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More "Surmise" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not in so many words, at least virtually speaking—that love had come into Pia's life. Love embittered alone could have inflicted the wound she felt Pia to be enduring. And yet the wording of her letter would appear to put that surmise out of the question. Truly it was ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... knowledge of its contents, are still stronger elements of doubt. Together, the circumstances fully justify the scepticism of Mr. Hepworth Dixon in the copious compilation styled by him a History of the Tower, though it is not requisite to adopt his amusing surmise that a document allowed to repose in the dark till the present age was fabricated to taint the credit of Ralegh as a virtuous husband. Probably the epistle was innocently concocted as a literary exercise by an admirer, who wished to explain or apologise ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... forsaken and lonely. Such occasions previous to this, she had not waited until a special invitation had been given her, but joined and helped with the merry-making. She felt that something stood between her and Helen. Just what that something was, she did not know, nor could she surmise. There was nothing tangible for her thoughts to work upon to reach a conclusion. She instinctively felt that something was wrong. In this particular case, instinct was stronger than reason. She crept into ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... window, which was barred, and almost totally eclipsed by shrubs; but a clout of sky was just visible under the architrave. It was a very gray sky; gray also was Rachel's face in the sudden grip of horror and surmise. Then a ragged edge of cloud caught golden fire, a glimmer found its way into the dust and dirt of the secret chamber, and Rachel relaxed with a slight smile but an exceedingly decided shake of the head. Thereafter she escaped incontinently, but successfully, as she ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... R.). And it is not difficult to surmise that the person who killed Wales was actuated by the strongest of all motives—self-protection. So in all human probability the murderer of Wales was also the murderer of Spencer Lee. You see, ladies and gentlemen, that by the use of a little patience we have come a long way in our ...
— The Thirteenth Chair • Bayard Veiller
... show himself. To discover his presence on shore, unless after many days, would, he believed, endanger the treasure. With his own knowledge possessing his whole soul, it seemed impossible that anybody in Sulaco should fail to jump at the right surmise. After a couple of weeks or so it would be different. Who could tell he had not returned overland from some port beyond the limits of the Republic? The existence of the treasure confused his thoughts with a peculiar sort of anxiety, as though his life had become bound up with it. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... 'I surmise Mr. Solo was lurkin' behind them there whiskers,' said a tall, thin Californian, when the party had somewhat ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... with great satisfaction. "Those two are going to catch it!" she said to herself; "I am glad I am out of it!" Mr Roberts knew sorrowfully that the surmise was woefully true, but he was rather relieved to find that his sister-in-law was "going to catch it" with him. Her presence was a sort of stick for him to ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... His surmise proved correct. Mark came quickly up, and held out his hand. He was dressed in Egyptian costume, and with his dark complexion and black eyes might easily have passed as ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... The shrewdness of this surmise struck her as not without humour. She smiled, and, turning, flung the stick straight down to the ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... blushed, and he no longer doubted the truth of his surmise. However, Raymonde was just then settling the bill with the easy assurance of a girl who is expert in figures; and immediately afterwards Madame Desagneaux led Madame Volmar away. The waiters were now growing more distracted ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... directing their movements with off-hand eloquence. We forbore to fire, because, although we did not understand what he said, we thought from the emphasis of the speaker, his volubility, and the imprecatory sound of the language, that it was French, and that his party were Louisianians. This surmise was correct. They were members of Colonel Mouton's fine regiment, the Eighteenth Louisiana. Their uniform cost them dearly before the fight was over. They were frequently fired into by Confederate regiments, and received, in that way, smart loss. At length they retaliated ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... of about four feet in height, extending the best part of a mile and sufficiently capacious to cover five thousand men." It was semi-circular in form, and its wings rested on the river, which covered the rear. His surmise that it was built for the purpose of defence is undoubtedly correct. He wonders how such a work could exist in a country inhabited by "untutored Indians" who had no military knowledge beyond drawing a bow. Since his time we have gained far more knowledge of the aborigines, and it is ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... (she ought to have remembered before) that he had never taken her in the least into his confidence about his affairs. That was not the Southern way, and he was at least as proud as he was poor. In this surmise she was just; Basil Ransom would have despised himself if he had been capable of confessing to a woman that he couldn't make a living. Such questions were none of their business (their business was simply to be provided for, practise the domestic virtues, and be charmingly grateful), and there was, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... atmosphere, and it is now a generally accepted theory that the changes noticed in its color throughout the year are the seasonal effects on vegetable matter existing on its surface.... What the inhabitants are like, however, we can only surmise, but a study of the conditions under which they live will help us to picture the wild amphibious creatures they must be. Their planet, more than half covered with water, and being so many millions of miles nearer the sun ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... crude and cold companion.... Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... could not but observe it; and I confess that the observation caused me more pleasure than pain. Could it be sorrow at my departure? We had been daily, almost hourly, companions for fourteen days, and the surmise was not unreasonable. She had always shewn me particular kindness, and she could not but have seen my marked preference for her. My heart beat wildly as I gazed on her pale cheek and drooping eyelid; for though ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... a surmise on my part, Frank," replied the Colonel. "We all admit that Jules is a very clever and long-headed rascal. Very well. Don't you suppose that he may regret having given way to sudden temptation, and fired ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... your maiden aunt intends to help you to entertain the party. I have not, as you know, the honour of your aunt's acquaintance, yet I think I may with reason surmise that she will organize games—guessing games—in which she will ask me to name a river in Asia beginning with a Z; on my failure to do so she will put a hot plate down my neck as a forfeit, and the children will clap their ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... Stafford's father. The issue of that act of infidelity was a child, Lois, who afterward was adopted by Caruthers, partly out of friendship for Stafford, partly because he had no children of his own. So much, at least, I surmise. I surmise, too, that that adoption cost him his wife's love and trust. Perhaps, ignorant of the child's real parentage, she believed the worst, perhaps there were other causes—be it as it may, in the hour of catastrophe she refused to share the general fate. She chose to throw herself upon ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... be interpreted as meaning that when many factors are being simultaneously redistributed among the germ-cells, certain of them exert what must be described as a repulsion upon other factors. We cannot surmise whither this discovery ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... evidence but hearsay and surmise against him. If you had died, your body would never have been found. A hundred good men would testify to his character, and I'd have been one. He stands a worse chance now than if you were anchored to the bottom of the lake. I haven't saved your life for his sake nor for yours: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... I should be pleased to confirm your surmise, but nothing could really be further from the fact. As to any benevolent interest in the conduct of industry and commerce, the capitalists expressly disavowed it. Their only object was to secure the greatest possible gain for themselves without any regard whatever ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... reason to doubt that the dominant white is a coloured bird in which the absence of colour is due to the action of a colour-inhibiting factor, though as to the nature of that factor we can at present make no surmise. It is probable that other facts, which at first sight do not appear to be in agreement with the "Presence and Absence" hypothesis, will eventually be brought into line through the action of inhibitor factors. Such a case, for instance, ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... only thing she could surmise, with any semblance of probability, was that the whole was some frolic of Lady Honoria Pemberton, who had persuaded Delvile to send her the dog, and perhaps assured him she had herself requested to ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... general notions of what men ought to be, she could not entirely repress a doubt, while she bore with the effusions of his endless conceit, of his being altogether completely agreeable. It was a bold surmise, for he was Isabella's brother; and she had been assured by James that his manners would recommend him to all her sex; but in spite of this, the extreme weariness of his company, which crept over her before they had been out an hour, and which continued unceasingly to increase ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... "right" what was now made "law." But the question is only carried back a stage further. Did not those judges decide according to law? In some cases we know they did, for we have the law before them. When we try to penetrate further into the background of history we can only surmise. Documents fail us to prove whether judges first made or administered the law. But we have now a very high antiquity for laws ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... that there was more here than met the eye. Davenant was too practised as a player of "the game" to pay a big price for a broken potsherd, unless he was tolerably sure in advance that within the potsherd or under it there lay more than its value. It was not easy to surmise the form of the treasure nor the spot where it was hidden, but that it was there—in kind satisfactory to Davenant himself—Guion had no doubt. It was his part, therefore, to be astute and wary, not to lose the chance ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... right enough in this surmise. Not one who saw Farmer Jocelyn's coffin lowered into the grave failed to notice the wreath of "Glory" roses that went with it—"from Innocent";—and her name was whispered from mouth to mouth with meaning looks and suggestive nods. And when Robin, with tears thick in his eyes, ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... through this business," thought Edie to himself; "mony folk surmise that the Earl's no very right in the judgment, and wha can say how far he may be offended wi' me for taking upon me ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... bundles are all thrown on the mat and the play begins again as before. Should the person designated by the Leader to guess think that he holds the bundle with eleven straws, he must point it at the Leader. If this surmise is correct, the person guessing puts a counter in his hair and all bundles are ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... had led them on to glory, where was he? No one ever knew. Never again was Nicholas seen by any one of those comrades who had followed him so far and so faithfully, trusted him so fully, and barest surmise fills in the mystery of ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... this as a peace-offering from the silent statesman—a kind of mute protest against his master's undiplomatic violence, and as an omen of a possible understanding to be arrived at yet. Otherwise Dain was not uneasy. Although recognising the justice of Lakamba's surmise that he had come back to Sambir only for the sake of the white man's daughter, yet he was not conscious of any childish lack of understanding, as suggested by Babalatchi. In fact, Dain knew very well that Lakamba was ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... Jefferson glibly. She liked discussions, and was accustomed to say she could talk on any subject—having indeed come from a country where women did talk on any subject, whether they were acquainted, with it or not. "I don't think there is much spirituality in any modern religion," she went on. "I surmise it's dead. Science has got the upper hand of theology and means to keep it. People are not content now-a-days with being told 'you must believe so and so.' They want a reason for believing. You're not a Romanist, ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... thought of the ranchman as "Mr. Carson," though when he spoke he called him "Dad," for he did not want strangers to surmise concerning the secret, nor did he wish to hurt the man who had been a father ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... a trifle, and he hesitated before he said, "I am not questioning your judgment, Captain, but you and I have camped out enough to know that a good camp-mate is about the scarcest article to be found. If we take in a stranger on this trip, which I surmise from the outfits is going to be a long one, the chances are more than even that he will turn out a ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... a certain woman in this city whose business it is, at least so I judge, to corrupt, morally and physically, young school and messenger boys, as you will surmise by a conversation which took place this very morning, and it is not her first offense. She called for her party, and as I could not get them at once, I asked for her number, so as to be able to call her as soon as I could. Presently I succeeded, and ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... gone Again,—men should gaze back upon my life, And look askance on me, whom no one ever, Before or since then, dared to emulate. Yes, thus I dreamed and dreamed,—and was deceived. Why did I not surmise, when you stood near me, The secret thoughts then growing in your soul. Yet, Catiline, beware; know that I see Beyond the veil that hides from you the future. Written among the stars—I ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... pleasant little legacy which my respected ancestor has bequeathed to his only grandson? It skipped the Judge, but it caught poor Uncle Lenox, and now it has nabbed me! What a fool I have been not to surmise what this confounded pain meant between my shoulders! Grandfather Hildreth kept himself alive with nostrums until he was seventy, but he was an invalid all his life. He ought to be cursed for his contemptible selfishness in bringing so much suffering ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, as we must perforce surmise, Leave ancestral ghosts behind them when they sailed 'neath alien skies? There is something in the notion, for it was a risky trip, And a spectre is a nuisance when he gibbers on board ship. So, no doubt, those sturdy people, when they crossed Atlantic foam, From an economic motive, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... what ordeal the neophyte was prepared in this singular apartment. He wondered how such neophytes were chosen, and to what tests they were submitted before being accepted as members of the bloodthirsty order. He could not even surmise. ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... department he will continue to yearn. And not even he has been given to understand why when a reconstructed Liberal like Mr. Rowell left the Cabinet at the appointment of Premier Meighen, the Minister of Immigration stayed on. One might surmise that the man who, a decade ago, looked to some people like an Elisha to Laurier, would run again in Moosejaw as a National Liberal Conservative with the expectation of re-entering the Cabinet, probably as Minister of the Interior. But he was suddenly and humdrumly ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... life than may be found in Jonson's "Sejanus" and "Catiline his Conspiracy," which followed in 1611. A passage in the address of the former play to the reader, in which Jonson refers to a collaboration in an earlier version, has led to the surmise that Shakespeare may have been that "worthier pen." There is no evidence ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... prisoners and refitting both vessels, which had very much suffered in the sails and rigging. There was an occasional wonder on board the Harpy what that strange vessel might be, who had turned the corvette and enabled them to capture her, but when people are all very busy, there is not much time for surmise. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... discoursing on a theme which at that period interested every thinking mind. I heard of the valiant Kosciusko, the good Stanislaus, and the palatine Sobieski, with his brave grandson, spoken of in the same breath. I durst not surmise who this grandson was; I dared not ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... I was slightly acquainted with the remote and sinister suburb where lay the Villa des Hortensias. I knew that at night it possessed a peculiar reputation, and my surmise was that Rosa had been decoyed thither with ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... was no less startled. There was audible gasping. The newspaper men looked at each other with a wild surmise and conjured up pleasant pictures of their sporting editors receiving this sensational item of news later on over the telephone. The two wise guys, continuing to pursue Mr. Butler with their dislike, emitted loud and raucous laughs, and one of them, forming his hands into a megaphone, urged the ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... ordinary conditions he might have been justified in such surmise, but that would be figuring on the normal thickness of the normal civilized skull, but yours—why, Bub, all I'm puzzling over now is how it happens that the monkey wrench was only twisted a ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... to tell about. Where and how this mad voyage, with a mad crew, will end is beyond all surmise. But the Elsinore drives on, and day by day her history is bloodily written. And while murder is done, and while the whole floating drama moves toward the bleak southern ocean and the icy blasts of Cape Horn, I sit in the high place with the masters, unafraid, I am proud to say, in an ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... something insolent in humanity as well as something divine, and just then she felt the insolence more than the divinity. Terrifically greater, more overpowering than man, the desert was yet also somehow less than man, feebler, vaguer. Or else how could she have been grasped, moved, turned to curiosity, surmise, almost to a sort of dread—all at the desert's expense—by the distant moving figure seen ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... requisite amount of money became, during the next few weeks, the anxious theme of all Ralph's thoughts. His lawyers' enquiries soon brought the confirmation of Clare's surmise, and it became clear that—for reasons swathed in all the ingenuities of legal verbiage—Undine might, in return for a substantial consideration, be prevailed on to admit that it was for her son's advantage ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their special enthusiasm,—a mysterious ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... translation was poor; and that a friend or friends of Mrs. Eddy mended its English three times, and finally got it into its present shape, where the grammar is plenty good enough, and the sentences are smooth and plausible though they do not mean anything. I think I am right in this surmise, for Mrs. Eddy cannot write English to-day, and this is argument that she never could. I am not able to guess who did the mending, but I think it was not done by any member of the Eddy Trust, nor by the editors of the 'Christian Science Journal,' ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was working like a trip-hammer. He was recalling a certain nomad settlement north of the city, the quarters of fishermen, poachers and horse-traders: a squalid, unclean community that lay under the walls between the northern gates and the river. These people, he was not slow to surmise, were undoubtedly hand in glove with Marlanx, if not so surely connected with the misguided Committee of Ten. This being the eve of the great uprising, it was not unlikely that a secret host lay here awake and ready for the foul observance ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... my saddle I discovered that the whole original lining had been removed and replaced by an immense number of baneful roots and herbs, which I burnt on the spot. How this evil deed had been effected I could not even surmise, but so it was, and from that hour I was a different man—my mind recovered its equilibrium, I was no longer affected by pain and distress of body, or haunted by nightly visions. Those who smile at the medicine- man, and are sceptical as to his power, may keep to their own ...
— Owindia • Charlotte Selina Bompas
... During dinner, two pretty looking girls with musical instruments entered the hall, and regaled our ears with singing some romances, among which were Dunois le Troubadour and La Sentinelle. They sang with much taste and feeling. I surmise this is not the only profession they exercise, if I might judge from the doux yeux they occasionally directed to some of the officers. These girls did not at least seem by their demeanour as if likely to incur the anathema of Rinaldo in ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... the tongues of the passing people, saying In their surmise, "Ah—whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought Round him that looms Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... the mouth of the river and the Gulf, by her influence upon the Indian tribes, and by intrigues with the settlers. Her object was primarily to safeguard the Spanish American monopoly which had made her a great nation in the world. Instinctively she seemed to surmise that out of this Valley were the issues of her future; here was the lever which might break successively, from her empire fragments about the Gulf—Louisiana, Florida and Texas, Cuba and Porto Rico—the Southwest and Pacific coast, and even the Philippines and the Isthmian Canal, while the American ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... her feet damp. In such a subject as herself it was enough. The doctor used only the phrase 'acute rheumatism.' Constance did not know that acute rheumatism was precisely the same thing as that dread disease, rheumatic fever, and she was not informed. She did not surmise for a considerable period that her case was desperately serious. The doctor explained the summoning of two nurses, and the frequency of his own visits, by saying that his chief anxiety was to minimise ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... it to herself, she said, to find for the girl the right thing, before sending her from the house. In the true spirit of benevolent tyranny, she said not a word to Letty of her design. She had the chronic distemper of concealment, where Letty had but a feverish attack. Much false surmise might have been corrected, and much evil avoided, had she put it in Letty's power to show how gladly she would leave Thornwick. In the mean time the old lady kept her lynx-eye ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... come down for meals," deduced the lady. Only those who have flown on active service can fully relish the comic savour of a surmise that the Flying Corps in France remain in the air all day amid all weathers, presumably picnicking, between flights, off sandwiches, cold chicken, pork pies, and ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... what Indians he thought they were. The reply was that he thought them to be Kiowas, and on coming up to them the surmise ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... it is impossible to surmise, for the crippled boy was handy with the familiar implement that so readily could be used as a weapon, though the Italian was sturdier, heavier and much older—in fact, although small, he was almost ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... interval, by a remarkable paleness of the sun. The sixth return, in the year eleven hundred and six, is recorded by the chronicles of Europe and China: and in the first fervor of the crusades, the Christians and the Mahometans might surmise, with equal reason, that it portended the destruction of the Infidels. The seventh phenomenon, of one thousand six hundred and eighty, was presented to the eyes of an enlightened age. [80] The philosophy of Bayle dispelled ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... cunning surmise of Jabez, the chief did write down the Independence year, "1776," and when this verdict was read aloud the boy felt deep disappointment. This was turned to joy, however, when his guess of "1750" was found to be among ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... this afternoon. Last night she considered herself called upon to make a demonstration in the cause that she has at heart. She smoked two cigarettes towards the emancipation of your sex, princess. Just to show her independence—to show, I surmise, that she didn't care a—that she did not care. She cares this afternoon. She ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... masked rustler was fastening them tightly but with a rotten rawhide. This peculiar circumstance caused a wild thrill to flash all through Larkin's being. Perhaps, after all, here was the weak link in the rustler's chain. The surmise became a certainty when the man, unobserved by his companions, sawed Bud's arms back and forth, showing him the quickest and easiest way ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... he argued with himself, and in that case his arm would come in handy. There was surely enough of them below to do all that was necessary, so that his absence would not count for much. And after all perhaps Joel would prove to be right in his surmise. ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... than all, I had still no certainty. I could only surmise that the lady was the one I was in search of, for I had not as yet clapt eyes on her, and I had been to some extent driven to show my hand before I had made my ground good. So the first thing I did on regaining ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... drawing rein. I can fancy his mind made up to watch the mudhouse until Gavin and the gypsy separated, and then pounce upon her. I daresay his whole plot could be condensed into a sentence, "If she's got rid o' this nicht, we may cheat the Session yet," But this is mere surmise. All I know is that he waited near Nanny's house, and by and by heard another trap coming up Windyghoul. That was just before the ten o'clock bell ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... to borrow during his time of stress. Always devoted to his mother, Borrow sent her sums of money at intervals from the moment the power of earning came to him. We shall never know, we can only surmise something of the self-sacrificing devotion of that mother during the years in which Borrow had failed to find remunerative work. Wherever he wandered there had always been a home in the Willow Lane cottage. It is probable that much the greater part ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... tracts, compilations, and what not—of a more or less marketable kind. It can only be surmised that by this time he may have formed some idea of producing a book not solely meant for the market, and that the characters in the Vicar of Wakefield were already engaging his attention; but the surmise becomes probable enough when we remember that his project of writing the Traveller, which was not published till 1764, had been formed as far back as 1755, while he was wandering aimlessly about Europe, and that a sketch of the poem ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... father; he took a fair young princess at his son's expense; but similar changes in state marriages were such matters of course, that no emotions were likely to be created in consequence. There is no proof whatever, nor any reason to surmise; that any love passages ever existed between Don ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... on cheerily through the early morning, till about 10.30 it slackened down in the inexplicable Boer fashion, and hardly one shot an hour was fired afterwards. The surmise goes that Joubert cannot get his men up to the attacking point. Their loss ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... as yet yielded no account of the events which tended to unite Egypt under the rule of one man; we can only surmise that the feudal principalities had gradually been drawn together into two groups, each of which formed a separate kingdom. Heliopolis became the chief focus in the north, from which civilization radiated over the wet plain and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... more children. When one draws a conclusion from insufficient data, it is always satisfactory to discover, as one too seldom does, that one was right. I had been right about the gentleman being an accountant, and here I was right again in my surmise that the lady was exceptionally highly connected, so highly that one could overlook her mother's mesalliance with the coachman. Her uncle was only a bishop at the time of her birth, he became a cardinal soon after Mery's mother married the coachman, and then he forced the coachman to legitimise ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Rebell is correct in his surmise, at least a part of Werdet's admiration for the novelist was inspired by his wife, who had become a great admirer of the works of the young writer, not well known at that time. Madame Werdet persuaded her husband to speak ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... exchanged at the worthy drover's fireside for the purer and holier melodies of another inspiration.[87] As a pendant to this creditable account of the bard's principles, we are informed that he was a frequent guest at the presbytery dinner-table; a circumstance which some may be so malicious as to surmise amounted to nothing more than a purpose to enhance the festive recreations of the reverend body—a suspicion, we believe, in this particular instance, totally unfounded. He died in 1778; and he has succeeded to some rather peculiar honours for a person in his position, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... me at first," said Wiggins. "He seemed puzzled; but as I talked with him, and heard his threats about Wilkins, and about what he called Edith's imprisonment, he seemed gradually to find out all, or to surmise it. It could not have been my face; it must have been my voice, for that unfortunately has not changed, and he once knew that well, in the old days when he was visiting here. At any rate, he made ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... now, I've business with a friar here, I vow; 'Twill presently be done if you'll but wait; Religious duties we must ne'er abate. What duties? cried the husband with surprise; You're surely mad:—'tis midnight I surmise; Confess yourself to-morrow if required; The holy fathers are to bed retired. That makes no difference, the lady cried.— I think it does, the husband straight replied, And thither I'll not let you go to-night:— ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... this is the true test—the traces of design less conspicuous in the external world, confusion there, as in the moral and in both greater than is now found in either; I extremely doubt whether the faintest surmise of such a Being would have suggested itself to me. But be that as it may; as to their other cardinal sentiments,—the nature of my relations to this Being,—his placability; if offended, —the terms ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... opinion of some, deception may mean two things; namely, any slight surmise, in which one adheres to what is false, as though it were true, but without the assent of belief—or it may mean a firm belief. Thus before sin Adam could not be deceived in either of these ways as regards those things to which his knowledge ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... "to mistrust," "to surmise." Expect, in the sense of "look forward to," is preferable to anticipate, since anticipate also means "take up, perform, or realize beforehand;" as, "Some real lives do actually anticipate the happiness ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... after the opening of the Great War that it is vain to surmise what the effect of that struggle would have been upon his soul. That it would have shaken him to the depths—and perhaps given him the spiritual experience necessary for his further advance—seems not improbable. One of his letters on ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... of Shakespeare is imperfect. It can only be increased by minute and patient study, by the rejection of surmise about him, and by the constant public playing of his plays, in the Shakespearean manner, by actors who will neither mutilate nor distort what the great mind strove ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... no reason why it should be. But 'Pauline' was, from the first, little known or discussed beyond the immediate circle of the poet's friends; and when, twenty years later, Dante Gabriel Rossetti unexpectedly came upon it in the library of the British Museum, he could only surmise that it had been written by the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... walked he grew more and more excited. That is shown by the increased length of his strides. He was talking all the while, and working himself up, no doubt, into a fury. Then the tragedy occurred. I've told you all I know myself now, for the rest is mere surmise and conjecture. We have a good working basis, however, on which to start. We must hurry up, for I want to go to Halle's concert to ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... In this surmise he was perfectly correct. No one of the name of Julius Hoffman was known at the Langham. The Hounslow police made no discovery, and the car was ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... done me the honor of making a confidant of me," said the minister, respectfully; "hence, I do not know, but merely venture to surmise, what ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... Turner kept nagging him for information, and Ray had only colored and stumbled painfully, and finally burst forth with, "See here, Blake; something has happened that I accidentally got mixed up in, but it's a thing a man can't tell of, so don't ask me;" and Blake could only surmise. Then, too, there was that desertion of Wolf's,—Ray knew something about it,—and then the colonel had asked him—Blake—a point-blank question about Ray's habits which amazed him and set him to thinking. Then no mail was received from the regiment for ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... from the rear that the road was blocked, and that the progress of Macpherson's brigade would certainly be opposed; while, on the crests of the hills to the right and left of my camp, bodies of men began to assemble, who, I surmised (which surmise I afterwards learnt was correct), were only waiting for the sun to go down to make a general attack upon the camp under cover ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... sent them off next morning, and a little later was able to tell him that his surmise as to his friends' mistake was correct. All Gravelton was thrilled by the news that the spiritual part of Mr. John Blows was walking the earth, and much exercised as to his ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... against such odds. They saw the lines of the face grow sharper and whiter, the dark eye-sockets sink to a curious roundness, a greyness gather about the mouth. There were times when they looked at each other in the last surmise. Yet the feeble ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... could the Majesty's Ministry, surmise the Czarina's secret at all, now or for a good while coming. And in fact, poor Hanbury, busy as a Diplomatic bee, never did more good in Russia, or out of it. By direction of the Majesty's Ministry, Hanbury still tried industriously, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... "I surmise that the tall Lieutenant did not fall a victim to my wiles as I had at first supposed, but, in some unaccountable manner, one can never tell how these things happen; he was most anxious to be left alone with the coy Miss Dorothy Amhurst, who does not understand ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... for a bookkeeper's wife. I surmise that Percy felt she was overdressed, and that made him awkward with me. I've always suspected that ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... of resolution thought Too much to see their neighbors caught For no crime but false surmise; Forthwith they join'd a warlike band, And march'd to Loudon out of hand, And kept the jailors pris'ners there, Until our friends enlarged were, Without ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... to attempt to guess at the meaning these early people attached to so singular a procedure, we may be guided by the ideas associated with this act in outlying corners of the world at the present time. On these grounds we may surmise that the motive underlying this, and other later methods of blood-letting, such as circumcision, piercing the ears, lips, and tongue, gashing the limbs and body, et cetera, was the offering ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... I would have made him eat my sword; by all the dignity of man, I would have crumbled his soul into powder. But I consider that the words were spoken by a woman, and I am calm again. Consider, my dear, that you are my sister, and behave yourself with more spirit. I have only mentioned to you my surmise. It may not have happened as I suspect; but, let what will have happened, you will have the comfort that your husband hath behaved himself with becoming dignity, and lies ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... it was done—how utterly impossible it would have been for me to have voluntarily committed such an act even in the last extremity. But what they will think of my appearance at your door last night, I don't know and I dare not surmise. I have done all I could; I have rid them of me, and I have written to your sister to thank her and your family for their very real kindness to the last woman in the world whom they would have willingly chosen to ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... process by which sentient existence first became evolved from inorganic matter seems to be beyond the scrutiny of man. It is so far without the scope of his experience, his speculation even, that it is futile to attempt to surmise it; although certain interesting phenomena have attended the experiments of naturalists, especially those of Professor Jeffries Wyman. Darwin takes the subject up at the appearance of animal life, and seeks to work out the causes of the present variation among animals, and to detect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... infrequent flashes of lightning and peals of thunder. There had been no further indications of pursuit; but Bridge argued that The Sky Pilot, being wise with the wisdom of the owl and cunning with the cunning of the fox, would doubtless surmise that a fugitive would take to the first road leading away from the main artery, and that even though they heard nothing it would be safe to assume that the gang was still upon the boy's trail. "And it's a bad bunch, too," he continued. "I've ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... three different directions, and Cuthbert, who knew every path and glade of the forest, was able pretty accurately to surmise those by which the various bands were ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... New West was, perforce, billed over American roads. These details and a score of others called for patience, for tact, and a judicious distribution of dollar bills. Harris made a mental note of his obligation to Tom Morrison in the matter. He was shrewd enough to surmise that this was the farmer's very practical wedding gift, but he took debit for ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... written after them, refers to events in 1208. Therefore, unless we suppose that the issue was for some reason delayed, or that Saxo spent seven years in polishing—which is not impossible—there is some reason to surmise that he began with that portion of his work which was nearest to his own time, and added the previous (especially the first nine, or mythical) books, as a completion, and possibly as an afterthought. But this is a point ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... "wizard"; but this fate has dogged him until he has come at last to resign himself to it with a resentful indignation only to be appreciated when watching him read the latest full-page Sunday "spread" that develops a casual conversation into oracular verbosity, and gives to his shrewd surmise ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... enough to belong to the age of Cleopatra, stands beside the modest iron gate of the entrance. An old peasant-woman passing with a pack on her back answers our question by saying that this is an ancient milestone which formerly stood a little above its present site; and we surmise that its mutilated condition is due to relic-hunters. Inside the gate we see a grassy plain with sandy patches; here and there are deep open ditches for drainage; and avenues stretch off in several directions, bounded by rows of great overarching trees. We follow one reaching ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... did rue; He haunted her form with sighs: As oft as his clay to a lady grew The carvers, with dim surmise, Would whisper, "The same shape come to woo, With ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... in the surface membrane is of a chemical character, and that no doubt may be correct; but even if we allow him every scientific fact, or surmise, he is still, as in the other cases with which we have dealt, miles away from any real explanation. He is still inside his chemico-physical explanation to begin with; and, even within that, he still leaves us anxious for the explanation of a number ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... riding boots. The trouble was, probably, that he had expected to be ridden by one of the young ladies, and was shocked by the abrupt discovery that a total stranger was to ride him. This is merely my surmise. I do not claim deep understanding of the mental workings of any horse, for there is no logic about them or their performances. They are like crafty lunatics, reasoning, if they reason at all, in a manner too treacherous and devious for human comprehension. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... of still greater discoveries was already at hand. "It was in Portugal," says Ferdinand Columbus, "that the admiral began to surmise that if men could sail so far south, one might also sail west and find lands in that direction." The Portuguese were so wedded to the search for the southeast route, and it was so nearly achieved at this time, that their interest was but languid ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... as the husband of his favourite child, the only man in the world whom he really positively disliked, would be a misfortune which he felt he would not know how to endure patiently. But then, could there be any ground for so dreadful a surmise? In all worldly matters he was apt to look upon the opinion of his eldest daughter, as one generally sound and trustworthy. In her appreciation of character, of motives, and the probable conduct ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... edge so as to form one smooth surface; and on these are written, in rows of hundreds, the names of all who subscribed for the statue and its shrine. The number announced is ten thousand. But the whole cost could not have exceeded ten Japanese dollars (yen); wherefore I surmise that each subscriber gave not more than one rin—one tenth of one sen, or cent. For the hyakusho are ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... 'I shall heartily enjoy it. But let me tell you, Prince, and pardon me for speaking bluntly, your surmise is incorrect. I would wager a hundred thousand dollars that Prince Eugen ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... the recollection and surmise together his fingers pressed the spring. There was a miniature within, but it was not the picture of Monsieur Delcasse. Ryder was looking down upon the face of a girl, a beautiful, spirited face, with merry eyes and wistful lips—dark eyes, ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the actual settlers to bid off portions of the land for them, and when the hour for business arrived, my seat was universally surrounded by a number of men with huge bludgeons. What was meant by the proceeding, I could, of course, only surmise, but I would not have envied the fate of the individual who would have ventured ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... keepsakes—be they from man or woman, I have destroyed. I send you herewith a little sum of money, which I received for ornaments and for some of my own manufactures, which I sold. Buy something with it which will give pleasure to Louise and Jacobi; but do not let them surmise, I earnestly beseech you, that it comes from Petrea. If I could only sell myself for a respectable price, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... opinion was neither asked nor desired. Even then my friend was not satisfied, and he voyaged about until I knew luncheon was long since a thing of the past, and I hated so the shape of his face I could have screamed. When at last we did return, I found my surmise as to luncheon had been only too correct, and we had to content ourselves with scraps. The next duck-shoot I attend I shall choose as companion a ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... inquiries. His first care, when able to take heed of what did not concern his immediate comfort, was that Colonel Deane should be written to, as his leave of absence was expired; but he said not a word about Hollywell, and Amabel therefore hoped her surmise was right, that his confession had been prompted by a delirious fancy, though Guy thought something was implied by his silence respecting the very persons of whom it would have ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Andover's house in the Strand on the day before the eve of Christmas, Cuthbert saw, by the stir and bustle and liveliness of the courtyard, that the family had plainly returned. On making inquiry he discovered that his surmise was correct, and he walked home resolving to lose no more time in delivering his letter, and wondering if he could contrive to take Cherry with him when he paid the visit, to secure for her a sight of the gay streets and a peep into Lord Andover's big house. ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Secondly, I doubt whether any inference on nature of climate can be deduced from extinct species of mammals. If the musk-ox and deer of great size of your Barren-Grounds had been known only by fossil bones, who would have ventured to surmise the excessively cold climate they lived under? With respect to food of large animals, if you care about the subject will you turn to my discussion on this subject partly in respect to the Elephas primigenius in my "Journal of Researches" (Murray's Home and Colonial Library), Chapter ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... gulch undoubtedly cradled a small stream of water but now it was only slightly damp, and on each side, untouched yet by frost, grew a golden profusion of flowers. Here and there freshly broken stems indicated that Ellen had not been amiss in her surmise as to the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... his first surmise. The next moment he knew the truth, for with a heavy thud the man struck the stones, falling sidewise, and then turned over upon his face, to lie with his limbs quivering slightly for a few moments ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... been delivered at the Union Bank this morning. Of course, as soon as the manager of the foreign department found a draft for a large sum drawn by a stranger and made payable to their correspondent in Berlin, he would at once surmise that a fraud had been committed and undoubtedly would send a telegram to Germany to that effect. The forgery once known in Berlin, the rumor of it, with a thousand exaggerations, might easily fly to every ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... wild surmise avers that, in 1763, the secrets of his birth and the source of his opulence were known in Holland. The authority is the Memoirs of Grosley (1813). Grosley was an archaeologist of Troyes; he had traveled in Italy, ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... fire was breathed Than breath of life itself, and by a leap, As lightning leaps from crag to crag, what seethed In man from the beginning broke the sleep That lay on consciousness of self, with eyes Awakened saw himself, out of the deep And wonder of the self caught the surmise Of Power beyond this world, and felt it ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Mr. Moxey's countenance a curious shadow. Godwin noticed it, and at once concluded that the manufacturer condemned Christian for undue advances to one below his own station. The result of this surmise was of course a sudden coldness on Godwin's part, increased when he found that Mr. Moxey turned to another subject, without a ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... that saved Jim at this juncture. It was an incident which he did not guess at the time and I am not sure that he became aware of it in later life, and yet there are reasons to surmise that he may have ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... The King alone would suffice, but Kings are rarely found in solitude," reasoned the Andalusian. "For a brief moment Europe looks with eyes of interest on the feasting little capital. The King will not be alone. No, it must be—so one would surmise—at the coronation." ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... poem of his—the opprobrium (as I hold) of the Middle Age. For if such were the dreams of its noblest and purest genius, what must have been the dreams of the ignoble and impure multitude? But had he seen this lake, how easy, how tempting too, it would have been to him to embody in imagery the surmise of a certain 'Father,' and heighten the torments of the lost beings, sinking slowly into that black Bolge beneath the baking rays of the tropic sun, by the sight of the saved, walking where we walked, beneath cool fragrant shade, among the pillars of ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... season of the year the prevailing winds which he might expect to meet with to the northward of Madeira would most probably be strong from the south- westward. And the event proved the correctness of that mariner's surmise, for on his seventh day out from Gravesend he fell in with the expected shift of wind, and four hours later the Concordia was fighting her way to the southward, under double-reefed topsails, against a heavy ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... are also the terse, pithy language which allows us to surmise the unlimited possibilities hidden in the saga literature, and the equally succinct manner of ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... not to smile in the teeth of pain might cost life itself. And the Japanese woman, as cultivated by the old home-training, is not less sweet a being because she represents the moral ideal of a vanishing world, and because we can faintly surmise the cost,—the incalculable cost in ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... smoke was very thick, I saw him seated near the drinking-bar, a tumbler of brandy before him, his arms resting on the edge of the counter where the liquor was sold. I judged then that he had made no idle visit to this place; and in a quarter of an hour or so my surmise was proved. The glass door again swung open; three men entered through it, and I recognised the three of them in a moment. The first was the Irishman, "Four Eyes"; the second-was the lantern-jawed Scotsman, who had ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... large bombards held them to level land, where they were laid on rugged mounts of the heaviest wood, anchored by stakes driven into the ground. A gunner would try to put his bombard 100 yards from the wall he wanted to batter down. One would surmise that the gunner, being so close to a castle wall manned by expert Genoese cross-bowmen, was in a precarious position. He was; but earthworks or a massive wooden shield arranged like a seesaw over his gun gave him fair protection. Lowering the front end of the shield made a barricade ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... do next in their freaks it is difficult to surmise; but it requires very little more to show that patriotism, taste, and self-esteem, are not the leading features in the character of the inhabitants of this ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... question as to the relation of the individual soul to Brahman. Do the Sutras indicate anywhere that their author held /S/a@nkara's doctrine, according to which the jiva is in reality identical with Brahman, and separated from it, as it were, only by a false surmise due to avidya, or do they rather favour the view that the souls, although they have sprung from Brahman, and constitute elements of its nature, yet enjoy a kind of individual existence apart from it? This question is in fact only ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... of the direction of the wind was made after Andree's departure, and proved that there was a fluctuation in direction from S.W. to N.W., indicating that the voyagers may have been borne across towards Siberia. This, however, can be but surmise. All aeronauts of experience know that it is an exceedingly difficult manoeuvre to keep a trail rope dragging on the ground if it is desirable to prevent contact with the earth on the one hand, or on the other to avoid loss of gas. A slight increase of temperature or drying off of condensed ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... of this play is made I fear that the great Charles Mathews did not find it available. There is also no trace of the play itself among the papers, which is rather to be regretted. We can only surmise that Morse came to the conclusion (very wisely) that he had no "dramatic talents," and that he turned to the pursuit of his professional studies ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... a quadrangle. It was erected about the year 1510, and was inhabited until 1667. The family-name of the nobleman—for such he appears to have been—of whom the following story is told, we have no means of ascertaining. That he was an occasional resident or visitor at the Tower is but surmise. During the period of these dark transactions we find that the mansion was inhabited by Jane Assheton, relict of Richard Townley, who died in the year 1637. Whoever he might be, the following horrible event, arising ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... that John Fox is a good man of business, and about as sharp as most people. Mrs. Fox will be glad to see you, and my boy, Joel, will be glad to have someone to keep him company. He is about sixteen years old. You don't say how old you are, but from your letter I surmise that you are as much as that. You will find a happy united famerly, consistin' of me and my wife, Joel and his sister, Sally. Sally is fourteen, just two years younger than Joel. We live in a comfortable way, but we don't ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... Wheeler Lee!" And Joseph had a pair of fightin' eyes; And his granddad was a Johnny, as perhaps you might surmise; Then "Robert Bruce MacPherson!" And the Yankee squad was done With "Isaac Abie Cohen!" once a ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... practice. Not a human being did Tad see during the rest of the journey, nor even a sign of human habitation. Evidently they were traveling through a very rough, uninhabited part of the state. If this were the case, he reasoned that they must be working northward. This surmise was verified with the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... country. There was surely some fierce swearing in Dublin Castle on the day that news arrived, and perhaps many a passionate query blurted out as to whether police, detectives, magistrates, and all in that southern district were not secretly in league with the rebels. In fact, a surmise actually got into the papers that the proprietors of the gunshops knew more about the disappearance of the arms, and were less aggrieved by the "seizure" than they cared to acknowledge. However this might be, the popular party enjoyed the whole thing immensely, laughed over it heartily, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... I; "still it is strange that I do not hear from her. I am fearful something is wrong, and what it can be, I cannot surmise." ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... Knowing your unbounded influence, and believing that your appearance among the seditious might bring them back to peace and reconciliation, individuals suggest the propriety of an invitation to you from congress to pay us a visit. This is only a surmise, and I take the liberty to mention it to you, that, should the conjuncture of affairs induce congress to make this request, you may have some previous time ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... there were two ways of viewing the gentleman, doubted whether she ought to express her opinion. It was Flora's disposition, and the advantages of the match, that weighed most upon her, and, in spite of her surmise having been treated as so injurious, she could not rid herself ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... discovering proofs and facts carefully prepared by Lupin, which would lead in a direction immediately opposite to the object in view. I feel confident that the facts, when they are known, will confirm my surmise in every respect. ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... made no endeavour to discover their whereabouts, taking it for granted that they would reappear when they had disposed of their dead to their satisfaction. While we were partaking of breakfast a big cloud of smoke arose from the woods situated at the eastern extremity of the bay, causing us to surmise that the dead were at that moment undergoing the process of cremation; but we made no attempt to investigate, leaving the savages to their own devices for that day, and proceeding to the shipyard as ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... But this surmise soon proved wrong, for the first persons to appear were two armed horsemen, who turned their heads as nimbly as their steeds, now to the right and now to the left, scanning the thickets along the road distrustfully. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... their striving, A small flock of terrified victims, and there, With an I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air And a tone which, at least to my fancy, appears Not so much to be entering as boxing your ears, Is unfolding a tale (of herself, I surmise, 1210 For 'tis dotted as thick as a peacock's with I's), Apropos of Miranda, I'll rest on my oars And drift through a trifling digression on bores, For, though not wearing ear-rings in more majorum, Our ears are kept ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Mercy's astonishment and consternation she burst into tears. Mercy tried to comfort her, but did not know how. She had seen for some time that there was a difference in her, that something was the matter, and wondered whether she could be missing Ian, but it was merest surmise. Perhaps now she ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... treachery. And it must have been by treason among those in whom I have placed my most familiar trust, that I am now where and what I am. I can but darkly surmise by whose baseness the act has been committed. It had been a nobler triumph to you, Roman, and a lighter fall to me, had the field of battle decided the fate of my kingdom, and led me a prisoner to ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... And, O Savitri, I know thee to be like the goddess Savitri herself in splendour. Thou must know the cause of this. Therefore, do thou relate it truly! If it should not be kept a secret, do thou unfold it unto us!' At these words of Gautama Savitri said, 'It is as ye surmise. Your desire shall surely not be unfulfilled. I have no secret to keep. Listen to the truth then! The high-souled Narada had predicted the death of my husband. To-day was the appointed time. I could not, therefore, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... up. That in thus surrendering the properties for which they were largely responsible they hoped at the conclusion of peace to see restored the 'status quo ante' should not be held against them. Some are now beginning to surmise that a complete restoration is impossible; and as a result of their socializing experience, are even wondering whether it is desirable. These are beginning to perceive that the national and international organizations ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... you would refuse them admittance to the Hall this year because you called the meeting in the living room," was Muriel's plausible surmise. "You had had a good deal of trouble with them and they knew they were in the wrong; that you disapproved of them. They may have scented disaster and taken the bull by the horns. They calculated, perhaps, that you ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... Thesmophoros; and thirdly, with a divine or sacred animal. In the Diasia we find the old superhuman snake, who reappears so ubiquitously throughout Greece, the regular symbol of the underworld powers, especially the hero or dead ancestor. Why the snake was so chosen we can only surmise. He obviously lived underground: his home was among the Chthonioi, the Earth-People. Also, says the Scholiast to Aristophanes (Plut. 533), he was a type of new birth because he throws off his old skin and renews ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... only a surmise,' I said, hesitating. 'I'll tell you about it later. I've had time to think while I've been coming back in the train, and I've thought of many things. Mount guard till I return, and mind you don't let Lord Southminster have ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Jack's surmise was correct. The white bears did not follow the adventurers when the latter had run to the right. Instead, increasing their pace, the polar bears sprang into the midst of the sea lions and soon there was a fierce battle ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... of the politicians to the co-operative movement rests, it is safe to surmise, upon some other foundation than these flimsy charges ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... was a Frenchwoman (his father was Henry Morland, the painter of the delightful pair of half-lengths, The Laundry Maids) suggests to my mind the wild surmise that she may have been the daughter of Chardin. For in the technique as well as in the temperament of Morland,—making allowance for difference of circumstances,—there is something remarkably akin to those of the great Frenchman. Both eschewed the temptation to become fashionable, both painted ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... cunning, caution against skill, against quacking hordes of wild-fowl in the tulares, against pronghorn and bighorn and deer. You can guess, however, that all this warring of rifles and bowstrings, this influx of overlording whites, had made game wilder and hunters fearful of being hunted. You can surmise also, for it was a crude time and the land was raw, that the women became in turn the game of ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... duchess; but what was a duchess without diamonds?— and in a dress which farmer Hodson's daughter might have worn! Was it the duchess? Could it be the duchess? The little crowd of inquirers around Mrs. Gibson thickened, to hear her confirm their disappointing surmise. After the duchess came Lady Cumnor, looking like Lady Macbeth in black velvet—a cloud upon her brow, made more conspicuous by the lines of age rapidly gathering on her handsome face; and Lady Harriet, and other ladies, amongst whom ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... move on very carefully, feeling my way from chest to chest. I discovered in my progress not only chests, but casks and bales. I had little doubt, therefore, that I had been conveyed to the smugglers' store, but where it was situated I was totally unable to surmise. That it was some way inland I thought probable, as I could not hear the sound of the surf breaking on the sea shore, which I thought I should have done had I been near the coast. I tried to think if I recollected any building ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... geographical names has become an object of mere surmise, and this is the more the pity because they suggest such picturesque possibilities. We would like to know, for instance, how Burnt Coat and Smutty Nose came by such titles. The conglomerate that strews the fields ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Pfaff with occupations devised apparently from hour to hour. On a master's morning the girls collected in the schoolroom one by one as they finished their bed-making and dusting. On other days the time immediately after breakfast was full of uncertainty and surmise. Judging from the interchange between the four first-floor bedrooms whose doors were always open during this bustling interval, Miriam, listening apprehensively as she did her share of work on the top floor, gathered that the lack of any planned programme ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... betrothed lived, in Third Street in Vassilyevsky Island. He knocked some time before he was admitted, and his visit at first caused great perturbation; but Svidrigailov could be very fascinating when he liked, so that the first, and indeed very intelligent surmise of the sensible parents that Svidrigailov had probably had so much to drink that he did not know what he was doing vanished immediately. The decrepit father was wheeled in to see Svidrigailov by the tender and sensible mother, who as usual began the conversation with various irrelevant questions. ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day; That I have frequent been with unknown minds, And given to time your own dear-purchas'd right; That I have hoisted sail to all the winds Which should transport me farthest from your sight. Book both my wilfulness and errors down, And on just proof surmise, accumulate; Bring me within the level of your frown, But shoot not at me in your waken'd hate; Since my appeal says I did strive to prove The constancy and virtue ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... brought me part iv. of the P.Z.S. for 1874, containing Mr. Dresser's interesting paper on the nidification of the Hypolais and Acrocephalus groups; and if I understand him rightly, he is certainly correct in his surmise as to the eggs of Acrocephalus dumetorum approaching those of the ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... simple; and hence the Ego, which is simple in the first sense, may, in the second sense, as indicating the soul itself, be a very complex conception, with a very various content. Thus it is evident that in all such arguments there lurks a paralogism. We guess (for without some such surmise our suspicion would not be excited in reference to a proof of this character) at the presence of the paralogism, by keeping ever before us a criterion of the possibility of those synthetical propositions which aim at proving more than experience can teach ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... head. 'It's only a surmise,' I said, hesitating. 'I'll tell you about it later. I've had time to think while I've been coming back in the train, and I've thought of many things. Mount guard till I return, and mind you don't let Lord Southminster ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... year 18—, I embarked on board the ship Cosmo, bound from the port of Bristol to that of New York. The season was unpropitious, the lingering effects of the autumnal equinox rendering it more than probable that the passage would be tempestuous. The result soon proved the correctness of this surmise, for soon after the vessel departed from Kingroad, and before she got clear of the English coast, we experienced boisterous weather, which was followed by a succession of gales, that rendered our situation perilous. But ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... especially true in our intercourse with our fellow-men. We never really know what they will do from time to time. Their action is still future and uncertain; but from our familiarity with their character, we surmise or imagine what they expect or think, and we then act so as to make our conduct fit into theirs. Here is suggestion of a personal kind which depends upon our ability, in a sense, to reconstruct the character of others, ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... was seeking to find entrance into the room, he could not doubt for a moment; but, on the other hand, it seemed an incredible surmise, because the wall along which the unknown visitor had plainly felt his way was an outside wall, and if there really were any person thus moving, he must be walking along some secret passage in the thickness of ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... remarkable, that being obliged by my profession to see a number of young girls, I do not recollect one at Chambery but what was charming: it will be said I was disposed to find them so, and perhaps there maybe some truth in the surmise. I cannot remember my young scholars without pleasure. Why, in naming the most amiable, cannot I recall them and myself also to that happy age in which our moments, pleasing as innocent, were passed with such happiness together? ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... "'My surmise proved correct. I have never been more petted than I was by "Toady," as the village boys had dubbed him. My present guardian is foolish enough over me, goodness knows, but she has other ties, while "Toady" had nothing else to love, not even himself. He could hardly believe his eyes at first ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... vast inferiority of the things they sell in the shops to the universe: our great puzzle is never perfectly solved. We come across marvellous hints, we join line to line and our hearts beat with the rapture of a great surmise; we follow a certain track and know by sure signs and signals that we are not mistaken, that we are on the right road; we are furnished with certain charts which tell us "here there be water-pools," "here is a waste place," "here ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Desmond's surmise proved correct. Aruna's left arm was broken above the elbow: a simple fracture, but it hurt a good deal. Thea, in charge of 'the wounded,' eased them both as best she could, during the long drive home. But Aruna, still in her exalted ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... mistaken in the fact that there exists, both in the educated and half-educated portions of the community, something of a surmise or misgiving, that there really is at bottom a certain contrariety between the declarations of religion and the results of physical inquiry; a suspicion such, that, while it encourages those persons who ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... surmise avers that, in 1763 the secrets of his birth and the source of his opulence were known in Holland. The authority is the 'Memoirs' of Grosley (1813). Grosley was an archaeologist of Troyes; he had travelled in Italy, and ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... New York it won't do much good to tell the police," answered Anderson Rover. "However, we can report it to morrow. But I think Cuffer and Shelley will keep in the shade until they see Sid Merrick and have a chance to get away," and in this surmise Mr. Rover was correct. The matter was reported to the police, and that was the end of it, so far as the authorities went, for they failed ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... was not less occupied by gloomy thoughts. Of all the leading men of the tribe, Topanashka saw perhaps most clearly the sinister machinations of some of the Turquoise people. Still he had not discovered, and could not even surmise, the real object of their intrigues. Of an intention to divide the tribe he had no idea. Personal ambition, greed, and thirst for influence was all he could think of; and he felt sure that they would not prevail, for to personal ambition the ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... instance, the comet was followed, though at a longer interval, by a remarkable paleness of the sun. The sixth return, in the year eleven hundred and six, is recorded by the chronicles of Europe and China: and in the first fervor of the crusades, the Christians and the Mahometans might surmise, with equal reason, that it portended the destruction of the Infidels. The seventh phenomenon, of one thousand six hundred and eighty, was presented to the eyes of an enlightened age. [80] The philosophy of Bayle dispelled ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... of the passing people, saying In their surmise, "Ah—whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought Round him that looms Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... was now in a fine attitude by act of Parliament. It could talk its contempt of medical women, and act its terror of them, and keep both its feigned contempt and its real alarm safe from the test of a public examination—that crucible in which cant, surmise, and mendacity are soon evaporated or precipitated, and only the ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... since I inscribe the painful remembrance of a striking act in the career of the Emperor; of an event which has been the subject of innumerable controversies, though it has been necessarily only a matter of surmise, since I alone knew all the painful details. I refer to the poisoning of the Emperor at Fontainebleau. I trust I do not need to protest my perfect truthfulness; I feel too keenly the great importance of such a revelation ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... Mr. Moncrief's surmise turned out to be correct. No further adventure befel them on the homeward journey. Paul learned, by the way, that the man Zuker was a German Jew of great ability and cunning. He was suspected to be a spy in the service of a foreign Government—which Government Mr. Moncrief did not mention, ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... conclusion from insufficient data, it is always satisfactory to discover, as one too seldom does, that one was right. I had been right about the gentleman being an accountant, and here I was right again in my surmise that the lady was exceptionally highly connected, so highly that one could overlook her mother's mesalliance with the coachman. Her uncle was only a bishop at the time of her birth, he became a cardinal soon after Mery's mother married ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... richly-toned drawings in sepia; and numerous crystals of garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To this last surmise, however, some of the neighbours to whom I showed my prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones, they said; whereas what I had found was merely a "stone upon the shore." My ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... had announced himself, to introduce her particularly by name. To forestall in the jolly sailor the natural interpretation of their appearance together at this hour and occasion, he had to lend himself to the only other reasonable surmise. If they were not, as he saw it on the tip of the good captain's tongue to propose, newly married, they were in a hopeful way to be. The consciousness of himself as accessory to so delightful an arrangement passed from the captain to Peter with almost the obviousness of a wink, as he ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... concentrated on me, as if to read from the expression of my face whether the news was good or bad. Colonel Michler of General Miles's staff was there, and if we should happen to be together talking, the women would surmise that the news was bad; and many times their surmises were just about right. One sweet little black-eyed woman always said she could tell from my face whether I was bluffing or not. July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, were ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... nowadays, that deal with peculiarities of grammar, how supremely repulsive they are! It is impossible to glean any sense from them, as the Editor mixes up Nipperwick's view with Sidgeley's reasoning and Spreckendzedeutscheim's surmise with Donnerundblitzendorf's conjecture in a way that seems to argue a thorough unsoundness of mind and morals, a cynical insanity combined with a blatant indecency. He occasionally starts in a reasonable manner by giving one ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... thing she could surmise, with any semblance of probability, was that the whole was some frolic of Lady Honoria Pemberton, who had persuaded Delvile to send her the dog, and perhaps assured him she had herself requested ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... brother, George, the rich one, who lived in Cleveland and manufactured rakes and hoes, wrote her one of his rare letters to the same effect. Lydia thought it likely that he had been moved to this unusual show of interest in her affairs by proddings from her mother and Marietta. If this surmise was correct, and if a similar request had been sent to Henry, the other member of the Emery family, the one who had married the grocer's daughter, the appeal had a strikingly different effect. From Oregon came an impetuous, slangily-worded exhortation to Lydia not ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... suggest, even, a life lived upon a different plane. Yet every now and then their references to everyday happenings were trite enough. Sir Timothy had assailed the recent craze for drugs, a diatribe to which Lady Cynthia had listened in silence for reasons which Francis could surmise. ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wondered if she really meant the marriage threat. At this distance in time it appears extremely doubtful. She may have had moments in which the steadily augmenting output of the Little Clean-Up tempted her, but this is only a surmise. And a little later I was to learn that during this very winter when she was dragging me bound and helpless at the end of her trail-rope, she was—but ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... marriage; however, I gave little credit to this rumour till I was obliged to go to town about business, and there I heard the same information confidently affirmed. Though I still considered it as a vague surmise, I wrote to him an account of what I had heard; and, in his answer, which is still in my possession, he assured me, with repeated vows and protestations, that the report was altogether false. Satisfied with this declaration, I returned to his house; and, though the tale was ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... all may be mere surmise; Wherefore, at present it will be most prudent, To hush the sad ideas of suspicion. A little time must prove its truth, or falsehood; Besides, the person ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... Harero heard him utter a curse, deep but suppressed, for the surmise of the multitude was correct. Captain Bezan had been reprieved; and, probably, in fear of this very thing, the general of the division had taken upon himself to set the time of execution one hour earlier ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... boys drew nearer they perceived their surmise had been correct. A dilapidated old wagon it was, standing beside the road. To it were hitched two mules. There was not ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... arrogant, with restive and fathomless eyes, he seemed to unite the East and the West in his being. Had his mother been a Jewess of pride and intellect, and his father an adventurous American of the superman type? Kate, looking at him with fresh interest, found her thoughts leaping to the surmise. She knew that he was, in a way, a great man—a man with a growing greatness. He had promulgated ideas so daring that his brother scientists were embarrassed to know where to place him. There were those who thought of him as a brilliant charlatan; but ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... be added that Duckworthy himself was shortly hanged, so that, if his surmise was true, there were now only three left alive of all that wicked crew that had successfully carried to its completion the greatest adventure which any pirate in the world had ever, ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... was criminal folly. It bore its natural fruit. Our men were scattered on the route from Harper's Ferry to Leesburg, a demoralized lot of stragglers. My diary mentions this experience with much indignation and attributes the folly to the effects of whiskey. Of course, this was only a surmise. ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... Hogsdon will to Hygate ere't be long, London has got a great way from the streame, I thinke she means to go to Islington, To eate a dish of strawberries and creame. The City's sure in progresse I surmise, Or going to revell it in some disorder, Without the Walls, without the Liberties, Where she neede feare nor Mayor nor Recorder. Well! say she do, 'twere pretty, yet 'tis pitty A Middlesex Bailiff should ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... he is only a Boer in the sense that he smokes hard and prefers coffee. He lives in a very ordinary dwelling-house, and it is even stated that his vrouw starches and irons his dress-shirts, but this may only be surmise. At all events he does not allow these trifles to worry him, his renowned diplomacy being directed chiefly to the management of his cosmopolitan children, who are apt occasionally to wax troublesome and exceed the bounds ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... had to borrow during his time of stress. Always devoted to his mother, Borrow sent her sums of money at intervals from the moment the power of earning came to him. We shall never know, we can only surmise something of the self-sacrificing devotion of that mother during the years in which Borrow had failed to find remunerative work. Wherever he wandered there had always been a home in the Willow Lane cottage. It is probable that much the greater part ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... was in the Navy," put in Bob as if to corroborate the surmise of the old gentleman. ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... his rescue from the Austrian papists of the Hungarian patriot, Martin Kozsta." The captain wisely refused to purchase any needles or thread for me on shore, or any articles of ladies' dress, for fear of the Jesuitical spies, who might surmise something and cause further trouble. But he kindly furnished me with some goods he had purchased for his own wife, and there were needles and silk enough on board, so that I soon cut and made a few articles that made me very comfortable during our ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... his head on his hands. In all his dealings with the Spartan he had believed he had covered the details of the fate of Glaucon. Lycon could surmise what he liked, but the proof to make the damning charges good Democrates believed he had safe in his own keeping. Only one man could have unlocked the casket of infamy—Agis—and the mention of his name was as a bolt from ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... to the vault, I had no very sure purpose in mind; only a vague surmise that this finding of Blackbeard's coffin would somehow lead to the finding of his treasure. But as I looked at the beard and pondered, I began to see that if anything was to be done, it must be by ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... be, and enquire as to where he was, and whether they could afford him any information as to what had become of Harry, when his quick ear caught one or two words of the conversation which the unknown persons were carrying on. It was in Spanish. Then his surmise was a true one, and he was indeed aboard one of the enemy's ships. With a stifled cry he flung himself down in the bunk, and pulled the coverlet over him once again, closing his eyes, and simulating heavy breathing, ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... and then forwarded to Pastor Henkel. What the questions were we have no means of determining [no doubt, they were the same questions asked the Pennsylvania Synod], but, judging from the ability and bent of the doughty David Henkel, we may surmise that the questions involved some difficulties. In the following year Synod resolved that it could not answer these questions, since it is not our purpose at our meetings to discuss theological questions, but to consider the general welfare ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... meant, to be symbols of Jehovah. The true object of worship was worshipped in a false way. No matter though the image represented Him, its worship was idol worship. There is no ground in the narrative for the surmise of Stanley,—who in this, as usual, simply says ditto to Ewald,—that Jeroboam's motive was the desire to prevent Israel's adopting false gods, and that the calves were a compromise by which he hoped ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... prolonged—in short, we find ourselves in a land of Faery; secondly, we find that the historic conditions in which the heroes are represented as living do not, for the most part, answer to anything we know or can surmise of the third century. For Finn and his warriors are perpetually on the watch to guard Ireland against the attacks of over-sea raiders, styled Lochlannac by the narrators, and by them undoubtedly thought of as Norsemen. But the latter, as is well known, only came to Ireland at the ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... Louis Capet is that of Death." Death by a small majority of Fifty-three. Nay, if we deduct from the one side, and add to the other, a certain Twenty-six, who said Death but coupled some faintest ineffectual surmise of mercy with it, the majority will ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... time. Do you think, now that my son is found, and that son like John Ardworth (for there can be no doubt that my surmise was right), with genius to make station the pedestal to the power I dreamed of in my youth, but which my sex forbade me to attain,—do you think I will keep him a month from his inheritance? Before the month is out, you shall ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... voice that not only swept the last film of sleep out of Beverley's brain, but made it perfectly clear to him that a very important bit of craftiness was being performed; just what its nature was, however, he could not surmise. One thing was obvious, Long-Hair did not wish the other Indians to know of the move he was making. Deftly he slipped the blankets from around Beverley, and cut the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me; we all surmise, They, this thing, and I, that; whom shall ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... sure was some hustle! There's one thing, Court. You won't have to candidate for any church like those other guys in your little old seminary. You just went out and bought one; though I surmise you and I'll have to do some scrubbing if you calculate to hold services ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... my business," he said presently; "but from your general appearance, from bits of idiom you occasionally drop, and from the way you handled those two boes the night we met I should rather surmise that at some time or other you had been less than a thousand miles from the w.k. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... know for certain that he is somewhere in this neighborhood, and we shall hunt him down. By your leave, General," and the man swung himself into the saddle as he spoke. It was well that he did so, for a corporal of gendarmerie trained to alert observation and quick surmise would have had his suspicions at once if he had caught sight of the General's face. Everything that passed through the soldier's mind was faithfully revealed ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... glance on the man in question. He was wearing evening kit, and at first sight the brown-skinned face above the white of his collar, taken in conjunction with dark hair and very strongly-marked brows, seemed to premise the correctness of Tony's surmise. Suddenly the man lifted his bent head, and over the top of the newspaper Arm found herself looking into a pair of unmistakably grey eyes—grey as steel. They were very direct eyes, with a certain brooding discontent in their depths which looked as though it might flame ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... tide of gossip and surmise. And in Hone's pocket lay the twisted note which the woman he loved had left behind—the note which he had read with an unmoved countenance under ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... Well did he surmise from whom the deadly provocation came, the loss of his farm, the death of a noble lad committed to his care; not to mention the loss of some common men, who could easily be replaced: for there were ever fresh swarms of Normans, French, and Bretons ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... forty years, he would have learnt, first from John Huss, and then from Luther and his followers, that although in certain hands things may last a while, it is only till they are worn out. What Boccaccio and the Jew would say now if they came back, I do not venture to surmise, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... this surmise to be correct. We saw where Ranger had slipped over a twenty-foot wall. If he had gone over just under the cedar where the depth was much greater he would never have ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer. A strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched something wet, and after one convulsive movement ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... pressed to her lips, but just as they brimmed over, some quick surmise of Ann's shrewd replies choked them back. After all, what had she got out of it? What that she could show? She rose slowly and walked back to her room, where the bath, fresh, uncreased clothes, and Hester's deft ministry waited ready for her. Later, she lay again in the balcony ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... permitting a witness to wander at will over the entire field of knowledge, hearsay, surmise and opinion has several distinct advantages over our practice. In giving hearsay evidence, for example, he may suggest a new and important witness of whom the counsel for the other side would not otherwise have heard, and who can then be brought into court. On some unguarded and apparently irrelevant ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... have saddened a nobler spirit enchanted Inglesby. He was dazzled by her. Her interest in what he was saying was coolly impersonal, the fixed habit of trained politeness. He could even surmise that she was mentally yawning behind her hand. When she looked at him her eyes under her level brows held a certain scornfulness. And this, too, delighted him. He groveled to it. His red face glowed with pleasure; he swelled with ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... verisimilitude, scope, instrument, character, testimony, and circumstances, with which they presented themselves to us; and, according to the final result of those various considerations, it was our duty to be sure, or to believe, or to opine, or to surmise, or to tolerate, or to reject, or to denounce. The main difference between my Essay on Miracles in 1826 and my Essay in 1842 is this: that in 1826 I considered that miracles were sharply divided into two classes, those which were to be received, and those which were to be rejected; ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... them out to her with his finger, and seems to do so as an encouragement to her. A young man follows the saint. His action is too expressive to suppose it that of a parent or convert." This is indeed a very fine specimen, both for what is said and what is unsaid—the surmise is perfectly French, and the pitying tender familiarity of Cecilia, for commiseration's sake robbed of her saintship, would be enough to melt an auction-room to tears, were the picture to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... staring at the rug. I wondered how she came to surmise that it was Gretchen's rose? ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... of her own purity, powerless to penetrate, yet nauseating her by the unclean impact. What, then, interposed to check him? What hidden force held him back from working his will against her? She could make no surmise. Certainly, here was no physical restraint to stay him. As certainly, no moral reason would be of effect. The thing was altogether mysterious. So, she marveled mightily, and was curious to understand, even ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... upon each, Embraced like sisters, thenceforth one. For her No arduous thing was Faith, ere yet she heard In heart believing: and, as when a babe Marks some bright shape, if near or far, it knows not, And stretches forth a witless hand to clasp Phantom or form, even so with wild surmise And guesses erring first, and questions apt, She chased the flying light, and round it closed At last, and found it substance. "This is He." Then cried she, "This, whom every maid should love, Conqueror self-sacrificed of sin ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... positive intention to devote the proceeds of the sale of those securities to bolstering up your business; and even yesterday you assured me that if they could only be found you would of course hand them over to the assignee, to be devoted to the liquidation of your debts. Am I correct in this surmise, ...
— Dick the Bank Boy - Or, A Missing Fortune • Frank V. Webster
... ganz unbegrndet steht, statt in den zweiten, wo es allein motiviert erscheint."[110] But this is not the correct explanation. The author of the rmur for some reason, such as a wish to rationalize the story, but which, however, we can only surmise, decided to make radical changes in it. In the first instance he substitutes a wolf for the dragon, but otherwise, considering the material he is going to use in the story of the fight with the bear, retains as much as he can of the story ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... lofty and far- reaching in its sensitiveness, was solitary, sad, thoughtful, yearning, prescient of an early death; yet, by the whole impression of her being, she gave birth, in those who lovingly looked on her, to the surmise that she was mysteriously self-sufficing and happy. Bettine writes to her, "I begin to believe thy feelings are enthroned beyond clouds which cast their shadows on the earth; while thou, borne on them, art revelling in celestial light." The best way to indicate briefly what this friendship ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... instant Jerry saw that his surmise was wrong. For suddenly a single figure came into view, a figure huddled on hands and knees a full fifty feet away from his companions. For an instant Jerry couldn't understand. Then the huddled figure was swept farther ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Repeller No. 1, rowed directly over the submerged net, and made for the harbour. When the approach of this flag-of-truce was perceived from the fort nearest the mouth of the harbour, it occasioned much surmise. Had the earthquake brought these Syndicate knaves to their senses? Or were they about to make further absurd and outrageous demands? Some irate officers were of the opinion that enemies like these should be considered no better ...
— The Great War Syndicate • Frank Stockton
... great marvel; moreover, they doubted his being a king's messenger, for, as Smallbones very shrewdly observed, "Why, if he was a king's messenger, did he not come with the despatches?" However, they could only surmise, and no more. But the dog being turned out of the cabin in compliance with Ramsay's wish, was the most important point of all. They could have got over all the rest, but that was quite incomprehensible; and they all agreed with Coble, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... from what had seemed natural sleep—save for the rapid breathing—and of a sudden recollected the number of the house in Cleveland Street at which Biffen was now living. He uttered it without explanation. Amy at once conjectured his meaning, and as soon as her surmise was confirmed she despatched a ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... "Molly Aston," not "dear Boothby," must have been the object of this rivalry[1]; and the surmise is strengthened by Johnson's calling Molly the loveliest creature he ever saw; adding (to Mrs. Thrale), "My wife was a little jealous, and happening one day when walking in the country to meet a fortune-hunting gipsy, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... practical horsemen that horses grown chiefly on alfalfa have not the staying power and endurance of those, for instance, that are grazed chiefly on Kentucky blue grass and some other grasses. There is probably some truth in the surmise, and if so, the objection raised could be met by dividing the grazing either through alternating the same with other pastures or by growing some other grass or ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... forethought and caution, he had succeeded in restoring Elise to her father's house, without her absence having been remarked, or having occasioned any surmise. In the close carriage in which they performed the journey home, they had not exchanged a word; but leaning hack on the cushions, each had rest and repose after the stormy and exciting scenes they had just passed through. Elise's hand still rested on Bertram's, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps because ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... the day I turned this over and over in my mind, and then, in the middle of our evening meal, enlightenment came to me. I remembered the man whose piteous tale had so much affected Beckenham on the day of our arrival, and the sound his crutches made upon the pavement as he left us. If my surmise proved correct, and we could only manage to communicate with him, here was a golden opportunity. But how were we to do this? We discussed it, and discussed it, times out of number, but in vain. That he must be stopped on his way down the street need not to be argued at all. ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art. Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread. Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... is mentioned only incidentally, which is natural, for it is a detail which would impress later piety rather than the Buddha himself. But there is no reason to be sceptical as to the part it has played in Buddhist history. Even if we had not been told that he sat under a tree, we might surmise that he did so, for to sit under a tree or in a cave was the only alternative for a homeless ascetic. The Mahavagga states that after attaining Buddhahood he sat crosslegged at the foot of the tree for seven days uninterruptedly, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... mission if, in accordance with the plan of the Jesuit provincial, it is decided to recall Father Germain to Quebec to fill the office of superior general of the house of the Jesuits in Canada. This is not merely a groundless surmise, for the destination and nomination to office of Father Germain are already determined, at least Father Germain himself so states in his last letter to the Abbe l'Isle-Dieu, and he adds that he has made every possible representation to at least delay his recall. The Abbe l'Isle-Dieu, ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... think you only the most adorable woman in the world. But there is one thing which has cost me many a sleepless hour, many a jealous surmise. If I could be reassured as to the nature of your errand that night when ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... mother was a Frenchwoman (his father was Henry Morland, the painter of the delightful pair of half-lengths, The Laundry Maids) suggests to my mind the wild surmise that she may have been the daughter of Chardin. For in the technique as well as in the temperament of Morland,—making allowance for difference of circumstances,—there is something remarkably akin to those of the great Frenchman. Both eschewed the ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... are—a change! semper eadem! Women will be wanting a change of air in Paradise; a change of angels too, I might surmise. A change from quarters like these to a French hotel would be a descent!—'this the seat, this mournful gloom for that celestial light.' I am perfectly at home in the library here. That excellent fellow Whitford ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... could judge from the volume of sound the battle seemed to be concentrated directly upon the hill. He knew that Grant expected to make a general attack in full force, and he surmised that one of the commanders under him was not pushing forward with the expected zeal. His surmise was correct. A general with fifteen thousand men was standing almost passive in front of a much smaller force, but other generals were showing great fire ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was on de table.'" [Footnote: This story, and the story of the "Postmaster" in a preceding chapter, I have told for so many years and to so many people, and with such varied amplifications, that I have long since persuaded myself that they are creations of my own. I surmise, however, that the basis of the "Postmaster" can be found in the corner of some forgotten newspaper, and I know that the "One-Legged Goose" is as old ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... stopped. One of the Wyandot warriors seemed to have seen something. He was looking fixedly in Henry's direction. Boughs and stumps of every sort often floated down the Ohio. He might have caught a glimpse of Henry's head. He would take it for a small stump, but he would not stop to surmise. ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Everyone could surmise where Joe Butler was, but no one voiced the supposition. Warren, handsome in his skirted coat, knee breeches, and ruffles, disappeared from the room, and the dancing went on. The scene was unbelievably brilliant, the hot, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... They walked farther along the path and found that it was one used by workmen, evidently, leading at last down the steep mountain side and across to the Rattler. They surmised that it must be one made by the timber cutters for the mine, and learned, in later months, that the surmise ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... stands away from the picture he is painting, and to examine it with a sideways head, with a peering, contracted gaze. This thing that protected a soul from sin—what was it like? What was it? He could not easily surmise. He had a clear vision of the Christ soul, of the exquisite essence of a divine individuality that prompted life to spring out of death for one perfect moment that it might miraculously reward a great human act of humanity. Yes, that soul floated before him almost visibly. He could call it ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Roosevelt as President. They united to hold a convention of the Progressive party at Chicago in 1916 on the same days on which the Republican Convention met there. Each convention opened with a calculating eye upon the activities of the other. But both watched with even more anxious surmise for some sign of intention from the Progressive leader back at Oyster Bay. He held in his single hand the power of life and death for the Progressive party. His decision as to cooperative action with the Republicans or individual action as a Progressive ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... men hurrying toward the beach with an uneasy feeling in the region of his heart. He could easily see that Aaron Dennison looked angry, and from this it was not difficult to surmise that fresh trouble hung over the heads ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... said, "is perfectly correct in her surmise. I do not want the life of this poor drivelling old man: my intentions are much more peaceable, be assured. It rests entirely with this accomplished young lady (whose spirit I like, and whose ready wit I admire), whether the business between us ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the door. 'Don't you see that this is really the first hint we have had to indicate that young Trent is still alive and a prisoner. Up to this moment all has been theory and surmise. If this letter is not a wretched fraud, a bold scheme to obtain money, hatched in the brain of some villain who has seen the advertised rewards and knows nothing about Trent, it is our first clue, and through it we may find him.' And promising to call upon her ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... sentiment, runs through the sacred books of the East, is the root and heart of their theology, the dogma that makes the cruelest penances pleasant if a renewed existence may thus be avoided. The sentiment is not alien to human longing and surmise, as witnesses the night thought of the English poet who, world sated, and sadly yearning, cries through the starry ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... time his hands were bound behind his back and he noticed that the masked rustler was fastening them tightly but with a rotten rawhide. This peculiar circumstance caused a wild thrill to flash all through Larkin's being. Perhaps, after all, here was the weak link in the rustler's chain. The surmise became a certainty when the man, unobserved by his companions, sawed Bud's arms back and forth, showing him the quickest and easiest ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... have heard, Agnes, that a gentleman visits you whom I surmise to be my brother, and, if so, I thought perhaps you would know through him ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... for you to find out how," said Mason Elliott, gravely. "It is incredible that Mrs, Embury is the guilty one, though I admit the incriminating appearance of the henbane. But I've beet thinking it over, and while Mr. Driscoll's surmise that the deed can possibly be traced to one who recently saw the play of 'Hamlet,' yet he must remember that thousands of people saw that play, and that therefore it cannot ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... But there was something pricked him which filled him for the instant with serious thoughts. When he had asked the question he wished to see her at his feet. There had come no answer, and he told himself that he was justified in thinking the surmise to be true. He was justified to himself, but only for the moment, for at the next had come her declaration that all was to be over between them. The idea of the lover became buried under the ruins which were ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... her, and press'd her hand, And said, "Art thou so pale, who wast so bland And merry in our meadows? How is this? Tell me thine ailment: tell me all amiss!— Ah! thou hast been unhappy at the change 520 Wrought suddenly in me. What indeed more strange? Or more complete to overwhelm surmise? Ambition is no sluggard: 'tis no prize, That toiling years would put within my grasp, That I have sigh'd for: with so deadly gasp No man e'er panted for a mortal love. So all have set my heavier grief above These things which happen. Rightly have they done: ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... of an opportunity to make, and to shame them for their monstrous credulity—but this I leave to thy own fat-headed prudence—Only it vexes me to the heart, that even scandal and calumny should dare to surmise the bare possibility of any man sharing the favours of a woman, whom now methinks I could worship with a veneration due ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... that he desired made, a cake for a wedding; and I directly found myself curious to know whose wedding. Even a dull wedding interests me more than other dull events, because it can arouse so much surmise and so much prophecy; but in this wedding I instantly, because of his strange and winning embarrassment, became quite absorbed. How came it he was ordering the cake for it? Blushing like the boy that ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the very dust, Hoping in vain to come across a crust. And, when our God-born WILHELM brings his Huns Here, he will find a few odd skeletons." Such is the tale a Teuton lately writ. How, then, I ask, does London look so fit? This is the reason, mainly, I surmise— We are fed up, of course, with ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... bookkeeper's wife. I surmise that Percy felt she was overdressed, and that made him awkward with me. I've always suspected ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... in a serious manner, there were few of us whose hearts did not flutter responsively to this surmise, for the danger became every minute more imminent and we knew what a terrific surf there must be then running on the shingle beach. But we now rapidly approached the shore; we were near to the floating ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... who have figured in our tale, we can only surmise—at least hope—that they lived long and happily, for the saga relates nothing as to the end of their respective careers. But of this we are quite sure, that wherever they went, or however long ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Golden Eagle," he comforted, "and anyway it's likely if no one stops them, that some at least of the canoes will drift down the river to the coast. M. Desplaines will no doubt be able to surmise something serious has happened when he hears of their arrival and will send aid. In the meantime we have to consider what we are to ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... him at his house in Chelsea, and when Whistler arrived he was shown into a reception-room. Seating himself, he was soon disturbed by a noise which appeared to be made by a rat or a mouse in the wainscoting of the room. This surmise was wrong, as he found the noise was in the center of the apartment. Stooping, to his amazement he saw Rossetti lying at full length ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... concluded calmly and coldly, "that you talk nonsense, when you say I have no heart." That was my father's disposition; to suspect that any one, or anything else could hope for the privilege of making his heart beat, except this natural physical contraction, were a vain and empty surmise indeed. And yet he had been twice married; the question may suggest itself, had he ever loved? I dare say he had analysed his amative propensity thoroughly, and knew to what extent it existed within him, but when a man can reconcile himself to the belief that on the "middle line ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... seldom the case that when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffodillies fill their cups with tears To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise; Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away,—where'er thy bones are hurl'd; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... his Pa,— Quite possibly recalling his own youth, And therefrom predicating, by high noon, The absent one was very probably Disporting his nude self in the delights Of the old swimmin'-hole, some hundred yards Below the slaughter-house, just east of town. The stoic father, too, in his surmise Was accurate—For, ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... I marry, there's the point: But if without him we be thought to feeble, My iudgement is, we should not step too farre Till we had his Assistance by the hand. For in a Theame so bloody fac'd, as this, Coniecture, Expectation, and Surmise Of Aydes incertaine, should not ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... consequences that ensue if the phenomena of heredity are considered as phenomena of memory. Thus, when he is dealing with the phenomena of old age (vol. i. p. 538, ed. 2) he does not ascribe them to lapse and failure of memory, nor surmise the principle underlying longevity. He never mentions memory in connection with heredity without presently saying something which makes us involuntarily think of a man missing an easy catch at cricket; it is only rarely, however, that he connects the ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... exquisite significance and tenderness. It is a beautiful smile still, but that charm of rarity (if it be a charm) is lacking. It is a conventional smile more than a spontaneous or a happy one; indeed, it led me to surmise that she had perhaps not been very happy since we last met, and had learned to use this smile as a sort of veil. Not that I suppose for a moment that Courtney has ill-treated her. I never could see anything in the man beyond a superficial ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... it. Fred knew that he must be a Russian. Yet in every detail of his appearance he was German. His clothes, his bearing, his every little mannerism, were carefully studied. Fred guessed that this was no servant, but a secret agent of much skill and experience. He was to learn the truth of his surmise before many ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... and caution, he had succeeded in restoring Elise to her father's house, without her absence having been remarked, or having occasioned any surmise. In the close carriage in which they performed the journey home, they had not exchanged a word; but leaning hack on the cushions, each had rest and repose after the stormy and exciting scenes they had just passed through. Elise's hand still rested on Bertram's, ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... Might not her refusal to marry him be caused by the same fear? some crushing disgrace or misery which threatened her through the murder, and which she feared to bring upon her husband? The motive I had guessed to be strong as her love: what if it were her love? Having stepped from surmise to surmise so far, I paused to strengthen my position by the facts. There were but two ways in which this murder could have prevented her marriage—through Merrick's guilt or her own. His innocence was proven; hers I did not doubt after I had ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... was correct in his surmise was shown later when Bob and Sam turned their craft into the stream which led to Round Lake, and then landed, evidently ...
