"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pull, and brought up a tangle of weeds. Again and again I cast out my line with aching arms, and drew it back empty. I looked at my uncle appealingly. "Try once more," he said; "we fishermen ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left something in the ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... are in case to fear betrayal, it may well be, my friends. As I crossed the bridge over the Metauro and took the path that leads hither, my eyes were caught by a crimson light shining from a tangle of bushes by the roadside. That crimson flame was a reflection of the setting sun flashed from the steel cap of a hidden watcher. The path took me nearer, and with my hat so set that it might best conceal my face, I was all eyes. And as I passed the spot ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... desecration of a hallowed spot. When the past has been dead and buried a long while ago there is no sweeter decking for its grave than a rich autumn tangle, all yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, with glossy evergreens and soft, damp moss to keep up the illusion of spring and summer all the ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... fat priest in a golden-edged tunic were tangled confusedly outside. The High Priestess looked away from them in disdain and said regally: "You may permit the Healer to enter, Captain." The tangle came untied and the little priest scooted in. To him, as the door closed again, the High Priestess whispered: "Sorry. I didn't expect you quite ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... spirit, the Ego, shines clear, free from the entanglements of the web and unaffected by the magnetic glamour of the Moon. And lo! the coffin is filled with stones, a symbol of death and the Moon, which is but a casket of stones. Therefore, little monad, caught in the tangle of the web of life and the glamour of earthly things, take heart, for, beyond all, is the star of your being. Call down the law of that star into yourself, and the web is broken and waves its tattered shreds in the breeze. ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... I had missed my proper Denver connection, owing to the wreck delay. But, a passenger agent directing me, I found the evening Union Pacific train waiting at another platform. A short half-hour later the tangle of railroad yards in the river "bottoms" was left behind and the overland train was boring westward into a cloudy night ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... sadness, its dusky fairness set in black, but attentive, as always, to the sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at became at once more significant to him—the tangle of tenacious roots that thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods, the swift, awkward flight of a pheasant that crossed their way with a creaking whir of wings, the amethyst stars of a bush ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the maid at straightening his rooms. As he lay on the lounge smoking he watched her lazily. She handled his books with a great deal of awe. She opened one of them and sat on the floor in the childlike way she often had. She read several sentences aloud. It was a tangle of technical words on the subject of ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... of the tangle there seemed none. Fight Sir Amys could not, with the weight of a false oath on his soul, yet to run away were to confess all, and leave Belisante to bear her father's anger alone. Turn his thoughts ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... understood. Men who were real patriots began to believe in it. Their country was wronged. Here was one to set her right. Men whose honor was beyond question became secret agents of this power. The state was honeycombed and mined; society was a tangle of plots. The king was helpless, though his only wish was for the people's welfare. Honest and straightforward, what could he do against this far-reaching machination? The very advisers by his side were corrupted through ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... most of the fiery spirit left by the whalers the preceding year was exhausted, and Teneskin was issuing an inferior brand of his own brewing, concocted much in the same way as the "gun-barrel water" of the Eskimo and even more potent, if possible, than San Francisco "Tangle-foot." This is made by mixing together one part each of flour and molasses with four parts of water and then letting the mixture stand for four days in a warm atmosphere until it ferments. The distillery consists of a coal oil tin, an old gun-barrel, and a wooden tub. The mash is put in the ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Du seem to me, gentlemen, seem' as we'm got into a bit of a tangle in a manner of spakin', 'twid be the most zimplest and vairest way to begin all over vrom the beginnin', so's t'ave it all vair an' square for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wide, desolate mud flats running right up to the railway embankment for some miles. At high tide the mud flats were under water, and out of these the great mass of network rose both horizontally and perpendicular. And in this tangle the dead body of a man had been found ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... like some parts of rural England—Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleen-wort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut. This is the landscape which the two sixteenth century novelists of Siena, Fortini and Sermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of literature absorbing in itself the specific character of a country, and conveying it to the reader less ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... its thousand novelties. I saw prickly pears in blossom upon a ledge of rock; a great lunar-moth resting drowsily, almost drunkenly, in the parasol shade of a wild-carrot blossom; here was the half of a wagon wheel, the wood rotted away, and there in the tangle an ancient cistern mouth of brick, the cistern filled to the brim with alluring rubbish. My sister sprang with a gurgle of delight to catch a garter snake, which eluded her; and a last year's brier, tough and humorously inclined, seized ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... rocks at the end of our garden there was a shingly opening, in which we used to bathe, and where at low tide I frequently waded among masses of rock covered with sea-weeds. With the exception of dulse and tangle I knew the names of none, though I was well acquainted with and admired many of these beautiful plants. I also watched the crabs, live shells, jelly-fish, and various marine animals, all of which were objects of curiosity and amusement to me in ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... is out! And you came here pretending a friendly concern that the tangle should be straightened out! We were to distinguish between the sound and unsound firms, and you requested me, most politely, to give you my ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... saw the bushes stir a few rods in front of her, and raised her gun into position, still hiding in the tangle. Albert discovered a movement in front of him, and ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... wuz talkin' pritty loud, ez if he'd been hittin' up ther tangle juice, an' ther other feller wuz tryin' ter make him put on ther soft pedal, what Clay calls talkin' pianissimo. But when the booze is in ther wit is out, an' ther feller would shut it down some fer a while, then he'd get a good lungful o' ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... too complicated for comprehension. Nor were their lives unregulated by principles and laws; they were ruled by canons and conventions as powerful as those of Europe, as merciless as the caste code of India; their social life was rooted in a tangle of relationships and customs as intricate as any in the world. The basis of the community was the House, at the head of which was a Master or Chief, independent and autocratic within his own limited domain, which ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... garden, beautiful to his eyes beyond all words, with broad terraces and gleaming marble steps where peacocks strutted; with at one end a fountain banked in a tangle of roses, where sprays of water fell with silvery splash and tinkle; with marble seats and statues gleaming from the cool gloom of trees. Around the garden were high walls, vine-hung, with the surrounding ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... of Artaban spread a fair garden, a tangle of flowers and fruit-trees, watered by a score of streams descending from the slopes of Mount Orontes, and made musical by innumerable birds. But all colour was lost in the soft and odorous darkness of the late September night, ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... thinking," he said. "You are quite right; it is an ugly tangle I have got my life into. But remember, a man does not meet every day a woman whom he can—love; and I—I have been in deep waters. I ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... duchesses, and all manner of coroneted folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors, and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pagent is over. I drift with the crowd out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets, where the public-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and children mixed together in colossal debauch. And on every side is rising the favourite song ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... easy to see she was doomed. We chopped away at the tangle of wreckage whenever we got a chance, but that wasn't often, because, in her present position, the waves raked her every second and we had to hang ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... perennial interests of Mr. Gladstone's life was that shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting interests, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths, that is veiled under the easy name of the Eastern question. The root of the Eastern question, as everybody almost too well knows, is the presence of the Ottoman Turks in ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of canyons, hopelessly lost in the hill tangle into which they had plunged, led deviously to a twisting pass, through which they defiled, to drop into a vista of rolling waves of forest-clad hills. Among these wound countless hidden gulches, known only to those who rode from out ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... the Confederate leader rose with elation at the prospect before him. In this tangle called the Wilderness, broken only here and there by small, scattered farm houses and fields, the Grand Army of the Republic had more than twice his numbers, and nearly three times as many big guns, but his artillery would be practically useless. It was ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... him. "Young man, I know you better than I did, and rate you higher. I overheard your talk with my daughter just now, as I had a right to do, and I esteem you a brave and honorable man. You have already shown that you can serve the state. If there comes a happy way out of this tangle, I shall be glad to welcome you again. But now it were ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... his family, whether he owes money or lends it, a Russian always feels guilty. Ivanov talks all the time about being to blame in some way, and the feeling of guilt increases in him at every juncture. In Act I. he says: "Suppose I am terribly to blame, yet my thoughts are in a tangle, my soul is in bondage to a sort of sloth, and I am incapable of understanding myself...." In Act II. he says to Sasha: "My conscience aches day and night, I feel that I am profoundly to blame, but in what exactly I have done ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... wanted to be looked at was on hand, right enough—and I reckon it showed to most advantage by about as much light as it got from the stars. All they could make sure of was something alive, moving sort of awkward and jumpy, coming out from a tangle of mesquite bushes not more'n three rods off and heading straight for 'em; and seeing it the way they did—just a black splotch all mixed in with the shadows of the bushes—it looked to be most as big as a cow! Limp as he was—so you'd a-thought there wasn't ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... frame house (from which the original paint had long ago peeled in great scrofulous patches) on an unimportant street in Chippewa. There was a worm-eaten, russet-apple tree in the yard, an untidy tangle of wild-cucumber vine over the front porch, and an uncut brush of sunburned grass ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... church harmonized perfectly with the poetic tangle of the humble exterior, the luxury and art of which was bestowed by Time, for once in a way charitable. Within, the eye first went to the roof, lined with chestnut, to which age had given the richest tints of the oldest woods of Europe. This roof was supported at equal distances by ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... names buzzed in the ears of the listener at the window like the humming of a swarm of gnats. To understand and remember them was impossible, and she gazed in astonishment at the old man who so clearly comprehended the confused tangle and drew from it so readily just what he ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... often been expressed in some mythical figure or Utopia. So to express it is simply to indulge an innocent instinct for prophecy and metaphor; but unfortunately the very innocence of fancy may engage it all the more hopelessly in a tangle of bad dreams. If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real forces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into an illusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments; and even when we have come out again into the open, we shall long carry ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... time we had seen no signs of sea-tangle or molluscae, but during the night we beheld some molluscae for the first time, shining like stars at a great depth below the ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... a fallen tree-trunk prevented further speech, as, probably, it prevented for the time, consecutive further thought of old-time memories. His mind was tensely concentrated on the work of climbing through the tangle of dead trunks and branches, and, when he had accomplished the hard passage, was turned wholly from the things which he had been considering by a slight crackling, as of some one stepping on a brittle twig, at a distance in advance ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... one little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who, wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in motion. To meet ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... threaten me with your weapons," he cried. "I mean no harm. It seems that you are Deucalion; though I should not have known you myself in those rags and skins, and behind that tangle of hair and beard. You will give me your good word I know. Believe me, I ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... glared white in the intense sunlight. The beds of the brooks in the valleys that cut their way through the hill-clefts were dry and dusty; and the sole shade visible lay upon the orchard floors, where the thick branches above cast blue-black shadows upon the golden tangle of grasses at their feet. A soft murmur of hidden creature-things rose like an invisible haze from earth, and nothing moved in all the horizon save the black kites high in the blue air and the white butterflies over the drowsy ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to tangle them a little. Barto said he believed I was lying, but, anyway, he'd give me a chance to 'prove up.' Then they brought me here, and your—er—Mrs. Blount kindly stepped ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... in answer, as the tall, agile figure of Holcomb appeared above the tangle of sumac, followed by a short, gray-haired man in blue flannel, who was stepping over a refractory sapling that Holcomb ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... prisoner!" he cried, both of them, captor and captive alike, being involved in a misty flurry of snow, which boiled up from the snowbank, in the midst of which they fraternally embraced, in that intimate tangle of legs and arms which only boys can achieve without ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... told how black it is, how far it is from the perfectness after which Nature is blundering and staggering. I know not; but it is manifest that when this grim old man, with the ivory face, the black, flashing eyes, the tangle of white hair and the tangle of beard, leans over the rostrum and calls sin 'beastly' and 'devilish' and 'nasty' the people sit as white and spellbound as the ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... But it sounded to Craven as if she had shouted it from the housetop. Without a word he turned from her and stumbled toward the verandah steps. He must get away, he must be alone—alone with the night to wrestle with this ghastly tangle. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... so, but he was in too dispirited a mood to argue the point. It had not been good for his peace of mind to sit and watch the color come and go in Mona's cheeks, and the laughter spring unheralded into her dear, big eyes, and the light tangle itself in the waves of ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... have tried to describe her she stood amid the men and the tangle of the beach; a shape majestical and yet (as we drew closer) slight and forlorn. The present cause of her gestures we made out to be a dark-skinned fellow whom two of Saint Aubyn's men held prisoner with his arms trussed behind him. On her ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... but over and leaping to its culmination when Collins arrived. Castlemon was just being dragged out, and as Collins ran he could see the two men drop him to the ground so that they might slam the cage-door shut. Inside, in so wildly struggling a tangle on the floor that it was difficult to discern what animals composed it, were Alphonso, Jack, and Michael looked together. Men danced about outside, thrusting in with iron bars and trying to separate them. In ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... I am so wrought up that I scarcely know what I am talking about, or what I am doing. As I said before, I have managed to get things into a terrible mess, and I believe that you, Beatrice, are the only person alive who can unravel the tangle for me. Will you ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... servant, Daniel Hill; or whether, as he himself surmised, the crime was instigated by an unfriendly neighbour, it is impossible to say. Strange adventures of this kind, blending fact and fancy in a now inextricable tangle, are of no unfrequent occurrence in Shelley's biography. In estimating the relative proportions of the two factors in this case, it must be borne in mind, on the one hand, that no one but Shelley, who was alone in the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... limping into cover under a tangle of gorse and blackberry bashes, that discovered to her the entrance to the series of little chambers and passages that led right through the headland to the side looking into Port Gorey. Which most ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... most charming. As we rested here a whole day, most of us used the opportunity to make excursions through the marvellous scenery, being most courteously guided about by several Englishmen who had settled here for missionary and business purposes. I could not penetrate so far as I wished into the tangle of delicious shadowy valleys and hills which surrounded us, because I had to arrange for the provisioning of the caravan both in Teita and for the desert districts between Teita and the Kilimanjaro. But ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... widely. Sometimes this appears to be mere reticulum (Fig. 23); at others, a short thread which is somewhat twisted or coiled (Fig. 26); while in other cells the chromatin thread is an extremely long, very much twisted convolute thread so complexly woven into a tangle as to give the appearance of a minute network. The nucleii differ also in the number of nucleoli they contain as well as in other less important particulars. Fig. 26 will give a little notion of the variety to be found among ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction." We can only praise either as it is "clothed in circumstances." Commonly we are led to praise the one by getting too much of the other. Confounded in a tangle of fussy, vexatious, perhaps malicious restrictions, men cry loudly for liberty. When people all about us are doing things by their own sweet will, we are converted to praise of regulation and discipline and the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... reason for not telling me!" Farland accused. "It is the truth, isn't it, that Prale does not know a single thing about it. You are afraid to tell me because I may inform him of what you say, and we may straighten out the tangle? I can see through you, sir, as easily as ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... car and took the wheel; and Stull watched them threading a tortuous path through the traffic tangle of Broadway. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Red Murrough crossed himself, as did the rest, muttered into his tangle of red beard, and motioned ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... off the draught from that cracked pane in the window. His face, like his wife's, was weatherbeaten, and of the same broad, flat type as hers, with small, surprised, dazzled-looking, pale blue eyes, and a tangle of grizzled light hair under his chin. He was noticeable for the green smock-frock he wore, a garment which is so rapidly disappearing before the march of civilisation, and giving place to the ill-cut, ill-made coat of shoddy cloth, which is fondly ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... wits' end-to know how to prevent them making fools of themselves. Then came Mrs. Grenville's letter. Mrs. Grenville had seen you. She had discovered that you cared for Meryl, and she told me so. I didn't stop to think then. I saw in a moment it was your business to help me help them out of the tangle. So I just sent you a telegram and asked you to ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... meet her thoughtful gaze. He was apparently watching the retreating form of the horse through the tangle of flower ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... out that ticket tangle after the show," mused Joe. "It's likely to get serious. I wonder—" he went on, struck by a new thought. "I wonder if—Oh, no! It couldn't be! He hasn't been around in ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... you, child,' she said, as we were parting, 'and you must pray for me. I find that the habits of a lifetime are not easily uprooted; if I get into a tangle, I shall send for my little minister to put ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... known Lucette for years, even when she was a barefooted little tangle-hair, peeping at me with her great brown eyes from beneath her ragged straw hat. She wears high-heeled slippers now, and sometimes on Sundays dainty silk stockings, and her hair is braided down her back, little French Marguerite that she is, and her hat is never ragged any more, nor her hair tangled. ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... of the storm. The left flank swung forward and encircled the base of an imposing kopje. The men swarmed up with tiger-like activity, quickly, and in broken and irregular lines; but there was no confusion, no wretched tangle, no helpless muddle. They did not rush madly to the top and stand on the sky-line to be a mark for their foes. When they almost touched the summit they paused, formed their broken lines, and carefully and wisely topped the black brow; and as they did so the Boer rifles spoke from a ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... and twenty-mule teams from the borax marsh to Mojave, ninety miles, with the trail wagon full of water barrels. Hot days the mules would go so mad for drink that the clank of the water bucket set them into an uproar of hideous, maimed noises, and a tangle of harness chains, while Salty would sit on the high seat with the sun glare heavy in his eyes, dealing out curses of pacification in a level, uninterested voice until the clamor fell off from sheer exhaustion. There was a line of shallow graves' ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... spent in his native land many years back, in which Ballymeen Races, a disreputable "welshing" bookmaker, himself, a jug of whiskey and a blackthorn stick were all hopelessly mixed in one grand Hibernian tangle. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... disclose to sift this mystery of Colonel Weatherby to the bottom, if possible, and then to fix the guilt where it belongs. By accident you have come into possession of certain facts that would be important in unravelling the tangle, but through your unfortunate affliction you are helpless to act in your own capacity. You need an ally with more strength and experience than yourself, and I propose you accept me as that ally. Together ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... lion hunt, Thorn and his grandfather started off to the stone yard. They soon came to the deep forest where they could not see far ahead of them, because the beeches and oaks and chestnuts grew close together, and under the branches there was a thick tangle of low bushes. ...
— The Cave Boy of the Age of Stone • Margaret A. McIntyre
... letter from Howarth, in which the latter said: 'Kelly did not half do his job, and all the others are kicking at me.' At any rate, Kelly did not get his one hundred and fifty dollars. Mr. Racicot then took him in hand and tried very hard to tangle him up. He commenced by trying to break down the force of the evidence of the letters, which Kelly claims Howarth has written, and which Kelly claims he had seen. Of course he had to admit that he could not swear they were written by Howarth. ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... deep dust assured that. Not down the mountain from above, for the cliff rose sheer for at least three hundred feet. Jimmy Gaynes, following unconsciously the general train of conjecture, craned his neck over the edge of the road. The broken jagged rock and shale dropped off an hundred feet to a tangle ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... from the intercepting party whizzed around him; but he sped on unharmed, while his pursuers only stopped long enough to throw off a few rails, and then both of the guerilla squads rode straight for the woods, with the plan of keeping the fugitive between them, knowing that in its tangle he ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... approach to success was made by my dear friend George William Curtis of New York, who, in admirable temper, and clear voice, unraveled the tangle, as he understood it, and seemed just about to start the convention fairly on its way, when some marplot arose to suggest that some minor point in Mr. Curtis's exposition was not correct, thus calling out a tumult of conflicting statements, the result of which ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... shrivelled mouth, and a back bent two-double. And I heard it on the very hearthstone of the Mayor's cottage, one afternoon, as we sat and smoked in the shadow of the crumbling mud wall, with a square of blue sky for roof, and for carpet a tangle of ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... James J. Ward modern, that he knows in all its bitter fullness the curse of civilized fear. He is now afraid of the dark, and night in the forest is to him a thing of abysmal terror. His city house is of the spick and span order, and he evinces a great interest in burglarproof devices. His home is a tangle of electric wires, and after bed-time a guest can scarcely breathe without setting off an alarm. Also, he had invented a combination keyless door-lock that travelers may carry in their vest pockets and apply immediately ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... and shrubs, a ruddy precipice, groups of pandanus palms, beach lined with casuarinas, banks of snow-white coral debris, ridge of sharped-edged rocks jutting out to the north-western cove and out-lying reef of coral, tangle of orchids and scrub all in miniature—save the orchids—gigantic and gross and profuse of old-gold bloom. In October and November hosts of sea-birds come hither to nest, and so also do nutmeg or Torres Straits pigeons, blue doves, peaceful doves, honey-eaters, wood-swallows, the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... lithe do the creepers clothe Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green: Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loath, In lappets of tangle they laugh between. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... full of Arizona tangle-foot, to have fired as wild as he did," I ejaculated, and walked over to where the mail-car had stood, to see just how bad the shooting was. When I got there and faced about, it was really impossible to believe any man could have done so badly, for raising my own Winchester ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... settled himself in an old tool-shop, corn-house, or rude out-building of some sort that had belonged to the ruined cottage. Here he had set up his house-hold gods; and since no one else had ever wanted a home in this dreary tangle of berry bushes, where the only shade came from stunted pines that flung shriveled arms to the sky and dropped dead cones to the sterile earth, here he ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the fields o' green, Cow-bells jingle, jangle, An' the kids thayre on the swing In the tree-tops' tangle! Wushin' fer to be a boy Whayre no sorrows fun destroy, An' the rain-bows ring the medders with a ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... her from the tangle of pedestrians and into the entrance of a corner candy-shop. "Aw, now, what's your hurry?" he insisted, regarding ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... 'A tangle of circumstantial evidence which is supposed to be conclusive, but on which we feel confident that no English jury would convict.'—NEW ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... are also in a small orchard of another neighbor, who reports that Success does best. The trees owned at one time by Dr. Stubbs seem not to be cultivated at all, but are grazed and mowed, and the orchard is now rather a tangle ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... to be covered with strips of Elm bark then on top of all he threw the clay dug from the bank, piling it well back, stamping on it, and working it down at the edges. Finally, he threw rubbish and leaves over it, so that it was confused with the general tangle. ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... scrape and scrape and scrape, you will go in old clothes, and old boots, and old ties until such a mass of treasure be garnered into the coffers of the Government as to secure at the end of all this tangle of misery a real and lasting settlement ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... soft as thickest velvet, terminated in two great yews, set far apart, a sundial between them, and backgrounded by the sea and sky. To right and left were flower borders brilliant in colour, against yew hedges. Still farther to the right was the Tangle Garden, where climbing roses, honeysuckle, and clematis roamed over pergolas and old tree stumps at their own sweet will and fancy. Beyond the yew hedge on the left was another garden of yews, and firs, and hollies. A long avenue ran its full length ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... we'll tangle, you 'n' me, young fellow. But not to-day. Take Ridley an' git out pronto before I change my mind. For a plug of tobacco I'd go to foggin' the ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... in my double gun and sat in my place, looking up eagerly, trying to pierce the green twilight and tangle of crossing boughs, while Pete slowly slipped off his dripping shirt and ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... Rucker I have come home yet, please. I want to go out and lay down in the barn on the hay and see if I can get that 'hair-despair' tangle straightened out. She hasn't seen me to tell me things for two hours or more and I know I won't get no thinking done this day if I don't make the barn 'fore she spies me." And with furtive steps and eyes he left the store and veered in a round-about ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... roadside was a witching tangle of shadows, and the air was drowsy with spicy, wind-blown scents, as four motor cars swept on their merry way ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... strange," she replied musingly, as if half speaking to herself; "so strange that I cannot understand it. Life is a queer tangle at best. That is, it seems so to ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... slowly crept the pale-gray auto. Away from it toddled coveys of wondering, tangle-haired, barefooted, unwashed children. It stopped before a crazy brick ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... tracing the annals of the Borgias, the honest seeker after truth is compelled to proceed axe in hand that he may hack himself a way through the tangle of irresponsible or malicious statements that have grown up about this subject, driving their roots deep into the soil of history. Not a single chance does malignity, free or chartered, appear to have missed for the invention of flagitious ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... character, therefore, is an index to the South African tangle. His enemies call the Boer "a combination of cunning and childishness." As a matter of fact the Boer is distinct among individualists. "Oom Paul" Kruger was a type. A fairly familiar story will concretely illustrate what lies within and behind the race. On one occasion ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... the quick response; and Theo, fired afresh, shut out the fair picture of the tiny speaker whose grave, sweet face looked out of a tangle of fine-spun, golden hair. Covering her eyes, she applied herself with renewed vigour to the detested task ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... Cappy Ricks half an hour after Matt Peasley had been pried away from Mr. Skinner and forced to listen to reason, "is the grandest thing in life. Now there's that crazy boy gone out in a rage just because he had the presumption to tangle with me in a business deal and get dog-gone well licked! He put it all over me yesterday, thinking I couldn't protect myself. Well, he knows better now, Skinner; he knows better now! In-fer-nal young scoundrel! Wow, but wasn't he a wild man, ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... sat down and cried in that patient, helpless, miserable way of hers. She didn't know just what she was crying for, herself or the children. Life was a hopeless, unmanageable tangle that seemed to give her nothing and take her all. So Mrs. Sears sat and cried. It ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... window-sill, and, taking hold of the upper edge of one of the casements, swung myself by this. I felt myself hovering an instant in mid-air. Then my feet had found the niche. I crouched, and, groping forward with one hand, grasped a stout tangle of vines. Releasing the casement I half-dragged, half-swung myself into the opening in the wall. I clung there a moment trembling, catching my breath, before I realized that the dark mass at the back of the niche ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... the top of the highest hill in Overstrand, the chimneys of a house showed above a thick tangle of fir-trees. Between the trees and the road rose a wall, high, compact, forbidding. Carl opened the gate in the wall and pushed his bicycle up a winding path hemmed in by bushes. At the sound of his feet on the gravel the bushes new apart, and a man sprang into the walk and confronted him. But, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... yellow jasmine and many-hued morning-glory,—the latter making a pillar heavy with triumphal wreaths of every old stump along the plashy brink,—the former swinging from tree-top to tree-top to knit the whole tropic wilderness into a tangle of emerald chains, drooping lamps of golden fire, and censers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... few years ago we sometimes saw factories in which the materials worked upon were moved upstairs, then downstairs, then back upstairs, hither and yon, until a diagram of their wanderings looked like a tangle of yarn. Even in offices, desks were placed at random and letters, orders, memoranda, and other documents and papers were moved about with all of the orderliness and method of a school-girl playing ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... have, it isn't every one can afford to wear it. I can. Why? Oh, because it's in character. Besides, I admire point any way,—it's so becoming; and then, you see, this amber! Now what is in finer unison, this old point-lace, all tags and tangle and fibrous and bewildering, and this amber, to which Heaven knows how many centuries, maybe, with all their changes, brought perpetual particles of increase? I like yellow things, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... in the tangle of her afflicted mind, supposing he had suspected it! Supposing by some queer chance, he had heard her forgotten story, and casually put two and two together! Supposing even that he were merely to mention in the Five Towns that the Pension Frensham was kept by a Mrs. Scales. 'Scales? Scales?' ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... warmer. Tiny green shoots appeared in the rusty tangle of last season's mesa grasses. Imperceptibly the dull-hued mesas became fresh carpeted with green across which the wind bore a subtly soft fragrance ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... sighed and let his eyes travel to Jane who was gazing in moody silence out at the tangle of trees and vines. Turning again to the paper, and with much rustling of the pages, he made ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... bear of enormous bulk, as large as polar bears, and when the salmon are spawning in the upper waters of the coast rivers, they become so fat they can hardly move. Certainly I have never been in a country where bear signs were so plentiful. The wood was an almost impassable tangle of vines and undergrowth, and the thought of really ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... most prominent being known as Sari Bair[I] which rises to a height of 971 feet at Koja Chemin Tepe and is the one most familiar to the Australians. These hills possess very steep—even precipitous—slopes which are much excoriated by wind, rain, and frost, and broken into an amazing tangle of gullies and hollows. Firs and stunted oaks, brushwood, oleanders or rhododendrons, and other shrubs are thick wherever they can hold, and form no inconsiderable obstacle—two to ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... a slow drift toward the dark forest under us. The trees seemed huge and spindly, a porous growth something on the Martian style, with huge leaves and a tangle of matter vines. They came mounting up at us as we fell with ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... spring, Charley was quicker. He dug his spur cruelly into his little pony's flank. With a neigh of pain the animal leaped forward. For a moment there was a tangle of striking hoofs and wriggling coils of the foiled reptile, while Charley leaning over in his saddle struck with the butt-end of his riding whip at the writhing coils. Though it seemed an eternity to the helpless watchers it was really only a few seconds ere the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... whole tangle of wreckage, and had straightened herself up with a long, triumphant "Ah-h!" of relief, as the current rushed it away, when a shadow fell over the mouth of the cave. Looking about in quick, instinctive fear, she saw Warren Gregory ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... novel viewpoint it was to the boy, and as he regarded the complicated web, he found himself wondering how much of all this tangle was known to the men, and whether they were always fair to their employer. He had frequently overheard conversations at his father's when they had proclaimed how easy and care-free a life the rich led, and while they had envied ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... What though you have no beauty ... Must you be therefore proud and pitiless? Why, what means this? Why do you look on me? I see no more in you than in the ordinary Of nature's sale-work: Od's my little life! I think she means to tangle my eyes too:— No, 'faith, proud mistress, hope not after it; 'Tis not your inky brows, your black silk-hair, Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream That can entame my spirits ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... opening, "When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in the heavens," to the final outburst, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" it was all as familiar to us as the sentences of the Lord's Prayer, and scarcely less consecrated. No logical unravelling of the tangle, but that burning expression of devotion to the Union, lay behind the enthusiasm with which we sprang to arms. The ghost of Webster hovered in the battle-smoke, and it was his call more than any other that rallied and kept us ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... deal better than you like your mamma to have hers; if you pout and cry when you can not do as you please; if you never own that you are in the wrong, and are sorry for it; never, in short, try with all your might to be docile and gentle, then your name is Tangle Thread, and you may depend you cost your mamma many sorrowful hours and many tears. And the best thing you can do is to go away by yourself and pray to Jesus to make you see how naughty you are, and to make you humble and sorry. Then the old and soiled thread ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Meanwhile, the tangle at Dublin was becoming hopeless. There, as Beresford warned Pitt, the report of the proposed Union was the letting out of water. Captain Saurin, an eminent counsel who was commander of a corps of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... her father to come home half an hour before his guests arrived. She had almost persuaded herself to make a full confession of her fault. But the tangle of circumstance was not to ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... down the receiver without listening to the tangle of exclamations from the other end, and walked quickly out of the shop. He ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a pretty tangle when he gets going. Just now he's dish-washer in a restaurant. Likes a good cigar. I've seen him eat in a ten-cent hash-house and pay fifty cents for the cigar he smoked afterward. I've got a couple in my pocket for him, if ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... where, at her feet, the hurrying stream rested an instant, to take breath, in a deep, dusky little pool, overhung by a tangle ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... rustic comrades. These men spoke English rather than Dutch, and indeed there were many men of English descent among them. But the others, the most formidable both in their numbers and in their primitive qualities, were the back-veld Boers, the sunburned, tangle-haired, full-bearded farmers, the men of the Bible and the rifle, imbued with the traditions of their own guerrilla warfare. These were perhaps the finest natural warriors upon earth, marksmen, hunters, accustomed to hard fare and a harder couch. They were rough in their ways and speech, but, ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Sybaritic—with which I had surrounded myself. She did not understand life from my point of view—life as Feurgeres had lived it. The life sentimental, but not passionate; the life to be evolved by will from the tangle of bruised hopes and ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... emigrants returning after prosperous years to the Fatherland were often pounced upon, the validity of their American citizenship denied, and taxes and military service demanded. It was tough work to straighten out such knots and the Minister was in the midst of such a tangle. But his high, broad forehead smoothed presently, and his grey eyes grew genial, while the vivacious features spoke with the very cordial impulse with which he greeted one who had heard the bullets of the Civil War whistle and was the son of his wife's old ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... occurrence!" he thinks. "I've killed millions of people, of all countries and nations, without the least misgiving; and now, suddenly, one miserable soldier comes and throws all my ideas into a tangle!" ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... was thick dark, and the street would be deserted. Then they tied their scarves round their necks, for they scorned overcoats, as all the colliers' children did, and went out. The entry was very dark, and at the end the whole great night opened out, in a hollow, with a little tangle of lights below where Minton pit lay, and another far away opposite for Selby. The farthest tiny lights seemed to stretch out the darkness for ever. The children looked anxiously down the road at the one lamp-post, which stood at the end of the field path. If ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... strangest, most obstinate, most unexpected attitudes. When the comb was dragged through the last braid, the wild, tortured, electric hairs following, and then rebounding from it in a bristling, snarling tangle. Massachusetts gave one encompassing glance at the State o' Maine's head, and announced her intention of going home to breakfast! She was deeply grieved at the result of her attempted beautifying, but she felt that meeting Miss Miranda Sawyer at the ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... think I never worked harder in my life than I did setting things to rights after our centennial; but I had one consolation through it, and that was the happiness of the two young things, who had had indirectly their love tangle ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... than others, some of those beautiful "weeds"—green, red, or brown—which have their use as well as their beauty; for they help to purify the water, just as plants do the air. Perhaps I should not promise more than the brown Tangle and the green Ulva, with its bright lettuce-like leaves; for red seaweeds belong to deep water, and are not easy to find. Many an hour have I spent peering and groping in the little pools at low water in search of these same much-prized rosy-tinted ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... possible or desirable, whether a man should be true to one woman, whether women should be the victims of a double standard, and all the other complicated issues which we must in time confront. Such a picking to pieces of the tangle is simply the method of scientific thought, and in this case, at least, has the advantage of making it possible to begin to do something, rather than saw ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... at his cigar as a slight vent to his feelings. "'Killed by a dose of aconitine by a person or persons unknown,' was the jury's verdict, and a nice tangle they have left me to ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... incidents was, that John one day slipped his foot on a tangle-covered rock, and fell into the sea. A small matter this, you will say, to a man who could swim, and in a climate so warm that a dip, with or without clothes, was a positive luxury. Most true; and had the wetting been all, Jarwin would have had nothing to annoy him; for at the time the ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... think you were going away to stay forever," gasped Bess, as she tried to disengage herself from a tangle of bag and hat box and umbrella. "For goodness' sake, look out, Nan. We are moving." This, because Nan stuck her head far out of the window to get a last look at the dear folks on ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... tickets for the leading lady's public performance; it could have been so little more public; but we had not, and there was nothing else in Burgos to invite the foot outdoors after dinner. From my own knowledge I cannot yet say the place was not lighted; but my sense of the tangle of streets lying night long in a rich Gothic gloom shall remain unimpaired by statistics. Very possibly Burgos is brilliantly lighted with electricity; only they have not got the electricity on, as in our steam-heated hotel they had not got ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... speak, in transit. This amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate—some fate or other; which, among the possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual—vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity. If the apparition was still all to be placed how came it to be vivid?—since we puzzle such quantities out, mostly, just by the business of placing them. One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... you will see the white soldiers." He mounted and followed, and sitting there amid the mountain tangle he saw his dreams come true. The traders and the talking men had not lied about the numbers of their people, for his eye did not come to the rear of the procession which wound up the valley like a great snake. There were pony-soldiers, walking-soldiers, ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... a sight of the reptile it had glided into the river, down among the branches of the fallen tree, as if quite used to the intricate tangle of pointed wood beneath the bank, and accustomed to use it for a home of refuge, or lurking place from which to strike ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... exchanged for that diffused light which fills vapours from within and lends them their mystery. A belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with great difficulty and many turns to right and left through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, and from that time on I was now in, now out, of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... a volley! out jets the flame! Men fall from their saddles like plums from trees; Horses take fright, reins tangle and bind; "Steady—Dismount—form—and into the wood" They go, but find what scarce can please: Their steeds have been tied in the field behind, And Mosby's men are ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... the ditch. Who said I would not go? Come along, say I." Thus saying, he led the way, the others following, till, after they had gone a short distance, they came to a little opening in the woodland, whence a brook, after gurgling out from under the tangle of overhanging bushes, spread out into a broad and glassy-pebbled pool. By the side of this pool, and beneath the branches of a willow, lay a youth upon his face, weeping aloud, the sound of which had first caught the quick ears of Stutely. His golden locks were tangled, ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... clouded the joy of reunion with her father; for both were adepts in the fine art of loving, the touchstone of every human relation. And in talk with him she could straighten out her tangle of impressions, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... a half the Big Ravine is a narrow cut between perpendicular rock walls thickly clothed to their very summits with bamboo and a tangle of thorny vines. In the bottom of the gorge a mountain torrent foams among huge bowlders but becomes a gentle, slow moving stream when it leaves the cool darkness of the canon to spread itself over the ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... on the grass and said: "I am accursed and beguiled; and I wander round and round in a tangle that I may not escape from. I am not far from deeming that this is a land of dreams made for my beguiling. Or has the earth become so full of lies, that there is no room amidst them for a true man to stand upon his ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... clearness of the day. Only down by the landing-place a waringan-tree, all in a blaze of clustering red berries, seemed alive with the stir of little birds that filled with the feverish flutter of their feathers the tangle of overloaded branches. Suddenly the variegated flock rose spinning in a soft whirr and dispersed, slashing the sunlit haze with the sharp outlines of stiffened wings. Mahmat and one of his brothers appeared coming up from ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... and so on. Sometimes during the night while we were fishing into the west, a hundred sail or more of vessels, we would pass through another big fleet coming the other way, and some of our long trawls and warps would tangle with theirs. Beyond the beautiful spectacle of the myriads of lights bobbing up and down often enough on mighty rough seas—for it needed good breezes to haul our trawls—would be the rockets and flares of the entangled boats, and ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... animals would come sooner or later, it could not but be so, and he imagined that time to himself and clearly pictured himself living in peace with all the animals, and suddenly he thought again of the pigs, and everything was in a tangle in ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov |
