, unamiable, inaffable, crabbed, crusty, captious, fractious, churlish, vixenish, querulous, fretful, choleric, touchy, waspish, morose, sullen, ill-natured, irascible acrimonious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... November days young Kedar and his trusty slave, Lauto, hunted along the Calawassee, with hope to get a shot at a buck—a buck that wore a single horn and that eluded them with easy, baffling gait whenever they met it in the fens. Kedar was piqued at this. He drained a deep draught and buttoned his coat with an air of resolution. "Now, by my soul," quoth he, "I'll have that buck to-day or die myself!" Then he laughed at the old slave, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... shadow of a spruce. It was evident that somebody was following his trail, and the pursuer, passing his hiding-place, followed it straight on. Geoffrey's was a curious character, and the very original cure for a disappointment in love, that of baffling a game watcher while his faithless mistress escaped, brought him relief; it ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... the League of Nations which could not with equal force be applied to the Four-Power and Naval Treaties. The Four-Power Treaty was the main object of attack, and Senators Lodge and Underwood were greatly embarrassed in attempting to explain its meaning. Its "baffling brevity" demanded explanations, but no satisfactory explanations were forthcoming. They talked in general terms about the tremendous importance of the treaty, but they dared not state the real fact that the treaty was drafted by Mr. Balfour ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... (there's a dear fellow) and send it soon. We sadly want books, and this will be readable again and again, and pay itself. Tell Emma I grieve for the poor self-punishing self-baffling Lady; with all our hearts we grieve for the pain and vexation she has encounterd; but we do not swerve a pin's-thought from the propriety of your measures. God comfort her, and there's an end of a painful necessity. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... least is clear; that the rock is well nigh insurmountable to those who know not the passes; that strict watch, baffling even Welch spies, is kept night and day; that the men on the summit are desperate and fierce; that our own troops are awed and terrified by the belief of the Welch, that the spot is haunted and the towers fiend-founded. One single defeat may lose us two years of victory. Gryffyth may break ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... likewise guessed the President's underhand manoeuvres with the Blandureaus, and his object in baffling old Blondet's efforts, but she saw nothing to be gained by opening the eyes of father or son to the perils of the situation; she was enjoying the beginning of the comedy; she knew about the proposals made by Chesnel's successor on behalf of Fabien du Ronceret, but she did not suspect ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... abashed by his success. "The deed, no less than the attempt, confounds him." His mind is assailed by the stings of remorse, and full of "preternatural solicitings." His speeches and soliloquies are dark riddles on human life, baffling solution, and entangling him in their labyrinths. In thought he is absent and perplexed, sudden and desperate in act, from a distrust of his own resolution. His energy springs from the anxiety and agitation of his mind. His blindly rushing forward on ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... succeeded, at the point of the pike, in establishing a safe egress for the twelve hundred visitors, it was then first ascertained that all traces of The Masque had been lost in the smoke and subsequent confusion; and that, with his usual good fortune, he had succeeded in baffling his pursuers. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... long and baffling silence, during which the doctor grew first red, then pale, then red again, and Messer Gambara stood with his scarlet cloak sweeping about his shapely limbs, sniffing his pomander and smiling almost ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... breaking around it? There's a current sets right across it and on it. And you see them bafflin' little cat's-paws? It's good weather and a falling tide. You just start to beat out, the two of you, and all you have to do is miss stays in the same baffling puff and the current ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... doctor. He soon makes his escape from the real difficulties with which the subject is beset, and mouths away at immense length and width about what he calls "the secret of Chaucer's rhythm in his heroic verse, which has been the baffling subject of so much discussion among scholars, a trifling increase in the syllables occasionally introduced for variety, and founded upon the same laws of contraction by apostrophe, syncope, &c., as those followed by all modern poets; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... personal and its achievements are so intimately conditioned by the author's idiosyncrasies that it was quite plainly impossible to imitate it, or even to learn from it. This is still more the case with the later works of Sologub, like the charming but baffling and ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... the words which are already yours, or which you can make yours through your own unaided efforts. For convenience we have grouped with them some words of a nature more baffling—words of which you know perhaps but a single aspect rather than the totality, or upon which you can obtain but a