"Conundrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of girls and men out for their holiday like baked ice-cream?" asked Dick. "That isn't a conundrum; ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... errors of taste. He might have spared many of the details of the bath scene, which, for the rest, tallies exactly with Mr. Thackeray's account of the same process. This little man with all his long letters remains as much a conundrum to me as ever. Your account of the domestic joys at Hunsworth amused me much. The good folks seem very happy—long may they continue so! It somewhat cheers me to know that such happiness does exist on the earth. Return Mr. Taylor's letter when you have read it. With love to your mother,—I ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Scriptural proofs. But this polemical motive can hardly have induced him to becloud an obvious text and invent interpretations which never occurred to any other ecclesiastical writer before or after his time. The conundrum can only be solved by the assumption that Augustine believed in a plurality of literal senses in the Bible and held that over and above (or notwithstanding) the sensus obvius every exegete is free to read as much truth into any given passage as possible, and that such interpretation lay within ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... a letter from Tyler, Texas, propounding the following fateful conundrum: "Can Woman Hypnotize Man?" My correspondent adds that "by answering, the ICONOCLAST will confer a favor on the people of Tyler, decide a bet ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... said. "Razors have moods, and are known to sulk. But science has solved the conundrum of their antics. It has been discovered that whetting changes the location of the molecules of metal, that there is frequently left what is not a perfect edge after the supposed sharpening, but that, given time, the molecules will readjust themselves, and the edge return. My dear, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... Madras, the third largest city of India, the heat began to oppress us. Up to this time India had been unexpectedly and refreshingly cool, at night even cold. But now it was unpleasantly warm. The heat reminded us of the conundrum: "Why is India, although so hot, the coldest country on the globe?" Answer: "Because the hottest thing in it is chilly" ("chili" is the peppery sauce which the natives mix with other spices to form "curry"). ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... living with my mind turned two ways. In the morasses of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape. Nobody ever chewed a few wretched clues into such a pulp ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... started a conundrum: "Why is Daniel Webster like Sisera? Because he was killed by a woman," and this had almost as great a run as ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... married to the brother of the Marquis of Dulhampton's solicitor. It reached Lake from Tom Twitters, of his club, who kept the Brandon Captain au courant of the town-talk; and it came to Dorcas in a more authentic fashion, though mysteriously, and rather in the guise of a conundrum than of a distinct bit of family intelligence, from no less a person than the old Dowager ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... rising from her seat Madge walked up and down the room, and wished some good fairy would hint to Brian that he was wanted. If man is a gregarious animal, how much more, then, is a woman? This is not a conundrum, but a simple truth. "A female Robinson Crusoe," says a writer who prided himself upon being a keen observer of human nature—"a female Robinson Crusoe would have gone mad for want of something to talk to." This ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... "Oh, if that's a conundrum, captain," replied she with a piquant laugh that lit up her whole face, making it quite beautiful, Frank Harness thought, "I give it up at once. I'm a bad ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... conversation. There was no end to his politeness, but it was an impossible task for him now and then promptly to carry over a long sentence from German to Russian, and he would give it up like an invincible conundrum, with the patient smile and head-wag and hand-wave of an amiable Dundreary. Yet I began to surmise a mystery even in him. More than once he inadvertently betrayed a knowledge of Romany, though he invariably spoke of his ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... complained bitterly of the "liberties" that Mr. Potter had taken with it. Those who had not read the book complained equally bitterly that Mr. Potter had not taken more of those "liberties" and made it better worth his while. To me, the book drama is a conundrum. It always has been, and now that it has nearly died out, I am still unable to solve it. When you read a book, you form mental pictures of its characters, and are generally discontented with those that confront you on the stage. And when you don't read a book, the ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... being a good deal overlooked in various ways, she has come to be almost the topic of the age, and strangely enough is she considered. According to the standpoint of the observer, woman is a riddle to be solved, a conundrum to be guessed, a puzzle to be interpreted, a mystery to be explained, a problem to be studied, a paradox to be reconciled. She is a toy or a drudge, a mistress or a servant, a queen or a slave, as circumstances may decide. She is at once an irresponsible ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx.' And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, With 'Whence am I?' and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Tear, yet steals away the Pang, Then, or with Berkeley, or with Hobbes romance it, Dissecting Truth with metaphysic lancet. Or, drawn from up these dark unfathom'd wells, In wiser folly chink the Cap and Bells. How many tales we told! what jokes we made, Conundrum, Crambo, Rebus, or Charade; nigmas that had driven the Theban mad, And Puns, these best when exquisitely bad; And I, if aught of archer vein I hit, With my own laughter stifled my ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... interested in post-pliocene things, when there's so much going on around us; and how you, with all those children to look after, and their clothes to make, can care for fossils and bones, and bits of rock and mineral, is a conundrum to me." ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... florins! Phew!" whistled Larry, astonished in spite of his initiation into the mysteries of Italian bargaining. "Well, if you were to ask me the Shakespearian conundrum, Hath not a Jew eyes? I shouldn't give it up; I should say he has eyes—for the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... it beautifully, Tom. I 'll give you a conundrum to lighten your labor: Why are bad boys like cake?" asked Polly, anxious to cheer ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... is not a conundrum. So you need not be chirping out, "On their feet, of course;" or some foolish answer of that kind. The real answer is, "Japan,"—at least, so I'm told, and there are such numbers of other queer things there, that I don't ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... is all this! How delightful is that notion of the pleasant Eastern people about knowledge, where the height of science is made to consist in the answering of riddles! and all the mathematicians and magicians bring their great beards to bear on a conundrum! ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conviction that his spiritual guides had found a law which authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their descendants, and millions of men, to serve as he was doing himself, and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or conundrum ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... asked a conundrum, Miss Carter, and you're the one person who can tell me the true answer. Am I permitted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... the road to the government house is the Gymkhana, and I venture to say that nobody who has not been in India can guess what that means. And if you want another conundrum, what is a chotohazree? It is customary for smart people to have their chotohazree at the Gymkhana, and I think that you would be pleased to join them after taking the beautiful drive which leads to the place. Nobody knows what the word was derived from, but it is ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... one," says Bobby, doggedly, "I never made out a conundrum in my life, except, 'What is most like ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Is he not a conundrum? If he interests you at a distance (and I take for granted that what you say in your letters is not merely conventional compliment) you can think how piquant he is in actual life. I must confess, however, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... double sense] Equivocalness — N. equivocalness &c adj.; double meaning &c 516; ambiguity, double entente, double entendre [Fr.], pun, paragram^, calembour^, quibble, equivoque [Fr.], anagram; conundrum &c (riddle) 533; play on words, word play &c (wit) 842; homonym, homonymy [Gramm.]; amphiboly^, amphibology^; ambilogy^, ambiloquy^. Sphinx, Delphic oracle. equivocation &c (duplicity) 544; white ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... art!—yet bitter, too And sparkling, like satiric fun; But how much better thee to brew, Than a conundrum or a pun, It is, in every point of view, Must ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... which had thrown her, weak and ill, upon our hands, were responsible for everything. For how much more, how many other changes, she would be responsible the future only could answer. And the future would answer in its own good, or bad, time. My conundrum "What are we going to do with her?" was as much of a puzzle as ever. For my part I gave it up. Sufficient unto the day was the evil ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... answer me then. It couldn't be expected, perhaps; but I am still of the impression that this conundrum is gradually working towards a solution in the brain of the Commander-in-Chief. I hope it don't lay heavily there; I wouldn't do anything to distress him. If GOLDWIN SMITH were expounding political economy to him in one ear, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... may be told in the first person as in Stevenson's Pavilion on the Links, or in the third person as in Kipling's The Bridge Builders. Yet again it may be a conundrum as Stockton's famous The Lady ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... creates value, and a great increase in use forces an increase in value, provided that the supply does not increase equally fast; and with silver that is an impossibility. If you think government cannot add value to a metal, consider this conundrum: What would be the present value of gold if all nations should demonetize it? It can be calculated approximately. There is on hand enough gold to supply the arts for forty years at the present rate of consumption. What, then, is the present value of a commodity of which the world ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... anticipated blooming out into a society blossom was a conundrum. Perhaps he had some secret method buried in the same box with his hoarded coin. His long evenings were passed reading the Family Herald and Weekly Star and the Ashcroft Journal by candle-light; for those were the only papers he would subscribe for. His bed consisted of, first, boards, ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... stock of first impressions of Indian life. "Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions," Mr Aberich Mackay calls them in his "Twenty-one days in India," that most amusing Indian classic. "What is it these travelling people put on paper?" he adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... whether "any ordinary individual can understand the forms now sent out by the Income Tax Department?" Fearing that if he replied in the affirmative he would be asked to solve some particularly abstruse conundrum, he contented himself with saying that the forms were complicated because the tax was complicated, and the tax was complicated because of the number and variety of the reliefs granted to the taxpayer. It does not seem to have occurred to him that it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... Jeffords, an' considers him a pleasin' conundrum. About tenth drink time he'd take a cha'r an' go camp by himse'f in a far corner, an' thar he'd warble hymns. Many a time as I files away my nosepaint in the Oriental have I ...
— How The Raven Died - 1902, From "Wolfville Nights" • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the driver expecting, as in similar cases in Paris, Berlin, or elsewhere, a trifle as a pourboire at the end of the service for which he is engaged. Where these ruinous structures which pass for public carriages originally came from is a conundrum; but there can be no possible doubt as to their antiquity. Mexican fleas, like those of Naples and continental Spain, are both omnivorous and carnivorous, and these vehicles are apt to be itinerant asylums for this ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... of his name. Then think of the opposite of a woman crying. If you cannot understand this take it to Uncle Ted, or some detective, and you will find out something you are very anxious to know. It is a good conundrum. Tell me if you get it. To resume. At about 10-0 this morning Fuller came in and started lighting fires, cleaning up the room, and cooking my breakfast. At 10-45 five officers came to see me—I was where? Two guesses allowed. Still ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... Punch. The Cause Irish Particular One Good Turn deserves Another Sticky The Poet Foiled Black and White Inquest—not Extraordinary Domestic Economy On Seeing an Execution A Voice, and Nothing Else The Amende Honorable The Czar Bas-Bleu To a Rich Young Widow The Railway of Life A Conjugal Conundrum Numbers Altered Grammar for the Court of Berlin The Empty Bottle Aytoun The Death of Doctor Morrison Bentley's Miscellany Epigrams by John G. Saxe. On a Recent Classic Controversy Another On an ill-read Lawyer On an ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... BACH'S music find a music-box is yet an unsettled conundrum. Such is likely to be the fate of the question raised with so much temper over the Passion Music of that great man by the English critics. Shame on all critics that condemn MOZART as a fogy and BACH as a nuisance. Of course it is going back ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... time as you see her now, laughing to herself and gesticulating. Sometimes she will lean back in her chair and absolutely shake with laughter, and she smiles at vacancy continually. She seems all right enough with the ex-ception of these vagaries. But she is a perfect conundrum to me." ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... of this remark all four came to be again on the same terms as of old; but suddenly a servant announced that the Empress (Yan Ch'un) had despatched a messenger to bring over a lantern-conundrum with the directions that they should all go and guess it, and that after they had found it out, they should each also devise one and send it in. At these words, the four of them left the room with hasty ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... if he should divorce his wife. Fact. Solemn word. That's the sort of thing. . . He wouldn't have believed it. Would I? Squatted on the verandah chewing betel-nut, sighing and spitting all over the place for more than an hour, and as glum as an undertaker before he came out with that dashed conundrum. That's the kind of thing that isn't so funny as it looks. What was a fellow to say?—Good wife?—Yes. Good wife—old though. Started a confounded long story about some brass pots. Been living together for fifteen years—twenty years—could not tell. A long, long time. Good wife. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... mystery of the identity of Paulus was like all court secrets and most secrets of intriguing governments, no mystery at all to hundreds, but to thousands an insoluble conundrum. The official propagandists of the court news, absolutely in control of all the channels through which facts could reach the public, easily offset the constant leakage from the lips of slaves and gladiators by disseminating artfully concocted news. Those actually in the secret, flattered ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... woman is after all a mystery. It has been well said, that woman is the great conundrum of the nineteenth century; but if we can not guess her, we ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... a link-bearer, or lackey; is our admiring Boswell, living and moving and having its being in the equability it derives from attending its illustrious master. An African sage once illustrated this philosophical principle of the greater controlling the less, by the following fine conundrum. "Why does the dog waggle his tail?" This problem, being beyond his auditors, was given up. The sage made answer, "Because the dog is bigger than the tail; else the tail would waggle the dog." It ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... noises, why did she not imagine other things; why, for example, did she not see tables dance, and tea-urns walk? All that would be fancy, unblushing, genuine fancy, and if she conjured up one absurdity, why not another! That was a conundrum for any sceptic. Thus did she argue, naturally and logically, in the quite sensible fashion of a lawyer, or a scientist; yet, all the while, her senses told her that the atmosphere of the house had undergone some ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... editor has issued a conundrum in a volume with the title Does Protection Protect? and undertakes to prove by statistics that answer is No. These Western people are in the habit, we know, of bragging a good deal of their exploits, and so the writer referred to says he ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... able to guess a conundrum; b badgers; c in that field; d mortally offended; e my; h noticed by me; k properly trained in a Board-School; l rushing about wildly ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... tall, slim figure Detective Inspector Wessex stared with a sort of wonder. Mr. Nicol Brinn of Cincinnati was a conundrum which he found himself unable to catalogue, although in his gallery of queer characters were many eccentric and peculiar. If Nicol Brinn should prove to be crooked, then automatically he became insane. This Wessex had reasoned out even ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... encounter Peter saw at a glance that he had now, in the interval, divined and that, to sound his note, he was only waiting till they should find themselves alone. This he had soon arranged and he then broke straight out. 'Do you know your conundrum has been keeping me awake? But in the watches of the night the answer came over me—so that, upon my honour, I quite laughed out. Had you been supposing I had to go to Paris to learn that? Even now, to see him still ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... is the standing conundrum with all the women. They will not accept Ethel Newcome even. Perhaps we shall have to admit that Thackeray was a writer ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to speculate rapidly on his father's enigmatic remark. All the way up in the elevator he pondered over the conundrum; and all the evening he turned it over in his mind. At last, tired with the day's activities, he went to bed, hoping that dreams might furnish him with a solution of the riddle. But although he slept hard no dreams came and ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... him bewildered. He was finding Carl more and more a conundrum. He consistently called his mother his old lady, insisted that she was a damned nuisance—and wrote to her every night. Hugh was writing to his mother only twice a week. It was ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... to put that conundrum to your brother; but doubtless the needs of the Confederate States require that it ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... retired to his room it occurred to him that he might have answered Jill's conundrum as to the profit of building fire-proof houses by reminding her that pecuniary loss is not the sole objection to being burned out of house and home whenever the fire fiend happens to crave a flaming sacrifice, in the daytime or in the night, in summer or in midwinter, in ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... are so changed I scarcely know you. Every time we meet I find you more of a conundrum. Friend, indeed! You certainly have been a distant one in every sense. If I had been the friend you say I was, you would have written me about the marvellous transformation you ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... and stood for a long time gazing at herself in the mirror. Vainly she tried to glean from it the answer to a most interesting conundrum: Did Mr. Queed still think her ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... "If it's a conundrum I'll give it up," said Rufus; "just tell a feller all about it, for I begin to think you're crazy, or else have come across some benevolent chap that's rather loose in ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... present perverse generation, will be likely to misconceive its object. Kant's purpose was, not to ascertain how many years the Earth had lived: a million of years, more or less, made very little difference to him. What he wished to settle was no such barren conundrum. For, had there even been any means of coercing the Earth into an honest answer, on such a delicate point, which the Sicilian canon, Recupero, fancied that there was; [Footnote: Recupero. See Brydone's Travels, some sixty or seventy years ago. The canon, being a beneficed clergyman ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Berlin station by her mother and Cousin von Briest. While drinking tea in the mother's room Cousin von Briest was asked to tell a joke, and propounded a Bible conundrum, which Effi took as an omen that no more sorrow was to befall her. The following day began the search for an apartment, and one was found on Keith street, which exactly suited, except that the house was not finished and the walls not yet dried out. Effi kept it in mind, however, and ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... Peel in the House of Commons, after congratulating him on his present enviable position, finished the confab with the following unrivalled conundrum:—"By the bye, which of your vegetables does your Tamworth speech resemble!"—"Spinach," replied Peel, who, no doubt, associated it with gammon.—"Pshaw," said the gallant Colonel, "your rope inions (your opinions), to be sure!" Peel opened his mouth, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... complete his statement of the case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid last ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... Whilst you were engaged in your grand Jenny Lind speculation, the following conundrum went the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... soil. Both works are full of capital illustrations. He has, moreover, read He Went for a Soldier, the WYNTER Annual of JOHN STRANGE of that ilk. But what had the soldier done, that "he" should "go for him"? The answer to this conundrum will be ascertained on reading the book. Nutshell Novels, by J. ASHBY STERRY, is also a volume that repays perusal. The Lazy Poet has turned his leisure to good account—the stories ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... evenings. Then we could use them for social purposes during the Christmas party season. I do not know how it may be with others, but I have often found, when introduced to a lady, that I have said "Good evening," and then had absolutely nothing else to say. With the help of the conundrum book I would fill in any awkward pause by asking her who was the most amiable king in history. That would break the ice. Besides, if we kept the book reasonably clean, it might afterward make a very serviceable and acceptable present to Eliza's mother. I generally know pretty well what ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... great problem what to do for the best in this case. Mebby Solomon knew enough to grapple with the question, but Josiah don't, nor Arvilly, though she thinks she duz. Robert Strong is gittin' one answer to the hard conundrum of life, and Ernest White is figurin' it out successful. And lots of other good and earnest souls all over the world are workin' away at the sum with their own slates and pencils. But oh, the time is long! One needs the patience of the Sphinx ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... present who could answer that conundrum, and after a fitting pause the chief was forced to ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... getting near the boil.' Elise rose with a strange little laugh and looked at a yellow silk stocking which dangled over the side of a wicker table. As if trying to solve a conundrum, she glanced from it to the shapely form of the young woman at her toilet. 'When the war's over,' she said ruminatingly, 'and our men find what kind of girls they married ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... seen three suspicious people—a man, perhaps an old man, in a dark-blue, well-cut suit, wearing a Homberg hat and goggles, a girl, and a man of whose appearance you have no knowledge? Come now, that's a conundrum! I have ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... called her a social pirate, and there is no doubt that her method of collecting the people whom she wants is to besiege them until they eventually surrender. Why, however, Bobbie Outram is always asked to her smartest week-ends was a conundrum to me until I met her magnificently convalescing after influenza at Folkestone. For I know Bobbie, and I would run a mile or two any day ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... the company now engaged in those less active sports, that exercise the subtility of the wit, more than the agility or strength of the body. Their untutored minds delighted themselves in the sly enigma, and the quaint conundrum. Much was their laughter at the wild guesses of the thoughtless and the giddy; and great the triumph of the swain who penetrated the mystery, and successfully removed the abstruseness of the problem. Many were the feats of skill exhibited by the dextrous shepherd, and infinite were ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... was to take a night-walk to Norwood, and, like the subject of a venerable riddle of my childhood, to go 'round and round the house, without ever touching the house', thinking about Dora. I believe the theme of this incomprehensible conundrum was the moon. No matter what it was, I, the moon-struck slave of Dora, perambulated round and round the house and garden for two hours, looking through crevices in the palings, getting my chin by dint of violent exertion above the rusty nails on the top, blowing kisses at the lights ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... of this inscrutable conundrum, a lank and tall girl of some fifteen summers, arose and said, not without something of the sublime air becoming a solitary intelligence: "It's ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... see so many Democrats in my life. Or was it Republicans? I forget. I had given 'em a good, hot, mixed Princeton paper,—dog, international law, society, industrial progress, footlight favorites, and the whole business; had Sermons from Many Lands, and a Conundrum Department, as well as a Household Corner—How to get Beautiful for the ladies, How to get Rich for the men, How to get Strong for the advertisers—why, if I do say it, I don't believe any one fellow was ever much more cosmopolitan in ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough |
