|
|
|
More "Speculate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... convenient than philosophical; it is a dodging of the question, instead of an attempt to solve it. Divine ordination—"[Greek: Doz d' etelevto Bonlae]"—is a maxim which settles all difficulties. But it also precludes all inquiry. Why speculate at all, with this universal solvent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the aching strangeness of the world in this steady labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in my mind, and presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again. After working an hour I began to speculate on the distance one had to go before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing it altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one of the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... found out that there was in Wall Street a broker who didn't speculate himself, who didn't drink to excess, who was absolutely honest, and who never opened his mouth when it was better shut, they began to patronize that man's firm. In short, the moment Jarrocks Bell's qualities were discovered, Jarrocks Bell was made. So that now, in speculative ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... am very sorry that headache and neuralgia should have been added to illness and dislike of writing, as your reason for not inquiring how we were going on. We sit here in the receipt of news without any means of reciprocity, but we can speculate on France, Italy, and Ireland. Of those, the country which most interests and most concerns me, is Ireland.... I have heard much of Lady and Lord Byron, and from good sources. I can only conclude that he was half mad and loved to frighten her, and that she believed in the stories ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... have been published, by northern as well as by southern men, and with the increase of information, there has been a subsidence of prejudice, and a preparation of the mind to receive truth. Our friends are still in a minority. It would be vain to speculate as to the period when their position will be reversed. Whether sooner or later, or never, they are still entitled to our regard and respect. A few years ago those who maintained our constitutional right, and to secure it voted ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... it is useless to speculate about that, because you grow worse instead of better. You are like one of those people who, apparently unharmed themselves, carry about with them the germs of typhoid and scatter destruction wherever they go. The sooner ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... mere thousands of years; they now claim millions, and many millions of years, for the performance of geological phenomena. If the earth has existed for the millions of years which geologists assert, it becomes reasonable for astronomers to speculate on the phenomena which have transpired in the heavens in the lapse of similar ages. By the aid of our knowledge of star distances, combined with an assumed velocity of thirty miles per second, we can make the attempt to peer back into the remote ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... their bodies, so it was not attack I was to fear, but some mysterious, underhanded treachery which would rob me of consciousness and make the precipitation of my body into the water both safe and easy. Perhaps it was in the bottle of brandy that the peril lay; perhaps—but why speculate further! I would watch till midnight and then, if nothing happened, signal my companions to ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... accidental or occasional flash of rhetoric. The mind of the Whig leader, acquiescing now in the completeness of Canadian local powers, and reading with disquiet the signs of the times in the form of Canadian turbulence, seems to have turned to speculate on the least harmful form which separation might take. Of this there is direct evidence in a private letter from Grey to Elgin: "Lord {265} John in a letter I had from him yesterday, expresses a good deal of anxiety as to the prospects of Canada, and reverts ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... had no idea of the plans for her future which were being talked about in St. Andrews. Had he? No one could even speculate with such an exceedingly reserved person. He retired behind his newspaper, and said ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... and his men had strayed off on account of having no guide, and would ultimately come in all right to Camp Supply or make their way back to Fort Dodge; a very unsatisfactory view of the matter, but as no one knew the direction Elliott had taken, it was useless to speculate on other suppositions, and altogether too late to make any search for him. I was now anxious to follow up Custer's stroke by an immediate move to the south with the entire column, but the Kansas regiment had not yet arrived. At first its ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... she paid the quarter's rent of the flat, four hundred francs, and was accepted as tenant. Her ears were soon quite accustomed to the sound of cannon, and she felt that she had always been a citizeness of Paris, and that Paris had always been besieged. She did not speculate about the end of the siege; she lived from day to day. Occasionally she had a qualm of fear, when the firing grew momentarily louder, or when she heard that battles had been fought in such and such a suburb. But then she said it was absurd to be afraid when you were with a couple of ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Gentleman's Magazine, N.S., I(July-Dec., 1856), 9. Neither the magazine nor the pamphlet mentioned Malone's authorship, but his hand in "the new Pamphlet," at least, was soon recognized (see the St. James's Chronicle, No. 3268, 14-16 Feb. 1782). One can only speculate whether Malone and Nichols were fellow plotters from the beginning. They seem to have taken interest in each other's work as early as 1779, when Nichols printed for Malone special copies of some early analogues ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... went by, wonderful, fashioning the ways and the characters of men. Seven passed. Buck Johnson and his foreman began to look for the stranger. Eight, they began to speculate. Nine, they doubted. On the tenth they ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... vaguely amused and declining to speculate as to the 'quandary' which according to the good woman had resulted in a species of lunacy, Walden followed as he was told, and slowly ascended the broad staircase, one of the finest specimens of Tudor work in all England, with its richly ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... given to those men so that they might see there was no ground for these threats, he said: "Most of them can not read and if they could the whiskey men would never allow a page of it to get into their hands." In what way the liquor dealers worked upon the political parties, it is not necessary to speculate. The methods were not new and are pretty well understood. They control tens of thousands of votes not only in California but in every State, which they can deliver to either of the great parties that does their bidding ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Epechi. Sextus Empiricus, who lived in the second century, under the Emperor Antoninus Pius, writ ten books against the mathematicians or astrologers, and three of the Phyrrhonian opinion. The word is derived from the Greek SKEPTESZAI, quod est, considerare, speculare. [To consider or speculate] ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... beauties of historical composition. The systems which professed to unfold the nature of God, of man, and of the universe, entertained the curiosity of the philosophic student; and according to the temper of his mind, he might doubt with the Sceptics, or decide with the Stoics, sublimely speculate with Plato, or severely argue with Aristotle. The pride of the adverse sects had fixed an unattainable term of moral happiness and perfection; but the race was glorious and salutary; the disciples of Zeno, and even those of Epicurus, were taught both ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... some deductions, but, if you will permit me to give you some counsel, I would tell you to go back to the chateau now, with no parti pris, and seek her immediately, and get her to tell you the whole truth yourself. Of what good for you and me to speculate, since we neither of us know all the facts?—or even, if our suppositions are correct——" Then, as Lord Fordyce hesitated, he continued: "The time has passed for reticence. There should be no more avoiding of feared subjects. Go, go, ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine only, but also reduces all ideas to commercial form, has yet to have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new phase of ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... voyageurs, traders, and trappers. Norman knew that Lake Winnipeg was muddy—he did not care to inquire the cause. He knew that there was a hilly country on its eastern and a low level land on its western shores, but it never occurred to him to speculate ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... as a shock to Ethne. She did not guess the correct answer; she was not, indeed, sufficiently mistress of herself to speculate upon any answer, but she dreaded ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... that would account for the man in the mask, but it is not our business to speculate save where ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... kindred studies of ethics and psychology. Their scope was, of course, confined to the field of their own experience, the small self-contained City-States of Greece, and it did not fall within their province to foreshadow, like the Jewish Prophets, the end of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their own fellow-countrymen on the narrow stage of Greek life. Their lasting achievement is to have laid down for mankind what a State is, as compared with other forms of human association, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... visits Bartley complained he had nothing to do. "I can sit here and speculate. I want to be in something myself; I think I will take a farm just to occupy ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... other teacher for these lads, and so we must rub on and do the best we can. Of course I should be most thankful, most happy if, during his lifetime, I once more found myself at home, but I don't think much nor speculate about it, and I am very happy, as I am well and hearty. You won't suspect me of any lessening of strong affection for all that savours of home. I think that I know every face in Alfington and in Feniton, and very many in Ottery as of old; I believe I think of all with increasing ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... signature—considered the vagary life had become for her, it was so whimsical, and the mystery of her secret which was so solely hers. Alicia knew, of course; but that was much as if she had written it down on a sheet of perfect notepaper and locked it up in a drawer. Alicia did not speculate about it, and the whole soul of it was tangled now in a speculation. There had been a time filled with the knowledge and the joy of this new depth in her, like a buoyant sea, and she had been content ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... is he? I don't remember him since we went down to Armstrong's. Yes, I do though!' she paused, 'but I can't think of it. Crying would be worse. What a queer thing fainting is! I used to speculate ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and his neighbors, who knew that he must have yielded to the force of a sudden and new temptation, did not care to speculate ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... a room in Miss Wollaston's well ordered mind which she had always guarded as an old-fashioned New England village housewife used to guard the best parlor, no light, no air, no dust, Holland covers on all the furniture. Rigorously she forbore to speculate upon the attraction which had drawn John and Paula together—upon what had happened between them—upon how the thing had looked and felt to either of them. She covered the whole episode with one blanket observation: she supposed it was natural in ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... military glory. Next to the career of arms, diplomacy, no doubt, would have been his choice, for which not only his courtly and fascinating manners, but every characteristic of his mind peculiarly adapted him. It is idle now to speculate upon what he might have been had Washington yielded to the importunities of Madison, Monroe, and others, and appointed him minister to the French republic. Our country, before which he then stood in the original brightness of his character, would have been honoured in the choice, both at home and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... to sharpen reason and to develop the mind, but they failed for want of data. Indeed, this has been the common failure of man, for in the height of civilization men speculate without sufficient knowledge. Even in the beginning of scientific thought, for lack of facts, men spent much of their time in speculation. The scholastic philosophers were led to consider many unimportant questions ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... being a mystery, I see no reason to speculate how or why it came to pass that Corona, who already possessed two pink and waxen girl-dolls, and treated them with the merest contempt, took this black manikin of a Golliwog straight to her heart ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fool! Couldn't you see what the end would be if your plunging didn't come off? You—you oughtn't to bet, or speculate, or play cards, you're not clever enough. You've got blind rashness, and so you think you're bold. And Di—oh, you idiot! And on a salary of a thousand ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... of Silverton town, whom the legislature, with that keen knowledge of human nature which marks the British senate, permitted, and still permits, to speculate in Insanity, stipulating, however, that the upper servant of all in his asylum should be a doctor; but omitting to provide against the instant dismissal of the said doctor should he go and rob his employer of a lodger—by curing ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... do we conclude from this one event? We conclude it is reasonable to believe that a person, and not a spook, triggered the plane alarm and led us to the quarry. We speculate that the person did not know about the alarm and set it off by accident, probably while inspecting the plane, since we see nothing to be gained by sabotage. We speculate that the chase was to frighten us, not primarily to harm us, the reason being that we rushed the ghost ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... He, Dickens, was to have the command of the story, and the artist was to illustrate him. How far these altered relations would have worked quite smoothly if Seymour had lived, and if Dickens' story had not so soon assumed the proportions of a colossal success, it is idle to speculate. Seymour died by his own hand before the second number was published, and so ceased to be in a position to assert himself. It was, however, in deference to the peculiar bent of his art that Mr. Winkle, with his ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... exist—which remitted their taxes, released their indebtedness, and remitted their rents, to the city due and owing—which ran the machinery for widening, improving and opening streets, parks and boulevards, to enable these men to speculate in assessed damages and greatly enhanced values—which created unnecessary offices with large salaries and no duties, in order to maintain a force of ruffianly supporters and manufacturers of votes—which used millions of dollars to bribe and corrupt newspapers, the organs of public opinion, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Nicholas's five sleeps were accomplished, the Boy began to curse the hour he had laid eyes on Father Wills. He began even to speculate desperately on the good priest's chances of tumbling into an air-hole, or being devoured by a timely wolf. But no, life was never so considerate as that. Yet he could neither face being the cause of the first serious row in camp, nor endure the thought of having his ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... to speculate about that future life upon which religion insists so much and communicates so little. Was it perhaps in other planets, under those wonderful, many-mooned, silver-banded skies? She perceived more and more a kind of absurdity in the existence all about ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... began to speculate as to whether it had been an ape-man or a Prussian that had abducted Lys. From what we knew of von Schoenvorts, we would not have been surprised at anything from him; but the footprints by the spring seemed indisputable evidence that one of Caprona's undeveloped men had borne ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... so-called love of which he was capable. No doubt one reason he was untrue to her was that she was too pure for his debauched fancy. Thus reasoned Drumley with that mingling of truth and error characteristic of those who speculate about matters of which they have ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... have been hazarded pending an election. It is true, probably, of every administration, not excepting that of General Washington, that the second term was less acceptable to the country than the first. Mr. Lincoln had no second term, and it is useless to speculate upon its probable character, if he had lived to perform ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... mean anything in particular? He wondered. He continued to speculate after her departure. It was a random shot, he decided. If it had been otherwise she scarcely would be giving him her business now, especially to the extent of this deposit—which he was needing—well, nobody but Mr. Wentz knew ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... eastern Tennessee at once." Again Buell promised compliance, only, however, again to report in a few weeks his conviction "that an advance into East Tennessee is impracticable at this time on any scale which would be sufficient." It is difficult to speculate upon the advantages lost by this unwillingness of a commander to obey instructions. To say nothing of the strategical value of East Tennessee to the Union, the fidelity of its people is shown in the reports sent to the Confederate government that "the whole country is now in ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... of Weald Hall, Essex; and as that gentleman, by this time, must have some of his flock to dispose off, we think their introduction among cottagers, for their wool and also for their milk, a fair subject for some of our female readers to speculate on. This variety of the common goat (or, probably, it may be a distinct species) is a fine-looking animal, and would be very ornamental in a park, on a ruin, on the side of a rock, or in a churchyard. It would also be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... will be the result of the arrangement that we have made. I decline to speculate or prophesy on that point. It would be indecent and improper. I cannot even tell in this country at the next election how large the Liberal majority will be. Still less would I recommend hon. gentlemen here to forecast the results of contests in which they will not be candidates. I cannot ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... denizen of the Board of Trade hall. He speculates on the prices of next week's, of next month's meat and breadstuffs. And still this sort of gambler may be a book-keeper in a bank, a farm hand, or a clerk in a grocery store. It ha become so simple and so common a practice for persons to speculate on the markets that any person with ten dollars, or twenty-five dollars, or a hundred dollars may take his chances. Tens of thousands of dollars to-day are being swept into this silent whirlpool, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... the world calls villainy. The two fellows who robbed me were named Haines and Phelps; they made me known to all the speculators that visited New Orleans, and gave me the name of every fellow who would speculate that lived on the Mississippi river, and many of its tributary streams, from New Orleans up to all ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... same protective rights claimed by the more fortunate citizens of such countries. In doing this we shall give a practical illustration of the imprisonment of four individuals in South Carolina, and ask those who speculate in the abstract science of State sovereignty, to reflect upon the issue of that lamentable injustice which inflicts punishment upon persons guiltless of crime. We prefer to be plain, and we know our Southern friends will not accuse us of misconstruction, ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... Alice, "that property is mine and I bought it for a home, not to sell. If you and Colonel Doller want to speculate, you need n't think you 're going to rope me into ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... of taste and a gentleman," I answered deliberately. "There's nothing in the least improbable in his being infatuated with a young woman of charm and wit like this girl. And it is hardly profitable or decent to speculate as to her interest in him. You mustn't forget that Uncle Bash was an unusual man, a man with whom a young girl might easily fall in love without reference to his age or money ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... moment, we ought to expect a much larger proportion of cases in which the spectre should come at the moment of the death of one or another of all the cluster who are closely connected with the original of the spectre. But this, we know, is almost without example. It remains then, for all, who speculate at all, to look upon the asserted phenomenon, think what they may of it, the thing which is to be explained, as a connection in time of the death, and the {48} simultaneous appearance of the dead. Any person the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... of Lavengro might speculate whether that 'young gentleman' was Borrow, but Borrow was in Norwich in January 1824, his father dying in the following month. In his Celebrated Trials Borrow tells the story of the execution with wonderful vividness, and supplies effective quotations from 'an eyewitness.' Borrow no ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... To speculate upon my title and my rank in order to make a wealthy marriage? To quit my nomad's tent for a fixed residence other than that where the Prerolles have succeeded one another from generation to generation? Never! Of all our ancient prejudices, ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... bequeathing to them as birthright an environment that their fathers had to make. The material for constructing any theory of mental, or joint mental and physical evolution, is so hazy that one cannot do more than speculate. It may be noted, however, that acquired mental characteristics appear to be more transmissible, and less stable, than acquired physical characteristics; and that mental evolution (in the broad sense again) proceeds faster and collapses more readily ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... grow torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... their daily life, and possibly they are given too much to morbid introspection. But anything that serves to make a human being exercise the function for which his brain was originally intended should be regarded with thankfulness. It is a thousand times better for the development of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances, or to philosophize on the shortcomings of the maid-of-all-work, than to babble off the dates of the Sovereigns from William the Conqueror, or to construe Horace's Odes without taking in a ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... Act— originally devised by Cromwell—so paralyzed every Irish industry, that the Puritan party became almost as dissatisfied as the Catholics. They maintained a close correspondence with their brethren in England, and began to speculate on the possibilities of another revolution. Ormond, to satisfy their demands, distributed 20,000 stand of arms among them, and reviewed the Leinster Militia, on the Curragh, in 1667. The next year he was recalled, and Lords Robarts, Berkely, and Essex, successively appointed to the government. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... attention of the scientific world was drawn to the flint implements which were scattered over the surface of our fields and in our gravel pits and mountain caves; and inquiring minds began to speculate as to their origin. The collections made at Amiens and Abbeville and other places began to convince men of the existence of an unknown and unimagined race, and it gradually dawned on us that on our moors and ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sight, that of a man lying full length in the soft tender grass of some retired spot of Forest park—with his face hidden in his folded arms. To the few who may see him, if they speculate at all about him he sleeps or he rests his body after a day's fatigue. "Am I never to be the brave man?" thought Hosmer, "always the coward, flying even from my ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... populous, she should have defied the Romans when their spirit was perceived—should have made a more gallant defense against Masinissa, and concentrated all her energies for a last stand upon her own territories. But why should we thus speculate? The doom of Carthage had been pronounced by the decrees of fate. The fall has all the mystery and solemnity of a providential event, like the fall of all empires, like the defeat of Darius by Alexander, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... delighted that you have kept your promise to me not to speculate any more that he has planned—oh! I nearly told, and it's ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... it fades into illegibility, never reinforced by the scanning process. Sensory data, coming in from the outside world as it does, is probably permanent. But the thought patterns originating within the mind itself, the processes that correlate and cross-index and speculate on and hypothesize about the sensory data, these are much more fragile. A man might glance once through a Latin primer and have each and every page imprinted indelibly on his recording mechanism and still be unable to make sense out of Nauta ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... don't let us plunge from philology into ethnology. I prefer to speculate upon Mr. Thomas Burroughs. Who is he? and what does he want of ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... the collapse of fictitious values, as in the stoppage of immigration. The country has been ever since adjusting itself to a normal growth, and the recovery is just in proportion to the arrival of settlers who come to work and not to speculate. I had heard that the "boom" had left San Diego and vicinity the "deadest" region to be found anywhere. A speculator would probably so regard it. But the people have had a great accession of common-sense. The ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy nor the night black unto him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not his imagination. In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in all quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole world in ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... ignominiously washed his hands of it, sealed forever his own social doom. That, it is certain, was most severe and drastic. The money paid him by the British Government was accursed as were the thirty silver pieces of Iscariot; for his passion to speculate ruined him financially some time before the end of his life, and he breathed his last amid comparative poverty and the dread ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... no humour for sport of any kind; he did not care to look out at the ships, and speculate upon what port they were bound for; he picked up no stones to send spinning at the grey gulls; did not see that the gorse was wonderfully full of flower; and did not even smell the wild thyme as he crushed it beneath ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... Swinton, it is because I believe that a forger is always a sneak and a thief. I judge men as I find them. I speculate upon their unseen acts by what has gone before. A brave man is always a brave man, a coward always a coward, a thief always a thief, because it is his natural bent. It is useless to prolong this interview. You lose your son; I gain a wife. The world will be well rid of a dangerous ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... understanding, may be inspired with a longing to inquire more deeply into this interesting subject. They may be stimulated to investigate, in a philosophical spirit, all the marvellous facts and phenomena connected with volcanic agency, and to speculate on their causes and modes of operation. Some also, on reaching their manhood, may be induced to ascend one or more of the nearer active volcanoes, and examine their phenomena for themselves. The facilities of travel are now so great, that a visit to Vesuvius or Etna is no longer beyond the limits ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... festival to bring a light into her lovely eyes that seemed to spread up and around her white forehead and beautiful hair like a supernatural lustre. There was a fire that animated her which nobody who saw its glow or felt its warmth could question. Without that altar of music—But why speculate on what she might have been if she had not been what she was? That would be to consider ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Edith! And Peter, how he would need me to help him to be responsible for all the wonderful things that were going to happen to him right along, now that he was the success of the hour. Even the papers had begun to speculate that first morning on his ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the fault of the manager of the gardens; he has the will, but no funds. My idea of the object of a botanical garden is, that agricultural theories should be reduced to facts, upon which private enterprise may speculate, and by such success the government should ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... money and on unpaid board while he fooled with verses and refused the manual tasks that waited everywhere about the busy city. He might have cleaned the streets or earned a decent living handling garbage in the city scows. But he had preferred to speculate in blackmail and play the badger-game with his wife as an unwitting accomplice. He had hated millionaires, and counted them all criminals deserving spoliation, but he felt that he had ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... it was to wander softly about and read titles and look at bindings and speculate on what she would like! They had very few books at Uncle Leverett's. Some volume of sermons, a few biographies that she had found rather dreary, a history of the French-Canadian War, and some of Poor Richard's Almanacs, which she thought the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... answering the end designed, the directors, to improve the infatuation of the monied men, opened their books for a second subscription of a million, at four hundred per cent. Such was the frantic eagerness of people of every class to speculate in these funds, that in the course of a few hours no less than a million and a half was subscribed ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... large, the only difficulty was to get people who had been accustomed to speculate in grain, cotton, and petroleum to try a new commodity. I knew the opportunities for money making, but it was necessary to convince the speculator that the chances of gain were better, the possibility of loss less than in the well-known great ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... doing a very small business, sir," he answered, "but quite enough to make a living. I don't speculate as a rule. Hardwells seemed perfectly safe, or I wouldn't have touched them. I sold at four. They are not worth one. I could have bought thousands last ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... unlovely lives, and experience no pleasures and no surprises. They have few regrets; their minds are mere blanks, and life is one long continued struggle with nature for bare subsistence. What wonder then that they are fatalists? They do not speculate on the mysteries of existence, they are content to be, to labour, to suffer, to die when their time comes like a dog, because it is Kismet—their fate. Many of them never strive to avert any impending calamity, such, for example, as sickness. A man sickens, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... with an affected ease, and a gaiety which, he by no means felt, Undy Scott leant back in his chair, and began to speculate whether his new purchase was worth the purchase-money. 'He's a sharp fellow; certainly, in some things, and may do well yet; but he's uncommonly green. That, however, will wear off. I should not be surprised if he told Neverbend the whole transaction before this time to-morrow.' And then ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... stories of these "stirs" are always much the same everywhere, in Glenluce, at Tedworth, where the Drummer came, in Peru, in Wesley's house, in heroic Iceland, when Glam, the vampire, "rode the roofs." It is curious to speculate on how the tradition of making themselves little nuisances in this particular manner has been handed down among children, if we are to suppose that children do the trick. Last autumn a farmer's house in Scotland was annoyed exactly as the ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... of large blue pebble, some of a tun weight; and directs us to a village called Aimanderby. Barton on the Street, and Appleton on the Street, lye a little on the side of the road." Drake then proceeds to speculate as to the likelihood of the road still making a bee-line for York, or whether it diverged towards Malton, then no doubt a Roman station; but as his ideas are unimportant in comparison with his discoveries, ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... for a whole year owner of an eating-place in a good-sized seaport city, and had not yet noticed that some people ate pie without a knife. By it I fancied I could gauge the man's social inheritance. And there were other customs of the place in keeping with the pie and knife. I used to speculate on what primitive sort of an upbringing he had that he was so slow to adopt the most ordinary ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... found much to speculate on. "Here is one of the few buildings in the whole Exposition done in what might be called the conventional exposition spirit. I like it immensely as an exposition building, but I should hate it as ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... faces? This included the powder-bag; then I must save that beautiful lace collar; and my hair was tumbling down, so in went the tucking-comb and hair-pins with the rest; until, if there had been any one to speculate, they would have wondered a long while at the singular appearance of a girl who is considered as very slight, usually. By this time, Miriam, alarmed for me, returned to find me, though urged by Dr. Castleton not to risk her life by attempting it, and we ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... There was no doubt in Paul's mind as to the quality of his patron. He had at once recognized the Greatest Pitcher. He ceased to speculate as to whether this assured young man owned the high office-building. That was now ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... first, as I knew within an hour, father would be along when with his assistance I could be easily extricated. I soon had enough to do without laughing, for in half an hour after, I heard a step above, but before I had time to speculate on it, the nose of a half grown cub was thrust over the top, and in the next moment its ugly carcase came tumbling down and fell with a crash at my feet, uttering a cry of pain as it fell, which was answered by a growl ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... quaint jewelry of the first Italian race, whose ghosts, if they wail over the "find," "speak in a language man knows no more." She charms us with etchings or scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on pictured Scottish stones. In short, she engages man to investigate his ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have interested ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... speaking in the guns which crashed incessantly day and night, while shells of all calibres rained—so many to the second—from every yard of the British front, on the German lines. The correspondents with the British Headquarters could only speculate with held breath, as to what was happening under that ghastly veil of smoke and fire on the horizon, and what our infantry would find when the artillery work was done, and the ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... frankness of the eyes; the soft wave of her hair. There was a marked sadness in her face in repose; to wonder why, was to transgress the code of loyal humility that Will set himself; he had not even considered it due chivalry to speculate, much less ask, as to the reason of so amazing a phenomenon as her presence in California at all, and the incongruity of her school-teaching. Her pose was perfect, and yet nothing could be more unconscious. Was that marvellous spontaneity, that simple dignity, the regular ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... 'It is too early yet in this moment of grief to speculate as to his successor in the constituency. But, difficult as it will be to replace him, we may find some solace in the thought that it will not be impossible. The spirit of the illustrious dead would itself rejoice to acknowledge the special ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... England are (or were) far more neurotic than the women of France, as they have fewer natural outlets. And the struggle for legal enfranchisement, involving, as it did, a sensationalism that affected even the non-combatants, did much to enhance this tendency, and it is interesting to speculate whether this war will make or finish them. Once more, personally, I believe it will make them, but as I was not able to go to London after my investigations in France were concluded and observe for myself ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... influence of her letters he developed a tremendous capacity for work. The greatest stimulus in the world had come to him, and remained with him. If it should be withdrawn at any time, it would weaken him. He did not speculate on that. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... inclination to do so. Two healthy, intelligent children completed his domestic happiness; the boy was about to enter the military career, which had been that of all his ancestors; the girl was to remain yet a while under her mother's wing. Like all men of old descent, our baron was a good deal given to speculate upon the past and the future of his family. We have said that his means were not large, and though he had always intended to lay by, the time for beginning to do so had never yet come. Either some improvement ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... will be my last—that I swear to you, and upon it you can rely. Every thing is uncertain and wavering in life. They have ruined me, lacerated my heart, and there is nothing more in the world which I honor. Only sycophants and hypocrites surround me, who speculate upon my future greatness; or spies, who would make their fortune today, and therefore spy and hang about me, in order to be paid by the reigning king, and who slander me in order to be favorites of his. No one at court loves me, not even my wife. How should she? She is ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... It is idle to speculate whether the "nephesh" of the animals, or the "living self" of the man, is an entity separate from the body, and capable of existing per se—of its own inherent nature—apart from it. We do not know that animal forms are the clothing of a lower-graded but separate ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy. The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing, one very windy, but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... facts as those under discussion, he must show how it is that hallucination might be supposed to work: he must bring forward some analogies and examples of somewhat similar instances in order to have a case at all. In science, we cannot speculate in vacuo, but must connect with what is already known, if we wish to be scientific at all. What analogies, then, have we that spirit-hands, similar to those described, can be created by suggestion; and that suggestion can ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... as well acquainted as I hope we will, it must be the result of a common business interest. So, then, for a bargain. I am going to enter this field in a large way; if you will take me for a client, I will buy and sell through you whenever possible. Perhaps we can even speculate together now and then. I'll guarantee you against loss. What ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... general discharge of tobacco-juice seemed to express the general adoption of the new-comers, whoever they were, as a necessary element of the scene, which it was useless to oppose, and about which it was idle to speculate. Before the Squire had found his party seats on one of the benches next the bar, the spectators had again given their languid attention to the administration of justice, which is everywhere informal ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... inwardly at his sister's indifference to her great opportunities for learning, would speculate to himself on the probable fate of each volume in the old schoolmaster's library, which had been sold when he, Friedrich, was but three years old. Thus, in these circumstances, the boy expressed his feelings with moderation when he said, "Our ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... together (though both of them, and especially Edith, had altered somewhat with the passage of years) without being reminded of the former love affair in which Lambert's double had been the hero. Did this also occur to Edith? It could hardly have been otherwise, and it would be interesting to speculate on her feelings in the matter; but I have only the story to tell. At all events, they never did marry, though they became very tender friends. At the end of seven years Colonel Saltine died of jaundice; he had been failing in his mind for some time previous, and had always addressed Lambert ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... were still fixed upon the line, I had completely given up my thoughts to the story of the poor German boy, who had been snatched from poverty by the interference of the parish clerk's daughter; and I contrived to speculate on what I should have done under such circumstances, imagining all sorts of extravagances in which I should have indulged, to testify my gratitude to so amiable and ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... on animal as a savage does at a ship{179}, or other great work of art, as a thing wholly beyond comprehension, but we feel far more interest in examining it. How interesting is every instinct, when we speculate on their origin as an hereditary or congenital habit or produced by the selection of individuals differing slightly from their parents. We must look at every complicated mechanism and instinct, as the summary of a long ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... the people, though by no means destitute of decency and propriety, are not cleanly. The women bathe their hands once a day, but any other washing is unknown. They never wash their clothes, and wear the same by day and night. I am afraid to speculate on the condition of their wealth of coal-black hair. They may be said to be very dirty—as dirty fully as masses of our people at home. Their houses swarm with fleas, but they are not worse in this ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... with safety only after materials from many sources have been obtained. It will not be safe for the collector to speculate much upon that which he observes. His own theory or explanation of customs will be of little worth, but the theory and explanation given by the Indians will be of the greatest value. What do the Indians do, and say, and believe? When these are before us ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... wished to speculate upon abstruse problems of identity, there was neither time nor the mental aptitude. A little later he had given his card to the servant at the door and was waiting in a darkened and most depressive library for the coming of the master ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... Yet she had demanded a lover-like devotion, and allowed him to speculate on what might have been if she were rich or he older. And though Jim's sturdy common-sense had kept him from going very deep, he felt wretched and jealous that any other man should have the supreme right; ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find it difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and speculate about what it was we WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a tremendous accession to power for one's party. Liberalism was ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... people towards whom, and in concert with whom, to practise his justice; and in like manner the man of perfected self-mastery, and the brave man, and so on of the rest; whereas the man of science can contemplate and speculate even when quite alone, and the more entirely he deserves the appellation the more able is he to do so: it may be he can do better for having fellow-workers but still he is certainly ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... speculate in what are called refuse slaves; i. e. the poor diseased ones. Many of them die in the piazzas of the auctioneers; and sometimes, in the agonies of death, they are sold as low as ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... Sypher, leaning over the footrail of the bed. "Next time you speculate come to me first for advice. Let me be your agent for ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... a mind measurable by its wants. Is there to you no meaning in the singularity that power in full degree to speculate upon the future was given to man alone? By the sign as I see it, God meant to make us know ourselves created for another and a better life, such being in fact the greatest need of our nature. But, alas! into what ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... least to detract from the praise due to Sinclair Lewis for the remarkable accuracy with which he reports details in his "Main Street," it is interesting to speculate on how other books might have read had their authors had Mr. Lewis's flair for minutiae and their publishers enough paper to ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... to her across the table.] It's true! And I led him to speculate more, I tricked him first with winning and then let him go! I knew he'd soon do for himself alone, and he did! Yes—I ruined him purposely and you through him, so as to get you to be my wife. I did it purposely and I'd do it again! Of course I meant ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... he followed her Master. Being in the light she understood the light, and had no need of system, either true or false, to explain it to her. She lived by the word proceeding out of the mouth of God. When life begins to speculate upon itself, I suspect it has begun to die. And seldom has there been a fitter soul, one clearer from evil, from folly, from human device—a purer cistern for such water of life as rose in the heart of Janet Grant to pour itself into, than ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... believe, moderately as usual," replied George, with a worried look on his face; "but I tell you frankly, Ben, whether it's a good thing or not, if that's Miss Mitty's legacy, you oughtn't to speculate with it. ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... "If ye who speculate and doubt as to the existence of a hell but peer into the hearts of those vile creatures who slew poor Cook, you will draw back in terror; for hell, black hell is there. To give birth to a deed of such infamy, ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... theory. But, to take a practical case: Here are the Australians, roaming in small bands, without more formal rulers than 'headmen' at most; not ancestor worshippers; not polytheists; with no departmental deities to select and aggrandise; not apt to speculate on the Anima Mundi. How, then, did they bridge the gulf between the ghost of a soon-forgotten fighting man, and that conception of a Father above, 'all-seeing,' moral, which, under various names, is found all over a huge continent? I cannot see that this problem ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... till his return home in November, 1389, with the affairs of Castile, and with claims arising out of his disbursements there. The reasons for Chaucer's attachment to this particular patron are probably not far to seek; on the precise nature of the relation between them it is useless to speculate. Before Wyclif's death in 1384, John of Gaunt had openly dissociated himself from the reformer; and whatever may have been the case in his later years, it was certainly not as a follower of his old patron that at this date Chaucer could have ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... under the Republic by the incessant calls of active life, now asserted itself in all earnest characters, and would not be content without satisfaction. Virgil was cut off before his philosophical development was completed, and therefore it is useless to speculate what views he would have finally espoused. But it is clear that his tone of mind was in reality artistic and not philosophical. Systems of thought could never have had real power over him except in so far ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the South Sea Bubble, which would have brought to life anything, and for a wild short season the quacks and alchemists and Jews came back: the ball rooms and the gaming saloons filled again. New houses were built; "amongst them that of Baron Swasso." To speculate as to who Baron Swasso may have been is agreeable: but the baronial hall could not save Epsom. Even a more powerful attraction than Baron Swasso failed to do so; or, rather, refused to try. She was Miss Wallin, whom the vulgar addressed as Crazy Sally; but she was not so crazy. Miss Wallin was a ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... grasp upon the work which should have been his a year before, and an interest in it. Only now for the first time did he take the trouble to learn the real meaning of resources and liabilities; to estimate profit and loss; to speculate upon success in the business which he found rather larger than he had suspected. He called a round-up to learn to the head how many steers and cows and calves carried the Bar L-M brand. He brought a quick look of surprise that was close to suspicion into Garth's eyes by asking casually just ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... George," pursued Mrs. Fowler—and from the sweetness of her manner she might have been paying him a compliment—"is that he has never been steady. He doesn't stick at anything long enough to make it a success. If he were left to himself he would speculate wildly, and this is why his father is obliged to overlook all that he does in the office. It is just here that you can be of such wonderful help to him, Gabriella, by your influence. This is why ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Indian differ from the Negro, and the European from both? This is a question on which we can only speculate. But we shall find it profitable to study the paths by which these diverse races found their way to America from man's primeval home. According to the now almost universally accepted theory, all the races of mankind had a common origin. But ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... go on speculating, hoping to discover real people in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift's Stella and Vanessa, and his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel, however, that these poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love are no mere goldsmith's compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... natural actions and the properties of things; and, being in alleged communication with supernatural beings, they were supposed to acquire such knowledge from them. Hence, by implication, the priest became the primitive man of science; and led by his special experiences to speculate about the causes of things, thus entered the sphere of philosophy: both his science and his philosophy being pursued in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... demonstrative of affection than was his wont. He seemed to eye me with a pitiful love that puzzled me; and he began to talk (this also was rare with him) of my special position, how I must be apart from other men, and to speculate in seeming idleness on what a place such as mine would be to him and make of him. All this came between our spurts of rowing or among our talk of sport or of flowers as we lay at ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... in prices is not instantaneous and equal for all things. Sharp men, brokers, and men of business, will not suffer by it; for it is their trade to watch the fluctuations of prices, to observe the cause, and even to speculate upon it. But little tradesmen, countrymen, and workmen, will bear the whole weight of it. The rich man is not any the richer for it, but the poor man becomes poorer by it. Therefore, expedients of this kind have the effect of increasing the distance which separates wealth from poverty, ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... clear and well imagined. He invited capitalists not to speculate in the lottery, but to guarantee it for a certain sum. In the case of the lottery's losing, each guarantor would have to share in paying according to the sum named, and in like manner they would share in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... taking some consolation from his briarwood and a steaming hot Scotch. For some minutes he continued in what for some reason or other is known as a brown study. How long he might have continued in that condition it is not necessary to speculate on. A tap at the window aroused him from his revery. He glanced in the direction from whence the sound came. There he beheld the well-known face of his first lieutenant, Smith. He motioned Handy ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... can be more miserable than the situation of a poor girl, who, after spending not only the interest, but the solid capital of her small fortune in dress, and frivolous extravagance, fails in her matrimonial expectations (as many do merely from not beginning to speculate in time). She finds herself at five or six-and-thirty a burden to her friends, destitute of the means of rendering herself independent (for the girls I speak of never think of learning to play cards), de trop in society, yet obliged to hang upon all her acquaintance, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... that is another matter; for there the moral element comes in. It is possible (and here lies the interest of the enigma) that the Veiled Being may one day justify himself even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing so behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely useless to speculate. Light may one day come to us, but it will come through patient investigation, not through idle pondering and guessing. In the meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the microcosm, ourselves including both extremes, and being, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... may speculate in love a little on her own account. She is only to be trusted as far as any other woman." He snorted in disdain. "And the fellow is young, eager, good looking. At any rate, I shall steer them both out of Lilienthal's clutches. The game is too risky for 'mein frent ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... inclined to speculate, to philosophize, and to reason on everything, it is not surprising that a fundamental law, as vaguely expressed as the charter, should leave ample room for discussion. We find that our own long experience in these written instruments ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that American of all others to whom this second chapter on England's Effort may look for sympathy. Whither are we tending—your country and mine? Congress meets on April 1st. Before this Letter reaches you great decisions will have been taken. I will not attempt to speculate. The logic of facts will sweep our nations together in some sort of intimate union—of that ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... time, too, that Bragg's army was falling back and scattering—makes the affair look like one of simple bravado, as if the leader was willing to be captured, provided he could end his career in a blaze of excitement created by his dash and daring. But it is useless to speculate now. Broken into squads, some few of his men will doubtless escape across the river, and make their way singly to the Confederacy, to tell the story of their long ride through Indiana and Ohio; but the power ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... passion, is eager for the trifles the possession of which would highly satisfy his vanity, his innate desire for luxury, and his more noble and more respectable love of the beautiful: upon this the dealers in this class of articles speculate. To tax fancy and elegance is no less odious or absurd than to tax circulation: but such a tax is collected by a few fashionable merchants, whom general infatuation protects, and whose whole merit generally consists in warping taste and generating fickleness. Hence no one ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... with orthodoxy. The painters are metaphysicians and psychologists. The breaking down of Exclusionism in China and Japan and in the United States has astonished History. The science of astronomy is going downward so that, though Pickering, for instance, did speculate upon a Trans-Neptunian planet, and Lowell did try to have accepted heretical ideas as to marks on Mars, attention is now minutely focused upon such technicalities as variations in shades of Jupiter's fourth ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... reaction has followed the late madness that it is said that this Sandgoist who purchased the ticket to speculate upon it has been unable to find ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... true I am not always faithful, but I never lose courage. I leave myself in the Arms of Our Lord. He teaches me to draw profit from everything, from the good and from the bad which He finds in me.[33] He teaches me to speculate in the Bank of Love, or rather it is He Who speculates for me, without telling me how He does it—that is His affair, not mine. I have but to surrender myself wholly to Him, to do so without reserve, ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... seeing that there is a nature or fixed order in all things known to us, it is conformable to the nature of our minds to believe that this universal Nature has a cause which operates continually, and that we are totally unable to speculate on the reason of any of those disorders or evils which we perceive. This I believe is the answer which may be collected from all that ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... extraneous means to work it off. "Slow and sure," is their motto—"Carpe diem," essentially that of their antagonists. And yet in one thing, we believe, most individuals holding these opposite opinions will be found to concur. They all speculate. Heraclitus signs his contract with a shudder, and trembles as he places his realized premium in the bank. Democritus laughingly subscribes his name to thousands, and chuckles as he beholds his favourite stock ascending in the thermometer of the share-market. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... I have no time to speculate upon it now, so get yourself ready. Wait a bit, my lady! I'll go along ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... and to speculate upon the exact place where the lion ended and the lamb began. The wholly religious character of the book was no drawback to its popularity, for the two great diaries of the time show how absolutely religion permeated the atmosphere surrounding ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion AT ALL satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws. A child (who may ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... "Physics are concerned with things which have a principle of motion in themselves; mathematics speculate on permanent, but not transcendental and self-existent things; and there is another science separate from these two, which treats of that which is immutable and transcendental, if indeed there exists such a substance, as we shall endeavor to show ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... means of pumping, this continuing nearly to the Gila River, out upon the Pima reservation. Now there is further extension eastward, and the great plain that stretches as far as Florence is being settled by population very generally tributary to Mesa. It would be idle to speculate upon the future of the city, but its tributary farming country is fully as great as that which ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... English ten-pound note, and the rest in new glittering napoleons—and then began to speculate upon the possibility of giving Austin twenty pounds, and appropriating the balance to her own uses. The children wanted so many things—that perpetual want of the juvenile population above all, shoe-leather; ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... daily life, and possibly they are given too much to morbid introspection. But anything that serves to make a human being exercise the function for which his brain was originally intended should be regarded with thankfulness. It is a thousand times better for the development of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances, or to philosophize on the shortcomings of the maid-of-all-work, than to babble off the dates of the Sovereigns from William the Conqueror, or to construe Horace's Odes without taking in a syllable of ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... enjoy himself - in India he wants to save money - and he does not in the least like getting hurt. He has received just sufficient education to make him understand half the purport of the orders he receives, and to speculate on the nature of clean, incised, and shattering wounds. Thus, if he is told to deploy under fire preparatory to an attack, he knows that he runs a very great risk of being killed while he is deploying, and suspects that he is being thrown away to gain ten minutes' time. He may either deploy ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... been so faultless that there seemed to be no possibility of failure. To take his fair-minded son—with the mother's eyes—into the game would be suicidal. The young fellow would turn from him forever. Bansemer never went so far as to wonder whence came the honest blood in the boy's veins, nor to speculate on the origin of the unquestioned integrity. He had but to recall the woman who bore him, the woman whose love was the only good thing he ever knew, the wife he had worshipped while ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... been able to leave his parish for a long day; so Bessie had plenty of leisure to speculate upon the possible loves of other people, instead of enjoying the blissfulness of her ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... excite himself over a mirror, or when his European visitors try to swagger with their mechanical appliances. Mr. Herbert Spencer founds, on the statements of Mr. Bates already quoted, a notion that "the savage, lacking ability to think and the accompanying desire to know, is without tendency to speculate". He backs Mr. Bates's experience with Mungo Park's failure to "draw" the negroes about the causes of day and night. They had never indulged a conjecture nor formed an hypothesis on the matter. Yet Park avers that "the belief in one God is entire and universal ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... digestive processes, continues to exist,' and gives us his own idea of how Keats should have treated the subject. An eminent French critic once exclaimed in despair, 'Je trouve des physiologistes partout!'; but it has been reserved for Mr. Rossetti to speculate on Endymion's digestion, and we readily accord to him all the distinction of the position. Even where Mr. Rossetti seeks to praise, he spoils what he praises. To speak of Hyperion as 'a monument of Cyclopean architecture ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... flat. I saw many ten-pound fish, but I did not know enough about bonefish then to appreciate what I saw. However, I did appreciate their keen sight and wariness and wonderful speed and incredible power. Some of the big surges made me speculate what a heavy bonefish might do to light tackle. Sam and I were disappointed at our luck, somewhat uncertain whether it was caused by destructive work of crabs or the wrong kind of bait or both. It scarcely occurred to us ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... tiny stream of salt water in the picturesque gorge—as weird and puzzling a bit of scenery as can be found in Persia, if one carefully examined each hill, each rock, and tried to speculate on ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... that question, for their principal support is the ignorance of the popular masses. They speculate on it, they work upon it by a ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... along with you. The fabric consolidates itself more and more, even while the earthquake rocks it; for, with a thousand drawbacks and deductions, love grows larger, zeal warmer, truth firmer among us. It makes the mind sad to speculate upon the question how much better all might have been; but our mourning should be turned into joy and thankfulness when we think also ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... the principal departments, coextensive with that which would be necessary for a government of the whole. The entire separation of the States into thirteen unconnected sovereignties is a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates. The ideas of men who speculate upon the dismemberment of the empire seem generally turned toward three confederacies—one consisting of the four Northern, another of the four Middle, and a third of the five Southern States. There is little probability that there would be a greater number. According to this ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... snow-laden pines and spruces, all inextricably mixed as the sleigh spun by. It was too late to turn back now, she knew; the best that could be done, was to hurry on—and she began to count the hoof-beats and to speculate how long it would be before they would see the lights of the little station, and find the ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... was resumed, and Mr. Fogo left to speculate on these dark sayings. But as the boat drew near the column of blue smoke that, rising from the hazels on the left bank, marked the whereabouts of the Dearloves' cottage, he grew aware of a picture that, perhaps by mere charm of composition, set his ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Reviewer, in discussing an objection to the Copyright Bill of Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, which was taken by Sir Edward Sugden, gives some curious particulars of the progeny of literary men. "We are not," says the writer, "going to speculate about the causes of the fact; but a fact it is, that men distinguished for extraordinary intellectual power of any sort rarely leave more than a very brief line of progeny behind them. Men of genius have scarcely ever done so; men of imaginative genius, we might say, almost ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... has somewhere heard, that a good housewife never has any thing to purchase when it is wanted. This maxim is often in her mouth, and always in her head. She is not one of those philosophical talkers that speculate without practice; and learn sentences of wisdom only to repeat them: she is always making additions to her stores; she never looks into a broker's shop, but she spies something that may be wanted some time; and it is impossible to make her pass the door ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... historical event I have been tempted to connect with this spot is the entry of Louis d'Orleans in 1452, who is said to have lodged in the "Hotel d'Estellan, Rue Petit Salut." But the house is worth visiting if only to speculate on the dungeon windows in the corner of the little street outside, and to look up the Impasse Petit Salut a little further on, where the Tour de Beurre rises with an extraordinary effect of solitary beauty above the twisted roof trees into ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... innocent; what had particularly annoyed him was the fact that he should have given the matter a second thought. To begin with, it was none of his business and he was not a man who presumed to judge or even speculate on other people's indiscretions. Claire Robson was no sheltered schoolgirl. She was a full-grown woman, in the thick of business life. Such women were not taken unawares. He had just dismissed the whole affair from his mind on this basis ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... not stay to speculate any longer upon them. He resolved to wake Guapo; but in doing so the whole party were aroused, and started to their feet in some alarm and confusion. The noise and movement had its effect on the nocturnal visitors; for before Leon could explain himself, those immediately around the fires and for ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... countenance, and doubtless genial ways, had the right to stand at her dressing-table, if he chose, and speculate upon the various uses of all the daintiness that was spread before him. He had the right and cared nothing for it, while the man who did care, stood there shamefaced, all at once feeling himself an intruder in a ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... Inhabitants. The undertaking met with almost prompt and cordial support; the proudest names and the brightest lights of the age were enlisted in it. The celebrated Madame de Maintenon became the patroness, forbidding, however, the Society to speculate upon her affairs; the illustrious Duke de Rohan became the president; the Czar Peter an honorary member; and the Society was otherwise royally and nobly officered and befriended. So numerous were the applications to be received as members, that it was found necessary to establish ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... perhaps permissible to speculate that electrons are small satellites, and that atoms of helium are larger ones. But to pursue the subject further, without more definite knowledge, which can be gained only by experiment, ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 3 • Various
... not so void of reason, as their practised conclusions. Some have held that snow is black, that the earth moves, that the soul is air, fire, water; but all this is philosophy: and there is no delirium, if we do but speculate the folly and indisputable dotage of avarice. To that subterraneous idol, and god of the earth, I do confess I am an atheist. I cannot persuade myself to honour that the world adores; whatsoever virtue ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... powerfully reinforced, and further, from the nature of the animal remains arose the conviction that "existing animals have a close relation in form with extinct species," another of the germinal facts which bore fruit in the "Origin of Species." Darwin was led to speculate on the causes which could have extinguished so many great species, and he remarks most suggestively: "One is tempted to believe in such simple relations as variation of climate and food, or introduction of enemies, or the increased numbers of other species, as the cause of the succession ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... stranger chanced to wander near her hut and overhear her jargon, incessant as it was, and shrill, he might speculate in vain on the reason of these sounds. If he waited in expectation of hearing some reply, he waited in vain. The strain, always voluble and sharp, was never intermitted for a moment, and would continue ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... its real nature, even though hundreds of eclipses furnish them with the indisputable evidence of its presence. The sun is so thickly surrounded by a shell of this "red matter," that it is useless for them to speculate with only the help of their physical instruments, upon the nature of that which they can never see or detect with mortal eye behind that brilliant, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and adventurous part, which we have dealt with in others, not excluding by any means in this half-reflective, half-contrasting office, the philosophical side also. Yet when men pray and fight, when they sneer and speculate, they are constrained to be very like themselves and each other. They are much freer in their dreams: and the Romance of the Rose, if it has not much else of life, is like it in this way—that it ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... infatuation or any renewal of it. And he had been taught to read through the beautiful twilighted woman, as if she were burnt paper held at the fire consuming her. His hopes hung elsewhere. Nevertheless, an intellectual demon-imp very lively in his head urged him to speculate on such a contest between them, and weigh the engaging forces. Difficulties were perceived, the scornful laughter on her side was plainly heard; but his feeling of savage mastery, far from beaten down, swelled so as to become irritable for the trial; and when he was near her house he held a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be another review, he supposed. A longer and more detailed one. There must be, had to be, something they'd overlooked in the first one. Had he been right in freezing out so many who wanted to speculate in that first one? But ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... day! The weariness! The sense of all being finished! She did not even allow herself to speculate as to what Hector was doing with himself. She must never let her thoughts turn that way at all if she could help it. She must devote herself to Josiah and to getting through the time. But something had gone out of her life which could never ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... thousand francs a-year is the least a Parisian can live upon. It is not only that all prices have fabulously increased, but that the dearer things become, the better people live. When I first came out, the world speculated upon me; now, in order to keep my standing, I am forced to speculate on the world. Hitherto I have not lost; Duplessis let me into a few good things this year, worth one hundred thousand francs or so. Croesus consulted the Delphic Oracle. Duplessis was not alive in the time of Croesus, or ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... the true instinct of a pure and innocent girl, shrank from his companionship; innocence will ever shrink with innate consciousness from baseness. He persuaded Hunter to rent a farm in addition to his own, and lent him money to speculate largely in breeding fancy sheep. The speculation failed—the agent pressed for payment. His master came forward and paid the amount. Thus he appeared as a benefactor, and Ellen's gratitude soon ripened into love; but her brother was in the way. He went ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... strides straight to the highest office that England could bestow. And others aver that when he was created a Peer in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven it was a move toward the Premiership, and that if his health had not failed he would surely have won the goal. But how futile it is to speculate on what might have happened had not this or the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... but men are different. If there is a veil before us, we must tear it away,—not sit muffled in its folds, and speculate on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... $125,000. The "Little Sons" looked at one another in consternation, while Brewster's indifference expressed itself in an unflattering comment upon his friend's vulgarity. "Good Lord, Nopper," he added, "you would speculate about the price ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... in the next minute or two one may speculate about, yet never definitely know, for in the instant of profound silence that followed Hank's roaring voice, and as though in answer to it, something went past through the darkness of the sky overhead at terrific speed—something of necessity very large, for it displaced much air, while ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... his views: "It is simply impossible for us to speculate on the course of the river, because we were unfortunate enough to pass it by in the night. It seems to me more probable, however, that it finds its way to the sea to the east of ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... through a court-yard, and the lamp goes out, so he went —in the night. Who can say? Wherefore speculate? He is gone. It is enough. Were it not for thee, Egypt should see ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and as we drove along before our now friendly wind I could not but speculate on the future. Here are wide tracts of fertile soil watered by abundant rains. The temperate sun warms the life within the soil. The cooling breeze refreshes the inhabitant. The delicious climate ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... had life. Looking for a while at the old man, I was satisfied that he was engaged in an act of worship or prayer, or communion of some kind with a supernatural being. I longed to penetrate his thoughts, but I could do nothing more than conjecture and speculate. I knew that though the intellect of an Indian can embrace the idea of an all-wise, all-powerful Spirit, the supreme Ruler of the universe, yet his mind will not always ascend into communion with a being that seems to him so vast, remote, and incomprehensible; and when danger ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... He could speculate on these things as if they were matters affecting none of us there. In that fourpenny doss-house he remained as aloof as a god, and in some vague way the calmness of the man in face of this infringing realism for ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... literature, not void of "detective stories," had at this moment primed Louise with its influence to the extent of inducing her to scent a mystery in the history of Captain Wegg. The plain folks around Millville might speculate listlessly upon the "queer doin's" at the farm, and never get anywhere near the truth. Indeed, the strange occurrences she had just heard were nearly forgotten in the community, and soon would be forgotten altogether—unless the quick ear of a ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... rises, and the colder air from the poles rushes in to supply its place. This causes wind, but the winds which would be raised on Venus by the rush of air from the icy side of the planet to the hot one would be tornadoes such as we could but faintly dream of. It is, of course, useless to speculate when we know so little, but in a subject so intensely interesting we cannot help guessing ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... hard work he found time to evolve a theory of whirlwinds and to speculate upon the soaring of birds. A companion has recorded in the following terms another matter which engaged much of his attention at this time: "The boldest of his speculations, and one of the soundest, as after-events proved, was his plan for ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... little time to speculate on this theme, however, for the next instant a piteous cry broke from the girl's lips—a cry in a voice strangely familiar; a cry that sent the blood bounding through his heart like an electric shock—and before he could take a step forward to prevent it, the ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... Carlyle tried hard to persuade him to "descend," but it would appear Emerson never to his dying day understood what Carlyle meant by the appeal, an appeal to take the devil by the throat and cease to merely speculate and dream (1803-1882). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the strange thrill that passed over me when I thus found myself standing on what I knew must be the eastern side of the globe. As soon as I had fairly recovered the use of my reason, I began to speculate as to the region of the country into which I emerged. If I had come directly through the centre of the earth, I knew, of course, just where I ought to be; but this hardly seemed possible, considering how short a time it had required for my journey. ...
— John Whopper - The Newsboy • Thomas March Clark
... Arthur Delaine's clumsy hints occurred to her. Was there, indeed, some private matter weighing on the young man's mind? She would not allow herself to speculate upon it; though she could not help watching the relation between the two men with some curiosity. It was polite enough; but there was certainly no cordiality in it; and once or twice ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dear sister. To speculate upon my title and my rank in order to make a wealthy marriage? To quit my nomad's tent for a fixed residence other than that where the Prerolles have succeeded one another from generation to generation? Never! ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... not yourself with that at present which you have not the power to comprehend, and speculate not on my proceedings, but listen to my words, and follow my advice, if you will that I should serve you in ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... might be he had for years not allowed himself to speculate. Unbidden at times the memory of certain revealing looks or acts of his father's floated into his mind:—a dread if not terror that on occasion dilated the elder man's eyes, and a steadfast driving of himself at work as if to obliterate painful and despairing thoughts, ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... what's that I hear about prices? I hope you're not offering to speculate in half-finished holes, or anything ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... for purposes of defence. You conquer an attack of rudeness by courtesy: you avert an attack of accusation by flattery. Every:one remembers the anecdote of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Ewing. "Prince," said Napoleon to Talleyrand, "they tell me that you sometimes speculate improperly in the funds. "They do me wrong then," said Talleyrand. "But how did you acquire so much money!" "I bought stock the day before you were proclaimed First Consul," replied the ex-bishop, "and I sold ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... too much pressing business for him to speculate on a girl's waywardness; orders to give, and then important matters to discuss at the warehouse before he made himself presentable at the dinner. The three years had added much to Marsac's store of knowledge, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... safely speculate about the nature and relation of things with which he is unacquainted at first hand, and the acquirement of an intimate and practical knowledge of the process of species-making and of all the uncertainties which underlie ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... opposed to our general ideas of physics that those who have not seen it sometimes deny its actuality, and those who have only occasionally witnessed it subsequently doubt the evidence of their own eyes. Others, who have seen the exceptional performances, speculate on various explanations, but the majority give it up as ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... that I can see at this moment, a stone summer-house like M. Chalmette's, so convenient for an afternoon nap, while the quail are singing all around among the vines. But no, constantly led astray by treacherous illusions, I longed to make a fortune, to speculate, to try banking operations on a grand scale, to tie my fortune to the chariot of the successful financiers of the day; and now here I am at the most melancholy stage of my history, clerk in a ruined counting-house, intrusted with the duty of answering a horde of creditors, of shareholders ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... their chaps, who had left the range for the chance of sudden wealth, to storekeepers from Hereford and other towns. Excitement reigned, no one was normal. Bottles passed freely. Among the crowd moved shifty-eyed men who had come to speculate. There were gamblers, plain bullies, swaggerers, with here and there a bearded miner, gray of hair and faded blue of eye, either moving steadily through the throng or held up by a little crowd to whom he declaimed with the right of experience. Some, it ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... men found out that there was in Wall Street a broker who didn't speculate himself, who didn't drink to excess, who was absolutely honest, and who never opened his mouth when it was better shut, they began to patronize that man's firm. In short, the moment Jarrocks Bell's qualities were discovered, Jarrocks Bell ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... of the same protective rights claimed by the more fortunate citizens of such countries. In doing this we shall give a practical illustration of the imprisonment of four individuals in South Carolina, and ask those who speculate in the abstract science of State sovereignty, to reflect upon the issue of that lamentable injustice which inflicts punishment upon persons guiltless of crime. We prefer to be plain, and we know our Southern ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... as Saturn, it is of even more interest to the amateur astronomer, because he can study it with less optical power, and see more of the changes upon its surface. Every work on astronomy tells in a general way of the belts of Jupiter, and many speculate upon their causes. The reader of recent works knows that Jupiter is supposed to be not a solid mass like the earth, but a great globe of molten and vaporous matter, intermediate in constitution between the earth and ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... father had gone to pay the morning visit to the printing shops, he ran out to post the letter himself. He could not be contented until it was in the post. Now, when he saw men of about his own class and age in the street, he would speculate upon their experiences in the romance of women. And it did genuinely seem to him impossible that anybody else in a town like Bursley could have passed through an episode so exquisitely strange and beautiful as that through which he was passing. Yet his reason told him that ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... certain as anything can well be, that his influence, exercised through Lord Normanby, alone averted French intervention in August 1848, when the desperate state of things made the Italians willing to accept foreign aid. What would have happened if the French had intervened it is interesting to speculate, but impossible to decide. Their help was not desired, except as a last resource, by any party in Italy, nor by any man of note except Manin. The republicans wished Italy to owe her liberation to herself; Charles Albert wished her to owe it to him. The King ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... entered into with the Portuguese for the possession of that place, which could not fail to prove most convenient for our eastern commerce. An equivalent may be found among the West Indian islands; but it is perhaps equally vain and invidious to speculate on such very distant concerns, when the wonderful events now occurring in a kingdom so long the torment and the teacher of nations, arrest the imagination from every trivial selfish pursuit, and fix the mind undividedly on ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... of which she had heard from her childhood, he felt that her attention was no longer his; that a discord had come in between their minds; that she had passed out of his power. This certainty of intuition lasted but for an instant; he had no time to wonder or to speculate as to what had affected her so adversely to his wishes before the door opened and Kinraid came in. Then Hepburn knew that she must have heard his coming footsteps, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Calvinists of all countries have presented the strongest possible resemblance to each other—the Calvinists of Geneva and Holland, the Huguenots of France, the Covenanters of Scotland, and the Puritans of Old and New England, seeming, as it were, to be but members of the same family. It is curious to speculate on the influence which the religion of Calvin—himself a Frenchman—might have exercised on the history of France, as well as on the individual character of Frenchmen, had the balance of forces carried the nation bodily ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... in return—knives, or tobacco, or sago, or handkerchiefs. I then have to endeavour to explain, through any interpreter who may be at hand, that neither tripang nor pearl oyster shells have any charms for me, and that I even decline to speculate in tortoiseshell, but that anything eatable I will buy—fish, or turtle, or vegetables of any sort. Almost the only food, however, that we can obtain with any regularity, are fish and cockles of very good quality, and ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... tithing which they have never reported to the General Tithing Office. We have documents to show that Bishops have taken in hundreds of bushels of wheat, and only a small portion of it has come into the General Tithing Office. They stole it to let their friends speculate upon."* ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Captain Cannonby. If this gentleman really was with Frederick Massingbird when he died, and saw him buried, it was evident that it could not be Frederick come back to life. In that case, who or what it might be, Lionel did not stay to speculate; his business lay in ascertaining by the most direct means in his power, whether it was, or was not, Frederick Massingbird. How was it possible to do this? how could it be possible to set the ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the boy's mind, was an object of special interest. He would purposely sneak up-stairs and sit on one of the soft sofas in the foyer simply to see the well-dressed diners go in and come out. Edward would speculate on whether the time would ever come when he could dine in that wonderful room ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... his own would have told Dr H. in the words of Bacon, that "the prerogative of God extendeth as well to the reason, as to the will of man;" and that therefore it became him humbly to contemplate what God has done, rather than to speculate as to what he might have done. In nothing, however, has he so monstrously blundered, as in hinting, that if an event is natural, therefore Providence is out of the question in effecting it; and that, on the other hand, if it is not natural, therefore even a benevolent Providence, that has ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... It is easy to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and foremost, without which any other favorable ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... make a second set of drawings that is somewhat different, though of a simpler shape and design, on which other scientists aboard can speculate, and which can be sent to Earth to ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... in the first century before Christ), and by his pupil Themison (B.C. 50). The third school of medical thought, that of Empiricism, taught that experience was the only teacher, and that it was idle to speculate upon remote causes. The Empirics based these views upon the teaching of philosophers known as Sceptics or Zetetics, followers of Parmenides and Pyrrho, who taught that it was useless to fatigue the mind in endeavouring ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... what she had gleaned from me last night, I was sure of that; but I was not so sure about Alb, who wore a clouded brow. Whether he was worrying over his own affairs, or whether friend Robert had commandered his hero's sympathy, I could not guess, and dared not ask. Nor had I much time to speculate upon Alb's business, for I saw by Freule Menela's eye that my own was pressing, and all my energies were bent in steering clear of her during the good-by excursion ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly. Therefore, being desirous, too, of telling the truth in this matter, I must confess that Lucy did speculate with some regret on what it would have been to be Lady Lufton. To have been the wife of such a man, the owner of such a heart, the mistress of such a destiny—what more or what better could the world have done for her? And now she had thrown all that aside because she would not endure ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... no great theories of government. Even their literature was, in part, an imitation of the Greek, though possessing many elements of native strength and beauty. They were a people who knew how to accomplish results rather than to speculate about means and ends. Usefulness and effectiveness were with them the criteria of the worth of any idea or project. They subdued and annexed an empire, they gave law and order to a primitive world, they ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... came as a shock to Ethne. She did not guess the correct answer; she was not, indeed, sufficiently mistress of herself to speculate upon any answer, but she dreaded it, whatever ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... P. Jones will encounter ruin is almost a matter of course; but then he is none the worse for being ruined. It hardly makes him unhappy. He is greedy of dollars with a terrible covetousness; but he is greedy in order that he may speculate more widely. He would sooner have built Jones's tenth block, with a prospect of completing a twentieth, than settle himself down at rest for life as the owner of a Chatsworth or a Woburn. As for his children, ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... by looking back, he commanded a view of the opening among the mountains which indicates the site of the valley of the Rhone. The look was long and understanding; but, when it was ended, he turned and resumed his march with the business-like air of one more disposed to act than to speculate on the future. But for the few words which had just escaped him, this natural movement would have attracted no attention; and, as it was, it was observed by none but the Signor Grimaldi, who would himself have attached little importance to the ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... dusk, and drive off toward the bruised sunset. The observation of this pointless and preposterous phenomenon had become a sort of cult among the men of Fish. To observe, that was all; there remained in them none of the vital quality of illusion which would make them wonder or speculate, else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond all religion—the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... eighties was a most speculative time all over Australia and New Zealand. I was glad that leaving the English and Scottish Bank enabled my brother to go into political and official life, but it also allowed him to speculate far beyond what he could have done if he had been manager of a bank. Everybody speculated—in mines, in land, and in leases. I was earning by my pen a very decent income, and I spent it, sometimes wisely and sometimes foolishly. I could be liberal to church and to good causes. I was able to keep ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... forced on the attention of the country by the course of the war, it may not be uninteresting to speculate upon the nature of the possible boundary, which a drawn game in the contest—a possibility at least, viewed from that early point of observation—might have imposed upon the two future nationalities. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... morning I felt a weight at my heart, and a cloud on my brain, for which I could in no way account. As I passed along Broad Street, I made one or two bold attempts to rally. I stared inquisitively at the different passers by, endeavouring, by a snatch at the expression of their faces, to speculate on the turn of their minds, and the nature of their occupations; I then began to whistle and hum some lively air, at the same time twirling my glove with affected unconcern; but nothing would do; every exertion ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... who performed an artificial hypospadias on themselves for a specific purpose, requiring a knowledge of the anatomical relation of the parts as well as of their physiological functions, it is hard to speculate how the operation was first suggested or how it came at first to be performed. As a Malthusian agent it is certainly an operation of the highest merit, and it should be introduced, by all means, in the United States, where the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... sort of continuity and unity in thought The preoccupations of man are the same in all ages—to provide for his material needs, and to speculate what can possibly happen to his spirit, when the body, broken by accident or disease or decay, can no longer contain his soul. The best thought of man has always been centred on trying to devise some sort of future hope which could ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that states very much nearer to us than the End must be utterly beyond the powers not only of our understanding but also of our imagination, even when strained to its utmost. This being so, why should we attempt to speculate about The End? Instead, why not ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... in fact, it was the only thing to be done, for he was off. So I sat down and watched the scorner of girls disappear eagerly around a bend in the road. At the end of a half hour of waiting I began to speculate. Had Dickie's courage failed him, had he taken to the woods, or was he upbraiding her of the gatepost for the sin of conceit? I would go and see ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... coat, and a sallow, fattish face adorned with dark, well-curled moustaches, and that incorrigible commencement of whisker which, eluding the strictest attempts at shaving, seems the mark of something deeply ingrained in the personality of the shaver, being especially noticeable in men who speculate. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... kitchen. Through the day, while the baking and washing and ironing were going on, the father lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself had hewn, or out at the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle over and over. It diverted him to speculate as to how much weight each of the steers would probably put on by spring. He often called his daughter in to talk to her about this. Before Alexandra was twelve years old she had begun to be a help ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages. Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will live in all weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they must have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Chance" is nearly half done before the drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Almayer's Folly" we are thrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginning until we come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book. As in structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to look about. Whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions of motives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soon as they are made. Even the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (in the English ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Lucy went on smoothly, and the Professor showed no sign of wishing to break the engagement. But Hope, as he confided to Lucy, was somewhat worried, as his pauper uncle, on an insufficient borrowed capital, had begun to speculate in South African mines, and it was probable that he would lose all his money. In that case Hope fancied he would be once more called upon to make good the avuncular loss, and so the marriage would have to be postponed. But it so happened that the pauper ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... the head-master to the most prudent dealer, and the boys who lost their money time after time should be dismissed. Of course if any boy proved to have a genius for speculation and made money—well and good, let him speculate by all means. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... around him. After sailing along a coastline of cliffs some 200 feet in height, and in general effect and outline not unlike those of Dover, he observes an apparent breach in the sea-wall, forming two abrupt headlands, and ere he has time to speculate upon the cause of that fancied ruin, his ship glides between the wave-worn cliffs into the magnificent harbour of Port Jackson. The view which solicits the eye of the sea-wearied voyager as he proceeds up ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... sat down to our solitary wedding breakfast; and there were no eyes to speculate upon the bride's beauty, to note her changing color, or the glory of her eyes; and no healths were proposed or toasts drunk, nor any speeches spoken—except, perhaps by my good friend—the brook outside, who, of course, understood the situation, and babbled tolerantly of ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... is anything buried there," said the Colonel hastily. "I only said it was remotely possible. The Indians have been gone from this region for so long that it is not safe to speculate upon anything they might have left. I only know that from time to time ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... brain in its excited state was scarcely able to tackle. His thoughts got somewhat confused and broken as he approached his chambers. He was so near the letter now—a few minutes and he would no longer need to wonder or speculate about it, but would know exactly what she said. He turned and stood for a minute or so at the Temple gates, looking out upon the busy Strand. It was still as lovely as a summer night could be overhead, but down here it was—well, it was London, which is another thing. The usual ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... is April! Peter said. 'The First of April, as I think. Five little weeks will soon be fled: One scarcely will have time to wink! Give me a year to speculate— To buy and sell—to drive a trade—' Said Paul 'I cannot change the date. On May the Fourth it must ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... Lord Bathurst is at Cirencester, the Duke of Wellington in Holland, Lord Sidmouth in Yorkshire, Peel and Lord Melville in Scotland with the King. No event ever gave rise to more speculation with the few people there are left to speculate, and the general opinion seems to be that Canning will not go to India,[10] but will be appointed in his room. It certainly opens a door to his ambition as well as to that of Peel, who, unless Canning comes into office, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the level of the Odd Fellows regalia, and only used by them on rare occasions. For the last ten years, however, it had done miscellaneous duty as warder of Old Man Wheeler's lumber-room. If a key could be supposed to peep through a keyhole, and speculate on the nature of the service it was rendering to humanity, in keeping safe the contents of the room into which it gazed, this key might have indulged in fine conjectures, and have passed its lifetime in a state of chronic bewilderment. ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... disguised after the modern fashion. And the same is true of the baptized infidelity imported from Germany. The German mind is cramped and diseased by the bands which confine it. It is not allowed to speculate freely on politics, and the many questions most nearly touching present interests. Therefore, on the records and on the doctrines which pertain to eternal interests, it falls with an insane avidity for innovation, and runs into licentiousness a liberty no where else enjoyed. Hence the levity, ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... he was going to marry old Miser Jerrold's daughter. He wanted to quit father's employ, and he thanked him in a real manly way for the manner in which he had always treated him. Well Jacobs left, and mother says that father would sit and speculate about him, as to whether he had fallen in love with Eliza Jerrold, or whether he was determined to regain possession of the box, and was going to do it honestly, or whether he was sorry for having frightened the old man into a greater degree of imbecility, and was ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... "Don't—don't wonder and speculate any more why a little girl of ten years didn't do exactly as a grown-up person would have done," burst forth Uncle John. "The whole blame lies with us, or with Tom and me. We should never have allowed such a child to be sent off ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... promised to bring him fifty per cent. He invested in the traffic of usury what had sufficed to save a hundred such as I am from perdition, and he lost it all. It was nearly his whole fortune; but he lives and has his luxuries still: be cannot speculate, but he can save: he cared not if I starved, for he finds an ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... because we want to do business. But I just ask you, if she had given me five francs for myself and paid my return journey, would that have ruined her? A pretty girl like her oughtn't to be hard up for money. I know very well that in our calling there are some people who are hardly honest, who speculate and ask for commissions, and then put out nurslings at cheap rates and rob both the parents and the nurse. It's really not right to treat these dear little things as if they were goods—poultry or vegetables. When folks do that I can ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... other. "That is why we're only ready to offer you out-district virgin forest value for the portions colored blue in this plan. In other words, we speculate by advancing you money ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... they think most likely to prevail, in order to obtain to themselves consideration in some new order or disorder of things. They may be led to act in this manner, that they may secure some portion of their own property, and perhaps to become partakers of the spoil of their own order. Those who speculate on change always make a great number among people of rank and fortune, as well as amongst the low ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... you are in need, denotes that you will speculate unwisely and distressing news of ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... "I speculate about my lot as a woman; I see the bitterness and the sorrow of my sex through the ages. I have become physically misshapen, so that I am no longer attractive to him. I am no longer active and free, I can no longer go about with him; on the contrary, I am a burden, and he is a man who never ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... of the measure of all values (gold) is detrimental to the interests of trade. It makes the man of business an involuntary gambler, for in all sales where future payment is to be made both parties speculate as to what will be the value of the currency to be paid and received. I earnestly recommend to you, then, such legislation as will insure a gradual return to specie payments and put an immediate stop to fluctuations in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... the utmost; and Wilfred, determined to rise to the occasion, threw off his sadness, ceased to speculate as to the chances of the insurrection {xvi}; that night, at least, he would give to joy—he would encourage his people who loved him so faithfully by rejoicing ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... with the things the men required in readiness for a spring campaign[740] but it was up-hill work. And what was perfectly incomprehensible to him was, that when his need was so great there was yet corn available for private parties to speculate in and to realize enormous profits on.[741] In April, the Indian regiments, assembling and reforming in expectation of a call to action, made special demands upon his ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded and gave over. I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my dander got hotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace of mind till I dined on roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, that that stood for skookum mamook pukapuk—excuse Chinook, I mean there was ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... light in No. 401; but then it was too late. Had he been delayed ten seconds, or had he gotten off at the fourth floor, he would have—. However, I anticipate; or rather I speculate on what would have happened under hypothetical conditions—which is fatuous in the extreme; hypothetical conditions never are ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... afford to shut out the intellectual and mentally progressive element, or must it accept as normal these salaries and make it respectable to begin on them? It is the strain which unessential social conventions give to the young families that leads the business father to speculate in order to get into the $10,000-a-year class, and that leads the young scientific and literary man to take extra work outside of his normal duties. This sort of thing cannot go on without serious danger to the Republic. Cleanliness and good manners should be insisted upon, but they may ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... healthy, intelligent children completed his domestic happiness; the boy was about to enter the military career, which had been that of all his ancestors; the girl was to remain yet a while under her mother's wing. Like all men of old descent, our baron was a good deal given to speculate upon the past and the future of his family. We have said that his means were not large, and though he had always intended to lay by, the time for beginning to do so had never yet come. Either some improvement to house or grounds was wanted, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... familiar with Nevada, there are dozens of such desert reaches which must instantly suggest themselves to the mind, and it is interesting to speculate, not altogether idly, on how advantage might be taken of such conditions. The Bulletin particularly speaks of one of ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... may be given without the least hesitation: with stone tools. For many years the method of working the stones was a matter of great debate, and the uncertainty then prevailing permitted many theorists to speculate on the "Roman" origin of the structure. Now, however, the entire absence of any metal which resulted from Mr. Gowland's excavations in 1901, at once precludes the possibility of the builders being anything but a primitive people, to whom the use of metal was unknown, or only partly ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... slip of paper from headquarters had said, and he did not speculate as to what those services would be, but he knew that they would not be exactly holding Sunday-School picnics in the neighborhood of Montdidier. Billy Brownway, machine gunner, had assured Thatchy that ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... down the History-book, and to speculate upon what MIGHT have happened in the world, but for the fatal occurrence of what actually did take place (a most puzzling, amusing, ingenious, and profitable kind of meditation), have no doubt often thought to themselves what a specially bad time Napoleon ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... high northern latitude in Baffin's Bay, who appear to be so isolated, and so unconnected with their brethren of South Greenland, as to justify us in connecting them rather with the numerous ruined habitations found westward as far as Melville Island, and lead the mind to speculate upon some more northern region,—some terra incognita, yet to be visited by us,—encourages us, aye, urges us not to halt in our exploration. Humanity and science are united in the cause: where one falters, let a love for the other ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... back through Vernor Vinge's "True Names" (see the {Bibliography} in Appendix C) to John Brunner's 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider"). Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly na"ive and tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived but innovative "Max Headroom" TV series. See {cyberspace}, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... done and instantly. He gently closed the door before answering the third question. In his nervousness he spoke in English, advancing to the middle of the room. Impossible to see the woman to whom he hissed this alarming threat-he only could speculate ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the American rebellion so soon after he had ignominiously washed his hands of it, sealed forever his own social doom. That, it is certain, was most severe and drastic. The money paid him by the British Government was accursed as were the thirty silver pieces of Iscariot; for his passion to speculate ruined him financially some time before the end of his life, and he breathed his last amid comparative poverty and the dread ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... researches enable me to discover the exquisite pencil that paints the flower of the field? and have I ever detected the secret that gives their brilliant dye to the ruby and the emerald, or the art that enamels the delicate shell?—I observe the sagacity of animals—I call it instinct, and speculate upon its various degrees of approximation to the reason of man; but, after all, I know as little of the cogitations of the brute as he does of mine. When I see a flight of birds overhead, performing their evolutions, or steering their course to some ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... gathering feet about the house. Almost on tiptoe he entered the lofty hall, high above the first story. The dust lay thick on a large marble table—but what was that?—a streak across it, brushed sharply through the middle of the dust! It was strange! But he would not wait to speculate on the agent! The room to which the earl had directed him was on the first floor, and he ascended to it at once—by the great oak staircase which went up the sides ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... world's eye, are dear to us all;—are, doubtless, intended to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly. Therefore, being desirous, too, of telling the truth in this matter, I must confess that Lucy did speculate with some regret on what it would have been to be Lady Lufton. To have been the wife of such a man, the owner of such a heart, the mistress of such a destiny—what more or what better could the world have done for her? And now she had thrown all that aside because she would not endure that Lady ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... warm man in the City circles. His only child was Kate, a girl of seventeen. There were no other near relatives, save Dr. Dimsdale, a prosperous West-end physician. No wonder that Ezra Girdlestone's active business mind, and perhaps that of his father too, should speculate as to the disposal of the fortune ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... never good times in England since the poor began to speculate upon their condition. Formerly, they jogged on with as little reflection as horses: the whistling ploughman went cheek by jowl with his brother that neighed. Now the biped carries a box of phosphorus in his leather-breeches; and in the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... muscle in an effort to breathe naturally, like one asleep, the boy counted the seconds while he waited for the clutch of a savage hand. And as the moment passed and the attack did not come he tried to speculate on what the strangers were doing. A guttural half exclamation soon allowed him a quick breath of temporary relief. The Indians were only after ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... sup in comfort, or sleep in peace, or to do anything but plan and speculate. Never till this night had we talked with absolute mutual confidence, for Davies broke down the last barriers of reserve and let me see his whole mind. He loved this girl and he loved his country, two simple passions which for the time absorbed his ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... otherwise their condition in the world beyond, their ideas as to the other life continued to remain vague, and never approached the minute precision of the Egyptian conception. The cares of the present life were too absorbing to allow them leisure to speculate upon the conditions ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... it as a matter of course that he should speculate and gamble at cards, and indeed do anything and everything he fancied, but they beg him at least to keep to respectable clubs. He is constantly away. His daughter tries to tempt him home with the bloom of her hyacinths. 'How they long to see him again!' she says, 'how greatly have they been disappointed, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... wrong, because I don't speculate," he returned. "I'm not a gambler—except on certainties. I guess I disappointed a friend of yours the other day because I wouldn't back him on ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... land is one of black and white, mostly black, without many of those really dangerous half-lights and shadows in which too many of our present day playwrights virtuously invite us to skulk and peer and speculate. ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... negative. And Fenwick looked up quickly, and uttered a little sharp "Ah!" as though something had struck him. The slow head-shake said as plain as words could have said it, "I wish I could say yes." So expressive was it that Fenwick did not even speculate on the third alternative—a separation without a divorce. He saw at once he could make it easier for her if he spoke out plain, treating the bygone as a thing that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... a place of such luxury. The main dining-room, to the boy's mind, was an object of special interest. He would purposely sneak up-stairs and sit on one of the soft sofas in the foyer simply to see the well-dressed diners go in and come out. Edward would speculate on whether the time would ever come when he could dine in that wonderful ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... side. Ventilators were quickly brought to their places, and later even the hatches were battened down. The dust became suffocating, and the men at times had all they could do to keep from choking. What the stuff was we could not at first conjecture, or rather, we didn't have much time to speculate on it, for we had to get our ship in shape to ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... was Alice who said, "Shut up, Pop"—and rather casually at that—and she and me went on to speculate and then to argue about which buttons we ought to push, if ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... his crucibles had burst except one, which Kellerman said contained the "Blacker than Black." One of his assistants, however, protested that no gold had ever been found; and so, even persevering old Kellerman, the last of his race, who dared to speculate with the iron horse just behind him, disappears from the scene, discredited by the Phillistines, ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... is astride of his hobby, the case is hopeless. To cast a doubt upon even the least of his declarations touching the doings of the Roman General is the signal for a blaze of arguments down all his battle front; and I really do not like even to speculate upon what might happen were I to meet one of his major propositions with a flat denial! But an attack in flank, I find—the sudden posing of a question upon some minor antiquarian theme—usually can be counted upon, as in this instance, to draw him outside the Roman lines. ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... a fancy to speculate how, supposing the matter still undecided, I would like to spend my life. Often I feel how good it would be to give it in service to one of my six dear friends: just to offer it to them as so much capital, for whatever it may be worth. ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... last remark," he said. "My opinion is your views are sound. It is very rash to speculate on shares you don't ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... for dollar—always—sometimes more. My people are popularly known as Shylocks. But you note that my rate of usury is small, the time long, and that I want these settlers to stay. I am not trying to get rid of them in order to speculate on their land in coming days of prosperity—the days when you will be landlords over broad acres and I a merchant prince. I say again, I believe in the West and in you farmer people who must turn the West from a wilderness to ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... that he feared it would be so, although he could not yet speak with any degree of certainty; and getting away as soon as he could, went home to con Newman's letter once more, and speculate upon ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... I am philosopher enough to be happy,—I meant to say not particularly unhappy,—in solitude; but man is an animal made for society. I was gifted with reason, not to speculate in Aspenden Park, but to interchange ideas with some person who can understand me. This is what I miss at Aspenden. There are several here who possess both taste and reading; who can criticise Lord Byron and Southey with much tact and "savoir du metier." ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... cabinet itself—receives him;"—and Ichabod grew more than ever pleased and satisfied with the idea, when he reflected that Jared had all along been held to possess a goodly person, and a very fair development of the parts of speech. He even ventured to speculate upon the possibility of Jared passing into the White House—the dawn of that era having already arrived, which left nobody safe from the crowning ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... attempt to speculate on the original creation of the universe. Their speculations, however, are concerned with what is called Avantara srishti or that creation which springs forth with the awakening of Brahman. Creation and Destruction have occurred ceaselessly and will occur ceaselessly. The ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... on my return. He always, morning, noon, and night, had one either in his hand or projecting out of his mouth. It signified not what was his occupation, the little stiletto was always to the fore. We used to speculate on board if he so slept, and the ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... Monstrous incongruity. Philosophy and fighting troopers. The Infinite and dead horses. There's humour for you. The Sublime takes off its hat to the Ridiculous. Send a cartridge clashing into the breech and speculate about the Absolute. Keep one eye on your sights and the other on Cosmos. Blow the reek of burned powder from before you so you may look over the edge of the abyss of the Great Primal Cause. Duck to the whistle of a bullet and commune with Schopenhauer. Perhaps I am a little mad. Perhaps I am supremely ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... most natural, and simplest means by which a living being can utter itself is gesture—action. It is not necessary to speculate on prehistoric conditions. We need only observe the world around us, the behaviour of our friends and acquaintances, particularly those of South-European blood, to recognize how direct and eloquent is the expression of gesture. On the stage a simple series of dramatic actions ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... why his brethren passed him over, and left him there all these years in Caesarea, whilst there was so much going on that was the continuation and development of the very movement that he had begun. We do not know why, and it is useless to try to speculate, but we may ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... a naval officer myself, I have gathered from the traditions of the service that it has been fully two hundred years since smoke or sail has been sighted east of 30d or west of 175d. The fate of the relinquished provinces which lay beyond the dead lines we could only speculate upon. That they were taken by the military power, which rose so suddenly in China after the fall of the republic, and which wrested Manchuria and Korea from Russia and Japan, and also absorbed the Philippines, is quite within the range ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had seen Frank over the mat which lay outside his study door, and that there was a six foot servitor to open any other door through which he might have to pass, he returned to his seat, and, drawing his chair close to the fire, began to speculate on ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... settlements must have some faults about them. There must be some inadequacy in their very nature to the purpose to which they were designed. We can only speculate as to where that fault, that inadequacy, is, but we may ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... carrying her milk-pail well-poised upon her head, began to speculate on its value. She would sell the milk and buy eggs; she would set the eggs and rear chickens; the chickens she would sell and buy a pig; this she would fatten and change for a cow and calf, and would it not be delightful to see the little calf skip and play? So ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... did not agree with her by any means; it made her hot with annoyance to realise that anybody could so think of James. At the same time she felt that she must steady herself. After all, a man might kiss his wife if he pleased, and he might do it how he pleased. It was undignified to speculate about it. She tried very hard to drive that home to herself, and she did succeed in imposing it upon her conduct. But she was not convinced. She was too deeply romantic for conviction by any such specious reasoning. That affair in the dark had been the real thing; it implied—oh, ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... consider what that work was, how varied and how wonderful, it seems idle—nay, it seems ungrateful and ungracious—to speculate too curiously on what further or other benefits this great intellect might have conferred upon mankind, had its possessor been endowed with those qualities of resolution and independence which he lacked. That Coleridge so often only shows the way, and so seldom ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion AT ALL satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws. A child (who may turn out an ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... anything was discovered, but again it was impossible, for there were calls upon me which I had not expected. If I had been short in my accounts I should have lost my situation, and it was a handsome one for a man of my age. You won't understand the details, but I began to speculate, to put off the evil hour, always hoping for a coup which would put everything right; but it never came. I was not helped, you see! Things went from bad to worse, until I could go on no longer. Then in despair I confessed the whole story to ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... telegraph was truly epoch-making. It came at a time when steam navigation on land and water was yet in its infancy, and it is idle to speculate on the slow progress which this would have made had it not been for the assistance ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... appreciation. "I'm going to ask a favour of you," he said. "I want to leave the general run of my investments and interests here in your hands, to keep track of I don't want to speculate at all, in the ordinary meaning of the word. Even after I bury a pot of money in non-productive real estate, I shall have an income of 50,000 pounds at the very least, and perhaps twice as much. There's no fun in gambling when you've got such a bank as that behind you. But if ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... with exemplary fortitude; and I was lately edified by the magnanimous unconcern with which a married friend of mine sang the last verse of "Home! sweet home!" as the chaise which was to convey him from the burthen of his song drove up to the door. It does not become a bachelor to speculate on the mysteries of matrimonial philosophy; but the feeling of pain with which I enter on the task of migration has no affinity with individual sympathies, or even with domiciliary attachments. My landlady is, without exception, the ugliest woman in London; and the locality of Elbow-lane cannot ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... has little contact with life and its interests, so strong is the social spirit that the preaching can be left out of account. What could be accomplished were the preaching as consciously directed to forwarding the social interests of the community one can only speculate."[19] ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... instructed me in the entanglements of Right and Wrong. Again it was you appeared in the meadows clad in a golden cope, like an Ambrose or an Augustine. Then I knew not the curse of thought; but you set me thinking. You put pride like a coal of fire on my lips; and I learned to speculate. But as yet, in the untrained freshness of my wit and raw youthfulness of mind, I felt no doubt. But again you came to me, and gave me uncertainty to feed on and doubt to drink like wine. So comes it, that this day I taste through you the entrancing illusion ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... into close, daily contact with the ruling power, a contact from which there was no escape, in which instinctive likes and antipathies might make or mar a career. At this thought the young man began to speculate with some intensity upon the personality indicated thus far to his mind only by the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... his home quite an hour after the time when the deed must have been done, and these women were discussing that point, one of them saying: "I don't believe my boy would ha' come 'ome that Sunday night if he'd ha' done it." It was surprising to me to hear a respectable mother speculate as to how her own son would behave in such a case, or contemplate even the possibility of his being guilty of murder; and I thought it all too practical a way of considering the subject. But it revealed how appallingly real such things may be to people who, as I tried to show ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... have the command of the story, and the artist was to illustrate him. How far these altered relations would have worked quite smoothly if Seymour had lived, and if Dickens' story had not so soon assumed the proportions of a colossal success, it is idle to speculate. Seymour died by his own hand before the second number was published, and so ceased to be in a position to assert himself. It was, however, in deference to the peculiar bent of his art that Mr. Winkle, with his disastrous sporting proclivities, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... with the vice or the vagabondage which it suggests. And so it is that Slang words have a life as closely packed with adventure as is the life of those who use them with the quickest understanding. To ask what becomes of last year's Slang is as rash as to speculate on the fate of last year's literature. Many specimens die in the gutter, where they were born, after living a precarious life in the mouths of men. Others are gathered into dictionaries, and survive to become the sport of ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... get at her, was a novel species of flattery. She recognized the ring of a distinctly new note in his voice; but, strangely enough, the note lost its unfamiliarity in an instant. Margaret recognized that fact also, and as she swiftly speculate don the phenomenon her pulse went one ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... idle to speculate whether the "nephesh" of the animals, or the "living self" of the man, is an entity separate from the body, and capable of existing per se—of its own inherent nature—apart from it. We do not ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... wild jungle creatures? Did they, in those days, cast aside their bark loin clothes, and revel once more in pristine nakedness, and in the green things of the forest, on all occasions of rejoicing? We can only speculate, and none can tell us whether we guess aright. But year after year, in a hundred camps throughout the broad Sakai country, the same ceremony is performed, and the same ancient chant goes up through the still night ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... noon, the usual hour of dinner, yet no preparations seemed made for the Queen's entertainment. Mary herself had retired into her own apartment, where she was closely engaged in writing. Her attendants were together in the presence-chamber, and much disposed to speculate on the delay of the dinner; for it may be recollected that their breakfast had been interrupted. "I believe in my conscience," said the page, "that having found the poisoning scheme miscarry, by having gone to the wrong merchant for their deadly wares, they are now about to ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... empty, and Jimmie Dale chose a seat by himself. How did she know? How did she know not only this, but the hundred other affairs that she had outlined in those letters of hers? By what means, superhuman, indeed, it seemed, did she—Jimmie Dale jerked himself erect suddenly. What good did it do to speculate on that now, when every minute was priceless? What was HE to do, how was he to act, what plan could he formulate and carry out, and WIN against odds that, at the outset, were desperate enough even to forecast ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... again disappointed; the news of victories gained by the French over the Austrians seemed to occupy every attention, and threw a dark shade over all expectation of present liberty. I learned, however, and a prisoner's mind would not fail to speculate thereon, that my detention was well known in Paris, and thought to be hard; but it was also said, that I was considered in the same light as those persons who were arrested in France, as hostages for ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... is a dynamic force within you. It pervades your whole being. It is an unseen but a very telling strength. It directs you, and it sends you on your errand of life. You cannot rest satisfied merely to know your ideal and to speculate about it. It is the engine of warfare in your career. Study ideals, not to contemplate and analyze, but to emulate them and to fill yourself with them. You have work to do. And work is more insistent than philosophy. You have work to do which no one else ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... and muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all the while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar atmosphere. It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad. You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again. Ah! that ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... into the basement and were passed in by the grille-keeper, whose manner betrayed a discreet consciousness of something in the air. It was unnecessary to speculate why. In the distance, muffled by the armoured passages, an authoritative voice boomed like a ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... a door, a latch clicked as the door was opened, a hollow jarring sound followed as the door was sharply closed. Stella went back into the room. The letter had been delivered; at this moment Henry Thresk was reading it; and with a sinking heart she began to speculate in what spirit he would receive its message. Henry Thresk! The unhappy woman bestirred herself to remember him. He had grown dim to her of late. How much did she know of him? she asked herself. Once years ago there had been a ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... inconstancy, and flitting from Kennedy's Red Discovery to Kennedy's White, and from Hood's Sarsaparilla to Mother Seigel's Syrup. And there were, besides, some mildewed and half-empty bottles, the labels obliterated, over which Nares would sometimes sniff and speculate. "Seems to smell like diarrhoea stuff," he would remark. "I wish't I knew, and I would try it." But the slop-chest was indeed represented by the plugs of niggerhead and nothing else. Thus paternal laws are made, thus they are evaded; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Bacon came by his death gives a good idea of how he tried to make use of his philosophy. He was not content with thinking and speculating, that is, looking at ideas. Speculate comes from the Latin speculari, to spy out. He wanted to experiment too. And although in those days no one had thought about it, we now know that Bacon was quite right and that meat can be kept by freezing it. And it is pleasant to know that before Bacon died he was able to write ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... not see any of an antique make. The men seemed to be contented with rings—huge, heavy rings of solid gold, worked with a rough flower pattern. One young fellow had three upon his fingers. This circumstance led me to speculate whether a certain portion at least of this display of jewellery around me had not been borrowed for ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... two miles from us, but we were most mercilessly jolted over a plank-road, where many of the planks had made a descent into a sea of mud, on the depth of which I did not attempt to speculate. Even in beautiful England I never saw a prettier sight than the assembling of the congregation. The church is built upon a very steep little knoll, the base of which is nearly encircled by a river. Close ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... object for them to buy. I got out with a net profit of seventy-four hundred and fifty dollars on the two schooners. Not so bad, eh, Mr. Ricks? Over nine thousand dollars in less than three months? Of course, I realize I could not have made that much if I hadn't had the funds with which to speculate." ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... prophetic. Clarinda turned out a remarkable woman. She married an eminent dissenting minister, and became the mother of Dr. John Aiken and Mrs. Barbauld, and in her granddaughter, Lucy Aiken, her matrimonial name still survives; so that the curious in such matters may speculate how far the instructions of Doddridge contributed to produce the "Universal Biography," "Evenings at Home," and "Memoirs of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... rafts which they moor to the bank. It is a busy scene; the wreckers, men, women, and children alike, are so engaged in their grab-bag game that they have no eyes for us; unobserved, we watch them at close range, and speculate ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... gentleman the lady's watch for the gentleman's horse." If lady's and gentleman's are nouns, her and his must be personal pronouns. The same remarks apply to my, thy, our, your, their and its. This view of these words may be objected to by those who speculate and refine upon the principles of grammar until they prove their non-existence, but it is believed, nevertheless, to be based on sound reason and ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... Asclepiades of Prusa (who lived in Rome in the first century before Christ), and by his pupil Themison (B.C. 50). The third school of medical thought, that of Empiricism, taught that experience was the only teacher, and that it was idle to speculate upon remote causes. The Empirics based these views upon the teaching of philosophers known as Sceptics or Zetetics, followers of Parmenides and Pyrrho, who taught that it was useless to fatigue the mind in endeavouring ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... moved so softly that he might not lose the echoes of this cry. The two men seemed alone in the silent scene. Once Tatsu thought his eye caught a swift flicker, as of a gray sleeve, but he was not sure. At any rate he would not think of it, or speculate, or marvel! He was beginning to tremble before the unknown. The sense of shrinking, of miracle, of being, perhaps, too small to contain the thing decreed, bore hard upon him. With it came a keen impression of the unreality ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... any action Ferguson must be convinced of the guilt of the man he was hunting, and nothing had yet occurred that would lead him to suspect Radford. He did not speculate on what course he would take should circumstances prove Radford to be the thief. Would the fact that he was Mary Radford's brother affect his decision? He preferred to answer that question when the time came—if it ever came. One thing was certain; he was not shooting anyone unless ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... did much to sharpen reason and to develop the mind, but they failed for want of data. Indeed, this has been the common failure of man, for in the height of civilization men speculate without sufficient knowledge. Even in the beginning of scientific thought, for lack of facts, men spent much of their time in speculation. The scholastic philosophers were led to consider many unimportant questions which could not be well settled. They asked the church authorities why the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... plans and intentions; or too dishonest to acknowledge either. But without pretending to any prophetic sagacity, we can certainly predict to that society the ultimate triumph of their hopes and labours; and disappointment and defeat to all who oppose them. Men may theorize and speculate about their plans in America. But there can be no speculation here. The cheerful abodes of civilization and happiness, which are scattered over this verdant mountain; the flourishing settlements which are spreading around it—the sound of Christian instruction, and scene of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... her feet in a moment. She appeared glad to have some excuse for action. She was, no doubt, nervous and excited as to the probable result of her lover's mission to the Hall, and wanted to be alone with Anne in order that they might speculate upon those probabilities which Banks's return would ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... entered the port of Joppa they observed another English yacht in those waters; but, before they could speculate on its owner, they were involved in all the complications of landing. On the quay, the Russian vice-consul was in attendance with horses and mules, and donkeys handsomer than either. The ladies were ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... philosophical; it is a dodging of the question, instead of an attempt to solve it. Divine ordination—"[Greek: Doz d' etelevto Bonlae]"—is a maxim which settles all difficulties. But it also precludes all inquiry. Why speculate at all, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... divined, not even she who, from her cradle, has been my destined bride. In this lies the secret of my political enthusiasm. Spain has taken the place of a mistress and received the homage of my heart. And now Spain, too, is gone! Beggared of all, I can gaze upon the ruin of what once was me and speculate over the mysteries of ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Perhaps I should have spoken when I first surprised the secret, but it's all so past that it's useless to speculate now. It was fate, I suppose. I was very young, you were very unapproachable, and—and we had no love to make the way easy." For a second her glance faltered and she looked away. "A woman's—a girl's—disillusioning is a very sad comedy—it should never have an audience." She laughed a ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... the sun. He is at home everywhere. When he dies they won't be able to get any grave to hold him. They will have to bury him under a pyramid." In our reckoning such a man hardly counts. It would be most interesting, if it were as yet possible, to speculate as to whether his permanent influence has been more on the side of a kind of a wild Titanic paganism, or of that ancient Calvinistic God whom Macandrew worships in the temple ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... episode T. began to speculate about sexual matters and to observe the coupling of dogs with newly acquired interest. At 10 years he often lay awake, listening to a woman of 25 singing to a piano accompaniment. The woman's voice seemed very beautiful, and so strongly impressed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... disturbing the ashes. Perhaps, he felt it all the more keenly on account of those expressions which recalled his own youth. He understood how irresistible must have been the strength of such a love and he trembled to speculate ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... time, we sat down to our solitary wedding breakfast; and there were no eyes to speculate upon the bride's beauty, to note her changing color, or the glory of her eyes; and no healths were proposed or toasts drunk, nor any speeches spoken—except, perhaps by my good friend—the brook outside, who, of course, understood the situation, and babbled tolerantly of us to the listening ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... steamers are usually filled with an interesting lot of passengers. At first you may only speculate as to who and what they are and whither they are bound, but as the days go by you get acquainted with many of them and find out who nearly everybody is and all about him. On this steamer there were several interesting people. First in station and importance ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... be insisted on for her,' said Miss Headworth. 'It is no use, however, to speculate on the future. We cannot guess how Mr. Mark Egremont's communication will be received, or whether any wish will be expressed for your mother's rejoining your father. In such a case the terms must ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Isidore of Seville. Then again, there is a danger, I think, analogous to the danger met with in early botany—the danger of confusing a resemblance with a relationship. It is extremely interesting to speculate that the Place de l'Etoile is an evolution from the plan of the game-forest, with its shooting avenues radiating from a centre, but it would be difficult to show that there is any historical connection. The thing ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... reached up tall enough. He had no love in his heart, nor mirth. My cousin has always loved a horse and even in his childhood this love was strong. And so, during the days that led up to Christmas when children speculate upon their desires and check them on their fingers, he kept asking his uncle for a pony. At first, as you might know, his uncle was stolid against the thought, but finally, with many winks and nods—pleasantries beyond ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... dogs of Caneville were little disposed to speculate that day, or I was very awkward in my occupation, but no one seemed willing to make a trial of my "fire-flies." In vain I used the most enticing words to set off my goods, even going so far as to say that cigars lighted ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... in forecasting what was going to happen downtown. I used to say to myself that if I had capital it would be easy to make money breed money. Well, one day I borrowed from the bank, without the bank's leave, $3,000 in order to speculate. I won on that deal and the next and the next. Then I was able to return what I'd borrowed and to set up in a small way for myself in the furniture business. That was my start, ladies—the ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... allow money-making—even for those he is to leave behind—to be combined with his pursuit, it loses its fresh relish, its exhilarating influence, and becomes the source of wretched cares and paltry anxieties. Where money is the object, let a man speculate or become a miser—a very enviable condition to him who has the saving grace to achieve it, if we hold with Byron that the accumulation of money is the only ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... her word. Young Hugh was an athletic, well proportioned, handsome man; of a sanguine temper, prone to pleasure, a frequenter of wakes and fairs, and much addicted to speculate; particularly in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... to understand why Bruno's prosecution occupied the Holy Office through this space of time. But conjectures on the subject are now useless. Equally futile is it to speculate whether Bruno offered to conform in life and doctrine to the Church at Rome as he had done at Venice. The temptation to do so must have been great. Most probably he begged for grace, but grace was not accorded on his own terms; and he chose death ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a stranger—to decoy him into a speculation that promised to bring him fifty per cent. He invested in the traffic of usury what had sufficed to save a hundred such as I am from perdition, and he lost it all. It was nearly his whole fortune; but he lives and has his luxuries still: he cannot speculate, but he can save: he cared not if I starved, for he finds an hourly happiness ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... talk so; but men are different. If there is a veil before us, we must tear it away,—not sit muffled in its folds, and speculate on what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... me, in 1837, that something might be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting upon all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... weighed down by such intense misery, or covered with filthier rags, though she was fatter than ever, and wore a stupid look. In the foulest weather, despite hard frosts or drenching rain, the old woman now followed funerals in order to speculate on the pity of the charitable. She well knew that amongst the gravestones the fear of death makes people generous; and so she prowled from tomb to tomb, approaching the kneeling mourners at the moment they burst into tears, for she understood that they were then powerless to refuse ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... of the last eight years, during which the system has been in force, may be taken as a reliable guide, the experiment shows many signs of success. It has certainly checked the tendency to speculate in lands with a view to a rise in price, which threatened to become a great, as it certainly was a growing, evil. It has been found that it will not pay to do this in the face of taxation, and particularly of the graduated tax; and owners of large areas ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... so, for, in spite of all their scout courage, the girls were not especially anxious to run headlong into the arms of two foreigners, who would undoubtedly be angry. The prospect of meeting a benevolent old grandfather was much more comfortable to speculate upon. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... When you speculate on margins you are like the fellow holding on a bear's tail as it runs around a tree—if you lose your hold the ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... worst of being in society is that you are forced to know so many disreputable people); when they come to our house—and they do come in shoals, Angelica being the attraction, you know—then we speculate. Angelica feels quite sure that the Duke of Morningquest himself is your father. He was a loose old fish, they say. And there is a sort of family likeness between you. Angelica thinks you came here that your presence might be a ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the present chronicler nor Mistress Plodgitt got any further information from the prudent Carmen, and must fain speculate upon certain facts ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... Jackson was accessible. But he was not communicative, and up to Inauguration Day people were left to speculate not only upon the truth of the rumor that there was to be a "full sweep" in the offices but upon the new Administration's attitude on public questions in general. Even Isaac Hill, a warm friend and supporter, was obliged to write to an acquaintance ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Paul. There was no doubt in Paul's mind as to the quality of his patron. He had at once recognized the Greatest Pitcher. He ceased to speculate as to whether this assured young man owned the high office-building. That was ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... seamen had free access to the shore. Under similar circumstances nowadays, if the fruit happened not to be ready, the ship would have been off, after ten days' relaxation, to survey other islands, or speculate on coral reefs, or make astronomical observations; in short, to do something or other to keep the devil out of the heads of the crew.'[8] Bligh would appear to have been sensible of this on his next expedition in the Providence, ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... good it would at least strike somewhere in the midst of the debris and add more or less to the wreckage. As to whether the Boche commander-in-chief had been caught napping and buried in the ruins, was a matter about which they could only speculate. ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... had been increasing for five or six years, therefore it is impossible to ascertain or even to speculate upon the distance to which it might extend. The slave-traders had been obliged to seek another rout, which they had found via the Bahr Giraffe, which river had proved to be merely a branch of the White Nile, as I had suggested in my former work, and ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... the mill we could see other objects of deep interest. These were, the vessels from St. Michael's, on their way to Baltimore. It was a source of much amusement to view the flowing sails and complicated rigging, as the little crafts dashed by, and to speculate upon Baltimore, as to the kind and quality of the place. With so many sources of interest around me, the reader may be prepared to learn that I began to think very highly of Col. L.'s plantation. It was just a place to my boyish taste. There were fish ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... General Tithing Office. We have documents to show that Bishops have taken in hundreds of bushels of wheat, and only a small portion of it has come into the General Tithing Office. They stole it to let their friends speculate upon."* ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... responsibility, where I could have rallied my enfeebled health. Besides, I had a doubt whether I ought to be put on a District so soon again, after having completed two full terms before I reached my fortieth year. But it is vain to speculate in advance. At the close of the Conference, I found myself appointed Presiding Elder ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... only speculate, of course, on such an occasion, but perhaps no trial is recorded as having taken place, with the results of which every body, the parties convicted only excepted, was, in all probability, better pleased ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... tenants could be found, the house was eventually pulled down, and a row of fine modern buildings now occupy the site. As the history of the place could never be traced with any degree of authenticity, one can do no more than speculate as to the cause of the disturbances, which, I am inclined to think, were due to the phantoms of people and animals that had once actually lived ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... whose beaming face shone out from the midst of a bevy of particular friends, while ever and again above the turmoil, like a banner in the breeze, waved the tawny mane of Sir Digby Oakshott. It amused Railsford to watch the group, and when now and then they looked his way, to speculate on what was the subject of their conversation. Perhaps Arthur had been telling them of the new master's athletic achievements at Cambridge, and how he had rowed his boat to the head of the river; or possibly he had been describing to them some of the big football-matches ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... Gaston's brief visits from home, Joyce had gone to Drew, timing her call when she knew his womenkind were away. She had an instinctive aversion to her own sex. She had thought it was contempt for St. Ange womanhood; she did not speculate about these others. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... head-master to the most prudent dealer, and the boys who lost their money time after time should be dismissed. Of course if any boy proved to have a genius for speculation and made money—well and good, let him speculate by ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... potentialities had wakened her imagination. If she had been a young woman she knew that she might have fallen tragically and hopelessly in love with him; as an old woman she found it well worth her while to watch him and speculate upon him. When he had become engaged to Agnes Stornaway, she had watched him and secretly wondered how the engagement would end; when it had ended in marriage she had not wondered, but she had seen many things other people did not see. "He is not in love with ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and which came under the jurisdiction of Upham. In all these villages people were wont to run from the windows to the doors when they saw the doctor's sulky whirl past, peer after it, up or down the road, to see where it might stop, and speculate if this old soul were about to leave the world, or that new ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... And Sheil will abuse the Parliament, And Peel the Association; And the thought of bayonets and swords Will make ex-Chancellors merry— And jokes will be cut in the House of Lords, And throats in the County Kerry; And writers of weight will speculate On the Cabinet's design— And just what it did in Twenty-eight, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... conifer seeds for each one she chooses for growth, so we can only speculate as to the selection of the seed from which sprung this storied pine. It may be that the cone in which it matured was crushed into the earth by the hoof of a passing deer. It may have been hidden by a jay; or, as ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... commanded by the voice of Conscience, whose dictates I must not speculate about, but obey in silence—are they actually the means, and the only means, of accomplishing the earthly aim of mankind? That I cannot refer them to any other object but this, that I can have no other intent with ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... historical composition. The systems which professed to unfold the nature of God, of man, and of the universe, entertained the curiosity of the philosophic student; and according to the temper of his mind, he might doubt with the Sceptics, or decide with the Stoics, sublimely speculate with Plato, or severely argue with Aristotle. The pride of the adverse sects had fixed an unattainable term of moral happiness and perfection; but the race was glorious and salutary; the disciples of Zeno, and even those ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
