"Speculate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... under the Republic by the incessant calls of active life, now asserted itself in all earnest characters, and would not be content without satisfaction. Virgil was cut off before his philosophical development was completed, and therefore it is useless to speculate what views he would have finally espoused. But it is clear that his tone of mind was in reality artistic and not philosophical. Systems of thought could never have had real power over him except in so far ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the South Sea Bubble, which would have brought to life anything, and for a wild short season the quacks and alchemists and Jews came back: the ball rooms and the gaming saloons filled again. New houses were built; "amongst them that of Baron Swasso." To speculate as to who Baron Swasso may have been is agreeable: but the baronial hall could not save Epsom. Even a more powerful attraction than Baron Swasso failed to do so; or, rather, refused to try. She was Miss Wallin, whom the vulgar addressed as Crazy Sally; but she was not so crazy. Miss Wallin was a ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... grasp upon the work which should have been his a year before, and an interest in it. Only now for the first time did he take the trouble to learn the real meaning of resources and liabilities; to estimate profit and loss; to speculate upon success in the business which he found rather larger than he had suspected. He called a round-up to learn to the head how many steers and cows and calves carried the Bar L-M brand. He brought a quick look of surprise that was close to suspicion into Garth's eyes by asking casually just ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... George," pursued Mrs. Fowler—and from the sweetness of her manner she might have been paying him a compliment—"is that he has never been steady. He doesn't stick at anything long enough to make it a success. If he were left to himself he would speculate wildly, and this is why his father is obliged to overlook all that he does in the office. It is just here that you can be of such wonderful help to him, Gabriella, by your influence. This is why ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Indian differ from the Negro, and the European from both? This is a question on which we can only speculate. But we shall find it profitable to study the paths by which these diverse races found their way to America from man's primeval home. According to the now almost universally accepted theory, all the races of mankind had a common origin. But ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... go on speculating, hoping to discover real people in the shadows, as they speculate about Swift's Stella and Vanessa, and his relations to them. It is enough for us to feel, however, that these poems railing at or glorying in Platonic love are no mere goldsmith's compliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford. Miracles of this ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... natural actions and the properties of things; and, being in alleged communication with supernatural beings, they were supposed to acquire such knowledge from them. Hence, by implication, the priest became the primitive man of science; and led by his special experiences to speculate about the causes of things, thus entered the sphere of philosophy: both his science and his philosophy being pursued in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... demonstrative of affection than was his wont. He seemed to eye me with a pitiful love that puzzled me; and he began to talk (this also was rare with him) of my special position, how I must be apart from other men, and to speculate in seeming idleness on what a place such as mine would be to him and make of him. All this came between our spurts of rowing or among our talk of sport or of flowers as we lay at ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... in prices is not instantaneous and equal for all things. Sharp men, brokers, and men of business, will not suffer by it; for it is their trade to watch the fluctuations of prices, to observe the cause, and even to speculate upon it. But little tradesmen, countrymen, and workmen, will bear the whole weight of it. The rich man is not any the richer for it, but the poor man becomes poorer by it. Therefore, expedients of this kind have the effect of increasing the distance which separates wealth from poverty, ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... clear and well imagined. He invited capitalists not to speculate in the lottery, but to guarantee it for a certain sum. In the case of the lottery's losing, each guarantor would have to share in paying according to the sum named, and in like manner they would share in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... taking some consolation from his briarwood and a steaming hot Scotch. For some minutes he continued in what for some reason or other is known as a brown study. How long he might have continued in that condition it is not necessary to speculate on. A tap at the window aroused him from his revery. He glanced in the direction from whence the sound came. There he beheld the well-known face of his first lieutenant, Smith. He motioned Handy ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... can be more miserable than the situation of a poor girl, who, after spending not only the interest, but the solid capital of her small fortune in dress, and frivolous extravagance, fails in her matrimonial expectations (as many do merely from not beginning to speculate in time). She finds herself at five or six-and-thirty a burden to her friends, destitute of the means of rendering herself independent (for the girls I speak of never think of learning to play cards), de trop in society, yet obliged to hang upon all her acquaintance, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... that is another matter; for there the moral element comes in. It is possible (and here lies the interest of the enigma) that the Veiled Being may one day justify himself even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing so behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely useless to speculate. Light may one day come to us, but it will come through patient investigation, not through idle pondering and guessing. In the meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the microcosm, ourselves including both extremes, and being, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... to her across the table.] It's true! And I led him to speculate more, I tricked him first with winning and then let him go! I knew he'd soon do for himself alone, and he did! Yes—I ruined him purposely and you through him, so as to get you to be my wife. I did it purposely and I'd do it again! ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... may speculate in love a little on her own account. She is only to be trusted as far as any other woman." He snorted in disdain. "And the fellow is young, eager, good looking. At any rate, I shall steer them both out of Lilienthal's clutches. The game is too risky for 'mein frent ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... inclined to speculate, to philosophize, and to reason on everything, it is not surprising that a fundamental law, as vaguely expressed as the charter, should leave ample room for discussion. We find that our own long experience in these written instruments ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... that American of all others to whom this second chapter on England's Effort may look for sympathy. Whither are we tending—your country and mine? Congress meets on April 1st. Before this Letter reaches you great decisions will have been taken. I will not attempt to speculate. The logic of facts will sweep our nations together in some sort of intimate union—of that ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... time, too, that Bragg's army was falling back and scattering—makes the affair look like one of simple bravado, as if the leader was willing to be captured, provided he could end his career in a blaze of excitement created by his dash and daring. But it is useless to speculate now. Broken into squads, some few of his men will doubtless escape across the river, and make their way singly to the Confederacy, to tell the story of their long ride through Indiana and Ohio; but the power ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... It is idle to speculate on what might have been if things had happened otherwise; if the daily stress of anxiety and perplexity which haunted her home had been removed—difficulties and anxieties which may well have absorbed all the spare energy and interest that under ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... passion, is eager for the trifles the possession of which would highly satisfy his vanity, his innate desire for luxury, and his more noble and more respectable love of the beautiful: upon this the dealers in this class of articles speculate. To tax fancy and elegance is no less odious or absurd than to tax circulation: but such a tax is collected by a few fashionable merchants, whom general infatuation protects, and whose whole merit generally consists in warping taste and generating fickleness. Hence no one ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... with orthodoxy. The painters are metaphysicians and psychologists. The breaking down of Exclusionism in China and Japan and in the United States has astonished History. The science of astronomy is going downward so that, though Pickering, for instance, did speculate upon a Trans-Neptunian planet, and Lowell did try to have accepted heretical ideas as to marks on Mars, attention is now minutely focused upon such technicalities as variations in shades of Jupiter's fourth ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... speculate vaguely whether or not Desmond knew the nature of the tight place—tight was such a very descriptive adjective—out of which he had pulled Scaife. Then ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... reaction has followed the late madness that it is said that this Sandgoist who purchased the ticket to speculate upon it has been unable to find ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... true I am not always faithful, but I never lose courage. I leave myself in the Arms of Our Lord. He teaches me to draw profit from everything, from the good and from the bad which He finds in me.[33] He teaches me to speculate in the Bank of Love, or rather it is He Who speculates for me, without telling me how He does it—that is His affair, not mine. I have but to surrender myself wholly to Him, to do so without reserve, ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... seeing that there is a nature or fixed order in all things known to us, it is conformable to the nature of our minds to believe that this universal Nature has a cause which operates continually, and that we are totally unable to speculate on the reason of any of those disorders or evils which we perceive. This I believe is the answer which may be collected from all that ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... extraneous means to work it off. "Slow and sure," is their motto—"Carpe diem," essentially that of their antagonists. And yet in one thing, we believe, most individuals holding these opposite opinions will be found to concur. They all speculate. Heraclitus signs his contract with a shudder, and trembles as he places his realized premium in the bank. Democritus laughingly subscribes his name to thousands, and chuckles as he beholds his favourite stock ascending in the thermometer of the share-market. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... I have no time to speculate upon it now, so get yourself ready. Wait a bit, my lady! I'll go along ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... and to speculate upon the exact place where the lion ended and the lamb began. The wholly religious character of the book was no drawback to its popularity, for the two great diaries of the time show how absolutely religion permeated the atmosphere surrounding ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion AT ALL satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical. The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws. A child (who may ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... "Physics are concerned with things which have a principle of motion in themselves; mathematics speculate on permanent, but not transcendental and self-existent things; and there is another science separate from these two, which treats of that which is immutable and transcendental, if indeed there exists such a substance, as we shall endeavor to show ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... means of pumping, this continuing nearly to the Gila River, out upon the Pima reservation. Now there is further extension eastward, and the great plain that stretches as far as Florence is being settled by population very generally tributary to Mesa. It would be idle to speculate upon the future of the city, but its tributary farming country is fully as great as that which ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... English ten-pound note, and the rest in new glittering napoleons—and then began to speculate upon the possibility of giving Austin twenty pounds, and appropriating the balance to her own uses. The children wanted so many things—that perpetual want of the juvenile population above all, shoe-leather; ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... daily life, and possibly they are given too much to morbid introspection. But anything that serves to make a human being exercise the function for which his brain was originally intended should be regarded with thankfulness. It is a thousand times better for the development of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances, or to philosophize on the shortcomings of the maid-of-all-work, than to babble off the dates of the Sovereigns from William the Conqueror, or to construe Horace's Odes without taking in a syllable of ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... enjoy himself - in India he wants to save money - and he does not in the least like getting hurt. He has received just sufficient education to make him understand half the purport of the orders he receives, and to speculate on the nature of clean, incised, and shattering wounds. Thus, if he is told to deploy under fire preparatory to an attack, he knows that he runs a very great risk of being killed while he is deploying, and suspects that he is being thrown away to gain ten minutes' time. He may either deploy ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... been so faultless that there seemed to be no possibility of failure. To take his fair-minded son—with the mother's eyes—into the game would be suicidal. The young fellow would turn from him forever. Bansemer never went so far as to wonder whence came the honest blood in the boy's veins, nor to speculate on the origin of the unquestioned integrity. He had but to recall the woman who bore him, the woman whose love was the only good thing he ever knew, the wife he had worshipped while ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... been able to leave his parish for a long day; so Bessie had plenty of leisure to speculate upon the possible loves of other people, instead of enjoying the blissfulness of her ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... excite himself over a mirror, or when his European visitors try to swagger with their mechanical appliances. Mr. Herbert Spencer founds, on the statements of Mr. Bates already quoted, a notion that "the savage, lacking ability to think and the accompanying desire to know, is without tendency to speculate". He backs Mr. Bates's experience with Mungo Park's failure to "draw" the negroes about the causes of day and night. They had never indulged a conjecture nor formed an hypothesis on the matter. Yet Park avers that "the belief in one God is entire and universal ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... digestive processes, continues to exist,' and gives us his own idea of how Keats should have treated the subject. An eminent French critic once exclaimed in despair, 'Je trouve des physiologistes partout!'; but it has been reserved for Mr. Rossetti to speculate on Endymion's digestion, and we readily accord to him all the distinction of the position. Even where Mr. Rossetti seeks to praise, he spoils what he praises. To speak of Hyperion as 'a monument of Cyclopean architecture ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... flat. I saw many ten-pound fish, but I did not know enough about bonefish then to appreciate what I saw. However, I did appreciate their keen sight and wariness and wonderful speed and incredible power. Some of the big surges made me speculate what a heavy bonefish might do to light tackle. Sam and I were disappointed at our luck, somewhat uncertain whether it was caused by destructive work of crabs or the wrong kind of bait or both. It scarcely occurred to us ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... tiny stream of salt water in the picturesque gorge—as weird and puzzling a bit of scenery as can be found in Persia, if one carefully examined each hill, each rock, and tried to speculate on ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... that question, for their principal support is the ignorance of the popular masses. They speculate on it, they work upon it by a ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... along with you. The fabric consolidates itself more and more, even while the earthquake rocks it; for, with a thousand drawbacks and deductions, love grows larger, zeal warmer, truth firmer among us. It makes the mind sad to speculate upon the question how much better all might have been; but our mourning should be turned into joy and thankfulness when we think also ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... the principal departments, coextensive with that which would be necessary for a government of the whole. The entire separation of the States into thirteen unconnected sovereignties is a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates. The ideas of men who speculate upon the dismemberment of the empire seem generally turned toward three confederacies—one consisting of the four Northern, another of the four Middle, and a third of the five Southern States. There is little probability that there would be a greater number. According to this ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... snow-laden pines and spruces, all inextricably mixed as the sleigh spun by. It was too late to turn back now, she knew; the best that could be done, was to hurry on—and she began to count the hoof-beats and to speculate how long it would be before they would see the lights of the little station, and find the ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... was resumed, and Mr. Fogo left to speculate on these dark sayings. But as the boat drew near the column of blue smoke that, rising from the hazels on the left bank, marked the whereabouts of the Dearloves' cottage, he grew aware of a picture that, perhaps by mere charm of composition, set his ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Reviewer, in discussing an objection to the Copyright Bill of Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, which was taken by Sir Edward Sugden, gives some curious particulars of the progeny of literary men. "We are not," says the writer, "going to speculate about the causes of the fact; but a fact it is, that men distinguished for extraordinary intellectual power of any sort rarely leave more than a very brief line of progeny behind them. Men of genius have scarcely ever done so; men of imaginative genius, we might say, almost ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... has somewhere heard, that a good housewife never has any thing to purchase when it is wanted. This maxim is often in her mouth, and always in her head. She is not one of those philosophical talkers that speculate without practice; and learn sentences of wisdom only to repeat them: she is always making additions to her stores; she never looks into a broker's shop, but she spies something that may be wanted some time; and it is impossible to make her pass the door ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... to speculate upon the first of these points—the permanence of our advance, if it is an advance. But we may be encouraged by one thing that distinguishes this period—say from the middle of the eighteenth century—from ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... historical event I have been tempted to connect with this spot is the entry of Louis d'Orleans in 1452, who is said to have lodged in the "Hotel d'Estellan, Rue Petit Salut." But the house is worth visiting if only to speculate on the dungeon windows in the corner of the little street outside, and to look up the Impasse Petit Salut a little further on, where the Tour de Beurre rises with an extraordinary effect of solitary beauty above the twisted roof trees into ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... innocent; what had particularly annoyed him was the fact that he should have given the matter a second thought. To begin with, it was none of his business and he was not a man who presumed to judge or even speculate on other people's indiscretions. Claire Robson was no sheltered schoolgirl. She was a full-grown woman, in the thick of business life. Such women were not taken unawares. He had just dismissed the whole affair from his mind on this basis ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... not stay to speculate any longer upon them. He resolved to wake Guapo; but in doing so the whole party were aroused, and started to their feet in some alarm and confusion. The noise and movement had its effect on the nocturnal visitors; for before Leon could explain himself, those immediately around the fires and for ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... countenance, and doubtless genial ways, had the right to stand at her dressing-table, if he chose, and speculate upon the various uses of all the daintiness that was spread before him. He had the right and cared nothing for it, while the man who did care, stood there shamefaced, all at once feeling himself an intruder in a ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... Inhabitants. The undertaking met with almost prompt and cordial support; the proudest names and the brightest lights of the age were enlisted in it. The celebrated Madame de Maintenon became the patroness, forbidding, however, the Society to speculate upon her affairs; the illustrious Duke de Rohan became the president; the Czar Peter an honorary member; and the Society was otherwise royally and nobly officered and befriended. So numerous were the applications to be received as members, that it was found necessary to establish ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... perhaps permissible to speculate that electrons are small satellites, and that atoms of helium are larger ones. But to pursue the subject further, without more definite knowledge, which can be gained only by experiment, ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 3 • Various
... not so void of reason, as their practised conclusions. Some have held that snow is black, that the earth moves, that the soul is air, fire, water; but all this is philosophy: and there is no delirium, if we do but speculate the folly and indisputable dotage of avarice. To that subterraneous idol, and god of the earth, I do confess I am an atheist. I cannot persuade myself to honour that the world adores; whatsoever virtue ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... powerfully reinforced, and further, from the nature of the animal remains arose the conviction that "existing animals have a close relation in form with extinct species," another of the germinal facts which bore fruit in the "Origin of Species." Darwin was led to speculate on the causes which could have extinguished so many great species, and he remarks most suggestively: "One is tempted to believe in such simple relations as variation of climate and food, or introduction of enemies, or the increased numbers of other species, as the cause of the succession ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... stranger chanced to wander near her hut and overhear her jargon, incessant as it was, and shrill, he might speculate in vain on the reason of these sounds. If he waited in expectation of hearing some reply, he waited in vain. The strain, always voluble and sharp, was never intermitted for a moment, and would continue ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... its real nature, even though hundreds of eclipses furnish them with the indisputable evidence of its presence. The sun is so thickly surrounded by a shell of this "red matter," that it is useless for them to speculate with only the help of their physical instruments, upon the nature of that which they can never see or detect with mortal eye behind that brilliant, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and adventurous part, which we have dealt with in others, not excluding by any means in this half-reflective, half-contrasting office, the philosophical side also. Yet when men pray and fight, when they sneer and speculate, they are constrained to be very like themselves and each other. They are much freer in their dreams: and the Romance of the Rose, if it has not much else of life, is like it in this way—that it ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... infatuation or any renewal of it. And he had been taught to read through the beautiful twilighted woman, as if she were burnt paper held at the fire consuming her. His hopes hung elsewhere. Nevertheless, an intellectual demon-imp very lively in his head urged him to speculate on such a contest between them, and weigh the engaging forces. Difficulties were perceived, the scornful laughter on her side was plainly heard; but his feeling of savage mastery, far from beaten down, swelled so as to become irritable for the trial; and when he was near her house he held a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... began to speculate about Richter's visit. He had come at some risk and seemed sorry for her, but he had urged her to stay in the house, as if she expected her father to return. This could be of no advantage to the latter, and she wondered ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... be another review, he supposed. A longer and more detailed one. There must be, had to be, something they'd overlooked in the first one. Had he been right in freezing out so many who wanted to speculate in that first one? But ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... day! The weariness! The sense of all being finished! She did not even allow herself to speculate as to what Hector was doing with himself. She must never let her thoughts turn that way at all if she could help it. She must devote herself to Josiah and to getting through the time. But something had gone out of her life which could never ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... thousand francs a-year is the least a Parisian can live upon. It is not only that all prices have fabulously increased, but that the dearer things become, the better people live. When I first came out, the world speculated upon me; now, in order to keep my standing, I am forced to speculate on the world. Hitherto I have not lost; Duplessis let me into a few good things this year, worth one hundred thousand francs or so. Croesus consulted the Delphic Oracle. Duplessis was not alive in the time of Croesus, or ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... the true instinct of a pure and innocent girl, shrank from his companionship; innocence will ever shrink with innate consciousness from baseness. He persuaded Hunter to rent a farm in addition to his own, and lent him money to speculate largely in breeding fancy sheep. The speculation failed—the agent pressed for payment. His master came forward and paid the amount. Thus he appeared as a benefactor, and Ellen's gratitude soon ripened into love; but her brother was in the way. He went ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... strides straight to the highest office that England could bestow. And others aver that when he was created a Peer in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven it was a move toward the Premiership, and that if his health had not failed he would surely have won the goal. But how futile it is to speculate on what might have happened had not this or the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... but men are different. If there is a veil before us, we must tear it away,—not sit muffled in its folds, and speculate on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... $125,000. The "Little Sons" looked at one another in consternation, while Brewster's indifference expressed itself in an unflattering comment upon his friend's vulgarity. "Good Lord, Nopper," he added, "you would speculate about the price ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... in the next minute or two one may speculate about, yet never definitely know, for in the instant of profound silence that followed Hank's roaring voice, and as though in answer to it, something went past through the darkness of the sky overhead at terrific speed—something of necessity very large, for it displaced much air, while ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... his views: "It is simply impossible for us to speculate on the course of the river, because we were unfortunate enough to pass it by in the night. It seems to me more probable, however, that it finds its way to the sea to the east of ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... to speculate on the possibility of the Episcopalian, Catholic, and Presbyterian clergy joining in an Antiquarian Society to preserve our ecclesiastical remains—our churches, our abbeys, our crosses, and our fathers' tombs, from fellows like the Meath road-makers? It would be a politic and ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... through a court-yard, and the lamp goes out, so he went —in the night. Who can say? Wherefore speculate? He is gone. It is enough. Were it not for thee, Egypt should see ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and as we drove along before our now friendly wind I could not but speculate on the future. Here are wide tracts of fertile soil watered by abundant rains. The temperate sun warms the life within the soil. The cooling breeze refreshes the inhabitant. The delicious climate ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... had life. Looking for a while at the old man, I was satisfied that he was engaged in an act of worship or prayer, or communion of some kind with a supernatural being. I longed to penetrate his thoughts, but I could do nothing more than conjecture and speculate. I knew that though the intellect of an Indian can embrace the idea of an all-wise, all-powerful Spirit, the supreme Ruler of the universe, yet his mind will not always ascend into communion with a being that seems to him so vast, remote, and incomprehensible; and when danger ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... He could speculate on these things as if they were matters affecting none of us there. In that fourpenny doss-house he remained as aloof as a god, and in some vague way the calmness of the man in face of this infringing realism for ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... literature, not void of "detective stories," had at this moment primed Louise with its influence to the extent of inducing her to scent a mystery in the history of Captain Wegg. The plain folks around Millville might speculate listlessly upon the "queer doin's" at the farm, and never get anywhere near the truth. Indeed, the strange occurrences she had just heard were nearly forgotten in the community, and soon would be forgotten altogether—unless the quick ear of a ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... rises, and the colder air from the poles rushes in to supply its place. This causes wind, but the winds which would be raised on Venus by the rush of air from the icy side of the planet to the hot one would be tornadoes such as we could but faintly dream of. It is, of course, useless to speculate when we know so little, but in a subject so intensely interesting we cannot help guessing ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... hard work he found time to evolve a theory of whirlwinds and to speculate upon the soaring of birds. A companion has recorded in the following terms another matter which engaged much of his attention at this time: "The boldest of his speculations, and one of the soundest, as after-events proved, was his plan for ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... little time to speculate on this theme, however, for the next instant a piteous cry broke from the girl's lips—a cry in a voice strangely familiar; a cry that sent the blood bounding through his heart like an electric shock—and before he could take a step forward to prevent it, the ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... Carlyle tried hard to persuade him to "descend," but it would appear Emerson never to his dying day understood what Carlyle meant by the appeal, an appeal to take the devil by the throat and cease to merely speculate and dream (1803-1882). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the strange thrill that passed over me when I thus found myself standing on what I knew must be the eastern side of the globe. As soon as I had fairly recovered the use of my reason, I began to speculate as to the region of the country into which I emerged. If I had come directly through the centre of the earth, I knew, of course, just where I ought to be; but this hardly seemed possible, considering how short a time it had required for my journey. ...
— John Whopper - The Newsboy • Thomas March Clark
... Arthur Delaine's clumsy hints occurred to her. Was there, indeed, some private matter weighing on the young man's mind? She would not allow herself to speculate upon it; though she could not help watching the relation between the two men with some curiosity. It was polite enough; but there was certainly no cordiality in it; and once or twice ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dear sister. To speculate upon my title and my rank in order to make a wealthy marriage? To quit my nomad's tent for a fixed residence other than that where the Prerolles have succeeded one another from generation to generation? Never! ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... not yourself with that at present which you have not the power to comprehend, and speculate not on my proceedings, but listen to my words, and follow my advice, if you will that I should serve you in ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... might be he had for years not allowed himself to speculate. Unbidden at times the memory of certain revealing looks or acts of his father's floated into his mind:—a dread if not terror that on occasion dilated the elder man's eyes, and a steadfast driving of himself at work as if to obliterate painful and despairing thoughts, ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... what's that I hear about prices? I hope you're not offering to speculate in half-finished holes, or anything ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... for purposes of defence. You conquer an attack of rudeness by courtesy: you avert an attack of accusation by flattery. Every:one remembers the anecdote of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Ewing. "Prince," said Napoleon to Talleyrand, "they tell me that you sometimes speculate improperly in the funds. "They do me wrong then," said Talleyrand. "But how did you acquire so much money!" "I bought stock the day before you were proclaimed First Consul," replied the ex-bishop, "and I sold ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... too much pressing business for him to speculate on a girl's waywardness; orders to give, and then important matters to discuss at the warehouse before he made himself presentable at the dinner. The three years had added much to Marsac's store of knowledge, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... safely speculate about the nature and relation of things with which he is unacquainted at first hand, and the acquirement of an intimate and practical knowledge of the process of species-making and of all the uncertainties which underlie ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... opposed to our general ideas of physics that those who have not seen it sometimes deny its actuality, and those who have only occasionally witnessed it subsequently doubt the evidence of their own eyes. Others, who have seen the exceptional performances, speculate on various explanations, but the majority give it up as ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... that I can see at this moment, a stone summer-house like M. Chalmette's, so convenient for an afternoon nap, while the quail are singing all around among the vines. But no, constantly led astray by treacherous illusions, I longed to make a fortune, to speculate, to try banking operations on a grand scale, to tie my fortune to the chariot of the successful financiers of the day; and now here I am at the most melancholy stage of my history, clerk in a ruined counting-house, intrusted with the duty of answering a horde of creditors, of shareholders ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... their chaps, who had left the range for the chance of sudden wealth, to storekeepers from Hereford and other towns. Excitement reigned, no one was normal. Bottles passed freely. Among the crowd moved shifty-eyed men who had come to speculate. There were gamblers, plain bullies, swaggerers, with here and there a bearded miner, gray of hair and faded blue of eye, either moving steadily through the throng or held up by a little crowd to whom he declaimed with the right of experience. Some, it ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... men found out that there was in Wall Street a broker who didn't speculate himself, who didn't drink to excess, who was absolutely honest, and who never opened his mouth when it was better shut, they began to patronize that man's firm. In short, the moment Jarrocks Bell's qualities were discovered, Jarrocks Bell ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... of the same protective rights claimed by the more fortunate citizens of such countries. In doing this we shall give a practical illustration of the imprisonment of four individuals in South Carolina, and ask those who speculate in the abstract science of State sovereignty, to reflect upon the issue of that lamentable injustice which inflicts punishment upon persons guiltless of crime. We prefer to be plain, and we know our Southern ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... as Saturn, it is of even more interest to the amateur astronomer, because he can study it with less optical power, and see more of the changes upon its surface. Every work on astronomy tells in a general way of the belts of Jupiter, and many speculate upon their causes. The reader of recent works knows that Jupiter is supposed to be not a solid mass like the earth, but a great globe of molten and vaporous matter, intermediate in constitution between the earth and ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... father had gone to pay the morning visit to the printing shops, he ran out to post the letter himself. He could not be contented until it was in the post. Now, when he saw men of about his own class and age in the street, he would speculate upon their experiences in the romance of women. And it did genuinely seem to him impossible that anybody else in a town like Bursley could have passed through an episode so exquisitely strange and beautiful as that through which he was passing. Yet his reason told him that ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... certain as anything can well be, that his influence, exercised through Lord Normanby, alone averted French intervention in August 1848, when the desperate state of things made the Italians willing to accept foreign aid. What would have happened if the French had intervened it is interesting to speculate, but impossible to decide. Their help was not desired, except as a last resource, by any party in Italy, nor by any man of note except Manin. The republicans wished Italy to owe her liberation to herself; Charles Albert wished her to owe it to him. The King ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... entered into with the Portuguese for the possession of that place, which could not fail to prove most convenient for our eastern commerce. An equivalent may be found among the West Indian islands; but it is perhaps equally vain and invidious to speculate on such very distant concerns, when the wonderful events now occurring in a kingdom so long the torment and the teacher of nations, arrest the imagination from every trivial selfish pursuit, and fix the mind undividedly on ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... of which she had heard from her childhood, he felt that her attention was no longer his; that a discord had come in between their minds; that she had passed out of his power. This certainty of intuition lasted but for an instant; he had no time to wonder or to speculate as to what had affected her so adversely to his wishes before the door opened and Kinraid came in. Then Hepburn knew that she must have heard his coming footsteps, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Calvinists of all countries have presented the strongest possible resemblance to each other—the Calvinists of Geneva and Holland, the Huguenots of France, the Covenanters of Scotland, and the Puritans of Old and New England, seeming, as it were, to be but members of the same family. It is curious to speculate on the influence which the religion of Calvin—himself a Frenchman—might have exercised on the history of France, as well as on the individual character of Frenchmen, had the balance of forces carried the nation bodily ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... in return—knives, or tobacco, or sago, or handkerchiefs. I then have to endeavour to explain, through any interpreter who may be at hand, that neither tripang nor pearl oyster shells have any charms for me, and that I even decline to speculate in tortoiseshell, but that anything eatable I will buy—fish, or turtle, or vegetables of any sort. Almost the only food, however, that we can obtain with any regularity, are fish and cockles of very good quality, and ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... tithing which they have never reported to the General Tithing Office. We have documents to show that Bishops have taken in hundreds of bushels of wheat, and only a small portion of it has come into the General Tithing Office. They stole it to let their friends speculate upon."* ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Captain Cannonby. If this gentleman really was with Frederick Massingbird when he died, and saw him buried, it was evident that it could not be Frederick come back to life. In that case, who or what it might be, Lionel did not stay to speculate; his business lay in ascertaining by the most direct means in his power, whether it was, or was not, Frederick Massingbird. How was it possible to do this? how could it be possible to set the ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the boy's mind, was an object of special interest. He would purposely sneak up-stairs and sit on one of the soft sofas in the foyer simply to see the well-dressed diners go in and come out. Edward would speculate on whether the time would ever come when he could dine in that wonderful room ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... his own would have told Dr H. in the words of Bacon, that "the prerogative of God extendeth as well to the reason, as to the will of man;" and that therefore it became him humbly to contemplate what God has done, rather than to speculate as to what he might have done. In nothing, however, has he so monstrously blundered, as in hinting, that if an event is natural, therefore Providence is out of the question in effecting it; and that, on the other hand, if it is not natural, therefore even a benevolent Providence, that has ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... It is easy to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and foremost, without which any other favorable ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... make a second set of drawings that is somewhat different, though of a simpler shape and design, on which other scientists aboard can speculate, and which can be sent to Earth to ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... in the first century before Christ), and by his pupil Themison (B.C. 50). The third school of medical thought, that of Empiricism, taught that experience was the only teacher, and that it was idle to speculate upon remote causes. The Empirics based these views upon the teaching of philosophers known as Sceptics or Zetetics, followers of Parmenides and Pyrrho, who taught that it was useless to fatigue the mind in endeavouring ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... what she had gleaned from me last night, I was sure of that; but I was not so sure about Alb, who wore a clouded brow. Whether he was worrying over his own affairs, or whether friend Robert had commandered his hero's sympathy, I could not guess, and dared not ask. Nor had I much time to speculate upon Alb's business, for I saw by Freule Menela's eye that my own was pressing, and all my energies were bent in steering clear of her during the good-by excursion ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly. Therefore, being desirous, too, of telling the truth in this matter, I must confess that Lucy did speculate with some regret on what it would have been to be Lady Lufton. To have been the wife of such a man, the owner of such a heart, the mistress of such a destiny—what more or what better could the world have done for her? And now she had thrown all that aside because she would not endure ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... no great theories of government. Even their literature was, in part, an imitation of the Greek, though possessing many elements of native strength and beauty. They were a people who knew how to accomplish results rather than to speculate about means and ends. Usefulness and effectiveness were with them the criteria of the worth of any idea or project. They subdued and annexed an empire, they gave law and order to a primitive world, they ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... sight, that of a man lying full length in the soft tender grass of some retired spot of Forest park—with his face hidden in his folded arms. To the few who may see him, if they speculate at all about him he sleeps or he rests his body after a day's fatigue. "Am I never to be the brave man?" thought Hosmer, "always the coward, flying even from my ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... came as a shock to Ethne. She did not guess the correct answer; she was not, indeed, sufficiently mistress of herself to speculate upon any answer, but she dreaded it, whatever ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... P. Jones will encounter ruin is almost a matter of course; but then he is none the worse for being ruined. It hardly makes him unhappy. He is greedy of dollars with a terrible covetousness; but he is greedy in order that he may speculate more widely. He would sooner have built Jones's tenth block, with a prospect of completing a twentieth, than settle himself down at rest for life as the owner of a Chatsworth or a Woburn. As for his children, ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... by looking back, he commanded a view of the opening among the mountains which indicates the site of the valley of the Rhone. The look was long and understanding; but, when it was ended, he turned and resumed his march with the business-like air of one more disposed to act than to speculate on the future. But for the few words which had just escaped him, this natural movement would have attracted no attention; and, as it was, it was observed by none but the Signor Grimaldi, who would himself have attached little importance to the ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... dusk, and drive off toward the bruised sunset. The observation of this pointless and preposterous phenomenon had become a sort of cult among the men of Fish. To observe, that was all; there remained in them none of the vital quality of illusion which would make them wonder or speculate, else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond all religion—the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock—so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... eighties was a most speculative time all over Australia and New Zealand. I was glad that leaving the English and Scottish Bank enabled my brother to go into political and official life, but it also allowed him to speculate far beyond what he could have done if he had been manager of a bank. Everybody speculated—in mines, in land, and in leases. I was earning by my pen a very decent income, and I spent it, sometimes wisely and sometimes foolishly. I could be liberal to church and to good causes. I was able to keep ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... forced on the attention of the country by the course of the war, it may not be uninteresting to speculate upon the nature of the possible boundary, which a drawn game in the contest—a possibility at least, viewed from that early point of observation—might have imposed upon the two future nationalities. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... morning I felt a weight at my heart, and a cloud on my brain, for which I could in no way account. As I passed along Broad Street, I made one or two bold attempts to rally. I stared inquisitively at the different passers by, endeavouring, by a snatch at the expression of their faces, to speculate on the turn of their minds, and the nature of their occupations; I then began to whistle and hum some lively air, at the same time twirling my glove with affected unconcern; but nothing would do; every exertion ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... who performed an artificial hypospadias on themselves for a specific purpose, requiring a knowledge of the anatomical relation of the parts as well as of their physiological functions, it is hard to speculate how the operation was first suggested or how it came at first to be performed. As a Malthusian agent it is certainly an operation of the highest merit, and it should be introduced, by all means, in the United States, where the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... sort of continuity and unity in thought The preoccupations of man are the same in all ages—to provide for his material needs, and to speculate what can possibly happen to his spirit, when the body, broken by accident or disease or decay, can no longer contain his soul. The best thought of man has always been centred on trying to devise some sort of future hope which could ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that states very much nearer to us than the End must be utterly beyond the powers not only of our understanding but also of our imagination, even when strained to its utmost. This being so, why should we attempt to speculate about The End? Instead, why not ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... in fact, it was the only thing to be done, for he was off. So I sat down and watched the scorner of girls disappear eagerly around a bend in the road. At the end of a half hour of waiting I began to speculate. Had Dickie's courage failed him, had he taken to the woods, or was he upbraiding her of the gatepost for the sin of conceit? I would go and see ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... coat, and a sallow, fattish face adorned with dark, well-curled moustaches, and that incorrigible commencement of whisker which, eluding the strictest attempts at shaving, seems the mark of something deeply ingrained in the personality of the shaver, being especially noticeable in men who speculate. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... kitchen. Through the day, while the baking and washing and ironing were going on, the father lay and looked up at the roof beams that he himself had hewn, or out at the cattle in the corral. He counted the cattle over and over. It diverted him to speculate as to how much weight each of the steers would probably put on by spring. He often called his daughter in to talk to her about this. Before Alexandra was twelve years old she had begun to be a help ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages. Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will live in all weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they must have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Chance" is nearly half done before the drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Almayer's Folly" we are thrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginning until we come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book. As in structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to look about. Whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions of motives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soon as they are made. Even the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (in the English ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Lucy went on smoothly, and the Professor showed no sign of wishing to break the engagement. But Hope, as he confided to Lucy, was somewhat worried, as his pauper uncle, on an insufficient borrowed capital, had begun to speculate in South African mines, and it was probable that he would lose all his money. In that case Hope fancied he would be once more called upon to make good the avuncular loss, and so the marriage would have to be postponed. But it so happened that the pauper ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... the head-master to the most prudent dealer, and the boys who lost their money time after time should be dismissed. Of course if any boy proved to have a genius for speculation and made money—well and good, let him speculate by all means. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... around him. After sailing along a coastline of cliffs some 200 feet in height, and in general effect and outline not unlike those of Dover, he observes an apparent breach in the sea-wall, forming two abrupt headlands, and ere he has time to speculate upon the cause of that fancied ruin, his ship glides between the wave-worn cliffs into the magnificent harbour of Port Jackson. The view which solicits the eye of the sea-wearied voyager as he proceeds up ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... sat down to our solitary wedding breakfast; and there were no eyes to speculate upon the bride's beauty, to note her changing color, or the glory of her eyes; and no healths were proposed or toasts drunk, nor any speeches spoken—except, perhaps by my good friend—the brook outside, who, of course, understood the situation, and babbled tolerantly of ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... is anything buried there," said the Colonel hastily. "I only said it was remotely possible. The Indians have been gone from this region for so long that it is not safe to speculate upon anything they might have left. I only know that from time to time ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... can be more miserable than the situation of a poor girl who fails in her matrimonial expectations (as many do merely from not beginning to speculate in time)," she wrote from Bath. "She finds herself at five or six-and-thirty a burden to her friends, destitute of the means of rendering herself independent—for the girls I speak of never think of learning to play cards—de trop in society, yet obliged to hang upon all her acquaintances, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... brain in its excited state was scarcely able to tackle. His thoughts got somewhat confused and broken as he approached his chambers. He was so near the letter now—a few minutes and he would no longer need to wonder or speculate about it, but would know exactly what she said. He turned and stood for a minute or so at the Temple gates, looking out upon the busy Strand. It was still as lovely as a summer night could be overhead, but down here it was—well, it was London, which is another thing. The usual ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... is April! Peter said. 'The First of April, as I think. Five little weeks will soon be fled: One scarcely will have time to wink! Give me a year to speculate— To buy and sell—to drive a trade—' Said Paul 'I cannot change the date. On May the Fourth it must ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... Lord Bathurst is at Cirencester, the Duke of Wellington in Holland, Lord Sidmouth in Yorkshire, Peel and Lord Melville in Scotland with the King. No event ever gave rise to more speculation with the few people there are left to speculate, and the general opinion seems to be that Canning will not go to India,[10] but will be appointed in his room. It certainly opens a door to his ambition as well as to that of Peel, who, unless Canning comes into office, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the level of the Odd Fellows regalia, and only used by them on rare occasions. For the last ten years, however, it had done miscellaneous duty as warder of Old Man Wheeler's lumber-room. If a key could be supposed to peep through a keyhole, and speculate on the nature of the service it was rendering to humanity, in keeping safe the contents of the room into which it gazed, this key might have indulged in fine conjectures, and have passed its lifetime in a state of chronic bewilderment. ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... disguised after the modern fashion. And the same is true of the baptized infidelity imported from Germany. The German mind is cramped and diseased by the bands which confine it. It is not allowed to speculate freely on politics, and the many questions most nearly touching present interests. Therefore, on the records and on the doctrines which pertain to eternal interests, it falls with an insane avidity for innovation, and runs into licentiousness a liberty no where else enjoyed. Hence the levity, ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... he was going to marry old Miser Jerrold's daughter. He wanted to quit father's employ, and he thanked him in a real manly way for the manner in which he had always treated him. Well Jacobs left, and mother says that father would sit and speculate about him, as to whether he had fallen in love with Eliza Jerrold, or whether he was determined to regain possession of the box, and was going to do it honestly, or whether he was sorry for having frightened the old man into a greater degree of imbecility, and was ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... "Don't—don't wonder and speculate any more why a little girl of ten years didn't do exactly as a grown-up person would have done," burst forth Uncle John. "The whole blame lies with us, or with Tom and me. We should never have allowed such a child to be sent off ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... promised to bring him fifty per cent. He invested in the traffic of usury what had sufficed to save a hundred such as I am from perdition, and he lost it all. It was nearly his whole fortune; but he lives and has his luxuries still: be cannot speculate, but he can save: he cared not if I starved, for he finds an ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... because we want to do business. But I just ask you, if she had given me five francs for myself and paid my return journey, would that have ruined her? A pretty girl like her oughtn't to be hard up for money. I know very well that in our calling there are some people who are hardly honest, who speculate and ask for commissions, and then put out nurslings at cheap rates and rob both the parents and the nurse. It's really not right to treat these dear little things as if they were goods—poultry or vegetables. When folks do that I can ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... other. "That is why we're only ready to offer you out-district virgin forest value for the portions colored blue in this plan. In other words, we speculate by advancing you money ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... they think most likely to prevail, in order to obtain to themselves consideration in some new order or disorder of things. They may be led to act in this manner, that they may secure some portion of their own property, and perhaps to become partakers of the spoil of their own order. Those who speculate on change always make a great number among people of rank and fortune, as well as amongst the low ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... you are in need, denotes that you will speculate unwisely and distressing news of ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... "I speculate about my lot as a woman; I see the bitterness and the sorrow of my sex through the ages. I have become physically misshapen, so that I am no longer attractive to him. I am no longer active and free, I can no longer go about with him; on the contrary, I am a burden, and he is a man who never ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... of the measure of all values (gold) is detrimental to the interests of trade. It makes the man of business an involuntary gambler, for in all sales where future payment is to be made both parties speculate as to what will be the value of the currency to be paid and received. I earnestly recommend to you, then, such legislation as will insure a gradual return to specie payments and put an immediate stop to fluctuations in ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... the utmost; and Wilfred, determined to rise to the occasion, threw off his sadness, ceased to speculate as to the chances of the insurrection {xvi}; that night, at least, he would give to joy—he would encourage his people who loved him so faithfully by rejoicing ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... with the things the men required in readiness for a spring campaign[740] but it was up-hill work. And what was perfectly incomprehensible to him was, that when his need was so great there was yet corn available for private parties to speculate in and to realize enormous profits on.[741] In April, the Indian regiments, assembling and reforming in expectation of a call to action, made special demands upon his ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded and gave over. I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my dander got hotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace of mind till I dined on roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, that that stood for skookum mamook pukapuk—excuse Chinook, I mean there was ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... theory. But, to take a practical case: Here are the Australians, roaming in small bands, without more formal rulers than 'headmen' at most; not ancestor worshippers; not polytheists; with no departmental deities to select and aggrandise; not apt to speculate on the Anima Mundi. How, then, did they bridge the gulf between the ghost of a soon-forgotten fighting man, and that conception of a Father above, 'all-seeing,' moral, which, under various names, is found all over a huge continent? I cannot see that this problem has ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... light in No. 401; but then it was too late. Had he been delayed ten seconds, or had he gotten off at the fourth floor, he would have—. However, I anticipate; or rather I speculate on what would have happened under hypothetical conditions—which is fatuous in the extreme; hypothetical conditions never are ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... afford to shut out the intellectual and mentally progressive element, or must it accept as normal these salaries and make it respectable to begin on them? It is the strain which unessential social conventions give to the young families that leads the business father to speculate in order to get into the $10,000-a-year class, and that leads the young scientific and literary man to take extra work outside of his normal duties. This sort of thing cannot go on without serious danger to the Republic. Cleanliness and good manners should be insisted upon, but they may ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... healthy, intelligent children completed his domestic happiness; the boy was about to enter the military career, which had been that of all his ancestors; the girl was to remain yet a while under her mother's wing. Like all men of old descent, our baron was a good deal given to speculate upon the past and the future of his family. We have said that his means were not large, and though he had always intended to lay by, the time for beginning to do so had never yet come. Either some improvement to house or grounds was wanted, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... familiar with Nevada, there are dozens of such desert reaches which must instantly suggest themselves to the mind, and it is interesting to speculate, not altogether idly, on how advantage might be taken of such conditions. The Bulletin particularly speaks of one of ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... may be given without the least hesitation: with stone tools. For many years the method of working the stones was a matter of great debate, and the uncertainty then prevailing permitted many theorists to speculate on the "Roman" origin of the structure. Now, however, the entire absence of any metal which resulted from Mr. Gowland's excavations in 1901, at once precludes the possibility of the builders being anything but a primitive people, to whom the use of metal was unknown, or only partly ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... slip of paper from headquarters had said, and he did not speculate as to what those services would be, but he knew that they would not be exactly holding Sunday-School picnics in the neighborhood of Montdidier. Billy Brownway, machine gunner, had assured Thatchy that ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... down the History-book, and to speculate upon what MIGHT have happened in the world, but for the fatal occurrence of what actually did take place (a most puzzling, amusing, ingenious, and profitable kind of meditation), have no doubt often thought to themselves what a specially bad time Napoleon ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray |
