"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost 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 hot desires. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... paces and pointed, making him stoop to see. Under the tangle of a thin brush patch he made out what she had seen. But a short distance from the spot they had elected for their camp site was a tiny ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... broken country a few miles up the valley. There was no road of any sort, only cattle tracks, which, amid the wild tangle of bush, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... garments of a girl, who is running with all her might towards the pine trees; she disappears amongst the thick foliage of the underbrush ere the guide can come up to her, but leaping from off his horse, he follows her closely, and notes the spot wherein she has hidden herself amidst a tangle of creeping vines and maple bushes. He awaited our coming, and, motioning us to surround the place of concealment quickly, remained still as a statue whilst we arranged our little detachment so as to preclude any chance of an escape. Then gliding noiselessly as a reptile ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... how—Bah! Why should he pretend to himself? He was not really concerned with generalities or great moral principles. He was trying to decide whether he should worm a secret out of Hubbard to throw as a sop to that vile cursed cad, Irons, to keep his foul mouth shut about Ninitta. Heavens! What a tangle he had got into simply because he wanted a decent model for his picture! The abominable prudery and hypocrisy of the time lay behind the whole matter. But this would never do. He must work now; not think of these exciting ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... and unexpected interruption made a grievous tangle in his day's work. Arrived at the store he flew about in eager haste, and then rushed with more than usual speed to the bank. Just five minutes too late; the last shutter was being closed as he reached the ...
— Three People • Pansy
... once the idea struck her: could it possibly, under any circumstances, have been better for her favorite Grisha if he had never existed? And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that she shook her head to drive away this tangle ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the communicator outside. Hoddan opened a cabinet, threw switches, and painstakingly cut and snipped and snipped at a tangle ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... revived her. On sitting up, she saw a desolate shore stretching both ways—nothing to eat, nothing to drink, but fortunately the raft and the money had been thrown near her; none of the lashings having given way—only what is the use of a guinea amongst tangle and sea-gulls? The money she distributed amongst her pockets, and soon found strength to rise and march forward. But which was forward? and which backward? She knew by the conversation of the sailors that Paita must be in the neighborhood; and Paita, being a port, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... now confronted us in the fullest degree. Immediately above our tent the ice rose steeply a couple of hundred feet, and at that level began to be most intricately crevassed. It took several days to unravel the tangle of fissures and discover and prepare a trail that the dogs could haul the sleds along. Sometimes a bridge would be found over against one wall of the glacier, and for the next we might have to go clear across to the other wall. Sometimes a block of ice jammed ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... retort in an undertone. "Don't you know better than to tangle my lines when I'm playing a fish? Shut up!" He tossed his hand at the individual in the crowd, ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... fingers. "I had always hoped you did," I continued, "for his sake, and for yours, and in my way, a very blundering way as it seems now, I have tried to bring you two together." Prudence only sobbed. "But things are not hopeless yet. I think I can see a means of straightening out this tangle." ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... there are dozens of others. He was impatient of the old man's rigid control. Hilton is sharp and shrewd, and he guessed things were going wrong financially. He knew that his father's methods were out of date, and believed he could straighten the tangle if the reins of power were ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... at the neck to reveal the soft, full curves where they flowed down to the swell of her bosom. She shook down her hair and gathered it loosely in a knot, leaving it as the wind and rain had tossed it into a bewildering tangle of ringlets about her face. One glance she threw at her mirror. Never had she appeared more lovely. The dead ivory of her skin, relieved by a faint flush in her cheeks, the lustrous eyes, now aglow with passion, all set in the frame of the night-black masses of ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... have been 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 ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... of water. A physician struggled from his pew across the sittings of three stout dowagers, and knelt, with practiced finger on the little fluttering pulse. The bride's stepmother roused to solicitous and anxious attention. The organ came smartly up again in a hopeless tangle of chords and modulations, trying to get its poise once more. People climbed upon their seats to see, or crowded out in the aisle curiously and unwisely kind, and in the way. Then the minister asked the congregation to be seated; and amid ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... certainly felt in his contact with authors by profession like Emerson and his other contemporaries. Fields was, too, in a