— Messenger No. 48 • James Otis
... ye take [Sidenote: Watch knowing folk, and] Where ye be sette / right in ententyf wyse Connyng folk / connyng men shal make 500 To their connyng ye shal make your surmise [Sidenote: their skill.] And as they do / ye muste your self deuyse For this my childe / is as the gospel trewe Who wil be connyng / he must [th]^e ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... Hazy weather at noon with a considerable swell from the westward. Latitude observed to be 47 degrees 35 minutes north. NOTE—We found this morning at daybreak that the Audacious was missing, and we concluded was the ship who had secured the prize, neither being in sight.* (* Of course this surmise was incorrect. The Audacious had not secured the Revolutionnaire which was towed into Rochefort by the Audacieux (curious similarity in names). The Audacious badly crippled made her way to Plymouth ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... fair young princess at his son's expense; but similar changes in state marriages were such matters of course, that no emotions were likely to be created in consequence. There is no proof whatever, nor any reason to surmise; that any love passages ever existed between Don ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... official or registered form, touching the policy outlined by Mr. Johnson. He was the duly-elected Vice-President. He had come to the magistracy in presumed sympathy and close affiliation with the Republicans whose suffrages he had received. All beyond these facts was surmise or inference. No one knew any thing with precision ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... some fierce swearing in Dublin Castle on the day that news arrived, and perhaps many a passionate query blurted out as to whether police, detectives, magistrates, and all in that southern district were not secretly in league with the rebels. In fact, a surmise actually got into the papers that the proprietors of the gunshops knew more about the disappearance of the arms, and were less aggrieved by the "seizure" than they cared to acknowledge. However this might be, the popular party enjoyed the whole thing immensely, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... Grant drily, "although I hope it will be, this country isn't quite free yet. I surmise that you don't know that the office of your contemporary farther east was broken into a few hours ago, and an article written by a friend of mine pulled out of the press. The proprietor was quietly held down upon the floor ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... about the country during, it is to be hoped, vacation- time only, and is to be found writing the most cheerful letters to his friends in Ireland (all of whom are persuaded that he is going some day to be somebody, though sorely puzzled to surmise what thing or when, so pleasantly does he take life), from all sorts of out-of-the-way country places, where he lodges with quaint old landladies who wonder maternally why he never gets drunk, and generally mistake him for an author until he pays his bill. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... dust, Hoping in vain to come across a crust. And, when our God-born WILHELM brings his Huns Here, he will find a few odd skeletons." Such is the tale a Teuton lately writ. How, then, I ask, does London look so fit? This is the reason, mainly, I surmise— We are fed up, of ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... own I was glad to receive your assurance that the Calcutta paper's surmise was unfounded. {398} It is said that when we wish a thing to be true, we are prone to believe it true; but I think (judging from myself) we adopt with a still prompter credulity ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... owls, in their habitation on the old ruined gateway, whenever we choose. Confident of protection, these pretty birds betray no fear when the stranger mounts up to their place of abode. I would here venture a surmise, that the barn owl sleeps standing. Whenever we go to look at it, we invariably see it upon the perch bolt upright, and often with its eyes closed, apparently fast asleep. Buffon and Bewick err (no doubt, unintentionally) when ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... because "it is involved in the idea." Such thinkers do not reflect that the idea, being a result of abstraction, ought to conform to the facts, and can not make the facts conform to it. The argument is at most admissible as an appeal to authority; a surmise, that what is now part of the idea, must, before it became so, have been found by previous inquirers in the facts. Nevertheless, the philosopher who more than all others made professions of rejecting authority, Descartes, constructed his system on this very basis. His favorite ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Leger, who was the commodore's cook; and as he was a Frenchman, and suspected to be a papist, it was by some imagined that he had deserted with a view of betraying all that he knew to the enemy; but this appeared by the event to be an ill-grounded surmise, for it was afterwards known that he had been taken by some Indians, who carried him prisoner to Acapulco, from whence he was transferred, to Mexico, and then to Vera Cruz, where he was shipped on board a vessel bound to Old Spain: ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... were quite alone in the room designed for his studio, 'you are to reign mistress here; but be careful never to drop a hint regarding the humble manner in which you have lived for so many years; no one must surmise that we have been in poverty, or our ruin is certain. I intend giving an entertainment to my friends a few nights hence, and then I shall introduce you to society; meantime I expect that you will provide yourself with elegant and ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... down-spout, and from the top of the window to the spout he saw stretching what looked like a double cord. It was painted the same color as the walls, and had he not been looking out specially he would not have seen it. A moment's glance at the foot of the spout showed him his surmise was correct. Pushed in behind it and normally concealed by it were two insulated wires, which ran down the wall from the window and disappeared into the ground with ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... understandable. Remained only the object of an expedition of this peculiar character. Sam Bolton knew that the Indian would satisfy himself by surmises,—he would never apply the direct question to a man's affairs,—and surmise might come dangerously near the truth. So he proceeded to impart a little information in ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... occupied the chair in which he had expected to find Daly. He thanked the clerk and went back thoughtfully to his place, because it looked as if Daly had been there and the other had helped him to steal away. If this surmise was correct, they might be trying to follow Featherstone; but he was, fortunately, out of their reach, and Foster decided that he must not exaggerate the importance of the matter. After all, Daly might have come to Montreal on business, and the rotunda of a ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... character and the character of that peculiar disquiet which the howl of the creature evokes. But since the senses of a dog are totally unlike those of a man, we shall never really know. And we can only surmise, in the vaguest way, the meaning of the uneasiness in ourselves. Some notes in the long cry,—and the weirdest of them,—oddly resemble those tones of the human voice that tell of agony and terror. Again, we have reason to believe that the sound of the cry itself became associated ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... Shoxford, my cousin," Lord Castlewood said to me that day, after a plain though courteous refusal to enlighten me even with a mere surmise, except upon the condition before rejected. "I can not allow you to be there without strict supervision and protection. You will not, perhaps, be aware of it, as perhaps you have not been before; but a careful watch will be kept on you. I merely tell you ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... a singular exhibition of the efficiency of the Department. He had no hesitation, however, in expressing an unofficial opinion that there were five thousand of these recruits. It is scarce necessary to surmise what the condition of the army was likely to be, with James Wilkinson as the senior general officer of consecutive service, and with Dearborn, a man of sixty, and in civil life ever since the War ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... How the two hosts managed to live in the mean time the tellers of the story do not say. Thucydides, the historian, thinks it likely that the Greeks had to farm the neighboring lands for food. How the Trojans and their allies contrived to survive so long within their walls we are left to surmise, unless they farmed their streets. And thus we reach the opening of the tenth year ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... great satisfaction. "Those two are going to catch it!" she said to herself; "I am glad I am out of it!" Mr Roberts knew sorrowfully that the surmise was woefully true, but he was rather relieved to find that his sister-in-law was "going to catch it" with him. Her presence was a sort of stick for him to ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... fallen into the way of not considering things, especially such things as were under Jack's care. We had, therefore, never doubted for a moment that all was going well, so that it was with no little anxiety that we heard him make the above remark. However, we had no time for question or surmise, for at the moment he spoke a heavy squall was bearing down upon us; and as we were then flying with our lee gunwale dipping occasionally under the waves, it was evident that we should have to lower our sail altogether. In a few seconds the squall ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... I asked what made him surmise all this: when it seemed to me that with speedy country horses they might already be far ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... enough to contradict this unfair insinuation, and also the incorrect surmise that I went to the States to the interest of any paper or person? I simply made the journey in search of health, and not interest of ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... conjectured that he and Marcia had an understanding; and some of the ladies used such scant opportunity as he gave them to make sly allusions to her absence and his desolate condition. They were confirmed in their surmise by the fact, known from actual observation, that Bartley had not spoken a word to any other young lady since Marcia ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... Love and Personal Beauty I intimated (116) that Oliver Goldsmith was the first author who had a suspicion of the fact that love is not the same everywhere and at all times. My surmise was apparently correct; it is not refuted by any of the references to love by the several authors just quoted, since all of these were written from about a half a century to a century later than Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (published in 1764), which contains ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... have been her protector since she was fourteen years of age. She is the possessor of a large fortune in her own right. Her father,—who was my brother,—gave her into my care when he was on his death-bed. I leave you to surmise just what were his dying words to me. She was his idol. I have not failed him in any respect. You ask me to give my consent to your marriage. I cannot do so. No doubt you will be married, just as you have planned. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... on the part of the vessel. Why did she steer so straight for land? Why did she so quickly drop anchor and put out two boats? Could it be that this vessel had been on their track? Could it be that the Peruvian government—But he could not waste time in surmise as to what might be. They must act, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... employed in this manner, but none of those on whom he called could give him the slightest information. They all believed that Master Pearson had left the country, and some supposed that he had gone to one of the plantations in America, but that was only a surmise, as he had for some reason or other left no trace of the direction he had taken. Very unwillingly, therefore, Jack and his companion returned ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... his hand upon it, found that it was attached to his lady's great toe, and said to himself:—This must be some trick: and afterwards discovering that the thread passed out of the window, was confirmed in his surmise. Wherefore, he softly severed it from the lady's toe, and affixed it to his own; and waited, all attention, to learn the result of his experiment. Nor had he long to wait before Ruberto came, and Arriguccio felt him jerk the thread according to his wont: and as Arriguccio had not known how ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... once had a surmise, nor was it mistaken. The usual greetings had scarcely passed, when the girl, with cheeks on ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... habitations were observed on the small streams. Though these occur sometimes in little groups, the court-yards are not connected so as to form a defensive village. Small inclosed surfaces, with no evidence that a house ever was connected with them, were also observed. Mr. Bandelier could only surmise that these were garden-plots, something like the ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... he said, "is not a great strategist, yet I surmise he is ready in case of trouble to seize ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... Dick's surmise that the advancing party was being spied on seemed to be correct, since before they reached the cave shots came from the cavern, and there was the vicious whine and ping of bullets. One or two of the cowboys were hit, ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... made up of the two metals; and hence the supply of silver would be increased in the other countries. And so it is quite possible, up to a certain point, that the larger silver coin should be replaced by small gold ones, ten and five franc pieces etc. Rau is certainly right in his surmise that a general rise in the price of commodities as compared with coin, the result of a great increase of gold, would go farthest in countries in which the gold is the medium of circulation, begin later in those which had a mixed circulation, and continue for the the shortest time in those countries ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... fie upon you! how bawdy[137] you are! I-wis, Friendship, it mought[138] have been spoken at twice: What think you, for your saying that the people will surmise? ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... she had carried my mother in her arms, as she had carried me, and had made the proud discovery of her first tooth, as, piously exploring among my tender gums with her little finger, she had found mine, I stared at the Pacific of her possible nursings, in a wild surmise, silent upon a peak of wonder. "Well, then, Auntie," I asked, "do you think you're much more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... marked on the chart, such as Christmas Harbour and Cumberland Bay, which have been properly sounded and have the points laid down; but of this western coast little appears known, and it has been only from surmise that the outlines of the map have been sketched in. I really don't think any exploring party has ever visited it since Monsieur Lieutenant de Kerguelen-Tremarec briefly surveyed it in 1772—more than a hundred ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... The conversation turned principally upon the trade and customs of the coast. The slave-trade was freely discussed; and the subject had a peculiar interest, under the circumstances, because this identical Frenchman, at table with us, is suspected to have some connection with it. It is merely a surmise. The French captain speaks a little English; but, after dinner, as a matter of courtesy, we all adopted his native language. Our friend Colonel Hicks, as usual, did most of the talking; he is as shrewd, ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... them before in my life. They was about as old as he. Well, by and by one of them stood up in the boat. I surmise he had been drinkin'. Then, a minute afterward, I saw the boat upset, and the three was ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... ruled his life; but now and again he would hesitate perplexedly as if at the thought of something that she did not understand, or act suddenly in response to an overwhelming flood of impulse whose spring was beyond her control or even her surmise. Women mother all their men because men are on the whole such big babies, but from a generation of babies is born occasionally the master. Women get so used to the rule that they forget the exception. When he comes, then, ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... again subside at once; but his attempts soon began again, and again, Undine was obliged to warn him off; so that the pleasure of the little party was grievously disturbed. To make things worse, the watermen would mutter many a dark surmise into each other's ears, and cast strange looks at the three gentlefolks, whose very servants began to feel suspicion, and to show distrust of their lord. Huldbrand said to himself more than once, "This comes of uniting with ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... flush'd that rosy cheek Spoke what the heart forbade the tongue to speak, And told the feelings of that heart as well, Nay, with more candour than the tongue could tell. Though this fair lass had with the wealthy dwelt, Yet like the damsel of the cot she felt; And, at the distant hint or dark surmise, The blood into the mantling cheek would rise. Now Anna's station frequent terrors wrought, In one whose looks were with such meaning fraught, For on a Lady, as an humble friend, It was her painful office to attend. Her duties here were of the usual kind - And some the body ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... surprise her dressing room transformed into a bower of roses. A great bouquet of three dozen American beauties on her table bore her father's name and all the rest were from Stuart. She had a vague surmise that he paid for her father's, too. Every tint of rose that blooms he had sent, hiring an artist to arrange them so that their colouring made a veritable song of joy as she entered. There was no card to indicate who had ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... Mrs. Draper was too outrageously late at an appointment for tea, the two girls gave her up, and leaving the house, walked side by side back across the campus, Sylvia quite aware of the wondering surmise which followed their appearance together. On these occasions, Eleanor talked with more freedom than in Mrs. Draper's presence, always in the quietest, simplest way, of small events and quite uninteresting minor matters in her life, or the life of the various household pets, of ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Your surmise that I could not go away from Weymar at present was quite correct. The Altenburg is indeed very deserted, as Princess Marie went away directly after her marriage on the 15th October, and the Princess went to Paris yesterday for several days—yet I will not leave my own hearth ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... except that Codfish may have got cold feet when it came to traveling up this way in such a snowstorm. You know there is nothing brave about that little sneak." And in this surmise Gif was correct. Stowell had found a boarding place in the town and had said he would remain there until the storm cleared away and the ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... reports furnished. Reconnoitring parties must be sent out, roads examined, positions surveyed, and shelter and supplies requisitioned in advance. Thus the movements of staff officers are a clue to the projected movements of the army, and the smallest hint may set a hundred brains to the work of surmise. There will always be many who are just as anxious to discover the general's intentions as he is to conceal them; and if, by any possibility whatever, the gossip and guesses of the camp may come ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... of the heroes are miraculously prolonged—in short, we find ourselves in a land of Faery; secondly, we find that the historic conditions in which the heroes are represented as living do not, for the most part, answer to anything we know or can surmise of the third century. For Finn and his warriors are perpetually on the watch to guard Ireland against the attacks of over-sea raiders, styled Lochlannac by the narrators, and by them undoubtedly thought of as Norsemen. But the latter, ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... opprobrium (as I hold) of the Middle Age. For if such were the dreams of its noblest and purest genius, what must have been the dreams of the ignoble and impure multitude? But had he seen this lake, how easy, how tempting too, it would have been to him to embody in imagery the surmise of a certain 'Father,' and heighten the torments of the lost beings, sinking slowly into that black Bolge beneath the baking rays of the tropic sun, by the sight of the saved, walking where we walked, beneath cool fragrant shade, among the pillars of a ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... nauseating morality, but I inferred that he is trying to force Vetch to agree to this general strike, and that he is prepared to threaten him with some kind of exposure if he doesn't. This, however, was mere surmise on my part. The fellow is as shrewd as he ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... rise to its present position, it will be best to dispose of that outlying state on the southeast, probably an ally or even client of Lydia, which, we are told, was at this time one of the "four powers of Asia." These powers included Babylon also, and accordingly, if our surmise that the Mede was then the overlord of Nebuchadnezzar be correct, this statement of Eusebius, for what it is worth, does not imply that Cilicia had attained an imperial position. Doubtless of the four ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... you, because when I heard your warning cry and took to flight, hoping for a chance later on to rescue you, I ran within two hours straight into the camp of the rangers and the Mohawks. You can easily surmise how glad I was to see them, and ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... smiling day Rejoices in its clamor. Earth and sky Resound with glory of its majesty, Impetuous splendor of its rushing by.— But on those heights the woodland dark is still, Expectant of its coming.... Far away Each anxious tree upon each waiting hill Tingles anticipation, as in gray Surmise of rapture. Now the first gusts play, Like laughter low, about their rippling spines; And now the wildwood, one exultant sway, Shouts—and the light at each tumultuous pause, The light that glooms and shines, Seems hands in ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... more senses than one. Listen to me, Mr. Thane, and don't mind if I am not very lucid. In speaking of the affairs of another, and a young woman, I can only deal in outlines. You will be able to surmise and hope the rest. I feel in duty bound to tell you that at the time of my son's death there was a misunderstanding on my part which forced Miss Lewis into a false position in respect to her relations to my son. Too much was assumed ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... sick of a fever, and died January 28, 1596. His death, like that of his coadjutor, is attributed to mental distress, and nothing is more probable than that disappointment may have made that noxious climate more deadly. Hints of poisoning were thrown out, but this is a surmise easily and often lightly made. "Thus," says Fuller, in his "Holy State," "an extempore performance, scarce heard to be begun before we hear it is ended, comes off with better applause, or miscarries with less disgrace, than a long-studied and openly premeditated action. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... important rules in education is to impress children with a persuasion that the vices we would keep them from, such as lying and breaking one's word, are too shocking to be thought possible. A maxim this worthy of the great Fenelon, his beloved model, and which common tutors do not so much as surmise. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... whom he had left with me. I told him what I had done, in my anxiety about himself, and that more than sufficient time had elapsed for his brother's return. His reply was: "They have caught him. The poor fellow is dead." His surmise proved correct; for news soon came that the poor boy had been captured at his father's house, and hanged. The blow to Card was a severe one, and so hardened his heart against the guerrillas in the neighborhood of his father's home—for he knew they were guilty of ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... he could feel the dampness from it, but the soft, rippling character showed that it did not amount to much. It was a mere cascade, the water of which entered and passed out the cavern by some means which the boy could only surmise. ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... his hand; and, in his irritable surmise of what was to come, losing his habitual self-control, "I know not what all this has to do with you; surely you trespass upon ground sacred to Miss Cameron and myself? Whatever you have to say, let me beg you to come ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book V • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... day following the editor promised the character of Buonaparte, but the surmise of a visit from the French minister, then at our court, was sufficient to put a stop to its publication; accordingly it 'never appeared'. Coleridge was requested by the proprietor and editor to report a speech of Pitt's, which at ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... candles would burn in still air a little over six hours. It would thus be possible for the person who inhabited these rooms to go away at seven o'clock in the evening and leave a light which would burn until past one in the morning and then extinguish itself. This, of course, was only surmise, but it destroyed the significance of the night ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... trail. Once in a while he broke a branch and left it swinging as a guide to Sam when he should follow with the riders from the ranch. They would be coming in now and in a few minutes would start on remounts. Perhaps Brandon had come? Sandy wasted little time on surmise. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... several times, and I must confess that the mention of that other wire from Joe worried me a good deal. Just how far the telegram I had just sent might conflict with the facts as known to the Kents, I could not surmise. I could only trust to luck and pray for the best. I learned from the chambermaid that the Goblin had come in very late the night before, and had gone out at six A.M. That bothered me ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... in his surmise, and though her ladyship was vexed at losing a new acquaintance whom it would have been "nice to know in Paris," she resigned herself for the morning to the society of husband and Baedeker. It was kind old Sir Samuel's proposal that I should be left free to do some sight-seeing on my own account ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... it's under thirty it means that the next number is the number of a play. Over thirty, it means nothing. Your second digit of your second number is your runner. The second digit of the third number is the hole. The fourth number, as you doubtless surmise, is also a fake. Now, then, sir! ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... "however, soon come to an understanding with Montenegro. The scandalous discord which exists between Belgrade and Cetinje must be cleared off the carpet. We have most urgently pressed this on Prince Nikola when he was in Petersburg." The Prince, we may surmise, went to ask Russian support, received no sympathy, began to realize he was no longer Russia's "only friend," and was filled with ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... important and, one may surmise, far-reaching step which has been taken in respect of Irish industries in the last few years is to be found in the registration, under the Merchandise Marks Act of 1905, of a national trade-mark, the ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... sense of the awakening of the East, who would teach the deaf to hear, the blind to see, that the millions only await their leader? He will die. And this is only one phase of the devilish campaign. The others I can merely surmise." ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Suddenly closed his book, And lifted his blue eyes With doubt and strange surmise Depicted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... will, sooner or later, come to open strife in the southern states of the Union? But if it be asked what the issue of the struggle is likely to be, it will readily be understood, that we are here left to form a very vague surmise of the truth. The human mind may succeed in tracing a wide circle, as it were, which includes the course of future events; but within that circle a thousand various chances and circumstances may direct it in as many different ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... at length. Jill, who know him so well, could tell by the restored ring of cheeriness in his tone that he was himself again. He had dealt with this situation in his mind and was prepared to cope with it. The surmise was confirmed the next instant when he rose and stationed himself in front of the fire. Mr Pilkington detested steam-heat and had scoured the city till he had found a studio apartment with an open fireplace. Uncle Chris spread his legs and expanded his chest. "Of course," he said. ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... 858; dependence on, reliance on. persuasion, conviction, convincement[obs3], plerophory[obs3], self- conviction; certainty &c. 474; opinion, mind, view; conception, thinking; impression &c. (idea) 453; surmise &c. 514; conclusion &c. (judgment) 480. tenet, dogma, principle, way of thinking; popular belief &c. (assent) 488. firm belief, implicit belief, settled belief, fixed rooted deep-rooted belief, staunch belief, unshaken belief, steadfast belief, inveterate belief, calm belief, sober ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... two ways of viewing the gentleman, doubted whether she ought to express her opinion. It was Flora's disposition, and the advantages of the match, that weighed most upon her, and, in spite of her surmise having been treated as so injurious, she could not rid ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... relatively unchanged for a long, but not an interminable, period. Indeed, exactly here comes in the novel and startling feature of. Helmholtz's calculation. According to Mayer's meteoric hypothesis, there were no data at hand for any estimate whatever as to the sun's permanency, since no one could surmise what might be the limits of the meteoric supply. But Helmholtz's estimate implied an incandescent body cooling—keeping up a somewhat equable temperature through contraction for a time, but for a limited time only; destined ultimately to become liquid, solid; to cool below the temperature of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... a great admirer of Richard, and when the lion-hearted king was ill, sent him fruits and even ice, so the historian says. Where the Saracens got their ice at that time we can only surmise. ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... here the beginning of April. Be here by that time, if possible. Get Mr. Thaddeus Burr to enclose your letter to Loudon the printer, who will be careful to forward it to me. How could I write to you How divine your residence? Never again harbour, for a moment, a surmise that derogates ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... brown furze bushes; amongst which, a meagre, shaggy ass, more miserable still, with his hind legs logged and chained, was endeavouring to pick up a scanty subsistence. What the road of the other day could have been, it surpassed even my capacity, with this specimen of "the bootiful" before me, to surmise; but my companion was evidently one of those enviable individuals, whose ignorance is indeed their happiness, or whose imagination supplies the deficiencies of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... "Boys, you surmise that I'm feelin' lonesome. And I am. But I won't be lonesome long. The widder can't let that cow o' hers go without two milkin's, an' her pigs an' chickens must be fed. She'll be back in the village 'bout four or five; an' to-night, to-night, ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... collision that must be disastrous to the patriots. More than once Ned Clinton was certain a warrior was crouching so near him that he could touch him by reaching out his hand. The young scout was possibly correct in his surmise, for Rosa, who was next to him, was equally sure of the presence of an enemy, the supposition, in her case, extending even further. Her eyes were fixed upon the spot where she believed she could detect a dark form stealing ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... many-figured arras, all alive with beauties and significance that the dull eye conjectures not, that the impure, unpurged eye shrinks away from, lest it be seared by the too great splendor! I know it all now. I began gropingly, in surmise, error, darkness; but now my brow catches, ay, and reflects, the calm, pure, effulgent light of Nature's definite day, and I bathe myself in its happy warmth. Erst, I grovelled like a worm, blind and earth-fed: now, I shall speed through very space, winged heel and shoulder, a swift, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... attempt to explain what is to me inexplicable. Was my policeman right when he called Quidnunc a herald angel? Is there any substance behind the surmise that the ancient gods still sway the souls and bodies of men? Was Quidnunc, that swift, remorseless, smiling messenger, that god of the winged feet? The Argeiphont? Who can answer these things? All I have to tell you by way of ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... tongues of the passing people, saying In their surmise, "Ah—whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought Round him that looms Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings, Save ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... he grew animated I thought, as others have thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must have Scandinavian blood in his veins—that he was of the heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the surmise. He told me that he was the author of that charming book of gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for him some attentions from the literary set. But if I had known that he had written those two stories of sixteenth-century Paris—as I learned afterwards ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... not murder or otherwise wrong another, since it might possibly cost him the life of his best friend. Did the Greenlander know that it would probably cost him his own life, his sense of responsibility, we may surmise, might be somewhat quickened. On the other hand, duelling is not a satisfactory way of redressing the balance, since it merely gives the powerful bully an opportunity of adding a second murder to the first. Hence the ordeal marks an advance in legal evolution. A good many Australian peoples, for ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... the hotel, I could feel forty or fifty pairs of anxious eyes concentrated on me, as if to read from the expression of my face whether the news was good or bad. Colonel Michler of General Miles's staff was there, and if we should happen to be together talking, the women would surmise that the news was bad; and many times their surmises were just about right. One sweet little black-eyed woman always said she could tell from my face whether I was bluffing or not. July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, were very gloomy days for we poor chaps who had been left behind—and for the women. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... then my friend was not satisfied, and he voyaged about until I knew luncheon was long since a thing of the past, and I hated so the shape of his face I could have screamed. When at last we did return, I found my surmise as to luncheon had been only too correct, and we had to content ourselves with scraps. The next duck-shoot I attend I shall choose as companion a ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... little knots of folk at doors, and men in twos and threes on the pavement, and it needed no particular stretching of his ears to inform him that everybody was talking of the murder of his cousin. He caught fragmentary bits of surmise and comment as he walked along; near a shadowy corner of the great church he purposely paused, pretending to tie his shoe-lace, in order to overhear a conversation between three or four men who had just emerged from the ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... out-generalled himself by making all too tidy to be natural. Hence, suspicion at the inquest; for the "apoplexy" thought was really such a good one, that, but for so exact a laying out, the fat old corpse might have easily been buried without one surmise of the way she met her end. Again and again, in the history of crimes, it is seen that a "Judas hangs himself;" and albeit, as we know, the murderer has hitherto escaped detection, still his own dark hour shall arrive ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... there must be a reason for this strange procrastination—there must be an unrevealed cause which the future will in due time disclose and unravel. All the recollections of the past forbid one unrighteous surmise on His tried faithfulness. "Now, Jesus loved Lazarus," is a soft pillow on which to repose;—raising the sorrowing spirit above the unkind insinuation, "My Lord hath forsaken me, and my God hath ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... "My surmise was correct, you see," said the professor some ten minutes afterwards, as he pointed to another gauge on the wall of the pilot- house. "We are now running steadily at a speed of one hundred and fifty miles per hour; and we have already travelled ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... This surmise was confirmed as, turning his head at the sound of the opening door, the fellow withdrew from the lantern the end of the black cord—which was of course a length of fuse composed of spun-yarn well coated with damp powder, now fizzing and spluttering and smoking as the fire swiftly travelled along ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... mouth. Bea's labors over the classes in manners had included some research in the subject of physiognomy. Now she leaned forward to secure another view of that profile in the front pew. Then she settled back with the contented sigh of an investigator whose surmise has proved correct. Miss More's features certainly expressed an impulsive, reckless and lovable temperament as opposed to Miss Whiton's conscientious and calculating prudence. Oh, yes, there was conscience enough in the icily handsome face among the instructors. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... English taste for wildness in us. There had been Buffalo Bill, with his show, and there had been other Buffalo Bills, literary ones, who were themselves shows. There had then arisen a conjecture, a tardy surmise, of an American fineness, which might be as well in its way as the American wildness, and the American who had any imaginable touch of this found as warm a liking ready for him then as the wild American found earlier, or the rich ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... he was surprised at their lack of discipline and general unruliness—all except some of the Indians, and those, he must say, were well-trained—fine fellows and good soldiers. One could surmise the workings of his mind as one thought of the average happy-go-lucky Tommy Atkins, and then came across one of those tall, straight, hawk-eyed Sikhs and saw him snap his heels together and his arms to his sides and stand there ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... A wild surmise darted through Peter's soul. Could it be? Could it conceivably be? Was it possible that—that—was it possible, in fine, that this was a kind of signal, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... Mrs. Dinneford. "If you and I keep our own counsel, we are safe. The testimony of a condemned criminal goes for nothing. People may surmise and talk as much as they please, but no one knows anything about those notes but you ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... he said, "is perfectly correct in her surmise. I do not want the life of this poor drivelling old man: my intentions are much more peaceable, be assured. It rests entirely with this accomplished young lady (whose spirit I like, and whose ready wit I admire), whether the business between us shall be a matter of love or ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in wonder after the disappearing animal. It was certainly Big Bob. The animal was fully familiar to Andy. The beast wobbled to one side as it ran, and this the boy discerned was due to the sore paw. He was a fugitive, and his escape had been discovered. Andy could surmise this from shouts and calls in the distance, back in the direction of ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... anon.' What more? in sooth, The mother of to-morrow is to-day, And brings forth after her kind. There is no ruth On the heart's sigh, that 'more' is hidden away, And man's to-morrow yet shall pine and yearn; He shall surmise, and he ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... from his smile a genial glow Of green mid-summer seemed to overflow, Filling with verdure all that barren place. The warm red blood rushed to Sir Gawayne's face; He caught his breath, and in his eager eyes There shone a sudden flash of dark surmise, And then he stood a long while pondering; But in his breast his heart began to sing The old, old music whose still echoes roll Forever voiceless through the listening soul. He said farewell to his good fairy friend As in a dream, where real and unreal blend In phantom unison, and with the light ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... occasion Be servant to my wits. "The dinner-hour." Twice hath he come; and first upon parade Inspected all the men; the second time The transport visited. Surmise hath grown To certainty. He will inspect the dinners! Go, faithful Adjutant, stir up the cooks And bid them thicken ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... into the river with his waif, was at least to do something. In half an hour he had reached the straggling cabin and sheds of Trinidad Joe, and from the few scanty flowers that mingled with the brushwood fence, and a surplus of linen fluttering on the line, he knew that his surmise as to Trinidad Joe's domestic ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... the scene of the murder. They also pay, in common with other and less atrocious robbers, a portion of their gains to the Polygars, or native authorities of the districts in which they reside, to secure protection. The friends and relatives of the victims, perhaps a thousand miles off, never surmise their fate till a period has elapsed when all inquiry would be fruitless, or, at least, extremely difficult. They have no clue to the assassins, and very often impute to the wild beasts of the jungles the slaughter committed by ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... his mistress and her agent at this dying interview Paul could not surmise, but he believed that it concerned himself. He perceived that Mrs. Everett treated him more considerately afterward; and many times, as he looked up from a long silence, he found her regarding him inquisitively. She asked him strange questions once, bearing upon his early life, and he was almost ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... traffic with the New West was, perforce, billed over American roads. These details and a score of others called for patience, for tact, and a judicious distribution of dollar bills. Harris made a mental note of his obligation to Tom Morrison in the matter. He was shrewd enough to surmise that this was the farmer's very practical wedding gift, but he ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... obliged to give you so strong an impression that you may never forget that you have seen a Salamander, which is a sign that your destiny is to become a learned man, perhaps a magician. Your face also made me surmise favourably of your intelligence." ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... Mercy tried to comfort her, but did not know how. She had seen for some time that there was a difference in her, that something was the matter, and wondered whether she could be missing Ian, but it was merest surmise. Perhaps now ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... from the volume of sound the battle seemed to be concentrated directly upon the hill. He knew that Grant expected to make a general attack in full force, and he surmised that one of the commanders under him was not pushing forward with the expected zeal. His surmise was correct. A general with fifteen thousand men was standing almost passive in front of a much smaller force, but other generals were showing great ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in Scotland began not later than September, 1815; and the writer of the Memorials himself affirms that Hood "returned to London about 1820," in or before July. If so, he was in Scotland about five years; and, from the fact that he had written in a Dundee newspaper in 1814, one might even surmise that the term of six years was nearer the mark. At any rate, as he had reached Scotland by September, 1815, he was there soon after completing his sixteenth year: yet Mr. Hessey (Memorials, p. 23) says that he was articled to the engraving business "at ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Vielhaber's Emil; some with people now come to be human like himself; others with ineffable beings who had progressed in measureless periods of time beyond any human development that even Dave Cowan could surmise. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... and has been a most powerful factor in shaping Christian conduct—the idea of Immortality. It is not quite correct to say that we owe this doctrine to Christianity alone. Long before the Christian era it was recognised in Egypt, Greece, and the Orient generally. But it was entertained more as a surmise than a conviction. And among the Greeks it was little more than the shadowy speculation of philosophers. Plato, in his Phaedo, puts into the mouth of Socrates utterances of great beauty and far-reaching import; ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... as to get the shelter of the trees, they made their way cautiously towards the boat. Colour was lent to Mr. Chalk's surmise by the fact that it was fairly well laden with stores. As they got near they saw a couple of small casks which he thought contained water, an untidy pile of tinned provisions, and two or three bags of biscuit. The closest search failed to ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... that gentle, agitating voice of hers, "My poor boy." The words I was about to utter died on my tongue, and I remained silent for several minutes. After all, thought I, this lady is evidently sincere in her expressed conviction that Sir Harry Compton was her husband. If her surmise be correct, evidence of the truth may perhaps be obtained by a keen search for it; and since Sir Jasper guarantees the expenses—I rang the bell. "Step over to Cursitor Street," said I to the clerk as soon as he entered; "and if Mr. Ferret is within, ask him to step over immediately." Ferret ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... with the importance given to him by his father's coming journey. From this, and from other equally well-known circumstances, it was surmised that Mr. Mildmay would decline the task proposed to him. This, nevertheless, was only a surmise,—whereas the fact with reference to Sir Everard was fully substantiated. The gout had flown to his stomach, and he was dead. "By —— yes; as dead as a herring," said Mr. Ratler, who at that moment, however, was not within hearing of either of the ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... followed on the heels of his surmise as the girl turned her head, and in an instant he recognised the red hair and dark eyes of the waitress in the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... exploits of the bush, the prairie, or the frontier, by which Bret Harte, Lindsay Gordon, and again Kipling have attained celebrity. As these poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in its long evolution. Such a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... regard the beetles, kittens, or other animals, power to torment whom has been given them. It was after prison hours—the men had been already locked in their cells, and the warden and deputy had gone home. It was left to the subordinates to put the fear of God in our hearts; we could only surmise how far they would go in that instruction. We did not then know that their power was limited only by their good pleasure. But it is an accepted and reasonable principle with them that the sooner one begins to take the nonsense out a prisoner, the better. The strangeness ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... history, proceed mainly from his influence. We know that "the heart of a lost angel is in the earth," and as we know its throbbings carry misery and despair to millions of our fellow-beings, we can surmise the intensity of we wherewith it afflicts himself. Mrs. Browning's ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... the goddess Savitri herself in splendour. Thou must know the cause of this. Therefore, do thou relate it truly! If it should not be kept a secret, do thou unfold it unto us!' At these words of Gautama Savitri said, 'It is as ye surmise. Your desire shall surely not be unfulfilled. I have no secret to keep. Listen to the truth then! The high-souled Narada had predicted the death of my husband. To-day was the appointed time. I could not, therefore, bear to be separated from my husband's company. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Anglo-American folk-tale will be enriched indeed. A further examination of English nursery rhymes may result in some additions to our stock. I reserve these for separate treatment in which I am especially interested, owing to the relations which I surmise between the folk-tale and ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... by step she might have been made of wood. I stepped back and pointed my finger at the darkness of the passage leading to the studio. She passed within a foot of me, her pale eyes staring straight ahead, her face still with disappointment and fury. Yet it is only my surmise. She might have been made thus inhuman by the force of an invisible purpose. I waited a moment, then, stealthily, with extreme caution, I opened the door of ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... meditated, woe to the mind that conceived, woe to the council that decided on the project of their setting out on the voyage!" The exiles left Rathmullen on the 14th of September, 1607. O'Neill had been with the Lord Deputy shortly before; and one cannot but suppose that he had then obtained some surmise of premeditated treachery, for he arranged his flight secretly and swiftly, pretending that he was about to visit London. O'Neill was accompanied by his Countess, his three sons, O'Donnell, and other relatives. They first sailed to Normandy, where an attempt ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... known, as you surmise, for long. She was possibly - no, I take back possibly - she was one of the greatest works of God. Your note about the resemblance of her verses to mine gave me great joy, though it only proved me a plagiarist. By the by, was it not over THE CHILD'S GARDEN ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Luc roved to the Onondaga and rested longest upon him. Robert saw the blue eyes sparkle, and he knew that the mind of the chevalier was arrested by some important thought. He could almost surmise what it was, but for the present he preferred to keep silent and watch, because his curiosity was great and natural, and he wondered what St. Luc ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... and a score of others called for patience, for tact, and a judicious distribution of dollar bills. Harris made a mental note of his obligation to Tom Morrison in the matter. He was shrewd enough to surmise that this was the farmer's very practical wedding gift, but he took ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... sure enough," said the Major; "I am glad he has escaped, but he has lost his famous black horse. Let Lady Margaret know, John Gudyill; order some refreshments; get oats for the soldiers' horses; and let us to the hall, Edith, to meet him. I surmise we shall hear but ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of Swift's relations with Stella. It has been suggested that she was pained by reports of Swift's intercourse with Vanessa, and felt that his feelings towards herself were growing colder; but this is surmise, and no satisfactory explanation has been given to account for a form of marriage being gone through after so many years of the closest friendship. There is no reason to suppose that there was at the time any gossip in circulation about Stella, and if her reputation was in question, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... supremacy of "the Doctor" welcome a demonstration on behalf of his predecessor? For more than a year Pitt's friends had been puzzled and abashed by his unexplained retirement, witness the uncharitable surmise of the usually benevolent Dr. Burgh—"Can I see Addington climb upon the stooping neck of Mr. Pitt, and not believe that it is done in hostility or in a masked confederacy? If the former, how am I to estimate the man who comes in? If the latter, what judgement can I form of the man who ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... lives of the heroes are miraculously prolonged—in short, we find ourselves in a land of Faery; secondly, we find that the historic conditions in which the heroes are represented as living do not, for the most part, answer to anything we know or can surmise of the third century. For Finn and his warriors are perpetually on the watch to guard Ireland against the attacks of over-sea raiders, styled Lochlannac by the narrators, and by them undoubtedly thought ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... that cockle-shell!' exclaimed Mrs Auld. Her owner replied 'She was one fine boat, new, built by Yankee.' He was the only one of the crew who understood English, and was quick in his motions. He soon had all we brought with us stowed, and when a corner was found for the last chest, it was a surmise where the crew and passengers could find standing-room. The decked portions were allotted the women and children, the men and boys roosted on top of boxes and bales as they could. When all was ready, the conductor took ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... knew, as soon as she saw Mrs. Vansittart that she had formed an entirely erroneous conception. This was not the sort of woman to seek the admiration of the first-comer, and Percy Roden had allowed his sister to surmise that, whether it had been sought or not, Mrs. Vansittart had certainly been accorded ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... spirit had vanished in the simple sense of her nearness. The throb of her hand in his was like the heart-beat of hope. He felt himself no longer a drifting spectator of life but a sharer in its gifts and renunciations. Which this meeting would bring he dared not yet surmise: it was enough that he was with Fulvia and that love had freed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... actually engaged in a treaty of marriage; however, I gave little credit to this rumour till I was obliged to go to town about business, and there I heard the same information confidently affirmed. Though I still considered it as a vague surmise, I wrote to him an account of what I had heard; and, in his answer, which is still in my possession, he assured me, with repeated vows and protestations, that the report was altogether false. Satisfied with this declaration, I returned to his house; and, though the tale was ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... chap I want to see," thought Tom. "I'll have a talk with him." He reasoned that he could get more about the identity of the two mysterious men from the mechanic than from the waiter. Nor was he wrong in this surmise. ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... both had fallen off, and as he who exerted himself so strenuously, rose once or twice in the vigour of his efforts above the element with which he contended, he seemed to present the grisly, woolly hair, and the sable countenance of an aged negro. A vague surmise of the truth now flashed upon the mind, of the excited officer, but when, presently afterwards, he saw the powerful form once more raised, and in a voice that made itself distinctly heard above the howling of the wind, exclaim: "Help a dare," there was no longer a doubt, and he rushed towards ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... a man, who, from his garb, I took to be a priest. I went up to him and saw that I was right in my surmise. ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... as yet made no attempt to rob him, he could only surmise that some incredibly foolish mistake had been made. But when he remembered the three invisible horsemen who had passed him on the broad mesa he was not so certain about the mistake. Most naturally, his thoughts went back to the little episode on the ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten who in ears and eyes Match me; we all surmise, They this thing, and I that; whom shall ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... pale, expressionless face of the man who during the last few years had enjoyed her father's absolute confidence. Like many others of his class, there seemed to be so little upon which to comment in his appearance, so little room for surmise or analysis in his quiet, negative features, his studiously low voice, his unexceptionable deportment. Yet for a moment a queer sense of apprehension troubled her. Was it true, she wondered, that she did not like the man? She ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... less wild surmise avers that, in 1763 the secrets of his birth and the source of his opulence were known in Holland. The authority is the 'Memoirs' of Grosley (1813). Grosley was an archaeologist of Troyes; he had travelled in Italy, and written an account of his ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... considering things, especially such things as were under Jack's care. We had, therefore, never doubted for a moment that all was going well, so that it was with no little anxiety that we heard him make the above remark. However, we had no time for question or surmise, for at the moment he spoke a heavy squall was bearing down upon us; and as we were then flying with our lee gunwale dipping occasionally under the waves, it was evident that we should have to lower ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... that, in fact, I knew it perfectly. But what was yet more strange, and far more uncommon, was, that, although the feeling with regard to the hall faded and vanished instantly, and although I could not in the least surmise the appearance of any of the regions into which I was about to be ushered, I yet followed the butler with a kind of indefinable expectation of seeing something which I had seen before; and every room or passage in that mansion affected me, on entering it for the first ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... Brewster's. The Anchor in the Plain; ... took Joseph Brewster for our guide, and went to Town. Essay'd to be quarter'd at Mr. Knight's, but he not being at home, his wife refused us."[208] When a judge, himself, was refused ordinary hospitality, we may surmise that the law was rather strictly followed. But many other rules of the day seem just as ridiculous to a modern reader. As Weeden in his Economic and Social History of New England ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... been made as yet, it is safe to surmise that some company commanders will offer prizes for the squads producing the biggest pumpkins, the best summer squashes, and the most luscious watermelons. (Texas troops please heed.) Company commanders, you know, have never been in the habit of awarding prizes for the squads ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... can teach us nothing of the future beyond a vague surmise. All theories which proceed on an assumption of knowledge concerning finalities, whether in science or dogma, are cobwebs of the brain, not the fruit of knowledge, and obscure the faculty of intellectual perception. It is wasteful of one's time to frame them, and fatal ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... given in a former lecture, dealing with the inheritance of monstrosities. I have shown that in many instances monstrosities [819] constitute double races, consisting of monstrous and of normal individuals. At first sight one might be induced to surmise that the monstrous ones are the true representatives of the race, and that their seeds should be exclusively sown, in order to keep the strain up to its normal standard. One might even suppose that the normal individuals, or the so-called ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... boat fast and, soothing his conscience with a surmise that its owner would find it there in the morning, strode swiftly over to the train line that runs along the embankment, swung aboard an adventitious car and broke his first ten-franc piece in order ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... longing to trace things to their source, bringing into his possession knowledge of some missing link or defective title, which would throw a great property away from its owner, but which, by his death, would again be buried from the ken of men. This, of course, is only surmise; but Weed indicates that property prompted the crime, and that the heirs of the murderer profited by it. Lansing was in his seventy-sixth year when the fatal blow came, yet so vigorous that old age had not set its seal ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... that latitude (about 4 deg. south) there was not very much probability of meeting with one, every preparation was made, as violent squalls and heavy rain, at least, were certain to follow the greenish warning in the sky. In a very short time their surmise proved correct, for by four in the afternoon the Triton under short canvas, was battling with a mountainous sea and furious gusts of wind from the W.N. W. The presence of so much land around them, surrounded by networks of outlying ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... its modern aspect after Captain Cook's circumnavigation of the globe in high southern latitudes, accomplished between 1772 and 1775. Fact replaced the fiction and surmise of former times, and maps appeared showing a large blank area at the southern extremity of the earth, where speculative cartographers had affirmed the existence of habitable land extending far towards the Equator. Cook's voyage made it clear that if there were any considerable ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... which I imagine myself to have witnessed in his behavior and that of his wife were owing to the purpose that they had formed of burying, in this spot, the silver and plate which they were perhaps unwilling to risk to the chances of war. But when I try to stifle my graver fears with this surmise, I recall the fearful nature of the shriek which startled me from my sleep, and ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... Scott at the last restoration, just before 1882. He designed the tracery in accordance with what he conceived to have been the date of the church; but when his work was finished a single window, that furthest east in the south aisle, was discovered walled up, and the style of this showed that his surmise had not been far wrong, though the period he had chosen was a little later. The glass in several of the windows is of interest. That at the east end of the south aisle is the Caxton window, put up 1820 by the Roxburghe ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Uncle John cautiously, "this is merely surmise on our part, and before accepting it we must reconcile it with the incongruities in the case. It is possible that the elder Jones owned an interest in the Continental and bequeathed it to his son. But is it probable? Remember, he was an islander, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... is not as apparent as you imagine, for my manner toward Salome has been calculated to check and chill any sentiment analogous to that which my father sought to win from my mother. Pray, do not press upon me a surmise which is indescribably ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... failing in which she had shot him, inflicting an inconsiderable wound, and then killed herself; and that Dr. Surtaine had thereupon turned his son out of the house. Hal's removal to the hotel served to bear out this surmise, and the Doctor's strategic effort to cover the situation by giving it out that his son's part of the mansion was being remodeled—even going to the lengths of actually setting a force of men to work there—failed ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... on. All these were legitimate themes for science; and all of them were opposed to the popular belief at the time—as much so as is the antiquity of man now. And further, we say that the mere suspicion that any such thing may be—the mere surmise of any such fact—the merest inkling which scientific men may get of a secret yet hidden beneath the veil, and waiting to be revealed—is a sufficient justification of those tentative efforts of science which often result in the attainment of some grand discovery. Let no timid religionist ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... vegetables. Then after we had had a feed, Richards and Wild went down the bay and killed a couple of seals. I gave a good menu of seal meat at night, and we turned in about 11 o'clock, full—too full, in fact. As there is no news here of the ship, and we cannot see her, we surmise she has gone down with all hands. I cannot see there is any chance of her being afloat or she would be here. I don't know how the Skipper will ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... Magdalene Home," says the judge, and the name brings a startling surmise as to what He ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... he came into power he was to punish Yuan for his treachery. At the beginning of 1909 the Regent dismissed Yuan on an apparently trivial pretext, but every one in China knew the real reason for his fall, and not a few wondered that his life had been spared. It is idle to surmise what might have happened if his services had been retained by the Throne all the time, but who could have imagined that so swift and almost incredible an instance of time's revenges was in store—that within barely ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... wings convey me to thy breast! Such, friendly disputant of studious mind! Ever to good, in active life, inclind! Such are my thoughts, my views, my hopes, my creed, Adverse, I own, to those, for which you plead! And which, to speak without reserve, I deem A rash surmise, a dark Socinian dream! Tho' tenets diversely our fancy strike, May both, in purity of heart alike, Still trust the hope, to that endowment given, To reach the glorious certainty of Heaven! Where, when the pardon'd round their ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... or the thin, sweet enchantment that comes to the mind when a lark thrills out of sight in the air and the hushed fields listen to the song. But his wife's voice was sweeter to Fionn than the singing of a lark. She filled him with wonder and surmise. There was magic in the tips of her fingers. Her thin palm ravished him. Her slender foot set his heart beating; and whatever way her head moved there came a new shape of beauty to ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... scene was now peopled, and I could see him in the old-time garden with Miss Anvoy, who would be certain, and very justly, to think him good- looking. It would be too much to describe myself as troubled by this play of surmise; but I occur to remember the relief, singular enough, of feeling it suddenly brushed away by an annoyance really much greater; an annoyance the result of its happening to come over me about that time with a rush that I was simply ashamed of Frank Saltram. There were limits after all, and ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... ages of time, without staff to support us, without light to conduct us, or hand to guide us. The way is long, dark, and slippery. The credit of an historian is built upon truth; he cannot assert, without giving his facts; he cannot surmise, without giving his reasons; he must relate things as they are, not as he would have them. The fabric founded in error will moulder of itself, but that founded in reality will stand ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... future plans were practically settled so far as the young people were concerned. Rowena had been right in her surmise about the boys, for, like most fathers, Mr Saxon was prepared to retrench in any and every direction rather than interfere with the education of his sons. It was a family tradition that the eldest son should go into the army; therefore, at all costs, ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... both came out and drove away together. Ruth, invisible in her own room with a headache, her only means of defence against Mrs. Alwynn's society, heard the coming and the going, and was not far wrong in her surmise that Dare had come to beg Mr. Alwynn to accompany him to Vandon—being afraid to face alone the mysterious ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... eyes from anything in the nature of a ruined temple. Of one thing I am sure. The huge canvas in the studio had its face to the wall. There is never a reference to it by Goethe in any letter after that of June 27th. But I surmise that its nearness continually worked on him, and that sometimes, when no one was by, he all unwillingly approached it, he moved it out into a good light and, stepping back, gazed at it for a long time. And I wonder that Tischbein was not shamed, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... have acted in Hamlet's place it is useless to surmise, but in his true nature he was quite the opposite of Hamlet,— slow and cautious, but driven onward by an inexorable will. If Hamlet had possessed half of Hawthorne's determination, he might have broken through the network of evil conditions which surrounded ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... kind, yet great news too, but now and then he would linger in the odour of the bloom that sprayed the gean-tree like a fall of snow, or he would cast an eye admiring upon the turgid river, washing from bank to bank, and feel the strange uneasiness of wonder and surmise, the same that comes from mists that swirl in gorges of the hills or haunt old ancient woods. The sigh of the wind seemed to be for his peculiar ear. The nod of the saugh leaf on the banks was a salutation. There is, in a flutter of the tree's young ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... Lady Gertrude, laughing, "what a terribly old-fashioned surmise! No man nowadays kills himself for a false love; he ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... soon after the opening of the Great War that it is vain to surmise what the effect of that struggle would have been upon his soul. That it would have shaken him to the depths—and perhaps given him the spiritual experience necessary for his further advance—seems not improbable. One of his letters ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... brother's son, does not appear; but the personal history of this energetic pluralist—Prebendary of Durham, Archdeacon of Cleveland, Canon Residentiary, Precentor, Prebendary, and Archdeacon of York, Rector of Rise, and Rector of Hornsey-cum-Riston—suggests the surmise that he detected qualities in the young Cambridge graduate which would make him useful. For Dr. Sterne was a typical specimen of the Churchman-politician, in days when both components of the compound word meant a ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... trust, however, that my decided contradiction of the paragraph will put a stop to further surmise and discussion ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was not the case at all. The individual whose visual organs while the above was going on were at this juncture commencing to exhibit symptoms of animation ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... mind. I knew, from reading the society items in the Whirald, that Mr. Bobby Wilbraham would celebrate the attainment of his majority by a big fete on the 17th of next month. Everybody knows that Mr. Blank is Mr. Wilbraham's trustee until he comes of age. It was easy enough to surmise from that what the nature of the trouble was. Two and two almost invariably make four, ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... confined within the palace prison. The puppet under whom she ruled had proved inconvenient, and there was not a moment's hesitation in putting him out of the way. What became of him is not known, the prison rarely revealing its secrets, but from Liuchi's character we may safely surmise ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... substance of these impressions which affect us we call Nature, and thus Nature stands in an immediate relationship to those functions of our bodies which we call senses. Unknown and mysterious relations of our body allow us to surmise unknown and mysterious correlations with Nature, and therefore Nature is that wondrous fellowship into which our bodies introduce us, and which we learn to know through the mode of its constitutions ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... refer the origin of the lunar craters to some ancient epoch in the moon's history. We have no moans of knowing the remoteness of that epoch, but it is reasonable to surmise that the antiquity of the lunar volcanoes must be extremely great. At the time when the moon was sufficiently heated to originate those convulsions, of which the mighty craters are the survivals, the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... "Your surmise that the Soviet officials did not realize the potential of the new craft was apparently correct," the President said. "General Thayer had already sent another ship in to rescue the crew of the disabled vessel, staying low, below the horizon of the Russian ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... suffer not too much, Seldom does she feel the touch Of that fresh, auroral joy Lighter spirits may decoy To their pure and sunny lives. Heavy honey 'tis she hives. To her sweet but burdened soul All that here she may control— What of bitter memories, What of coming fate's surmise, Paris' passion, distant din Of the war now drifting in To her quiet—idle seems; Idle as the lazy gleams Of some stilly water's reach, Seen from where broad vine-leaves pleach A heavy arch; and, looking through, Far away the doubtful blue Glimmers, on a drowsy day, Crowded with ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... to the relation of the individual soul to Brahman. Do the Sutras indicate anywhere that their author held /S/a@nkara's doctrine, according to which the jiva is in reality identical with Brahman, and separated from it, as it were, only by a false surmise due to avidya, or do they rather favour the view that the souls, although they have sprung from Brahman, and constitute elements of its nature, yet enjoy a kind of individual existence apart from it? This question is in fact only ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... able to get ahead of the eavesdropper, and obtain a view of his face. And Jack was not mistaken in his surmise. It was one of the two men who had annoyed Jennie in the post office. The fellow seemed startled on confronting ...
— Jack of the Pony Express • Frank V. Webster
... all day did rue; He haunted her form with sighs: As oft as his clay to a lady grew The carvers, with dim surmise, Would whisper, "The same shape come to woo, ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Nephelaegeretaes], him at whose nod the heavens display themselves like a many-figured arras, all alive with beauties and significance that the dull eye conjectures not, that the impure, unpurged eye shrinks away from, lest it be seared by the too great splendor! I know it all now. I began gropingly, in surmise, error, darkness; but now my brow catches, ay, and reflects, the calm, pure, effulgent light of Nature's definite day, and I bathe myself in its happy warmth. Erst, I grovelled like a worm, blind and earth-fed: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... mournful a chill to the hearts of the watchers on the river had seemed to come out of the void of the blackness, had given but slight clue to the location of the place of captivity. Indeed, they could only surmise that it had been uttered by the missing woman. Yet in their hearts neither had ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Never before had anybody offered so panting, so militant a participation in his doings. He doubted too whether Virgilia could ever have felt so extreme an interest in the doings of any other man whomsoever. Certainly it was a fair surmise that Richard Morrell, during the formative period of the Pin-and-Needle Combine, had never so succeeded in enlisting her sympathy and support,—otherwise she would not have turned him off in the summary fashion that had kept society smiling and ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... change! semper eadem! Women will be wanting a change of air in Paradise; a change of angels too, I might surmise. A change from quarters like these to a French hotel would be a descent!—'this the seat, this mournful gloom for that celestial light.' I am perfectly at home in the library here. That excellent fellow Whitford ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thus happily wedded, Pringle set himself to goad ferret-eyed Creagan and the heavy-jawed sheriff into unwise speech. And inattentive Anastacio had a shrewd surmise at Pringle's design. He knew nothing of the fight at the Gadsden House, but he sensed an unexplained tension—and he ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... knowing nothing, but suspecting a great deal, and full of anxiety, repaired to Ion directly after breakfast. Blood-stains on the ground without and within the gate, and here and there along the avenue as he rode up to the house, confirmed his surmise that his friends had been attacked by the Ku Klux the previous night. He found them all in the library ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... "Evidently," I surmise, "he is in no mood to talk to concerning damages and how we can get out of paying them, so we will talk to ...
— The Flying Cuspidors • V. R. Francis
... ANTICIPATE.—To suspect is "to mistrust," "to surmise." Expect, in the sense of "look forward to," is preferable to anticipate, since anticipate also means "take up, perform, or realize beforehand;" as, "Some real lives do actually anticipate the ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... night the wolves had come back; probably to devour the carcasses of their slain companions. It was thought probable that they had returned up the river. One of the men went out to ascertain this, and on coming back told us that the first surmise was correct—that the pack had indeed gone up the river, but that it had afterwards gone down again, as was evident from the bloody marks ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... Hugh best felt certain there must be some good and valid reason for his action in this respect. He had taken none of them into his confidence, however, and they could only surmise what it might be. The general consensus of opinion was that possibly at some time in his younger years, Hugh may have shown signs of an ungovernable temper, and his wise mother had made him solemnly promise never to allow himself to be drawn into ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... escaped with their lives. In reporting the loss to the superintendent, Major Taliaferro wrote that "the general impression here is that fire was put to the house by Some drunken Indians & circumstances are strong in justifying such a conclusion."[207] This surmise was right, for on April 7, 1831, the Indians delivered at the fort one of their number who they claimed was ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... be quite correct in your surmise, Miss West. Your niece and I will hunt up Ambrose Pare's diary when we get to Paris, and see what he says about the case. If you are right, I'll take you into my office as ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... The reader may surmise that the finished story—the highly regarded story—was 'The Prince and the Pauper'. The other tale—the unfinished and less considered one was 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Nobody appears to have been especially concerned about ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... that direction? It is a mistake every way, injurious to you, his child; and should you happen to die during your sojourn under your uncle's care, it would woefully defeat the testator's object, and raise such a storm of surmise and inquiry as would awaken all England, and send the old scandal on the ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... it is forbidden to talk about this trip, or to surmise our destination. I can assure you that it is done for your benefit, and later you will appreciate the fact that you did not know the future. I can't say what the next few days will bring to all of us, but be assured that everything you ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... I hope it will be, this country isn't quite free yet. I surmise that you don't know that the office of your contemporary farther east was broken into a few hours ago, and an article written by a friend of mine pulled out of the press. The proprietor was quietly held down upon the floor when he objected. You ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... cailzie-cock rising, or the stag of ten at pause, while they stood, passionate adventurers in a rapture of the mind, held as it were by the spirit of such places as they lay in a sloeberry bloom of haze, the spirit of old good songs, the baffling surmise of the piper and the bard. To those corries of my native place will be coming in the yellow moon of brock and foumart—the beasts that dote on the autumn eves—the People of Quietness; have I not seen their lanthoms and heard their laughter in ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... front of the Credit Lyonnais at Bayonne. It looked so beautifully regular, so scholarly, so Latin, so sister to both Spanish and Italian, so richly and musically voweled, and yet remained so impenetrable to the most daring surmise, that I conceived at once a profound admiration for the race which could keep such a language to itself. When I remembered how blond, how red-blond our sinewy young porter was, I could not well help breveting him of that race, and honoring him because he could have read those words ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... differ from Gemma Frisius and Cabota, among themselues, and in diuers places from themselues, concerning the diuers situation and sundry limits of America, that one may not so rashly, as timely surmise, these men either to be ignorant in those points touching the aforesaid region, or that the Mappes they haue giuen out vnto the world, were collected onely by them, and neuer ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... gave him the appearance of a mad but sanctified apostle. Barney Bill, who profoundly distrusted all professional drinkers of water, such as Mr. Finn's employees, ate his cold beef silently, in the happy surmise that no one was paying the least attention to his misperformances with knife, fork and fingers. Jane looked steadily from Paul to Silas and from Silas ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... invention. The fathers were but of moderate assistance; it was the mothers who did the heavy work; and by ten o'clock some unsolved problems grew so delicate that a ladies' caucus was organized in a private room,—no admittance for men,—and what was done there I can only surmise. ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... thought was the planet Mercury in conjunction with the orb; the short time during which it was visible, in consequence of clouds having obscured the face of the luminary, prevented him from being able to determine the accuracy of his surmise, but since then it has been ascertained that no transit of Mercury took place at that time, and Kepler afterwards acknowledged that he had arrived at an erroneous conclusion. Galileo was much puzzled in trying to find out the true nature of the spots. At first ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... I be right in my surmise that very few homes in Wigan have roses round the door or stand in fields of growing cotton and corn or reek of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... friend again, I surmise," said Thorndyke at length, taking up one of the halves and examining the white patch through his lens. "A thoughtful soul, Jervis, and original too. I wish his talents could be applied in some other direction. I shall have to remonstrate with ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... and then invaded Etius, systematically devastating it, its king, Uduris, being powerless to prevent his ravages. All the principal towns succumbed one after another before the vigour of his assault, and, from the numbers killed and taken prisoners, we may surmise the importance of his victories in these barbarous districts, to which belonged the names of Seriazis, Silius, Zabakhas, Zirimutaras, Babanis, and Urmias,** though we cannot definitely ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.... Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... gad flies, cormorants winged, worse than beset Inachus' daughter. This he tells, this he brindles and burnishes on a' winter's eves, 'tis his star of set glory, his rejuvenescence to descant upon. Far from me be it (dii avertant) to look a gift story in the mouth, or cruelly to surmise (as those who doubt the plunge of Curtius) that the inseparate conjuncture of man and beast, the centaur-phenomenon that staggerd all Dunstable, might have been the effect of unromantic necessity, that the horse-part carried ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... be present on so short notice, especially since he knows that you are about to make an expedition against Gotland. His real purpose, I suspect, is to induce you to postpone your expedition." In this surmise the shrewd bishop doubtless was correct. Fredrik, though satisfied that Sweden should go to great expense in preparing for an expedition against Gotland, was reluctant to see her armies actually land upon the isle, lest his own claims to Gotland might thereby be ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... be observed as a consequence of operations much more commonly and irresponsibly performed a few years ago than now, which abruptly deprived the organism of the internal secretion through which, as we may surmise, the femaleness factor in the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... impulse. In that case the possibility of the modification of our sensation would be an impossibility. But there may be a likelihood that the power of conduction possessed by a nerve is not constant but capable of change. Should this surmise prove to be correct then we arrive at the momentous conclusion that sensation itself is modifiable, whatever the external stimulus. For the modification of nervous impulse there remains only one alternative; namely, some power to render the vehicle a very much better conductor ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... it was found that the whole contents were covered with a thin layer of sweepings. The Khansama (the servant who serves at the table) looked at Mr. Anderson and Mr. Anderson at the Khansama "with a wild surmise"; the cover was replaced and the dish taken away. Nothing was ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... that he must be a Russian. Yet in every detail of his appearance he was German. His clothes, his bearing, his every little mannerism, were carefully studied. Fred guessed that this was no servant, but a secret agent of much skill and experience. He was to learn the truth of his surmise before many ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... alas! only too common nowadays, that deal with peculiarities of grammar, how supremely repulsive they are! It is impossible to glean any sense from them, as the Editor mixes up Nipperwick's view with Sidgeley's reasoning and Spreckendzedeutscheim's surmise with Donnerundblitzendorf's conjecture in a way that seems to argue a thorough unsoundness of mind and morals, a cynical insanity combined with a blatant indecency. He occasionally starts in a reasonable ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... he told himself, when this task was completed. "When the thieves discover that their plunder is gone, they may surmise that it disappeared this way. Can I ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... legitimate to attempt to guess at the meaning these early people attached to so singular a procedure, we may be guided by the ideas associated with this act in outlying corners of the world at the present time. On these grounds we may surmise that the motive underlying this, and other later methods of blood-letting, such as circumcision, piercing the ears, lips, and tongue, gashing the limbs and body, et cetera, was the offering of ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... nobody appeared there who was at all out of the region of commonplace. The people were all quiet and settled; yet he could discern on their faces something more than attention, though it was less than excitement: perhaps it was expectation. And as if to bear out his surmise he heard at that moment the noise ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... 3 feet here at one time and this depression may have been subsequently filled up by sediment. This conjecture could be easily tested by excavating a trench across the area between the wall and the houses, but in the absence of such an excavation the suggestion is a mere surmise. ...
— Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... many of the anthems belong to this period. One might surmise that most of them do, as his activity at the theatre later on must have occupied most of his time. But if we had no dates for Mozart's three greater symphonies, we might readily fall into the mistake of attributing them to ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... The Intendant had laughingly wished them bon voyage and a speedy return with his friend Le Gardeur, giving them no other intimation of his wishes; nor could they surmise that he had any other object in view than the pleasure of again meeting a pleasant companion of his table and a sharer ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... would be very cold indeed, and that the surface would be frost-bound, not only at the poles, but far down towards the Equator. Instead of this being so, as we have seen, the polar caps melt more than those on the earth. We can only surmise there must be some compensation we do not know of that softens down the rigour of the seasons, and makes them milder ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... bad. Lord George had learned, indeed, that the Marchioness and Popenjoy were gone, and was able to surmise that the parting had not been pleasant. His brother would probably soon follow them. But what was he to do himself! He could not, in consequence of such a warning, drag his mother and sisters back to Cross Hall, into which house Mr. Price, the farmer, had already ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... bosom now. And, O defender of our house! attend My secret utterance. No friendly ear Is that which hearkens for my voice. My thought Must not be blazoned with her standing by, Lest through her envious and wide-babbling tongue She fill the city full of wild surmise. List, then, as I shall speak: and grant the dreams Whose two-fold apparition I to-night Have seen, if good their bodement, be fulfilled: If hostile, turn their influence on my foes. And yield not them their wish that would by guile Thrust me from this high fortune, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... idea survived the destruction of the hypothesis on the nature of heat, on which he seemed to rely. As he no doubt himself perceived, his idea was quite independent of this hypothesis, since, as we have seen, he was led to surmise that heat could disappear; but his demonstrations needed to be recast and, in some ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... not take much individual blackness of heart to work up a fine promising slander. A surmise made in jest is repeated in earnest, and all the other tale-bearers think they are telling simple facts. Depend upon it, the story did not get off from the Osborns by any means as it came ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... serious manner, there were few of us whose hearts did not flutter responsively to this surmise, for the danger became every minute more imminent, and we knew what a terrific surf there must be then running on the shingle beach. But we now rapidly approached the shore; we were near to the floating light, and in the roadstead not a vessel remained; all had weighed ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... of permitting a witness to wander at will over the entire field of knowledge, hearsay, surmise and opinion has several distinct advantages over our practice. In giving hearsay evidence, for example, he may suggest a new and important witness of whom the counsel for the other side would not otherwise have heard, and who can ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... his head. "We've got to be more certain yet. I daren't tell him too much—for my idea may prove to be wrong. You must remember that it was undoubtedly Eileen Meredith's finger-prints on the dagger. At present it is only surmise of mine how they got there. Finding the prints on her blotting-pad, which I showed you, corresponded with those on the dagger you gave me, was one of the biggest surprises of my life. But we may clear ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... Papuans, with whom we are at present concerned, march back to their village with closed eyes; this is why, when bidden to sit down, they remain standing stiffly, as if they understood neither the command nor the action; and this, too, we may surmise, is why their mothers and sisters receive them with a burst of emotion, as if their dead had come back to them from the grave. This interpretation of the ceremony is confirmed by a curious rite which is observed by the ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... prepared to believe them all. He thought it probable that his uncle had heard of his discharge from the steamer, and very likely he had found a place for him. But he did not want his uncle to assist him. This was all he could surmise in regard ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... next number is the number of a play. Over thirty, it means nothing. Your second digit of your second number is your runner. The second digit of the third number is the hole. The fourth number, as you doubtless surmise, is also a fake. Now, then, ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... "that Brown is helping us, and therefore, Brown is an enemy. Prob'ly they surmise Brown is in league with us to show us a short cut to what we're after. If that's how they work it out, then they wouldn't need think much to conclude that putting Brown on the blink would hoodoo us. Maybe they allow that that much bad luck to begin with ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... Haeckel is correct enough in his surmise that Lemuria was the cradle of the human race as it now exists, but it was not out of Anthropoid apes that mankind developed. A reference will be made later on to the position in nature which the ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart!" One may without indiscretion risk the surmise that Hawthorne's perception, of the "shining" element in his distinguished friend was more intense than his friend's appreciation of whatever luminous property might reside within the somewhat dusky envelope of our hero's identity as a collector of ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Mr. Knox, is aware of all the circumstances," continued the latter, "but he is as anxious as I am to terminate this painful interview. I surmise that what occurred on Wednesday night was this—(correct me if I am wrong): While dining with Mr. De Lana you heard sounds of altercation in the street below. May I suggest that you recognized one ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... unfrequented at this hour; at certain periods of the day, portions of it, intersected by meandering tracks, were crossed by men labouring in the adjacent fields or quarry; but till then it was only the circumstance of alarm being excited on Harry's account, or her protracted absence giving rise to surmise and search, that ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... Yang at once to form within herself some surmise more or less correct of the object of her errand, and suddenly blushing crimson, she lowered her head, and uttered ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... ended in the weaker member of the alliance becoming more and more the dependent of the stronger. What would have been the trend of events had William survived for another ten or fifteen years or had he left an heir to succeed him in his high dignities, one can only surmise. It may at least be safely said, that the treaty which ended the war of the Spanish succession would not have been the ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... as a settled point by all your friends here; and for my share I do not reckon upon the smallest doubt about the essential fact of it, simply on some calculation and adjustment about the circumstantials. Of Ireland, who I surmise is busy in the problem even now, you will hear by and by, probably in more definite terms: I did not see him again after my first notice of him to you; but there is no doubt concerning his determinations (for all manner of reasons) to get you to Lancashire, to England;—and in fact ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... drama as an actable play is that three of the four main episodes are fragmentary. We know nothing of the fate of Luigi: we can but surmise the future of Jules and Phene: we know not how or when Monsignor will see Pippa righted. Ottima and Sebald reach a higher level in voluntary death than they ever ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... elevation, and recalling childhood's school-book illustrations. You jump at the convenient conclusion that these structures of from six to ten stories had to do with the religion of the country, which surmise is erroneous, for the towers were reared to guard the geomantic properties of their respective neighborhoods, and in reality are relics of a bygone age ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... direction of the wind was made after Andree's departure, and proved that there was a fluctuation in direction from S.W. to N.W., indicating that the voyagers may have been borne across towards Siberia. This, however, can be but surmise. All aeronauts of experience know that it is an exceedingly difficult manoeuvre to keep a trail rope dragging on the ground if it is desirable to prevent contact with the earth on the one hand, or on the other to avoid loss of gas. A slight increase of temperature or drying ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... up to the cave some months later we found that the blast had done very little; it had moved the rock slightly, but not enough to open the passage; and so it remains to this day. Old Adwanko's scalp money is still there—if it ever was there; but it is my surmise that the cruel redskin is much more likely to have spent his blood money for rum than to have left it ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... originated with two witnesses heard at Carcassonne who spoke of "Figura Baflometi," and suggests that it was a corruption of "Mohammed," whom the Inquisitors wished to make the Knights confess they were taught to adore.[188] But this surmise with regard to the intentions of the Inquisitors seems highly improbable, since they must have been well aware that, as Wilcke points out, the Moslems forbid all idols.[189] For this reason Wilcke concludes that the Mohammedanism ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... this: A wave of light, reflected from the body of the man in front, entered the eye of the man just behind, where it was transformed into a nerve impulse that readied the brain through the optic nerve. Here it underwent complicated transformations and reactions whose nature we can but surmise, until it left the brain as a motor impulse and caused the leg muscles to contract, moving their owner forward. All this may or may not have taken place within the sphere of consciousness; in the most cases ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... The railroads in question are the New York Central, Pennsylvania and Chesapeake and Ohio. [The reader might surmise that the words Pennsylvania and Chesapeake and Ohio represent a single line or even three ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... myself into a closer harmony with his preconceptions, I said that his surmise was right. 'It was all hidden in the brain,' I said; 'but the difference was there. Perhaps if one could see the minds and souls of men they would be as varied and unequal as the Selenites. There were great men and small men, men who ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... in fear of harm? But harm precedes not sin: only our foe, Tempting, affronts us with his foul esteem Of our integrity: his foul esteem Sticks no dishonour on our front, but turns Foul on himself; then wherefore shunned or feared By us? who rather double honour gain From his surmise proved false; find peace within, Favour from Heaven, our witness, from the event. And what is faith, love, virtue, unassayed Alone, without exteriour help sustained? Let us not then suspect our happy state Left so imperfect ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... away from Mr. Schmitz and his temperament and disposition for three blessed months. Perhaps the daughter, sixteen, had spoken of that phase of the trip to Mrs. Schmitz. Mrs. Schmitz, being a dutiful wife who has stood Mr. Schmitz at least, we surmise, some seventeen years, replied to such comments of her ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... a different opinion. 'There has been,' he writes, 'no English poetry better than his, within the memory of man!' A writer in the last number of the 'Southern Literary Messenger,' likewise voluminous in prose and verse, if we rightly surmise, exhibits contrasts of judgment somewhat kindred with the foregoing, although certainly less violent. The author of 'Man in his various Aspects,' he tells us, 'has a boldness that attracts;' his are the 'strong and struggling conceptions which seek utterance in new and original ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... horsemen that horses grown chiefly on alfalfa have not the staying power and endurance of those, for instance, that are grazed chiefly on Kentucky blue grass and some other grasses. There is probably some truth in the surmise, and if so, the objection raised could be met by dividing the grazing either through alternating the same with other pastures or by growing some other grass or grasses ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... names, and the same dignified person had taken the order for dinner. The dignified person had then retreated downstairs slowly, and what was taking place for the next half-hour poor Mrs Mackenzie, in the agony of her mind, could not surmise. She longed to go and see, but did not dare. Even for Dr Slumpy, or even for his wife, had they been alone with her she would not have cared much. Miss Colza she could have treated with perfect indifference—could even have taken her down into the kitchen with her. ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... starving citizen who found himself at the beginning of this play, 'as lean as a rake' with this hero's legislation, and in danger of more fatal evils, was not so very wide of the truth, after all, in his surmise as to the principles of the heroic statesmanship and warfare, when he ventured thus early on that suggestion. The State banished him, as an enemy, and he came back with a Volscian army to make good that verdict. But his sword without was not more cruel than his law had been within. It was not ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... into the smoking-room and looked at it with a sudden surmise that it might have something to do with the matter which was uppermost in his thoughts. He had had no expectation of any registered letter, no idea of anything that could cause any correspondent of his to send him ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... about the costumes on that opening night of Come On In, until a realization of how amazingly good they were, made him search his program. The line "Costumes by Dane," had lighted up in his mind a wild surmise of the truth, though he admitted it had seemed almost too good to be true. Because the costumes were really wonderful. He tried to tell them how wonderful they were, but Violet seemed to regard this as ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
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