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More "Blunder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a thoughtful mood in his walk, and being more accustomed to riding than walking, in his absence of mind he made the blunder. ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... into the true state of the case, and I felt much easier on the subject. That Marble ever intended to serve under the British flag, I had not supposed for a moment; but I was not sure that regret for the blunder he had already made, might not lead him into some new mistake of equally serious import, under the impression that he was correcting the evil. As for Neb, I knew he would never desert me; and I had not, from the first, felt any other concern ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... The blunder of writing predicate for predict has become so widely diffused that it bids fair to render one of the most useful terms in the scientific vocabulary of Logic unintelligible. The mathematical and logical term "to eliminate" ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... furious. The stranger had uttered words of apology, but his tone had been insolent, and his apology was more offensive than his original blunder. Had it not been for Ben's reluctance to make a disturbance, he would have struck the offender in the mouth. If he had had a pistol, he could have shot him; his great uncle Ralph, for instance, would not have ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... stamps that have an interesting history of their own. They mark some official experiment, some curious blunder or accident, some little conceit, some historical event, or some crude and ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... Karl der Grosse, our best and biggest. Run down in the night by a British liner that blundered into the fighting in trying to blunder out. They're fighting in a gale. The liner's afloat with her nose broken, sagging about! There never was such a battle!—never before! Good ships and good men on both sides,—and a storm and the night and the dawn and all in the open ocean full steam ahead! No stabbing! ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... waiting which promised more money. But emulation counts for something, even in the thief-catching field; and since two members of his own staff had fired and missed their mark in St. Louis, there was a blunder ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... aristocratic re-action in England England's democratic tendencies Idleness of young aristocrats Death of Protection Revolutions leading to masquerades Tory reforms Imperial marriage New Reform Bill a blunder ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the oven, and let your cakes and pastry burn. Try not to mind the banter of your relations and friends at any possible failure. Many well-meaning efforts to acquire this useful knowledge have been nipped in the bud by the thoughtless, silly way in which some people will laugh at any mistake or blunder. A cake which has caught in baking, or a pudding with the sugar left out, will probably afford them an inexhaustible subject of mirth. Make up your mind, however, not to be discouraged by any of these things. Practice will give nimbleness to ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... said too much, he ceased speaking abruptly, and then, after the fashion of one unskilled in tricks of speech, proceeded to remedy one blunder ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... for instance, who, having made Pendennis an early confidant in his amour, gave him the whole story? Clive, Pendennis writes expressly, is travelling abroad with his wife. Who is that wife? By a most monstrous blunder, Mr. Pendennis killed Lord Farintosh's mother at one page and brought her to life again at another; but Rosey, who is so lately consigned to Kensal Green, it is not surely with her that Clive is travelling, for then Mrs. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... However, the blunder blind passion had led her into was partially repaired by Miss Rolleston herself. When she heard, next day, where Seaton was gone, she lifted up her hands in amazement. "What could papa be thinking of to send our benefactor to a hospital?" And, after meditating awhile, she ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... air as he stepped by her reaching out for butcher-knife and roast. "So you are dad's kind, are you? Hitting the booze every show you get. The Lord deliver me from his chief blunder. Meaning a man." ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... he prayed to have it again ('twas but a small request, mark ye me), and having a strong faith, he did not throw the hatchet after the helve, as some spirits of contradiction say by way of scandalous blunder, but the helve after the hatchet, as you all properly have it. Presently two great miracles were seen: up springs the hatchet from the bottom of the water, and fixes itself to its old acquaintance the helve. Now had he wished to coach it to heaven in a fiery chariot like Elias, to multiply in ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... in Oldham's imitation, many prosaick verses and bad rhymes, and his poem sets out with a strange inadvertent blunder: ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... perhaps no class of puzzle over which people so frequently blunder as that which involves what is called the theory of probabilities. I will give two simple examples of the sort of puzzle I mean. They are really quite easy, and yet many persons are tripped up by them. A friend recently produced five pennies ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... that this passage-way was known, and was used; that he was at the mercy of his captor; and that Russell had made a great blunder in hiding his package in such a place. But why had his visitor failed to discover the package? Perhaps because she came in the dark. That would account for it. She could not have seen it; she passed by it thus, both while ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... making him incapable of rendering correctly into English the spirit and the letter of a foreign tongue, I have respectfully declined. I may say, and with accuracy, that scarcely a translation is made which does not show some blunder more or less appalling. ...
— The Importance of the Proof-reader - A Paper read before the Club of Odd Volumes, in Boston, by John Wilson • John Wilson
... went Tom Morse looked hard as pig iron. He did not want to blunder, so he said nothing. But the girl would have been amazed if she could have read his thoughts. She seemed to him a rare flower that has blossomed in ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... what is a wiser and better thing, Can keep the living from ever needing Such an unnatural, strange proceeding, By showing conclusively and clearly That death is a stupid blunder merely, And not a necessity of our lives. My being here is accidental; The storm, that against your casement drives, In the little village below waylaid me. And there I heard, with a secret delight, Of your ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... in error when they consider that the name of Baron Fairfax ought not to be retained in the Peerage. The able heraldic editors of the Peerages are likely to be better versed in such matters than to have perpetrated and perpetuated so frequently the blunder; or what is to be said of Sir Bernard Burke's elevation to be a king of arms? Not to omit the instance of the Earl of Athlone, who, though a natural-born subject of a foreign realm, in 1795 took his seat in the House of Lords in Ireland (a case which H. G. wants ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... have made an unpardonable blunder. I don't deserve the divine blessings through Romesh; I am ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... cruelty and perfidy but of his dullness. The King had everything to hope from Egmont and nothing to fear. Granvelle knew the man well, and, almost to the last, could not believe in the possibility of so unparalleled a blunder as that which was to make a victim, a martyr, and a popular idol of a personage brave indeed, but incredibly vacillating and inordinately vain, who, by a little management, might have been converted into a most useful instrument ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... blunder, and it was necessary that he should correct it. His watch was lying in the trough of his easel, and he looked at it and wondered why Miss Van Siever was not there. He had tripped, and he must make a little struggle ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... were broken off, and war was finally declared, Germany was already the unavowed protectress of Russia. And when people point, as they frequently do, to the war as the greatest blunder ever committed by the Wilhelmstrasse since the Fatherland became one and indivisible, I feel unable to see with them eye to eye. Seemingly it was indeed an egregious mistake, but so obvious were the probable consequences which made it appear so that ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... necessity. Mere handicraft, however skilled, could not secure the requisite precision of workmanship; nor could the parts be turned out in sufficient quantity to meet any large demand. It was therefore requisite to devise machine-tools which should not blunder, nor turn out imperfect work;—machines, in short, which should be in a great measure independent of the want of dexterity of individual workmen, but which should unerringly labour in their prescribed track, and do the work ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... but pardonable blunder," said Mr. Witham, "that I died, and reached the Paradise of Poets. I had, indeed, published volumes of verse, but with the most blameless motives. Other poets were continually sending me theirs, and, as I could not admire them, and did ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the story must have left in the mind of Vergil himself. It is surely needless to assume that the first of poetic artists has forgotten the very rudiments of his art in placing at the opening of his song a figure which strips all interest from his hero. Nor is it needful to believe that such a blunder has been unconscious, and that Vergil has had to learn the true effect of his episode on the general texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The poet who paints for us the character of Dido must have felt, ere he could have painted it, that charm which has ever since ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... youngster,—and that, let me tell you, young friends, was some time ago,—they used to say that swallows lived in the mud all winter, as the eels do. The books made no such stupid blunder; only the ignorant people, such as never seem to use their eyes or their reason. It was one of the popular errors of the time. Silly as the notion seems, it has been held by ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... healthy, was born wealthy, and throughout the whole of his long life, continuing to be wealthy and healthy, he never committed a single sin, never fell into a single error, never once made a slip or a blunder. ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... no: I can't part with you tonight, no, not for an instant. I have many lessons to give you. How are we to learn our parts for to-morrow, if we don't rehearse them beforehand? Do you not know that a single blunder may turn what I hope will be a farce into a tragedy? Go home!—pooh! pooh! why, man, I have not seen my wife, nor put my house to rights, and if you do but listen to me I tell you again and again that not a hair of our heads ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the most cruel vexations, till a remedy could be found, resembled the patience of stupidity. He seems to have been capable of resentment, bitter and long-enduring; yet his resentment so seldom hurried him into any blunder that it may be doubted whether what appeared to be revenge ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... can't be sure where he is going to get his catch, so he picks out the place, or run-way, where the game has been in the habit of coming. He hides his traps about that place, and trusts to luck that the animal will blunder into one ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... madman or clear off his vertigo of death, suggested to him the idea of throwing himself from the highest peak of the Mont Blanc... That indeed! that would be worth doing, up there! A fine end among the elements... But here, at the bottom of a cave... Ah! vai, what a blunder!.. And he put such tone into his words, brusque and yet persuasive, such conviction, that the Swede allowed himself to be conquered, and there they were, at last, one by one, at the top of that ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... all other means of redeeming his folly in not learning Carmencita's full name and address before he left her. Was a man's whole life to be changed, to be made or unmade, by whimsical chance or by stupid blunder? In the gray dawn of a new day he reached his home and went to bed for ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... very gravely, and yet not unkindly: "You are not the first one of your age who has been on the verge of an irreparable blunder. Thank God it is not too late for you to retreat! Do not let this word jar upon you, for it often requires much higher courage and manhood to retreat than to advance. To do the latter in this case would be as foolhardy as it would ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... my skin," he answered, without reflecting. And then made haste to cover the blunder. "I have an ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... you look at it that way, of course you'll be suspicious. But I don't believe anything of the sort. It was just a blunder of someone who didn't know how, trying to ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... did not know what cuttings were, and did not want to commit himself or make a blunder. But, later on, in the evening, he whispered to the ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... in the MS., but apparently a copyist's error for Leatum, the form given in later pages; apparently a phonetic blunder for Liao-tung, the name of the province where the contest between Russia and Japan is now centered ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... knew him at once, the rogue! from having read of him; he was the yellow-breasted chat. It was well, indeed, that I happened to be looking at that very spot, and that I was quick in my observation; for in a moment he saw the blunder he had made, and slipped back down the stem, too late for his secret—I had him down in black ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... by the Milanese doctors. They demanded to be told why this man, who was not good enough to practise by their sanction, was good enough to lay down the laws for the residue of the medical world. They heaped blunder upon blunder, and held him up to ridicule with all the wealth of invective characteristic of the learned controversy of the age. Cardan was deeply humbled and annoyed. "For my opponents, seizing the opportunity, took occasion to assail me through the ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... to ask you 'why?' mon cher," said Bolkonski. "I confess I do not understand: perhaps there are diplomatic subtleties here beyond my feeble intelligence, but I can't make it out. Mack loses a whole army, the Archduke Ferdinand and the Archduke Karl give no signs of life and make blunder after blunder. Kutuzov alone at last gains a real victory, destroying the spell of the invincibility of the French, and the Minister of War does not even care to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... hear my voice speaking down by the sea, being thyself in the forest upon the mountain? surely thou liest, seeing that the murmur of the waves would make that impossible." This angered the old dragon, and seeking to get out of the blunder she fell still deeper into it, for she said, "I saw thee move thy lips, and from that I knew that thou didst call upon thy paramour the devil!" for my child straightway replied, "Oh, thou ungodly woman! thou saidst thou wert in the forest when ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... speed with the ships to Santiago, where the new fleet was fitting out. On appearing before Velasquez, he had no thanks for all the trouble he had been at, and was even abused for not having made a settlement, though he had acted exactly according to his instructions. This was a capital blunder in Velasquez, as he seemed resolved to find a person fitted both for making discoveries and of betraying him by setting up for himself. One would have imagined that a man of so much good sense as Velasquez certainly had, would have had ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... decided inclination for Stratton's society, and when he came to know her better he found her frank, breezy, and delightfully companionable. He knew perfectly well that unless he wanted to take a chance of making some tremendous blunder he ought to avoid any prolonged conversation with the lady. But she was so charming that every now and then he flung prudence to the winds—and usually ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... Not at all," said the judge. "That was a blunder, indeed. I merely told him I wanted to see you. I wanted to see if you could throw any light on the robbing of ...
— The Boy Scouts Patrol • Ralph Victor
... against his brother for his share in the fracas of a few nights before, since, when once his furious gusts of temper had passed, he was no malevolently minded man. Indeed he was glad that Foy had come back safe from his dangerous adventure, only he wished that he would not blunder into the bedroom and interrupt his delightful occupation of listening, while the beautiful Elsa read him romance ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Persia, China, as well as among the Slavs, Scandinavians, etc. If Sophocles did introduce this notion into his tragedy (and there is no reason for doubting it except the unwarranted assumption that he was too great a genius to make such a blunder), he did it in a bungling way, for inasmuch as Antigone's brother is dead she cannot benefit her family by favoring him at the expense of her betrothed; and moreover, her act of sacrificing herself in order to secure the rest of a dear ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... not the clear-cut blunder of which I spoke. The real blunder is this. Mr. Wells deserves a tiara of crowns and a garland of medals for all kinds of reasons. But if I were restricted, on grounds of public economy, to giving Mr. Wells only one medal ob cives servatos, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... forth with it upon a wrathful visit to the erring Shears, when a breathless messenger from him arrived with another parcel, and a note of explanation and apology, to the effect that by some unfortunate blunder the wrong suit had been sent home, and Mr Shears would feel greatly obliged if we would ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... sometimes took a wagon and made a week's hunt, returning with eight or ten deer carcasses, and perhaps an elk or a mountain sheep as well. I never became more than a fair hunter, and at times I had most exasperating experiences, either failing to see game which I ought to have seen, or committing some blunder in the stalk, or failing to kill when I fired. Looking back, I am inclined to say that if I had any good quality as a hunter it was that of perseverance. "It is dogged that does it" in hunting as in many other things. Unless in wholly exceptional ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves; the old animal hate moved them to trouble one another; the Law held them back from a brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... under the leadership of Calhoun, came presently to regard the Missouri arrangement as a capital blunder on its part, and from the standpoint of that section this conclusion seems strictly logical. For the location of a slave line upon the Louisiana territory operated in fact as a decided check to the expansion of slavery as a social rival and a political power at one and the same time, ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... Howarth et ther's bahn ta be sum play-acters at t'Fleece Inn Garritt, and ther bahn ta act 'Catherine fra t'Padding Can, er Who's ta tak t'screws;' ta be follered bi 'Alpaca, er t'smashing up o' t'engines.'" But Billy's blunder was perhaps for the best; for, seeing that this was about the time when hand woolcombing was on the decline, and engines were being brought out, the people had an idea that the announcement had some startling reference to their trade. Myself, I could not help but laugh ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... veins; so the Prussians were there at last; they had sat and waited two days for them to come up, and then had turned and fled. The most ignorant among the men had felt their cheeks tingle for very shame as, in their dull way, they recognized the idiocy that had prompted that enormous blunder, that imbecile delay, that trap into which they had walked blindfolded; the light cavalry of the IVth army feinting in front of Bordas' brigade and halting and neutralizing, one by one, the several corps of the army of Chalons, solely to give the Crown Prince time to hasten up with the IIId ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... cover up ignorance, and "the constant trembling lest some blunder should expose one's emptiness," are pitiable. Short cuts and abridged methods are the demand of the hour. But the way to shorten the road to success is to take plenty of time to lay in your reserve power. You can't stop to forage your provender as the army advances; if you do the enemy will ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Every war is a blunder; every battle a blot of shame upon human nature; and the greatest wisdom a successful belligerent can shew, even when he has been forced into the fray by his beaten antagonist, is to get out of it as fast as he can. But some wars are viewed, not as they ought ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... home! No-body home! Had to spill the beans, you simps! Nobody home a-tall! Had to shoot a man—got us all in wrong, you simps! Nobody home!" He waggled his head and flapped his hands in drunken self-righteousness, because he had not possessed a gun and therefore could not have committed the blunder ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... murmured, looking at the distant hills. 'There seems to be a fate in all this; I get out of the frying-pan into the fire. What a recompense to you for your goodness! The fact is, I was out of health and out of spirits, so I- -but no more of that. Now instantly to repair this tremendous blunder that we have ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... the colossal blunder of the Lusitania, there existed in the deep undercurrents of German politics a most remarkable whirlpool of discord, in which the policy of von Tirpitz was a severe tax on the patience of von Bethmann-Hollweg and the Foreign Office, for it was they ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... magnificent talents, both of them, but men of small wisdom, who did more harm than good to themselves and to others! It is a lamentable existence which wears itself out in maintaining a first antagonism, or a first blunder. The greater a man's intellectual power, the more dangerous is it for him to make a false start and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... elsewhere, I catch him peeping furtively at me as if he were frightened out of his life I should ferret out some secret. It would be deplorable if now that we have got so near the end of the Compact, we should be held up by some idiotic blunder—some nonsensical love affair of his. I wonder whether it's Rosenberg or some other girl. Will ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... advantages were with their opponents. A Union victory was so much achieved toward final and complete success; a Confederate victory only operated to postpone the subjugation of the Rebels for a few days, or perhaps weeks. We could afford to blunder, while they could not; and the prospect of the gallows made the brains of Davis and Lee uncommonly clear, and caused them to plan skilfully and to strike boldly, in order that they might get out and keep out of the road that leads ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... wanted to watch him all the time, which distracted me, I suppose, for once I called General Phillips "Mister!" It so happened, too, that just that instant there was not a sound in the room, so everyone heard the blunder. General Phillips straightened back in his chair, and his little son gave a smothered giggle—for which he should have been sent to bed at once. But that was not all! That soldier, who had been so dignified and ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... he lowered it towards his head cast a last look down the room, and—there stood Marguerite. She had entered just in time, it seemed to him, but just too late, in fact, to see and understand the blunder. Oh, agony! They bowed to each other with majestic faintness, and then each from each was gone. The girl at the desk ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... for myself at present,' he said; 'I get on her nerves. She was in love with that black-haired, enfant du siecle,—or rather, she prefers to assume that she was—and I haven't given her time to forget him. A serious blunder, and I deserve to suffer for it. Very well, then, I retire, and I ask you and Helen to keep watch. Don't let her go. Make yourselves nice to her; and, in fact, spoil me a little now I am on the high road to forty, as you used to spoil ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... right," Celestina declared, making haste to repair her blunder. "I've plenty of time to lay it myself. 'Twas only that when I saw you settin' up before it I thought mebbe you'd built it ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... holding to her for an instant. But Mary—If a curtain had been let down before me, pictured with the future as it has since developed, I could not have seen more plainly what her position would be, if attention were once directed towards her. So, in the vain endeavor to cover up my blunder, I began to lie. Forced to admit that a shadow of disagreement had been lately visible between Mr. Leavenworth and one of his nieces, I threw the burden of it upon Eleanore, as the one best able to bear it. The consequences were more serious ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... would even have extended his sympathy, except that his first efforts in this direction had not been received in the spirit he thought they should have been. If Buckner's statement was correct, there had been a cruel blunder on the part of Eleanor's counsel; yet unless he was certain of his ground, Gorham could not comprehend his daring to place himself in so dangerous a position. Already the machinery was in motion to settle this point, but so far the telegrams from the Colorado lawyers ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... just Everybride and Everygroom. Their hearts sang and the manse was more gorgeous than any mansion on earth, and all the world was good and sweet, and they couldn't possibly ever make any kind of a mistake or blunder, for love was guiding them,—and ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... answered; "if you don't mind, I'll sit here a while longer and think things over, Lester. Perhaps I'll blunder on ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... kinsmanship, camaraderie, and patronage. He is no longer either a county magistrate or an honorary citizen. He has done with all those qualities which make up a man's social amiability. Here Vertessy is only a soldier, a rigorous, inexorable commandant, who never overlooks a blunder, and never ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... dramatist tries to make him talk turgidly, about seeking for "an archangel with purple wings" who shall be worthy of his lady. But a lad in love would never talk in this mock heroic style; there is no period at which the young male is more sensitive and serious and afraid of looking a fool. This is a blunder; but there is another much bigger and blacker. It is completely and disastrously false to the whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... powerful speech at a special session of the Greek parliament. The accusation against him was not only that during the late war he had sacrificed Greek interests to Bulgaria but that he had committed a fatal blunder in joining her in the campaign against Turkey. His reply was that since Greece could not stand alone he had to seek allies in the Balkans, and that it was not his fault if the choice had fallen on Bulgaria. He had endeavored to maintain ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... Civil War a tactical blunder of another kind, due to the impetuosity of the commander of the Independent Cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, prevented the Southern commander from obtaining a great strategical advantage ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... embassy to him. And even Cicero at first consented to it, and allowed himself to be nominated with Servilius and three other senators, all of consular rank, but on more mature reflection he was convinced that he had been guilty of a blunder, and that the object of Antonius and his friends was only to gain time for Ventidius to join him with his three legions. Accordingly, at the next meeting of the senate, he delivered the following speech, retracting his former sanction of the proposed embassy. And he spoke so strongly ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... he tells us that the cow sheds her horns every two years; a most palpable errour, which Goldsmith has faithfully transferred into his book. It is wonderful that Buffon, who lived so much in the country, at his noble seat, should have fallen into such a blunder. I suppose he has confounded the cow with the deer. BOSWELL. Goldsmith says:—'At three years old the cow sheds its horns and new ones arise in their place, which continue as long as it lives.' Animated Nature, iii. 12. This statement remains in the second edition. Johnson said that the ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... conduct of the victor toward the vanquished, in 1859; but, if we judge from what we know, which is all that any monarch can demand of the formers of opinion, Napoleon III. was guilty of a monstrous political and military blunder when he forced a truce ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... deception upon her. She had a clear idea of how she meant to proceed. It was her purpose to march boldly upon Orleans by the north bank of the Loire. She gave that order to her generals. They said to themselves, "The idea is insane—it is blunder No. 1; it is what might have been expected of this child who is ignorant of war." They privately sent the word to the Bastard of Orleans. He also recognized the insanity of it—at least he thought he did—and privately ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... M. Zola left Paris, and throughout his sojourn in London and its immediate neighbourhood, there was little if any skill shown in the matter of keeping his movements secret. In point of fact, blunder upon blunder was committed. A first mistake was made in going to an hotel like the Grosvenor; a second in openly promenading some of the most frequented of the London streets; and a third in declining to make the slightest ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... instinct[4101]; thus preserving and humoring it; find room for it and its usefulness; let it have full play; getting all the service it is capable of rendering, and especially not twist or release it.—In this respect, any blunder might prove disastrous; and in every statute for each society, for each of the human vessels which gather together and serve as a retinue of individual vessels, there are two capital errors. On the one hand, if the statute, in fact and practically, is or becomes too grossly unjust, if ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... city Nasirabad, as the Trigonometrical Survey maps do, there is no excuse whatever for this, which is a mere blunder—not the only one, unfortunately—and attributes to the city the name of a small ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... he did, this was inevitable. Weber had bought Steinberger with hard cash; that was matter of history. The present government he did not even require to buy, having founded it by his intrigues, and introduced the premier to Samoa through the doors of his own office. And the effect of the initial blunder was kept alive by the chatter of the clerks in bar-rooms, boasting themselves of the new government and prophesying annihilation to all rivals. The time of raising a tax is the harvest of the merchants; it is the time when copra will be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pursuing the Russian; why he could not be killed in Siberia; why he must not be killed or arrested if seen now, until he, Hanada, said the word. He had not told why he thought that the Secret Service men had committed a blunder in offering a reward for ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... time; for already a law had been enacted to this effect, that if a tribune could not find time for executing in his tribunate what he had promised, the people might give the office to him again in preference to anyone else. This has been pronounced to be a blunder on Appian's part, but without adequate reason. It was in fact the natural and inevitable law which Caius would insist on first, and he would plead for it precisely on the grounds which Appian states. It is also clear that such a law once passed made virtual ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... is the reclining form, that the pianist thinks her father must be sleeping. Turning on the music-stool to get a view of his countenance, and to satisfy herself as to his state, she makes a false note, when, quick as the blunder, the brown wig turns upon the pillow—the furrowed face is presented to her observation, and an electric brightness fills the big black eyes, as the veteran, with deep rolling tones, reproves her carelessness:—"What are you doing?—what are you doing? I had ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... to the frontier—in fact, we had no certain news until three days ago, when we heard of the battle, his death, and the embarkation of the army, and its sailing for England. The last was a terrible blunder." ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... fleet only numbered about eighty sail, including a squadron which had been recalled from the Mediterranean. The "Generals-at-Sea," as they were called, were Monk and Rupert. They began by committing the great blunder of dividing their force. Rupert was detached with twenty ships to keep watch over de Beaufort, a diversion which had serious consequences for the English. The Dutch fleet, consisting of seventy-two men-of-war with twelve frigates, was the most powerful ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... anon." So the Chaplain came in. Now the servants say he is my sweetheart, Because he's always in my chamber, and I always take his part. So, as the devil would have it, before I was aware, out I blunder'd, "Parson" said I, "can you cast a nativity, when a body's plunder'd?" (Now you must know, he hates to be called Parson, like the devil!) "Truly," says he, "Mrs. Nab, it might become you to be more civil; If your money be gone, as a learned Divine says,[12] d'ye see, You are no text ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... wisdom in Napoleon's recipe for saving life in dealing with a mob,—"First fire grape-shot into them; after that, over their heads as much as you like." The position of Mr. Lincoln was already embarrassed when he entered upon office, by what we believe to have been a political blunder in the leaders of the Republican Party. Instead of keeping closely to the real point, and the only point, at issue, namely, the claim of a minority to a right of rebellion when displeased with the result of an election, the bare question of Secession, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... constitution, and almost everything else Roman; it calls for special knowledge as well as a sufficient training in Roman institutions generally. Each of these Roman subjects is like a language with a delicate accidence, which is always presenting the unwary with pitfalls into which they are sure to blunder unless they have a thorough mastery of it. I could mention a book full of valuable thoughts about the relation to Paganism of the early Christian Church, by a scholar at once learned and sympathetic;[4] who when he happens to deal for a moment with ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... in Fred's eyes, which were steadily fixed on her, that he was, on that point, of his mother's opinion. She went on, however, still pretending to blunder. ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... it was necessary for Peggy to begin at the beginning, and in the course of twenty minutes or so, the good man began to understand. As the extent of his blunder gradually dawned upon him, he threw back his head and broke into a hearty guffaw whose enjoyment was contagious. Peggy joined him, and then there was an exultant note in her laughter. Observation had taught her that when a man is laughing, it is ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... their appearance before the walls, Champagny was unwilling to grant them admittance. The addle-brained Oberstein had confessed to him the enormous blunder which he had committed in his midnight treaty, and at the same time ingenuously confessed his intention of sending it to the winds. The enemy had extorted from his dulness or his drunkenness a promise, which his mature and sober ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... make fun of him as you will, he was a scout. He was at once the littlest scout and the biggest scout that ever scouting had known. He boasted and bungled, but out of his bungling came triumph. He fell, oh such falls as he fell! But he always landed right side up. He could save the world with a blunder. And ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... rifle fire, but by the time they had gained this useless and undefended village, hundreds of their number lay wounded and dying in the snow. The carnage and slaughter this day in the enemy's ranks was terrific, resulting from a most stupid military blunder, but it atoned slightly for our losses previous thereto. The valley below us was dotted with pile after pile of enemy dead, the carnage here being almost equal to the terrific fighting later at Vistavka. When he discovered ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... in my opinion can be more unbecoming: for just as if one who professed to teach grammar should speak with impropriety, or a master of music sing out of tune, such conduct has the worst appearance in these men, because they blunder in the very particular with which they profess that they are well acquainted. So a philosopher who errs in the conduct of his life is the more infamous because he is erring in the very thing which he pretends to teach, and, while he lays down rules to regulate ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... where all his passions, ambitions and sentiments are at white heat, will readily throw away the whole game of life in some mad act out of harmony with all he ever did. It matters little whether the needle prick him by accident or blunder or design, he will burst all bounds, and establish again the old truth that each of us will prove himself a fool given perfect opportunity. Nor need the occasion of this revolution be a great one; the most trivial event may ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... allowed to penetrate, in which I had been guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast. That "perfect innocence" ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... insect of which the bee-hunter sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are dull and clumsy compared with the honeybee. Attracted in the fields by the bee-hunter's box, they will come up the wind on the scent and blunder into it in the ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... the reader to fall into the same blunder, with regard to the worthy "Maurice," as my friend Charles O'Malley has done. It is only fair to state that the doctor in the following tale was hoaxing the "dragoon." A braver and a better fellow than Quill never existed, equally beloved by his brother officers, as delighted in for his convivial ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... blame for it, Allan. I thought Mary loved you when you came home this summer; to-night I am sure she loves you. You must have made some great blunder or she would have ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... have made another blunder about Lady Westmoreland and my sister. It is not the Duke of Wellington's money, in particular, that she objects to receiving; she does not intend to sing in private for money at all, anywhere, or on any occasion; which I am very glad of, as, if she did, I think ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Let us suppose his idea was all nonsense; yet your immediate object was to put it out of his head." She suddenly added, "I think your last question was a diplomatic blunder, Mr. Beaumaroy. You must have known what I meant. What was the good of ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... compass of a day's march, but they had seen enough in their two weeks' comradeship to give them confidence in the young officer they never felt for their own and only "Grumbly," who, with all his experience, would often blunder, and Grumbly's blunders told on his troop, otherwise they might not ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... trying to recall exactly what had happened. There was a slight scratch on his hand, and when he automatically touched it with his lips, it made them burn. The lit lamps in the Gray's Inn Road seemed to him a little unsteady, and the passers-by showed a disposition to blunder ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... should march so slowly. The whole thing has been a hideous blunder, and the idea of encumbering a force of four thousand men with something like thirty thousand camp followers, and with a train of no less than nineteen thousand bullocks, to say nothing of other draught animals, is the most preposterous thing I ever heard of. In fact, the whole ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... of this was uncanny. He played, it seemed, a spiritual Blind Man's Buff. On every side of him things filled the air; once and again he would touch them, sometimes he would fancy that he was alone, clear, isolated, when suddenly something again would blunder up against him. And always with him, driving him into the bustle of his fellow men, flinging him, hurling him from one noise to another noise, was the terror of silence. Let him once be alone, once waiting in suspense, and he would hear. . . . What ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... all events, it argues very much indeed in a writer's favour, that the "layman" has managed to write the simplest sentence about a specialty, without some more or less serious blunder. ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... had made a very ridiculous blunder in a French translation that morning. Such a thing was unusual for him, and was such a comical one that it set the others of the class in a roar of laughter. Drake was so extravagantly affected by Alf's blunder that Mr Clare had to stop his laughter, which was half genuine and half ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... to have been reared in a brothel kept by her mother, is prepossessing in appearance. On entering K.'s service S. was continually negligent and careless. This so provoked K. that on one occasion he struck her. She showed great pleasure and confessed that her blunder had been deliberately intended to arouse him to physical violence. At her suggestion K. ultimately consented to thrash her. This operation took place in K.'s office, S. stripping for the purpose, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... strolled past the inn. Filled with amazement, I rose quickly, and went into the street. The door of the astrologer's house was shut; in truth it had not been opened, yet here were my mysterious strangers several yards in front of me! Rubbing my eyes, I wondered if I had made a second blunder! But that was impossible, and the idea not worth considering. While I stood thus, dazed and half-stupefied by the strangeness of the affair, the men had ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... subject was "expressly pretermitted" in the June Platform! Mr. Watkins was in such a hurry to join the Forney, Pierce, and Catholic Democracy, that he did not stop to examine even the Platform which most disgusted him! But this is not the worst blunder which he committed in that speech. He turned to the new Platform, and asked, with an ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... period by period, and scene by scene, his kaleidoscopic past career, his first fatal blunder as a Grand Trunk telegraph operator, when one slip of the wrist brought a gravel train head-on into an Odd Fellows' Excursion special, his summary dismissal from the railroad, and his unhappy flight to New York, his passionate ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Pyecroft quickly, easily, to forestall any blunder by the hapless Matilda—and deftly interposing himself between Jack and Mrs. De ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... "Adonais," begins, "As long as skies are blue," where also there would be a double gain by writing "So long as skies are blue." On page 242 of the first volume of De Quincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by as philosophic a politician as Edmund Burke," in which the critical blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse for the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules, from principle) which determines the use of this small particle ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... a body left the centre to itself, and thereby not only wrecked the concentration at which Rodney aimed, but was out of hand to support his flag and his division, when badly battered by the enemy's fire. This was the great tactical blunder which brought to nought Rodney's patient, wary manoeuvres of the past six hours. To it especially, but not to it alone, he referred in the stinging words of his despatch: "'T is with concern inexpressible, mixt with indignation, that the duty I owe my sovereign ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... not care to trust Walkirk with this affair. It was plain that he did not thoroughly sympathize with me in the project. I was afraid he might make a blunder, or in some way fail me. Any way, this was a matter which I wished ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... baptized "John Joel Jedediah Cleishbotham," or nothing! It was in vain that he remonstrated. Janet was firm, and hunting up Maude's letter, written more than three years before, she bade him write down the name, so as not to make a blunder. But this he refused to do. "He guessed he could remember that horrid name; there was not another like it in Christendom," he said, and on the Sunday morning of which we write he took his baby in his arms, and in a state of great nervous irritability started for church, repeating to himself ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... that as the atom is destructible—as you have seen by our experiments (the last of which resulted in a climax not intended by me)—the whole scheme of what is called creation falls to pieces. As the atom was the first etheric blunder, so the material Universe is the ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... of France—her torn and distracted condition—are mainly due to the blind and foolish method of attempting to force intelligent men to accept a form of religion which in their hearts they do not believe is true. There can be no united people, strong and happy, until the blunder of compelling conscience entirely ceases. He pleads in tenderness and love with both religious parties, Catholics and Evangelicals, to leave the outgrown legalism of Moses and go to the Gospels for a religion which leads into truth and freedom. "O France, France," he ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... to you, Master Gilian!" said Nan. "You have the fine tongue in your head after all. What a pity we have been wasting such a grand opportunity for it here!" and there was an indulgence in her eye, though now and then the numb regret of a blunder made came upon ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... unaffectedly ill-natured or ill-bred as he wished to appear. His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman,—but she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it. It was rather a wish of distinction, she believed, which produced his contemptuous treatment of every body, and his general abuse of every thing before him. It was ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the things they are interested in. Of course the little ones cannot spell on their fingers; but I manage to read their lips. If I do not succeed they resort to dumb show. Sometimes I make a mistake and do the wrong thing. A burst of childish laughter greets my blunder, and the pantomime begins all over again. I often tell them stories or teach them a game, and the winged hours depart and leave us ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... eyes, which were steadily fixed on her, that he was, on that point, of his mother's opinion. She went on, however, still pretending to blunder. ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... to sit and hear her blunder through a chapter; but, when that was finished, the kind aunt tried at some little explanation; after which she set her to write in a copy-book. Mrs. Goodriche dictated what she was to write: it was generally something of what ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... a reason appears. Aside from these greater tragedies of life innumerable things of lesser consequence continually bring to us little miseries and minor heartaches. We most earnestly desire to avoid them but we never see them until they strike us, until in the darkness of our ignorance we blunder upon them. The thing we lack is the spiritual illumination that will enable us to look far and wide, finding the hidden causes of human suffering and revealing the method by which they may be avoided; and if we ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... was uphill work at first. It was found that Adams could blunder on pretty well with the small words, but made sad havoc among the long ones. Still his condition was pronounced hopeful. As to Sally, she seemed to take up the letters at the first sitting, and even began to form some correct notion ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... to regret this blunder of the postmaster on account of the enclosures, some of which I wished to have got to your hands without delay, that they might have undergone the consideration and acting upon which were suggested in the letter accompanying them. On another account I am ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... not meet again through some horrible blunder, Which a merciless Fate must be asked to explain, And I sometimes sit smoking, and wearily wonder If I ever am destined to see you again. Yet wherever the future may possibly find you, To this final request do not answer me Nay, When I ask that this gift of myself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... no reason why we should stay longer," and without sparing himself in the slightest, Bill explained what a blunder had been committed. ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... save that he admitted being tired or having a headache, when she sought to enliven him, to draw him up to her own plane of merriment. He was reminding himself every hour of the night and day that he must make no irretrievable blunder, that he must do nothing to injure his wife needlessly. Appearances were against her, but ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... you to blunder into Klae's body one of these days," he said. "The explanation is quite simple. Klae had been ill for many months, and he knew his time was up. His one desire in life was to go on this expedition with me, and ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... under the blankets. "I forgot to warn Tom to look out for the dogs (but being a Southerner he ought to know enough for that without being told), and I ought not to have said so much in his favor to Mr. Westall. Now that I think of it, that was a fearful blunder, and it may be the means of bringing trouble to me. Well, I can't help it. I detest Tom's principles and would be glad to see them thrashed out of him; but when it comes to hanging him for something he didn't do—that's carrying things just a little too far. There's not a ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... than the French. Here the stranger, let him come from what country he may, and be ever so unacquainted with the people and language, he is sure of a civil reply to any question that he may ask. With the exception of the egregious blunder I have mentioned of the cabman driving me to the Elysee, I was not laughed at once while ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... ma'am. I'd never get it out. Just let me blunder through it out here someways. Yes'm, Aunty Nan, she ain't very well. She's—she's dying, I guess. And she's longing for you night and day. Seems as if she couldn't die in peace without seeing you. She wanted to get ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... teach, a house, an explanation which, he playfully adds, is tautology with a witness. But where did he find authority for the word Caiceach? I answer, nowhere; and the tautology he speaks of was either a creation or a blunder of his own. It is evident to me that the Glossarist to whom he refers is no other than his favourite Cormac; but the latter makes no such blunder, as will appear from the passage which our ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... to have considered the RUDIMENTS of COOKERY quite unworthy of attention. These little delicate distinctions constitute all the difference between a common and an elegant table, and are not trifles to the YOUNG HOUSEKEEPERS who must learn them either from the communication of others or blunder on till their own slowly accumulating ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... laid before him all the papers in the case with praiseworthy frankness. He would even have extended his sympathy, except that his first efforts in this direction had not been received in the spirit he thought they should have been. If Buckner's statement was correct, there had been a cruel blunder on the part of Eleanor's counsel; yet unless he was certain of his ground, Gorham could not comprehend his daring to place himself in so dangerous a position. Already the machinery was in motion to settle this point, but ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... it. By some unaccountable blunder he had made her cry. What was it he had said? Only a minute ago she had been so radiant and smiling. His first thought was of Porter; she must not know. This crying must be stopped before she heard it. Any moment she might enter. Even now ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... chuckle which preceded an invitation to inspect some candidate's egregious blunder; Irving would read and smile quietly, unaware that Barclay was watching him and wondering how appreciative he might be ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... do. It was bad enough before, letting everybody else aboard know that all he has to do is push you over. But it was an awful blunder to let him know it, the ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... with Hungary, committed the immeasurable blunder of calling in the 200,000 Russians who made conquest certain, but the price of whose aid she may still have to pay. Venice, and Venice only, continued to defy her power. Since Novara, the first result of which was the withdrawal of the Sardinian Commissioners, who had taken over ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... the Imperial-revolutionary system. There are many blunders in the above extract as we read it; blundering metaphors, blundering arguments, and blundering assertions; but this is surely the grandest blunder of all; and one wonders at the blindness of the legislator and historian who can advance such a parallel. And what are we to say of the legacy of the dying revolution to Napoleon? Revolutions do not die, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... moistened with a frothy liquid, became glutinous, and was drawn out like a riband. This bee then attached all the wax it could concoct to the vault of the hive, and went its way. A second now succeeded, and did the like; a third followed, but owing to some blunder did not put the wax in the same line with its predecessor; upon which another bee, apparently sensible of the defect, removed the displaced wax, and carrying it to the former heap, deposited it there, exactly in the order and direction ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... rose to her feet. Durrance rose with her. He was still not so much disheartened as conscious of a blunder. He had put his case badly; he should never have given her the opportunity to think that marriage would be an ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... Billy, "the parson's showed some sense. He might's well do the 'Harbor,' 'cause that's only one place an' he can't blunder much—seems if. You take the streets, same's he said; and I—if you'll put a needle an' thread through me, bime-by, after he's found, I'll go find him an' call it square. I'll begin to the lowest down end the city hospitals ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... horrified eyes. Maybe I was looking the same. It was plain enough now. He'd planned to poison the plants and drive us back. Murder of Hendrix had been a blunder when he'd thought it wasn't working properly. ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... like some of those hollow images of the gods that one hears of in barbarian temples—looked at in front, fair, but when you get behind them you find a hollow, full of dust and spiders' webs and unclean things. Be sure of this, every sin is a blunder. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... know all that—so far as it's true," said Beth with startling candor, "but we know it isn't true at all, and you've got to confess that you made some ridiculous blunder or else ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the difficult question of imposition and personation by spirits. Thus a soul, or a spirit, may give itself out for a god, and exhibit the appropriate phantasmagoria: may boast and deceive (ii. 10). This is the result of some error or blunder in the ceremony of evocation. {69} A bad or low spirit may thus enter, disguised as a demon or god, and may utter deceitful words. But all arts, says our guide, are liable to errors, and the 'sacred art' must not be judged by its occasional imperfections. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... its nature, must be dealt with as a fact of some social importance, so long as it is believed by large numbers to be essential to the right ordering of life. Whether true or false, beliefs are facts—mental and social facts, and the scheme of things which leaves them out of account is making a blunder of the most ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... curious that Whitlocke, noting the new appointment of Meadows, under March 1655-6, enters it thus: "Mr. Meadows was going for Denmark, agent for the Protector." Meadows did go to Denmark, but not till a good while afterwards; and the blunder of Denmark at this date for Portugal is one of the many proofs that Whitlocke's memorials are not all strictly contemporary, but often combinations of reminiscences and afterthoughts with the materials of an ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... strata above him, and, whatever the enraged democrats may say, this in itself is a great advantage. One can see from his "Education" that his material difficulties were so slight that he could take them cheerfully, even in our world where poverty is both a blunder and a crime. This in itself tends toward happiness. Henry Adams, it is true, suffered terribly in his heart. His description of the death of his sister is heart-rending; he does not dwell on the worst of his griefs. No man had a more agreeable circle ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Mississippian gal she'll flare-up like a scorched feather, and return the compliment by bruising your sky-lights, or may-be giving the quid pro quo in the shape of a blunder-buss. Baltimore girls, more beautiful than any in the world, all meet you with a half-smiling, half-saucy, come-kiss-me-if-you-dare kind of a look, but you must be careful of the first essay. After that no difficulty will arise, unless you be caught attempting ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... at me, and said with equal sharpness, "You don't belong about here." I was alarmed, and thought I had betrayed myself. A fip in Maryland was six and a quarter cents, called fourpence in Massachusetts. But no harm came from the "fi'penny-bit" blunder, and I confidently and cheerfully went to work with my saw and buck. It was new business to me, but I never did better work, or more of it, in the same space of time on the plantation for Covey, the negro-breaker, than I did ...
— Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass • Frederick Douglass
... cockpit before the Speaker's desk, demanding firmly to be heard—so firmly that Mr. Harper, with a glance at him, sits down again; so firmly that Mr. Speaker Doby, hypnotized by an eye, makes the blunder that will eventually cost him ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... themselves abruptly, and he turned away. The nurse, watching, felt he was satisfied that no blunder had occurred within the house. Brenton, though, knew differently. Watching the doctor, he was well aware that, in the doctor's mind, there were no more doubts as to the person who had made the fatal substitution than as if, like Brenton's self, his keen old eyes had rested ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... renewed carelessness, and an error crept into one of the reports she was copying. The error was slight, but it brought her a sharp reprimand from Mr. Troy. It was the second time, he reminded her, that she had made that blunder. At the reproof the girl's face flushed ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... For a fashionable beauty there is no great difference between an armchair and a throne. The minor actors are not so accustomed to their new position. Nothing is more amusing than the embarrassment of the courtiers when they have to answer the Emperor's questions. They begin with a blunder; then, in correcting themselves, they fall into still worse confusion; ten times a minute was repeated, Sire, General, Your Majesty, Citizen, First Consul. Constant, the Emperor's valet de chambre, has given us ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... of the Goths, has been laid hold of by legend and by poetry. Southey wrote his poem on the theme, and Scott his "Vision of Don Roderic," an odd blunder in the title, as don was not used prior to the ninth century. Roderic ascended the throne of the Goths in Spain in 709. According to the legend he seduced the daughter of Julian, Count of the Gothic possessions in Africa. She complained to her father, and he in revenge invited the Moors, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... staircases, the very place for a wet afternoon. They are decorated like second-class waiting-rooms and lead to a lot of rooms like third-class waiting-rooms; and at every corner there is a policeman; but this only adds to the excitement. Besides, at any moment you may blunder into some very secret waiting-room ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... Aragonese to their sovereign on his accession, "Nos que valemos tanto como vos," etc., frequently quoted by historians, rests on the authority of Antonio Perez, the unfortunate minister of Philip II., who, however good a voucher for the usages of his own time, has made a blunder in the very sentence preceding this, by confounding the Privilege of Union with one of the Laws of Soprarbe, which shows him to be insufficient, especially as he is the only, authority for this ancient ceremony. See Antonio Perez, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... the house. Yes, it is handsome, grand. Youth and age together did not make any blunder of it. There is the tower, that was to be his study and library and place of resort generally. What crude dreams he had in those days! Science and poesy, art and history, were all a sad jumble in his brain, and now he has found his ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... because the cup is absolutely non-existent. It is merely an experience of the infinite, having no permanence, liable to be shattered at any instant. It is in the claiming of reality and permanence for the four walls of his personality, that man makes the vast blunder which plunges him into a prolonged series of unfortunate incidents, and intensifies continually the existence of his favorite forms of sensation. Pleasure and pain become to him more real than the great ocean of which he is a part and where ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... of Representatives), passed a series of resolutions, denying the authority of the government to declare martial law, such as existed in this city under the administration of Gen. Winder. It was a great blunder, and alienated thousands. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... in intrigue, whom he will find a pretty difficult lot. He will sink in the estimation of the delegates who are not within the inner circle, and what will be still more disastrous will be the loss of confidence among the peoples of the nations represented here. A grievous blunder has been made." ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... If your judgment agrees That he did not embark Like an ignorant spark, Or a troublesome lout, To puzzle and bother, and blunder about, Give him a shout, At his first setting out! And all pull away With a hearty huzza For success to the play! Send him away, Smiling and gay, Shining and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Hay, being over-confident because of his superior numbers, blundered at the outset. Instead of attacking first with his infantry, he placed his horsemen in front, and ordered an assault. Cavalier was quick to take advantage of this blunder. He ordered only a few of his men to fire, and this drew a volley from the advancing horsemen, which did little damage to the sheltered troops, but emptied the horsemen's weapons. Instantly Cavalier ordered a charge and a volley, and the horsemen, with empty pistols, gave way, Cavalier pursuing ...
— Strange Stories from History for Young People • George Cary Eggleston
... on one paddle-wheel and then on the other from the angry guardian breakers, which seem sworn foes of boats and passengers. Again and again are we knocked aside by huge billows, as though the poor little tug were a walnut-shell; again and again do we recover ourselves, and blunder bravely on, sometimes with but one paddle in the water, sometimes burying our bowsprit in a big green wave too high to climb, and dashing right through it as fast as if we shut our eyes and went at everything. The spray flies high over our heads, G—— and I are drenched over and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... helped to any thing in them dishes," pointing to the finger glasses, which now for the first time appeared in Rice Corner! The half suppressed mirth of the ladies convinced the widow that she'd made a blunder, and perfectly disgusted with "new-fangled fashions" she retreated into the kitchen, were she found things more to her taste, and "thanked her stars, she could, if she liked, eat with her fingers, and wipe them on her ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... of Washington that borders on blunder was in refusing to take wages for his work. In doing this, he visited untold misery on others, who, not having married rich widows, tried to follow his example and floundered into woeful debt and disgrace; and thereby were lost to useful society and ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... from his interview with Dawes, reporting that nothing could have been in better taste or feeling than Dawes's view of the matter. As far as the Rector was concerned—and he had told Mr. Barron so—the story was ridiculous, the mere blunder of a crazy woman; and, for the rest, what had they to do in Upcote with ferreting into other people's private affairs? He had locked up the letter in case it might some time be necessary to hand it to the police, and didn't intend himself to say a word to anybody. If the thing went any further, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of his pride, Till wooed by danger, his yet weeping bride! 220 Oh, France! retaken by a single march, Whose path was through one long triumphal arch! Oh bloody and most bootless Waterloo! Which proves how fools may have their fortune too, Won half by blunder, half by treachery: Oh dull Saint Helen! with thy gaoler nigh— Hear! hear Prometheus[294] from his rock appeal To Earth,—Air,—Ocean,—all that felt or feel His power and glory, all who yet shall hear A name eternal as the rolling year; 230 He teaches them the lesson taught so long, So oft, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... least enlightenment in regard to their contents, he presently wearied of his inaction and turned back towards the highway, comforting himself with the reflection that in a few short hours he would have her to himself when nothing but a blunder on his part should hinder him from sounding her young mind and getting such answers to his questions as the affair in which he was so ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... like a thousand other boys of fourteen, all legs, blunder, and bluster. Indeed the family called him the "Blunderbuss," and always expected to see him tumble over the chairs, bump against the tables, and knock down any small articles near him. He bragged a good deal about what he could do, but seldom did any thing to prove it, was not ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... very disconsolate Condition. This Lady must, doubtless, said they to themselves, be the Queen of Babylon: And without listning to her Complaints, convey'd her instantly to my Husband Moabdar. Their gross Blunder at first incens'd his Majesty to the last Degree; but after he had view'd the Lady with an attentive Eye, he found she was extremely pretty, and was soon pacify'd. Her Name was Missouf. I have been since ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... for that.' I'm telling you, sir, what Johnson told me. 'He looked close down at the shawls, as if he were short-sighted, though he could see as far as any man. "I beg your pardon, ladies," said he, "you're right. I am quite wrong. What a stupid blunder to make! And yet they did deceive me. Here, Johnson, take these shawls away. How could you be so stupid? I will fetch the thing you want myself, ladies." So I went with him. He chose out three or four shawls, of the nicest patterns, from the very same ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... above Green Fancy, but a long way off to the right of it. My bump of direction tells me that we have been going to the right all of the time. Admitting that to be the case, I am afraid to retrace our steps. The Lord only knows what we might blunder into." ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... Grifona: "No," I said, "since I had been threatened with a regale of hams and Florence wine, I had dropped it." My Lady Granville said, "You was afraid of being thought interested."—"Yes," said the queen-mother, with all the importance with which she used to blunder out pieces of heathen mythology, "I think it was very ministerial." Don't you think that the Minister word came in as awkwardly as I did into their room? The Minister is most gracious to me; he has returned my ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... afterwards," he said, "but at the moment, I could not but think of you; how you suit it out here." Now she coloured and drew back. Then she heard close by her: "You must not be angry, it always happens that when we wish to repair a blunder, we make another." ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... complicated. She showed a decided inclination for Stratton's society, and when he came to know her better he found her frank, breezy, and delightfully companionable. He knew perfectly well that unless he wanted to take a chance of making some tremendous blunder he ought to avoid any prolonged conversation with the lady. But she was so charming that every now and then he flung prudence to the winds—and ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... went through the ceremony of guard mounting without a single blunder, I was not at all at ease. I inspected the front rank, while my junior inspected the rear. I was sorely displeased to observe some of the cadets change color as they tossed up their pieces for my inspection, and that they watched me as I went through that operation. Some of them were from the ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... objects of wonder daily diminish, and he is continually finding out some very simple cause for some great matter of marvel. Thus have I chanced, in my peregrinations about this great metropolis, to blunder upon a scene which unfolded to me some of the mysteries of the book-making craft, and at once put an end to ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... improvements, more efficient and profitable laborers. They fail to see that the strength of the enemy will lie henceforth more frequently in deception than in repression. But even this is not their most fatal blunder. In attacking individualistic and reactionary rather than collectivistic and progressive capitalism, these Socialists are not only wasting their energies by assaulting a moribund power, but are training their forces to use weapons ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... expenditure in Ireland, they have now ceased to contribute a penny, and are a little in debt. As we shall see, when I come to a closer examination of finance, the main factor in producing this result has been the Old Age Pensions. The application of the British scale, unmodified, to Ireland is the kind of blunder which the Union encourages. Ireland, where wages and the standard of living are far lower than in England, does not need pensions on so high a scale, and already suffers too much from benevolent paternalism. It was an unavoidable blunder, given a joint ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... Lambert remonstrated with me as you have done, madam," George rejoins, with a laugh, "I made this same defence which I am making to you. I said I offered to the Prince the best soldier in the family, and the two gentlemen allowed that my blunder at least had some excuse. Who knows but that they may set me right with his Royal Highness? The taste I have had of battles has shown me how little my genius inclines that way. We saw the Scotch play which everybody is talking about ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I pondered upon it as much as I did upon what the teacher said to me. In introducing Swartboy to his readers he made use of this expression: "No visible change was observable in Swartboy's countenance." Now, it occurred to me that if a man of his education could make such a blunder as that and still write a book, I ought to be able to do it, too. I went home that very day and began a story, "The Old Guide's Narrative," which was sent to the New York Weekly, and came back, respectfully declined. It was written on both sides of the sheets but ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Boston, were confused in this comment. The one, who had recently been South, but who did not preach the sermon, was read a severe lecture, because after partaking of the hospitality of the Southern people, he had spoken in so severe terms of them. It was an amusing blunder, but illustrates the fact that more and more even the Southern editor is coming to feel the importance of Northern criticism. It is a very hopeful sign. It is sometimes said that time will settle these monstrous inequalities that prevail in the South, but time never ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 6, June, 1890 • Various
... Longstreet. He also started another division a day later, but our attack having commenced before it reached Knoxville Bragg ordered it back. It had got so far, however, that it could not return to Chattanooga in time to be of service there. It is possible this latter blunder may have been made by Bragg having become confused as to what was going on on our side. Sherman had, as already stated, crossed to the north side of the Tennessee River at Brown's Ferry, in full view of Bragg's troops from Lookout Mountain, a few days before the attack. They then disappeared behind ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... always going on—we had audiences as though they were matinees—and they afforded much amusement to us as well as the spectators when we made our corrections or abused one another for some egregious blunder. This, of course, did not include Mathews, who coached us from an improvised royalty box, where he graciously acted as George IV., got up in a wonderful Georgian costume for the occasion. George was so good that he diverted ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... me a big brown bob-cat, and you said I looked like I'd slept in the Hondo 'royo all my life. I know I looked it, too. I'll forgive you if you will excuse my blunder to-day. What became of that boy, Marcos? Have you ever seen him since you ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... Lazare was quite red. He felt that he had just committed a blunder. He had imagined that this was not my first meeting with the young girl, and here he gave me a certainty, when as yet I only dared dream of a hope. He held his tongue now; it was I ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... in his exasperation, was guilty of the colossal blunder of showing this letter and allowing it to be copied. His indignation drove him to ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... persons on the train. A dozen of these, finding we were going to walk back to Paris, proposed to join us. The night was growing dark, and we pushed on. There was no woman afoot but Hermione. "Madame" they called her, evidently taking her for my wife, but by no word or smile did she notice the blunder. After a while she accepted my arm, drawing up her skirts by means of loops or pins. We had one lantern among us, and from time to time its glare permitted me to see her dainty feet growing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... happy with her husband, and a bond of mutual sympathy drew the composer to her. After the death of her husband, she persuaded Haydn to sign a promise to marry her if his wife should die, but the composer afterward repudiated the agreement, very likely not wishing to repeat his first matrimonial blunder. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... then remembering the Doctor's relationship with the Van Dorns, colored and tried to cover his blunder with: "Just boys, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... taken for granted. On one point he must be firm. From the beginning he must assume the necessity of her renouncing her recently acquired family. He could say and with truth that children made him nervous. But to postpone the settlement of the difficulty until after the wedding would be a fatal blunder. When women felt sure of a man, they sometimes developed a disagreeable tenacity in holding to their own way. Altogether on this early morning drive, Justin's difficulties dwindled almost to imperceptible points while his blessings loomed large, a state of ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... group of gilded equestrian statues, placed by the present Metellus on the Capitol, a statue of Africanus with the name of Serapio inscribed under it, I thought it a mistake of the workman. I now see that it is an error of Metellus's. What a shocking historical blunder! For that about Flavius and the Fasti, if it is a blunder, is one shared in by all, and you were quite right to raise the question. I followed the opinion which runs through nearly all historians, as is often the case with Greek writers. For example, do they not ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... my elevated position enjoyed a first-rate view of the race which ensued. Both were heavy weights, and at first Maignan gained no ground. But when a couple of hundred yards had been covered Fresnoy had the ill-luck to blunder into some heavy ground, and this enabling his pursuer, who had time to avoid it, to get within two-score paces of him, the race became as exciting as I could wish. Slowly and surely Maignan, who had chosen the Cid, reduced the distance between ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... is presented to us in the psychology of primitive man. Each stage of theistic belief grows out of the proceeding stage, and if it can be shown that the beginning of this evolution arose in a huge blunder, I quite fail to see how any subsequent development can convert this unmistakable blunder into a demonstrable truth." ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Mr. Carleton was there. Fleda sat a little apart from the rest, industriously bending over a complicated piece of embroidery belonging to Constance and in which that young lady had made a great blunder which she declared her patience unequal to the task of rectifying. The conversation went gayly forward among the others; Fleda taking no part in it beyond an involuntary one. Mr. Carleton's part was rather reserved ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... farmer plowing land, his gun and powder horn leaning against a newly cut stump, a mounted Indian, surprised at the sight of the plow, lance in hand, fleeing toward the setting sun, with the Latin motto, "Quae sursum volo videre," ("I wish to see what is above"). A blunder was made by the engraver, in substituting the word "Quo" for "Quae," in the motto, which destroyed its meaning. Some time after, it was changed to the French motto, "L'Etoile du Nord" ("Star of the North"), and thus remains until ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... made a bad blunder, which I attempted to rectify by reaching Buffalo that night; but Tom Barrett had won the game. I was arrested at Fort Erie, handcuffed, jailed, tried, convicted of attempted assault and illicit whiskey-trading on the Grand River Indian Reserve—and spent the next five ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... And, what is a wiser and better thing, Can keep the living from ever needing Such an unnatural, strange proceeding, By showing conclusively and clearly That death is a stupid blunder merely, And not a necessity of our lives. My being here is accidental; The storm, that against your casement drives, In the little village below waylaid me. And there I heard, with a secret delight, Of your maladies physical ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... set trash of phrase, Ineffably, legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile. Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of endless ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... difficult passage attracts more than usual of a translator's attention, and if he fails there, it is either because the difficulty cannot be overcome, or because he cannot overcome it. Mere inadvertence or sleepiness may sometimes cause a translator to blunder, when he would not have blundered if any friend had been ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... to make amends for his blunder of a moment before. "Shall I send the bank watchmen to go on each floor in turn and ask everybody to ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... to go back to the old treasurer, and explain to him his blunder. He was already so confused with age, besides a natural want of punctuality, that she would have had some difficulty in making him understand it. She saw that in an instant. And then it was such a bit of money! and then the image of a larger allowance of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... that infernal blunder with the widow—confound her!—that is, I mean of course, bless her! It's all the same, you know. To-day you behold the miserable state to which I am reduced. To-morrow I will get a reply from her. Of course, she will consent to ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... erect, with this end in view, I found the undertaking even a more serious task than my fears had led me to imagine. On each side of the narrow passage arose a complete wall of various heavy lumber, which the least blunder on my part might be the means of bringing down upon my head; or, if this accident did not occur, the path might be effectually blocked up against my return by the descending mass, as it was in front ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... closed upon him. Never told him she'd got a cat! of course she hadn't! What a fool he had been to make such a blunder—what ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... discussion of the treaty of Paris; he missed both. So far as the war was concerned, he never had an idea beyond a little cheap renown as a paper colonel of volunteers; so far as the treaty was concerned, he made the unpardonable blunder of playing into the hands of his opponents, and leaving the sound and conservative sentiment of the country without ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... trend in the process of evolution. This animistic explanation of phenomena is a form of the fallacy which the logicians knew by the name of ignava ratio. For the purposes of industry or of science it counts as a blunder in the apprehension and valuation of facts. Apart from its direct industrial consequences, the animistic habit has a certain significance for economic theory on other grounds. (1) It is a fairly reliable indication of the presence, and to some ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... make restitution. And in order to make restitution, to be kind and helpful and remedial, he must retain the management of Irish affairs in his benevolent hands. In order to expiate the crimes of the past he must repeat the basal blunder that was the cause and source of them. For this kind of sympathy we have only to say, in a somewhat vulgar phrase, that we have no use whatever. The Englishman who ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... with present fact, and one's morality consists in sheer revolt all along the line. The whole matter is in confusion. You have to accept Mrs. Walker's and Mrs. Gordon's view of the case, plainly and simply, or you get off into a sort of morass and blunder ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... affair—whom he would want to show some attention, and I must take charge of Miss Gage myself, and try to find her other partners. She drilled me in the duties of my position until I believed that I was letter-perfect, and then she said that she supposed I would commit some terrible blunder that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... And this is the world's supreme need to-day; more than our eloquence, or our knowledge, or our wealth, or all else besides, it needs our love. True, even love may sometimes err; but the cure for love's mistakes is just more love; we often blunder because we do not love enough. God help us all that, like Whittier, we may live and die, giving ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... pilot was on edge, and careful to avoid any such blunder. They had been well drilled in all the maneuvers connected with just such a hurried ascent in numbers. Each plane had its regular orbit of action, and must not overstep the bounds on penalty of the ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... hear him!—Well, I'm point blank mad with myself for making this blunder; but how could I help it? As sure as ever I am meaning to do the best thing on earth, ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... of our modern students in architecture have made a strange blunder here, when they imagine that Josephus affirms the entire foundations of the temple or holy house sunk down into the rocky mountain on which it stood no less than twenty cubits, whereas he is clear that they were the foundations of the additional twenty cubits only above the hundred [made perhaps ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... sangversxo—ado. Bloodvessel sangvejno. Bloom flori. Blossom flori. Blot makulo. Blotch skabio. Blotting paper sorba papero. Blow (stroke) bato. Blow blovi. Blouse kitelo. Blow (of flowers) ekflori. Bludgeon bastonego. Blue blua. Bluish dubeblua. Blunder erarego. Blunt malakra. Blunt (mannered) malafabla. Blur malpurigi. Blush rugxigxi. Bluster fanfaroni. Boa boao. Boar porkviro. Board (food) nutrado—ajxo. Board (plank) tabulo. Board logxi. Boarder (house) logxanto. Boarder (school) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Mr. Playmore. When I am an older woman, I may be a wiser woman. In the meantime, I can only trust to your indulgence if I still blindly blunder ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... churches Leave behind sectarian lurches; Jump on board the Car of Freedom, Ere it be too late to need them. Sound the alarm! Pulpits thunder! Ere too late you see your blunder! ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... that your son had been discharged from the S—— Bank on suspicion. I think my boarder has made a mistake; he declares it was Evan Nelson of Hometon, though. Let me hear from you, Caroline, for I'm anxious to know that there has been a blunder." ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... at the season of mutatio caparum, when their eminences are not dressed in scarlet but in purple—therefore propriety absolutely requires that my cardinals should wear purple. This is a capital point, and one on which your common run of writers would be sure to blunder; but as for me I could not go wrong, for I have read the whole Roman ceremonial through, merely that I might be ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... more than Mangan, most of them wouldn't have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... for there was nothing to sneer at. In the same dark hour, however, there was a printer who was (I suppose) so devoted to this Government that he could think of no Gray but Sir Edward Grey. He spelt it "Grey" by a mere misprint, and the whole tale was complete: first blunder, second ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... musket rocket gimlet closet carpet racket hornet mantle camel model parcel ravel panel saddle travel slumber chapel canter pickle lumber cinder printer master whisper helper sister corner barber under lobster farmer scamper winter number tumbler blunder jester pitcher milker farther monster marble cycle uncle thimble jumble grumble stumble tingle tickle speckle candle nimble tumble ankle twinkle single dangle dimple cackle buckle magic picnic handle bundle frolic mimic simple wrinkle merit arctic solid limit habit infant stupid ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... Presbyterian minister, and a Scotch Highlander in his plaid." Langbaine and Aubrey both make the mistake of ascribing the third figure to Teague in "The Committee;" and in spite of Evelyn's clear statement, his editor in a note follows them in their blunder. Planche has reproduced the picture in his "History of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the close of the forenoon school, and Pen had been unnoticed all the previous part of the morning till now, when the Doctor put him on to construe in a Greek play. He did not know a word of it, though little Timmins, his form-fellow, was prompting him with all his might. Pen had made a sad blunder or two when the awful ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... extinct in his soul. He has now but one thought, one ferocious desire: to avenge himself upon those who have denied him—and even upon all mankind! Really, Mr. Hart, your governments of Europe and America committed a stupendous blunder in refusing to pay Roch the ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... with the men below us on the deck, some stupidity or blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire's raised voice. Like Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors that was distinctly ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... light early. The light only made the night flying insects buzz and blunder at the window screens. And how is it that moth millers will get into the most closely screened house? This was a vexing ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... professional reader at all events, it argues very much indeed in a writer's favour, that the "layman" has managed to write the simplest sentence about a specialty, without some more or less serious blunder. ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... little woman!" He bent over her and kissed her, apparently unconscious that she instinctively drew back from his caress. "If you really will help me, no doubt I shall build things up again in no time, and this one blunder won't count for much. You are a ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... she said, "you are so surrounded by true affection that I never thought how my thoughtless use of that familiar phrase might be construed; but you must thank me for my little blunder, because it has served to show you what friends your noble ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... beginning to the end of his administration he did nothing but blunder. He alienated even the confidence of the moderate element of the Reformers, and literally threw himself into the arms of the "family compact," and assisted them at the elections of the spring of 1836, which ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... ever exists between a divine incarnation and his devotees. The life of Lord Krishna has been misunderstood by many Western commentators. Scriptural allegory is baffling to literal minds. A hilarious blunder by a translator will illustrate this point. The story concerns an inspired medieval saint, the cobbler Ravidas, who sang in the simple terms of his own trade of the spiritual glory hidden in ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... loneliness thou wilt seek in vain to flee even from thyself, and it may be, judging thy life utterly unendurable, thou wilt seek refuge from its horror in a death of thy own contriving, having missed the very fruit of thy birth, and ending like a blunder of the Creator, and a thing that had ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... said Martha, taking courage, and laying a timid hand on his arm. "Sure, I don't know what 'tis all about. I don't know what blunder he've made. But I'm thinkin', zur, you'll be sorry if you acts in haste. 'Tis wise t' count a hundred. Don't be too hard on un, zur. 'Tis like the blunder may be mended. 'Tis like he'll do better next ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... and he will make no mistake, but take the choicest even without seeing it. In the same way, if you allow a girl who is well brought up to choose a husband for herself, if she is in a position to meet the man of her heart, rarely will she blunder. The act of nature in such cases is known as love at first sight; and in love, first sight is practically ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... grape-shot into them; after that, over their heads as much as you like." The position of Mr. Lincoln was already embarrassed when he entered upon office, by what we believe to have been a political blunder in the leaders of the Republican Party. Instead of keeping closely to the real point, and the only point, at issue, namely, the claim of a minority to a right of rebellion when displeased with the result of an election, the bare question of Secession, pure and simple, they allowed their party ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... his jackknife. When the liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their vice, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... A comical blunder has been made by the printer, in M. Ter naux-Compans's excellent translation of Xerez, in the account of this expedition. "On trouve sur toute la route beaucoup de porcs, de lamas." (Relation de la Conquete du Perou, p. 157.) The substitution of porcs for parcs might well lead the reader into the ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... "You make a blunder like that again, and you'll be sorry for it," he bullied, shaking an angry fist at Phil, who turned a pair of surprised ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... business matters," said he, "but it is plainly evident that the new owner wishes the farm house put into such shape that it will be comfortable for a man accustomed to modern luxuries. You don't know much about such things, Mac, and Mr. Merrick has made a blunder in employing your services in such a delicate matter. But do the best you can. Ride across to the Wegg place and look it over. Then get Taft, the carpenter, to fix up whatever is necessary. I'll sell you the lumber and nails, and you've got more money than you can probably use. Telegraph Mr. Merrick ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... Drumshorlin Muir; it is a little black beastie, about the size of my thoom-nail. The country-folks ca' them Clocks; and I believe they ca' them also Maggy-wi'-the-mony-feet; but they are not the least like any Louse that ever I saw; so that, in my opinion, though the defender may have made a blunder through ignorance, in comparing them, there does not seem to have been any animus injuriandi; therefore I am for refusing the ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... Chinese authorities at the violation of their territory fully revealed itself. Peremptory orders were sent to the Canton authorities from Pekin to expel the foreigners at all costs. The government of India was responsible for what was a distinct blunder in our political relations with China. In 1808, when alarm at Napoleon's schemes was at its height, it sent Admiral Drury and a considerable naval force to occupy Macao. The Chinese at once protested, withheld ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Houghton resumed, very gravely, and yet not unkindly: "You are not the first one of your age who has been on the verge of an irreparable blunder. Thank God it is not too late for you to retreat! Do not let this word jar upon you, for it often requires much higher courage and manhood to retreat than to advance. To do the latter in this case would be as foolhardy as it would be wrong and disastrous to all ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... am going to let you off so," said he; "you must give me half-a-dozen kisses at least to prove that you have forgiven me for making so great a blunder." ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... the thirty-seventh of the era to the forty-eighth inclusive should be common years, by which means the intercalations were reduced to the proper number of twelve in forty-eight years. No account is taken of this blunder in chronology; and it is tacitly supposed that the calendar has been ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... one hitch, and it is to the honour of human nature. Evil spirits like Saradine often blunder by never expecting the virtues of mankind. He took it for granted that the Italian's blow, when it came, would be dark, violent and nameless, like the blow it avenged; that the victim would be knifed at night, or shot from behind a hedge, and so die without ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... just preceded him, and it seemed a moment aptly chosen for his so-different theme. "And then," to quote Howells, "the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... I must steadily caution you. All kinds of color are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is no vehicle or method of color which admits of alteration or repentance; you must be right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle bullet in your hand, and put ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... and we were engaged. But it was just a blunder. It was not Dan I wanted. Carol, every woman feels like that at times. She is full of that great magnificent ideal of home, and husband, and little children. It seems the finest thing in the world, the only flawless life. She can't resist it, for the time being. She feels that ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... sons carry the royal blood far down among the people, down even into the kennels of the outcast. Generations follow, oblivious of the high beginnings, but there is that in the stock which is fated to endure. The sons and daughters blunder and sin and perish, but the race goes on, for there is a fierce stuff of life in it. It sinks and rises again and blossoms at haphazard into virtue or vice, since the ordinary moral laws do not concern its mission. Some rags of greatness always cling to it, the dumb faith that ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... come a season Which shall rid us from the curse Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... we had in some incomprehensible way omitted putting on the letter of credit the sub-manager's name. How could we have committed such a blunder? My answer is that this is only another example of the unforeseen "something" ever happening to defeat any ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... for already a law had been enacted to this effect, that if a tribune could not find time for executing in his tribunate what he had promised, the people might give the office to him again in preference to anyone else. This has been pronounced to be a blunder on Appian's part, but without adequate reason. It was in fact the natural and inevitable law which Caius would insist on first, and he would plead for it precisely on the grounds which Appian states. It is also ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... eyes hovered about Mysie, who sat gazing before her with look distraught, with wide eyes and scarce-moving eyelids, beholding something neither on sea or shore; and Mr. Lindsay would now and then correct Ericson in some egregious blunder; while Mysie would now and then start awake and ask Robert or Ericson to take another cup of tea. Before the sentence was finished, however, she would let it die away, speaking the last words mechanically, as her consciousness ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... had that on the Bosporus, when we made that trip to the Black Sea in the Maud," added the lady, who seemed to be pleased because she had caught the captain in a blunder. ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... the nations of the world and the rest of mankind." A revised edition was soon printed, in which the corrected sentence read, "We are at peace with all the nations of the world, and seek to maintain our cherished relations of amity with them." The blunder caused much diversion among the Democrats, and greatly annoyed Colonel Bliss, who, as the President's private secretary, had superintended the publication of the message. The message contained no allusion to the slavery question, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... bad news, indeed. What a blunder it was to let them slip through their fingers, when they might have seized them with two or three hundred ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... spirit, Sir George, to make a great nation, and you see that the daughter is likely to prove worthy of the old lady! But, my dear sir, are you quite sure that Mr. John Effingham has absolutely so high a sentiment in his own favour. It would be awkward business to make a blunder in such a serious matter, and murder a paragraph for nothing. You should remember the mistake of ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... which I was beating for the body of my Jupiter; one of my men was finishing the head, another the legs; and it is easy to imagine what a din we made between us. It happened that a little French lad was working at my side, who had just been guilty of some trifling blunder. I gave the lad a kick, and, as my good luck would have it, caught him with my foot exactly in the fork between his legs, and sent him spinning several yards, so that he came stumbling up against the King precisely at the moment when his Majesty arrived. The King was vastly amused, but ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... she had traveled—true, against her will, but yet through scenes which she now remembered. And always there came up in her mind a question which she found no way to ask. It was Jeanne herself who, either by divination or by blunder, brought ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... Pilar shivered in her cloak, which was not made for motoring. When Dick saw this, before I could speak he had his own fur-lined coat off, insisting that she should put it on. "I can take Casa Triana's," said he, "since he's still posing as a soldier of Spain." And a glance warned me not to blunder by asking why, in the name of common sense, she shouldn't have mine which I wasn't using, instead of his, which was on his back. He wanted her to wear his coat, ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... up his goggles and gazed at her, absolutely bewildered. Horror smote her to the heart, for even she began to suspect that they were at cross-purposes, and that she had commenced her mission by some hideous blunder. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... is at times, or how wanting in judgment, may be seen when it tries to develop a callosity upon the foot as a result of the friction of the shoe, and overdoes the matter and produces the corn. The corn is a physiological blunder. Or see an unexpected manifestation of this intelligence when we cut off the central and leading shoot of a spruce or of a pine tree, and straightway one of the lateral and horizontal branches rises up, takes the place of the lost leader, and carries the tree upward; ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... practically not to be felt. This country is not run by votes. Do you think it is? It is governed by influence. It is governed by the ambitions and the enterprises which control votes. The young woman that thinks she is going to vote for the sake of holding an office is making an awful blunder. ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... him a fortnight in Paris on his way to Germany, as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's point of view) was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old Pater be expected to know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no sort of way even to South Germany? He should have gone to Brussels, if he was ever, spiritually speaking, ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... that tunic," remarked the other surgeon, "I should wager the rascal belongs to some Spanish gentleman. By what blunder was ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... or no light on the literary and historical questions which he is under the necessity of examining in that Essay. He is, therefore, left completely in the dark; and it is melancholy to see how helplessly he gropes his way from blunder to blunder. He assigns, as grounds for his religious belief, stories as absurd as that of the Cock-Lane ghost, and forgeries as rank as Ireland's Vortigern, puts faith in the lie about the Thundering Legion, is convinced ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... advertisement. He was sure of several things: first, that Tudor was not the right man for Joan and could not possibly make her permanently happy; next, that Joan was too sensible a girl really to fall in love with a man of such superficial stamp; and, finally, that Tudor would blunder his love-making somehow. And at the same time, with true lover's anxiety, Sheldon feared that the other might somehow fail to blunder, and win the girl with purely fortuitous and successful meretricious show. But of the one thing Sheldon was sure: Tudor had ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... would stand for the broadest justice as Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans stood for Lacedaemon! But Hebrew David was thought to be punished for taking a census; nor is the story without significance. To reckon numbers alone a success is a sin, and a blunder beside. Russia has sixty millions of people: who would not gladly swap her out of the world for glorious little Greece back again, and Plato and Aeschylus and Epaminondas still there? Who would exchange Concord or Cambridge in Massachusetts for any hundred thousand square miles of slave-breeding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Bertrand was amused at Joan's naive way of referring to her advice as if it had been a valuable present to a hostile leader who was saved by it from making a censurable blunder of omission, and then he went on to admire how ingeniously she had deceived that man and yet had not told him anything that was not the truth. This troubled ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... Brendon village; Brendon forge, and other Brendons. I was so excited that I forgot the Lethbridge episode, and was on the point of exclaiming to Sir Lionel "How interesting to come on father's ancestral home!" I wonder what would have happened if I had? I should have had to try and blunder out of the scrape somehow, with Dick's eyes on me, sparkling with mischief, and Mrs. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... modern practical politician. I wish to speak especially of another and much more general delusion. It pervades the minds and speeches of all the practical men of all parties; and it is a childish blunder built upon a single false metaphor. I refer to the universal modern talk about young nations and new nations; about America being young, about New Zealand being new. The whole thing is a trick of words. America is not young, New Zealand is not new. It is a very ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... seemed, these people evidently believed that a revolution had taken place in the United States; that the two opposing parties had been represented by the passengers of the Excelsior; and that one party had succeeded, headed by the indomitable Perkins. If she could be able to convince them of their blunder, would it be wise to do so? She thought of Mrs. Brimmer's supplication to be ranged "on her side," and realized with feminine quickness that the situation might be turned to her countrymen's advantage. But which side had Todos Santos favored? It was left to her woman's ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... an outrage," replied Ahenobarbus; "it's a sheer blunder of the Fates. Remind me to tell you about Drusus and his fortune, before I ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... "I could only find one answer. It was such an obvious blunder that it must have been intentional. The lumps of lead endorsed this idea. Whilst the large piece was flat and difficult to move, the small piece was like a ball and meant to roll and strike the side the moment the coffin was ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... impropriety of laughing at me. One of the children immediately replied, "Please, sir, do you know what we were laughing at?" I replied in the negative. "Then, sir," says the boy, "I will tell you. Please, sir, you have made a blunder." I, thinking I had not, proceeded to defend myself, when the children replied, "Please, sir, you convict yourself." I replied, "How so?" "Why," says the children, "you said a right-angled triangle had one right angle, and that all its angles are acute. If it has ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... mistake, might blunder in the slowness of his deliberate way—there was the faintest suspicion of a smile on Hugh Carden Ali's face as he remembered, even at this critical moment, how, having won the toss, it had taken Ben Kelham so long to decide, at the foot of the Hill, whether to put his ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... steward, Salome, the mother of James and John, and Mary, the mother of Jesus (Luke viii, 3; Mark xvi, 40; John xix, 25), strongly discountenance such a supposition. The error, which had no other source than ecclesiastical tradition, has been fostered and perpetuated by the stupid blunder of the translators of the authorized version in identifying her with the "sinner" who is described in Luke vii, 37-50 as washing the feet of Jesus with her tears (see head-note to ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... still, each as like the other as peas. But put your thirty men up to run a race, and they will soon assume different forms. And in doing nothing, you can hardly do amiss. Let the doers of nothing have something of action forced upon them, and they, too, will blunder and quarrel. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... reason why we should stay longer," and without sparing himself in the slightest, Bill explained what a blunder had ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... A wooden post or pillar, especially a house-post, should be set up according to the original position of the tree from which it was hewn,—that is to say, with the part nearest to the roots downward. To erect a house-post in the contrary way is thought to be unlucky;—formerly such a blunder was believed to involve unpleasant consequences of a ghostly kind, because an "upside-down" pillar would do malignant things. It would moan and groan in the night, and move all its cracks like mouths, and open all its knots like eyes. Moreover, the spirit of it (for every house-post ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... long as the history of the Somme battle endures. I read an interview in a New York paper with the Chief of Staff of the German Army opposite the British in which he must have been correctly quoted, as his remarks passed the censorship. He said that the loss of Pozieres was a blunder. I liked his frankness in laying the blame on a subordinate who, if he also had spoken, might have mentioned the presence of the Australians as an excuse, which, personally, I think is an ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the parent can do right. You would think that now and then he might, if only by mere accident, blunder into sense. But, no, there seems to be a law against it. He brings home woolly rabbits and indiarubber elephants, and expects the Child to be contented "forsooth" with suchlike aids to its education. ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... booming his utter unbelief in all he had heard. Clark, it struck him, did not know what he was talking about, and who was Clark anyway? Had a single man in the room ever heard of Clark before that afternoon? The town had made one blunder, and it would be wise to keep ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... herself, and to stand before him as one justified, had gone from her. She felt that having still possessed his love, having still been the owner of the one thing that she valued, she had ruined herself by her own doubts; and she could not forgive herself the fatal blunder. 'It is of no use to think of it any more,' he said at last. 'You have to become this man's wife now, and I suppose you must go through ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... (Al-Kulub?) signifying Ravisher of Hearts" and his names for the six slave-girls (vol. iv. 37) such as "Zohorob Bostan" (Zahr al-Bustan), which Galland rightly renders by "Fleur du Jardin," serve only to heap blunder upon blunder. Indeed the Anglo-French translations are below criticism: it would be waste of time to notice them. The characteristic is a servile suit paid to the original e.g. rendering hair "accomode en boucles" by "hair festooned ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... express our disapprobation of Homer, or any other poet, who is guilty of such a foolish blunder as to tell us (Iliad, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... I should not wonder at his exerting himself for a great reform in the process of inquiry, preaching the method of Induction, and, if he fancied that theologians were indirectly or in any respect the occasion of the blunder, getting provoked for a time, however unreasonably, with ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... think out the first moves in that game of skill of which his life was the stake. He had often read of people of hasty temper, evading the police for a time, and eventually falling into their hands for lack of the most elementary common sense. He had heard it said that they always made some stupid blunder, left behind them some damning clue. He took his revolver from a drawer and saw that it was loaded. If the worst came to the worst, he ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... and when that was over, each was presented with a glass of raisin wine." During the christening ceremony an accident happened to the doll, because Master Tommy, the parson, "in endeavouring to get rid of it before the little gossips were ready to receive it, made a sad blunder.... Miss Polly, with tears in her eyes, snatched up the doll and clasped it to her bosom; while the rest of the little gossips turned all the little masters out of the room, that they might be left to themselves to inquire more privately ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... "The universal blunder of this world is in thinking that there are certain persons put into the world to govern and certain others to obey. Everybody is in this world to govern and everybody to obey. There are no benefactors ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the Senator surprised her by expressing a strong wish to join them. He explained that, as the political lead was no longer in his hands, the chances were nine in ten that if he stirred at all he should make a blunder; that his friends expected him to do something when, in fact, nothing could be done; that every preparation had already been made, and that for him to go on an excursion to Mount Vernon, at this moment, with the British Minister, was, on the whole, about the best use he could make of ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... three men, three dauntless soldiers, had succeeded each other in the command, MacMahon, Ducrot, Wimpfen; MacMahon had only time to be wounded, Ducrot had only time to commit a blunder, Wimpfen had only time to conceive an heroic idea, and he conceived it; but MacMahon is not responsible for his wound, Ducrot is not responsible for his blunder, and Wimpfen is not responsible for the impossibility of his suggestion to cut their way out. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... ball-room, with Mrs. Lincoln leaning on his arm, and took his seat by the side of the President. The evening was pleasantly spent, and the newspapers at once discovered how great a blunder they had made. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... to a hope that there was some mistake, perhaps a blunder on the part of the servant who delivered the message, and that I should receive a note or a visit the next day which would set the matter right. But neither note nor visit came. In a few days the schooner Mary left Baltimore on the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... this justice) is not the author of the famous blunder which is now repeated in every circle. I am assured it was our neighbour, Lord G. though I scarce believe it, who on being presented with the Countess of Albany's card, exclaimed—"The Countess of Albany! Ah!—true—I remember: wasn't ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... this tale. Citoyen Grospierre had paid for his blunder on the guillotine, but what a fool! oh! what ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... purpose; because, not having exercised their powers on small things, their powers lack the development necessary for great ones. Hence, thoughtless people, when forced to act in an affair of importance, blunder through it with no more chance of doing as they should than one would have of hitting a small or distant mark at a shooting-match, if previous practice had not given the power of hitting objects ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... lectures gave us an insight into the second great German blunder after the failure to occupy Paris, which was the failure immediately to swing a line across Northern France, thus cutting off Calais and Boulogne, where they could really have leveled a pistol at England's head. He explained that it was the superiority of the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... tramloads of wounded soldiers, that there were five thousand in the square in front of the railway station, and that two trains had been provided to take them away! It was evident that some extraordinary blunder had been made; and while we were in doubt as to what to do, a second order came to us cancelling entirely the evacuation order which we and all the other hospitals in Antwerp had received a few hours before. It was all so perplexing that we felt that the only satisfactory plan was to go round to ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... himself recorded a case in which a similar mistake has been made—not in an ordinary communication such its this, but in an Imperial ordinance. In a Rescript of the Emperor Hadrian, Licinius Granianus, the proconsul, is styled Serenus Granianus. [43:3] If such a blunder could be perpetrated in an official State document, need we wonder if the penman of the postscript of the Smyrnaean letter has written Statius Quadratus for Ummidius Quadratus? And yet, if we admit this very likely oversight, the whole chronological edifice ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... try if we could get rid of the annoying restraints which made our residence here a sort of imprisonment, I discovered that the whole affair was not one of blunder or accident, but that we actually were prisoners thus be design. It appeared that Kamrasi's brothers, when they heard we were coming into Unyoro, murmured, and said to the king, "Why are you bringing such guests amongst us, who will practise all kinds of diabolical sorcery, and bring evil on us?" ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... truth. For he bestows those withering words on the nation that has the fifty religions, and attributes "ideas"—as the antithesis of "convenience" and "practical sense"—to the nation that has the fifty sauces. And not for a moment does he suspect himself of this blunder, so manifest as to be disconcerting to his reader. One seems to hear an incurably English accent in all this, which indeed is reported, by his acquaintance, of Matthew Arnold's actual speaking of French. It is certain that he has ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... than ever. The Eusebians had behaved discreditably enough, but they had at least frustrated the council, and secured a recognition of their creed from a large body of Eastern conservatives. So far they had been fairly successful, but the next move on their side was a blunder and worse. When the Sardican envoys, Vincent of Capua and Euphrates of Cologne, came eastward in the spring of 344, a harlot was brought one night into their lodgings. Great was the scandal when the plot was traced up to the Eusebian leader, Stephen of Antioch. ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... to call it a Blunder, he makes about Hell; which he not only makes LOCAL, but gives it a being before the Fall of the Angels; and brings it in opening its mouth to receive them. This is so contrary to the nature of the thing, and so great an absurdity, that no Poetic License ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... it critically and was still confident that it was really composed of precious gems. He believed that if she had had them made to order to replace the stolen ones, either the jeweler had been guilty of a wretched blunder, or else some friend had interposed to replace the jewels which she ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... in Danton, stepping forward. Then, conscious of the blunder, he turned away, and took up ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... doubt or wonder - I check myself, and say, "That mighty One Who made the solar system cannot blunder - And for the best all things are being done." Who set the stars on their eternal courses Has fashioned this strange earth by some sure plan. Bow low, bow low to those majestic forces, Nor dare to doubt their ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... is in this place a blunder of the copyists, which almost makes the sentence unintelligible. The translator, without entering into minute controversies, has, upon all such occasions, adopted what appeared, from the context, to be the most ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... apprehended he was about to salute me. Promptly I acknowledged the expected salute, only to discover that the sergeant had raised his hand for no other purpose than to blow his nose with his naked fingers. Believe me, even now, when I think of this blunder, I catch my breath ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... said the Superintendent, with a slight smile. "Owing to the inexcusable blunder, I'm afraid something about what it contains may leak out prematurely. Those pests, the reporters, are everywhere; you ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... circumstances it is but reasonable to suppose that errors of judgment must have occurred. Even had they not, differences of opinion between the Executive, bound by an oath to the strict performance of his duties, and writers and debaters must have arisen. It is not necessarily evidence of blunder on the part of the Executive because there are these differences of views. Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit, but it seems to me oftener in the selections made of the assistants appointed to aid ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... absolutely dulled. The dressed and waxed moustache, which ran to a needle-like point, looked doubly tasteless against his wax mask of a face. He was the incarnation of walking decrepitude, vapid and slack. Quite evidently he had committed the blunder of trusting to a split in Germany. In his blindness he explained that he had come to free the Germans, who had, against their will, been incorporated into Prussia, and all Germany rose like one man ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... or form of government in France for over a century. It rallied to itself men from the ranks of all its former enemies, but its greatest victory was over the Monarchists. The wreck of their cause by the alliance with a military adventurer was a blunder in the eyes of one section of the Royalists; in the eyes of another, it was a dishonor that amounted ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... despite the utmost care of which I was capable while studying up for the "Coral Island," I fell into a blunder through ignorance in regard to a familiar fruit. I was under the impression that cocoanuts grew on their trees in the same form as that in which they are usually presented to us in grocers' windows—namely, about the size of a large fist with three spots at one end. Learning from trustworthy ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... remaining debtors, and reappeared at Sancerre as Master of Appeals, with an appointment as Royal Commissioner to a commercial association established in the Nivernais, at a salary of six thousand francs, an absolute sinecure. So the worthy La Baudraye, who was supposed to have committed a financial blunder, had, in fact, done very good business in ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... and groping his way with a stick, and after an ineffectual attempt to scale the rock above, F. and I also unwillingly followed his example. The water was piercingly cold as it swept against us, and the pain was so great that we were glad to blunder over as quickly as possible, without taking very much trouble about picking our steps. After passing this in safety we came suddenly upon a band of hill-men with their loads, from Thibet; they were the first natives we had encountered, and wild and weird-looking savages they appeared ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... in a blunder, I attempted to correct it. I might have seen there was too great a disparity between the ages of the parties to make it likely that they were man and wife. One was about forty: a period of mental vigour at which men seldom cherish the delusion of being married for love by girls: ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... Wiles saw his blunder, but saw also that he had gone too far to stop. "Pedro," he said, "was strongly suspected of having murdered Concho, one of ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... sarcastic smile. "I beg pardon," said he, "miss; I must guard against that blunder in future, ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... his blunder, gives the three blows with his right hoof, followed by the four blows with his left, which represent the most unexceptionable F ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... artillery preparation perform a feat which later required a Division of fresh troops, after one of the most carefully planned and destructive bombardments at that time known? The Brigade could but have failed, and to the onlooker it seemed a tragic blunder, but to those who have read the pathetic story of a tragic day, the title given by "The Student in Arms" of "The Honour of the Brigade" alone provides the excuse for an operation which from every other point of view, was one of the ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... they imagine that the Observatory men had committed such a blunder? Barbican would not believe it possible. He made the Captain go over his calculation again and again; but no flaw was to be found in it. He himself carefully examined it, figure after figure, but he could find nothing wrong. They both took up the formula and subjected it to the strongest ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... this morning, and I must not be cheated of my fare.' I would still have refused, but I perceived Clifton began to look serious, and I said to him—'Well, well, good man, here then, take this snuff-box to the marchioness, she may want it: but do not blunder, and break it; for if you do I shall dismiss you my service. Recollect the picture in the ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... this blunder of the postmaster on account of the enclosures, some of which I wished to have got to your hands without delay, that they might have undergone the consideration and acting upon which were suggested in the ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... tissue of pedantry and error from beginning to end—written, I will wager my head, by some scribbler who never saw Athens! Moreover, the whole article is based upon a glaring blunder; for, according to Plutarch and Diodorus, on the memorable night in question there was a new moon. Pshaw! it is a tasteless, insipid plagiarism from Grote; and if I am to be bored with such insufferable ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... answers were related quickly enough, and the cause of Michael's blunder was plain ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world's poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal world-darkening blunder. And then I showed them how four fifths of the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare, the lack of organization and concert among the workers. Seeking to make the matter very plain, I instanced the case of arid lands where ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... for information that will help them make good use of their courtship opportunity. They rightly feel that if they blunder in this period, there is little hope of their making their goal later. They have grown suspicious of a strong feeling of attachment, because they have been forced to see in the experiences of many of their friends that this has not guaranteed later happiness. They expect to have sooner or ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... pieces that are away beyond your grasp. This is the greatest fault in our American musical educational systems of to-day. Pupils are permitted to play works that are technically impossible for them to hope to execute without years of preparation. What a huge blunder this is! ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... and looks toward the house. Yes, it is handsome, grand. Youth and age together did not make any blunder of it. There is the tower, that was to be his study and library and place of resort generally. What crude dreams he had in those days! Science and poesy, art and history, were all a sad jumble in his brain, and now he has found his life-work. He hopes that he may make the world ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... as it might have occurred to him at one time, that Sheila had made some blunder somewhere and been unavoidably detained. He did not think of any possible repetition of her adventures in Richmond Park. He was too conscious of the probable reason of Sheila's remaining away from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... do leave yon barbarian boy at our court as hostage of their faith," demanded young Theodosius the emperor, now speaking for the first time and making a most stupid blunder at ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... sir, I have two vessels waiting for cargoes of India-rubbers there, under a blunder-headed captain, who will do nothing he has not been bidden to,—obey his orders if he breaks his owners. You smile, sir? Why, I should have made thirty thousand dollars this winter, sir, by my India-rubbers, if we had not had this ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... "That was a blunder. Gilks, in his flurry, got hold of the wrong rudder. I really think that's why it wasn't ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... of years, after Shakspeare's birth, and did not settle to the value of twenty-one shillings until a century after his death. The nerve of such an anachronism would lie in putting the estimate into a mouth of that age. And this is precisely the blunder into which the foolish forger of Vortigern, &c., has fallen. He does not indeed directly mention guineas; but indirectly and virtually he does, by repeatedly giving us accounts imputed to Shakspearian contemporaries, in which the sum total ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach. It is something for a woman to be assured, in her eight-and-twentieth year, that she has not lost one charm of earlier youth; but the value of such homage was inexpressibly increased to Anne, by comparing it with former ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... of such set trash of phrase Ineffably—legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,— Nor even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... are such accidents truly, and serious things be they to encounter," answered Spike, hemming a little to clear his throat, as was much his practice whenever the widow ran into any unusually extravagant blunder; "yes, serious things to encounter. But the land-fall that I mean is a different sort of thing; being, as you well know, what we say when we come in sight of land, a'ter a v'y'ge; or, meaning the land we may happen first to see. The departure is the beginning ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... form—Has the movement of alliterative verse got the initial or the final beat? In the middle of the 18th century Bishop Percy decided this question with sufficient accuracy, though he mixed up his statement with a blunder which it is not easy to account for. He points out how the poets began to introduce rhyme into alliterative verse, until at length rhyme came to predominate over alliteration, and "thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in the common burlesque Alexandrine or anapaestic ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... provision boats, and after a little further dialogue, in which the cool Highlander completely deceived the French sentries, the British were allowed to slip past in the darkness. The tiny cove was safely reached, the boats stole silently up without a blunder, twenty-four volunteers from the Light Infantry leaped from their boat and led the way in single file up the path, that ran like a thread along the face of the cliff. Wolfe sat eagerly listening in his ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... from subject to subject. They had so much to say that the shadows were rising in the distant end of the room before Mark came to the real matter of moment. It was proof of the change in him that he did not grope and blunder to it but brought it ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... was unsaddling his horse, and shaking down some litter for the poor wearied animal, he heard Smith observe to Ganlesse,—"By my faith, Dick, thou hast fallen into poor Slender's blunder; missed Anne Page, and brought us a great ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... symptoms under medication, as well as the full value of the symptoms when not under medication. This knowledge I am using in analyzing this medical classic and from my standpoint I can see how very easy it was for the author of the article under consideration to blunder along as he did. The doctor should not feel lonesome, however, for he has ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... the English. What was the use of it, they asked, if the German army were reduced to 100,000 men? M. Tardieu himself tells the story of all the efforts made, especially by Lloyd George and Bonar Law, to prevent the blunder which later on was endorsed in the treaty as Article 428. Lloyd George went so far as to complain of political intrigues for creating disorder on the Rhine. But Clemenceau took care to put the question in such a form that no discussion was possible. ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... inquirer doubts the possibility of entering into a scientific knowledge of spiritual truth by following this formula, what then? It can only be because he is so unscholarly as to make the blunder in logic of assuming as untrue or impossible that which remains to ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... seen for miles. The Germans displayed their "thoroughness" as they retired by poisoning the wells with arsenic, and setting high-explosive traps into which they hoped the British advance guards would blunder. Bridges over all the waterways were burned and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... such luck?" grumbled Dick. "You have made yourself a deserter. You did all you could to earn being shot; you walked back, and again did all you could to leave Amherst no other choice but to shoot you. And, again, you blunder into saving half an army! Have ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... mischief take it! I am a notary and a member of my chamber!—Pshaw! it was an ambassador's fit of temper, nothing is sacred for people of that kind. To-morrow he shall explain what he meant by saying that I had done nothing but blunder and talk nonsense in his house. I will ask him for an explanation—that is, I will ask him to explain my mistake. After all is done and said, I am in the wrong perhaps—— Upon my word, it is very good of me to cudgel my brains ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... it were a fatal blunder To be blind to this appalling Tragedy you wrong by calling The result of spells—no spells Are such signs, but miracles Outside man's experience falling. He came here because he yearned With his pure and holy breath To give life, and so found death. 'T is a ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... professed loyalty to their sovereign, and one of whom, Egmont, had performed distinguished services for his country and king, was profound. A wave of mingled rage and sorrow swept over the land. It was not only an act of cruel injustice, but even as an act of policy a blunder of the first magnitude, which was sure to bring, as it did bring, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... that on the Bosporus, when we made that trip to the Black Sea in the Maud," added the lady, who seemed to be pleased because she had caught the captain in a blunder. ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... extracted her own letters. She never did it a second time. On the contrary, she begged pardon in real regret at having given such deep offence to her brother and his wife, and in astonishment that so simple an action could offend. She had made an equally distressing blunder in the early days of her life with the Gresleys by taking up the daily paper on its arrival ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... come about, and was equally implicated with my graceless self in this little conspiracy. But one thing yet—tell me before I go, Isabelle, Comtesse de Lineuil, whether you really do intend to accept the Baron de Sigognac as your husband—I don't want to run any risk of making a blunder at this stage of the proceedings, you understand, after having conducted the negotiations successfully up to this point. You do definitely and finally accept him, eh?—that is well—and now I will go to the prince. Engaged lovers sometimes have matters to discuss that even a brother may ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... Mohawk River. Burgoyne began his advance in June, with about eight thousand men. Proceeding up Lake Champlain he compelled the Americans to evacuate Crown Point, Ticonderoga and Fort Anne. His first blunder was in failing to avail himself of the water carriage of Lake George, at the head of which there was a direct road to Fort Edward. Instead of taking this course he spent three weeks in cutting a road through the ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... desperation had sought freedom in death. Let no man judge him, and least of all those who are strangers to the fascinating and infernal strength of his enemy. You may call it a grave mistake, a dreadful blunder, a doleful insanity, but do not assume to put him beyond the reach of mercy, or to decide that his lamentable end was not the iron door through which he may have passed to the city ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Secretary of the Air Force Eugene M. Zuckert, one of the architects of Air Force integration in 1949. American commanders lacked training in the delicate art of community relations, Zuckert later explained, and should even a few of them blunder they could bring on a race crisis of major proportions. He sympathized with the activists' goals and was convinced that the President as Commander in Chief could and should use the armed forces for social ends; but these ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... he had "run his head against a stone wall," and narrowly escaped ruining himself as far as Templeton was concerned. For he knew the young gentlemen of that school well enough to be sure, after a blunder like this, that the place would soon have become too hot ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... that he had been in his neighbourhood, without having formed his personal acquaintance. To Mr Skinner's son, whom he accidentally met in Aberdeen on his return, he expressed a deep regret for the blunder, as "he would have gone twenty miles out of his way to visit ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... work at first. It was found that Adams could blunder on pretty well with the small words, but made sad havoc among the long ones. Still his condition was pronounced hopeful. As to Sally, she seemed to take up the letters at the first sitting, and even began to form some correct ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... to sign the petition," said Mrs. Staggs. "Everybody agrees that you must, before court meets. And that reminds me, I met Henry Bostic's mother today. The old lady doesn't appear to be at all grieved over the part her son took in the affair. It would nearly kill me if a son of mine had made such a blunder." ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... as he hurried back to the station, and his face burned hotly as he thought of the chance such a blunder on his part would have given Quade and Culver Rann to circulate the stories with which they largely played their scoundrelly game. He sent another and longer telegram. This time it ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... will proceed to another, and be aghast at the cellar yawning at his feet. Trying a third, he surprises the housemaid at her work. In the end, no more relying on his own unaided efforts, he procures a trusty guide in some passing person, and in good time successfully emerges. Perhaps as curious a blunder as any, was that of a certain stylish young gentleman, a great exquisite, in whose judicious eyes my daughter Anna had found especial favor. He called upon the young lady one evening, and found her alone in the dining-room at her needlework. ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... his lowest terms," B said firmly, "that'll fetch him." C's life might even then have been saved but they made a mistake about the medicine. It stood at the head of the bed on a bracket, and the nurse accidentally removed it from the bracket without changing the sign. After the fatal blunder C seems to have sunk rapidly. On the evening of the next day, as the shadows deepened in the little room, it was clear to all that the end was near. I think that even A was affected at the last as he stood with bowed head, ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... years previously, he had endeavoured to obtain two war-galleons from the Portuguese, and had he succeeded, the history of the Far East might have been radically different. Evidently, however, he committed a blunder which his countrymen in modern times have conspicuously avoided; he drew the sword without having fully investigated his ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... as to startle her by the fear of having ignorantly committed some egregious blunder; 'I'm the last person ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thing," she continued rather proudly, "a thing men too often blunder over—with the very best intentions, bless them, only they do blunder, and that leads to ructions. Please put the question of money out of your head once and for all. I have a certain amount of my own, nothing princely well ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... incontestable superiority! Now all notion of patriotism is extinct in his soul. He has now but one thought, one ferocious desire: to avenge himself upon those who have denied him—and even upon all mankind! Really, Mr. Hart, your governments of Europe and America committed a stupendous blunder in refusing to pay Roch the price ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... laughter overwhelmed her; but it was not shared by Dick, who stood above her on the slope, frowning in perplexity, thinking of the strange blunder into which he had been led by the words of poor old Bells, his acceptance of her identity, his ignorance that Bully Presby had kith or kin, and of the mine owner's sarcastic references and veiled antagonism throughout ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... My blunder was this, I travelled to Bayreuth with an ideal in my breast, and was thus doomed to experience the bitterest disappointment. The preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness and strong ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... of you! I shall never forgive myself for the foolish blunder I made. See! these people look upon you as a hero, for you risked your life for a child of Malta. I am proud to be known as ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us: It wad frae monie a blunder free ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... cohesion. There is a temptation, from which some people suffer, to think that one can't be fighting for God at all, unless one is doing it furiously, and all the time, and successfully, and on a large and impressive scale. That is a fatal blunder. To hide your adversary's sword is often a very good way of fighting. To have an open tussle often makes the bystanders sympathise with the assailant. It is really a far more civilised thing, and often stands for a higher degree of force and honour, to be able to bear contradiction ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... climax came. Liege had fallen. The English Expedition had landed, and was marching on Belgium. A victorious German army had goose-stepped into defenseless Brussels, and was sweeping out toward the French frontier. The French advance into Alsace had been a blunder. ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... drama. The olla podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however, concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own critics, was still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for the most anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... eventful night, the air went flaming red before my eyes and helpless wrath came uppermost. I saw no way to clear her, and had there been the plainest way, dumb rage would still have held me tongue-tied. So I could only mop and mow and stammer, and, when the words were found, make shift to blunder out that such an accusation did the lady grievous wrong; that she had come attended and at my beseeching, to take a message from a dying man to ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... reconcile the king and the Parliament, which met again in February 1677 after a prorogation of fifteen months. The Country party stood in the way of such a reconciliation, but Danby resolved to break its strength by measures of unscrupulous vigour for which a blunder of Shaftesbury's gave an opportunity. Shaftesbury despaired of bringing the House of Commons, elected as it had been fifteen years before in a moment of religious and political reaction, to any steady opposition to the Crown. He had ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... a forger would pay sufficient attention to his materials to be on his guard against the blunder which earned the perpetrator of the Whalley Will Forgery penal servitude. He put forward a will dated 1862, written on paper bearing in a plain watermark the date 1870! Another indiscreet person asked the ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... idea that there are such faults. The language of children who have heard no language but what is good, must be correct. On the contrary, children who hear a mixture of low and high vulgarity before their own habits are fixed, must, whenever they speak, continually blunder; they have no rule to guide their judgment in their selection from the variety of dialects which they hear; probably they may often be reproved for their mistakes, but these reproofs will be of no avail, whilst the pupils continue to be puzzled between the example of the nursery and of the drawing-room. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... equally ignorant with Lieutenant Loti but uninstructed evidently, marries a geisha whose father had made the happy dispatch at the request of the Son of Heaven after making a blunder in his military command. She is Cio-Cio-San, also Madama Butterfly, and she comes to her wedding with a bevy of geishas or mousmes (I do not know which) and a retinue of relations. All enjoy the hospitality of the American officer while picking him to pieces, but turn from their kinswoman when ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... hear that," said Lionel, sharply. Fairthorn looked frightened. "I 'm afraid I have made a blunder. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Brandon, is the worst," Richter answered with keen bitterness. "We knew he was against us, but thought this something of a joke. Well, it seems we were mistaken. These English are obstinate; often without imagination or forethought, they blunder on, and chance, that favors simpletons, is sometimes with them. But remember, that if your father meets with misfortunes, you ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... "Mr. Sanford Quest is my friend. I am here in charge of his house. Believing as I do that his arrest was an egregious blunder, I shall say or do nothing likely to afford you ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he had made a blunder, and sought to rectify it by lying copiously. He averred that he had been merely trying his uncle; he begged his pardon for this absurd and ill-timed joke; he admitted that he was a pig and a dog and everything else ignoble; ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... it. No, you send the old lady packing, for the good of her health, and Mrs. Mackintosh and I'll help you and Cecil entertain, and we'll have a dance, and a marquee, and lots of punch. I dare say you've never been to a dance in your life," she rattled on, not giving him a chance to blunder out excuses. ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... Stanley saw his blunder and grew hot with rage. He had been outwitted; and now, as between him and the King, he must ever bear the burden of having first suggested Edward's sons as a menace to the State. The trap was so easy; and yet he had never seen it until it had ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... their lives as we are living ours, in the shimmer of a globule in space, it is not enough that we should lift our faces to the sky and blunder and guess at a God there, because there is so much room between the stars, and murmur faintly, "Spiritual things are spiritually discerned." By the infinite bones of our bodies, by the seeds of the million ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... that the translators have here made an extraordinary blunder. They have, I think, mistaken [Greek: diamerizo] for [Greek: diamerizo]. For the peculiar meaning of the former verb I beg to refer those who have not observed it, to Liddell and Scott's Lexicon. The substitution of a letter here ([eta] for [epsilon]) would give to the Scripture ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... found means to break off the treaty I was making for that purpose with the Prince de Guemende, who had the reversion of it, and then represented me to the people as one who only sought my own interest. Instead of profiting by this blunder, which I might have done to my own advantage, I added another to it, and said all that rage could prompt me against the Cardinal to one who told it ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... people: until, placed in power some day, he shows that to rule well requires other things than one-sidedness in the ruling person; and is fortunate if he does not acquire that part of renown which consists in notoriety, by committing some colossal blunder, ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... Wellington, the dedication of his poems to the Queen, and his welcome to Alexandra, Princess of Wales, all of which are of great excellence. His Charge of the Light Brigade, at Balaclava, while it gave undue currency to that stupid military blunder, must rank as one of the finest ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... their journey had been without its risks, but now they had to be more careful than ever. The whole shore of the Straits was, they knew, a network of forts and hidden defences. There was no saying when they might blunder upon something of ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... the pitiable mistakes to which love alone is subject. I have inadvertently wandered from my purpose, which was to expose quite an opposite blunder, into which we are no less apt to fall, through hate. How ugly a person looks upon whose reputation some awkward aspersion hangs, and how suddenly his countenance clears up with his character! I remember being persuaded of a man whom I had conceived an ill ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Now what a Blunder would be committed in the Education of such a Family, if, with this different Turn of Mind in the Children, there should be no difference made in the Management of them, or their Disposal in the World. If all should be put into one Way of Life, or brought up to one Business. Or if in the ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... of the mere possibility of such a colossal blunder was, of course, the admission of the whole of John Dillon's contention—namely, that, whatever might happen in Egypt, Ireland was right in not accepting the discretion of any man as the sole guarantee of ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... my day," said Odo wearily. "And meanwhile we blunder on, without ever really knowing what incalculable instincts and prejudices are pitted against us. You and your party tell me the people are sick of the burdens the clergy lay on them—yet their blind devotion to the Church ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... By special direction, Came down the world's wonder, Sir Salathiel Blunder, With a quoif on his head As heavy as lead; ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... underwent a radical modification. The original document threw open to the English every port in Japan; the revised document limited them to Hirado. But this restriction may be indirectly traced to the blunder of not accepting a settlement in Yedo and a port at Uraga. For the foreign policy of the Tokugawa was largely swayed by an apprehension that the Kyushu feudatories, many of whom were not over-well ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... widespread. John G. Whittier and Theodore D. Weld, who were both avowed believers in the idea of women's rights, nevertheless, felt that the agitation of the subject, under the circumstances, was a grave blunder. "No moral enterprise, when prosecuted with ability and any sort of energy, ever failed under heaven," wrote Weld to Sarah and Angelina, "so long as its conductors pushed the main principle, and did not strike off ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... variety of subject. This feat was lately communicated to me by one of his then schoolfellows; and I also recollect him once mentioning the subject to me himself; adding, if I recollect correctly, that there was not a blunder found in any of the verses which he had written. During his vacations he visited France, and mastered the French and Italian languages, with both of which, up to the period of his death, he continued perfectly familiar, and very partial to the writers of both. About ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... with the impishness of childhood, climbed up in the auto. It was a simple matter to even blunder on pushing the button that would set the self-starter in operation. The car had been left standing on a level bit of road, but, just ahead of it, was a rather steep slope. Mollie had neglected to leave the emergency brake set, and when the motor started there was ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... lead me about and show me the things they are interested in. Of course the little ones cannot spell on their fingers; but I manage to read their lips. If I do not succeed they resort to dumb show. Sometimes I make a mistake and do the wrong thing. A burst of childish laughter greets my blunder, and the pantomime begins all over again. I often tell them stories or teach them a game, and the winged hours depart and leave us good ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... said to have occurred. By some mistake of General Mack's, in directing the operations of a feigned fight, it so happened that his own troops were completely surrounded by those of the enemy; when Lord Nelson, vexed at the unfortunate and inauspicious blunder, immediately exclaimed, to his surrounding friends—"This fellow does not ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... and hypnotised and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in his soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the modern art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery was that NOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above all silently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fed the men. Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... being ornamented with this decoration. Can any of your correspondents produce another example? or can they account, from any other cause, for Richard Harpur receiving such a distinction? or may I not rather attribute it to the blunder of the sculptor? ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... place!" she scoffed. "Her place where a blunder-headed man puts her! How do you know what her place is? Do you suppose the blood in a healthy-bodied, healthy-minded woman is any different from your blood? How would you like to be told just what your place is? To be jammed, for instance, into a little ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... treaty of "peace", negotiated with the Cherokees at the close of 1759, was worse than a crime: it was a crass and hideous blunder. His domineering attitude and tyrannical treatment of these Indians had aroused the bitterest animosity. Yet he did not realize that it was no longer safe to trust their word. No sooner did the governor withdraw his army from the borders than the cunning Cherokees, whose passions had been inflamed ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... not only to you gentlemen here, but to all British constituencies—that it is well you should have patience enough to listen to a speech about India; because it is no secret to anybody who understands, that if the Government were to make a certain kind of bad blunder in India—which I do not at all expect them to make—there would be short work for a long time to come, with many of those schemes, upon which you have set your heart. Do not dream, if any mishap of a certain ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... regret to say, confess his blunder, but left the Reverend Mr. Withholder to remain under suspicion of having committed an unprovoked assault and battery. It was characteristic of Rocky Canyon, however, that this suspicion, far from injuring his clerical ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a tower, and bearing a shield of eight millstones, and as he walked he shouted: 'Ho! blunder-head! by what right do you come to our country and kill our people? Come! make two of me.' As the prince was despicable in his eyes, he tossed aside his club and rushed to grip him with his hands. He caught him by the collar, tucked him under his arm and set off with ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... Inches did not come in again. She took out her big check once or twice in the course of the day and looked at it resentfully; and as she brooded upon the matter, it was borne in upon her with peculiar force that she had made a fatal blunder in exchanging her "chances" for that fixed, inexpansive sum. Had it not been cowardly in her to yield so easily? Supposing Dayton himself had lacked courage at the critical moment; where would his four-in-hand have been to-day? She was sure that ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... had dabbled in the humanities; but he would drag forth my smattering of learning with so much glee that one might have thought him ignorant of the plainest A B C of the matter. More than once I have known him blunder in a Latin quotation that I might correct him. Aileen and he had a hundred topics in common from which I was excluded by reason of my ignorance of the Highlands, but the Macdonald was as sly as a fox on my behalf. He would draw out the girl about the dear Northland they both loved and ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... Laplace, and Galileo, and Copernicus, and Darwin to contradict the teachings of the previous fifty thousand years. He asks us to believe that God muddled men's minds with a mysterious series of revelations cloaked in fable and allegory; that He allowed them to stumble and to blunder, and to quarrel over these "revelations"; that He allowed them to persecute, and slay, and torture each other on account of divergent readings of his "revelations" for ages and ages; and that He is still looking on while a number of bewildered and antagonistic ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... Ascend, then, with me the hall steps, that I may introduce you to my Lord and his visitants. But have a care how you proceed; be mindful to go there in broad daylight, and with your eyes about you. For, should you make any blunder,—should you go to the right of the hall steps, you are laid hold of by a bear; and should you go to the left, your case is still worse, for you run full against a wolf!—Nor, when you have attained the door, is your danger over; for the hall being decayed, and therefore standing in need of repair, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... restrain them, when intoxicated with success and confident of their strength, would probably have been too hard a task even for him, as it had been, in the preceding generation, too hard a task for Montrose. The new general did nothing but hesitate and blunder. One of his first acts was to send a large body of men, chiefly Robertsons, down into the low country for the purpose of collecting provisions. He seems to have supposed that this detachment would without difficulty ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... best we can to solve the problem, and overhaul the Islander," I continued; "but, after all, we may miss her. If Captain Blastblow has made a blunder, or there is any misunderstanding, he must soon discover it. If he has only come out here for a trial trip, and should happen to pass us in the fog without our seeing him, he knows the Sylvania ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... to and fro; "Well, it surprises me," he said; then, after a pause, "I have been accustomed to think both celibacy and marriage good in their way. In the Church of Rome great good, I see, comes of celibacy; but depend on it, my dear Reding, you are making a great blunder if you are for introducing celibacy ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... the Epistles of Phalaris, the import of {men} and {de}, the Catholic question, or the great roots of Christian faith; ending with the latest joke in the town or the West Raw, the last effusion by Affleck, tailor and poet, the last blunder of AEsop the apothecary, and the last repartee of the village fool, with the week's Edinburgh and Glasgow news by their respective carriers; the whole little life, sad and humorous—who had been born, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... I was still in durance vile, and Higgins was in his strait-jacket. On being released, my hands were full, as you can suppose. Moreover, I did not learn at once of your detention. The saddle and the valise caused me to suspect that a blunder had been committed. I cannot adequately express my regrets. In ten minutes," continued Dr. Pendegrast, turning a fat gold watch over on its back in the palm of his hand, where it looked like a little ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... complain extremely when I tell them I have no order to apprehend anybody for past misdemeanours."[16] And this scrupulous observance of his orders, at a time when a little excess of zeal was unlikely to be regarded as a very serious blunder, is yet more strikingly illustrated in his next letter, written a week later from Dumfries. In that town, at the southern end of the bridge over the Nith, the charity of some devout Covenanting ladies had lately ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... was well known that a man had to be up very early in every sense if he wanted to keep an eye on a Putnam horse. Mat Woodburn might be old, but he was by no means sleepy; and Joses could not afford to blunder. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... arises out of the Edgar incident. But that incident merely precipitated a struggle which was certain to come. It is possible to make too much of the killing of Edgar. It was a shocking and, in my judgment, a criminal blunder, such as would have caused a popular outcry anywhere. It was made much worse by the light way in which it was first dealt with by the Public Prosecutor and then by the judge at the trial. By itself, however, it would not have justified, nor, in fact, provoked the present storm. But ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... been of this fact; and now he learnt that this imputed lover of Eleanor's was at any rage as much disliked by her as by any one of the family. Mr Harding, however, was by no means sufficiently a man of the world to conceal the blunder he had made. He could not pretend that he had entertained no suspicion; he could not make believe that he had never joined the archdeacon in his surmises. He was greatly surprised, and gratified beyond measure, and he could not help showing that ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... celebrate the stillness and sweetness of truth in an open mind. Clear perception is refreshing as sleep. It is a sleep from blunder, care, and sin. In every thought we are lifted to sit with the serene rulers, and see how lightly, yet firmly, in their orbits the worlds are borne. With insight we work freely, for every result is secure; we rest, for every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... the enclosed is worth your reading. I am smashed to atoms about Glen Roy. My paper was one long gigantic blunder from beginning to end. Eheu! Eheu! (524/1. See "Life and Letters," I., pages 68, 69, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... step in that course which made Prussia so formidable a member of the Grand Alliance of 1813-15. But even so late as the close of May, 1813, Prussia was in danger of annihilation, and would have been annihilated had not Napoleon proffered an armistice, which was accepted,—the greatest blunder of his career, according to some eminent critics, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... for the last part of our journey. Shortly beyond the town, the road turned, for a moment, into the river, and after passing for a few rods in the river-bed, struck up again onto the bank. At this place we made a fatal blunder. When the road went down into the river, supposing that we were about to ford, we kept straight across the stream. Finding a road upon the other side we had no suspicion but what we were going well and travelled onward. For a long time we found trails of ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... it? To account for this, the Persian creates a second spirit, whose nature is evil, and supposes a continual war between that and the god of good. In our own shadowy and tremendous Typhon, the Egyptians image a similar demon. Perplexing blunder that yet more bewilders us!—folly that arose from the vain delusion that makes a palpable, a corporeal, a human being, of this unknown power—that clothes the Invisible with attributes and a nature ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... was not to allow for that earlier train! It's abduction, Watson—abduction! Murder! Heaven knows what! Block the road! Stop the horse! That's right. Now, jump in, and let us see if I can repair the consequences of my own blunder." ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... myself, Hoka was still staring and ruffling like a gamecock. It was a Corsican who had years before called him cochon sauvage—cocon chauvage, as Hoka mispronounced it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality. When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly explained the nature of my offence: I had asked him to sell cocoa-nuts; and in Hoka's view articles ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had gone smoothly," he thought, "I should have cursed the fellow's stupidity. As it is, I'm not sorry for the blunder." ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... know." Up to a certain point this is shrewd and wholesome advice. One does undoubtedly keep some kinds of suffering in check by resolutely minimising them. But there is a significance in suffering too. It is not all a clumsy error, a well-meaning blunder. It is a deliberate part of the constitution ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the instant comprehended his blunder. For the first time Booverman's shot went wide of the mark, straight into the trees that bordered the river ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... liberties enormous, after ideas of their own, with the text of a friend thus honoured. But although they printed with intent altogether faithful, they did so certainly without any adequate jealousy of the printers—apparently without a suspicion of how they could blunder. Of blunders therefore in the Folio also there are many, some through mere following of blundered print, some in fresh corruption of the same, some through mistaking of the manuscript corrections, and some probably from ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... things, or all of them, but it is always something more. Friendly visiting means intimate and continuous knowledge of and sympathy with a poor family's joys, sorrows, opinions, feelings, and entire outlook upon life. The visitor that has this is unlikely to blunder either about relief or any detail; without it, he is almost certain, in any charitable relations with members of the family, to blunder seriously. Visitors have said to me that they could not see that they had been of any special service, though their friendly feeling for certain families made ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... loyalty to their sovereign, and one of whom, Egmont, had performed distinguished services for his country and king, was profound. A wave of mingled rage and sorrow swept over the land. It was not only an act of cruel injustice, but even as an act of policy a blunder of the first magnitude, which was sure to bring, as it did bring, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... reader at all events, it argues very much indeed in a writer's favour, that the "layman" has managed to write the simplest sentence about a specialty, without some more or less serious blunder. ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... though there was a side-table for the children, at which, when the Shepherd of Ettrick was about to seat himself, his friend probably whispered that it was reserved for the "little lords and ladies, and their playmates." This blunder may seem undeserving of any explanation; but it is often in small matters that the strongest feelings are most strikingly betrayed—and this story is, in exact {p.088} proportion to its silliness, indicative of the jealous feeling which mars and distorts so many of Hogg's representations ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... mind could hardly decide; but she was afraid it was by herself. She knew she had never felt sure enough of his attentions to do more than speculate on what she would do if they should become more pointed, and yet she felt angry and sore at having been exposed to so absurd a blunder by the silence of the parties concerned. "After all," she said to herself, "there can be no great harm done, I have not been weak enough to commit my heart to the error. I am unscathed, and I will show it by sympathy ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... such set trash of phrase Ineffably—legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,— Nor even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... life never to get into a passion, never to let herself go, never to reveal herself by intemperate speech, never to any one, except occasionally to her husband when his cold sarcasm became intolerable. She felt, as soon as the door closed on Philip, that she had made a blunder, and yet in her irritation she committed a worse one. She went at once to Evelyn's room, resolved to make it perfectly sure that the Philip episode was ended. She had had suspicions about her daughter ever since the Van Cortlandt dinner. She would find out if they were justified, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... all speakers would reasonably be called upon to render such an account, if any of their words were spoken for money; I only say this. If Aeschines in his private capacity has spoken wildly on some occasion or committed some blunder, do not be over-strict with him, but let it pass and grant him pardon: but if as your ambassador he has deliberately deceived you for money, then do not let him go, or tolerate the plea that he ought not to be ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... carcasses, and perhaps an elk or a mountain sheep as well. I never became more than a fair hunter, and at times I had most exasperating experiences, either failing to see game which I ought to have seen, or committing some blunder in the stalk, or failing to kill when I fired. Looking back, I am inclined to say that if I had any good quality as a hunter it was that of perseverance. "It is dogged that does it" in hunting as in many other things. Unless in wholly exceptional cases, when we were ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... law. What a mysterious labyrinth was this Trade confederacy, into which he had put his foot so rashly, and shown his game, like a novice, to the subtle and crafty Grotait. He now collected all his powers, not to injure Little, but to slip out of his own blunder. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... two danced with delight. Many in the situation of Fred Greenwood would have laughed at Jack and "guyed" him over his blunder, but the incident was too dreadful and the terror of his friend too intense for Fred to wish to amuse himself at his expense. However, he could not help indulging just a trifle. Suddenly pausing in his antics he looked down at ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... me. They lead me about and show me the things they are interested in. Of course the little ones cannot spell on their fingers; but I manage to read their lips. If I do not succeed they resort to dumb show. Sometimes I make a mistake and do the wrong thing. A burst of childish laughter greets my blunder, and the pantomime begins all over again. I often tell them stories or teach them a game, and the winged hours depart and leave us good ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... which was not made for motoring. When Dick saw this, before I could speak he had his own fur-lined coat off, insisting that she should put it on. "I can take Casa Triana's," said he, "since he's still posing as a soldier of Spain." And a glance warned me not to blunder by asking why, in the name of common sense, she shouldn't have mine which I wasn't using, instead of his, which was on his back. He wanted her to wear his coat, ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... is given in the old copies, sarua voulra boungrace, but surely Mercatore was not intended to blunder in his own language.] ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... of me Maddy would be," he thought, glancing sidewise at Mrs. Noah, who had witnessed the blunder, and was now looking from the window to ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... Du. haakbus, hook-gun, the second element of which appears in blunderbuss. The first part of this word has undergone so many popular transformations that it is difficult to say which was the original form. Ludwig has Donner-buechs, Blunder-buechs, oder Muszketon, "a thunder-box; a blunder-buss; a musketoon; a wide-mouthed brass-gun, carrying about twenty pistol bullets at once." It was also called in German Plantier-buechs, from plantieren, ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... Canada which would terminate in independence and freedom from the baneful domination of the mother country, and the tyrannical conduct of a small and despicable faction in the colony." The official class availed themselves of this egregious blunder to excite the indignation of the Loyalist population against Mr. Mackenzie and other Reformers, many of whom, like the Baldwins and Perrys, disavowed all sympathy with such language. Mr. Mackenzie's motive was really to insult Mr. Ryerson, with whom he had quarrelled. ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... hands of a man who was so little qualified to govern Rigganites, as was the present rector, the Reverend Harold Barholm. A man who has mistaken his vocation, and who has become ever so faintly conscious of his blunder, may be a stumbling-block in another's path; but restrained as he will be by his secret pangs of conscience, he can scarcely be an active obstructionist. But a man who, having mistaken the field of his life's labor, yet remains amiably self-satisfied, and unconscious ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... worse by adding "Alcolom (Al-Kulub?) signifying Ravisher of Hearts" and his names for the six slave-girls (vol. iv. 37) such as "Zohorob Bostan" (Zahr al-Bustan), which Galland rightly renders by "Fleur du Jardin," serve only to heap blunder upon blunder. Indeed the Anglo-French translations are below criticism: it would be waste of time to notice them. The characteristic is a servile suit paid to the original e.g. rendering hair "accomode ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... sturdy old Commodore Jones will blunder along with the American liners, CYANE and UNITED STATES, and haul down that proud Mexican ensign. He will hoist for the first time, on October, 19, 1842, the stars and stripes over the town. Even though he apologizes, the foreigners ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... of marines sitting in the house-place, drinking. He, too, like Philip, had lost his way; but was turning his blunder to account by telling all manner of wonderful stories to two or three rustics who had come in ready to drink on any pretence; especially if they could get good liquor without ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the "Leonore" operas, of Gaveaux and Paer. Much confusion has existed in the books (and still exists, for that matter) touching the order in which the four overtures were composed. The early biographers were mistaken on that point, and the blunder was perpetuated by the numbering when the scores were published. The true "Leonore No. 1," is the overture known in the concert-room, where it is occasionally heard, as "Leonore No. 2." This was the original overture ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... cannot overlook a stupendous and laughable blunder of Rienzi. The Lex regia empowers Vespasian to enlarge the Pomrium, a word familiar to every antiquary. It was not so to the tribune; he confounds it with pomarium, an orchard, translates lo Jardino de Roma cioene Italia, and is copied by the less excusable ignorance ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... razor down. Here (in Michael's words) was the total disappearance of a valuable uncle; here was a time of inexplicable conduct on the part of a nephew who had been in bad blood with the old man any time these seven years; what a chance for a judicial blunder! "But no," thought Morris, "they cannot, they dare not, make it murder. Not that. But honestly, and speaking as a man to a man, I don't see any other crime in the calendar (except arson) that I don't seem somehow to have committed. And yet I'm a perfectly respectable man, and wished nothing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after all, the settlers had been caught more or less off their guard. And, so far from it being possible for me to undertake singlehanded an expedition for the rescue of Nell, I was liable at any moment to blunder upon a war party of savages and either be slain by them forthwith, or, still worse, be carried off a captive, to suffer death by torture; indeed, the wonder was that something of this kind had not already happened to me, as doubtless it had to many another unsuspecting ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... to the Barmecides, who had begun to set forth shadowy feasts. That is the way in thick weather; you are no sooner out of one scrape than you blunder into another. ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... fault against which they hurl the rather stolid thunders of their "Inasmuch." The world, which gives the lie to the law alike in its rejoicings, in its habits, and in its pleasures, is severer than the Code and the Church; the world punishes a blunder after encouraging hypocrisy. The whole economy of the law on marriage seems to me to require reconstruction from the bottom to the top. The French law would be perfect perhaps if it excluded ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... hide the hideous blunder. "Told of such a home as this is," he explained, "a true ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... takes his judgments generously, gratefully. Can it be that, after all, he despises and is no true lover of his own art, and is but chilled by an enthusiasm for it in another, such as that of Jean-Baptiste? as if Jean-Baptiste over-valued it, or as if some ignobleness or blunder, some sign that he has really missed his aim, started into sight from his work at the sound of praise—as if such praise could hardly ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... known that a man had to be up very early in every sense if he wanted to keep an eye on a Putnam horse. Mat Woodburn might be old, but he was by no means sleepy; and Joses could not afford to blunder. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... War must soon be over. Europe as a whole could not allow this devastation of resources. America would intervene. Already the Germans realized their gigantic blunder in starting the attack. Their men were said to be—she read—much less brave than people had expected. The mighty German Armies had been held up for ten days by a puny Belgian force and the forts of Liege and Namur. There ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... more careful in future. Another blunder like this, and I shall be compelled to ask the aid of ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... showed a decided inclination for Stratton's society, and when he came to know her better he found her frank, breezy, and delightfully companionable. He knew perfectly well that unless he wanted to take a chance of making some tremendous blunder he ought to avoid any prolonged conversation with the lady. But she was so charming that every now and then he flung prudence to the ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... the cause of this singular intoxication, the consequences of which might have been very disastrous? A simple blunder of Michel's, which, fortunately, Nicholl was able ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... engaged some children to personate the supernatural beings summoned by the witches from that weird vessel. Little Edmund with his irons was the cause of a ridiculous accident, and the attempt to embody the ghostly forms was abruptly abandoned. But the child seems to have been pardoned for his blunder, and for a short time was permitted by the manager to appear in one or two children's parts. Little did the dignified manager imagine that the child—who was one of his cauldron of imps in Macbeth—was to become, twenty years later, his formidable rival—formidable enough ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... the gig came alongside the schooner, the lieutenant offered his hand to Miss Lydia, and then helped the colonel to swing himself up on deck. Once there, Sir Thomas, who was still very much ashamed of his blunder, and at a loss to know what he had better do to make the man whose ancestry dated from the year 1100 forget it, invited him to supper, without waiting for his daughter's consent, and with many fresh apologies and handshakes. Miss Lydia ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... impishness of childhood, climbed up in the auto. It was a simple matter to even blunder on pushing the button that would set the self-starter in operation. The car had been left standing on a level bit of road, but, just ahead of it, was a rather steep slope. Mollie had neglected ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... Elections. Some violent Tories in the House of Commons flattered themselves that they might be able to carry a resolution reflecting on the King. They moved that whoever had advised His Majesty to refuse his assent to their bill was an enemy to him and to the nation. Never was a greater blunder committed. The temper of the House was very different from what it had been on the day when the address against Portland's grant had been voted by acclamation. The detection of a murderous conspiracy, the apprehension of a French invasion, had changed every thing. The King was popular. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... quick, Count! Aye, aye, that was a blunder indeed. Don't you see the dogs? There they run—they have lost the scent. [Exit Baron looking after ...
— Lover's Vows • Mrs. Inchbald
... useless and undefended village, hundreds of their number lay wounded and dying in the snow. The carnage and slaughter this day in the enemy's ranks was terrific, resulting from a most stupid military blunder, but it atoned slightly for our losses previous thereto. The valley below us was dotted with pile after pile of enemy dead, the carnage here being almost equal to the terrific fighting later at Vistavka. When he discovered his mistake and useless sacrifice of men, and seeing it was hopeless to ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... told me I am perfect, and everything I do is perfect, and he does not want me different. But I have never really shared his life and interests. If I make idiotic mistakes he does not correct me. I have to find them out, when I repeat them before others. When I made that silly blunder about the brazen serpent, you so kindly put me right. Michael would have smiled and let it pass as not worth correcting; then I should have repeated it before a roomful of people, and wondered why they looked amused! Ah, but what do I care for people, ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... as he stepped by her reaching out for butcher-knife and roast. "So you are dad's kind, are you? Hitting the booze every show you get. The Lord deliver me from his chief blunder. Meaning a man." ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... Committee on the Conduct of the War, Hooker and Sickles both testify that the panic of the Eleventh Corps produced a gap in the line, and that this was the main cause of disaster on this field. But the fatal gap was made long before the Eleventh Corps was attacked. It was Hooker's giddy blunder in ordering away, two miles in their front, the entire line from Dowdall's to ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... here when the doctor was out, switched the barn line on to this one, and taken my call without Jones knowing anything about it," he said as he hung up the receiver and went out. "It was a pretty good plot, but one little blunder will spoil ...
— The Hilltop Boys - A Story of School Life • Cyril Burleigh
... his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their vice, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... a petulant way,' the President responded, '"It is with you, sir, all story, story! You are the father of every military blunder that has been made during the war. You are on your road to hell, sir, with this government, by your obstinacy, and you are not a mile ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... faults and inaccuracies in the work; but I have reason to believe that they are neither numerous nor important: I may have occasionally given a wrong name to a hill or a brook; or may have overstated or understated, by a furlong, the distance between one hamlet and another; or even committed the blunder of saying that Mr Jones Ap Jenkins lived in this or that homestead, whereas in reality Mr Jenkins Ap Jones honoured it with his residence: I may be chargeable with such inaccuracies; in which case I beg to express ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... in the boxes on the left hand, and as quickly as we could accommodate ourselves to the heat of the water, we got into the great tank. We were scarcely in, when a company of six or eight men and women entered the bath house; they at once perceived our blunder, but without the slightest hesitation, the women as well as the men went over to the men's side and proceeded to undress and get into the tank with us, betraying no consciousness that aught was amiss. So far as I could see there was not ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the Karl der Grosse, our best and biggest. Run down in the night by a British liner that blundered into the fighting in trying to blunder out. They're fighting in a gale. The liner's afloat with her nose broken, sagging about! There never was such a battle!—never before! Good ships and good men on both sides,—and a storm and the night and the dawn and all in the open ocean full steam ahead! No stabbing! No submarines! Guns and shooting! ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... of the various books of our Bible, concerning women, are compared with the times in which severally they probably were written, in general they are certainly in advance of most contemporary opinion. The hurtful blunder of later eras has been the setting up of early, cruder standards touching the relations of men and of women, as moulding influences and guides to broader civilizations. They ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... we broke camp and the time they reached the bridge the three who went ahead drank a quart of whisky, and there was the initial blunder at Northfield. I never knew Bob to drink before, and I did not know he was drinking that day till ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... his victim was bent upon sparing Southern feeling so far as it could be spared without injustice being done to the country, Booth must have expected to find his act condemned by every rational Southern man as a worse than useless crime, as a blunder of the very first magnitude. Had he succeeded in getting abroad, Secession exiles would have shunned him, and have treated him as one who had brought an ineffaceable stain on their cause, and also had rendered their restoration to their homes impossible. The pistol-shot of Sergeant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... in another quarter, Allcraft suddenly discovered that he had committed an egregious blunder. He had entrusted Planner with the secret of his critical position—had made him acquainted with the dishonest transactions of his father, and the consequent bankruptcy of the firm. Not that this disclosure had been made in any violent ebullition of unguarded feeling—from any particular ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... the head, old man; it will be all right to-morrow. Their blunder is in having unwittingly sprung their trap on the very evening the Princess and you came to an understanding. Had they been even a few hours earlier you would not have dared to speak of love to her—and so you might not have had the King's daughter as a special advocate. ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... as of some consternation in the little company. The elderly ladies stopped talking abruptly and exchanged glances, though this was not of my observation at the moment, I think, but recurred to my consciousness later, when I had perceived my blunder. ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... declined Jack's polite invitation, upon the plea that he felt it to be his imperative duty to return forthwith to Havana, to report to the authorities there the full and true circumstances of the case, in order that Jack might be subjected to no further annoyance from the unfortunate blunder that had somehow been made. But no doubt the true explanation of his refusal was to be found in the fact that his exceedingly sensitive pride was hurt by Jack's innuendo, and by the fact that he had been placed in a false and somewhat ridiculous position. It was bad enough to be ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... Pompey means to do," he wrote to Atticus. "I do not think he knows himself. Certainly none of us know.—It is all panic and blunder. We are uncertain whether he will make a stand, or leave Italy. If he stays, I fear his army is too unreliable. If not, where will he go, and how and what are his plans? Like you, I am afraid that Caesar will be a Phalaris, and that we may expect the very worst. The flight of the Senate, the ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... suppose that errors of judgment must have occurred. Even had they not, differences of opinion between the Executive, bound by an oath to the strict performance of his duties, and writers and debaters must have arisen. It is not necessarily evidence of blunder on the part of the Executive because there are these differences of views. Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit, but it seems to me oftener in the selections made of the assistants appointed to aid in carrying out the various ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... renew the feast next day. The bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-hunter sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are dull and clumsy compared with the honey-bee. Attracted in the fields by the bee-hunter's box, they will come up the wind on the scent and blunder into it in the most stupid, ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... from disclosing it. I perceive, however, that he keeps up an acquaintance with your real mother, and that, in private, he assists her; perhaps all this is not done without a reason. On the other hand, he commits a blunder by urging you to marry some young lady! Perhaps he knows that you took the place of his son, without knowing that you are a girl. But this digression might gradually carry us too far; let us return to that secret which I am impatient ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
... did. They were to see still more within the compass of a day's march, but they had seen enough in their two weeks' comradeship to give them confidence in the young officer they never felt for their own and only "Grumbly," who, with all his experience, would often blunder, and Grumbly's blunders told on his troop, otherwise ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... trust that the present Administration will not commit the blunder of attempting to 'gain favour with this or that section of the constituencies, by indulging in loose talk on ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... how damned weak I am," he said to himself. The adventure was like a blunder that one had committed at a party so horrible that one felt nothing could be done to excuse it: the only remedy was to forget. His horror at the degradation he had suffered helped him. He was like a snake casting its skin and he looked upon the old covering with nausea. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... made another blunder. Lord Abinger, it seems, is too Conservative to resign. After all the editorial boasting about "exclusive information," "official intelligence," &c. it is very evident that the "Morning Twaddler" must not be looked upon as a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... annulled at any moment by Arthur's reappearance on the political scene. If, therefore, Arthur—as is most probable—was now really dead, whether he had indeed perished a victim of one of those fits of ungovernable fury in which—and in which alone—the Angevin counts sometimes added blunder to crime, or whether he had died a natural death from sickness in prison, or by a fall in attempting to escape,[35] it would be equally politic on John's part to let rumor do its worst rather than suffer any gleam of light to penetrate the mystery ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... saw what a misleading blunder she had committed towards Loveday in playing to the yeoman. Perhaps she had sown the seeds ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... they don't commit murders—not in Europe, at any rate," said Mr. Flexen. "In the East and in the United States it's different perhaps. Murder is always as much of a blunder as a crime. It makes people so keen after the criminal. No: no really ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... Louise caught a faint resemblance to Marthy in his face. "I saw a man accused of a theft once," he said. "The evidence was—or seemed—absolutely unassailable. And afterward he was exonerated completely; it was just a horrible mistake. But he left school under a cloud. His life was ruined by the blunder. I'd have to know absolutely before I'd accuse anyone of stealing those calves, Miss Louise. I'd have to see them in a man's corral, with his brand on them—I believe that's the way it's done, out ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... erected into charms. In other words, men play the love game so unintelligently that they often esteem a woman in proportion as she seems to disdain and make a mock of her intelligence. Women seldom, if ever, make that blunder. What they commonly value in a man is not mere showiness, whether physical or spiritual, but that compound of small capacities which makes up masculine efficiency and passes for masculine intelligence. This intelligence, at its highest, has a human value substantially ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... nevertheless preserve her own peculiar modes of thought and feeling? One striking fact is hopeful: that the Japanese admiration for Western material superiority is by no means extended to Western morals. Oriental thinkers do not commit the serious blunder of confounding mechanical with ethical progress, nor have any failed to perceive the moral weaknesses of our boasted civilisation. One Japanese writer has expressed his judgment of things Occidental after a fashion that deserves to be noticed by a larger circle of readers than ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... he is at war with himself as well as with others, for it is the life of a being who, though essentially social, tries to find satisfaction in a personal or individual good. The "intelligence" and the "heart" equally condemn such a life; it is not only a crime but a blunder. For a spiritual being as such is one who can only save his life by losing it in a wider life, one who must die to himself in order that he may live. In the progress of man's spirit, therefore, there is no necessary or possible schism between the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... deprives any discussion about date of its point. But as I have said, this is the one Dickens work of which the date is essential. It is really an important part of the criticism of this book to say that it is his first book. Certain elements of clumsiness, of obviousness, of evident blunder, actually require the chronological explanation. It is biographically important that this is his first book, almost exactly in the same way that it is biographically important that The Mystery of Edwin Drood was his last book. Change or no change, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Avernus, and coot and teal also blunder here occasionally, as if to contradict Virgil and confute etymology—for Avernus is [Greek: aornos] (birdless,) and Latinised as every one knows. However, few birds are to be found here. The Lucrine is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... an armchair and a throne. The minor actors are not so accustomed to their new position. Nothing is more amusing than the embarrassment of the courtiers when they have to answer the Emperor's questions. They begin with a blunder; then, in correcting themselves, they fall into still worse confusion; ten times a minute was repeated, Sire, General, Your Majesty, Citizen, First Consul. Constant, the Emperor's valet de chambre, has given us a description of this ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... action, always with an eye to his general oversight. I never forgot that fact. He possessed the eye of an eagle. His uncanny powers of observation kept me terrified. He could detect at a glance the slightest blunder or wrong doing in my day's activities. Every afternoon, about sunset he came whirling into the yard, his team flecked with foam, his big gray eyes flashing from side to side, and if any tool was out of place or broken, he discovered it at once, and his reproof was never a cause ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Vertebrata into hot and cold blooded is a curiously retrograde step, only intelligible when we reflect that the excellent entomologist had no real comprehension of vertebrate morphology; but he makes some atonement for the blunder by steadily upholding the class distinctness of the Amphibia. In this he was followed by Dr J. E. Gray; but Dumeril and Bibron in their great work,7 and Dr Gunther in his Catalogue, in substance, adopted Brongniart's arrangement, the Batrachia being simply one ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Mr. Pyecroft quickly, easily, to forestall any blunder by the hapless Matilda—and deftly interposing himself between Jack and Mrs. De ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... 'for life in general there is but one decree. Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret. Do not suppose,' he added, smiling, 'that I hold that youth is genius; all that I say is, that genius, when young, is divine. Why, the greatest captains of ancient and modern ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... in impressionable years, through a court blunder, young William had had a tutor, Delbrueck, who poisoned his charge's mind against the Prussian ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... mistake of the last session was the attempt to do this very thing, by a renunciation of its power to secure political rights to any class of citizens, with the obvious purpose to allow the rebellious States to disfranchise, if they should see fit, their colored citizens. This unfortunate blunder must now be retrieved, and the emasculated citizenship given to the negro supplanted by that contemplated in the Constitution of the United States, which declares that the citizens of each State shall enjoy all the rights ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... too—she's given the highest amount subscribed, you know; she has slews of money all in her own right, because she's of age, you know—and then the girls began to get scared and Elsie Dare got right up and said she thought there had been some kind of a mistake—a blunder—they mustn't get excited—they must begin all over, and somebody must go after Jane and bring her back and explain—as if there was any way to explain a bold, bare insult like that!—and they sent a committee after her. They wanted me to go, ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... relations, and that, too, at some little cost, on the propriety of using me himself that evening at the chateau of the King of the French. Fortunately, his monitress, though by no means of the purest water, knew better than to suffer her eleve to commit so gross a blunder, and I escaped the calamity of making my first appearance at court under the ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... things, necessary that the inquiry bear a tint so neutral that the person to whom it is addressed shall find it impossible to reflect its colour in his reply. He will then sometimes, in his confusion, blunder into a truthful answer, but he does so generally with a bashful air, indicative of the painful consciousness that he has been reluctantly violating the rules of good breeding. A search after accurate statistics, under such conditions, is ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... under the figure of a white horse with a crested and noble head, like that which we have among the Elgin Marbles) to the chariot of the Soul. The system of Aristotle, as above stated, is throughout a mere complicated blunder, supported by sophistry, the laboriously developed mistake of Temperance for the essence of the virtues which it guides. Temperance in the mediaeval systems is generally opposed by Anger, or by Folly, or Gluttony: but her proper opposite ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... smoldering ruin and the smoke of its burning buildings could be seen for miles. The Germans displayed their "thoroughness" as they retired by poisoning the wells with arsenic, and setting high-explosive traps into which they hoped the British advance guards would blunder. Bridges over all the waterways were burned and the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... dissipated as practically not to be felt. This country is not run by votes. Do you think it is? It is governed by influence. It is governed by the ambitions and the enterprises which control votes. The young woman that thinks she is going to vote for the sake of holding an office is making an awful blunder. ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... Professor W. P. Trent, of Columbia University, has offered valuable suggestions and given important advice; and to Mr. M. Grant Daniell's patience, accuracy, and judgment this volume owes both its freedom from many a blunder and its possession ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... after this humiliation; resigned his office, and, to soothe his feelings, was actually promoted to be an earl! It is the most wonderful reason for promoting a man that ever I heard. Lord Bruce was made an earl for a blunder in prosody; and Nelson was made a baron for the victory of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... father had given him a fortnight in Paris on his way to Germany, as the reward of acquiescence. That (from Herr Harrison's point of view) was a disastrous blunder. How could the dear old Pater be expected to know that Paris is, spiritually speaking, no sort of way even to South Germany? He should have gone to Brussels, if he was ever, spiritually speaking, to get ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... He persists in writing "Zobeyda," "Khalifa," "Aziza" (p. 194) and "Kahramana" (p. 199) without the terminal aspirate which, in Arabic if not in Turkish, is a sine qua non (see my Suppl. vol. v. 302). He preserves the pretentious blunder "The Khalif" (p. 193), a word which does not exist in Arabic. He translates (p. 181), although I have taught him to do better, "Hadimu 'I-Lizzati wa Mufarriku 'l-Jama'at," by "Terminator of Delights and Separator of Companies" instead of Destroyer ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... sad blunder— What can be come over me lately, I wonder? The Prince was as cheerful as if all his life He had never been troubled with Friends or a Wife— "Fine weather," says he—to which I, who must prate, Answered, "Yes, Sir, but changeable rather, of late." He took it, I fear, for he lookt ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... be defrayed largely out of Imperial and not merely out of Provincial funds. If the educational problem is the most vital and the most urgent one of all at the present hour in India, it stands to reason that no more disastrous blunder could be made than to stint the new department ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... caused by war could scarcely have fitted them to stand this unexpected trial. Rome's harsh dealings with the treasonable South, although adopted for political motives, was almost unquestionably a political blunder. She confiscated devastated lands, and so perpetuated their devastation. She left ruined harbours and cities in decay. She crippled her own resources to add to the pastoral wealth of a handful of her citizens. In the East of Italy there was ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... not raise the question whether Lincoln made a colossal blunder when he renounced his favorite doctrine so emphatically set forth in his Congressional speech (page 47). The die was cast when Sumter was fired on. The question which confronted him in 1863-64—What to do with the perishing Union prisoners?—was ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague
... her intense suffering, she had an irresistible claim upon his compassion, her husband did not feel certain that even were Eva herself again Toni's tragic blunder would be repaired; and although he was fully determined to do all in his power to bring Eva's restless spirit peace, there was a possibility that she would return to life as callous, as heartless, as vindictive ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... my power to have cancelled the leaf in the large paper as well as in the small; but I thought it might thereby have taken from the former the air of a true edition; and so the blunder (a mere transposition of the letters ar) will go down to a future generation in the large paper. There is yet another slight variation between the small and large. At p. 111, in the account of the catalogue of Krohn's books, the concluding sentence wholly varies: but I believe there is not ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Squadron sometimes only one-fourth could be used. To professional readers it may seem unnecessary to enter on such familiar and obvious details; but a military man, in making his estimate, has fallen into the curious blunder of making a fleet fire every gun, bow, stern, and both broadsides, into one fort, a hundred yards square; a feat which only could be performed by landing a ship in the centre of the works, in which case it could enjoy an all-round fire. The nine gunboats carried ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... Lieutenant Loti but uninstructed evidently, marries a geisha whose father had made the happy dispatch at the request of the Son of Heaven after making a blunder in his military command. She is Cio-Cio-San, also Madama Butterfly, and she comes to her wedding with a bevy of geishas or mousmes (I do not know which) and a retinue of relations. All enjoy the hospitality of the American officer while ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... his officers there was a colonel, a very brave man, and a capital soldier, who, on one occasion, had made some slight military slip or blunder. This drew on him the king's displeasure, and was never forgotten. So his pension or half-pay allowance was made the very lowest his rank would permit; for these allowances were regulated by ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... him could point appeal. His mistress was the thing of uses tried. Frigid the netting smile on whom he wooed, But on his Policy his eye was lewd. That sharp long zig-zag into distance brooked No foot across; a shade his ire provoked. The blunder or the cruelty of a deed His Policy imperative could plead. He deemed nought other precious, nor knew he Legitimate outside his Policy. Men's lives and works were due, from their birth's date, To the State's shield and sword, himself the State. He thought for them in mass, as Titan may; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... military skill, he fails. Once more has the President on his hands the serious problem of finding the right man. This time the commission was given to General Joseph Hooker. With the later records before us, it is easy to point out that this selection also was a blunder. There were better men in the group of major-generals. Reynolds, Meade, or Hancock would doubtless have made more effective use of the power of the army of the Potomac, but in January, 1863, the relative characters and abilities of these generals were ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... was Alvord's reply, "but he's handicapped by the personality of his man. Edge's doing pretty well, considering. He probably is wise to the situation. He didn't expect anything like a contest, you know, owing to that confounded blunder one of you two made. Now he's doing the best he can; but his man's been too strong in the God-and-morality way in years gone by to wipe out the stain by one evening of free booze. On the other hand, your life has been perfect—always careful and sound in business, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... having tragic consequences is also the strength that saves her when chastened by suffering. In her the author "gives us the common stuff of life," says an English critic, "gives it us simple and direct. There is nothing here of Ibsen's pathology. We are in the sun. Her most hideous blunder cannot undo a woman's soul. Bjoernson knows that the deed is nothing at all. It is the soul behind the deed that he sees. Not everything that cometh out of a man defileth a man. At all events, so it is here: triumph and joy built upon an act that—as the Philistines would say—has ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... course, what you mean. And, Billy, I'll confess that I've been sorry lots of times, since, that I spoke as I did to you, particularly when I saw how it grieved my brother William to have you go away. If I blundered then, I'm sorry; and perhaps I did blunder. At all events, that is only the more reason now why I am so anxious to do what I can to rectify that old ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... Hermia when he awoke, the blunder Puck committed would have been of no consequence, for he could not love that faithful lady too well; but for poor Lysander to be forced by a fairy love-charm, to forget his own true Hermia, and to run after another lady, and leave Hermia ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... the keenest fox-hunter, to be in at the death. But the great trial was an anthem that had been prepared and arranged by Master Simon, and on which he had founded great expectation. Unluckily there was a blunder at the very outset; the musicians became flurried; Master Simon was in a fever, everything went on lamely and irregularly until they came to a chorus beginning "Now let us sing with one accord," which seemed to be ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... ventures on a remark on Sanskrit grammar. It is the only passage in all his writings, as far as I remember, where, instead of indulging in mere sheet lightning, he comes down upon me with a crashing thunderbolt, and points out a real grammatical blunder. He says ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... intrusion. Nokomee began to talk swiftly in that rattling, high-pitched tongue of theirs. I squatted down on my heels, took out my pipe, lit it. At the flare of my match Holaf struck it from my hand. I realized it had been a blunder, even a spark might attract attention to their presence on the hillside. Still, the incident told me Nokomee had not been lying ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... highest to the lowest—in all metres, and on every variety of subject. This feat was lately communicated to me by one of his then schoolfellows; and I also recollect him once mentioning the subject to me himself; adding, if I recollect correctly, that there was not a blunder found in any of the verses which he had written. During his vacations he visited France, and mastered the French and Italian languages, with both of which, up to the period of his death, he continued perfectly familiar, and very partial to the writers of both. About this time he began to cast about ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the parties. This man Cole seems to have been the most wiley conspirator of them all, and played his infamous part of the plot with the most adroit shrewdness; and the defeat of the whole scheme was not owing to any blunder of his, but rather the blunder of those who employed and furnished him with the means. Having been well supplied with money by Mr. Thompson, and no limit put to his expenses, he began his work with a will. He seems to have begun by getting generally well acquainted with the officers ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... while doing their best to precipitate it through the downfall of the Government, may very reasonably continue their policy of pin-pricks to keep politicians from going to sleep, but serious violence would be worse than a crime; it would be a blunder. No general dares throw away his men when nothing is to be gained, and our analysis shows that the interval between women and the vote can only be shortened by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... in such a shape that we cannot fail of debating it with great advantage. He intends, as you will see by his speech, to move the previous question on Pitt's proposition, which he is afraid to attempt to negative. After this recantation was over, the day was closed by such a blunder of Sheridan's, as I never knew any man of the meanest talents guilty of before. During the whole time that I have sat in Parliament, in pretty warm times, I never remember such an uproar as was raised by his threatening us with the danger of provoking the ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... and was equally implicated with my graceless self in this little conspiracy. But one thing yet—tell me before I go, Isabelle, Comtesse de Lineuil, whether you really do intend to accept the Baron de Sigognac as your husband—I don't want to run any risk of making a blunder at this stage of the proceedings, you understand, after having conducted the negotiations successfully up to this point. You do definitely and finally accept him, eh?—that is well—and now I will go to the ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... by the present Metellus on the Capitol, a statue of Africanus with the name of Serapio inscribed under it, I thought it a mistake of the workman. I now see that it is an error of Metellus's. What a shocking historical blunder! For that about Flavius and the Fasti, if it is a blunder, is one shared in by all, and you were quite right to raise the question. I followed the opinion which runs through nearly all historians, as is often the case with Greek writers. For example, do they ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... wrong term," said James, irritably. "Mesne profits refer to profits derived from real estate. Just like a solicitor to make such a blunder." ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... Nita joined it, and they had the exquisite pleasure of seeing Bob blush so red that there was no need for a candle this time, then turn very white, and clinging to the chairman's arm insist that there must be some blunder—it couldn't be she that they wanted. Finally, assured that the honor had indeed fallen to her, she broke into a war- whoop which shook the house to its foundation and brought the matron on the ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... danger would not be divined by the invader. Of course, the chances are that the invading airship would unconsciously miss the mines; on the other hand the possibilities are equally great that it would blunder into one of these traps ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... for applying "so pricketh hem nature in hire corages" to the folks that "longen to go on pilgrimages"—and not to the "smale foules." Or is it intended for a happy innovation? To us it seems an unhappy blunder—taking away a fine touch of nature from Chaucer, and hardening it into horn; while "all energies and ages" is indeed a free and affected version of "corages." "For to wander thro'," is a mistranslation of "to seken;" and to "sing the holy mass," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... I told you I was going to be married, you showed your confounded supercilious pity! You thought I was making a fatal mistake. Well, you're not a clever fellow, Stephen, but that was the worst blunder you ever made. Marrying Sadie is perhaps the only wise thing I have done. She has borne with my follies, hustled me when I needed it, and helped me to fight my weaknesses; and if there's any hope of my being a useful man, I owe it to her. Now it's obvious that I can't ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... scepticism had begun to arm itself against the sceptic: the economist of 1800 was no longer quite sure of his ground. He was now suspected of being fallible; and, what seemed of worse augury, he was beginning himself to suspect as much. To one capital blunder he was obliged publicly to plead guilty. What it was, we shall have occasion to mention immediately. Meantime it was justly thought that, in a dispute loaded with such prodigious practical consequences, good sense and prudence demanded a more extended enquiry than had yet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... witnessed. At the last he discovered that the man had picked up in his wanderings a little German. His own German was not first-rate; it was fluent, forcible, and accurate enough, so far as hotels and railway-stations were concerned; elsewhere it had a tendency to halt, blunder, and double back on itself. But, at all events, he managed to convey to his companion the distinct intimation that any further troubling of that young lady would only procure for him ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... you came here. Then I saw you couldn't be he. Chester had known you when Frank was at home with his mother—I compared dates and was sure of that—and he called you Ford Campbell. So then I saw what a horrible blunder I'd made, and I was worried nearly to death! But I couldn't see what I could do ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... of the responsibility that would rest upon you," protested the colonel. "A single blunder on your ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... an army is likely to be a mere encumbrance in war, it is perhaps even a still graver blunder to maintain one during that conflict of preparation which is at present the European substitute for actual hostilities. It consumes. It produces nothing. It not only eats and drinks and wears out its clothes and withdraws men from industry, but under the stress of invention it needs constantly ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... endocrine episodes in the life history of the individual, the sphere of applications is as long and broad and deep as life itself. Not only do the internal secretions open up before us the great hope—that Life at last will cease to stumble and grope and blunder, manacled by the iron chains of inexorable cause and effect. They provide tools, concrete and measurable, that can be handled and moved, weighed and seen, for the management of the problems of human ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... that when this distinguished Doctor said, "We are not now justified in destroying a living child," he was speaking from a medical standpoint, and meant to say that such destruction is now scientifically unjustifiable, is a blunder in surgery. From a moral point of view it is not only now, but it was always, unjustifiable to slay a child as a means to save the mother's life; a good end cannot justify an evil means, is a truth that cannot be too emphatically inculcated. This is one of the most important ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... land—this sacred land! I believe land to have nothing peculiar in its nature which does not belong to other property; and everything that we have done with the view of treating land differently from other property has been a blunder—a false course which we must retrace—an error which lies at the foundation of very much of the pauperism and want of employment which so generally prevail. Now, with regard to intestate estates, I am told that the House of Lords ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... ministerial disregard of physical laws and its consequences,—lessons which, unfortunately, seem to have but little effect on cabinets, owing to their shifting personelle, England following up the disasters of Carthagena with the still greater blunder of the Walcheren expedition, where, out of England's small available physical war material, nearly forty thousand men were either left to fatten the swamps of Walcheren, or to wander through England in after years on the pension-list, physical wrecks and in bodily and financial ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... prompting her when names or faces confused her, treating her with a little air of gracious intimacy eminently becoming and charming under the circumstances. His tact stood between her and more than one blunder, and it was to be noticed that she relied upon him even more than upon his father. Carey Coppered, indeed, hitherto staid and serious, was quite transformed by his joy and pride in her, and would not ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... warning glance, and she tried to cover her blunder: "I heard your father—I mean this gentleman—call you 'Jacky,'" she explained—panting, for Maurice's quick frown frightened her. "Here's a present for ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... Pembroke was represented as having been known in youth. The originators of the theory claimed to discover in the Earl of Pembroke the only young man of rank and wealth to whom the initials 'W. H' applied at the needful dates. In thus interpreting the initials, the Pembroke theorists made a blunder that proves on examination to be fatal to ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... I did. I twigged that long ago," replied he. "That is why I cut my stick so suddenly. I couldn't support a wife then, and I wasn't goin' to be thought a fortune-hunter, you know." It must have been that he was forgiven the sentimental blunder that is worse than a crime,—a want of frankness,—or how else could they have been married in six weeks and sailed for England? Mr. Alfred Brown, being in California, did not witness this ceremony, but Mr. Ketchum did, and "a large and fashionable company of the elite of Kalsing" (vide the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... political blunder. It stirred up the embers of Napoleonism. Ten years later they ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... first with Egypt's darkness in his head Thinks Wit the devil, and curses books unread. For twice ten winters has he blunder'd on, Thro' heavy comments, yet ne'er lost nor won: Much may be done in twenty winters more, And let him then learn English at threescore. No sacred Maro glitters on his shelf, He wants the mighty Stagyrite himself. See vast ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... that it might have been better for you," he said, breathing quickly. "In all probability you would have accepted him, had I not been here to—blunder into the affair." ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... continued Billy, "the parson's showed some sense. He might's well do the 'Harbor,' 'cause that's only one place an' he can't blunder much—seems if. You take the streets, same's he said; and I—if you'll put a needle an' thread through me, bime-by, after he's found, I'll go find him an' call it square. I'll begin to the lowest down end the city ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, And foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... books about the ideal public life of the future. Socialistic forecasts, and that kind of literature. He is a world-improver, you know, among other things. They have amused me more than I thought they would. That venerable blunder: to think that in changing the form of government you change the heart of man. And in other respects, too, these dreamers are at sea. For surely we should aim at simplification of machinery. Conceive, now, the state of affairs where everybody is more or less employed by the community—the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... this way, I wonder, Did editors always display The same disposition to blunder O'er the weight of the news of the day? When simpler was war and directer, Was Athens accustomed to see In the sheets of its Argus how ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... tough, strong head work—a bout at wrestling, be it Caesar's Bridge, the Epistles of Phalaris, the import of {men} and {de}, the Catholic question, or the great roots of Christian faith; ending with the latest joke in the town or the West Raw, the last effusion by Affleck, tailor and poet, the last blunder of AEsop the apothecary, and the last repartee of the village fool, with the week's Edinburgh and Glasgow news by their respective carriers; the whole little life, sad and humorous—who had been born, and who was dying or dead, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... adopted, at the earliest moment, the principle of reproductive employment. At length the Government felt the force of this logic, and did, although late, make an attempt to lessen the effects of their own great blunder. On the 5th of October, the "Labouchere letter" came out, authorizing reproductive works, the very thing the landlords were agitating for; now that their agitation was successful, what did they do? Nothing, or next to nothing, except that they ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... during the last few weeks had monopolised her thoughts to an amazing extent, the man for whose aid and protection she had hastened, the man to whom she was perfectly content to entrust the setting right of this ghastly blunder. Watching him, she suddenly felt that she was tired of it all, that she would like to creep away from the storm and rest somewhere. The quiet and his presence seemed to soothe her. Her tense expression relaxed, her eyes became softer. She ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and allowed a motion hostile to tariff reform to be passed nem. con. Though the Scottish Churches Bill, the Unemployed Bill and the Aliens Bill were passed, a complete fiasco occurred over the redistribution proposals, which pleased nobody and had to be withdrawn owing to a blunder as to procedure; and though on the 17th of July a meeting of the party at the foreign office resulted in verbal assurances of loyalty, only two days later the government was caught in a minority of four on the estimates for the Irish Land Commission. For a few days it was uncertain whether ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... is a blunder; every battle a blot of shame upon human nature; and the greatest wisdom a successful belligerent can shew, even when he has been forced into the fray by his beaten antagonist, is to get out of it as fast as he can. But some wars are viewed, not as they ought to be, as indications of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... There is one blunder, as Kathleen, the daughter of the Earl of Elsmore, is referred to as Lady Kathleen. Her father would have had to be a Duke or a Marquess for that address to be correct. Her actual title does not sound so good, so perhaps Perkins can ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... inexplicable blunder, its arrival was not made known to the proper authorities,—and the papers which should have accompanied it being lost or not delivered, no one at the custom-house knew what the huge case contained. It was deposited in a bonded warehouse ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... does not tell them in so many words where they are wrong; he attacks instead the cause in themselves which led to their mistake—a matter always of infinitely more consequence than any mistake itself: the one is a live mistake, an untruth in the soul, the other a mere dead blunder born of it. The word-connection therefore between their blunder and our Lord's exhortation, is not to be found; the logic of what the Lord said, is not on the surface. Often he speaks not to the words but to the thought; here he speaks ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... which it brings have passed away without improvement, and vice appears to prevail when the passions have subsided. The wretch that, after having seen the consequences of a thousand errours, continues still to blunder, and whose age has only added obstinacy to stupidity, is surely the object of either abhorrence or contempt, and deserves not that his grey head should secure him ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... and, when built upon, so certainly bring the superstructure tumbling to the ground, that the competent and careful workman can render no better service than to point out and correct them wherever found, undeterred by the association of great names, or the consciousness of his own liability to blunder. A sound and conscientious writer will welcome the courteous correction of his error, in the interest of historical accuracy; the opinion of any other need not ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... hope that there was some mistake, perhaps a blunder on the part of the servant who delivered the message, and that I should receive a note or a visit the next day which would set the matter right. But neither note nor visit came. In a few days the schooner Mary left Baltimore ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Jowett replied, in his quavering treble, "That's a false antithesis, Rogers. It's quite possible to bluster and blunder, too!" ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... The second blunder was the selection of the person who was to administer the country. Sir T. Shepstone, who knew it well and was liked by the Boers, was replaced by a military officer who had shown vigour in dealing with local disturbances in Griqualand West, but was totally unfit for ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... curiously towards the hollow-sounding hoof-beats, but neither the colonel nor his junior officer seems to notice them. Abbot's thoughts are evidently far away, and he makes no reply. The surgeon who sanctions his return to field duty yet a while would, to all appearances, be guilty of a professional blunder. The lieutenant's face is pale and thin; his hand looks very fragile and fearfully white in contrast with the bronze of his cheek. He leans his head upon his hand as he gazes away into the distance, and the colonel stands attentively regarding him. ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... dedication of his poems to the Queen, and his welcome to Alexandra, Princess of Wales, all of which are of great excellence. His Charge of the Light Brigade, at Balaclava, while it gave undue currency to that stupid military blunder, must rank as one of the finest battle-lyrics ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... true,I should have been surprised had it been otherwiseCome, show me up stairs, Mrs. Hadoway, lest I make a blunder, and go ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... doubt that signal as was this success, it shook the confidence of the force. The men were resolute to a point of ferocity, but the leaders' confidence in themselves and their task had been rudely tried; and yet the breaking of the square had been clearly due to a tactical blunder, and the inability of the cavalry to adapt themselves to ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... before I did, and thus defeated me, at least for a time. Twice had he confused and confounded his own schemes. Bunyard, deceived by the letter I had brought from my uncle, gave me the address of my mother. If not before, he learned his blunder when Dunkswell arrived. I could fancy the confusion with which they confronted each other when the facts came out. But it was "all up" with them. They had been "whipped out," and I was satisfied. I did not wish to prosecute them, because it would delay ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... my eyes upon her and seen Quicksands; say you, I should have thought of that before condemning Gerard his fancy; but there, life is a school, and the lesson ne'er done; we put down one fault and take up t'other, and so go blundering here, and blundering there, till we blunder into our graves, and there's ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Agamemnon about a—; and then afterwards, animated by private resentment only, he went about killing people basely, I will call it, because he knew himself invulnerable; and yet, invulnerable as he was, he wore the strongest armour in the world; which I humbly apprehend to be a blunder; for a horseshoe clapped to his vulnerable heel would have been sufficient. On the other hand, with submission to the favourers of the moderns, I assert with Mr. Dryden, that the Devil is in truth the hero of Milton's poem: his plan, which he lays, pursues, and at last executes, being the subject ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... damaging is his conduct. He falls into a kind of fit on discovering that his nephew's engagement had been broken off, which he might well do if his crime turned out to be not only a crime but also a blunder. And his conduct to the girl is, to say the least of it, strange. Nor will his character help him. He frequents the opium dens of the East-end of London. Guilty, guilty, most certainly guilty. There is nothing to be said in arrest of judgment. Let ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... at the risk of making a sad blunder, I will just say, that 'my nephew Tom' is any thing but a prepossessing youth; and that I hope all eyes regard him exactly as he appears to ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... intelligent princess. With all her splendour, there were hints of splendour still hidden—hints of an older, richer, and more mysterious land. He smiled at the idea of her being "not there." Ansell, clever as he was, had made a bad blunder. She had more reality than any other woman ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... has. The chin is firm and rather full; but it expresses resolution and fitly ends this profile, royal if not divine. It is necessary to add that the upper lip beneath the nose is lightly shaded by a charming down. Nature would have made a blunder had she not cast that tender mist upon the face. The ears are delicately convoluted,—a sign of secret refinement. The bust is large, the waist slim and sufficiently rounded. The hips are not prominent, but ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... understands English 2. Head of firm's statement and has been taught American business and factory methods," says Mr. Sicher, "she doesn't hesitate and Statement in concrete blunder; she understands what she is terms told and she ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... be held responsible for the behaviour of their agent is not altogether easy to determine. The appointment of such a creature as Bobadilla was a sad blunder, but one such as is liable to be made under any government. Fonseca was very powerful at court, and Bobadilla never would have dared to proceed as he did if he had not known that the bishop would ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Kinsella, came towards them from the boat He was bent on being particularly polite to Miss Rutherford, feeling that he ought to atone for his unfortunate blunder with the boat He took off his cap ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... Louis regarded it as the most sacred of relics. On this the king swore to observe the treaty, though it contained clauses to which he would not have assented under other circumstances. The document was immediately signed. Louis, for the first moment since learning of his almost fatal blunder, breathed at ease. As for the second part of his promise, that of helping Charles to punish the townsmen whom he had himself stirred to rebellion, it little troubled his conscience—if he possessed any sentiment that could properly ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... first night or something else. In that feverish environment he forgot the form of words which he had carefully prepared for the breaking to his wife of the great financial news. Fortunately she gave him no chance to blunder. ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... fear from science, and science need not be afraid of religion. Religion claims to interpret the word of God, and science to reveal the laws of God. The interpreters may blunder, but truths are immutable, eternal, and never ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... sooner said the words than he perceived the horrible blunder he had committed in making such a speech before Mademoiselle de Nucingen. He colored high,—a most unusual sign in him,—and the solemn silence which seemed to wrap all present completed ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the title of "champion of the world," Rustem escorted the stupid king home, but this monarch, not satisfied with this blunder, committed one folly after another. We are told that he even undertook to fly, his special make of aeroplane being a carpet borne by four starving eagles, fastened to the four corners of its frame, and frantically striving to reach a piece of meat fixed temptingly ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... nearly. And, what is a wiser and better thing, Can keep the living from ever needing Such an unnatural, strange proceeding, By showing conclusively and clearly That death is a stupid blunder merely, And not a necessity of our lives. My being here is accidental; The storm, that against your casement drives, In the little village below waylaid me. And there I heard, with a secret delight, Of your maladies ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... in line with the Prussians to-morrow. I suppose he thought Blucher would send, and Blucher thought he had sent; and so between them nothing was done, and we only got the news at seven o'clock this evening. Nine precious hours thrown away. It is just a blunder of this sort that makes all the difference between failure and success in war. Had the message been sent, we and the Dutch divisions and the troops from Braine le-Comte might all have been up by the morning. As it is, Blucher, with only three ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... of the Somme battle endures. I read an interview in a New York paper with the Chief of Staff of the German Army opposite the British in which he must have been correctly quoted, as his remarks passed the censorship. He said that the loss of Pozieres was a blunder. I liked his frankness in laying the blame on a subordinate who, if he also had spoken, might have mentioned the presence of the Australians as an excuse, which, personally, I think is an ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Corporation, no less a dignitary than the Common Serjeant[8], personally to convey to us the invitation on the first day of Michaelmas term at our inn. Sir Thomas Chambers, when he occupied this office, was accustomed to commit a most amusing blunder. Whether moved by some idea of his own dignity, or acting under civic instruction, I am unable to say, but when he came to perform his task he addressed himself solely to the Judges, not even naming the Serjeants, although the former were asked only in that capacity, and were included with the Lord ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... he will. I don't mean that we should repeat the blunder of last night. You may be sure he won't keep it in ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... especially, was a miniature sacrament; and the story of that premature audacity of Elsa with Lohengrin never failed to touch his sense of awe. "What's in a name?" for him, was a significant question—a question of life or death. For to mispronounce a name was a bad blunder, but to name it wrongly was to miss it altogether. Such a thing had no real life, or at best a vitality that would soon fade. Adam knew that! And he pondered much in his childhood over the difficulty Adam must ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... shelter of his pride, Till wooed by danger, his yet weeping bride! 220 Oh, France! retaken by a single march, Whose path was through one long triumphal arch! Oh bloody and most bootless Waterloo! Which proves how fools may have their fortune too, Won half by blunder, half by treachery: Oh dull Saint Helen! with thy gaoler nigh— Hear! hear Prometheus[294] from his rock appeal To Earth,—Air,—Ocean,—all that felt or feel His power and glory, all who yet shall hear A name eternal as the rolling year; 230 He teaches them the lesson taught so long, So oft, so ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... night so dark that it would have been impossible to keep together, to be sure of the way, or to distinguish friend from foe, to do a thing which he hesitated to do in the daytime and with his entire force, would have been a more serious blunder than either. Of course, if Preston had started, it would have been with the determination to succeed or lose his life in the adventure. That was his reputation and his character as a soldier. But the services and ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... out that little matter," explained Mr. Sanders. "I have talked with the police, and have described Hastings. The police are in deep chagrin over their blunder. Mr. Hastings is now at liberty ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... "The blunder was not a life and death matter. In the mountains where we don't see one woman a year it might happen that any man expecting one young lady should mistake another for her. Miss Brock is full of mischief, and the temptation to her to ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... quite erroneous, and such as the Italians themselves would laugh at, or most probably no more comprehend than I did De Leuze repeating the "Botanic Garden": I was just going to ask what language it was, when my mother, good at need, saved me from the irreparable blunder by whispering, "It is English." The words were, I believe, all right, but the accents were all thrown wrong. As Lady Spencer said, "It is wonderful that foreigners never by accident throw the accents ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... from the office. If it had been so, Edward and Lucy would certainly have written to us at the same time. I could have shown, too, that Maddox had written to me the day before to ascertain where Edward was, so as to be sure of the date. It was a little country village, and I made a blunder in copying the spelling from Lucy's writing. Ailie found that very blunder repeated in Dr. Long's letter, and we showed him that Edward did not write it so. Besides, before going abroad, Edward had lost the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... whatever the cause, my failing to understand led to a rather careful study of the old Book itself until somewhat clearer light has come. And now in this convention I am anxious to put the truth as simply as I may that others may not blunder and bungle along and lose precious time as I ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... clergyman, who, in a trembling voice, began the rite which was to unite Amyas Belamour to Aurelia Delavie. He intended to shorten the service, but his nervous terror and the obscurity of the room made him stumble in finding the essential passages, and blunder in dictating the vows, thus increasing the confusion and bewilderment of poor little Aurelia. Somehow her one comfort was in the touch of the hand that either clasped hers, or held the ring on her finger—a strong, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... aloud before such a woman as Mrs. Ready. Who will venture to excuse such an eccentric proceeding? Would not the whole world blame you for your incorrigible blunder? It had, however, one good effect. It quickly cleared the room of your intrusive guest; who swept out of the apartment with a haughty "Good morning." And well she might be offended; she had accidentally heard the truth, which no one else in the town ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... still in durance vile, and Higgins was in his strait-jacket. On being released, my hands were full, as you can suppose. Moreover, I did not learn at once of your detention. The saddle and the valise caused me to suspect that a blunder had been committed. I cannot adequately express my regrets. In ten minutes," continued Dr. Pendegrast, turning a fat gold watch over on its back in the palm of his hand, where it looked like a little yellow turtle, "in ten minutes dinner will be served. Unless you ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a very ridiculous blunder in a French translation that morning. Such a thing was unusual for him, and was such a comical one that it set the others of the class in a roar of laughter. Drake was so extravagantly affected by Alf's blunder that Mr Clare had to stop his laughter, which was half genuine ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... be cheated of my fare.' I would still have refused, but I perceived Clifton began to look serious, and I said to him—'Well, well, good man, here then, take this snuff-box to the marchioness, she may want it: but do not blunder, and break it; for if you do I shall dismiss you my service. Recollect the picture in the lid, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... take his chance with the rest on us. He's got his wits back again, and don't zeem like to go wool-gathering again; and, if he's sharp, he'll speak up and make that t'other man understand it's all a blunder about him being sent off along o' we. But there, he wants to go his own fashion, zo he must. But if I was him I should kick up a dust before we start, and have myself zent back home by ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... Dr. Perrin, and it was touching to see how Sylvia treated him. She had, it appeared, conceived the idea that the calamity must be due to some blunder on his part, and then she had reflected that he was young, and that chance had thrown upon him a responsibility for which he had not bargained. He must be reproaching himself bitterly, so she had to persuade him that it was really not so bad as we were making ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... made out to be, even from the point of view of English merchants, an economic blunder; but in the eyes of vigilant Bostonians it was something more, and much worse than an economic blunder. Vigilant Bostonians assembled in Town Meeting in May, 1764, in order to instruct their representatives ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... of Europe, and by females equally illustrious among our own fair countrywomen, only they do not occur to us just at this moment. Why, then, should not female proficients be entitled to degrees of merit, as well as nine-tenths of the blunder-heads who go through college, and come out no wiser than they went in? For our parts we shall stand up for female rights,—for, as ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... of the blunder he had so narrowly avoided, Ainsley turned his head toward the great red disk that was disappearing into the sands of the desert. He was so long silent that the girl lifted her eyes, and found that already he had forgotten her presence and, transfixed, was staring at the ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... wrath of the ambitious Ali. He swore vengeance for the spoliation of which he considered himself the victim. But the moment was not favourable for putting his projects in train. The murder of Capelan, which its perpetrator intended for a mere crime, proved a huge blunder. The numerous enemies of Tepeleni, silent under the administration of the late pacha, whose resentment they had cause to fear, soon made common cause under the new one, for whose support they had hopes. Ali saw the danger, sought and found the means to obviate ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... pay for the Waitara purchase. It was not a crime, unless every purchaser who takes land with a bad title which he believes to be good is a criminal. But, probably wrong technically, certainly needless and disastrous, it will always remain for New Zealand the classic example of a blunder worse ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... at each other uneasily. Tulke had called three prefects' meetings in two terms, till the Head had informed the Sixth that they were expected to maintain discipline without the recurrent menace of his authority. Now, it seemed that they had made a blunder at the outset, but any right-minded boy would have sunk the legality and been properly impressed by the Court. Beetle's protest was ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... more complicated. She showed a decided inclination for Stratton's society, and when he came to know her better he found her frank, breezy, and delightfully companionable. He knew perfectly well that unless he wanted to take a chance of making some tremendous blunder he ought to avoid any prolonged conversation with the lady. But she was so charming that every now and then he flung prudence to the winds—and usually ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... so much interest to her; and though she probably told the General, he never afterwards alluded to the episode. Indeed, Cecil's labours at Scutari were rather a tabooed subject, as Harry speedily discovered when one day he attempted to blunder out his ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us: It wad frae monie a blunder free us An' ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... the perception of some tremendous blunder began to seize upon Mr. Hazeltine. He had been red before; now, he felt the redness creeping over his scalp ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... good; but, in another quarter, Allcraft suddenly discovered that he had committed an egregious blunder. He had entrusted Planner with the secret of his critical position—had made him acquainted with the dishonest transactions of his father, and the consequent bankruptcy of the firm. Not that this disclosure had been made in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... mottoes and embellishments to his thesis. He cannot learn anatomy by thrusting an exploring needle into the body. He will be very liable to misquote his author's meaning while he is picking off his outside sentences. He may make as great a blunder as that simple prince who praised the conductor of his orchestra for the piece just before the overture; the musician was too good a courtier to tell him that it was only ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that Siegfried might blunder in his reply, took the answer out of his mouth and said: "O Queen, the good knight Siegfried was hard by the ship when Gunther won the games from you. Naught ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... to blunder along and keep in the game by sheer luck, for he did not play the cards for their face value at any time. Still he made enough to keep on his feet and not have to get out of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... she shrugged and smiled, replying that his compatriots all spoke French like Parisians, enquiring, after a moment's thought, if they learned it, la bas, des negres, and laughing heartily when Durham's astonishment revealed her blunder. ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... pathetic blunder of haste and happiness; it brought Dr. Lavendar and David up to the Stuffed Animal House very often, "to try on." David's coming was always a delight, but the old man fretted her, somehow;—he was so good. She said so to William King, who laughed at the humor of ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... never been claimed that the siege of Boston was not the legitimate result of British blunder and American pluck. In a previous paper, the siege itself has been presented as that opportunity and training-school exercise which projected its experience into the entire war, and assured final triumph. It has not been as generally ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... permitted no compromising word or admission to escape her. Really, she knew nothing of Louise Merrick, having unfortunately neglected to examine her antecedents and personal characteristics before undertaking her acquaintance. One is so likely to blunder through excess of good nature. She had supposed a niece of Mr. John Merrick would be of the right sort; but the age is peculiar, and one cannot be too cautious in choosing associates. If Miss Merrick had run away from her home and friends, Miss Von Taer was in no way responsible for the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... me out," she said to John as he bowed and seated himself. "'Some one has blundered,' and here is a whole bottle of champagne which must be drunk to save it. Are you prepared to help turn my, or somebody's, blunder into hospitality?" ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... sensibilities have been too blunted by association with those Washington vulgarians," he reasoned, "for her to realize the enormity of my offense, but she realizes enough to look down at me more contemptuously every time she recalls it." However, the greater the blunder the greater the necessity of repairing. He resolutely thrust his self-abasing thoughts to the background of ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... danced before his eyes. Imagine some unskilled player pitted against an expert at cards, awake at one moment to his weakness, and the next overwhelmingly aware that his opponent, by an incredible blunder, is delivered into his hands. The elation of it fairly frightened Mr. Chichester, and he so far forgot himself as to take up his whip and administer a sharp flick on Archdeacon's shoulder—an outrage which the good horse, after an instant of amazement, resented by a creditable ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the snow, as of one coming over from the other side; his obvious ignorance of the Afforesting Act, as shown by his having lit a fire and making no effort to conceal his quails till our permit shewed him his blunder; the cock-and-bull story he told us about your orders, and that other story about his having killed a foreign devil—if these facts do not satisfy you, they will satisfy the King that the prisoner is a foreign devil ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... allusion on the dominant topic. When he first adopts a subject he necessarily falls into mistakes, and it is interesting to watch his gradual progress into fuller information and better nourished irony, without his ever needing to admit that he has made a blunder or to appear conscious of correction. Suppose, for example, he had incautiously founded some ingenious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine thirteens made a hundred and two, and the insignificant Bantam, hitherto silent, seemed to spoil ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... persons knew absolutely which either of us was, and those two were ourselves. Our mother certainly did not—at least without seeing one or other of our backs. Even we ourselves have each made the blunder occasionally of calling the other by the wrong name. Our indistinguishableness was the source of ever-recurring mistake, of constant amusement, of frequent bewilderment, and sometimes of annoyance in the family. I once heard my father say to a friend, that God had never made two things alike, ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... scientific policy of producing, through wholesale reforms and improvements, more efficient and profitable laborers. They fail to see that the strength of the enemy will lie henceforth more frequently in deception than in repression. But even this is not their most fatal blunder. In attacking individualistic and reactionary rather than collectivistic and progressive capitalism, these Socialists are not only wasting their energies by assaulting a moribund power, but are training their forces to use weapons and ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... more alarming. This is the ordinary form of punishment for a grave offence against custom: violence is rare, and when resorted to is intended (except in [96] some extraordinary cases presently to be noticed) as a mere correction, the punishment of a blunder. In certain rough communities, blunders endangering life are immediately punished by physical chastisement,—not in anger, but on traditional principle. Once I witnessed at a fishing-settlement, a chastisement of this kind. Men were killing tunny in the surf; the work was ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... designation of Horus, their dawn-god, used the finger in or on the lips for "child." It has been conjectured in the last instance that the gesture implied, not the mode of taking nourishment, but inability to speak—in-fans. This conjecture, however, was only made to explain the blunder of the Greeks, who saw in the hand placed connected with the mouth in the hieroglyph of Horus (the) son, "Hor-(p)-chrot," the gesture familiar to themselves of a finger on the lips to express "silence," and so, mistaking both the name and the ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... On the contrary, she begged pardon in real regret at having given such deep offence to her brother and his wife, and in astonishment that so simple an action could offend. She had made an equally distressing blunder in the early days of her life with the Gresleys by taking up the daily paper on ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... powers whose fleets held the mastery of the sea. But the advance from such a union to the formation of the European alliance against France on which he was bent was a step that still had to be made. Already indeed his action in England had told decisively on the contest. The blunder of Lewis in choosing Germany instead of Holland for his point of attack had been all but atoned for by the brilliant successes with which he opened the war. The whole country west of the Rhine fell at once into ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... should have believed, as late as October fourth, that he would not be condemned to death. Even more pathetic that his friends and comrades should once more have made the blunder in crediting the enemy with a sense of justice. Time and again they had placed faith in the judicial powers, only to see their brothers killed before their very eyes. They made no preparation to rescue Ferrer, not even a protest of any extent; nothing. "Why, it is impossible to condemn Ferrer; ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... tells me that it is no longer the fashion to refer to persons or things as being "simon-pure"; the fashion, as he says, passed out some years ago when a writer in a German paper "was led into an amusing blunder by an English review. The reviewer, having occasion to draw a distinction between George and Robert Cruikshank, spoke of the former as the real Simon Pure. The German, not understanding the allusion, gravely told his readers that George Cruikshank was a pseudonym, the author's real name ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... we have never tried to justify our admiration, have never thought that it needed an explanation; and then, unexpectedly, we find ourselves challenged, we find our taste criticised, and in our efforts at self-defence we blunder and stumble and hesitate about what we still feel that we are quite right ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... a very distressing—a terrible and horrible blunder," she said, with a desperation that must have seemed something else ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... corrected her first blunder," said Mr. Birdwing, as the American flag went up to her peak. "The skipper of that craft don't exactly know what he ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... caught Schwarz in the right mood, or in the nick of time. How he envied those fortunate mortals who always arrived at the right moment, and instinctively said the right thing! That talent had never been his. With him it was blunder. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... was," he exclaimed, doubtfully. He realized his blunder even as the words left his lips, and sought to correct it as best he might. "Why, yes, I do, too," he went on, as if assailed by sudden memory. "I dropped into her place kind of late, and they said she'd gone to bed—headache, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... (often exhibiting that rarest quality of the successful trader, the art of linking one transaction with another), he was sometimes amusingly deficient in what is known as common sense. In later life he used to tell with infinite zest a story of a blunder of earlier years which might easily have led to serious if not fatal results. He had been suffering from nervous exhaustion and had been ordered to take a preparation of nux vomica. The dose was to be taken three times daily: in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... He had made his blunder. There was only one thing for him to say and he said it cordially, mentally damning himself for forgetting that Rosalie was to ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Iron" policy, made a huge blunder in not perceiving that in the modern world spiritual forces are arising which must for ever discredit the same. He emphasized the blunder by wresting Alsace-Lorraine from France, and again by crippling Russia in the treaty of 1878—thus making enemies where ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... and my chest is troublesome. So that I depend on nature and on God. But I do not depend on human caprice; this is the point to be insisted on. It is true that my chemist may make a blunder and poison me, my banker may reduce me to pauperism, just as an earthquake may destroy my house without hope of redress. Absolute independence, therefore, is a pure chimera. But I do possess relative independence—that of the stoic who withdraws ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that a man had to be up very early in every sense if he wanted to keep an eye on a Putnam horse. Mat Woodburn might be old, but he was by no means sleepy; and Joses could not afford to blunder. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... "Pinkerton strong box." His manner and tone of sincerity, when he declared Fotheringham innocent of any complicity with him or his companions, carried conviction with it. He believed himself that a blunder had been made, and Fotheringham was ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... the people failed to understand; but possibly it had never before fallen into the hands of a man who was so little qualified to govern Rigganites, as was the present rector, the Reverend Harold Barholm. A man who has mistaken his vocation, and who has become ever so faintly conscious of his blunder, may be a stumbling-block in another's path; but restrained as he will be by his secret pangs of conscience, he can scarcely be an active obstructionist. But a man who, having mistaken the field of his life's labor, yet remains amiably ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that same of marriage—saw many abroad, Greek and Catholic—one, at home, many years ago. There be some strange phrases in the prologue (the exhortation), which made me turn away, not to laugh in the face of the surpliceman. Made one blunder, when I joined the hands of the happy—rammed their left hands, by mistake, into one another. Corrected it—bustled back to the altar-rail, and said 'Amen.' Portsmouth responded as if he had got the whole by heart; and, if any thing, was rather before the priest. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... dealt with as a fact of some social importance, so long as it is believed by large numbers to be essential to the right ordering of life. Whether true or false, beliefs are facts—mental and social facts, and the scheme of things which leaves them out of account is making a blunder of the most ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... contrary, it be caused by an event, that which has been occasioned by anything human, by the co-operation of human circumstances, can be, and invariably is, removed by the same means. Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of Grief the blunder of a life. Mix in the world, and in a month's time you will speak to me very differently. A young man, you meet with disappointment; in spite of all your exalted notions of your own powers, you immediately sink ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... magnificent set of Large Paper Hearnes for about 40 Guineas. Many of these are now in the choice library of his Grace the Duke of Grafton. The copies were catalogued as small paper. Was there ever a more provoking blunder?!] ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... name was called its young bearer rose and confronted her inquisitors. And the inquisitors began to blunder. Accusations of the fatal taint were met with denials and withdrawn with apologies. Sometimes it was truth, and sometimes pure arrogance and falsehood, that triumphed over these champions of instinctive racial antagonism. One dark girl ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... practice of bribery, and obtaining exorbitant grants? Had she engrossed her M[ajest]y's favours, without admitting any access but through her means? Had she heaped employments upon herself, her family and dependants? Had she an imperious, haughty behaviour? Or, after all, was it a perfect blunder and mistake of one person for another? I have heard of a man who lay all night on a rough pavement; and in the morning, wondering what it could possibly be, that made him rest so ill, happened to see a feather under ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... have found some better way, in word or deed, for manifesting the sympathy of true friendship. He had betrayed a doubt which must for ever affect Hugh's feeling towards him. But this was his lot in life, to blunder amid trying circumstances, to prove unequal to every grave call upon him. He tried vainly to see what else he could have done, yet felt that another man would have faced the situation to better purpose. One resolve, at all events, he had brought out of it: Hugh Carnaby's ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... enough, only you like to make me blunder where you can talk," said my wife, putting her hand in mine. "But I will try. Sometimes, after thinking about something for a long time, you come to a conclusion about it, and you think you have settled it ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... think it was time for him to go to bed, when I heard somebody else blunder into my sitter, and in a moment Lambert appeared at the door. Now Lambert, who was only gorgeous by day, frequently became aggressive at night, and I told him to clear out jolly quickly. But instead of doing what he was wanted ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... there's a limit to the things a man will stand under the mess I'm laboring with. I'm going to do the best I can. What it will be I don't know. There's a deal of money at stake—my friends', the public's, my own—I'm responsible for it. I've made a terrible blunder. I am paying for it, but nothing that has happened has altered my idea of the duty I ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... little cost, on the propriety of using me himself that evening at the chateau of the King of the French. Fortunately, his monitress, though by no means of the purest water, knew better than to suffer her eleve to commit so gross a blunder, and I escaped the calamity of making my first appearance at court under the ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... was not that!—It was—" He paused, reflected half a second. "I'll be there," he added, and, turning quickly, withdrew, leaving Livingstone feeling very blank and then, somewhat angry. He was angry with himself for making such a blunder, and then angrier with the clerk for leading ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... same thing precisely happens when men of scientific eminence indulge in religious dissertations, for of course, though it is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same blunder is quite possible in non-scientific fields of knowledge. I once asked one versed in theology what he thought of the religious articles of a distinguished man, unfamiliar himself with theology, yet, none the less, then splashing freely and to the great admiration of the ignorant, in the theological ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... of Sally Carrol's eyes and, how they had allured him ever since she entered the room, went into a violent convulsion when he found she was visiting the Bellamys—was Harry's fiancee. He seemed to feel as though he had made some risque and inexcusable blunder, became immediately formal and left her at the ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... elements are indispensable where the work to be performed is of a local and business nature. We find that under the present system, no matter which branch of government dominates, there is always a notorious lack of responsibility. If the council makes a blunder in legislation, it immediately lays the blame upon the administrative officials, maintaining that it passed the measure upon recommendation of the administrative branch, or that branch failed to carry out its policy. If the administrative officials are neglectful, ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... my salon and sat down to reflect on the consequences of my mishap. Of course, it was easy to set the matter right, but what a muddle! I must make haste in the morning to correct my blunder. ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... Alessandro still hoped that the Duke of Albany would succeed in changing this decision of the king of France who, willing as he was to buy the support of the Medici in Italy, would only grant them his second son, the Duc d'Orleans. This petty blunder lost Italy to France, and did not prevent ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... be there. Next to his translations Botany is his grand study. He has collected every plant and tree in his garden that will possibly grow in India, and is so scientific withal that he calls everything by its classical name. If, therefore, I should at any time blunder out the word Geranium, he would say Pelargonium, and perhaps accuse me of ignorance, or blame me for vulgarity. We had the pleasure of hearing him preach from Rom. vii. 13, when he gave us an excellent sermon. In manner ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... had in some incomprehensible way omitted putting on the letter of credit the sub-manager's name. How could we have committed such a blunder? My answer is that this is only another example of the unforeseen "something" ever happening to defeat any ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... conceivable, considering the popular sentiment roused by such Philhellenes as Byron, Erskine, Gladstone, and the Genevan banker Eynard. Think of the massacre of Chios, and then hear men talking of Navarino as a blunder! ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
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