very real sense, the messenger and herald of fame standing at last in the humble doorway of the Mall Street house that had latterly been the scene of such a tangle of human events. The anecdote of what he found there is finely told ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... earlier than she had dared to hope: and with this deterioration of the testimony of the witness who was nearest the time and place of the disaster, the jury presently went to work to evolve out of so slender a thread of fact and so knotty a tangle of possibility ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... whether her credit over her husband was great; but he appeared full of regard, of care, and of respect for her; at the time of their departure they were each about fifty and fifty-five years old. Law had made many acquisitions of all kinds and still more debts, so that this tangle is not yet unravelled by the committee of the council appointed to arrange his affairs with his creditors. I have said elsewhere, and I repeat it here, that there was neither avarice nor roguery in his composition. He was a gentle, good, respectable man, whom ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... busy with a hundred things, while her eyes went afield for every scrap of prettiness the country held. There were meadows of brilliant daisies, broken by clumps of silver poplars, white birches, and a solitary sentinel pine; and there was the roadside tangle with its constant surprises of meadowsweet and columbine, white violets—in the swampy places—and once in a ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... only stand out for me, though these in the highest relief. Love, or the Countess and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles—I see that still as the blazonry of one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of her lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of the minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... was more discussion of the strange tangle of events, which now seemed to be about to be cleared up. Indeed, it took many days for them to thrash the subject out completely, but it would hardly do to write another book on matters now essentially ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... everybody, and occupies a large part of Ricardo's book. The popular answers involved innumerable inconsistencies, and were supported by arguments which only required to be confronted in order to be confuted. Ricardo's aim was to substitute a clear and consistent theory for this tangle of perplexed sophistry. In that sense his aim was in the highest degree 'practical,' although he left to others the detailed application of his doctrines to the actual ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... richly grassed slopes of a beautiful open forest, intersected by frequent watercourses where the land trended gradually upward to the distant mountain-range. Sometimes they had to go out of their course in order to avoid the tangle of tropic jungle; but onward north by east they went, beneath the shade of heavy-fruited palms, their road again made difficult by the large and numerous anthills that give these northern latitudes so strange a solemnity and appearance ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... bark, grasses and feathers, compactly woven together and located in bushes from one to four feet from the ground. They lay from three to five plain, unmarked, pure white eggs; size .75 x .54. Data.—Wrights, Cal. Nest in a tangle of vines in a deep ravine; composed of strips of bark, moss and grasses, lined with ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... the dazzling sweet lights on the meadows, playing upon the meadow-sweet and elder bushes; at last we came to the lovely glades of Carriglass. It seemed to me that we had reached an enchanted forest amid this green sweet tangle of ivy, of flowering summer trees, of immemorial oaks ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... the door. She was just disappearing into a tangle of weeds that had once been an orange grove. He set off after her at ...
— Collectivum • Mike Lewis
... Dawn, touch the cartridge with your dewy wing! Trip the foot of the hunter in a tangle of grass! He is your Cock! He drove off the darkness and the shadow of the Hawk! And he is going to die. Nightingale, you, ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... long-suffering canvas. His mop of brown hair had started the day brushed back and comparatively sleek; it was now a mere tousel. His butterfly tie had been a thing of some esthetic pretensions; it was become a tangle of silk. His smile had been bland and his manner courteous; he now resembled a buffalo with ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... to flow; As when the briny surge That Thrace-born tempests urge (The big wave ever gathering more and more) Runs o'er the darkness of the deep, And with far-searching sweep Uprolls the storm-heap'd tangle on the shore, While cliff to beaten cliff resounds ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... from the stairway into the kitchen, or living- room, her father turned from the hopeless-seeming tangle of soiled and torn netting on the floor before him, and looked at her half wistfully from under the glazed brim ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... tracks and entered a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,—the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Franci, gently, as he pulled John out of the tangle of canvas and ropes. "But I am 'most killed all my life with looking at your ugly face, you old she monkey! A little more killing make not much ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... Hedgehog With his sleepy eyes looked at him, Shot his shining quills, like arrows, Saying with a drowsy murmur, Through the tangle of his whiskers, "Take ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... brambled waste, gone the flickering tangle of woodland. Instead, terrace after terrace of shaven sward, stone-edged, urn-cornered, stepped delicately down to where the stream, now tamed and educated, passed from one to another marble basin, in which on occasion gleams of red hinted ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... 