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More "Conjecture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 13th, fine weather and calm. At six this morning the boatswain shot a horse, and the people a wild dog. The horse was branded on the left buttock with these letters A.R. By this we conjecture there are inhabitants not far off. At nine veered the boat in, lashed the oars to the hatches, and made a stage to haul up the seal. The people swam off three casks of water, sent on shore one quarter-cask more, and two breakers. Came aboard the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... it that he left the paternal roof while yet a child (he was probably not more than nine years old), and was apprenticed, as above stated, in Perugia—though to what artist Vasari does not tell us. Here, therefore, conjecture is rife, and Buonfigli,—that delightful decorator of the Perugian Palazzo Pubblico,—Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and even Niccolo da Foligno himself have been assigned by various critics as his teacher. Personally, I incline ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... had not been able to realize the conception, or we should not have had his hypothesis of a subtle ether, the occult cause of gravitation; and his writings prove, that although he deemed the particular nature of the intermediate agency a matter of conjecture, the necessity of some such agency appeared to him indubitable. It would seem that, even now, the majority of scientific men have not completely got over this very difficulty; for though they have at last learned to conceive the sun attracting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... aquatic experience, we determined to resume the mountains, but in a milder form; before which, however, it became necessary to do a little shopping. An individual—one of the party, whose name I will not divulge, and whose identity you never can conjecture, so it isn't worth while to exhaust yourself with guessing—found one day, while she was in the country, that she had walked a hole through the bottom of her boots. How she discovered this fact is of no moment; but, upon investigating the subject, she ascertained that it could ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... did Athens, or any other city, come to possess a text? One can only conjecture; but my conjecture is that there had always been texts—copied out in successive generations—in the hands of the curious; for example, in the hands of the Cyclic poets, who knew our Iliad as the late French Cyclic poets ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... last century. Certainly, when it comes to the artist at Truefitt's wearing a frock-coat while cutting your hair, you cannot help asking yourself whether its hour has not struck. Yet, when one has said this, one must hedge from a conjecture so extreme. The king wears a frock-coat, a long, gray one, with a white top-hat and lavender gloves, and those who like to be like a king conform to his taste. No one, upon his life, may yet wear a frock and a derby, but many people now wear top-hats, though black ones, with sack-coats, with ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... all assembled to celebrate this double marriage, and as yet only one of the brides appearing, there was much of wondering and conjecture, but they mostly thought that Ganimed was ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... numbers of baronesses that both talk and act with passion, that one would think the nation had lost its senses. Every thing has miscarried that has been undertaken, and the worse we succeed, the more is risked;—yet the nation is not angry! How can one conjecture during such a delirium? I sometimes almost think I must be in the wrong to be of so contrary an opinion to most men—yet, when every Misfortune that has happened had been foretold by a few, why should I not think I have been in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... conjecture that the similar ornaments worn by Mabuiag girls in similar circumstances are also amulets. See above, p. 36. Among the aborigines of the Upper Yarra river in Victoria, a girl at puberty used to have cords tied very tightly round several parts of her body. The ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... living in the Chateau here in the greatest privacy. I and the Intendant only see her. She is beautiful and full of sorrow as the picture of the blessed Madonna. What she is, I may guess; but who she is, I cannot conjecture, and would give my ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sniffing the raw air, and wondering, as always at this season, will there be frost to-night or will there not? Of course if I were a woodchuck or a muskrat, or any other really intelligent creature, I should know at once and act accordingly, but being only a stupid human being, I am thrown back on conjecture, assisted by the thermometer, and an appeal ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... monuments may give us a clearer idea of what seats were used. The reader may consult Perrot and Chipiez, or the dictionaries of the Bible, under the articles: chairs, couches, et cetera, for illustrations. Unless we can find a picture with a named article upon it we are still left a wide margin of conjecture. The picture of Sennacherib receiving the tribute and submission of Lachish gives the contemporary representation of a kussu nimedu, but we cannot argue that every kussu was ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... much as I relate them—and for which there is abundant evidence—drove his too-zealous agents to rather desperate lengths, and thus brought suspicion, not only upon the guilty Dudley, but also upon the innocent Queen. The manner of Amy's murder is pure conjecture; but it should not be far from what actually took place. The possibility of an accident—extraordinarily and suspiciously opportune for Dudley as it would have been—could not be altogether ruled out but for the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... operation, nor any advantages to put as a counterpoise into the opposite scale. He may have been under the guidance and tuition of a good Christian and (p. 021) well-informed man; he may have been surrounded by companions whose acquaintance would be a blessing. But this is all conjecture; and probably the question is now beyond the reach of any ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... exercise will give me just the life I need to talk real business to Dave when he comes," she mused, punctuating her conjecture with a gasp or two as she fought against a gust of wind that forced her almost to a standstill. Winning this skirmish with the storm, she pressed forward again, when suddenly another gasp was forced from her by an entirely different ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... For one man it is easy to believe in visions and all other heavenly manifestations; for another it is next to impossible. To one man the resurrection is the one great reality; to another it is merely a matter of conjecture. One man feels certain that his prayers are heard and answered; another feels equally certain that they cannot be. One man is emotionally spiritual; another is coldly hard-headed and matter-of-fact. The point is not ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... {209} that “we are altogether unfurnished with any documents that would warrant our hazarding even a conjecture on the number of people, the materials we possess for judging of the population of the valley of Nepaul itself being at the best extremely vague, and enabling us only to state it loosely at about half a million.” In p. 161, he reckons 48,000 or 50,000 people in Kathmandu, which ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... communication with the country, and, if necessary, have despatched assistance to open a passage for General Burgoyne. This scheme was too visible to succeed: for had General Washington suffered you to command the open country above him, I think it a very reasonable conjecture that the conquest of Burgoyne would not have taken place, because you could, in that case, have relieved him. It was therefore necessary, while that important victory was in suspense, to trepan you into a situation in ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... now be dealt with. Drawn as they have been from contemporary records which were compiled in and handed down through the ages we have to deal with, the facts here collected are based upon no assumption or conjecture. The writer may have failed fully to comprehend the facts, and so may have partially misstated them. But the original records are open for investigation to the duly qualified, and those who are disposed to undertake ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... large proportion of this class it is, in their youth, one of the most vivid exhilarations to witness the terrors and anguish of living beings. In many parts of the country it would be no improbable conjecture in explanation of a savage yell heard at a distance, that a company of rationals may be witnessing the writhings, agonies, and cries, of some animal struggling for escape or for life, while it is suffering the infliction, perhaps, of stones, and kicks, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... has, however, the official basis that the Allies have pledged themselves to remove the power of the Turk from Constantinople, and to remove out of the power of the Turk the alien peoples who have too long already been subject to his murderous rule. I have, in fact, but attempted to conjecture in what kind of manner that promise will ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... of Australia, it never rose higher than its starting-point, totemism; in others, as for instance in Samoa, it became polytheism without ceasing to be totemism; in others again, as for instance amongst the Aryan peoples, it became so completely polytheistic that even conjecture can discover but few indications or 'survivals' of the totemism from which it is supposed to have developed; and the polytheism of the Israelites was so completely superseded by monotheism that the very existence of an earlier stage of polytheism could be as strenuously denied in their case as ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... saddle and sat looking across the waste with eyes of misery, asking himself whither and for what? Whither had they taken her, and why? The Bristol road once left, his theory was at fault; he had no clue, and felt, where time was life and more than life, the slough of horrible conjecture rise to ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... broken forth into positive delirium, which long had been menacing all who saw him most closely; and the queen was so overpowered as to fall into violent hysterics. All the princesses were in misery, and the Prince of Wales had burst into tears. No one knew what was to follow— no one could conjecture ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... quietly resigned himself to slumber; but before he fell asleep, he was very disagreeably undeceived in his conjecture. His ears were all at once saluted with a noise from the next room, conveyed in distinct bounces against the wainscot; then a hoarse voice exclaimed, "Bring up the artillery—let Brutandorf's brigade advance—detach my black hussars to ravage the country—let them be new booted—take particular ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... lettuce-bed—they gave it vitality and dominion. And fortunate it is for those who look for another such reanimation, that the method of the Van Eycks was not altogether their own discovery. Had it been so, that method might still have remained a subject of conjecture; but after being put in possession of the principles commonly acknowledged before their time, it is comparatively easy to trace the direction of their inquiry and the nature of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... reiteration of the risks and difficulties involved in every step of mining enterprise from the valuation of the mine to its administration as a going concern, the impression may be gained that the whole business is one great gamble; in other words, that the point whereat certainties stop and conjecture steps in is so vital as to render ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... that I had many an hour of anxious conjecture, and many a horrible vigil by night. But ten days later I was summoned to my uncle's room. He implored me once more to wed Dudley—to listen to the appeal of an ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... edge of the plateau outside the redoubt and taken his position where he could study the advancing figures with his field-glass, had not spoken. The lieutenant who was next in command to him had walked out after him, and stood near him, from time to time dropping a word or two of conjecture in a half-audible tone; but the Colonel had not answered a word; perhaps none was expected. Suddenly he took his glass down, and gave an order to the lieutenant: "Take two men and meet them at the turn yonder; learn their business; ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... tremendous mystery,' replied the priest; 'who shall decide wherein her power consists? At the best we can but conjecture at her connexion with the world of man—her weaving and working. No one can deny that a solemn curse, spoken with a determined and haughty purpose, has often, on the very instant, accomplished its fulfilment. If this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... way of providing for his daughters; and as all this flashed through Daniel's mind it was momentarily within his imagination that the provision for him might come in some way from his mother. But such vaporous conjecture passed away as quickly as ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the progress of spring labor were freely interchanged, and the few unimportant items of social news, which had collected in seven days, were gravely distributed. This was at the men's end of the meeting-house; on their side, the women were similarly occupied, but we can only conjecture the subjects of their conversation. The young men—as is generally the case in religious sects of a rigid and clannish character—were by no means handsome. Their faces all bore the stamp of repression, in some form or other, and ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... affairs of that sort, He looks at as merely ideas; in short, As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet, Of such vast extent that our earth's a mere dab in it; 570 Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her, Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer; You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration, Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion, With the quiet precision of science he'll ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... breaking up of chloral hydrate, in the presence of alkalis, with the production of chloroform and formates, led Liebreich to the conjecture that a similar decomposition might be produced in the blood; and hence his introduction of the drug, in 1869, as an anaesthetic and hypnotic. It is now known, however, that the drug circulates in the blood unchanged, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... "My conjecture was right," he said. "They intended, no doubt, to keep some large merchantman they had captured, fill her with the contents of their prizes, and then with the papers and manifests of cargo they could go almost anywhere and dispose of ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... possible. That is always the way with our lord and master; there is no use in asking him anything, for with one truth he mingles a thousand lies, and from what I have noted of his replies it appears that he knows nothing for certain of the future, but only by way of conjecture. At the same time he so be-fools us that, in spite of a thousand treacherous tricks he plays us, we cannot shake off his influence. We go to see him a long way from here in a great field, where we meet a multitude of warlocks and witches, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... adventurous a journey in search of them, we cannot say. Her sureties were also sureties for a certain Mary Elliott, so they may have been friends intending to travel together. But, according to Sydney Grier's conjecture, Mary Elliott did not, after all, sail in the Bombay Castle, but remained behind to marry a certain Captain Buchanan, sailing with him to India the following year. Captain Buchanan lost his life in the Black Hole, and his widow (whether she was Mary Elliott or not) married Warren Hastings. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... of Osman soon brought him into contact with the mounted force. His real intentions are still a matter of conjecture. Whether he had been ordered to attack the Egyptian brigade, or to drive back the cavalry, or to disappear behind the Kerreri Hills in conformity with Ali-Wad-Helu, is impossible to pronounce. His action was, however, clear. He could not safely assail the Egyptians with a powerful ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... however, that in a large proportion of cases which end in recovery, the diagnosis of fracture of the base is little more than a conjecture. The external evidence of damage to the bone is so slight and so liable to be misleading, that little reliance can be placed upon it. The associated cerebral and nervous symptoms also are only presumptive evidence of fracture of the bone. In all cases, however, in ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... due west. Not many days after he laid this course he perceived the symptoms of a new scene of difficulty. The sailors now began to contemplate the dangers and uncertain issue of a voyage, the nature and length of which were left entirely open to conjecture. Besides the fickleness and timidity natural to men unaccustomed to the discipline of a seafaring life, several circumstances contributed to inspire an obstinate and mutinous disposition; which required the most consummate art as well as fortitude in the admiral to ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... means of locomotion these high dignitaries of the colony found their way to Durant's Neck, we can only conjecture. Possibly a coach and four may have borne Governor Eden and Governor Hyde the long journey from Chowan and Bath to Hecklefield's door. Possibly Judge and advocate, members of the Assembly and councilors, preferred to make the trip on horseback, breaking the journey by frequent stops at the ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson
... the king any great reason to felicitate them on their erudition. In fact, they all remained silent. Sully held his peace with the rest; but he looked so knowing, that the king turned towards him, and said:—"Great master! by your face I conjecture that you know more of this matter than you would have us believe. I pray you, and indeed I command, that you tell us what you think and what you know." The coy minister refused, as he says, out of mere ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the street door, and was quickly followed by a tap at his own. Nancy had lost no time in replying. What her letter might contain he found it impossible to conjecture. Reproaches? Joyous welcome? Wrath? Forgiveness? He knew her so imperfectly, that he could not feel sure even as to the probabilities of the case. And his suspense was abundantly justified. Her answer came upon him with the force of a ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... they taken up their position, when, with the sound of hurrying footsteps, came a long-drawn, hissing sound through the air. Before they had time to even conjecture its cause, they saw a knife strike Abdu in the breast, and he fell to the ground with a moan, the weapon still quivering in his body with the ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... weary of conjecture, unbent so far as to seek counsel of Miss Bishop. For Miss Bishop gave you to understand that on the subject of "gentlemen" there was nothing that she did not know. It was a little humiliating, for only ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... low cry and redoubled her speed, and was soon at Mr. Richard Hardie's door; but the street was deserted, and she was bewildered, and began to think she had been too hasty in her conjecture. A chill came over her impetuosity. The dark, drizzly, silent night, the tall masts, the smell of the river—how strange it all seemed: and she to be there alone ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... distinguished from the native Irish in the works of St. Patrick, and in other ancient monuments. As to their original, the most probable conjecture seems to be, that they were a foreign warlike nation, who made a settlement in Ireland before the arrival of St. Patrick. We find them mentioned there in the fourth century. Several colonies of them passed not long after into Scotland. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... if well worked out by a rhetorician, say of Dr. Liddon's type, it might have powerfully clinched some great argument for the necessary place of dogma in Christian theology. But the sermon has vanished, and we can only conjecture from the date of the entry—October 5, 1869—that the good Dean's ire had been excited by Matthew Arnold's first appearance in the field of theological controversy. Six years before, indeed, Arnold had touched that field, when in The Bishop and ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the names of the knight in the many languages, e.g. Halewijn (Dutch), Ulver, Olmar, Hollemen (Danish), Olbert (German), and Elf-knight in English, has caused some speculation as to a common origin. Professor Bugge has gone so far as to conjecture that the whole story is an offshoot of the tale of Judith and Holofernes, the latter name being the originals of the variants given above. While this hypothesis is perhaps too startling to be accepted without further evidence, it must be allowed that ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... he now opened was an old and much-fingered one, written—as he saw at the first glance—by his aunt to his mother. Why it was sent to him he could not conjecture; and, without attempting to so do, at ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... creature gave up the ghost, and uttered not a groan: These vain pretenders are ignorant of him they seek after; for of him that knew him we never heard again:—O thou! who towerest above the flights of conjecture, opinion, and comprehension; whatever has been reported of thee we have heard and read; the congregation is dismissed, and life drawn to a close; and we still rest at ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... had not only been great conjecture among the vicious element, with which I had begun to affiliate myself, but also a very decided checking of all kinds of action calculated to be conspicuous ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... go" (Vol. ii., p. 45.)—Your correspondent T. S. D. is certainly right in his notion that the ballad of "A frog he would a-wooing go" is very old, however fanciful may be his conjecture about its personal or political application to Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn. That it could not refer to "the Cavaliers and the Roundheads," another of T. S. D.'s notions, is clear from the fact, that it was entered at Stationers' Hall in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... much the same conjecture," said Mr Gosport, "and, if I am not greatly deceived, that man is a robber of no common sort. What think you, Miss Beverley, can you discern ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... hold a dialogue with one of less consequence on the other side. I shall not venture so far as to give the Christian nick-name of the person chiefly concerned, lest I should give offence, for which reason I shall call him Timothy, and leave the rest to the conjecture of the world."—Intelligencer, No. viii. See an account of this paper in "Prose ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... passengers like myself, puffing, blowing, eating, drinking, sweating, and toiling, as if their very existence depended upon keeping up the internal fires and blowing them off again. It is dreadful to see people so hard pushed to live. I really can't conjecture what sort of a commotion they will make when they come to die. A sandwich or two and a glass of tea lasted me all the way to Moscow—a journey of eighteen hours, and I never suffered from hunger, thirst, or fatigue the whole way. If I had "gone in" like other ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... which men thrice their age and repute would probably have felt it imperative to maintain. But perhaps this was premature: the omnipotent Miss Power's character—practical or ideal, politic or impulsive—he as yet knew nothing of; and giving over reasoning from insufficient data he lapsed into mere conjecture. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Madame Duval has received very little encouragement to proceed in her design; for she has been informed, that, as she neither heard the voice, nor saw the face of the person suspected, she will find difficulty to cast him upon conjecture, and will have but little probability of gaining her cause, unless she can procure witnesses of the transaction. Mr. Branghton, therefore, who has considered all the circumstances of the affair, is of the opinion; ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... provinces. This scheme may even have formed part of a plan of general pacification; for at Dresden, on May 17th, he proposed to Austria the admission of representatives of the Spanish insurgents to the European Congress. But it is time to turn from the haze of conjecture to the sharp outlines of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... passed away, the 'philosophy of Nature' cast aside the vague and poetic garb in which she had been enveloped from her origin, and, having assumed a severer aspect, she now weighs the value of observations, and substitutes induction and reasoning for conjecture and assumption. The dogmas of former ages survive now only in the superstitions of the people and the prejudices of the ignorant, or are perpetuated in a few systems, which, conscious of their weakness, shroud themselves in a vail of mystery. We may also trace the same primitive ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... they were welcomed back with exceeding joy. How mysterious did this trial appear! Why were those who had sought the Lord's counsel so earnestly, permitted to undertake a voyage apparently so useless, and accompanied by so much anxiety and suffering? How little could any one then conjecture that the Lord was thus training His children for the great life-work before them! Not for the welfare of their own family were Mr. and Mrs. Merry to be permitted to settle in those broad western lands; but many voyages were to follow, and they, and subsequently ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... Southampton, or an unknown Mr. W. H., or another); and that he treats of an intrigue with some unknown woman. The identification of the young man of the first seventeen sonnets with other friends who are praised in later sonnets is not certain, though in some cases probable; and much research and conjecture have entirely failed to make clear the relations between the poet, the rival poet, the lady, and the friend. The Sonnets furnish us with no knowledge of Shakespeare's personal affairs, and only a meager ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... night in the oven. I hardly expected, when I left him to go to windward, to find him alive upon my return. He was certainly as low as he could well be when I left him, and what would be the effect of the medicines that I gave him, I hardly then dared to conjecture. Yet I knew that he must die without them. I was not a little rejoiced, therefore, and relieved, upon our return, to see him decidedly better. The medicines were strong, and took hold and gave a check to the disorder which was destroying him; and, more than that, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... missing girl had been found, and whether her disappearance was a flight or an abduction no one could even conjecture. ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... no more concerning this goddess than did the learned John Selden, who, writing two hundred and twenty-odd years ago, "De Dis Syris," says, on page 296 of that work, "I cannot conjecture whether Babia, who seems to have been reverenced among the Syrians as goddess of childhood and youth, is identical with the Syrian Venus or not, and I do not remember to have met with any mention of this deity except in Damascius's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... curse of despotism that it has no halting place. The intermitted exercise of its power brings no sense of security to its subjects, for they can never know what more they will be called to endure when its red right hand is armed to plague them again. Nor is it possible to conjecture how or where power, unrestrained by law, may seek its next victims. The States that are still free may be enslaved at any moment; for if the Constitution does not protect all, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... is very low.—There are within the church two marble monuments, with recumbent figures upon them, but no inscription, and are, like the church, of such ancient date, that no person has yet presumed to say when they were executed nor for whom, (only by conjecture); but let the artists be who they would, the effigies do them great credit, and were highly deserving of better treatment than they have experienced. In the church is a fine-toned organ. In the steeple are twelve musical bells, and a set of chimes, that play with great ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... been compelled to join the Francesca, and who, from their dejected appearance, he conjectured were not altogether pleased or satisfied with the arrangement, he entered into conversation with them, and soon contrived to elicit from them that his conjecture was well founded. Thereupon, as there was no time to lose, he took the bold course of asking them outright whether, in the event of there being a scheme afoot on the part of others to escape from the brigantine to the ship, they would be disposed to join in it, to ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... glassy eyes, the drooping jaw, that horrible stain which darkened the throat and breast. For a few seconds, which to her seemed an eternity, she remained here, crouching beside the dead body of this unfortunate man, trying in vain in her confused mind to conjecture what had brought Bela here, instead of the young Count, within the reach of ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... I recalled his conjecture that Liputin knew not only more than we did about our affair, but something else ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... whose bed A genius graced, to all, save him, unknown; One day the secret passed his lips, and sped As secrets speed—thenceforth he slept alone. Too much, oh! far too much is told in books; Too broad a daylight wraps us all and each. Ah! it is well that, deeper than our looks, Some secrets lie beyond conjecture's reach. Ah! it is well that in the soul are nooks That will not open to the keys ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... even died a natural death. Again was the Russian imperial throne vacated! Who is there to mount it? whom has the empress named as her successor? No one dared to speak of it; the question was read in all eyes, but no lips ventured to open for the utterance of an answer, as every conjecture, every expression, if unfounded and unfulfilled, would be construed into the crime of high-treason as soon as another than the one thus indicated should be called ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... toucanets. The singular form of these birds makes a lasting impression on the memory. Every species of this family of enormous bill lays its eggs in the hollow trees. You will be at a loss to know for what ends nature has overloaded the head of this bird with such an enormous bill. It is impossible to conjecture. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... both able and willing, still it would only remain a positive deficit made good, and no new facility would be derived for alleviating the existing burthens. The burthens and distresses must still remain what they were before. He spoke not now upon conjecture, or loose calculation, he had brought his authority with him. These were the records from which he derived his statements—the official returns of the Treasury; and if false, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was present ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... in an underhand manner in those days. To this person Mr Nicholas Thorne appears to have sent armour and other articles which are specified in the memorandum or letter above mentioned—This Thomas Tison, so far as I can conjecture, appears to have been a secret factor for Mr Thorne and other English merchants, to transact for them in these remote parts; whence it is probable that some of our merchants carried on a kind of trade to the West Indies even ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... slipt away; and, as he did not show himself the next morning, it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at a plausible conjecture as to what his business could have been. Arriving at my room, I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate, lighted a cigar, and spent an hour in musings of every hue, from the brightest to the most sombre; being, in truth, not so very confident as at some former periods ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... must have got this practice from some external source or other; but I can make no sort of conjecture whence; and certainly no one had ever spoken to me on the subject of the Catholic religion, which I only knew by name. The French master was an emigre Priest, but he was simply made a butt, as French masters too commonly were in that day, and spoke English very imperfectly. ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... length of his writing." He speaks in one place of "plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style," which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively true. In another he remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We must conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase "if one has anything to say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the work ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... some time been watching, flying high, but well within easy ken, and these dense, hardly discernible clusters—hirundine nebulae, as it were—were all these but parts of one innumerable host, the main body of which was passing far above me altogether unseen? The conjecture was one to gratify the imagination. It pleased me even to think that it might be true. But it was only a conjecture, and meantime another ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... but as he never explained what he meant by "waugh," we must leave it to conjecture. It is probable, however, that he meant assent, for he turned aside in passing to set free the Blackfoot who had been bound to a tree. That red man, having expected death, went off with a lively feeling ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... "that the lad has many of the qualities we want, and we might find it hard to discover one better suited for our purpose. Besides, he is a bastard, knows nothing of his father, and therefore leaves a wide field for conjecture; for every natural son has the right to consider himself, if he likes, the offspring of a monarch. He has no family or any one to look after him, which assures us that whatever may happen, there is no one to call us to account. He is not overwise, ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... Chaucer, and his funeral was at the charge of the Earl of Essex. Beyond this we know nothing; nothing about the details of his escape, nothing of the fate of his manuscripts, or the condition in which he left his work, nothing about the suffering he went through in England. All conjecture is idle waste of time. We only know that the first of English poets perished miserably and prematurely, one of the many heavy sacrifices which the evil fortune of Ireland has cost to England; one of many illustrious victims to the madness, the evil customs, the vengeance of an ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... a seven days' wonder, but no clue was found as to the identity of the would-be assassin. Charlie Jackson had spent the evening with Kent. As the monotony of Levine's convalescence came on, gossip and conjecture lost interest in him. John himself would ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... days before the division on the coercion bill,' Mr. Gladstone says in a memorandum written at the time, 'I had not the smallest idea, beyond mere conjecture, of the views and intentions of Sir R. Peel with respect to himself or to his government. Only we had been governed in all questions, so far as I knew, by the determination to carry the corn bill and to let no collateral ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... could find no fresh water, except a small residue from rain in the hole of a rock, and that was barely sufficient though most sparingly used. During the night, having observed the fire above mentioned, the party began to conjecture that some of their shipmates might have been saved, for until then they had deemed their destruction inevitable.—The coxswain impressed with this opinion, proposed again hazarding themselves in the boat for their relief, and, although some feeble objections were offered against it, he continued ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... nonchalant grown-up airs. He was the very embodiment of youth, in its sun-tipped morning flower. What Charlie could have to "question" this artless young being—as incapable of plotting, it seemed to me, as a young faun—passed my conjecture; but, as Charlie had given me a quiet wink, as he spoke of the after-breakfast examination, I suspected that it was one of those jokes of his which are apt to have something of the simplicity ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... kindred. He has been so long separated from the primitive species whence he sprang that we cannot trace with any certainty his kinship with the creatures of the wilderness. Like his master he has become so artificialized that it is hard to conjecture what his original state may ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... is not per se proof of a necessarily fatal wound) "as by the infliction of such a wound" (Such a wound! What can be the meaning of this? What has Dean Alford made clear about the wound? We know absolutely nothing about the severity or intention of the wound, and it is mere baseless conjecture and assumption to say that we do; neither do we know anything concerning its effect unless it be shewn that the issuing of the blood and water PROVE that death must have ensued, and this Dean Alford has just virtually admitted ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... the strangest thing about them was, that in every picture the canvas about the head was pricked through and through in scores of places with very fine clean holes, and, looking around in his marvel, he found an arbalist or cross-bow, with some very sharp bolts, and was so led to conjecture that some one had been setting these heads of the Protector up as a target, and shooting bolts at them. He was at first minded to send an express after his daughter to London to question her if she knew aught of the matter; ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... an October blush. For the sallow old jurist had taken so great a liking to the Boston reincarnation of a Theban vestal, and was in consequence so rejuvenated, himself, that all Hyndsville was holding up the hands of astonishment and biting the finger of conjecture. ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... The conjecture that Sir Gilbert Elliot was the author of it is somewhat more plausible,—that gentleman being at this period high in the favor of the Prince, and possessing talents sufficient to authorize the suspicion (which was ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... conclude than that here is the very copy that Aldus prepared from the ancient manuscript and the collations and transcripts sent him by Fra Giocondo? One fact blocks this attractive conjecture: though there are many agreements between the readings of the emended Bodleian book and those of Aldus, there are also many disagreements. Mr. Hardy removed the obstacle by assuming that Aldus made changes in the proof; but the changes are numerous; they are not too numerous for a scholar who can ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... entirely ignorant as to what your recent experience has been. Moreover, what do you mean by a 'living Reality'? The flesh and blood, bone and substance that perishes in a brief seventy years or so and crumbles into indistinguishable dust? Surely, ... if, as I conjecture from your words, you have seen one of the fair inhabitants of higher spheres than ours, . . you would not drag her spiritual and death unconscious brightness down to the level of the 'reality of a merely human life? Nay, if ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... well to silence all conjecture at once, by stating that I am a woman of——no, I won't say how old, because everybody will date me from this time forward, and I shall not always be willing to tell how old I am! I am not very young now, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... contemporaries. If some of his conclusions were erroneous, they were at least ingenious and splendid; and their error resulted from the clouds which still hung over his peculiar path of enterprise. His own discoveries enlightened the ignorance of the age; guided conjecture to certainty, and dispelled that very darkness with which he had been ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... without trial, as without crime, were hurried away to speedy execution. Little less shocking was the recent fate of Ormond Chase, who was shot in Tepic on the 7th of August by order of the same Mexican general, not only without a trial, but without any conjecture by his friends of the cause of his arrest. He is represented as a young man of good character and intelligence, who had made numerous friends in Tepic by the courage and humanity which he had displayed on several trying occasions; and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... well-defined orbit, and the hunter knows where to intercept him. Again he leads off like a comet, quite beyond the system of hills and ridges upon which he was started, and his return is entirely a matter of conjecture; but if the day be not more than half spent, the chances are that the fox will be back before night, though the sportsman's patience seldom ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... the paths, occupied a very long space of time in passing. We still continued to follow the course of the Arve, which, according to the opinions of some writers, is believed to have, at one period, formed a lake between the mountains which encompass this valley; a conjecture which the marshy appearance of the ground ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... these accounts that the legendary discoverer of tin in Cornwall was originally a totally different character from the Irish saint, St. Kiran. If one might indulge in a conjecture, I should say that there probably was in the Celtic language a root kar, which in the Cymbric branch would assume the form par. Now cair in Gaelic means to dig, to raise; and from it a substantive might be derived, meaning digger or miner. In Ireland, Kiran seems to have ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... maintain. But perhaps this was premature: the omnipotent Miss Power's character—practical or ideal, politic or impulsive—he as yet knew nothing of; and giving over reasoning from insufficient data he lapsed into mere conjecture. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... face not unknown to me; I began to conjecture where I could have seen him; and, after an unobserved scrutiny, to speculate both as to his character and vocation. His physiognomy was prepossessing and intelligent, but ever and anon his brows lowered and gathered; a habit, as I then thought, with a degree of affectation in ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... was no idle conjecture, rather a well-thought-out possibility intelligently provided for, appeared when he went on to describe how the contingency must be faced. The enemy had already brought his full resources into the field. It was a maximum ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... water on it, as though Sir Horace had served himself with refreshments on his return to the house. The tops of the other sideboards were bare, and the presses, use in such a room Rolfe was at a loss to conjecture, were locked up. The antique sombre uniformity of the furniture as a whole was broken at odd intervals by several articles of bizarre modernity, including a few daring French prints, which struck an odd note of incongruity in ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... his strange captor or guide Clayton could only vaguely conjecture; but that he had heard the shot, and was in some manner affected by it was quite evident, for he quickened his pace so appreciably that Clayton, stumbling blindly in his wake, was down a dozen times in as many minutes in a ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... principles. This would give to his conclusions an appearance of inevitableness which usually overbore his adversary, and, even if it did not convince him, left him without any effective reply. This, too, had a good deal to do, I am disposed to conjecture, with another very noticeable characteristic of his which often came out in conversation, and that was his apparently unfailing confidence in the goodness of human nature. No man nor woman but he took to be in ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... over the innumerable documents now piling up in the case. Old Tamiya Yoemon proved easy game. He readily confessed all he knew. This brought in many witnesses from the wardsmen. It was not exactly what was wanted. The evidence was mostly mere hearsay and conjecture. In those days such testimony had a value not far below that of direct statement. All pointed the way to the real criminal, who after all was the star witness. Against Yoemon at first there was but little. However, ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Lisa Loved the King." Probably other poems had also been written, but poetry had not occupied much of her attention. As a school-girl, and even after she had gone to London, she had written verses. Among these earlier attempts, it may not be unsafe to conjecture, may have been the undated poems which she has published in connection with The Legend of Jubal. These are "Self and Life," "Sweet Evenings come and go, Love," ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... that the suicidal tendency is dependent on heat; but June is not the hottest month, nor is December the coldest. Durkheim has tested this conjecture by comparing temperatures with suicides in France, Italy, and Prussia. He finds that, in all three of these countries, suicides reach their maximum in June and their minimum in December, while the temperature does not rise to its maximum until July ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... day, in such a manner, that, on the 21st of the same month, being in the longitude of 158 degrees, I observed the variation to be no more than 4 degrees. On the 22nd of that month, the needle was in continual agitation, without resting in any of the eight points; which led me to conjecture that we were near some mine ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... apparent motion. But it would have been impossible to trace its course, even had we been nearer to the shore, above a few miles, on account of its numerous windings, the first of which, overshadowed as it is with wood, shuts it out from further observation. By continuing here so long, we had begun to conjecture that a landing somewhere on the banks of this river was in contemplation. In this, however, we were deceived, for about one o'clock the fleet was again under sail, and moving towards the Patuxent, a river which ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... of Menteith,—of that young nobleman in the scarlet laced cloak, who has just now left the bothy. But by no effort, though I have gazed till my eyes were almost fixed in the sockets, can I discover the face of this Highlander, or even conjecture who he may be, although his person and air seem familiar to me." ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... somewhat to do with Turks; yet I cannot venture the name, rank or purpose of the newcomer. Pursuing the argument, however, if my conjecture be true, then the message borne the Governor, though spirited, and most happily accordant with your high degree, will not accomplish your release, simply because the reason of the capture in the first place must remain a reason for detaining ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... their church views. The protestants look on those who voted against the Aggression bill with distrust; the evangelicals on Gladstone and S. Herbert with dislike. I don't pretend to be a prophet, but it is always well to put down what you expect and to compare these expectations with results. My conjecture is that Gladstone will, before long, leave the government or that he will break ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... in which this tale begins shall be left to the conjecture of the reader. But for the season of the year (which, in such a story, is the more important of the two) it was already so far forward in the spring, that when mountain people heard horns echoing all day about ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of a night in the oven. I hardly expected, when I left him to go to windward, to find him alive upon my return. He was certainly as low as he could well be when I left him, and what would be the effect of the medicines that I gave him, I hardly then dared to conjecture. Yet I knew that he must die without them. I was not a little rejoiced, therefore, and relieved, upon our return, to see him decidedly better. The medicines were strong, and took hold and gave a check to the disorder which was destroying him; ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Iceland, they would not have known as much about Icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence of Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the proportions of the case he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a number of educated Americans are very warmly ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... They made every effort to induce him to explain the reason which led him to such an act, or, if he was employed by others, to reveal their names; but he would reveal nothing. He was executed for his crime, leaving mankind to conjecture that his motive, or that of the persons who instigated him to the deed, was a desperate determination to save Scotland, at all hazards, from falling under ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... wide field of conjecture for a fertile imagination, and now that he was on the eve of engaging with such a being in mortal combat, on behalf of her he loved, the thoughts it gave rise to came more strongly and thickly upon him than ever they had ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... this country, I informed your Majesty, at the first opportunity, of everything possible, both of the condition in which I found affairs here, and of what I could conjecture in the beginning made by the new governor, Don Alonso Fajardo—of whom I immediately conceived suspicions and fears—and in the little that I saw of the beginnings of his government, by which he would not satisfy the need of the country for justice and [good] administration. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... he continued, "this whole affair has gone wrong from the start; nothing has turned out in the natural way. Criminals have been made into officers of the law, and honest men changed into outlaws. Now it seems impossible to conjecture how the adventure ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... that. It seemed to provide the key of the greater problem of Charles Turold's actions on that night. He had endeavoured to shield Sisily by altering the hands of the clock. The rest, for the present, must remain mere conjecture. One ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... and how she had tried to leave some provision which might rescue the former from the necessity of following her sister into the undesirable society she found abroad. This only served to confirm Theodora's conjecture. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... again appeared, so that Piper's conjecture that they were moving up the river by the opposite bank with a view to assemble the tribes higher up appeared to be correct. Their gins had been left at their old camp; for as the party crossed a flat not far from it, and I fired ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... attacking an elephant with a pea-shooter to imagine that any human weapon could cripple that mighty bulk. And yet I aimed better than I knew, for, with a loud report, one of the great blisters upon the creature's back exploded with the puncture of the buck-shot. It was very clear that my conjecture was right, and that these vast clear bladders were distended with some lifting gas, for in an instant the huge cloud- like body turned sideways, writhing desperately to find its balance, while the white beak snapped and gaped in horrible fury. But already I had shot away on the steepest glide ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a suspicion that the man wished to go to Australia, and had been somehow or other fraudulently mixed up with the events of the night. I say nothing in refutation of that conjecture; rather, I suggest it as one that would seem to many persons the most probable solution of improbable occurrences. My belief in my own theory remained unshaken. I returned in the evening to the house, to bring away ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... reading of the best authorities upon the history of science, Newton discovered neither gravitation, nor the law of gravitation; nor did he pretend to offer more than a conjecture as to the causation of gravitation. Moreover, his assertion that the notion of a body acting where it is not, is one that no competent thinker could entertain, is antagonistic to the whole current conception of attractive and repulsive forces, and therefore ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Spaniards, and all naked and bearing designs on their bodies, legs, arms, and hands (and some on their faces), in the manner of our Visayans, were found. Consequently, it is apparent that there are other nations of Pintados to be discovered. We have as yet not enough data, nor even a well founded conjecture, to say whether ours originated from the latter, or on the contrary both from some mainland. We know well that people who tattoo the body have been seen in Brasil and Florida. Then, too, this custom ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... informed that a double-sleigh load of able-bodied men followed close behind the one in which Miss King was taken home. What this movement meant, I am not able very satisfactorily to conjecture. I venture the opinion, however, that the good folks supposed their victim would jump out of the sleigh in which she was riding, if a good opportunity should offer, and run back to the Professor; and so this last load, no doubt, was put on as ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... Hamilton would have carried New York, or that North Carolina and Rhode Island would have finally decided not to be left in solitude outside. What the history of the nine united States only, with four disunited States among them, might have been, it is impossible to know, and quite useless to conjecture. The conditions which some of the States attached to the act of adoption, the addition of a Bill of Rights, proposed amendments to the Constitution, and the suggestion of submitting it to a second ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... of thee in times gone by— The bloody mutilation of thine eyes— And therefore know thee, son of Laius. All that I lately gathered on the way Made my conjecture doubly sure; and now Thy garb and that marred visage prove to me That thou art he. So pitying thine estate, Most ill-starred Oedipus, I fain would know What is the suit ye urge on me and Athens, Thou ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... and I saw the error I had committed. She was unmistakably of high-born lineage, and I would have given worlds to undo my rash action; though what she was doing at that place and at that hour is beyond me to conjecture. But we were at the door of my antagonist's house in a few moments, and he bade me hand over my burden. As he took her in his arms he exclaimed: 'To-morrow night, remember. The Sillon: ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... a priori, conjecture (as we shall ultimately find), that it cannot be bought, nor sold. Everything else is bought and sold for Labour, but labour itself cannot be bought nor sold for anything, being priceless.[25] The idea that it is a commodity ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... serpent-like shape whose existence is still a matter of question, although several seemingly authentic accounts have been circulated in attestation. The subject has given rise to much disputation and conjecture on the part of naturalists, but opinion mostly favours the supposition that these gigantic serpent-like appearances are caused by enormous cuttlefish swimming on the surface of the water, with their 20 ft. long tentacles elongated fore and aft. Other fishes ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... daughter, but in vain. The widow, confirmed in her previous belief that her lodgers had been attainted Lancastrians, could but suppose that they had been thus betrayed to their enemies. Hastings heard this with a dismay and remorse impossible to express. His only conjecture was that the king had discovered their retreat, and taken this measure to break off the intercourse he had so sternly denounced. Full of these ideas, he hastily remounted, and stopped not till once more at the gates of the Tower. Hastening to Edward's closet, the moment ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... amount or direction of the movements due to volcanic power by no means renders its efficacy as a land-preserving force in past times a mere matter of conjecture. The student will see in Chapter 24 that we have proofs of Carboniferous forests hundreds of miles in extent which grew on the lowlands or deltas near the sea, and which subsided and gave place ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... went by, he began to conjecture that he who had never had a friend was being hailed and halloed to, was being ordered, if not by precept, at any rate by example, to come out of the shell of his reserve, and let himself feel and let himself express. He could see how utterly different was Falbe's ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... new stables. The acrobats were dismissed. The guests went rapidly to an inspection of the carriages and horses. They were glad to escape. Jeneka, crushed in spirit and shamed at the brazen performance of her sister, began a plaintive conjecture as to "what people would say," when Kalora turned upon her such a tigerish glance that she fairly ran for her apartment, although she was too corpulent for actual sprinting. Mrs. Plumston remained behind as the ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... a vivid representation of a detected thief gone mad, and his private convulsions being still fresh in their memories, many are seen to direct their gaze towards the doctor's box, in doubt whether that gentleman will not be required to administer also to a mind diseased. But all conjecture on this point is presently set at rest by the acting madman himself, who is duly restored to his senses at ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... true course to pursue, my friend. In that way alone you have your own life developed. If by word, look or deed he ever betrays your trust, I shall call my intuitions vain, and all my insight into human character mere idle conjecture." ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... William's state of mind had become is matter for exorbitant conjecture. Jane, arriving at his locked door upon an errand, was bidden by a ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... down the Honorable William Linder lost himself in conjecture. He had just given an appointment to his tried and true, but quite impersonal ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... propositions, and though it is allowed only by courtesy to retain a place in modern metaphysics, yet a thought which maintained itself for such a length of time, however empty it seems to be, deserves an investigation of its origin, and justifies the conjecture that it must be grounded in some law of the understanding, which, as is often the case, has only been erroneously interpreted. These pretended transcendental predicates are, in fact, nothing but logical requisites and criteria of all cognition ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... I am unable to offer any conjecture here as to the "W. B." who wrote "The Elephant's Ball:" the same initials appear to an appendix to an edition of "Goody Two Shoes," published some time before 1780, but this may be ...
— The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast • Mr. Roscoe
... the Fuzby population. It would be long to tell the various little causes which led to Mr Kenrick's unpopularity among them. Every clergyman similarly circumstanced may conjecture these for himself; they resolved themselves mainly into the fact that Mr Kenrick was abler, wiser, purer, better, more Christian, than they. His thoughts were not theirs, nor ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... opportunity to study her appearance for the first time. He had not been mistaken in his conjecture. She was tall, with pale brown coloring, black eyebrows, eyes like drops of ink, and a light down on her lip and on her temples. Her youthful figure was full and firm, announcing a greater expansion for the future, as in all the women of her race. She seemed of a sweet ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... nation—so many landmarks along the way. And the distance between the starting-point and the furthest point reached by the race is measured not only by thousands of miles, but also by hundreds and hundreds of years; only the space can be actually measured; while the time can be computed merely by conjecture. The route from the south of India, along the shore of Malabar, the Persian Gulf, across the Arabian deserts, then down along the Red Sea and across the straits into Africa, is of such tremendous length that the settlements which the Cushite race left scattered along it must ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... My own private conjecture, I confess, has rather grown to be, on much reading of those RULHIERES and distracted Books, that the Czarina,—who was a grandiose creature, with considerable magnanimities, natural and acquired; with many ostentations, some really great qualities and talents; in effect, a kind ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... countless celestial globes with every conceivable variety of temperature and of constitution. Amid this vast number of worlds with which space is tenanted, are there any inhabited by living beings? To this great question science can make no response: we cannot tell. Yet it is impossible to resist a conjecture. We find our earth teeming with life in every part. We find life under the most varied conditions that can be conceived. It is met with under the burning heat of the tropics and in the everlasting frost at the poles. We find life ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... MS. is in the Museo-Biblioteca de Ultramar, Madrid; pressmark, "170-20-3a, caja no. 22." It has not, so far as is known, ever been published. Nothing indicates positively the name of the person to whom it was written; but we may reasonably conjecture, from the style of address, that it was probably sent to the president of the Audiencia of Mexico. As Legazpi's own account of his voyage and achievements, this document ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... Now entertain conjecture of a time When creeping murmur and the poring dark Fills the wide vessel of the universe. From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night The hum of either army stilly sounds,[1] That the fix'd sentinels almost receive The secret whispers of each ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... expectation are "inexplicable" and "incomprehensible."[241] He is, therefore, under the necessity of completing his definition of mind by adding that it is a series of feelings which "is aware of itself as a series;" and, still further, of supplementing this definition by the conjecture that "something which has ceased to exist, or is not yet in existence, can still, in a manner, be present."[242] Now he who can understand how a series of feelings can flow on in time, and from moment to moment drop out of the present into non-existence, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... It is all conjecture now; and upon this they must rely. But the weight of probability is in favour of the pursued party having kept to the river, and Gaspar is of this opinion. After riding some distance up the western bank of the arroyo, and seeing no trail or track there, he again returns ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... Abbe de Bernis had been a favoured lover of hers. The said Abbe was rather a coxcomb; he had a handsome face, and wrote poetry. Madame de Pompadour was the theme of his gallant verses. He sometimes received the compliments of his friends upon his success with a smile which left some room for conjecture, although he denied the thing in words. It was, for some time, reported at Court that she was in love with the Prince de Beauvau: he is a man distinguished for his gallantries, his air of rank and fashion, and his high play; he is brother ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... God, and affairs of that sort, He looks at as merely ideas; in short, As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet, Of such vast extent that our earth's a mere dab in it; 570 Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her, Namely, one part pure earth, ninety-nine parts pure lecturer; You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration, Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion, With the quiet precision of science he'll sort 'em, But ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... that their regular troops will form their right upon the lake, their militia occupy the ground between the regulars and the woods, and the Indians the woods. The formation herein prescribed is intended to resist an arrangement of this kind. Should the general's conjecture on that subject prove correct, as it must be evident that the right of the enemy cannot be turned, and on that wing his best troops must be placed, it will be proper to refuse him our left, and direct our principal effort to uncover the flank of his regulars by driving off his militia. In ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... side, where a similar article had been found with a finger nailed on it as a direction-post, I concluded that, in a line between these two boarding-pikes, one or both of the ships had been at anchor, and this conjecture was much borne out by the relative positions of the other traces found; and besides this, a small cairn on the crest of Beechey Island appears to have been intended as a meridian mark, and, if so, Franklin's squadron undoubtedly lay where I would place it, far and ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... rage rose from the Northmen, who were amazed and puzzled by the appearance of the Saxons, whose attire differed but slightly from their own; and the general belief among them was that this sudden alarm was the result of treachery among themselves. There was no time to waste in conjecture; the three groups of ships were now masses of flame, in the midst of which the lofty towers rose high. The shouts of the sailors in the vessels crowded together in helpless confusion in the stream below rose higher ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... a preconceived opinion by affirmative instances, neglecting all negative or opposed cases; and the tendency to generalize from few observations, or to give reality to mere abstractions, figments of the mind. Manifold errors also result from the weakness of the senses, which affords scope for mere conjecture; from the influence exercised over the understanding by the will and passions; from the restless desire of the mind to penetrate to the ultimate principles of things; and from the belief that "man is the measure of the universe," whereas, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... is a massive stone wall. The arches of this crypt are of the low pointed form, which came into use in the sixteenth century. There are no records of any monastery having existed on this spot, and it is difficult to conjecture what the building originally was. Mr. Chaffers thought it might be the remains of the Crown-sild, or shed, where our sovereigns resorted to view the joustings, shows, and great marching matches on the eves ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... from Trenton by a Mr. Furness which I hope you have received. I then informed you that we soon expected another tussle. I was not out in my conjecture. About three o'clock on the second of January, a column of the enemy attacked a party of ours which was stationed one mile above Trenton. Our party was small and did not make much resistance. The enemy, who were Hessians, entered the town pell-mell pretty much in the same manner that we had ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... take leave to propound my private thoughts: namely, that the Zecharias that here is mentioned, might not be he that we find in the book of Chronicles (2 Chron 24:21); but one of that name that lived in the days of Christ, possibly John Baptist's father, or some other holy man. My reasons for this conjecture, are, 1. Because the murderers are convict by Christ himself: Zecharias, whom ye slew between the altar and the temple. 2. Because Christ makes a stop at the blood of Zecharias, not at the blood of John the Baptist: wherefore, if the person here mentioned were not murdered after, but before ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... was sensible of something cold and even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet even this added to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed her fancy to play, as soon as they parted, in conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care for. Then, the next time they met she was abashed with the recollection of having unwarrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... unless there exists an earlier edition in quarto, as is the case in more than one half of the thirty-six plays. When the first Folio is corrupt, we have allowed some authority to the emendations of F2 above subsequent conjecture, and secondarily to F3 and F4; but a reference to our notes will show that the authority even of F2 in correcting is very small. Where we have Quartos of authority, their variations from F1 have ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... "Your conjecture is partly correct, although I have more reason to believe that the head of his column has reached Bear Fork, or will by to-morrow morning. Kindly step this way, Captain Wayne, and make note of the blue lines I have traced across this ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... hesitated, and Boone was no little puzzled to conjecture rightly what it was she intended to impart; but he was convinced it must be something of no ordinary nature that would induce a maiden of reputed timidity to leave her father's hut at a late ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... my conjecture that all that was presented, or would be presented, to my senses, must originate in some human being gifted by constitution with the power so to present them, and having some motive so to do, I felt an interest in my theory which, in its way, was rather philosophical than ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... reasonings which were rife in Weston for the next few days; and then the topic began to grow stale, for no one had been seen hanging about the house that afternoon, and there was no satisfactory peg upon which to hang conjecture. One hard fact remained; poor Crawley was answerable for four pounds twelve shillings which had been stolen from him, and this came at a time when he was particularly anxious to spend as little money as possible. He did not make ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... grand difference between the methods at present followed, and those of the ancients, becomes manifest. They were one-sided in these matters: they omitted the process of induction, and substituted conjecture for observation. They could never, therefore, fulfil the mission of Man to 'replenish the earth, and subdue it.' The subjugation of Nature is only to be accomplished by the penetration of her secrets and the patient ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... pardon," said the stranger, and he walked away with what Lemuel could only conjecture was the air of a ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... him easily, no stooping nor hobbling—above all, no cringing! She was wholly changed, in short, and the change, "whatever the change meant," had extended to her very clothes. The shabby wolf-skin cloak she wore seemed edged with gold coins. Under its shrouding disguise, she was wearing (we may conjecture), for this foreseen occasion, her dress of tribal Queen. But most wonderful of all was the change in her "eye-holes." When first he saw her that morning, they had been, as it were, empty of all but brine; now, two unmistakable eye-points, live and aware, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... celestial orbs were made and put in motion. How this mist was put in activity, and resolved into the luminous and revolving bodies that we now see, and one of which we inhabit is the first urgent perplexity to surmount in the conjecture. It is manifest that if a mist filled the entire region of space, a mist it must for ever remain, unless acted upon by some cause adequate to give it new action and arrangement. No sun, no stars or planets could spontaneously ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Field. It is true that at the present time he and she mingled in the same society; for he was the pet and plaything of the hour in the fashionable world; but he was not entirely blinded by that favor; he did not wholly mistake his position. And even supposing—a wild conjecture!—that she entertained an exceptional regard for him—that she could be induced to think of marrying him—would she be content that her husband remained on the stage and painted his face every evening and postured before the footlights? On the other hand, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... not speak by conjecture. It is not alone that the voices of statesmen and of newspapers reach me, and that the voices of foolish and intemperate agitators do not reach me at all. Through many, many channels I have been made aware ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... the largest portion becomes soured and spoiled through their ignorance or negligence, either from not putting it into good casks, or from not taking proper care of the liquor afterwards. Sheep they have none, although they have what is requisite for them if they chose. It is matter of conjecture whether you will find any milk or butter even in summer; we have not found any there at this season of the year. They bestow all their time and care in producing tobacco; each cask or hogshead, as they call it, of which ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... address, from which I gather that, owing to a superstitious dislike which the Gipsies entertain towards the Census, and the successfully cunning attempts on their part to baffle the enumerators, it is only by conjecture and guesswork that we can form any idea of the number of Bohemians in this country. The result of Mr. Smith's diligent inquiries has led him to the assumption that there are not less than 4,000 Gipsy men and women, and from 15,000 to 20,000 Gipsy and 'arab'—that is to say, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... exquisite melody of versification. The personifications from line 303 to 309, in the heat of the battle, had better been omitted; they are not very striking, and only encumber. The converse which Joan and Conrade hold on the banks of the Loire is altogether beautiful. Page 313: the conjecture that in dreams "all things are that seem," is one of those conceits which the poet delights to admit into his creed,—a creed, by the way, more marvellous and mystic than ever Athanasius dreamed of. Page 315: ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... like manner, if a person in broad daylight were falling asleep, to introduce a sudden darkness would prevent his sleep for that time, though silence and darkness in themselves, and not suddenly introduced, are very favorable to it. This I knew only by conjecture on the analogy of the senses when I first digested these observations; but I have since experienced it. And I have often experienced, and so have a thousand others, that on the first inclining towards sleep, we have been suddenly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the calamity is over, if they can recover and keep their new stock sound for seven years together, the former loss will easily be recompensed with double commodity. Cardan writeth that our waters are hurtful to our sheep; howbeit this is but his conjecture, for we know that our sheep are infected by going to the water, and take the same as a sure and certain token that a rot hath gotten hold of them, their livers and lights being already distempered through ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... powerful agent, thousands of times more powerful than electricity as we know it upon Earth. That the shadow on the film had been that of a Martian, I dared not hope. Though my mind continually reverted to this wild conjecture, I impatiently put it aside, as the apparent impossibility of it all would ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... top-heavy with piled luggage, deserted by its passengers, abandoned of its friend in the velvet cap, a motionless and apparently objectless coach. How it was to be dislodged and conveyed down the "vast abrupt" became matter of conjecture to the four, when presently some men came to the spot with a large coil of cable-cord, which they proceeded to pass through the two hindmost side-windows of the diligence, threading it like a bead on a string; and then they gradually lowered the lumbering coach down the side of the descent, amid ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... he would a-wooing go" (Vol. ii., p. 45.)—Your correspondent T. S. D. is certainly right in his notion that the ballad of "A frog he would a-wooing go" is very old, however fanciful may be his conjecture about its personal or political application to Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn. That it could not refer to "the Cavaliers and the Roundheads," another of T. S. D.'s notions, is clear from the fact, that it was entered at Stationers' Hall in November, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... and romantic scenery. The derivation of its name, has ever continued a matter of great perplexity; which perhaps may be considered as a very strong argument, in favour of the antiquity of the place. Some persons conjecture, that the appellation is derived from the two Saxon words, hurst, and ham, the first syllable signifying a wood, and the second a village or collection of houses: and this opinion seems to be supported by the known fact, that this part ...
— The History and Antiquities of Horsham • Howard Dudley
... Phanes, and all the Persian dignitaries watched the old men with deep sympathy, and though the proofs of Bartja's innocence were as yet only founded on conjecture, not one of those present doubted it one moment longer. Wherever the belief in a man's guilt is but slight, his defender ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... distended eyes; he snorted at it with vague yet troubled fury. Whether he detected his own presentment in Miss Mannersley's sketch, or whether he recognized it as an unknown and unfamiliar treachery in his surroundings, I could not conjecture; for the next moment the matador, taking advantage of the bull's concentration, with a complacent leer at the audience, advanced toward the paper. But at that instant a young man cleared the barrier into the arena with a single bound, shoved the matador to one side, caught up ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Cressid a Cleopatra—and his wanton gipsy-mistress was at length redeemed by a passion of heroic resolve. The majority of critics are still debating whether indeed Cleopatra is the "dark lady" of the sonnets or not. Professor Dowden puts forward the theory as a daring conjecture; but the identity of the two cannot be doubted. It is impossible not to notice that Shakespeare makes Cleopatra, who was a fair Greek, gipsy-dark like his sonnet-heroine. He says, too, of the "dark ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... speak;—and the abstruse question is, What is one to say? "Find me the original; let us be certain, first:" that you can say; that is one dear point; and pretty much the only one. The rest, at this time, as I conjecture, may have been not a little abstruse to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... a fair field.' Certainly it might; but by Englishmen of recent generations, and not by Danish immigrants of the ninth century. To balance the anomaly of what certainly wears a faint soupcon of anachronism—namely, the apparent anticipation of the modern Norse word field, Mr. Ferguson's conjecture would take a headlong plunge into good classical English. Now of this there is no other instance. Even the little swells of ground, that hardly rise to the dignity of hills, which might be expected to submit readily to changing appellations, under ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... had found employment. He made several voyages as sailing-master in 1805-8 from that port. He was apparently during these years successful after the manner of his craft. But he was not a man to remain long in one place. What was the immediate occasion of his strange behavior we can only conjecture. Possibly an increasing love for liquor had led to domestic differences, which his pleasure-loving nature would not brook. Certain it was that he was not like his wife. He was not a man in whom the moral sense ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... understanding will be strongly impressed with the persuasion that the satellites are placed in the system with a view to compensate for the diminished light of the sun at greater distances. Mars is an exception; some persons might conjecture from this case that the arrangement itself, like other useful arrangements, has been brought about by some wider law which we have not yet detected. But whether or not we entertain such a guess (it can be nothing more), we see in other parts of creation so many examples of apparent exceptions ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... through the fast-steadying brain of Martin Hawk as he watched his accuser pass him by without a look and stop irresolutely on his threshold to stare aghast at what lay beyond. It became a conviction, rather than a conjecture. Barry had set the dogs upon him! Snake! Well,—just let him get loose from these plagued hounds for half an hour or so and, by glory, they'd have something to hang him for or his name wasn't ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... in my conjecture," Thornton thought, as he took his leave of Mrs. Meredith who could not face Anna then, but paced restlessly up and down her spacious rooms, wondering how much Thornton had suspected and what the end ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... may follow the extracts from the archives of Mantua in the fifteenth century, we get nothing definite in regard to the production of the first Italian secular and lyric drama at that court. We are driven into the hazardous realm of conjecture as to the relations between its production and the prominent musicians who formed part of the suite of the Marquis. This indeed is but natural, since it could not be expected of the Marquis and his associates that they should ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... he had to go; why he stayed away so long, so very long, are not really relevant to this story; the facts, stripped of conjecture, were simply these: she was married, and he was not, and there came the time, it always comes in such relationships as theirs, when he had to choose between staying without honour and going quickly. He went. But even the bare facts concerning ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... Conjecture rages most fiercely in the Officers' Mess, which is in touch with sources of unreliable information not accessible to the rank and file. The humblest subaltern appears to be possessed of a friend ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... "my hands are cold as ice; the blood has curdled in my heart; that word compromise has a bad savor when truth and right are in question." When the Civil War came, in her seventieth year, she had "an intense desire to live to see the conclusion of the struggle," but could not conjecture "how peace and good neighborhood are ever to follow from this bitter hate." "It is delightful to see the gallantry of some of our men, who are repeating the heroic deeds that seemed fast receding to fabulous times." Some of these young ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... is infinite, and fills all space with his immensity; before an almighty being, who never executes that which he desires; before a being supremely good, and who causes but displeasure; before a being, the friend of order, and in whose government everything is in disorder. After all this, let us conjecture what this God ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... there were only two kinds of people—those who belonged to the church and those who belonged to the world. Those of the world were strangers—aliens. The life they lived, their pleasures, their ambitions, their loves, were all matters of conjecture to this daughter of the church. They were, to her, people to save—never people to be intimate with; nor were they to be regarded without grave suspicion until they were saved. She wondered, sometimes, what they were like if one were to really know them. As she had thought about it the night ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... delight, and turned back from the stranger, laughing: he, frequently shaking his head, retired with a hasty step and discontented air, and descended into the fountain. Huldbrand now felt perfectly certain that his conjecture was correct. ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... worship of the sacred tree and of the Sun. The toys which are hung on the twigs of the tree may also be "survivals" of the offerings which were usually made to the Sun and the heavenly bodies. If I am correct in my conjecture on this subject, it throws a very interesting light on what is considered as a mere agent for the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... corrected entirely the colored images which had rendered all previous telescopes very imperfect. He finds in this invention all the elements of design, as it appeared in the thought and action of a human designer. First, conjecture of certain laws or facts in optics. Then, experiment proving these laws or facts. Then, the contrivance and formation of an instrument by which those laws or facts must produce a certain ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... of something stereotyped? Here an important distinction must be drawn. When we speak of expressive beauty or even expressive ugliness, when we say that a face possesses expression, we mean expression that may be stable, but which we conjecture to be mobile. It maintains, in the midst of its fixity, a certain indecision in which are obscurely portrayed all possible shades of the state of mind it expresses, just as the sunny promise of a warm day manifests itself in the haze of a spring morning. But a comic expression ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... trees you fell? It must be a great labour to clear them out." "We don't clear them out," he replied. "We use ploughs that automatically rise when they come to a stump, and take the earth again on the other side." I cannot but conjecture that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is fitted with some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily over the snags that stud the ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... had been converted into a miniature temple, and there are several in one of the mission compounds. I believe they are known only in this region. They have been excavated by an expert hand, showing traces, it is thought, of Indian influence. Much conjecture has been expended upon them, and as yet there is no advance upon Baber's conclusion "that these excavations are of unknown date, and have been undertaken for unexplained purposes, by a people ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... "God has a reason for all His arrangements, and I think it is allowable for us to conjecture what that reason may be; but though we cannot find it out, we may be very sure the ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... singular introduction into the Lection for Good-Friday of this incident of the piercing of the REDEEMER'S side? Is it allowable to conjecture that, indirectly, the Diatessaron of Tatian may have been the occasion of that circumstance also; as well as of certain other similar phenomena in ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... righteousness"—the seeing him as he is and being made fit to see him. "I shall be satisfied when I awake in thy likeness"—the conformity to the Divine image at the instant sound of the resurrection trump. (Ps. 17: 15.) Perhaps we may conjecture wherein will consist the perfection of the resurrection state. We may find it in that one saying: "It is raised a spiritual body" (1 Cor. 15: 44). Now, how often the body dominates the spirit, making it do what it would not; but then, the spirit will dominate the body, making it do as ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... rifle, which has wonderful range, and ten millions of smokeless powder cartridges. Marksmen could sweep the decks of a ship with Mausers at the distance of a mile, and with the smokeless cartridges it would have been mere conjecture where the sharpshooters were located. There are rows of armor-piercing steel projectiles from Germany still standing around rusting in the Spanish batteries, and they never did any more than they ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... country, became so discouraged and exhausted by fatigue and famine, that they abandoned the country. Sir Richard Grenville returning shortly afterwards to America, and not being able to find them, and at a loss to conjecture their fate, left in the island another small party of settlers and again set ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... beginning, the simplest forms, and next a slow, gradual, complex and perfected organization; the organ created through habits, necessity and surrounding medium; heredity transmitting acquired modifications,[3105] all denoting in advance, in a state of conjecture and approximation, the cellular theory of later physiologists[3106] and the conclusions of Darwin. In the picture which the human mind draws of nature, the general outline is marked by the science of the eighteenth century, the arrangement of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... fields, does not talk about green fields, however he may enjoy them. Both your correspondents seem to anticipate this difficulty, and meet it by supposing Falstaff to be "babbling snatches of hymns;" but this I conceive to be far beyond the limits of reasonable conjecture. In fact, the whole of their very beautiful theory rests upon the very disputed passage in question. At an earlier period apparently, his mind did wander; when, as Mrs. Quickly says, he was "rheumatick," meaning doubtless lunatic, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... increasing. The slopes of the coastal ranges are admirably adapted for the culture of the vine, and the chief varieties grown are those most suitable for wine-making and for the table. Chasselas Doradillo, White Rice, Black Alicante, and Muscat of Alexandria are largely cultivated. There is, I conjecture, a good field open for the capitalist in the direction of the ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... bad-looking. And why did he come to Carlingford, having nothing in the world to do with the place? and coming to Carlingford, why was papa sought out, of all people, to be his tutor? Certainly the circumstances were such as invited conjecture, especially when added on to Sophy's allusions. He took Ursula in to dinner, which fluttered her somewhat; and though he was much intent upon the dinner itself, and studied the menu with a devotion which would have made her tremble for her housekeeping, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... upholding something in him that seemed a wavering part of the best of him—a chivalry that had demanded to be killed by judgment of a righteous woman. He was conscious of an uplift, a gladdening of his spirit. Yet the ache remained. More than that, he found himself plunged deeper into conjecture, doubt. Had not the Ellen Jorth incident ended? He denied his father's indictment of her and accepted the faith of his sister. "Reckon that's aboot all, as dad says," he soliloquized. Yet was that all? He paced under the cedars. He watched the sun set. He listened to the coyotes. He lingered ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... in the convents throughout Italy at this time is not a matter of mere conjecture, for the facts are known in many cases and are of such a nature as almost to pass belief. One reason for this state of affairs is to be found in the character of the women who composed these conventual orders. It is natural to think of them as holy maidens ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... at my mother's face. There was exulting triumph on it, mingled with a look of terrible hatred. I did not know what it meant, nor could I conjecture. ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... have already mentioned that some of her surviving friends consider that an incident which she heard, when at school at Miss Wooler's, was the germ of the story of Jane Eyre. But of this nothing. can be known, except by conjecture. Those to whom she spoke upon the subject of her writings are dead and silent; and the reader may probably have noticed, that in the correspondence from which I have quoted, there has been no allusion whatever to the publication of her poems, nor is there the least hint of the intention ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... can pick up under our feet. Had it been an accidental name, the similarity between it and Anaitis might have had something in it; but it turns out to be a mere physiological name.' Macleod said, Mr M'Queen's knowledge of etymology had destroyed his conjecture. JOHNSON. 'You have one possibility for you, and all possibilities against you. It is possible it may be the temple of Anaitis. But it is also possible that it may be a fortification; or it may be a place of Christian worship, as the first Christians often ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... discovered the young poet of Andes, and saved him from a life of struggling poverty. Virgil's health was always feeble, and his temper seems to have been rather melancholy; he had had little experience of life except in his remote country town, and would, we may plausibly conjecture, have succumbed in a contest from which the more ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... found a village. Now what? A Medic—A stranger appearing on the lane which served the town, a stranger in a distinctive uniform of Trade, would only incite conjecture and betrayal. ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... fangs actuated by a special ganglion? Are they actuated by fibres issuing from centres exercising further functions? I leave to anatomists equipped with more delicate instruments than I the task of elucidating this obscure question. The second conjecture appears to me the more probable, because of the palpi, whose nerves, it seems to me, must have the same origin as those of the fangs. Basing our argument on this latter hypothesis, we see that the Calicurgus has only one means of suppressing the movement of the poisoned pincers ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... footsteps, tiptoed to the front of the stage, and stooping down, began to mix a concoction in a plate. Many stood up to see what he was doing, and conjecture was rife. Mephisto and Faust were forgotten until Jake struck a heroic pose, and grasping ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... to conjecture that the haughty, unpopular, aristocratic old General[55] would not be as acceptable as a young man of thirty-five, fascinating in manner, gifted in speech, and not yet openly and offensively partisan; but it needed something more than this charm of personality to line up the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... (Night vii.) but such carelessness is characteristic despite the proverb, "In repetition is no fruition." I quote Torrens (p. 60) by way of variety. As regards the anemone (here called a tulip) being named "Shakik" fissure, I would conjecture that it derives from the flower often forming long lines of red like stripes of blood in the landscape. Travellers in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... no such thing as Christmas or Christmas dinners. Whether the turkey which Scrooge gave to Bob Cratchit had experienced a lovelier or more melancholy career than that of less attractive turkeys is a subject upon which I cannot even conjecture. But that Scrooge was better for giving the turkey and Cratchit happier for getting it I know as two facts, as I know that I have two feet. What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... high wall on the one hand and a high hedge on the other, which led up a steep hill to a road, on the other side of which was a cemetery. The child followed this path, and then Angelica knew that she had been right in her conjecture, and had only to follow him. He led her quite across the cemetery to a quiet corner where was an open grassy space away from the other graves. Two sides of it were sheltered by great horse chestnuts, old and umbrageous, and from where she stood she caught a glimpse of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... it is shown that a man does this or declines to do that for reasons best known to himself,—a reserve which is extremely conducive to the social interests of a community, since the conjecture into the origin and nature of those reasons stimulates the inquiring faculties, and furnishes the staple of modern conversation. And as it is not to be denied that, if their neighbours left them nothing to guess at, three-fourths of civilized humankind, male or female, would have nothing to ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... around the central object, though what he expected or hoped to accomplish by this curious proceeding was more than his antagonist could conjecture. ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... intended to lead. I shall not, however, ask the reader to accept any such conclusion or result merely because it removes difficulties or because it makes or rather leaves the poetry better; but I shall present—that the Sonnets contain direct testimony, testimony not leading to surmise or conjecture, but testimony which would authorize a judgment in a court of law, that the Sonnets were not written by Shakespeare, and that they very strongly indicate that Shakespeare was the friend or patron to whom so ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... the intermediate links have actually been found, but because analogy leads the observer to suppose either that they do now somewhere exist, or may formerly have existed; and here a wide door for the entry of doubt and conjecture is opened. ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... of rope: appeared, at first, to indicate that the inhabitants of these miserable cottages pursued some avocation on the river; but a glance at the shattered and useless condition of the articles thus displayed, would have led a passer-by, without much difficulty, to the conjecture that they were disposed there, rather for the preservation of appearances, than with any view to their being ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... easy stages brought the fugitives to another waterhole, a little round pocket under the heaved-up edge of lava. There was spare, short, bleached grass for the horses, but no wood for a fire. This night there was question and reply, conjecture, doubt, opinion, and conviction expressed by the men of the party. But the Indian, who alone could have told where they were, where they were going, what chance they had to escape, maintained his stoical silence. Gale took the early watch, Ladd ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... began chatting about the robbery. When they learned that Flandrin had desired to have a sketch of the man's head; when Mueller described his features, and I his obstinate reserve and semi-military air, their excitement knew no bounds. Each had immediately his own conjecture to offer. He was a political spy, and therefore fearful lest his portrait should be recognised. He was a conspirator of the Fieschi school. He was ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... been suggested that some were taken by the spectators who thronged to witness the exhibitions, as manuscripts known to have belonged to this library were found—so the catalogue states—as remote as in a grocer's shop in Nova Scotia. It would be difficult to conjecture which would have caused the greater grief to Mr. Prince,—the desecration of the church, whose construction had been a daily delight, and where he had earnestly labored for so many years, or the sacrifice of a portion of the results of the patient toil of a ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... daughter.[504] So stated the belief is hardly clear and intelligible; for if a man has several sons, he must evidently be alive and not dead when the eldest of them is born, and similarly with a woman and her eldest daughter. On the analogy of similar beliefs elsewhere we may conjecture that these Papuans imagine every firstborn son to be animated by the soul of his father, whether his father be alive or dead, and every firstborn daughter to be animated by the soul of her mother, whether her ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... this intelligence, but it filled her with wonder and conjecture. That Waife, who had so pertinaciously refused to break bread as a guest under any man's roof-tree, should be for days receiving the hospitality of Lionel Haughton's wealthy and powerful kinsman, was indeed mysterious. But whatever brought Waife and Lionel thus in confidential intercourse ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... against Pao-yue. And when she also unexpectedly heard Hsi Jen's disclosures on the subject, she became more positive in her surmises. The one, who had, in fact, told Hsi Jen was Pei Ming. But Pei Ming too had arrived at the conjecture in his own mind, and could not adduce any definite proof, so that every one treated his statements as founded partly on mere suppositions, and partly on actual facts; but, despite this, they felt quite certain that it was (Hsueeh P'an) ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Mars (March 1) was the dancing of the priests who carried curious shields, it was narrated, to account for this, that the shield of Mars fell down from heaven;[1466] and the goddess Maia, according to one conjecture, was invented to explain the name of the month of May.[1467] A Greek explanation of the fact that children at a later period were not called by the mother's name was that in the contest between Poseidon and Athene for the control of the city of Athens the latter deity prevailed by the votes of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... if any one could offer a conjecture as to the Bishop's meaning in this last sentence? I have shown it to several people, but no one has been able to think of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... N.N.W. course through it, and at the distance of three miles from its commencement, ascended a tree, to ascertain if I was near the marshes; when I found that I was fast receding from them. I concluded, therefore, that my conjecture as to their direction was right, and altered my course to N.W., a direction in which I had observed a dense smoke arising, which I supposed had been made by some natives near water. At the termination of ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... if it narrowed, the field of conjecture; and Darrow's gropings threw him back on the conclusion that he was probably reading too much significance into the moods of a lad he hardly knew, and who had been described to him as subject to sudden changes of humour. As ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... retreat. It was from Villa Torella that I had attempted to carry off Juliet; I had spent many an hour reconnoitring the spot, and knew each inch of ground in its vicinity. It was beautifully situated, embosomed in trees, on the margin of a stream. As I drew near, it became evident that my conjecture was right; nay, moreover, that the hours were being then devoted to feasting and merriment. For the house was lighted up; strains of soft and gay music were wafted towards me by the breeze. My heart sank within me. Such was ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Grouchy, upon whom Napoleon threw the blame of the defeat at Waterloo, because he strictly fulfilled his orders, by pressing the Prussians at Wavre, unheeding the cannonade on his left, which might have led him to conjecture that the more important contest between the Emperor and Wellington ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... impossible to forecast in what direction philosophy will move. The summary history we have been able to trace sufficiently shows, as it seems to us, that it has no regular advance such that by seeing how it has progressed one can conjecture what path it will pursue. It seems in no sense to depend, or at all events, to depend remarkably little, at any period, on the general state of civilization around it, and even for those who believe ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... there was a bustle and a leave-taking, and I had to post off before I could hear more. Not, however, that there was much more to hear, for everything seemed to be in the greatest confusion, and every species of conjecture was afloat as to the real criminal, and the motive for the crime. I had not much time to think of anything during the first day on board; yet, busy as I was in arranging and rearranging my things, poor old Sir John never seemed ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... burned up the temple, scorched the rock, making a powerful impression on the Indians and causing the poor Devil to flee, "roaring in a fury." "The cruel Devil never more returned to the rock nor to this district." Whether the roaring which they heard was that of the Devil or of the flames we can only conjecture. Whether the conflagration temporarily dried up the swamp or interfered with the arrangements of the water supply so that the pool disappeared for the time being and gave the Devil no chance to appear in the water, where he had formerly ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... dingy scrap, but the changes of her expressive face did not bear out Jerry's optimistic conjecture that the "inside" was all right. Judging from Peggy's crestfallen air, it was all wrong. The note was not written in Lucy's usual regular hand. The letters straggled, the lines zig-zagged across the page, and the name signed was ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... populace, but the nobles themselves, even the Holy Fathers and Associated Brethren were seen, forming in various groups, conversing eagerly and mysteriously. The interest in the prisoner had in some measure given way to a new excitement. Question followed question, conjecture followed conjecture, but nothing could solve the mystery of Donna Marie's terrible avowal, or decrease the bewilderment and perplexity which, from various causes, it created in every mind. One alone, ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... simile, and if well worked out by a rhetorician, say of Dr. Liddon's type, it might have powerfully clinched some great argument for the necessary place of dogma in Christian theology. But the sermon has vanished, and we can only conjecture from the date of the entry—October 5, 1869—that the good Dean's ire had been excited by Matthew Arnold's first appearance in the field of theological controversy. Six years before, indeed, Arnold had touched that field, when in The Bishop and the Philosopher ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... imagined that they could form a separate kingdom of Dublin, or dreamt of making an alliance with the tribes outside the Pale, it is useless now to conjecture; but we can see that though they had no chance of benefiting themselves they might have caused serious injury to England. Nor was it long before a difficulty arose. The inhabitants of the Pale remained attached to the House of York even after ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... have been willing to work with the Whites. He sent for Vieri de' Cerchi, the leader of that party, and tried to induce him to live peaceably with the other side. Vieri, for reasons which we can only conjecture, replied curtly that he had no quarrel with any one; and Boniface resorted to the old expedient of sending a Cardinal—Matthew ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... not comprehend what he meant; but on explaining himself, he said, 'Her mother behaved to her with an attention and a marked respect that it is impossible to account for in any other way; and I am sure of it.' His conjecture shortly afterwards proved to be the truth. This was carrying the prophetic spirit of common sense as far as it ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... poverty and want on a barren wild; forsaking all things enduring all things for the love of Knowledge, which he could still nobly follow through trials and extremities, without encouragement of fame or profit, without vantage ground of station or wealth, for its own dear sake. Beyond this, nothing but conjecture is left. The cell, the bed-place, the lines traced on the rocks, the inscription of the year in which he hewed his habitation out of them, are all the memorials that remain ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... an end, however, to conjecture founded upon circumstances and appearances, we directed Tupia to ask what bones they were; and the Indians, without the least hesitation, answered, the bones of a man. They were then asked what ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... something surpassing. From the day almost of his marriage the miseries of life lost half their bitterness, nor had it returned at her death. Instinctively he felt that outsiders, those even who respected him as an honest man, believed that, somehow or other, they could only conjecture how, he must be to blame for the circumstances he was in—either this, or providence did not take care of the just man. Such was virtually the unuttered conclusion of many, who nevertheless imagined they understood the Book of Job, and who would have counted Warlock's ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... she could not very well say. They were a mother with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on the way to it, and there was very intermittently the apparently bachelor brother of the girls; at the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her conjecture that he was some sort of minister. One could see they were all gentlefolks, though the girls were not of the last cry of fashion. They were very nice to their mother, and you could tell that they must have been coming with ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... cracked voice of the chorister was uplifted, intoning the text, as if it were the first verse of another hymn. So calmly was it done, so imperturbable were all the black countenances, that I half began to conjecture that the chaplain himself intended it for a hymn, though I could imagine no prospective rhyme for trouble, unless it were approximated by debbil,—which is, indeed, a favorite reference, both with the men and with his Reverence. But the chaplain, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... my parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth year, and—wretched I—I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more." Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern deity; but there is no ground whatever for ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... lessening or the complete loss of womanly grace and purity. Take away that reverential regard which men now feel for them, leave them to win their way by sheer strength of body or mind, and the result is not difficult to conjecture. Let the condition of women in savage life tell. Towards something like this, although in civilised society not so coarsely and roughly exposed to view, matters would tend if these agitators for women's rights were successful. Husbands, brothers, sons, have too keen a sense of what they owe ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... encountered on our route, had its own purpose. We reached very soon the end of the gallery, and then the procession turned and passed suddenly into another chamber, apparently narrow, but so faintly lighted by the lamp in our leader's hands that its dimensions were matter of mere conjecture. That we were descending a somewhat steep incline I was soon aware; and when we came again on to level ground I felt sure that we were passing through a gallery cut in natural rock. The light was far too dim to enable me to distinguish any openings in the walls; but the procession constantly ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... they may have rowed out and been caught in the storm," cried Paula, bursting into fresh weeping; and Magdalen saw the conjecture confirmed by Mr. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... cedrela, instead of having been cast on the strand of Teneriffe, had been carried farther south, It would probably have made the whole tour of the Atlantic, and returned to its native soil with the general current of the tropics. This conjecture is supported by a fact of more ancient date, recorded in the history of the Canaries by the abbe Viera. In 1770, a small vessel laden with corn, and bound from the island of Lancerota, to Santa Cruz, in Teneriffe, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... into pricking flames. Loud voices about, but invisible to him, were swearing and gibing. He was lying on his back, his head on a line with his body. A regular movement, broken by joltings that sent torturing darts through his whole frame, told him without much conjecture that he was in an ambulance. The accent of the voices outside told him that it was a rebel ambulance and not a Northern one he was in. He tried to raise his head to see his companions, but he might as well have been ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... not unknown to me; I began to conjecture where I could have seen him; and, after an unobserved scrutiny, to speculate both as to his character and vocation. His physiognomy was prepossessing and intelligent, but ever and anon his brows lowered and gathered; a habit, as I then ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... "that now you have taken up the affair, you will not stop until you find out everything, so, as I want the matter to rest as at present, I will anticipate you, and reveal all. You were right in your conjecture that I knew something likely to lead to the detection of Whyte's murderer; but when I tell you my reasons for keeping such a thing secret, I am sure you will not blame me. Mind you, I do not say that I know who committed the murder; but I have suspicions—very strong suspicions—and ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... months and explored the adjacent country, became so discouraged and exhausted by fatigue and famine, that they abandoned the country. Sir Richard Grenville returning shortly afterwards to America, and not being able to find them, and at a loss to conjecture their fate, left in the island another small party of settlers and again set ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... and so was Madame de Thoux. Though neither of them could conjecture what was the cause of Cassy's fainting, still they made all the tumult which is proper in such cases;—George upsetting a wash-pitcher, and breaking two tumblers, in the warmth of his humanity; and various ladies in the cabin, hearing that somebody had fainted, crowded the state-room door, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in her conjecture that Mignon would not allow matters to rest as they were. From the moment that Constance had been announced as the Princess she had made a vow that by either fair or unfair means she would supplant "that white-faced cat of a Stevens girl," who had been ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... Twelfth Night, have been cited as involving some reference to the Poet's own case, or as having been suggested by what himself had experienced of the evils resulting from the wedlock of persons "misgraffed in respect of years." There was never any thing but sheer conjecture for this notion. Rowe mentions nothing of the kind; and we may be sure that his candour would not have spared the Poet, had tradition offered him any such matter. As for the passages in question, I know ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... beautiful and very wilful young lady, her cousin, would never have made such an appeal to me. I did not care to conjecture the way in which she, long before this stage of the conversation, would have been expressing her indignation and withering me with ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... and the gulls circling overhead, that she had awakened to the knowledge of her love for Crispin. And so to him strayed now her thoughts, and to the fate her father had sent him to; and thus back again to her father and the evil he had wrought. It is matter for conjecture whether her loathing for Gregory would have been as intense as it was, had another than Crispin Galliard ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... cripple that mighty bulk. And yet I aimed better than I knew, for, with a loud report, one of the great blisters upon the creature's back exploded with the puncture of the buck-shot. It was very clear that my conjecture was right, and that these vast clear bladders were distended with some lifting gas, for in an instant the huge cloud- like body turned sideways, writhing desperately to find its balance, while the white beak snapped and gaped in horrible fury. But already ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pollen-mother-cells develop (type 2) while in others they do not (type 1). For this we have no explanation; nor can we explain why the tree is male sterile. I am afraid these phenomena will remain a matter of conjecture for some time to come. Since sterilities of this and other sorts in most other plants are largely genetic, that is, controlled by one or more genes that are inherited in Mendelian fashion, it is likely that such is ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... now for conjecture, time now only for action. She sprang for the door, had it open in a trice, and before the cabby was really enthroned upon his lofty box, the girl was on the step, fair troubled face upturned to ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... with himself that he should have allowed this interpretation to be placed on his presence here; then he still more resented the conjecture. ...
— The Crucial Moment - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... historical sketch of the previous discoveries, I shall not dwell upon such as depend upon conjecture and probability, but come speedily to those, for which there are authentic documents. In this latter, and solely important, class, the articles extracted from voyages, which are in the hands of the public, will be abridged to their leading heads; and the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... leaders and legislation of the revolutionary era than has hitherto been written. Certainly there could be no more instructive commentary on either history than the study of the other, for each supplements the other and emphasizes its defects. If Mommsen at times pushes conjecture to the verge of invention, as in his account of the junction of the Helvetii and Cimbri, Mr. Long, in his dogged determination never to swerve from facts to inference, falls into the opposite extreme, resorting ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... a complicated tragedy, thought Andrew McLean as he stood there, his eyes narrowing, his lips compressed, his mind invaded with a dark swarm of conjecture, surmise, suspicion, his vision possessed by a flitting ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... ambitious princess, who had renounced the most sacred duties of a mother. The nature, the duration, the probable consequences of such a union between two distant and dissonant empires, it is impossible to conjecture; but the unanimous silence of the Latins may teach us to suspect, that the report was invented by the enemies of Irene, to charge her with the guilt of betraying the church and state to the strangers of the West. [121] The French ambassadors were the spectators, and had nearly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... Maillet's dream and the Lamarckian hypothesis of a Creation undertaken once and for all, in place of a continuous creative intenention. This book, opposing natural law to miracle, carried complete conviction to the young and eager. Audacious spirits even hazarded the conjecture that primitive life itself might have originated in a natural way: had not, but recently, an investigator who brought a powerful voltaic battery to bear on a saturated solution of silicate of potash, been startled to find, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... the earth, nor the points of the compass, could any longer be seen. Stupefied by the dust, all the troops became blind. Neither the foe, O king, nor we, could distinguish each other. For this reason, the kings began to fight, guided by conjecture and the names they uttered. Deprived of their cars, car-warriors, O king, encountering one another, lost all order and became a tangled mass. Their steeds killed and drivers slain, many of them, becoming inactive, preserved their lives and looked exceedingly affrighted. Slain steeds ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Asiatics. We would be unwise to contemplate the situation of to-day as one that can or should perpetuate itself. Suppose we accept, the governing responsibility in the Philippines. It is not beyond the range of reasonable conjecture that American labor can educate the laborers of the Philippines out of their state of servitude as cheap laborers, and lead them to co-operate rather than compete with us, and not to go into the silver question further ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... above his knees. I noticed also the upward curve of a huge gray moustache against the stern profile of his face, while a long straight sword dangled at his side. Evidently the stranger was a soldier, and one not to be despised in feats at arms, although in what service I might merely conjecture, as his dress was not distinctive. Yet it was small likelihood any other nation than Spain had armed men ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... of the membranous folds, which he names valves, in the interior of veins. Several of these folds had been observed by Fernel, Sylvius and Vesalius; and in 1547 G. B. Canani observed those of the vena azygos; but no one appears to have offered any rational conjecture on their use, or to have traced them through the venous system at large, until Fabricius in 1574, upon this hypothesis, demonstrated the presence of these valvular folds in all the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... kind of monkeys; and to this day the features of the Marawars, who are supposed to be the aborigines of the southern part of the Carnatic, are not only different from those of their neighbours, but are of a character calculated to confirm the conjecture. Again, it is probable that the army of aborigines may have been accompanied by outlying bands of monkeys impelled by that magpie-like curiosity and love of plunder which are the peculiar characteristics of the monkey race; and this incident may have given rise ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... year of the Fire of London, after Bunyan had lain six years in Bedford gaol, "by the intercession of some interest or power that took pity on his sufferings," he enjoyed a short interval of liberty. Who these friends and sympathisers were is not mentioned, and it would be vain to conjecture. This period of freedom, however, was very short. He at once resumed his old work of preaching, against which the laws had become even more stringent during his imprisonment, and was apprehended at a meeting just as he was about to preach a sermon. He had given out his text, "Dost thou believe ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... belief in spirits, a mythology, and some form of church and state exist universally. At one time students of mankind, when they found a myth in Hawaii corresponding to the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice, or an Aztec poem of tender longing in absence, or a story of the deluge, were wont to conjecture how these could have been carried over from Greek or Elizabethan or Hebraic sources, or whether they did not afford evidence of a time when all branches of the human race dwelt together with a common fund of sentiment and tradition. But this standpoint ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... verified Charley's conjecture that the Mary Rebecca, as soon as launched, would run up the San Joaquin River nearly to Stockton for a load of wheat. Then Charley made his proposition, and Ole Ericsen shook ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... was Walter troubled. He lived in love's eternal present, and did not look forward. Even jealousy had not yet begun to show itself in any shape. He was not in Lady Lufa's set, and therefore not much drawn to conjecture what might be going on. In the glamour of literary ambition, he took for granted that Lady Lufa allotted his world a higher orbit than that of her social life, and prized most the pleasures they had in common, which so few were ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... occurred just now. One of the Devon Yeomanry who went up to the tent which is our post-office, on the off-chance of getting a letter, to his great astonishment got one. He came back eyeing the address suspiciously, and remarking, "It's tracts, I'm thinkin." His conjecture turned out correct. It appears that a certain thoughtful and religious society at home looks down the lists of the wounded and, now and again, sends some of the worst cases tracts. The title of one of the ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... saddles are such as are usually ridden by men, it may be supposed only men are to be mounted, and that the ladies' horses have not yet been brought out of the stable. This would naturally be the conjecture of a stranger to Spanish California. But one an fait to its fashions would draw deductions differently. Looking at the spurred heels upon the house-top, and the saddled horses below, he would conclude that two of the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... accustomed to performances of this order, for his conjecture was exactly verified. From the spot where we stood, to get, as he called it, a last peep at "the free-traders bamboozling the dragoons," we could see cavalry rushing up to the blaze, evidently sure ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... place her on a level with the beautiful and heroic Queen Nitokris, spoken of by Julius Africanus, Eusebius and others, and whose name, (signifying the victorious Neith) has been found on the monuments, applied to a queen of the sixth dynasty. This is a bold conjecture; it adds however to the importance of our heroine; and without doubt many traditions referring to the one have been transferred to the other, and vice versa. Herodotus lived so short a time after Rhodopis, and tells so many exact particulars of her private life that it is impossible ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... return of the emigrants, and in the superb receptions at the Tuilleries—that Bonaparte already contemplated the last days of the republic. To what new shape of power his ambition looks is yet only in conjecture. But he is ambitious, daring, and unscrupulous—the idol of the army, and the wonder of the people. He may shrink, like Caesar, from the diadem, or he may assume, like Cromwell, the power of a king, without the name; but the field ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... which is of most excellent use to all persons. Therefore let the nativities of children be diligently observed for the future, that is to say, the day, hour, and minute of birth as near as can be, which will be of use to the astrological physician, for the most principal conjecture of the malignity of the disease, whether it be curable, or shall end with death, depends upon the knowledge of the nativity; and very rarely any disease invades a person, but some unfortunate direction of the luminaries or ascendant to the body, or beams of malignant ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... he prefers Lee to Gainsborough;[F] not the most ordinary facts of nature, for we find him puzzled by the epithet "silver," as applied to the orange blossom,—evidently never having seen anything silvery about an orange in his life, except a spoon. Nay, he leaves us not to conjecture his calibre from internal evidence; he candidly tells us (Oct. 1842) that he has been studying trees only for the last week, and bases his critical remarks chiefly on his practical experience of birch. ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... opinions expressed no one save the writer is responsible, and, where records are scanty, much has necessarily been left to conjecture. ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... answered the doctor, calmly pressing the blotting-paper over the address he had just written. "Valentine is one of those people who defy all conjecture. No one can say what he will do, or what he won't. A man who cannot resist an application for shelter and supper from any stray cur who wags his tail at him in the street; a man who blindly believes in the troubles of begging-letter impostors; ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... in their conjecture. As he approached with his staff, the officer who had charge of them ordered his men to halt ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... infer that in the territory of Southern California the designated metals should be found in considerable quantities. The official notices which we possess in respect to Lower California fortify this conjecture. Those exhibited by persons who lack competent instruction upon this point contribute in part to foretell what will be the grade of prosperity which will come in time with the developing of the mineral industry in ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... approach to a rudder is a chimney or an unfinished pillar; the closest resemblance to a pilot is a hod-carrying workman clambering up a gangway. Dismissing the nautical hypothesis, your next effort to relieve your perplexity results in the conjecture that the prodigious masts and booms may be nothing more than curious gibbets, the cross-pieces to which, conforming rigidly to the Washington rule of contrariety, are fastened to the bottom instead of the top of the upright. Your theory is, that the destinies of the nation are to be hanged on ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... 1869.—It is remarkable that all the Ujiji Arabs who have any opinion on the subject, believe that all the water in the north, and all the water in the south, too, flows into Tanganyika, but where it then goes they have no conjecture. They assert, as a matter of fact, that Tanganyika, Usige water, and Loanda, are one and the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... powerless to efface. And if Art study hard and labor long and vehemently aspire to publish the truth of this, she does well. Her task is worthy, but is not easy: I think a greater, of the kind, has never been attempted. The height of this berg was determined by instruments—but with a conjecture only of the distance—to be one hundred and eighteen feet. Captain Brown, however, who went aloft, and thence formed a judgment, pronounced it not less than one hundred and fifty feet. One naturally inclines to the more moderate computation. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Further conjecture was suspended by the presence of the individual in regard to whom they were in doubt. He was a stranger, and Mr. Markland presented him as Mr. Lyon, son of an old and valued business correspondent, residing in Liverpool. A cordial ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... the Popple story overnight, and that made you think you saw a hedgehog when you were only half awake," said Mrs. Norbury, hazarding a conjecture that probably ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... and after this bitter experience, four companies of the Seventh were sent to their destruction on an errand equally hopeless. Had the brigade been sent together, instead of its three regiments in detail, the rebel line would have been carried and the road to Richmond opened to us. This is no conjecture. The testimony of a rebel staff-officer on duty at Fort Gilmer, and that of our own officers who were captured, fully ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... electron, whenever we send an electric charge through a gas at very low pressure, no matter what the kind of gas. Whether or not these positive units will yet prove susceptible of being split up into smaller particles comparable to the electrons, is merely a subject for conjecture. We have no proof that they will. At the present time what we call matter seems to be composed of these positive units and of the electrons which are about 1/1760 as great; and in the present state of our knowledge these ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... felicitate them on their erudition. In fact, they all remained silent. Sully held his peace with the rest; but he looked so knowing, that the king turned towards him, and said:—"Great master! by your face I conjecture that you know more of this matter than you would have us believe. I pray you, and indeed I command, that you tell us what you think and what you know." The coy minister refused, as he says, out of mere politeness to his more ignorant colleagues; but, being again pressed by the king, he entered ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Thucydides, the historian, from whose work the materials for the present narrative are taken. Thucydides was descended on his mother's side from the royal family of Thrace, [Footnote: Such, at least, is the highly probable conjecture of Classen.] and through this connexion he was the owner of valuable working rights in the gold-mines of Mount Pangaeus, and a man of great power and, influence in these districts. When the message arrived from Amphipolis, he was engaged in some business at Thasos, ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... had written, purely to amuse myself, before I was admitted to my charmer. But now I have to tell thee, that I was quite right in my conjecture, that she would set up for herself, and dismiss me: for she has declared in so many words that such was her resolution: And why? Because, to be plain with me, the more she saw of me, and of my ways, the less she liked ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... unfaithfulness." When the king returned from the chase, the chamberlain related to him what he had seen, and the king was angry and said: "This woman has deceived me with words and deeds, and has brought hither her desire by craft and cunning. This conjecture must be true, else why did she play such a trick, and why did she hatch such a plot, and why did she send the merchant?" The king, enraged, went into the harem. The queen saw from his countenance that the ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Consistory Court, according to Wren, was held. To the arcading of nave and transepts, Wren says that in later years four new and stronger piers were added in the common centre under the tower for the purpose of strengthening it. As these are not shown in Dugdale's plates, we can only conjecture their date to have been after the fire of 1445. By the plan they were far more massive than the others, and we can well understand Wren's complaint that they ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... involves all cabinet-councils, and more especially those of female politicians, prevents the cautious historian from presuming to decide. But arguing from general causes, and from the established characters and ruling passions of the parties concerned, we may safely conjecture that the baronet did not at this time make any decisive proposal to the lady, but that he kept himself at liberty to advance or recede, as circumstances should render it expedient. His ruling passion was avarice; and though he had been allured by the hints which his sister ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... dreams as divine portent. He refers to the skilled interpretations of dreams as a true divination; but adds that, like all other arts in which men have to proceed on conjecture and on artificial rules, ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... bred in Solomon's bones that it never occurred to him that he could reverse the order observed by the Grundys for generations back and be married on Thursday, for instance. And yet there is room for conjecture as to how much difference it might have made in his life if he had elected to contract an alliance on that day instead of a fatal illness. System is a fine servant but a poor master. Simply because custom has decreed that Monday shall be wash day, Tuesday ironing ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... marine monster of serpent-like shape whose existence is still a matter of question, although several seemingly authentic accounts have been circulated in attestation. The subject has given rise to much disputation and conjecture on the part of naturalists, but opinion mostly favours the supposition that these gigantic serpent-like appearances are caused by enormous cuttlefish swimming on the surface of the water, with their 20 ft. long tentacles ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... fattened her, and for my own information had her slaughtered at home. It was three months after, and the post-mortem examination showed one of the lungs, to the extent of about the size of a crown-piece, adhering to the ribs—a sufficient proof that my conjecture was correct. Many take the disease that are never suspected. I had a bullock showing some symptoms of the disease in a byre amongst ten. The others were, to all appearance, in perfect health. I sent them immediately to London. My salesman was ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... should have notions on the subject of liberty. Quickly this look became inquisitive and significant, so that I began to fancy he had doubts as to the use I might make of my stipulated freedom, and was puzzled to conjecture why a woman should wish to be free at all. Some such thought must have passed through his mind, for he said abruptly, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... huts surrounding a central stockade, which enclosed a small group of buildings of considerably more pretentious character than the ordinary huts, and which Dick and Grosvenor at once conjectured must be the royal palace and its dependencies. This conjecture was confirmed upon their arrival at the village, for at the gateway of the stockade the cavalcade halted, and 'Mpandula, dismounting, requested his charges to do the same, intimating that he was about to conduct them forthwith into the ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... sat looking across the waste with eyes of misery, asking himself whither and for what? Whither had they taken her, and why? The Bristol road once left, his theory was at fault; he had no clue, and felt, where time was life and more than life, the slough of horrible conjecture rise to his ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... for reserves on the teeming populations of Russia and Siberia would never know defeat. And this is not idle conjecture, mere dreaming in the realm of possibilities, because the Russian revolution has shown us how weak and tottering in reality was the ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... the land of Don Quixote's exploits, we reverentially visited any known spot which these had rendered famous. Amongst such was the VENTA of Quesada, from which, or from Quixada, as some conjecture, the knight derived his surname. It was here, attracted by its castellated style, and by two 'ladies of pleasure' at its door - whose virginity he at once offered to defend, that he spent the night of his first sally. It was here that, in his shirt, he kept guard till morning over ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... herself at this moment whether she was glad or sorry that the impressive manager was awaiting her presence. She was slightly flurried and tingling in the cheeks, but it was more nervousness than either fear or favour. She did not try to conjecture what the drift of the conversation would be. She only felt that she must be careful, and that Hurstwood had an indefinable fascination for her. Then she gave her tie its last touch with her fingers ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... must now be dealt with. Drawn as they have been from contemporary records which were compiled in and handed down through the ages we have to deal with, the facts here collected are based upon no assumption or conjecture. The writer may have failed fully to comprehend the facts, and so may have partially misstated them. But the original records are open for investigation to the duly qualified, and those who are disposed to undertake the necessary training ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... Though a single rodlike individual taken as a starting-point may be less than one five-thousandth of an inch in length, under natural circumstances it multiplies at a rate which within five days would cause its descendants to fill all the oceans to the depth of one mile. This is a fact, not a conjecture; the size of one organism is known, and the rate of its natural increase is known, so that it is merely a matter of simple arithmetic to find out what the result would be in a ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... answer, and if the colour came into her cheeks at the memory of what the man had said to her, Lady Bolsover was too amused at her own conjecture ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... his own avenger. And when the report of this was passed around and came to all the Libyans, they were expecting that some vengeance would come upon the Vandals at some time because of this sacred festival, but were unable to conjecture how in the world the vision would be realized for them. Now, therefore, when the emperor's expedition had come to Libya, since the time had already come round and would bring the celebration of the festival on the succeeding ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... seems not unreasonable to conjecture that the uniformly high physical standard of the Punans and their seemingly exceptional immunity from disease are due to their exposed mode of life, and to the consequently severe selection exercised ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... thy outward graces had been placed About thy thoughts, and counsels of thy heart! But, fare thee well, most foul, most fair! farewell, Thou pure impiety, and impious purity! For thee I'll lock up all the gates of love, And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang, To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm, And never shall it ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... the fete was to have been held had been erected on a headland between Castle Raa and a precipitous declivity to the sea, and the only reasonable conjecture is that the unhappy lady, going out on Thursday night to superintend the final preparations, lost her way in the darkness and fell ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... search had followed, which ended in its being picked up by one of the students and brought back as far as the great step leading up to the front door, when it had again disappeared, and in a way to rouse conjecture of the strangest and most ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... without a friend to whom she could apply. I presume that one of the few parishioners who visited at the rectory had written to acquaint Mrs Oldcastle with the condition in which her daughter was left, for, influenced by motives of which I dare not take upon me to conjecture an analysis, she wrote, offering her daughter all that she required in her old home. Whether she fore-intended her following conduct, or old habit returned with the return of her daughter, I cannot tell; but she had not been more than a few days in the house before ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... be watching? The dreaded arrival of the king bent on tearing her from her Abbey at Poitiers to replace her on the throne? For lack of any information every conjecture must ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... hunters came in sight, Jan and Truey ran down the rounds, and out to meet them. There was that in their glances that bespoke ill tidings, and their words soon confirmed this conjecture. ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... knows; We can't even guess, suppose, Hazard, speculate, surmise, Hint, conjecture, theorize, ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... Wallingford sat so still that she gave the impression of a doll made without speaking apparatus. It did not seem as if she could even wink. Then Alice Mendon, who disliked Margaret Edes and had a shrewd conjecture as to the state of affairs, but who was broad in her views, pitied Margaret. She arose with considerable motion and spoke to Daisy Shaw at her right, and broke the ghastly silence, and immediately everything was in motion and refreshments were being passed, but Martha Wallingford, who had written ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... for a full half-minute, gazing down at the flaming, flashing gems coiled in their silken bed. He was aroused from his wonder and wild conjecture by ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... of the book as the first and second, is scarcely less strange to me. For, in the first place, the identification of the personages in the framework of the Heptameron depends upon the merest and, as it seems to me, the idlest conjecture; and, in the second, the interest of the actual tittle-tattle, whether it could be fathered on A or B or not, is the least part of the interest of the book. Indeed, the stories altogether are, as I think, far less ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... of November is not solely a time of memory of the dead; customs of other sorts linger, or until lately used to linger, about it, especially in Scotland, northern England, Ireland, Cornwall, Wales, and the West Midlands. One may conjecture that these are survivals from the Celtic New Year's Day, for most of them are of the nature of omens or charms. Apples and nuts are prominent on Hallowe'en, the Eve of All |196| Saints;[89] they may be regarded either as a ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... he observed towards me respecting the letter just alluded to. I am indeed inclined to regard that letter as the result of one of his private conferences with Lucien; but I know nothing positive on the subject, and merely mention this as a conjecture. However, I had an opportunity of ascertaining the curious circumstances which took place at Mittau, when Bonaparte's letter was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... almost sinless hand had hold of a blessed link of that chain of ineffable love, which terminates in the breast of that awful Being, who sits at the right-hand of the throne of the Eternal. I give, myself, no opinion. I only state facts. But I cannot help hazarding a conjecture of what I might have been, had I then possessed a friend in any one of my instructors, who could have pointed out to me what were the precincts of true piety, what those of incipient insanity. At that time I had the courage to achieve anything. Let the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... weak and guilty. He felt as if he had just been accused of nameless crimes and had been unable to deny the charge. Such was the magic of Miss Trimble's eye—the left one, which looked directly at its object. Conjecture pauses baffled at the thought of the effect which her gaze might have created in the breasts of the sex she despised, had it been double instead of single-barrelled. But half of it had wasted itself on a spot some few feet to ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... confusion, servants bustled about in fright, the youthful family shrieked in fear, the father sought to restore the fond mother, as Montague chafed her right hand in his. Let us leave to the reader's conjecture a scene his fancy may depict better than we can describe, and pass to one more pleasant of results. Some half an hour had transpired, when, as if in strange bewilderment, Clotilda opened her eyes and seemed conscious of her position. A deep crimson shaded ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... I said anything about a quarrel? Please remember that the whole thing is conjecture from beginning to end, and don't go all over the place spreading stories and making mischief. I have told you this in ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... intends to espouse a Mr. Adam Rouffignac, a foreigner and a wine merchant; I suppose (since he is reputed rich) to arm herself with money to pay her lawyers. What his object can be, poor man, I am unable to conjecture. It is a strange world. While her ugly mother mates at the age of fifty, Diana—who started with all the advantages of looks—withers upon the ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... geologists have devised an easier method of count, measured not by units of time, but by what each phase of progress has accomplished. This measure is set forth in the accompanying table, together with a conjecture concerning the lapse of time in terms ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... hypothetic grounds, but this was the sort of action that had the keenest interest for his diplomatic mind. From a combination of general knowledge concerning Savonarola's purposes with diligently observed details he had framed a conjecture which he was about to verify by this visit to San Marco. If he proved to be right, his game would be won, and he might soon turn his back on Florence. He looked eagerly towards that consummation, for many circumstances besides his own ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... is not progressive. But on what grounds this assertion is based, it is not possible to conjecture. Poetry is as much progressive as anything else in these days of progress. Free-thought itself shews scarcely more strikingly those three great stages which mark advance and movement. For poetry, like Free-thought, was first a work of inspiration, ...
— Every Man His Own Poet - Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book • Newdigate Prizeman
... machine-made articles of cheap manufacture. His belongings were like hers now. She was bringing him a little closer to her in such ways,—food and lodging and raiment. But not in thought and being. Behind those deep-set eyes passed a world of thought, of conjecture and theory and belief, that ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... will see the reason of each sentence in it without the aid of my comments. I will only remark, that I was at first induced to insert, and afterwards to refuse striking out the sum, lest from leaving it uncertain, the public might have had room to conjecture, or individuals to insinuate, that I had imprudently run into such rash and expensive engagements, as to render it improper for Spain or France to afford me ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... American preachers, let him go into the Southern and Western sections of this country—I do not speak from hearsay—what I have written, is what I have seen and heard myself. No man may think that my book is made up of conjecture—I have travelled and observed nearly the whole of those things myself, and what little I did not get by my own observation, I received from those among the whites and blacks, in whom the ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... fair swordsman, sir," Philip said; "though my arm may lack somewhat of the strength it will have, a few years later. But had it been otherwise, I should have still taken the course I have. I do not say your conjecture is a correct one, but at any rate I would prefer the most unequal fight to being seized and questioned. One can but be killed once, and it were better that it should be by a thrust in the ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... a further source of perplexity. Our ignorance of the opinions which Plato is attacking is also an element of obscurity. Many things in a controversy might seem relevant, if we knew to what they were intended to refer. But no conjecture will enable us to supply what Plato has not told us; or to explain, from our fragmentary knowledge of them, the relation in which his doctrine stood to the Eleatic Being or the Megarian good, or ...
— Philebus • Plato
... them; but the conclusion of a sentence so importantly begun, and which leads to such expectations, is, "that to these conjectures it would be of little use to reply." This is all he says to public conjecture. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... happened arbitrarily, capriciously, mysteriously, without some gross and positive violation of social law, some wilful and therefore wicked departure from the known principles of science? Every random conjecture as to the causes of the prevailing distress implies an answer to the question, and it need not be repeated. It is more important to inquire what those violations and departures have been, than to reiterate the general ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... mystery,' replied the priest; 'who shall decide wherein her power consists? At the best we can but conjecture at her connexion with the world of man—her weaving and working. No one can deny that a solemn curse, spoken with a determined and haughty purpose, has often, on the very instant, accomplished its fulfilment. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the introduction of the system of loan-giving on a large scale, it would follow that the rate of interest would be based largely on the return yielded by the earth to the seed. Support is afforded to this conjecture by the fact that in the case of grain loans in the Central Provinces the interest on loans of grain of the crops which yield a comparatively small return, such as wheat, is twenty-five to fifty per cent, while in the case of those which yield a large return, such as juari and kodon, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... in Servian and Bulgarian, as well as in Rumanian (especially the Macedonian dialect), is peculiar to these languages in the Slavonic and Latin groups. These and other points of similarity, possibly only accidental, have led to the conjecture that the primitive Illyrian language may have exerted some kind of influence on the other idioms of the peninsula. In the absence of literary culture the Albanian dialects, as might be expected, are widely ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Tiovulfingacester of Venerable Bede; but Smith, the learned editor of the Cambridge edition of Bede, inclines to the opinion that Southwell is the town indicated by the pious and industrious monastic. The passage in Bede leaves every thing to conjecture: he simply relates that a truth-speaking presbyter and abbot of Pearteneu, (most likely, Partney, near Horncastle, in Lincolnshire,) named Deda, said that an old man had told him, that he, with a great multitude, was baptized by Paulinus, in the presence of King Edwin, ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... distinguished in the service, and all those misfortunes were wholly unaccountable. At length a stronger picket than usual was ordered for the night—not a man of them was to be found in the morning. As no firing had been heard, the natural conjecture was, that they must all have deserted. As this was a still more disgraceful result than actual defeat, the colonel called his officers together, to give what information they could. The camp, as usual, swarmed with Bohemians, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... sufficiently charged with any offence known to our laws which do not acknowledge a state of slavery; for the imputation of conspiring with the rioters and contriving the rescue is supported by no evidence and seems to rest on conjecture—The prisoner Blackburn it appears from the Documents before us was not committed for felony nor for any crime nor imprisoned for any cause which by our laws could be recognized as a justification of imprisonment. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... the most essential astronomical theories are too much a matter of conjecture, to give much strength to a theory built up entirely of such conjectural materials. The argument from probabilities can easily be turned against the author, for when a chain of reasoning depends upon a long series of problematic premises, the doubt of these premises ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... of MUSIC in SPEECH, we may conjecture that of TEMPERS. We know the Doric mood sounds gravity and sobriety; the Lydian, buxomness and freedom; the AEolic, sweet stillness and quiet composure; the Phrygian, jollity and youthful levity; the Ionic is a stiller of storms and disturbances arising from passion; and why ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... condemned Father Fabiano to end his days amid the swamps of St. Apollinare, as well as the precise nature of the connection which had existed between him and Paolina's parents, can be only matter of conjecture. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the suicidal tendency is dependent on heat; but June is not the hottest month, nor is December the coldest. Durkheim has tested this conjecture by comparing temperatures with suicides in France, Italy, and Prussia. He finds that, in all three of these countries, suicides reach their maximum in June and their minimum in December, while the temperature does not rise to its maximum until ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Schwartzenberg's victory over Sacken. Napoleon appeared pleased in proclaiming it aloud, with the addition, that "Schwartzenberg had immediately returned upon the heels of Tchitchakof, and that he was coming to our assistance." A conjecture, to which the disappearance of ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... was a veteran of one of the Jesuit missions on Lake Huron. Radisson himself, although the hero of many exploits, was not yet twenty-six years of age. Did that Sea of the North of which they had heard find western outlet by the long-sought passage? So ran rumour and conjecture concerning the two explorers in Three Rivers and Quebec; but Radisson himself writes: 'We considered whether to reveal what we had learned, for we had not yet been to the Bay of the North, knowing only what the Crees told us. We wished ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... narrow and harsh development. The national prose literature, of which he may fairly be called the founder, was kept up till the decay of Rome by a large and powerful minority of Latin writers. What results it might have produced, if allowed unchecked scope, can only be matter for conjecture; in the main current of Latin literature the Greek influence was, on the whole, triumphant; Cato's was the losing side (if one may so adapt the famous line of Lucan), and the men of genius ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... forthwith. She had mentally discarded him; yet she felt a shock which was scarcely painful, and a dread which was almost exhilarating. Her flying visit to Farnfield she thought little of at this moment. From the fact that the mind prefers imaginings to recapitulation, conjecture to history, Ethelberta had dwelt more upon Neigh's possible plans and anticipations than upon the incidents of her evening journey; and the former assumed a more distinct shape in her mind's eye than anything on the visible ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... still on the night of his temporary fright and imaginary rencontre with the giants, and the conversation he partly overheard all recurred to him, and he saw at once that Oonah was the person alluded to, whose name he could not catch, a circumstance that cost him many a conjecture in the interim. This gave him a clue to the persons into whose power he was about to fall, after having so far defeated their scheme, and he saw he should have to deal with very desperate and lawless parties. Remembering, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... she resumed, pressing her hand on her heart to still its struggles for relief in sobs,—"can you think that I could have watched and thought and taxed my poor mind so constantly, to conjecture what might best soothe or please you, and not seen, long since, that you have secrets known to your daughter, your servant, not to me? Fear not,—the secrets cannot be evil, or you would not tell ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and use; and the forts which they build to defend themselves against their enemies. I have ventured to write this relation because I have been informed that many things concerning events in this land have been written, and sent to Nueva Espana, which are the merest fable and conjecture. For instance, they say that there are in this country Moors like those of Barberia [Barbary], and that their strength in arms is quite equal to that of those people; and that they fight and defend themselves like the Turks. Those who have so written are in error. Much to the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair
... state of mind had become is matter for exorbitant conjecture. Jane, arriving at his locked door upon an errand, was bidden by a thick, ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... the stronghold of facts, and advance into the of conjecture. I ascribe the prologue ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... glowed strangely. "I didn't exactly know at the time, Nanette. I'm not sure that I know even now. But I've got a theory and Karl has helped me to build a second machine to flash a restoring ray on the square spot. What will take place I cannot even conjecture." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... the father of the child was a man of some standing, the bolder spirits even accusing Lord Engleton himself. But this was conjecture run wild, and nobody seriously ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the purpose of his ride to town, and Shorty was lost in a maze of futile conjecture. Shorty knew, however, that a man in Lawler's condition would not ride to town to gratify a whim; and the longer he watched Lawler the deeper became his conviction that another tragedy was imminent. For there was something in Lawler's manner, ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... observe, however, that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle appeared in July with St. John's name in their mouths, the conjecture is probable that the wild revels of St. John's Day, A.D. 1374, gave rise to this mental plague, which thenceforth has visited so many thousands with incurable aberration of mind and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the expression of the fourth stanza of this Ode in the Latin. Tentare cannot stand without an object, and to connect it, as the commentators do, with deos is awkward. I was going to remark that possibly some future Bentley would conjecture certare, or litare, when I found that certare had been anticipated by Peerlkamp, who, if not a Bentley, was a Bentleian. But it would not be easy to account for the corruption, as the fact that the previous line begins with cervice would rather have led to ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... objective counterpart? Then what becomes of the positive character of this narrative, as a lesson, as a warning to us? The whole degenerates into an acted parable. It fades into the idle pageantry of a dream. Thus we lose ourselves in shadowy conjecture. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... early part of a night in the oven. I hardly expected, when I left him to go to windward, to find him alive upon my return. He was certainly as low as he could well be when I left him, and what would be the effect of the medicines that I gave him I hardly then dared to conjecture. Yet I knew that he must die without them. I was not a little rejoiced, therefore, and relieved, upon our return, to see him decidedly better. The medicines were strong, and took hold and gave a check to the disorder which ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... but not more so than I. Something was evidently on foot, but what I could not conjecture. The vakeel wavered, and to my astonishment I heard the accusation made against him that during the night the whole of the escort had mutinously conspired to desert me, with my arms and ammunition ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... that after they have tried their utmost efforts to bring you into their measures, and find them ineffectual, they will recede. But I cannot say I am of her mind. She does not own, she has any authority for this, but her own conjecture. I should otherwise have hoped, that your uncle Antony and she had been in on one secret, and that favourable to you. Woe be to one of them at least [to you uncle to be sure I mean] if they should ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... and giving color to the picture. A shabby garb cannot be made to fit into this picture. When it appears, there is discord in the general harmony. All this motion must have motives behind it somewhere; but we can only conjecture the motives. We have only surface indications to guide us in our quest for these. But we are reasonably certain that these people are animated by the instinct of acquisition. They seem to want to get things, and so come where things are ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... of Plotinus ascribes to prudence six parts, namely, "reasoning," "understanding," "circumspection," "foresight," "docility" and "caution." Aristotle says (Ethic. vi, 9, 10, 11) that "good counsel," "synesis" and "gnome" belong to prudence. Again under the head of prudence he mentions "conjecture," "shrewdness," "sense" and "understanding." And another Greek philosopher [*Andronicus; Cf. Q. 80, Obj. 4] says that ten things are connected with prudence, namely, "good counsel," "shrewdness," "foresight," "regnative ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... actually rang when nothing could have touched it. The bell was then placed upon the other side, still upon the carpet, and it came over to me, and placed itself in my hand. It did the same to Lord Brougham. These were the principal experiments: we could give no explanation of them, and could not conjecture how they could be produced by any kind of mechanism.... We do not believe that it ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... originated long before the beginning of the Victorian era, but it lacked the support of carefully examined facts, and most sensible men regarded it as nothing more than a plausible conjecture. The thinker who did more than any other to supply the facts, and to put the theory, so far as it relates to natural history, on a solid and lasting foundation, was the distinguished ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... impossible to conjecture just what her emotions may have been as she discerned the lights of a flier speeding rapidly out of the distance from that very direction, as though impelled toward her garden by the very intensity of ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... name Baleares is a mere matter of conjecture; it is obvious, however, that the modern Majorca and Minorca are obtained from the Latin Major and Minor, through the Byzantine forms [Greek: Maiorika] and [Greek: Minorika]; while Iviza is plainly the older Ebusus, a name probably of Carthaginian origin. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... believe I am not at all surprised at what you tell me, since it is but a confirmation of my own conjecture that I sent you last week, and made you my reproaches upon it at a venture. It looks exceeding strange, yet, I believe it to be a great truth, that, in order to carry a point in your house, the two following circumstances are of great advantage; first, to have ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... order'd, cross the bed, And at his feet at length reclined her head; A kiss on them she ventured to impress, But not too roughly, lest she should transgress: We may conjecture if he were at ease; What victory! to see her stoop to please; A beauty so renowned for charms and pride, 'Twould take a week, to note each trait described; No other fault than paleness he could trace, Which gave her (causes known) ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... also a case reported in which there were two cords in a twin pregnancy, each of them measuring five feet in length. The Lancet gives the account of a most peculiar pregnancy consisting of a placenta alone, the fetus wanting. What this "placenta" was will always be a matter of conjecture. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... while the reasonings are fine-drawn and flimsy. Extraordinary ingenuity is shown in piling up a lofty fabric, but the foundation is of sand, and the edifice has hardly a solid wall or beam in it. A clever conjecture is treated as a fact; an inference possible but represented as probable is drawn from this conjecture; a second inference is based upon the first; we are made to forget that the probability of ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... to expatiate, to insist on the charm of Herrick at his best—a charm so incomparable and so inimitable that even English poetry can boast of nothing quite like it or worthy to be named after it—the most appreciative reader will be the slowest to affirm or imagine that he can conjecture. This, however, he will hardly fail to remark: that Herrick, like most if not all other lyric poets, is not best known by his best work. If we may judge by frequency of quotation or of reference, the ballad of the ride from Ghent to Aix is a far more popular, more generally admired and ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... fretting guesswork on her cousin's surmise. She relied too much on Owen's sense of propriety to entertain the idea that he could be forwarding a pursuit so obviously insolent, but a still wilder conjecture had been set afloat in her mind. Could the nameless one be Robert Fulmort? Though aware of the anonymous nature of brother's friends, the secrecy struck her as unusually guarded; and to one so ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... see the cakes is a-burnin' already,"— but Melindy did not complete the sentence for the toot of a horn near the barnyard proved that her better half had some grounds for his conjecture. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... about a hundred miles, and the first landmark by which they were able to conjecture their position with any degree of confidence was an island about seventy miles in length, which they presumed to be Le Grande Isle.[5] They now knew that they were not a very great distance from the Missouri ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... dispersed some of the greatest universities in Germany, under the particular circumstances of its situation, had greatly increased that of Klosterheim. Judging by the tone which prevailed, and the random expressions which fell upon the ear at intervals, a stranger might conjecture that it was no empty lamentation over impending evils which occupied this crowd, but some serious preparation for meeting or redressing them. An officer of some distinction had been for some time observing them from the antique portals of the palace. It was probable, however, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... apologies. This place is a very good one," the stranger replied, laying down his heavy whip on the table of a stone-floored room, to which he had been shown. "You are a man of business, and I am come upon dry business. You can conjecture—is it not so?—who I am by this time, although I am told that I do not bear any strong resemblance to ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... quite unable to conceal it from notice. "What a case!" I heard him say to himself, stopping at the window in his walk, and drumming on the glass with his fingers. "It not only defies explanation, it's even beyond conjecture." ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was fairly cold in his grave. We can go to the records and find out the life-history of every renowned race-horse of modern times—but not Shakespeare's! There are many reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself—he hadn't any history to record. There is no way of getting around that deadly fact. And no sane way has yet been discovered ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... good-by kiss was but a fiction to soothe the child, but in my belief it was not. Though we know with certainty so little of the detail of the life beyond, we have two good grounds on which to base reasonable conjecture. We know of God's love; we know your father's love; now what would be natural in view of these two facts? I think we can manage to keep Bertha from seeing that which is no longer her father, and thus every memory of him will be pleasant. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... devised an easier method of count, measured not by units of time, but by what each phase of progress has accomplished. This measure is set forth in the accompanying table, together with a conjecture concerning the lapse of time in terms ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... circumstances as to the disposal of my daughter.—My daughter! that word sends the blood to and from my heart in cold and then in hot gushing streams! But, Robin, you must not tarry; close watch shall be set for this dangerous imp, to prevent farther mischief; and if Springall's conjecture should be right—yet it is most wild, and most improbable!—What disguise will you adopt in this ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... bubonic bassi bleat. But, for the tolerably delicate enterprise that he had in hand, there were the preliminary steps which could only be hastened slowly and anything slower than the Metropolitan on a Sunday night, it was beyond him to conjecture. ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... countries, and we trace the small spot upon the world's map which marks our little island, and in every sphere we gaze with wonder at our vast possessions. This is a picture of the present. What will the future be in these days of advancement? It were vain to hazard a conjecture; but we can look back upon the past, and build upon this foundation our ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... home in Sioux Falls after a brief illness. But thirty-one years of age, he had won a place in literature so gratifying that one might well rest content with a recital of his accomplishments. But his youth suggests a tale that is only partly told and the conjecture naturally arises,—"What success might he not have won?" Five novels, "Ben Blair," "Where the Trail Divides," "The Dissolving Circle," "The Quest Eternal," and "The Dominant Dollar," besides magazine articles, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... old fellow, "knew the person who knocked. Her haste to open the door gives rise to this conjecture; what follows proves it. The assassin then gained admission without difficulty. He is a young man, a little above the middle height, elegantly dressed. He wore on that evening a high hat. He carried an umbrella, and smoked a ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... vine, and the chief varieties grown are those most suitable for wine-making and for the table. Chasselas Doradillo, White Rice, Black Alicante, and Muscat of Alexandria are largely cultivated. There is, I conjecture, a good field open for the capitalist in the direction of the ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... point of view, than that which its windows command. The island, whose garrison and buildings are distinguishable by the naked eye, was for many years the prison of the mysterious Masque de Fer, whose identity, like that of Junius, has hitherto baffled conjecture. In the room where we were sitting Murat passed some of the time intervening between his expulsion from Naples, and the crisis of his fate; and on the sands about half a mile to the left, is the spot where Buonaparte first landed from Elba, and bivouacked ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... sketch of the previous discoveries, I shall not dwell upon such as depend upon conjecture and probability, but come speedily to those, for which there are authentic documents. In this latter, and solely important, class, the articles extracted from voyages, which are in the hands of the public, will be ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... all returned safe to their own country, and that the men whom they came to were all necromancers." Etearchus also conjectured that this river, which flows by their city, is the Nile; and reason so evinces: for the Nile flows from Libya, and intersects it in the middle; and (as I conjecture, inferring things unknown from things known) it sets out from a point corresponding with the Ister. For the Ister, beginning from the Celts, and the city of Pyrene, divides Europe in its course; but the Celts are beyond the pillars of Hercules, and border on the territories ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... entertain conjecture of a time When creeping murmur and the poring dark Fills the wide vessel of the universe. From camp to camp through the foul womb of night The hum of either army stilly sounds, That the fixed sentinels almost ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... fact, the piled-up monuments of the Mound Builders. The greatest and most impressive of these mysterious remains, a huge mound in the form of a sugar-loaf, appealed so strongly to Arlington's imagination, that, contemplating it, he for a time forgot everything else, losing himself in admiration and conjecture. Intending a closer inspection of the steep, artificial hill, he crossed a dry fosse which ran around it in a perfect circle, and was clambering up the mound when a voice from above ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... In this conjecture Jack was right. The gold-miner was enjoying an unsocial cup of tea at the time, and fortunately heard the distant shots and shouting. Buckley was a prompt man. Loading his double barrel with ball as he ran, he suddenly made his appearance on the field, saw at a glance how matters stood, and, being ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... style and language from any I have yet given. There was little communication to blend the different modes of speech prevailing in different parts of the country. It belongs,[24] according to students of English, to the Midland dialect of the fourteenth century. The author is beyond conjecture. ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... We now know that Captain Cook's conjecture was well founded. It appears, from the Journal of this Voyage, already referred to, that the Spaniards had intercourse with the natives of this coast only in three places, in latitude 41 deg. 7'; in latitude 47 deg. 21'; and in latitude 57 deg. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... a reed stem. In other words, we have here a record of the first smoking of the herb Nicotiana Tabacum by a European on this continent. The probable results of this discovery are so vast as to baffle conjecture. If it be objected, that the smoking of a pipe would hardly justify the setting up of a memorial stone, I answer, that even now the Moquis Indian, ere he takes his first whiff, bows reverently toward the four quarters of the sky in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... for further talk or conjecture; the red horseman had reached the bottom of the hill; in ten seconds more, he would be lazoed ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... this morning." And one minister of religion moved quite sharply in his chair when I told him (as he understood it) that I had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in a minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannot conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is, of having written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthy to be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes, this book is what ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... the sea and the discharge of two rivers run like a mill-race. According to Barbot (ii. 1) 'the natives call Cabo Ledo (not Liedo) or Tagrin (Cape Sa Leone) 'Hesperi Cornu,' the adjoining peoples (who are lamp-black) Leucsethiopes, and the mountain up the country Eyssadius Mons.' All the merest conjecture! Mr. Secretary Griffith, of whom more presently, here finds the terminus of the Periplus of Hanno, the Carthaginian, in the sixth century B.C., and the far-famed gorilla-land. [Footnote: This I emphatically deny. Hanno describes an eruption, not a bush-fire, and Sa Leone ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... army of Virginia retreated from their position at Manassas before the Northern generals knew that they were moving; and that when they were gone no word whatever was left of their numbers. I do not believe that the Northern government is even yet able to make any probable conjecture as to the number of troops which the Southern Confederacy is maintaining; and if this be so, they can certainly make no trustworthy estimates as to their own expenses for the ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... persecution, Laura's morbid self-communing was renewed. At night the day's contribution of detraction, innuendo and malicious conjecture would be canvassed in her mind, and then she would drift into a course of thinking. As her thoughts ran on, the indignant tears would spring to her eyes, and she would spit out fierce little ejaculations at intervals. But finally she would ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... nearly to zero. Her intelligent eyes, her broad forehead, her thoughtful carriage, ensured one thing, that of all the girls he had known he had never met one with more charming and solid qualities than Avice Caro's. This was not a mere conjecture—he had known her long and thoroughly; ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... in his conjecture that Shakespeare used a translation, the absence of any allusion to North's Plutarch would show that he did not know of it. He is in error about Livy. Philemon Holland's ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three- quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "Probably conjecture is all that can now be expected respecting the rise and progress of these changes. It is, indeed, beyond all doubt, that by the constitution, even as subsisting under the early Normans, the great council shared the legislative power with the king, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... judgment to be formed as to the extent to which Free Trade may be regarded as a preventive to war. The question remains substantially much in the same condition as it was seventy years ago. In forming an opinion upon it, we have still to rely largely on conjecture and on academic considerations. All that has been proved is that numerous wars have taken place during a period of history when Protection was the rule, and Free Trade the exception; though the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... she had seen my accident, from above; of course she had sent the harvest laborer to aid me home. It was quite natural she should imagine some special, romantic interest in the lonely dell, on my part, and the gift took additional value from her conjecture. ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... that there is vital heat in man and in every living creature; but its origin is not known. Every one speaks of it from conjecture, consequently such as have known nothing of the correspondence of natural things with spiritual have ascribed its origin, some to the sun's heat, some to the activity of the parts, some to life itself; but as they have ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... third class passengers like myself, puffing, blowing, eating, drinking, sweating, and toiling, as if their very existence depended upon keeping up the internal fires and blowing them off again. It is dreadful to see people so hard pushed to live. I really can't conjecture what sort of a commotion they will make when they come to die. A sandwich or two and a glass of tea lasted me all the way to Moscow—a journey of eighteen hours, and I never suffered from hunger, thirst, or fatigue the whole way. If ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... river was filled with gun-boats and transports. At a signal, all the guns were fired, at short range, too, for some minutes with great rapidity, and then the batteries were withdrawn. I happened to be awake, and could not conjecture what the rumpus meant. But we fired too high in the dark, and did but little execution. Our shells fell beyond the enemy's camp on the opposite side of the river. We lost a few men, by accident, mostly. But hereafter in "each bush they ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... discussed at considerable length in the "History of the Aesopic Fable," which forms the introductory volume to my edition of Caxton's Esope (London, D. Nutt, "Bibliothque de Carabas," 1889). In this place I can only roughly summarise my results. I conjecture that a collection of fables existed in India before Buddha and independently of the Jatakas, and connected with the name of Kasyapa, who was afterwards made by the Buddhists into the latest of the twenty-seven pre-incarnations of the Buddha. This collection of the ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... The expulsion of the friars and the confiscation of their lands would have surprised no one cognizant of Philippine history. But what would have become of religion? Would the predominant religion in the Philippines, fifty years hence, have been Christian? Recent events lead one to conjecture that liberty of cult, under native rule, would have been a misnomer, and Roman Catholicism a persecuted cause, with the civilizing labours of generations ceasing ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... mantelpiece, surmounted by a mirror in a gilt frame, the candlesticks and a clock all of crystal struck the eye with sharp brilliancy. As to the private apartment of Mademoiselle Gamard, no one had ever been permitted to look into it. Conjecture alone suggested that it was full of odds and ends, worn-out furniture, and bits of stuff and pieces dear to the hearts ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... position of the lights, the height and density of the box screen and then boldly and rapidly opened the door, stepped through and closed it behind him. His calculations had been accurate. He found himself in a room, the extent of which he could only conjecture. What, however, interested him mostly was the accuracy of his calculation that the door was hidden. An "L"-shaped stack of crates was piled within two feet of the ceiling, and formed a little lobby to anybody entering the vault the way Beale ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... unnecessarily, to trust his voice in the square of St. Mark, and at that hour. But his look of inquiry was returned by a sign to follow. He had been stopped by one whose figure was so completely concealed by a domino, as to baffle all conjecture concerning his true character. Perceiving, however, that the other wished to lead him to a part of the square that was vacant, and which was directly on the course he was about to pursue, the Bravo made a gesture ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... he turned away, and hurried homeward, with the feeling of a heart already overborne, and defrauded in all its hopes and expectations. The flowers were threatened with blight in his Eden: but he did not conjecture, poor fellow, that a serpent had ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... people so often, that no wonder need be felt at those who thought his words might bear a double meaning. The late President, who did not lack sagacity, had once written to his successor, "Bonaparte's policy is so crooked that it eludes conjecture. I fear his first object now is to dry up the sources of British prosperity, by excluding her manufactures from the Continent. He may fear that opening the ports of Europe to our vessels will open them to an inundation of British wares."[324] This was exactly Bonaparte's ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... that any part of this history was ever written. What it might have been we can only regretfully conjecture: it has perished with the uncompleted novel, and all the other dreams of that principle of the creative intellect which the world calls Ambition, but which the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... of one—only surmise and conjecture. We should be laughed out of court if we came with such ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... rebellion as well as the present insurrection from its start. No alternative save physical exhaustion of either combatant, and therewithal the practical ruin of the island, lay in sight, but how far distant no one could venture to conjecture. ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... unimportant items of social news, which had collected in seven days, were gravely distributed. This was at the men's end of the meeting-house; on their side, the women were similarly occupied, but we can only conjecture the subjects of their conversation. The young men—as is generally the case in religious sects of a rigid and clannish character—were by no means handsome. Their faces all bore the stamp of repression, in some form or other, and as they talked their eyes wandered with ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... and that no unkindly feeling ever exists between the inmates? Most men's experience would seem to justify them in declaring that, throughout the inhabited world, no such house exists. I, knowing at all events of one, admit the possibility that there may be more; yet I feel that it is to hazard a conjecture; I cannot point with certainty to any other instance, nor in all my secular life (I speak as one who has quitted the world) could I have ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... stars are fixed in the sky, or float freely in the air; of what size and of what material are the heavens; whether they be at rest or in motion; what is the magnitude of the earth; on what foundations is it suspended or balanced;—to dispute and conjecture upon such matters is just as if we chose to discuss what we think of a city in a remote country, of which we ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... Rainham responded so fluently with an assumption that she was right, that things were an excellent joke. After all, perhaps they pretended too much; at least, she found herself often, when they were present, falling away into reveries full of conjecture, from which, as happened now, she only awoke with a slight blush ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... I will comply with your wishes, and explain as well as I can what you require; but not with any idea that, like the Pythian Apollo, what I say must needs be certain and indisputable, but as a mere man, endeavoring to arrive at probabilities by conjecture, for I have no ground to proceed further on than probability. Those men may call their statements indisputable who assert that what they say can be perceived by the senses, and who proclaim themselves philosophers ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... wavering part of the best of him—a chivalry that had demanded to be killed by judgment of a righteous woman. He was conscious of an uplift, a gladdening of his spirit. Yet the ache remained. More than that, he found himself plunged deeper into conjecture, doubt. Had not the Ellen Jorth incident ended? He denied his father's indictment of her and accepted the faith of his sister. "Reckon that's aboot all, as dad says," he soliloquized. Yet was that all? He paced under the cedars. He watched the ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... a mere conjecture on my own part. It is possible that the Commissioners never consulted his book, though to assert such a thing of them would be an insult to their scholarship. Be it as it may, it is a fact beyond question that their arrangement ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... (MS. Journals, page 468.) at Valparaiso: "I have already found beds of recent shells yet retaining their colour at an elevation of 1300 feet, and beneath, the level country is strewn with them. It seems not a very improbable conjecture that the want of animals may be owing to none having been created since this country was raised from ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... to her about his wish or his conjecture. A silent, undiscerned resolve grew up in him, which gave him, if not strength, stability and calm. One midday when, after an absence of two hours, she came into the room, she beheld the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... the straightforward fashion with which one deals with a lawful enemy, such as one meets with in ordinary warfare. Your information, Robert, is valuable, not altogether on account of its novelty, but rather as being confirmatory of what has hitherto amounted merely to conjecture on our part. I have long suspected that our friend Johnson is not quite so straightforward as he would have us believe. Well, 'forewarned is forearmed;' we are evidently in a very critical position here, a position demanding all the coolness, self-possession, ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... himself with this valuable diplomatic information. One fine day the clerk was missing and with him certain papers. Then there ensued a period of months during which the firm and their employers could only conjecture the full extent of ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... both its occupants plainly discernible to those on shore. One of Malbihn's blacks it was who first recognized his fellow black in the person of Baynes' companion. Then Malbihn guessed who the white man must be, though he could scarce believe his own reasoning. It seemed beyond the pale of wildest conjecture to suppose that the Hon. Morison Baynes had followed him through the jungle with but a single companion—and yet it was true. Beneath the dirt and dishevelment he recognized him at last, and in the necessity ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that it disturbed the friendship which had so long existed between Mr. Murray and Mr. Isaac D'Israeli. The real cause of Benjamin's sudden dissociation from an enterprise of which in its earlier stages he had been the moving spirit, can only be matter of conjecture. The only mention of his name in the later correspondence regarding the newspaper occurs ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... current of his thoughts brought about by the tingling of the horsewhip. All else was mystery. But the commonest knowledge of the English and colonial history of those days was sufficient to stimulate conjecture on these points. At the date of the incident recorded James II had been on the throne more than a year, and for a long time both as duke and king had been hated and feared on both sides of the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... All Father belief, and transmitted it to the Euahlayi, to some Queensland tribe, with their Mulkari, and even to the Kaitish, or whether the faith has been independently developed among the tribes with no matrimonial classes and the others. Conjecture is at ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... perfection, would leave him infinitely less complete than we have already known him. He could not be roundly happy. Paradise, among all its enjoyments, would lack one daily felicity which his sombre little island possessed. Perhaps it is not irreverent to conjecture that a provision may have been made, in this particular, for the Englishman's exceptional necessities. It strikes me that Milton was of the opinion here suggested, and may have intended to throw out a delightful and consolatory hope for his countrymen, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... unsuspicious, the manner in which it tinges every event, and every reflection, are painted with a vividness and a detail of which we can scarcely conceive any one but a female, and we should almost add, a female writing from recollection, capable.' This conjecture, however probable, was wide of the mark. The picture was drawn from the intuitive perceptions of genius, not from personal experience. In no circumstance of her life was there any similarity between herself and her heroine in 'Mansfield Park.' She did not indeed pass ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... Many take the god for Aesculapius, because he cures disease: others for Osiris, the oldest of the local gods; some, again, for Jupiter, as being the sovereign lord of the world. But the majority of people, either judging by what are clearly attributes of the god or by an ingenious process of conjecture, identify ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... more than the words he spoke impressed the boys with the fact that he was holding back something that he had heard or knew concerning the possibilities of trouble for the swift little motor-boat. Just what they were, neither Fred nor George could conjecture. Their confidence in Sam was great and when they departed from the boat-house they made ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... wrapped in mystery. On another slope a full mile away stood the Castle, ancient battlemented, starkly splendid, one westward-facing window burning as with fire. He sat motionless for a space, gazing across at it, his face a curious mask of conjecture and regret. ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... wrong." But the tell-tale blushes on Bella's face showed him plainly enough that he had been right in his conjecture, and had to thank his wife's relatives for her rebellion and ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... his right would then stake against it any article which he deemed of equal value; and if the leader accepted the bet he would signify it; his opponent had then to guess the number of pebbles taken by the first Indian; and if his conjecture was correct, became the possessor of the articles wagered. If he failed to guess the right number, the holder of the stones was the winner; then the next savage seized the pebbles, and so it went round and round the circle, the winners ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... a sudden dismay that took entire possession of me, I sank into one of the deep fauteuils that extended its arms very opportunely to receive me, and sat mutely for a moment, while anguish unutterable, and conjecture too wild to be hazarded in speech, were surging ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Charlemagne's face when exhumed." It was a striking simile, and if well worked out by a rhetorician, say of Dr. Liddon's type, it might have powerfully clinched some great argument for the necessary place of dogma in Christian theology. But the sermon has vanished, and we can only conjecture from the date of the entry—October 5, 1869—that the good Dean's ire had been excited by Matthew Arnold's first appearance in the field of theological controversy. Six years before, indeed, Arnold had touched that field, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... was about fourteen years old his father lost his little property and fell into debt, and the boy probably left school to help support the family of younger children. What occupation he followed for the next eight years is a matter of conjecture. From evidence found in his plays, it is alleged with some show of authority that he was a country schoolmaster and a lawyer's clerk, the character of Holofernes, in Love's Labour's Lost, being the warrant ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... problems rather than having to come at Federal programs and agencies along the more lengthy traditional route through the States. The implications of this new kind of alignment are still a matter for debate and conjecture. ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... all hopeless. Often, I admit, it develops into permanent insanity, but there are many examples of complete recovery. Our first business must be to assure ourselves that we are right in this conjecture. I may be entirely wrong, for the unexpected is what I have been taught to look for in every case of mystery that has come under my observation. But I believe I have the material at hand to prove the personality of this Eliza Parsons, and after that I shall know what to do. Who ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... embodying the true mode of Social Construction. There has not been, in other words, any discovery of the right Principles upon which the affairs of mankind should be conducted in reference to their mutual relationships; and hence, there is no real knowledge, but only conjecture, of what are the right relations. Might has always been the accepted Right and the only Standard of Right in the regulation of Society. The opinions of the Ruling Power give tone to human thought and action. While Kings and Oligarchies were in the ascendency, the Standard ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... more easily can an error be repaired; therefore, so much the bolder a General will be in his calculations, so much the more readily will he keep them below the line of the absolute, and build everything upon probabilities and conjecture. Thus, according as the course of the War is more or less slow, more or less time will be allowed for that which the nature of a concrete case particularly requires, calculation of probability based ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... captain who cut folk's coats according as he wanted the cloth. How the builders climbed to this height, how they managed to carry up their material, and how they achieved the building of these towers, is impossible to conjecture. The tradition is, that when the English quitted Peyrousse they destroyed the means of ascent, and since 1443 no human being has been able to climb the rock and visit the towers, that for nearly five hundred years have had no other denizens than ravens and jackdaws. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... and their tongues were very busy for a time until, in fact, a fresher sensation arrived. Nurse Hagar was viewed and interviewed; but beyond sincere expression of grief at her disappearance, and the unvarying statement that she had not even the slightest conjecture as to the fate of the lost girl, nothing could ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... all upon the qui vive, for, not only was the closing act of the very clever play looked forward to with much interest, for its own sake, but the genuine surprise promised them was a matter for much curious conjecture and eager anticipation. ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... in accordingly, and, after exhausting the regions of conjecture, the powers of speculation, and the realms of fancy, Mark and Hockins ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... intelligence for a dexterous and keen-witted scholar to apply his solid learning and his vivid fancy to the detection or the interpretation of some new or obscure point in a great man's life or work; but none the less is it a perilous pastime to give the reins to a learned fancy, and let loose conjecture on the trail of any dubious crotchet or the scent of any supposed allusion that may spring up in the way of its confident and eager quest. To start a new solution of some crucial problem, to track some new undercurrent of concealed significance in a passage hitherto ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a complete system of notification, which the Committee consider is urgently necessary, any estimate as to the number of feeble-minded to be dealt with must be largely a matter of conjecture. ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... Tyler the Democratic candidate in the approaching Presidential election. What Mr. Upshur's success might have been in the difficult field of negotiation upon which he had entered, must be left to conjecture, for his life was suddenly destroyed by the terrible accident on board the United-States steamer "Princeton," in February, 1844, but little more than seven months after he had entered upon ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... they were inherited from some ancestor who was a smuggler, or perhaps even an old pirate. In his investigation of sin he was expiating the sins of his progenitors." There is reason for believing that Alcott was not far wrong in this conjecture. ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... knew the terms of the armistice full twenty-four hours before the courier's return to German Headquarters at Spa, I have not seen explained or heard any one conjecture. ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... felt that, artistically considered, there was no comparison whatever between the two men. The face of the elder compelled attention and study, and loosed in the observer's mind a whole stream of conjecture and unanswerable questions. The face of the younger began and ended perhaps in the attractions of youth and high spirits. It was a face of which, should the mind back of it prove wanting, you might tire, and learn ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... somewhat different kind; and, as it proves, more difficult to bring to a satisfactory solution than the symbols of heraldic blazon. As an initial it will bear many interpretations—it may be said, an indefinite number, for every new Oedipus has some fresh conjecture to propose. And this brings me to render the account required by Dr. Rock of the reasons which led me to conclude that the letter S originated with the office of Seneschallus or Steward. I must still refer to the Gentleman's Magazine for 1842, or to the republication of my essays which I ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... the fourth.] From whence the want of cariages did proceed, you may conjecture in that we marched through a countrey neither plentifull of such prouisions, nor willing to part from any thing: yet this I can assure you, that no man of worth was left either hurt or sicke in ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... the curvature of the cornea or crystalline, and then in the density of the humours, or conversely, might successively occur, and would be advantageous to the animal whilst under water, without serious detriment to its power of vision in the air. It is of course impossible to conjecture by what steps the fundamental structure of the eye in the Vertebrata was originally acquired, for we know absolutely nothing about this organ in the first progenitors of the class. With respect to the lowest animals in the scale, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... I sent off the gossoon early to the post-office, to see was there any letter likely to set matters to rights, and he brought back one with the proper postmark upon it, sure enough, and I had no time to examine or make any conjecture more about it, for into the servants' hall pops Mrs. Jane with a blue bandbox in her ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... shows what the spirits which communicate are not, it just as clearly reveals also what they are; so that in no particular is one left to conjecture or guesswork. There is an order of beings brought to view in the Scriptures, above man but lower than God or Christ, called "angels." No Bible believer questions the existence of such beings. It is sometimes ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... writer, and that could counterfeit any antique writing. Him the Archbishop customarily used to make old books complete, that wanted some pages; that the character might seem to be the same throughout. So that he acquired at length an admirable collection of ancient MSS. and very many too: as we may conjecture from his diligence for so many years as he lived, in buying and procuring such monuments. The remainders of his highly valuable collections are now preserved in several libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but chiefly in that of ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... and all those other phenomena which are supposed to make History interesting; nor would I deny that the strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of Mathematics, continually inducing conjecture and giving the opportunity of immediate verification, imparts to our existence a zest which you in Spaceland can hardly comprehend. I speak now from the aesthetic and artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull; aesthetically and artistically, ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... is a little rivulet here in our country in Chaeronea, running into the Cephisus. But we know of none that is so called at the present time; and can only conjecture that the streamlet which is now called Haemon, and runs by the Temple of Hercules, where the Grecians were encamped, might perhaps in those days be called Thermodon, and after the fight, being filled with ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... crossed to the mainland by the afternoon ferry. She never came back, and there were some in the Island who believed she had sold her soul to the devil, and that he had claimed her fulfilment of the compact. But Mauryeen is an honest man's wife, and whatever people may conjecture in their inmost hearts as to the truth or falsity of her mother's tale, they say nothing, for did not Father Tiernay declare such gossip to be a sin? But for all that Mauryeen's ways are finer and gentler than those of any woman ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... know, this tune has never been printed until now. I learnt it from Northumbrian sailors when a very small boy, and have never heard of its use in any other than Blyth and Tyne ships. It may be a Northumbrian air, but from such knowledge as I have gleaned of Northumbrian folk-tunes, I incline to the conjecture that it may have been picked up in more southern latitudes by ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... and walking-stick and quitted the house, leaving his pupil to gather up her music and conjecture, meanwhile, whether the wood-yard or a neighboring bar-room was his ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... identification, even when satisfied she could not be in error; but she was measurably sure of Mrs. Artemas beneath Diana's Grecian draperies, of Trego in his Western guise, of Mercedes Pride in the conventional make-up of a witch. The rest at once provoked and eluded conjecture; she fancied she knew Lyttleton in the doublet and hose of Sir Francis Drake, but could not feel certain; divested of his peculiarly well-tailored personality, he was astonishingly like half a dozen other ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... characters, the sums it cost only for garlic, leeks, onions, and other vegetables of this description, for the workmen; and the whole amounted to sixteen hundred talents of silver,(273) that is, four millions five hundred thousand French livres; from whence it was easy to conjecture what a vast sum the whole expense must ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... of such intricacy, be frequently entangled; that in one part refinement will be subtilized beyond exactness, and evidence dilated in another beyond perspicuity. Yet I do not despair of approbation from those who, knowing the uncertainty of conjecture, the scantiness of knowledge, the fallibility of memory, and the unsteadiness of attention, can compare the causes of errour with the means of avoiding it, and the extent of art with the capacity of man: and whatever be the event of my endeavours, I shall not easily regret ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... Sydney entered his study about a quarter to seven, with a companion whom he had found waiting for him on the door-step, it would have been impossible for him to conjecture the presence of his wife. He did not light another lamp. The first words of his visitor had startled him into forgetting that the room was dark—perhaps, as the interview went on, he was glad of the obscurity into which his face was thrown. And the ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... grizzly bear in the world, may be seen in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. As to his exact weight, there is much conjecture. That has not been determined, as the bear has never been placed on a scale. Good judges estimate it at not far from twelve hundred pounds. The bear's appearance justifies that conclusion. Monarch enjoys the enviable distinction of being the largest ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... that if her kings had not been expelled, Rome must very soon have become a weak and inconsiderable State. For seeing to what a pitch of corruption these kings had come, we may conjecture that if two or three more like reigns had followed, and the taint spread from the head to the members, so soon as the latter became infected, cure would have been hopeless. But from the head being removed while the trunk was still sound, it was not ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... Josephine, with a melancholy smile, "no one is able to know at the present time, nay, even to conjecture, what Bonaparte will do; no one, not even myself. His mind is impenetrable, and he only speaks of what he has done, not of what he is going to do. His plans lie inscrutable and silent in his breast, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... plain, pure-hearted common sense, generally speaking, at the very first sight decides the question for us without argument; but if we do not listen promptly to this secret monitor, its light goes out at once, and we are left to the mercy of mere conjecture, and grope about with but second-best guides. Then seeming arguments in favour of deceit and evil compliance with the world's wishes, or of disgraceful indolence, urge us, and either prevail, or at least so confuse us, that ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... centre to which we can reach—being as powerful at the tops of the highest mountains as at the bottom of the deepest mines—he conceived it highly probable that it must extend much further than was usually supposed. No sooner had this happy conjecture occurred to his mind than he considered what would be the effect of its extending as far as the moon. That her motion must be influenced by such a power he did not for a moment doubt; and a little reflection convinced him that it might be sufficient ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... not been present. But she conjectured the scene, and her conjecture was not far from the truth. But why? she asked, and again fear took hold of her. "What was to be gained?" There were limits to Sylvia's knowledge of the under side of life. She ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... Nirvana of Buddha, who lies serenely asleep, with all creation, from saints and kings to birds and beasts, passionately bewailing him. The composition is known from Japanese copies; and it is in fact from the early religious schools of Japan that we can best conjecture the grandeur of the T'ang style. Wu Taotzue excelled in all subjects: other masters are best known for some particular one. Han Kan was famous for his horses, the models for succeeding generations of painters, both ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... unable even to conjecture, what relation the examination of that gentleman can possibly have to those abusive and injurious letters, written by Mr Izard and Mr Lee, yet, as I had so often troubled Congress during a three months' attendance, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence; and, before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may, at least, be able to conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolution ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... bearing upon your problem. While such facts were scarce, I did discover a few interesting items. I spied upon them in public and in their most private haunts. I analyzed them individually and collectively, and from the few known facts and from the great deal of guesswork and conjecture there available to me, I have formulated a theory. I shall first give you the known facts. Their scientists cannot direct nor control any ray not propagated through ether, but they can detect one such ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... in the 'eighties. But for a certain type of Englishman there is a perennial attraction in feeling that at any moment the proprieties may be outraged. That they never actually are outraged does not seem very greatly to affect his pleasure. He can always console himself with easy conjecture of the wickedness of the original. So there will never be wanting a public for these ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... states his intention, it must be confessed that the "foreigners, and gentlemen of our own country" had not much upon which to congratulate themselves. Why Swift should have chosen the Count de Gyllenborg to whom to address the dedication must also remain a matter for conjecture. The Count had been sent out of the British Isles for instigating a conspiracy for a Jacobite insurrection in Great Britain. Swift wrote his dedication three years after the Count's expulsion. Knowing that the Count's master, Charles XII. of Sweden, had been a party to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... with Angelo Politian, and Lorenzo the Magnificent. His Morgante has been attributed, in part at least,[1] to the assistance of Marsilius Ficinus, and by others the whole has been attributed to Politian. The first conjecture is utterly improbable; the last is possible, indeed, on account of the licentiousness of the poem; but there are no direct grounds for believing it. The 'Morgante Maggiore' [2] is the first proper ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... concierge, on taking up the provisions, had found the poor mother half mad, running from one room to another, looking for a note from the child, for any clew, however unimportant, that would enable her at least to form some conjecture. ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... had been much surprised at the length of my absence, were at first buoyed up with the hope that I had found water; but this hope had at last died away, and they knew not what to conjecture. They were all reduced to the last degree of weakness and want; indeed I myself was at this period suffering from the most distressing symptoms of thirst; not only was my mouth parched, burning, and devoid of moisture, but the senses of sight and hearing became much affected; ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... shall have wrought unfaithfulness." When the king returned from the chase, the chamberlain related to him what he had seen, and the king was angry and said: "This woman has deceived me with words and deeds, and has brought hither her desire by craft and cunning. This conjecture must be true, else why did she play such a trick, and why did she hatch such a plot, and why did she send the merchant?" The king, enraged, went into the harem. The queen saw from his countenance that the occurrence of the night before had become known to him, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... subdued, was now, in the silence of night, distinctly audible; while our whispers, on the contrary, mingled as they were with the crisping sound of the waves rippling on the sands were, at that distance, undistinguishable. It was evident that I had erred in my original conjecture. Had it been Desborough himself, living alone as he did, he would not have knocked for admission where there was no one to afford it, but would have quietly let himself in. It could then be no other than a visiter—perhaps ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... half-hour in their rooms did the girls a world of good, and when the lunch gong sounded they gathered about the table in something like their normal spirits. It is true that none ate very much, but tongues flew fast in comment and conjecture. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... have my reasons against interfering at all with the Editorial arrangement of the London, I transmitted it (not in my own hand-writing) to them, who I doubt not will be glad to insert it. What eventual benefit it can be to you (otherwise than that a kind man's wish is a benefit) I cannot conjecture. Your Society are eminently men of Business, and will probably regard you as an idle fellow, possibly disown you, that is to say, if you had put your own name to a sonnet of that sort, but they cannot excommunicate Mr. Mitford, therefore I thoroughly approve ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the reader will soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influenced more fearfully than could be imagined. One day a Malay knocked at my door. What business a Malay could have to transact among English mountains I can not conjecture, but possibly he was on his road to a sea-port about ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... could not be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world. She had ranged, she would have said, through space and surveyed ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... a chance for him—poor beggar. He'll possibly swing for it, too! Pleasant conjecture before lunch, I must say. And we'll have it all cold if we don't look sharp about it, Lake, ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... (27) this conjecture may be considered as finally disposed of by Dr. Johnson's explicit declaration that he never saw one word of"Cecilia" before ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... by Catherine herself; and above her own tomb at Saint Denis which she had constructed during her lifetime. All the same, it must have pleased Henry immensely to have the royal cipher look much more like D H than like C H, and there is still room for conjecture which, after all, is one of the charms of history, so, Monsieur et Mesdames, it is quite a votre choix," with a graceful bow in ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... those institutions, on the inferior animals. To a large proportion of this class it is, in their youth, one of the most vivid exhilarations to witness the terrors and anguish of living beings. In many parts of the country it would be no improbable conjecture in explanation of a savage yell heard at a distance, that a company of rationals may be witnessing the writhings, agonies, and cries, of some animal struggling for escape or for life, while it is suffering the infliction, perhaps, of stones, and kicks, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... man influenced by books. Yet who can deny that the fruit of that early reading is to be found in his "Memoirs," in which a man of action, unused to writing, and called upon to narrate great events, discovers an easy adequate style? There is a dangerous kind of conjecture in which many biographers indulge when they try to relate logically the scattered events of a man's life. A conjectured relation is set down as a proved or unquestioned relation. I have said something about ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... Poppas stood before me in a short, tightly buttoned grey coat and cap, exactly the colour of his greyish skin and hair and waxed moustache; a monocle on a very wide black ribbon dangled over his chest. As to his age, I could not offer a conjecture. In the twelve years I had known his thin lupine face behind Cressida's shoulder, it had not changed. I was used to his cold, supercilious manner, to his alarming, deep-set eyes,—very close together, in colour a yellowish green, and always gleaming with something like defeated fury, as if he were ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... man's mouth, and of which the derivation appears to puzzle all our philologists, is nothing but a slight corruption of the word "Yengeese," the term applied to the "English," by the tribes to whom they first became known. We have no other authority for this derivation than conjecture, and conjectures that are purely our own; but it is so very plausible as almost to carry conviction of itself. [Footnote: Since writing the above, the author has met with an allusion that has induced him to think he may not have been the first to suggest this ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... of this action it is easy to conjecture, but it is fully stated in the order of the inhabitants of Charlestown at the meeting in which the action for the government of the town by selectmen was taken: "In consideration of the great trouble and charge of the inhabitants of Charlestown by reason of the frequent meeting of the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... correct knowledge of their nature and instincts; and this we shall never obtain by the course hitherto pursued. As much of their labor is performed in the dark, and difficult to be observed, it has given rise to conjecture and false reasoning, leading ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the great Roman Bath. (4) Lucas's Bath being a plain hall without piers, Sutherland assumed the same form for the hall of the great Roman Bath, and altogether omitted the arcades that divide it into three aisles. (5) Not to dwell on other errors built on the baseless fabric of conjecture, it is evident that Sutherland imagined a system of baths existed west of the great Roman Bath similar in all respects to that known to exist east of the great Roman Bath. But here, again, theory has been upset by facts. And now is a fitting opportunity to draw attention to what has ...
— The Excavations of Roman Baths at Bath • Charles E. Davis
... features, again, had none of her mother's regularity of proportion. Her smile, simple and sweet, and soon passing away, was certainly not an inherited smile on the maternal side. Whether she resembled her father, I was unable to conjecture—having never seen him. The one thing certain was, that not the faintest trace, in feature or expression, of Eunice's mother was to be seen in Eunice herself. Of the two girls, Helena—judging by something in the color of ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... him anew, where his person should not be known. Jacopo forced his boat from among the crowd at the quay, and having entered the open space between the tiers, he lay on his oar, well knowing that he was watched, and that he would soon be followed. His conjecture was right, for in a few moments a gondola pulled swiftly to the side of his own, and two men in masks passed from the strange boat into that of the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... man's spirit, there is Progress, in spite of checks and hindrances which come from within it, a constant if chequered advance in true worth or value. And that knowledge I build on grounded and reasoned hope that it will and must continue—how, I do not know, but can only surmise and conjecture and imagine. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... a darker glimmer of old oak and old armour; and higher up hung the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or utensils, whether designed for killing enemies or merely for cooking them, no mere white man could possibly conjecture. But the romance of the eye, which really on this rich evening, clung about the shop, had its main source in the accident of two doors standing open, the front door that opened on the street and a back door that opened on an odd green square of garden, that the sun turned to a square ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... was on visiting terms with the authorities—the general in command, the prefect, the receiver-general, and the bishop but in every house he was frigid, polite, and slightly supercilious, like a man out of his proper place awaiting the favors of power. His social talents he left to conjecture, nor did they lose anything in reputation on that account; then when people began to talk about him and wish to know him, and curiosity was still lively; when he had reconnoitred the men and found them nought, and studied the women with the eyes of experience in the cathedral for ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... plumbers who were at work in the south gutter. According to the "Builder" of that month, "a peculiar whirring noise" caused them to look inside the roof, and they found three of the main roof-timbers blazing. "The best conjecture seems to be that the dry twigs, straw, and similar debris, carried into the roof by birds, and which it has been the custom to clear at intervals out of the vault pockets, had caught fire from a spark that had in some way passed through the roof covering, perhaps under a sheet raised ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... even in our time received what I may call some fireside embellishments; but these are the facts, and the parish knows little beyond them. I (as you conjecture) know a great deal more; and yet there is a sense in which I know nothing more. You and I, my old friend, have come to an age when men do not care to juggle with the mysteries of another world, but knowing that the time is near when all accounts must ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... danger too was great. Fritzing was so conscious of it that he used to break out into perspirations whenever Priscilla was with him in public, and his very perspirations were conspicuous. The strain made his manner oddly nervous when speaking to or of his niece, and he became the subject of much conjecture to the observant Robin. Robin thought that in spite of her caressing ways with her uncle the girl must be privately a dreadful tyrant. It seemed difficult to believe, but Robin prided himself on being ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... mark. Many eyes are fixed upon him; many have interest in his well-being; his movements are of concern; he can not disappear unheeded; his name is in many mouths; his name is upon many books; he is a man of note—of promissory note; he fills the speculation of many minds; men conjecture about him, wonder about him,—wonder and conjecture whether he will pay. He is a man of consequence, for many are running after him. His door is thronged with duns. He is inquired after every hour ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... swordsman, sir," Philip said; "though my arm may lack somewhat of the strength it will have, a few years later. But had it been otherwise, I should have still taken the course I have. I do not say your conjecture is a correct one, but at any rate I would prefer the most unequal fight to being seized and questioned. One can but be killed once, and it were better that it should be by a thrust in the open air than a long imprisonment, ending perhaps ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... engendered by local differences previous to organization, and the Governor desired to bridge over all these troubles by giving the regiment a commander who knew nothing about them. I presume that some one said to the Governor about this time, "Why don't you get Sheridan?" This, however, is only conjecture. I really do not know how my name was proposed to him, but I have often been told since that General Gordon Granger, whom I knew slightly then, and who had been the former colonel of the regiment, first suggested the appointment. At all events, on the morning of May ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... not conjecture by what miraculous conception the angelic prediction would be verified; but she did not hesitate a moment to allow the apparently incongruous facts of his being her son, and yet the Son of the Highest, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... few moments in which the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal proceeding. But the realities of his situation soon displaced conjecture on ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... no doubt. I wonder much that Dr. Macmichael or Dr. B. Hawkins, when favouring us with eastern quotations, did not give the public the opinion of Dr. Davy, who is so well known in Europe, and who saw the cholera in Ceylon; his conjecture (quite accessible, I believe, to every medical man in London) may perhaps be as valuable as that of any other person. The following is a copy of it:—"The cause of the disease is not any sensible change in the atmosphere; yet, considering ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... thoughts: namely, that the Zecharias that here is mentioned, might not be he that we find in the book of Chronicles (2 Chron 24:21); but one of that name that lived in the days of Christ, possibly John Baptist's father, or some other holy man. My reasons for this conjecture, are, 1. Because the murderers are convict by Christ himself: Zecharias, whom ye slew between the altar and the temple. 2. Because Christ makes a stop at the blood of Zecharias, not at the blood of John the Baptist: wherefore, if the person here mentioned were not murdered after, but before ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... might have done for Birmingham it is impossible to conjecture had he remained longer our local leader. But he was called up higher. Perhaps this was lucky for him. The great enterprises, or at least some of them, were only fairly started when he relinquished his grasp of them, and it remained to be seen whether ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... interrupted Montreal, "the only conjecture I could form;—Adeline's mother, on learning we had a son, sent to Adeline a letter, that well nigh broke her heart, reproaching her for her love to me, and so forth, as if that had made her the vilest of the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... rescuing himself—The wife of Blackburn we cannot find to be sufficiently charged with any offence known to our laws which do not acknowledge a state of slavery; for the imputation of conspiring with the rioters and contriving the rescue is supported by no evidence and seems to rest on conjecture—The prisoner Blackburn it appears from the Documents before us was not committed for felony nor for any crime nor imprisoned for any cause which by our laws could be recognized as a justification of imprisonment. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... had was another groan, as from the burthened breast, as if he felt it almost an outrage to one whom he so reverenced to transfer to her the heart that had once beat for Meg Cree. There was no more speech for a long time, during which I feared that I had merely made him unhappy by communicating my conjecture, but just as we were reaching our own grounds he said, "You ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... French frontier, in exchanging ideas with English military experts as to how best her neutrality could be defended, Belgium was preparing for the inevitable. This inevitableness is no longer a matter of moral conjecture. It is a matter of ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... adopted the erroneous hypothesis of Columbus, who considered the lands he had discovered, as bordering on the eastern shores of Asia, and lying adjacent to the vast and opulent regions depicted in such golden colors by Mandeville and the Poli. This conjecture, which was conformable to the admiral's opinions before undertaking the voyage, was corroborated by the apparent similarity between various natural productions of these islands, and of the east. From this misapprehension, the new dominions soon came to be distinguished ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... this was only conjecture, and I must have certainty. The certainty came that evening. Mr. Hammond passed the store as I was standing by the counter, and insisted that I should go home to tea with him. I had often done so before, and had no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... was the same who pillaged Angers, and commanded a fleet of Saxon pirates on the ocean. Greg. Turon. l. ii. c. 18, in tom. ii. p. 170. 8 Note: According to St. Martin there is no foundation for this conjecture, vii 5—M.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... to estimate the amount or direction of the movements due to volcanic power by no means renders its efficacy as a land-preserving force in past times a mere matter of conjecture. The student will see in Chapter 24 that we have proofs of Carboniferous forests hundreds of miles in extent which grew on the lowlands or deltas near the sea, and which subsided and gave place to other forests, until in some regions fluviatile ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... had been compelled to join the Francesca, and who, from their dejected appearance, he conjectured were not altogether pleased or satisfied with the arrangement, he entered into conversation with them, and soon contrived to elicit from them that his conjecture was well founded. Thereupon, as there was no time to lose, he took the bold course of asking them outright whether, in the event of there being a scheme afoot on the part of others to escape from the brigantine to the ship, they would be disposed to join in it, to which they replied ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... "upstairs teacher"—that is, the lady who presided over the grammar grade of the school—and the question of her probable successor. In fact, this question of who the new teacher was to be was the prevailing subject of surmise and conjecture in the village ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... funereal chamber draped with black; while another authority declares that the poet, the victim of his own satires, was hung on a fork-shaped gibbet, not on account of his abuse of Pius IV., but through the hatred of Pius V., which some personal quarrel had excited. This conjecture is, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Grandfather, "though you have made a pretty shrewd conjecture. He planned, in 1745, an expedition against Louisbourg. This was a fortified city, on the Island of Cape Breton, near Nova Scotia. Its walls were of immense height and strength, and were defended by hundreds of heavy cannon. It was the strongest fortress which the French possessed in ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... burial? Why, presumably he lives still. But not with the life of the universal soul. Oh no! There have been mystics in China, but the Chinese are not mystical. What he was he still is, an eating and drinking creature, and, one might even conjecture, a snob. For if one visits the family chapel of the Changs—another of the sights of Canton—one sees ranged round the walls hundreds of little tablets, painted green and inscribed in gold. These are the memorials of the deceased. And they are arranged in three classes, those who ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... appeal to Leigh's imagination. Through it, as through a golden mist, he saw the drama of life sublimated, himself an actor of dignity and worth; and a few moments later he entered the president's office with a poise in which there remained no trace of anxious conjecture. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... accept any such conclusion or result merely because it removes difficulties or because it makes or rather leaves the poetry better; but I shall present—that the Sonnets contain direct testimony, testimony not leading to surmise or conjecture, but testimony which would authorize a judgment in a court of law, that the Sonnets were not written by Shakespeare, and that they very strongly indicate that Shakespeare was the friend or patron to whom so many of ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... will be seen that there were lakes in the centre of what is now the island-continent of Australia—lakes where the land is at present exceedingly dry and parched. By the second map period those lakes had disappeared, and it seems natural to conjecture that the districts where those lakes lay, must, during the eruptions of the great volcanoes which lay to the south-east (between the present Australia and New Zealand), have been so raked with red-hot volcanic dust that the very ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... did not originate in our solar system has been verified, for we find that the globe of which it was once a part revolved around an immense sun which had a retinue of twenty- seven planets of various sizes. Whether this great sun is one of the stars of our firmament we can only conjecture; perhaps in some future state ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... from between her long curls, with great anxiety, "you do know more only you are afraid to tell us. Pray be kind to us, and tell us all you know." "Why should I tell you what would add to your sorrow, when there may be nothing but conjecture in the idea?" "Oh," said the eager Mother, "tell us all, we are so bewildered and lost in conjectures, that nothing you can tell us could add to the anxiety we are in. Moreover, I think I know what you mean. I have already hinted such a thing to my husband. Are ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... walking-stick and quitted the house, leaving his pupil to gather up her music and conjecture, meanwhile, whether the wood-yard or a neighboring bar-room was his ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Laurillard's arm with the other, he led him up-stairs to present him to his wife and sister-in-law, saying, 'I have got my foot, and M. Laurillard found it for me.' It seems that this skilful operation confirmed all M. Cuvier's previous conjecture concerning a foot, the existence and form of which he had already guessed, but for which he had long and vainly sought. So occupied had he been by it, that, when he appeared to be particularly absent, his family were wont to accuse him of seeking his fore-foot. The next morning ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... shape, and as giving only solidity or hardness, which last, it is apprehended, is the only sense in which our author here considers crystallization, although, from the way in which he has employed this principle, it would seem that it is the figure which is to be explained by it. This conjecture is supported by the example of alabaster or stalactites, with which he compares the section of those mountains; for, in the example of implicated figures of the stalactite marble, similar to those of the present distorted strata, crystallization ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... traveller has however, with much ingenuity of conjecture, given us an excellent reason why the Sphinx was peculiar to Egypt, as the Nile was observed to overflow when the sun was in those ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... told herself at this moment whether she was glad or sorry that the impressive manager was awaiting her presence. She was slightly flurried and tingling in the cheeks, but it was more nervousness than either fear or favour. She did not try to conjecture what the drift of the conversation would be. She only felt that she must be careful, and that Hurstwood had an indefinable fascination for her. Then she gave her tie its last touch with ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... undoubtedly a benefactor to her small public. She had roused the intelligence of Drayton Parva as it had never been roused before. Conjecture followed furtively on her footsteps, and inference met her and stared her in the face. No circumstance, not even Sir Peter's innocent admiration, was too trivial to furnish a link in the chain of evidence against her. ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... and yet more bitterly they bewailed them, and the mariners were at their wits' end, as the gale grew hourly more violent, nor knew they, nor might conjecture, whither they went, they drew nigh the island of Rhodes, albeit that Rhodes it was they wist not, and set themselves, as best and most skilfully they might, to run the ship aground. In which enterprise Fortune favoured them, bringing them ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... beginning of history. But that beginning had emerged without any breach of continuity from a development which carries us back to a quadrimane ancestor, still further back (according to Darwin's conjecture) to a marine animal of the ascidian type, and then through remoter periods to the lowest form of organism. It is essential in this theory that though links have been lost there was no break in the gradual development; and this conception of a continuous ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... may be suffered by those whom you seek to avenge I can conjecture but I wish never to hear. I pray God that I may never know what it might break my heart to learn. You must save them, you must also avenge them. You are strong, and you are implacable. When you strike your blow will ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... which after the third generation a tall and highly self-fertile variety appeared. But as in the two succeeding generations the crossed plants resumed their former superiority over the self-fertilised, the case must be looked at as an anomaly. The sole conjecture which I can form is that the crossed seeds had not been sufficiently ripened, and thus produced weakly plants, as occurred with Iberis. When the crossed plants were between 3 and 4 inches in height, ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... believed, they were not singular; or, anyhow, he wasn't; he saw what he was convinced was the same failure in the men past youth about him. But in Fanny there was, he recognized, that fierce if narrow singleness of impulse, of purity. His thoughts of other women were not innocent of provocative conjecture—Anette's sinuous body, now as dead to him as Alohabad, recurred to his mind—but in this Fanny was utterly loyal. Yes, she had, a thing impossible for any man he had known, a ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... having remained about twelve months and explored the adjacent country, became so discouraged and exhausted by fatigue and famine, that they abandoned the country. Sir Richard Grenville returning shortly afterwards to America, and not being able to find them, and at a loss to conjecture their fate, left in the island another small party of settlers and again ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... ten years' rebellion as well as the present insurrection from its start. No alternative save physical exhaustion of either combatant, and therewithal the practical ruin of the island, lay in sight, but how far distant no one could venture to conjecture. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... vestige of popular election; and it contained no provision for enforcing in any individual State, whose ruler might choose to disregard it, the principle of constitutional rule. Whether the Federation would in any degree have protected Germany in case of attack by France or Russia is matter for conjecture, since a long period of peace followed the year 1815; but so far was it from securing liberty to the Minor States, that in the hands of Metternich the Diet, impotent for every other purpose, became an instrument for the persecution ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... wall, but remains covered as it extends to a great distance inside the city, being carried on a high arch of baked brick. Consequently, when the men under the command of Magnus and Ennes had got inside the fortifications, they were one and all unable even to conjecture where in the world they were. Furthermore, they could not leave the aqueduct at any point until the foremost of them came to a place where the aqueduct chanced to be without a roof and where stood a building ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... anonymous author always arouses a certain inquiry, and when the book is clever and original the interest becomes keen; and conjecture is rife, endowing the most unlikely people with authorship.... It is very brilliant, very forcible, very sad.... It is perfect in its way, in style clear, sharp and forcible, the dialogue epigrammatic and sparkling.... Enough has been said to show that 'The Hypocrite' is a striking ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... price, from a new king, confirmations of the important grants of his predecessors. But any explanation of the ground of right on which the king demanded this general redemption of lands must remain from lack of evidence a mere conjecture. The fact itself seems beyond question, and is an indication of no little value of the views and intentions of the new king. The kingdom was his; all the land must be held of him and with his formal consent, but no uncalled-for disturbance ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... was rumored that an American corvette of twenty-two guns had been brought into Rio, a prize to a British seventy-four. This intelligence placed Capt. Porter in some perplexity. He felt convinced that the successful American frigate was the "Constitution;" a conjecture in which he was correct, for the news referred to the celebrated action of that ship with the "Java." The captured American corvette, he concluded, must be the "Hornet;" but herein the captain was wrong, for the "Hornet" was at that moment ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... to the community had Edison's automatic telegraph inventions been allowed to take their legitimate place in the art, but we shall not allow ourselves to indulge in flights of fancy, as the value of this chapter rests not upon conjecture, but only upon actual fact. Nor shall we attempt to offer any statistics regarding Edison's numerous inventions relating to telegraphs and kindred devices, such as stock tickers, relays, magnets, rheotomes, repeaters, printing telegraphs, messenger calls, etc., on which ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... these testimonies belong to the region of conjecture. Let me close this chapter by a narrative of fact, derived from the late Lord de Ros, who was an eye-witness of the events which he narrated. Arthur Thistlewood (whose execution for the "Cato Street Conspiracy" I have described ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... sense of poetic form, he has not read the poems aloud to get the charm of their melody, and he will not let them linger in his mind long enough to feel that the simplest sentiments are often the most profound and moving. He simply tries to conjecture what sort of questions he is likely to meet on examination. Doubtless from this type of pupil better results can be obtained by the reading of prose not too familiar, that suggests more questions for ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... of poverty. There must have been in his mind, I think, a dim feeling: "Did all my dark crises mean only this; was I crucified only that I might become a solicitor's clerk?" Whatever be the truth about this conjecture there can be no question about the facts themselves. It was about this time that he began to burst and bubble over, to insist upon his own intellect, to claim a career. It was about this time that he put together a loose pile of papers, satires on institutions, pictures of private persons, ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... funds than was reckoned; dear old gentleman doesn't cut up as well as they hoped! And meanwhile our friend B——! Does it dawn on you at all, from our friend B——'s point of view, Sergeant? I may be wrong, but that's my provisional conjecture. The question remains how he's got the old gent ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... he seemed singularly uncommunicative, and we could get but little out of him beyond the fact that he had, with very great difficulty, reached the summit, and found my conjecture as to its being an extinct crater correct. He thawed a little during dinner, and volunteered the information that he had seen land far away on the southern board—nearly or quite a hundred miles distant, he supposed— ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... something good or evil, or produced some exceptional work; or if this is denied them, at any rate to hear from others what he looks like. This is why, on the one hand, they go to places where they conjecture he is to be found; and on the other, why the press, and especially the English press, tries to describe him in a minute and striking way; he is soon brought visibly before us either by a painter or an engraver; and ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... "it is true; and that makes me conjecture, that these devils were in fact only playing a part; to deceive me into thinking that the red heathen around us were not really the children of Satan, as ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... obviousness and familiarity of a casual observation. The truth of the imitation is indeed so great, that it has been argued that Fielding must have had his materials ready-made to his hands, and was merely a transcriber of local manners and individual habits. For this conjecture, however, there seems to be no foundation. His representations, it is true, are local and individual; but they are not the less profound and conclusive. The feeling of the general principles of human nature, operating in particular circumstances, is always intense, and uppermost in his mind; and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... and, although they belonged to different political parties, the young poet must have known and visited the old polymath; there was every reason for him to have taken advantage of the opportunity. Whatever justification there may be for this conjecture, the fact remains that Varro is in the background every where throughout the Georgics, as the "deadly parallel" in the appended note will indicate. This is perhaps the most interesting thing about Varro's treatise: ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... replied with the most provoking simplicity. The uncle was annoyed. He would rather that Ralph should have relieved him, by a conjecture of his own, from the necessity of hinting to him that such extreme sympathies, between the parties, were by no means a matter of course. But the nephew would not, or could not, see; and his surprise, at the uncle's course, was perpetually looking for explanation. It ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... assumed position, postulation, condition, presupposition, hypothesis, blue sky hypothesis, postulate, postulatum[Lat], theory; thesis, theorem; data; proposition, position; proposal &c. (plan) 626; presumption &c. (belief) 484; divination. conjecture; guess, guesswork, speculation; rough guess, shot, shot in the dark [coll.]; conjecturality[obs3]; surmise, suspicion, sneaking suspicion; estimate, approximation (nearness) 197. inkling, suggestion, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... not win anything even if he tried. Others darkly hinted that he was one of the authors of the house's present disgrace; and others whispered that there was no love lost between Railsford and his fourth prefect. In this last conjecture the gossips were right. Felgate and the Master of the Shell had not hit it from the first day of their acquaintance; and within the last few days an occurrence had taken place which had brought the two into ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... it, one inflicted from the back and two from the front, but who inflicted or caused to be inflicted those wounds it was impossible to assert with knowledge, though it was easy enough to hazard a conjecture. ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... is known that there is vital heat in man and in every living creature; but its origin is not known. Every one speaks of it from conjecture, consequently such as have known nothing of the correspondence of natural things with spiritual have ascribed its origin, some to the sun's heat, some to the activity of the parts, some to life itself; but as they have not known what life is, they have been content with the mere phrase. But any ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... when he began to stumble, loud was the laughter, which is not in good taste, not even in Germans. And if there was always a full audience to honour the Liedenbrock courses, I should be sorry to conjecture how many came to make merry ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... might conjecture, even if we knew nothing more about him, that Sulpicius was a man of very fine clay, of real humanitas in the widest sense of that expressive word; and this is entirely borne out in other ways.[179] Emerging at last from retirement, he stood again ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... transcends, or is absolutely detached from, all human experience. Uncompounded (asankhato) may refer to the passing away of all sankharas but what may be the meaning of dhatu or element in this context, I do not presume to conjecture. But whatever else the word may mean, it clearly does not signify annihilation. Both here and in the Questions of Milinda an impression is produced in the mind of the reader, and perhaps was not absent in the mind of the writer, that nirvana is a sphere ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... felt like it, and did not scruple to leave an observation, or even a question, permanently suspended in an embarrassing silence. Quin soon found it much more interesting to commune with himself. It was exciting to conjecture what was about to happen, and what effect it would have on his love affair. If he got a raise, would he be justified in putting his fate to the test? All spring he had fought the temptation of going to New York in the hope that by waiting he would have more to offer. If by any miracle of grace Miss ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... stewardess was to help along the matter. It seemed to me that some heavy reward had been promised to Cornwood for his services, or he would not endanger the liberal wages he was paid for his services on board of the Sylvania. But I knew nothing about the matter, and it was useless to conjecture ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... in the balance, he experienced a sudden distaste of his work which almost drove him into renouncing the whole affair. But the habits of a lifetime are not parted with so easily; and when the Chief Inspector observed—evidently with the idea of goading him on—"This seems to be mainly a matter of conjecture, Gryce," his old self reasserted itself, and ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... any human weapon could cripple that mighty bulk. And yet I aimed better than I knew, for, with a loud report, one of the great blisters upon the creature's back exploded with the puncture of the buck-shot. It was very clear that my conjecture was right, and that these vast, clear bladders were distended with some lifting gas, for in an instant the huge, cloud-like body turned sideways, writhing desperately to find its balance, while the white beak snapped and gaped in horrible ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... American camp that the decision to hold the city was now reconsidered, and the evacuation fixed for September 15. It was seen that the storm centre was now shifting over toward the American communications, but just where it would break forth was still a matter of conjecture. ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... division was also in process of organization, and he, like Sherman, was in advance, and on Sherman's left. The complete absence of the ordinary precautions, always taken by military commanders since the beginning of history, is inexplicable. The only reason I can conjecture for it grows out of the character of General Grant and his distinguished subordinate, and their inexperience. They had had then little practical knowledge of actual warfare. General Sherman, except on one occasion, ...
— "Shiloh" as Seen by a Private Soldier - With Some Personal Reminiscences • Warren Olney
... was obscure. He must be introduced, as he has come down to us, without rank or pedigree. His pedigree nature acknowledged, and gave him a right to become great among her sons. His birth is a matter of fact, its time and place, circumstances of conjecture. Some affirm that he was born at the Old Seneca Castle, near the foot of Seneca lake, not far from 1750. [Footnote: Hist. of North American tribes by ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... tell you, ladies? It is painful to leave a subject where the soul has so many mysterious emanations; there is such a field for conjecture; but as everything in this world must have an end, so must even ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned. She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do. Grave she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world. She had ranged, she would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... again, as to who would most probably take her in to dinner, who would be assigned to Mr. Alwynn, and whether Ruth would be taken in by a married man or a single one. As it was quite impossible absolutely to settle these interesting points beforehand, Mrs. Alwynn's mind had a vast field for conjecture opened to her, in which she disported herself at will, varying the entertainment for herself and Ruth by speculating as to who would sit on the other side of each of them; "for," as she justly observed, "everybody has two ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... friends, originated with me, and I proposed it in consequence of his calling to my recollection the certificates he had received from them. I then had no suspicion awake, and I believed what he told me. In what manner the disguise was ultimately disposed of I can only conjecture, as any one else might, from the evidence given on the trial. He presented himself to me in a grey great coat, and a green under coat; and if the persons whose affidavits I now tender had been examined on the trial, and they did attend for that purpose, I do feel persuaded that ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... flower-bud or an inflorescence than a leaf-bud or a branch. This may be due to the position of the flowers on a portion of the stem of the plant especially devoted to the formation of flower-buds, to the more or less complete exclusion of leaf-buds, i.e. on the inflorescence. This conjecture is borne out by the comparative rarity with which prolification has been observed in flowers that are solitary in the axils of the ordinary leaves of the plant. If the lists of genera appended hereto be perused, it will be seen that nearly all the cases occur in genera where the inflorescence ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... Sayce has even gone so far as to suggest an identification of Adapa (by reading Adawa) with the Biblical Adam, but this conjecture is untenable. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... residence, a complete stranger to her neighbors. She was quiet and well-behaved; she wore good clothes and shamefully neglected her child. These were the meager facts upon which gossip built a tower of conjecture. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... queries were forthcoming. Durend could have spoken, but would not. Dale might have spoken; for though he knew not the plans of his chief, his position at the rudder enabled him to conjecture a great deal. But he, too, was dumb. So it was that the Benson crew could answer the questions of their distressed friends only by referring them with disparaging shrugs of the shoulders to ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... are not left to conjecture in regard to the status or condition of Abraham's servants; we will bring proofs showing that it could not have ...
— Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible? • Isaac Allen
... occupied, and hobbled towards the window. I thought a signal-gun was just then audible, as from some vessel in distress. Ere I could communicate this intelligence, another and a nearer roll silenced all conjecture. It was indeed but too evident that a vessel was in the offing, and rapidly driving towards the shore, from the increasing distinctness of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... was introduced among the Indians at the time of which we write, it is impossible to say and useless to conjecture. The fact of its desolating effects is unquestionable. One who dwelt in the country at the time writes: [See Sir Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages, page 14.] "The fatal infection spread around with a baneful rapidity which no flight could escape, ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... willing the spirit, to hide the wound our guilt had dealt him. Whatever the object of this display, it gave me a great itching to retreat behind my sister's skirts, for fear and shame. And, as it appeared, he was quick to conjecture my feeling: for at once he dropped the fantastic manner and proceeded to a quiet and appallingly lucid statement of ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... too much to conjecture that it was remembered also in popular poetry; and these and other classical writers of the Middle Ages, who despised not the common folk and their ways, no doubt drank deeply of knowledge and inspiration from the clear and hidden ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... them in orderly array; but, under the cold logic of events, one by one they crumbled and fell away. More and more heavily, more and more depressingly the enormity of his offense weighed upon him as he considered it, and what the outcome of it all would be he did not even dare to conjecture. ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... that there was considerable bustle in the palace, attended by hammering, and the sound of furniture either placed or displaced. She had paid very little attention to it, for the rooms were entirely empty, and she could only conjecture that her needy spouse might have rented them out for the carnival. But the noise came nearer and nearer, until she perceived that it had reached the adjoining chamber, whence she could hear the sound of voices, and distinguish much ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... intellectual state or commonwealth of learning, will soon discover the first ground of disagreement between the two great parties at this time in arms, and may form just conclusions upon the merits of either cause. But the issue or events of this war are not so easy to conjecture at; for the present quarrel is so inflamed by the warm heads of either faction, and the pretensions somewhere or other so exorbitant, as not to admit the least overtures of accommodation. This quarrel first ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... soon be for the removal of the Seminoles. I regret that the Cherokees east of the Mississippi have not yet determined as a community to remove. How long the personal causes which have heretofore retarded that ultimately inevitable measure will continue to operate I am unable to conjecture. It is certain, however, that delay will bring with it accumulated evils which will render their condition more and more unpleasant. The experience of every year adds to the conviction that emigration, and that alone, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
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