feeble and precarious grip. These slightly known words belong more to the class now to be considered than to that just disposed of. For we have now to deal with words over which ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the section of the chamber may be narrowed down by laying sand in the bottom and fire-brick thereon; also that baffle walls may be built into various portions of it, and that cooling surfaces with baffling may be introduced. In addition to variations in the tests, due to changes in construction in the combustion chamber, there will be variations in the fuels tested. Especial effort will be made to procure fuels ranging ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... which in reality foamed beneath his furrowing keel as he ploughed the sea in search of it. It is the same thrill which the wilting west wind steeps from the salt marsh as it comes across, some baffling and alluring ether distilled from under-sea caverns where cool green mermen tend emerald fires. The scent of it levitates from the wash of every wave and if you will watch with pure eyes and clear sight you may of moonlight nights see white-bodied mermaids flashing through the combers ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... disposal. He had heard it told at the newspaper office that Tisdale, whose golden statements were to furnish his little scoop, Hollis Tisdale of Alaska and the Geographical Survey, who knew more about the coal situation than any other man, was also the most silent, baffling sphinx on record when it ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... shoulders collapsed without a struggle into the powerful bulk of his chest and belly. He was excellently and quietly dressed. Amory noticed that he was inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur's head as if speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute problem. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... at the table, his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness of the landscape, but his thought elsewhere. It wandered over the years already lived through, wandering backwards even to the days when existence, opening before the child eyes, was a baffling and vaguely ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... well meant, but were not practically of much value. As Glendower could call spirits from the vasty deep, so they, with like success, sought to call soldiers from the earth in the midst of defeat, and in the teeth of a North American winter. Washington, baffling pursuit and flying from town to town, left nothing undone. North and south went letters and appeals for men, money, and supplies. Vain, very vain, it all was, for the most part, but still it was done in a tenacious spirit. Lee would not come, the Jersey militia would ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... priestly craft, has something in it closely akin to the English temperament. Sarpi was a sound Catholic Christian in religion, and in politics what we should call a staunch Whig. So far as it is now possible to penetrate his somewhat baffling personality, we might compare him to a Macaulay of finer edge, to a Dean Stanley of more vigorous build. He was less commonplace than the one, more substantial than the other. But we must be cautious in offering any interpretation of his real opinions. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the importance of secrecy, General Gage quietly got ready eight hundred picked troops, which he meant to convey under cover of night across the West Bay, and to land on the Cambridge side, thus baffling the vigilance of the townspeople, and at the same time considerably shortening the distance his troops would have to march. So much pains were taken to keep the actual destination of these troops a profound secret, ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... regular soldiers. But when Pompey also passed over the Pyrenees, and Sertorius pitched his camp near him, and offered and himself accepted every occasion by which military skill could be put to the proof, and in this contest of dexterity was found to have the better, both in baffling his enemy's designs and in counter-scheming himself, the fame of him now spread even to Rome itself, as the most expert commander of his time. For the renown of Pompey was not small, who had already won much honor by his achievements in the wars of Sylla, from whom he received ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... must entreat you, friends, below! The angry storm begins to blow, For the weather changes with the moon. All this morning, until noon, We had baffling winds, and sudden flaws Struck the sea with their cat's-paws. Only a little hour ago I was whistling to Saint Antonio For a capful of wind to fill our sail, And instead of a breeze he has sent a gale. Last night I saw St. Elmo's stars, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Mad-men, and at Times I have met with People who have Boxed, fought at Back-sword, and taken Poison before King Charles II. In a Word, he was so pleasant a Man, that no one could be sorrowful under his Government. This made him capable of baffling, with the greatest Ease imaginable, all Suggestions of Jealousie, and the People could not entertain Notions of any thing terrible in him, whom they saw every way agreeable. This Scrap of the familiar Part of that Prince's History I thought ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Matthew Flinders, was beating off the eastern extremity of Kangaroo Island, endeavouring to make the mainland of Terra Australis, to follow the course of discovery and survey for which she had been commissioned. The winds were very baffling for pursuing his task according to the carefully scientific method which Flinders had prescribed for himself. He had declared to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, before he left England, that he would endeavour so to explore the then unknown coasts of the ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... was brewing she was not far from the Downs, but the baffling winds retarded her progress, and it was pitch dark when she reached the neighbourhood of the Goodwin sands. Nevertheless those on board of her did not feel much uneasiness, because a good pilot had been secured in ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... by an extraordinary development of the passion for delitescency! I the rather suspect some natural disposition of this kind; for, from the instant I perceived the extreme curiosity manifested on the subject, I felt a secret satisfaction in baffling it, for which, when its unimportance is considered, I do not well ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... cumulative vote have been almost universally rejected as schemes for baffling the majority. But the principle of dividing the representatives equally between population and property has never had fair play. It was introduced by Thouret into the constitution of 1791. The Revolution made it inoperative; and it was so manipulated from 1817 to 1848 by ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the portal of the Temple of Isis: 'I am whatever has been, is, or ever will be; and my veil no man hath yet lifted.' Not thus do modern seekers after truth confront Nature—the word that stands for the baffling mysteries of the Universe. Steadily, unflinchingly, we strive to pierce the inmost heart of Nature, from what she is to reconstruct what she has been, and to prophesy what she shall be. Veil after veil we have lifted, ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... on the trail, trying to cut a calf away from its mother. The gray brutes boldly trotted to within a few yards of him, and slyly looked at him, with pale, fiery eyes. They had already scented his captive. Precious time flew by; the situation, critical and baffling, had never before been met by him. There lay his little calf tied fast, and to the north ran many others, some of which he must—he would have. To think quickly had meant the solving of many a plainsman's ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... brought with him in the ships. But what in the world could a Greek slave know of that affair? I wandered up and down among the streets trying to unravel the mystery, and the more I considered it, the more baffling it grew. One thing only seemed certain and that certainty took away my breath for the moment. If I came to full knowledge of anything at all, it would not be one life of the soul in Charlie Mears's body, but half a dozen—half a dozen several and separate ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... herself if not her interlocutors. She was perfectly aware of the opinions of her fellow servitors. She knew all about them while they knew nothing whatsoever about her. Her limited English could be used as a means of baffling them. She smiled, and fell into Hindustani when ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... require much narrative from us here. Ill-luck, which, Friedrich complains, had followed him like his shadow, in a strange and fateful manner, from the day of Kunersdorf and earlier, does not yet cease its sad company; but, on the contrary, for long months to come, is more constant than ever, baffling every effort of his own, and from the distance sending him news of mere disaster and discomfiture. It is in this Campaign, though not till far on in it, that the long lane does prove to have a turning, and the Fortune of War recovers its old ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... thoughts here, and tried to make herself feel like a woman engaged to be married. Somehow the fact persisted in baffling her. There was an unreality about it that prevented her from tasting the full sweet. Engaged—to a rich man, and a rich man's son. Well, perhaps when Ward came back, it would seem ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... of his opponent, had nothing in it consolatory to his wounded feelings. He was lowered in his own eyes, when he recollected how completely the proposed victim of his ingenuity had seen through his schemes, and only abstained from baffling them entirely, because to do so suited best with his own. There was a shade of suspicion, too, which he could not entirely eradicate from his mind.—What occasion had this young nobleman to preface, by the voluntary loss ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... treachery, "Without whose aid the links accurst, "That bind these impious slaves, would be "Too strong for ALLA'S self to burst! "That rebel fiend whose blade has spread "My path with piles of Moslem dead, "Whose baffling spells had almost driven "Back from their course the Swords of Heaven, "This night with all his band shall know "How deep an Arab's steel can go, "When God and Vengeance speed the blow. "And—Prophet! by that holy wreath "Thou ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... having been the scene of frequent British operations in previous wars. Owing to this, "the Maria, because of her distant situation (from which the Inflexible and Carleton had chased by signal) when the rebels were first discovered, and baffling winds, could not get into close action."[13] For the same reason the Inflexible could not support the Carleton. The Americans, in the aggregate distinctly inferior, were thus permitted a concentration of superior force upon part of their enemies. It is needless to enlarge upon ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... his home, in his school, in the streets, he seized upon and how he made this his own. I tried to determine what were the relationships he used to order his experiences. Fortunately for the purposes of writing stories I did not have to get behind the baffling eyes and the inscrutable sounds of a small baby. Yet I learned much for understanding the twos by watching even through the first months. What "the great, big, blooming, buzzing confusion" (as James describes it) means to an infant, I fancy we grown-ups will really never know. But I suppose we may ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... little chin met Mr Fledgeby's gaze with such a baffling hitch, that that agreeable gentleman was for some time at a loss how to resume his fascinating part in the dialogue. At ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... watch struck the hour on the bell. “It is ten o'clock; let us turn in.” There is an inviting glimmer through the cabin skylights. We are better off in this floating hotel than has often been our lot, baffling with storm and tempest, benighted, weary, cold and wet, in rough roads, forest or desert waste, with dubious hopes of shelter and comfort at the end ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... addressing itself to the angels. Being, as it were, ourselves the angels we had only a limited quarrel in each case with the event; but its inconsequent character, given the forces set in motion, was peculiarly baffling. It was like an interminable sum that wouldn't come straight; nobody had the time to handle so many figures. Limbert gathered, to make his pudding, dry bones and dead husks; how then was one to formulate the law that made the dish ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... as far up as we could in the history of primitive societies. The phenomena which early societies present us with are not easy at first to understand, but the difficulty of grappling with them bears no proportion to the perplexities which beset us in considering the baffling entanglement of modern social organisation. It is a difficulty arising from their strangeness and uncouthness, not from their number and complexity. One does not readily get over the surprise which they ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... near this baffling secret at times; in the dewy silence of mornings, just before the sun comes up, when familiar woods and trees stand in a sort of musing happiness; at night when the sky is thickly sown with stars, or when the moon ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not heed the city any more, It has given me a duty to perform. I pass along nonchalantly, Insinuating myself into self-baffling movements. Impalpable charm of back streets In which I find myself: Cool spaces filled with shadow. Passers-by, white hammocks ...
— Some Imagist Poets - An Anthology • Richard Aldington
... yours, you have, in fact, a legal right to inspect the printer's books. But this is valueless. The printer would cook his books to please the publisher. You can have no conception of the villany done under all these sharing agreements. But forewarned forearmed. Think of some way of baffling this invariable fraud. Ask a knowing printer some way. Do anything but underrate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... contest, and hovered, smiling ineffectually, on the outskirts of his little chaos. Perhaps he tried to find comfort in a conscience satisfied for a party spoiled. But for Audrey this wild confusion was rich in possibility. However baffling to those officially responsible, it offered a wider field for individual enterprise; and if she did not possess that fine flow of animal spirits which sometimes supports lesser minds under such circumstances, ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... mantle about them; and they vanished, God's holy light between the world and them, leaving behind a memory, half mortal and half myth. From first to last they were the creations of some special Providence, baffling the wit of man to fathom, defeating the machinations of the world, the flesh and the devil, until their work was done, then passing from the scene as mysteriously as they had ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... is traversed, I'll await Your well-timed counsel. If I have you by me I'll laugh at all the baffling strokes of Fate And lay the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... experience that the men who have been most eagerly sought in friendship have not as a rule been the most open-hearted and expansive natures. I suppose that a certain law of pursuit holds good, and that people of self-contained temperament, with a sort of baffling charm, who are critical and hard to please, excite a certain ambition in those who would ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the story centers in London and Italy. The book is skilfully written and makes one of the most baffling, mystifying, exciting detective stories ever written—cleverly keeping the suspense and mystery intact until the surprising ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... with simplicity or with a baffling irony. "Why not open my mind's eye for me? My friend Harold March here will tell you I sometimes see things, ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... its contradictory and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, months, years spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing! It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of insight. He was in his glory in a case like this. This was shown now by his gleaming eyes and the trembling hand which pulled nervously at his short, black moustache. Goldberger's moustache was a good index to his mental state—the more ragged it grew, the more baffling he found the ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... was, but mark the sequel: 'She did not outgrow it.' He puts this in italics. 'The power within her gained in mastery, and, what is most singular and baffling to me, she continues to be a hearty, healthy child in all other ways, and yet at times she seems the calm centre of a whirlwind of invisible forces. Chairs, books, thimbles, even the piano, move to and fro without visible pushing. Electric snapping ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... hopes of baffling your Majesty's sagacity," said Heriot; "the piece is really what I say, and the price a hundred and fifty pounds sterling, if it pleases your ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... a chief part in making the poet's career his fixed ideal, and ultimately, with his father's willing consent, his definite choice. What we know of his inner and outer life during the important years which turned the boy into the man is slight and baffling enough. The fiery spirit of poetry can rarely have worked out its way with so little disturbance to the frame. Minute scrutiny has disclosed traits of unrest and revolt; he professed "atheism" and ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... not remain as Easy as it would have liked under the erring attribution of prominence. Yet to have refused to help in so good a work would not have been in its nature, and it lost as little time as possible in summoning a real author of prominence to consider the problems so baffling to a mere editorial effigy; for, as we ought to explain, the de facto editor is to be found in the Study next door, and never in the Easy Chair. The author prominently before the public came at once, for that kind of author has very little to do, and is only too happy to respond ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... well though not expensively furnished, and both mother and child had the unmistakable air of good birth and refinement. As Silvia glanced at Mrs. Bell she was conscious of something in her face at once baffling and appealing. She had the indefinable look of one who dwells with a sorrow for which ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... the prisoner's wrists and knees, With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls; Till Gaea's lap receiving them, they stretched, And both upon her bosom shaken to speech, Burst the hot story out of throats of both, Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut The hurried spout. And as when drifting storm Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon A peak, a forest mound, a valley's gleam Of grass and the river's crooks and snaky coils, Signification marvellous she caught, Through ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... those who have played at hare and hounds, can fully appreciate the excitement, the interest, and the pleasure of the game; or the proud feeling of the hare, who finds that he is successfully baffling his pursuers when he is distancing them by the rapidity of his pace, or by the artfulness of his dodges; still all the time, whatever twists and turns he may make, knowing that he is bound to leave traces of his scent sufficiently strong to ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... brig from Rio, bound to Norfolk. Weather hazy, with a light baffling wind from the eastward. To-day Hartman Rogers died, having been attacked on the eighth with spasms after drinking a glass of grog. This man was of the cook's party, and one upon whom Peters placed his main reliance. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... had ordered differently. Towards midnight, the breeze almost failed and became baffling, and when the day dawned the officer of the watch reported that it was ahead. The pursuing ship, though still in sight, was luckily so far astern and to leeward as to prevent any danger from a visit by boats, and there was leisure to make the preparations that might become ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... descriptions, with the full confidence of always being able to keep his seat; but when at Paris he met with a master who could not only defy any horse to throw him, but under all circumstances could always preserve a graceful position, even while baffling every attempt of a horse to floor him. In order to try the capabilities of Mr. W., the French master placed him on all kinds of horses, and amongst the rest those which had been taught all sorts of tricks to fling their riders, but W. resisted all their attempts, but it was ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... silent on the way home. The world sometimes seemed desperately sordid, and human nature a baffling proposition. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... entirely engrossed in his devotions. Starting from the front entrance of the church he moved slowly nearer and nearer to the altar, and, slipping from the shelter of one pillar to another, anxiously scanned the rows of kneeling women. He found the mantilla a baffling disguise, and as each woman present in the church wore one, and as the hair of each was black, and as the back of the head of one woman is very much like that of another, it was not until the worshippers ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... a miserable thing for a question of truth {319} to be confined to mere presumption and counter-presumption, with no decisive thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness. And, sooth to say, in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of our records, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the so-called 'rigorously scientific' disbeliever, and making an ad hominem ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... away from us when we tried to overtake him? That was a baffling question, and the only way we could explain it was that he was afraid we would accuse him of theft. That he had not gone very far away from us was shown by the way he had appeared in the picture theatre that afternoon. But if he was a detective, why did he not boldly march ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... I! Out!—Oh, so far, far, far, Over the lofty mountains! Here is this cramping, confining bar, Baffling my thoughts, that so buoyant are;— Lord! Let me try the scaling, Suffer no ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... Andrews with some show of gratification. "I flatter myself that we have pulled the wires so as to keep the thing out of the papers as much as possible. We don't want to frighten the quarry till the net is spread. The point is, though, to find out who is the quarry. It's most baffling." ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... was often baffling to the observer, especially in its restraint. It was only after many years that the present writer found the master-key to Dilke's actions, and it was revealed in a flash at the time of the passing of the South Africa Union Act. The question was the representation of the native population ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... from the road to the school-room was not without many a struggle on Sandy's part. The new life, the new customs, and the strange language, were baffling. ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... hand upon the door, wheeled abruptly and studied Yancey's face, trying to discover the jest hidden behind that baffling, ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... experience he was also by virtue of his rationality a participator in eternal truth. A substantial justice was thus done both to the conditions and to the functions of human life, although, for want of a natural history inspired by mechanical ideas, this dualism remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its basis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of experience, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... man had as much to do with the circumstance as the man himself. He was polite, engaging, and handsome; the objection to his complexion, if such there were, was at least offset by a very positive faculty of entertaining; besides which, the unspeakable something in manner, always baffling disguises, always whispering of other conditions, always exciting suggestions and expectations, was ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... she was thinking it over in her room that evening vague and baffling doubts came drifting across this conviction. She doubted how she stood toward him and what the restrained gleam of his face might signify. She felt that perhaps, in her desire to play an adequate part in the conversation, she had talked rather more freely than she ought to have done, and given him ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... prosperity. The West, then almost unexplored, began to develop, and has continued to do so until now it is studded with proud cities, teeming with throbbing life, growing like the grass of the prairies in spring-time, advancing like the steam-engine, baffling distance like the telegraph, and spreading the pulsations of their mighty hearts to the uttermost parts of the world. There they stand with their echoing marts of trade, their stately spires of worship and their magnificent institutions ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... what the law says," was her baffling rejoinder; "I have taken the trouble to find out since I came home. I am not ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... appealed to men to go back into their own thoughts and feelings, and there challenged them; were not the preacher's words the echoes and interpreting images of their own deepest, possibly most perplexing and baffling, experience? From first to last this was his great engine and power; from first to last he boldly used it. He claimed to read their hearts; and people felt that he did read them, their follies and their aspirations, the blended ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... later she left the studio. Bloeckman had promised that she should hear the result of the test within the next few days. Too proud to force any definite comment she felt a baffling uncertainty and only now when the step had at last been taken did she realize how the possibility of a successful screen career had played in the back of her mind for the past three years. That night she tried to tell over to herself the elements that might decide for or against her. Whether ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... him readily the larger share of their plunder. Under a variety of names and disguises, through a succession of frauds, some vast and some mean, but chiefly on the Continent, they had pursued their course, eluding all danger and baffling all law. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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