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 and criticized and slandered the Fernalds and asserted ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... 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 his brain. ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the Chancellor's "revelations," but dismissed them as soon as they had crept into his brain. No matter where the clue to the tangle might lie, he told himself that it was not in any act of which Helen Mowbray need ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... out of them. That, he was conscious, was not the sentiment which the complicated play of human feelings had engendered in society. The men around him would expect that he should immediately apply those florins to his benefactor's rescue. But what was the sentiment of society?—a mere tangle of anomalous traditions and opinions, which no wise man would take as a guide, except so far as his own comfort was concerned. Not that he cared for the florins save perhaps for Romola's sake: he would give up ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... nothing much but scrap-iron out of what's left," growled McCloskey, climbing out of the tangle of crushed cars and bent and twisted iron-work to stand beside Lidgerwood on the main-line embankment. Then to the men who were making the snatch-hitch for the next pull: "A little farther back, boys; farther yet, so she won't overbalance ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... now. This coming in among his labours and plans had brought it home to her keenly. All the same, she could take no new stand just to please him; it would not be true, she could not keep up to it, could not act it out. Was she ready, for other reasons, to take such a stand? The old tangle of perplexed questions seemed closing her in again; and now and then, between whiles, when Rollo was looking away, the brown eyes studied him; as if studying his face would magnetize her out of her difficulties,the ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... closed, She opened them wide at this appeal for sympathy, stretched out her hand and pushed back a tangle of bright hair ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... and rejoice in nothing so much as in possessing means and ability to indulge these tastes. From this hotbed is engendered in the state a spirit of blind folly (24) and cowardice, and in the hearts of the citizens spreads a tangle of hatred and mutual hostility which, as I often shudder to think, will some day cause some disaster to befall the state greater ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... leaving the clergy to be supported by the crown. A new tithe bill was, however, introduced, by which the clergy should accept something short of what they were entitled to by law. Not only was the tithing system an apparently inextricable tangle, but there was trouble about the renewal of the Coercion Act. Lord Grey, wearied with political life, resigned the premiership, and Lord Melbourne succeeded him,—a statesman who cared next to nothing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... waving languid fronds in a breeze that came from beyond them. The telescope seemed to be pointing at a gentle slope, and those tree-ferns cut off a farther view, but there was an impenetrable tangle of breast-high foliage between the instrument and that slope, and halfway up the incline there rested ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... and quite happy," returned Errington, with a slight smile. "The terrible change, as you term it, has affected me very little. I find real work most exhilarating, and slight success is sweet. Since I knew that the tangle of my poor father's affairs was satisfactorily unravelled, I have been at ease, comparatively. Life has many sides. I ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... for so many years, who had thus arraigned her? Her instant of inaction past, she darted down the corridor after Mary. But the latter passed into the study hall before she could overtake her. She could do nothing now to straighten the tangle in which they had so suddenly become involved until the morning session of school was over. She glanced anxiously toward Mary's seat the moment she stepped across the threshold of the study hall, only to see her friend in earnest conversation with Mignon La Salle. An angry little furrow settled ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... we turn, thou sadder sage, To thee! we feel thy spell! —The hopeless tangle of our age, Thou ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Provinces soon after the Act came into force, with the object of "teaching" Magistrates how to administer it. A Congress of Magistrates — a most unusual thing — was also called in Pretoria to find a way for carrying out the King's writ in the face of the difficulties arising from this tangle of the Act. We may add that nearly all white lawyers in South Africa, to whom we spoke about this measure, had either not seen the Act at all, or had not read it carefully, so that in both cases they could not tell exactly for whose benefit it had been passed. The study of this ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the growing and weaving and thickening threads of a tangle that had already involved him. And the sudden pang of regret he sustained was not wholly because of sympathies ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... joy passes into His servant's heart. I saw, not long since, in a wood a mass of blue wild hyacinths, that looked like a little bit of heaven dropped down upon earth. You and I may have such a tiny bit of heaven itself lying amidst all the tangle of our daily lives, if only we put our trust in Christ, and so get into our hearts some little portion of that joy that is unspeakable, and that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... thyme. He took a sprig of woodbine that was coloured of cream and butter. The grass wetted his brown shoes and his flannel trousers. Again, a fresh breeze put the scent of the sea in his uncovered hair. The cliff was a tangle of flowers above and below, with poppies at the lip being blown out like red flame, and scabious leaning inquisitively to look down, and pink and ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... for me. I know how much I care for you, and how much this effort is costing me. We were too late. No other course in honor presents itself. God knows how eagerly and hopelessly I have sought a way out of this tangle ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... open glade, and waving his hat, evidently having had good luck; and when he reined in his small, wiry cow-pony, we saw that he had packed behind his saddle the fine, glossy pelt of a black bear. Better still, he announced that he had been off about ten miles to a perfect tangle of ravines and valleys where bear sign was very thick; and not of black bear either, but of grizzly. The black bear (the only one we got on the mountains) he had run ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... Through the tangle of her love affairs Wilmot Allen threaded a path of hope, despair, and cynicism. There were times when she seemed to have a return of her childhood infatuation for him; there were times when he feared that in one of her moments of impressionable enthusiasm she would marry some other man in ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... as he tried to unravel this fresh tangle. Why was Jim Crow shadowing him? In the interests of the Indians? Again he pulled out his watch. And the woman beside him saw that his hand was shaking as he held it out to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... visit to the Sultan whose hands were still wet with the blood of murdered Christians. Could that be reconciled with what is right? A little later he saw the Kaiser once again pushing himself into Mediterranean politics, where no direct German interest lay, and endeavoring to tangle up the French developments in Northern Africa by provocative personal appearances at Morocco, and, later, by sending a gunboat to intrude upon a scene of action which had already by the Treaty of Algeciras been allotted to ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... had never brought any direct difficulties upon himself, but who had been worried—and worried out—through troubles left him by others. On the whole, he had found life an unrewarding thing; and he passed along, at fifty-five, with no great regrets. The tangle of family affairs had finally been straightened out in considerable measure, though Raymond found enough detail still left to make him realize what a five years his father had passed through; and when, the year following, his mother died, with the ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... 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 consisted ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... in the forefront of the crowd, but the child flashed past without heeding, straight up the stone steps where stood a beautiful baby smiling on the crowd. With his bundle of papers held high, and the late morning sunlight catching his tangle of golden hair, Mikky flung himself toward the little one. The sharp crack of a revolver from the opposite curbstone was simultaneous with their fall. Then ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... Why must we dress ourselves? I love to pass my fingers through your silky hair and tangle its blond curls. Ah ca! sweet one, don't let your women kiss that pretty throat and those white shoulders any more; don't allow it, I say. It is too much that the fogs of Scotland ever ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... these things as he stood leaning upon the graveyard fence. His life was a graveyard, a tangle of weeds, a plat of purposes overgrown with rank despair. He had struggled since he could remember. All his life had been one terrible struggle. And now, he knew that it was useless, he understood that ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... of hoofs and shouts of "Whoa!" and "Stand still!" He tried to rise, but the tangle of twigs before him seemed impenetrable, so he gave it up and remained where he was. Then, after an interval, came a hail ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the situation. There was much fine writing last year in regard to the sin and shame of cutting down the pretty, wild growth of shrubs, vines, and flowers along the wayside, so picturesque to the summer tourist. The tangle of wild grape, clematis, and woodbine is certainly pretty, but underneath is sure to be found a luxuriant growth of thistle, wild carrot, silk weed, mullein, chickweed, tansy, and plantain, which, if allowed to seed and disseminate themselves, would soon ruin the ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... vulgar encounter between them and desperadoes who had subsequently scuttled to safety and were doubtless quaking near at hand, in fear of their misdeeds coming to light; what appeared to be a perfect tangle might be the simplest matter in the world. So I judged—and next morning there came news that seemed to indicate that matters were going to be explained on the lines which ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... stood, watching the dog; yet, all the time, with half my gaze on the wild tangle of gardens, stretching 'round me. Now, I went toward him, and, bending down, examined the surface of the door, where he was smelling. I found that the wood was covered with a network of scratches, crossing and recrossing one another, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the ford Terry heard a sharp out-cry from one of the guards, followed by the sharp crack of a rifle. Whirling, he saw the brush on his right agitated by the movements of a figure that crashed unseen through the tangle of vegetation. Two soldiers flung themselves off their ponies and leaped in pursuit, pausing fruitlessly for sight of the fleeing form and dashing on with trailed rifles. The aggressive Mercado galloped up, shouting an explanatory "Sakay!" as he charged ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... assent to all these truisms—for I felt conscience-stricken. I knew I had always depended in all my housekeeping emergencies too much on my "talent for improvising," as Kate Wilson merrily entitles my readiness in a domestic tangle and stand-still. I had been in the habit of letting things go on as easily as possible, scrupulously avoiding domestic tempests, because they deranged my nervous system; and if I found a servant would not do a thing in my way, I would let her accomplish it in her own manner, and at ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... to sail from Liverpool, and there was some imperative last-shopping on the eve. Two of them took a courageous cab, and started for Bond Street. In a few moments the cab was in the thick of the fog and its consequences, a tangle of stationary vehicles with horses detached, or marking time, without advancing either way. A trembling hand lifted the little trap in the cab-roof, and a trembling voice asked the cabman: "Do you think you can go on?" "I think so, sir." The ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... of a troop of boys and girls, all ages and sizes, from big, six-foot Hector to little tangle-haired Betty. They were already gathered, and several of the neighbours' families had arrived and were seated on the improvised benches along the wall. There were Praying Donald's family, Store Thompson and his wife, several others representative ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... war-torch has continued burning, yet No rest, no pause of conflict. Swede and German, Papist and Lutheran! neither will give way To the other, every hand's against the other. 170 Each one is party and no one a judge. Where shall this end? Where's he that will unravel This tangle, ever tangling more and more. It must be cut asunder. I feel that I am the man of destiny, 175 And trust, with your assistance, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a little way from the edge of the water, Bunny saw a place where a tangle of vines, growing over an old stump, had made a place like a little tent, or bower. All at once Bunny remembered a story his mother had read to him. Back he ran to where ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue • Laura Lee Hope
... find you also rested. The air of the world will have cleared somewhat, giving a nearer view of "the city"; its mountains will have sunk down well nigh out of sight, before the everlasting hills to which you may lift up your eyes for help. And labour and care and profit and loss will cease to be a tangle when stamped ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... unarmed, but they kept the pistols, for the sake of show in case any peons of the jungle should offer trouble, and pressed forward, with all the speed possible in so dense a tangle of forest. In the deep shade of trees and bushes Ned continually saw the shadows of immense black jaguars. He knew that it was only nerves and imagination, but he did not like to be in a condition that enabled fancy to play ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the dewy grasses; the life of plant and flower, which seemed almost as personal and conscious a form of existence; since it was difficult to believe there was no sense of struggle or of joy in those rapid growths which shot out from a tangle of dark undergrowth upward to the sunlight, no fondness in the wild vines that clung so close to some patriarchal trunk, covering decay with the beautiful exuberance of youth. Denzil taught her to realise the wonders of creation—most wonderful when most minute—for beyond the picturesque ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... crowded to the window and looked out. The moat and the tents and the besieging force were all gone—and there was the garden with its tangle of dahlias and marigolds and asters and later roses, and the spiky iron railings and ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... turned a face upon him which was lion-like in its strength and in its wrath. With his tangle of golden hair, his fierce blue eyes, and his large, well-marked features, he was the most comely man whom Alleyne had ever seen, and yet there was something so sinister and so fell in his expression that child or beast ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "you are a much suffering man. I feel for you. Here, I am sure, you are safe from reporters, and the yellow journals will soon forget you in their discovery of the next distorted wonder. Briefly, Mr. Bland and myself will outline the tangle of events that brought us to ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... her knee, brooded under the bright tangle of her hair, linking and unlinking her fingers as she gently swayed her foot to ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Aug. 16th, for one week they were on the road to Chattanooga and all sorts of a time was experienced. Some "coon juice" "tangle-foot" was occasionally in evidence and caused some exhilaration and subsequent depression and some insubordination temporary. One good man, the Captain felt compelled to buck near Ringston, Ga., and some excitement was created ...
— A History of Lumsden's Battery, C.S.A. • George Little
... we got farther and farther upstream, in a dark tangle of rivers, lakes, morasses, and dense forests, with here and there an unexpected long spur running out from the big mountains beyond, I noticed that more and more of these savages had a story about a strange and terrible Woman Land in ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... in the kitchen when she arrived, his head towering into the tangle of strings that crossed and recrossed the small interior. Whatever his impression of the extraordinary spectacle he evinced no curiosity but remained as imperturbable amid the network that ensnared him as if such astounding phenomena were ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... ways warped American ideas of war and politics, and their influence perhaps survives to this day. The extent of the President's authority and his position in regard to the advice he could obtain have been explained. An examination of the tangle in which military policy was first involved may make the chief incidents of the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... horn of her saddle as though all her strength had dribbled out of her, and she were going to fall. The keen nostrils of the animal had led him to this object with its sinister connection with the tragedy and he had pawed at it, dragging it toward him and free of the green tangle into which it had ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... the deep and matted tangle, I heard the startled shout of the Oneida; the distant crashing of many men running in the underbrush; and, throttling him with both hands, I dragged him to his feet and started toward the Oneida, pulling my prisoner with me. But a yell from the wood's edge seemed to put fresh life into him; he ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 finding a bear ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... middle-class life, written in the alexandrine verse, which was soon to be discarded along with other French fashions. We have a quartet consisting of an inquisitive inn-keeper, his mismated sentimental daughter, her worthless husband, and her former lover. They tangle themselves up in a series of low intrigues and are finally unmasked as one and all poor miserable sinners. Technically it is a good play—lively, diverting, well put together. But one can not ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... some time; not a sound came from the native campong, while it was hard to believe that within touch of the mess-room there were the quarters of nearly three hundred men. But once in a while something like a whisper came from the jungle, suggesting the passing through its dense tangle of some prey-seeking, cat-like creature. But no one spoke; though, in a half-drowsy way, those seated by the window and a couple of dark figures outside in the veranda were straining their ears and trying to make out what caused the distant ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... the old in a prison of loneliness and suspicion. If we worshipped life instead of metal disks, we would see that the young are not really the heirs of the old, but the old are heirs of the young. Then and there I vowed to keep myself clear of the whole wretched tangle, even if I had to carry laundry all my life, so that if any one ever tried to fetter me I could fling his words back in his face! (Uncle Richard's nerves are all on edge. A terrific storm of overbearing temper visibly gathers during this ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... ships, ships coming home with laughter, ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... be threaded together through the needle, care being taken not to tangle the piece of "rope" from which they have been detached. There need be no waste if this operation is carefully done, as good silk will always divide into strands ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... sophomores. A poor thrower could not very well have missed that mark, and Ken Ward was remarkably accurate. He had a powerful overhand swing, and the potatoes flew like bullets. One wild-eyed Soph slipped out of the tangle to leap up the steps. Ken, throwing rather low, hit him on the shin. He buckled and dropped down with a blood-curdling yell. Another shook himself loose and faced upward. A better-aimed shot took him in the shoulder. He gave an exhibition of a high ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... the enormous trunks being choked with undergrowth of a thousand varied forms, conspicuous among which were immense ferns towering high above their heads, while above these, and drooping in many cases right down to the ground, was an inextricable maze and tangle of lianas, or "monkey rope," intertwined with which were countless festoons of flowering creepers, the mingled perfumes of which were almost overpowering in their pungency. Long pliant twigs thickly studded with needle-sharp ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... world." (Select Letters of Columbus, p. vi.) Mr. Major knows very well that no such "news" was possible for many a year after 1493; his remark is, of course, a mere slip of the pen, but if we are ever going to straighten out the tangle of misconceptions with which this subject is commonly surrounded, we must be careful in our choice of words.—As a fair specimen, of the chap-book style of Dati's stanzas, we ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... me that if he had asked for it nine months before there would have been more sense in it. What on earth could I do when affairs were in such a tangle? However, I could not help feeling complimented when so independent a fellow as Cullingworth turned to ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... to a place where the underbrush at the side of the path was somewhat beaten aside. I thought I could distinguish where some person or animal had gone from this place, tramping a sort of barely traceable furrow through the tangle. I followed this course: it led me back to the glade. Doubtless ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... lifted from under her the woman screamed—the first human sound Brion had heard in this human anthill. His pursuers were just behind him, and he hurled the woman into them with all his strength. They fell in a tangle, and Brion used the precious seconds gained to reach the top of ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... ravine and stood in a rocky gateway. At the right a green-clothed mountain rose out of a tangle of luxuriant vegetation; to the left wave after wave of magnificent forested ridges lost themselves in the low hung clouds; at our feet lay a beautiful valley filled with stately trees which spread into a thick ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... out with it! If that pile of papers is in a tangle, say the word, and I'll bring my mighty brain to bear on them, and set them in order for you in no time! No? Are the men going out on a strike, then? or is your great-grandma down with the measles? Then, for Heaven's sake, why such ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... This is a very tangle of empty phrases and misstatements. No people stood in more heartfelt and naive relation to Nature, especially to the animal world, than the Hindoos and Persians. In earlier enquiries[6] we have ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... underlying harmony and single inspiration of all man's various and apparently conflicting expressions of his instinct for fullness of life. For we shall not be able to make order, in any hopeful sense, of the tangle of material which is before us, until we have subdued it to this ruling thought: seen one transcendent Object towards which all our twisting pathways run, and one impulsion pressing us ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... and, always threading their way amid a tangle of flowers, the children suddenly passed a corner and found themselves in a forest clearing, where there were a lot of pointed huts—the huts, as they ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... of these. It does not make men talk and sing and tell their secrets and reveal their love and their hate, and knock their heads against the stars and tangle their feet one ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... steep banks hemming it in and darkening it. On one side it skirted the mountain, all covered with a tangle of wet ferns; on the other appeared a large wooden house almost devoid of openings and of evil aspect; it was there that my ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... it will take the Shawnees an' the Miamis to straighten out that tangle about the great war trail?" asked the shiftless ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... me an easy one. Said he wanted a thirty by forty. There it is on the easel," and Fred moved a chair out of his way, hung his wet coat and hat on a peg behind the door, and started to clear up a tangle of artillery harness ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... selvage of low vegetation—ipom[oe]a, white and mauve-flowered; rushes and tangle-grass, a variety of salsolaceae, and the cyperus, whose stalk is used like the kalam, or reed-pen, further east. These growths are filmed with spiders' webs, whose central shafts lead to their nests. The highest levels, only a few feet above water, are grown with a dense bush that wants the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... Lysander by Puck's mistake, instead of on Demetrius, as Oberon intended, and sets forth its further effects upon Helena and Hermia. The dialogues between the two pairs of lovers now overheard by Oberon makes the error clear, and so enables him to take the first step in clearing up the tangle. Meantime, the poet and his audience agree with Puck that they are so far 'glad it so did sort, As this their jangling' ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... no way of telling where they were, Cecil took a definite course through the jungle. They scrambled over and through the twisted tangle of undergrowth, creepers and lianas, and, in less than an hour, reached a small foot-path, ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... by day, doing the work of the dugout before he began the work of the fields, not only bending over the tubs early in the morning for fear such bending might hurt her, but hanging out the clothes on the line for fear the fierce and vengeful wind might tan her beautiful complexion and tangle the fine soft ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... young man Bell was tall and slender, with jet-black eyes and hair, the latter being pushed back into a curly tangle. He was sensitive and high-strung, very much the artist and the man of science. His enthusiasms were intense, and, once his mind was filled with an idea, he followed it devotedly. He was very little the practical business ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... rose shall appear, As if in pure water you dropped and let die A bruised black-blooded mulberry; And that other sort, their crowning pride, With long white threads distinct inside, 380 Like the lake-flower's fibrous roots which dangle Loose such a length and never tangle, Where the bold sword-lily cuts the clear waters, And the cup-lily couches with all the white daughters: Such are the works they put their hand to, 385 The uses they turn and twist iron and sand to. And these made ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... do as he chose. She did not care if he did prefer pitch and tar, and whale blubber and grease, to hawks and hounds, and lords and ladies. She was sure she wanted no more great lubberly lads—with a sly cut at Diccon—to tangle her silk, and torment her to bait their hooks. She was well quit of any ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some stolen rings of wire," said Uncle Jack, as he seized hold, and together they dragged a great tangle of leather and catgut bands over the platform into the grinding-shop, fully half falling back with ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... threaten and the boys' patriotism is tested in a peculiar international tangle. The scene is laid ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... took off the dress that she was wearing and put on some horrible old rags belonging to a beggar, all torn and covered with mud. After that she smeared mud all over her hands and face, and shook her hair into a great tangle. Having thus changed her appearance, she went about offering herself as a goose-girl or shepherdess. But the farmers' wives would have nothing to say to such a dirty maiden, and sent her away with a morsel ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... their conversation would have been sprightly enough, I warrant. But as here they saw around them one and another amazing triumph of industry and art, they grew earnest, spoke exaltedly of this great age, and marvelled at the tangle of chances that had thrown them here together. John called it, pensively, a most happy fortune for himself, but Barbara in reply only invited his attention to the beauty of ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... both Chee and Chirk, so amused at the funny tangle of legs in which the Walking Stick was, that they ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... the library's resources. Then I took up picture puzzles. Mr. Tracy brings them out to me every week, but we both get cross about them because they interest us so that we spend half his precious day over them! Just now I am trying to teach myself to knit, out of a book, and I'm in a dreadful tangle. I think the chamber-maid knows how, and I ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers pronounce the word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its meaning and pronunciation, as 'kludge'. (Phonetically, consider huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as opposed to sludge, judge, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... been beautiful, in the days when money was more plenty with the proprietor than at present; but now there were marks of neglect and decay everywhere, and in some parts of it the shrubs, and vines, and roses were mixed together in so hopeless a tangle that to separate them seemed impossible, while the yew trees, of which there were several, grew dark, and thick, and untrimmed, and cast heavy shadows upon the grass plats near them. The central part of the garden, however, showed signs of care. The broad gravel walk ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... romance and devotion; her own clever, untiring methods of pushing him into the front ranks; Mary and Mary's little secret, so unsafe in Trudy's keeping; Beatrice, who did not know quite how many rings she possessed; the whole maddening and really uninteresting tangle—she wondered if she could force Gay to buy her a ring. Should she boldly order such-and-such a stone and pick out a setting and present him with the bill? Why she hesitated she did not know; she was like all her wilful sisters ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... scarlet figure of little Melissa came shyly out of the dark shadows behind and drew shyly closer and closer, until she was crouched in the chimney corner with her face shaded from the fire by one hand and a tangle of yellow hair, listening and watching him with her big, solemn eyes, quite fearlessly. Already the house was full of children and dependents, but no word passed between old Joel and the old mother, for no word was necessary. Two waifs ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... wandered back to that day when he had visited the old house as a patient, and from that along the strange road they had both come since then. He reflected, not exactly in those terms, that life, any man's life, was only one thread in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle the one thread was to interfere with all the others. David Livingstone, the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed, Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... let him through easily. The wallabies, seeing his shining success, followed his course, and midway managed to entangle their reins, at which Wally and Harry were wildly hauling. Confusion became disorder, and the wallabies at length reduced themselves to a tangle, out of which they had to be assisted by ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... 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 ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... sweet-faced and mild-looking lady, who reminded Samuel of the picture of his mother. All the while that Everley was telling his story the boy was staring at her, and trying to straighten out the tangle of perplexity that was caused in his mind by the idea of her being ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair |
