"Puzzle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on this principle, I pretended not to feel the effect of the spikes tearing the flesh off my backbone; and when they led me before the Pombo to show him how covered with blood I was, I expressed satisfaction at riding such an excellent pony. This seemed to puzzle them. ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... puzzle your liege-lord. For you loathe me and you still worship my sister-in-law, an unattainable princess. In these two particulars you display such wisdom as would inevitably prompt you to make an end of me. Yet, what ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... little Jack needed or cu'd use, was a few clothes, some bac'n an' coffee an' flour. Often I'd fill my pockets an' say: 'Well, I'll buy somethin' I want, an' that little Jack will want.' I'd go to town an' see it all, an' think an' puzzle an' wonder—then I'd come home with a few toys, maybe, an' bac'n ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... puzzle Mr William Wellington Hurst, as much as any man, to find out on what grounds I placed him on the list of my College friends; for certainly our intimacy was hardly sufficient to warrant such a liberty; and he was one of those happy individuals who would ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... they were unprepared and desired delay. His anxiety about my servant; his evident displeasure and impatience; his sending for me at all when he must have known over and over again that I was not of his party—each detail fitted in like a puzzle. And yet I must not shew ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... maps, in order to make any meaning at all, and to study hard before one can do it. Not that I grudge the study or the time. The depth and power of the significance (when it is apprehended) glorifies the puzzle. With you and me it is so; but with the majority of readers, even of readers of poetry, it is not and cannot ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... it by not asking me to play my hand before I have all the cards I want. All in good time. I'm working several ends, and they all must be fitted together, like the old jigsaw puzzle, before I can act. Besides, anything I could say now wouldn't set you free. You can't get out before a trial or before I can produce some one on whom I can actually fasten the murder. And I can't do that yet. ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... Lytton Bulwer, an accomplished diplomat, slender, and apparently in ill health. He was afterward, for many years, the British Minister at Constantinople, where he defeated the machinations of Russia, and held in cunning hand the tangled thread of that delicate puzzle, the Eastern Question. His private secretary while he was at Washington was his nephew, Mr. Robert Bulwer (a son of the novelist), who has since won renown as Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India, and as ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... cried Alice Wigram indignantly. "And she would have gone to perdition without us, and taken that poor youth with her. Oh, I know, I know! But morals are a great puzzle to me. However, I firmly remind myself of that 'one in the eye,' and then all my doubts depart. Good-night. Sleep well! You know very well that I should have shirked it if it hadn't ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... of the strange and fantastic hand-made studies of Chinese and Japanese artists would puzzle the Celestials, especially in the coloring and finish. Professional critics are often deceived as to the materials employed, so fine a finish ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... a person of selfish instincts, but without the usual cruel impulses. There was little if any sign of true refinement in the features, and yet, there was a strange strength of purpose that puzzled him. As her story progressed, he solved the puzzle. She had the strength to carry out a purpose that might further her own personal interests; but not the will to endure sacrifice for the sake of another. Her sister was larger and possessed a reserve that might have been mistaken for deepness. He felt that she was ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... wanted Skepsey to come down to her; moaned over the loss of her Louise. The puzzle of the reason for the long separation from her parents, was evident ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... answer seemed both to puzzle and to surprise her. She regarded me doubtfully. I could see that she thought, for some reason, I ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... his chums leagued together to help another boy save a peculiar invention of his father's, a talking frog, from thieving hands,—wait breathlessly in the lonely brick house where the puzzle maker had met with such a strange death. ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Paris for a year? No, no!—too many of the Englishmen who went to Paris lost their individuality and became third-rate Frenchmen. He would puzzle out things for himself—stick to his own ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... took one of her pins, and said to the servants, "If the king can make twelve spoons out of this pin, I can also make twelve dishes out of that bird." On receiving the answer, the king realized that the wise Marcela had gotten the better of him; and he began to think of another plan to puzzle her. ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... House to debate, and, if to debate, to decide upon. So idle is genius! I see through the motive power: if Parliament has a right to confer power, it has a right to say what sort of power. So far Fox's penetration reached, and so he boldly denied the major of the proposition; and then, in a puzzle for consistency of popular attachment to good old rights of the Lords and Commons, and his subscription to the pillar at Runnymede, run into the contradiction of admitting the major in shape of recognitions. It is impossible yet to foresee what ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... been a puzzle to our party not easily solved, had Guapo not been upon the spot. But Guapo had witnessed such an incident before. Just before the mule gave the first plunge Guapo's eyes had been wandering in that direction. He had noticed an odd-looking ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... small Frenchman who sat on the right hand of my Gouverneur Faulkner, and opposite to me sat my Uncle, the General Robert. No business was in discussion at that time but I could see those eyes of French shrewdness make a darting from one face to another and ever they came back to me with a great puzzle which gave to me ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... I'll tell you just what he did and you'll see how it solved the puzzle. And, believe me, you'll have to admit that Westy's a pretty smart fellow. If you have an old book you don't care anything about, you can even try it and you don't even need an oar-lock. Westy turned to a new place in the book ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... is that I can supply something new: I can furnish the key to the puzzle. There is always a certain mystery about these adventures: I can dispel it. I reprint articles that have been read over and over again; I copy out old interviews: but all these things I rearrange and classify and put to the exact test of truth. My collaborator ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... who desires to be hopelessly perplexed, may desert the contemplation of the Fiscal Question, and turn his eyes upon The Mystery of the Clyde. "Popular" this puzzle cannot be, for there is no "demmed demp disagreeable body" in the Mystery. No such object was found in Clyde, near Dumbarton, but a set of odd and inexpensive looking, yet profoundly enigmatic scraps of stone, bone, ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... opinions I have erred, I have not the least shadow of doubt upon my mind that a wise, just and beneficent Creator and father of all, will pardon my errors. I do not feel the least disposed now to investigate, or puzzle myself, in my last moments, in a vain endeavour to enquire whether I have been right or wrong; the Lord's will be done, say I, and may he in his goodness assist you to continue an honest and an upright man amongst your fellow men. Do your duty ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... more began to talk as follows:—"I suppose, as they say, we shall at last reach the shore, and everything will be as it should be, and my mistress will be happy and contented after all her troubles—poor dear, sweet, young lady—I'm sure she ought to be. Well, it does puzzle me, exceedingly—that it does—I cannot make it out, no more, I am sure, would wiser heads than mine. But there is one thing I am very sure of, that Signor Paolo is one of the wisest and most amiable ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the bit of wire curiously. It was undoubtedly a puzzle, but it had appendages to it that I ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... to another time, demand explanations which repel the attention; one should also avoid leaving, in the midst of a plot, gaps which prevent the different parts of the drama from adhering closely to one another, and which, moreover, puzzle the spectator because he does not know what there may be in those gaps." But these are precisely the difficulties which art has to meet. These are some of the obstacles peculiar to one subject or another, as to which it would be impossible to ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... two attendant peacocks, who each in turn saluted him respectfully and withdrew a little farther back, on which Dudu began a very slow and imposing progress down the steps. How he succeeded in making it so imposing was the puzzle, for after all, his descent was undoubtedly a series of hops, but all the same it was very majestic, and Hugh felt greatly impressed, and ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... and them as prayed and drawed the lots, all but that wicked un, if they'd ha' done the right thing by you if they could, isn't there Them as was at the making on us, and knows better and has a better will? And that's all as ever I can be sure on, and everything else is a big puzzle to me when I think on it. For there was the fever come and took off them as were full-growed, and left the helpless children; and there's the breaking o' limbs; and them as 'ud do right and be sober have ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... pale, handsome boy of ten, and Josephine, a rosy girl of seven, sat on the opposite side of the fire, amusing themselves with a puzzle. The gusts of wind, and the great splashes of rain on the glass, only made them feel ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... should be regarded as the shadows of living men. Rather it was we who lived in a vain show, and would continue to do so until the spirit, the true substance of us, should be set free. Well, whatever the truth of it might be, it was all a charming puzzle, and we should learn all about it some day, and meantime he had been furnished with an entirely new idea—the revealing power of darkness. He loved the light because it was beautiful, and now he loved the darkness because it was ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... themselves, and the relation of cause and effect dawns upon the boy. He begins to see that the present condition of things is not final, but depends upon one that has gone before, and will be succeeded by another. He becomes a puzzle to himself; and to satisfy his newly-awakened curiosity, asks all manner of inconvenient questions. The needs and tendencies of human nature express themselves through these early yearnings of the child. As thought ripens, he ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the grocery business, I should take care that he was well grounded in the principles of sound bookkeeping and prudence. But I should not fail to tell him the story of the Harrison Avenue grocer, hoping that he would puzzle ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... who and where he was; all he could remember, however, went into a single sentence and kept repeating itself on the waves of his singing, dancing blood: "Clock's stopped, clock's stopped,—stopped clocks, stopped clocks...!" till it sounded like a puzzle sentence—then ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... student, in a very real sense of the term, Robert became more reconciled to his isolation. His mind was broadening and deepening, and he felt that it was so. Many things that had before seemed a puzzle to him now became plain. He was compelled, despite his youth, to meditate upon life, and he resolved that when he took up its thread again among his kind he would put his new knowledge to the ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Candles. The Lucky Or Unlucky Slipper. Cakes. Valentines. Initial Compliments. Heart Hunt. Heart Pricks. Valentine Puzzle. Hearts And Mittens. Riven Hearts. Proposals. Washington's Birthday. April First. Easter Egg Race. Suspended Eggs. Egg Race. Rolling Eggs. Bunny's Egg. July Fourth. Flags Of All Nations. Our Flag. Hallowe'en. Hallowe'en Stories. Hallowe'en Fates. ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... a duty of religious veneration towards bishops. I was willing to honour a Lord Bishop as a peer of Parliament; but his office was to me no guarantee of spiritual eminence.—To find my brother thus stop my mouth, was a puzzle; and impeded all free speech towards him. In fact, I very soon left off the attempt at intimate religious intercourse with him, or asking counsel as of one who could sympathize. We talked, indeed, a great deal on the surface of religious matters; ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... more the same canal confirmed the disappearance of the English fleet for four days after the engagement—but behold! we had scarce had time to jumble together our sorrow for our situation, and our satisfaction for the despatch we had used to repair it, when yesterday threw us into a new puzzle. Our spies, the French, have sent us intelligence that Galissoni'ere is disgraced, recalled, and La Motte sent to replace him, and that Byng has reinforced the garrison of St. Philip's(698) with—150 men! You, who ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... of finality, "Scaife talks about going into the Grenadiers; but they'll give him a hot time there, a very hot time. One is really sorry for the poor fellow, because, of course, he can't help being a bounder. What does puzzle me is, why did Caesar want such a fellow for ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... was rather off, Bess. I beg your pardon, Miss Faith and Miss—but which is which, and how will I know if you tell me? It's a regular Chinese puzzle, for you are precisely the same until you speak, and then there's a difference. For you," he pointed towards Hope, "look somehow—well, jollier, ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... beneath the starry vault—she slipped out to the summit of the ridge in the big pasture, climbing lightly, with the springy ease born of the vigor her nineteen outdoor years had stored in the strong young body. She wanted to be alone, to puzzle out what the coming of this man meant to her. Had he intended anything by that last drawling remark of his in the store? Why was it that his careless, half insulting familiarity set the blood leaping through her like wine? He lured her to the sex duel, then trampled ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... then resumed: "The thing's puzzling. I can't see why Baumstein's fixed on buying a claim that nobody else wants, but you can reckon it a sure snap for him when he makes a deal. There's the puzzle! The ore is pretty good, but that's all. We were kind of disappointed by the assay. The specimens looked ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... the little child without speaking, while he cautiously manipulated his arms and interested himself in the puzzle of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Susan and Mary Lou chanced to be in the dining-room, working over a puzzle-card that had been delivered as an advertisement of some new breakfast food. They had intended to go to market immediately after lunch, but it was now three o'clock, and still they hung over the fascinating little combination of paper angles and triangles, feeling that ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... was a duke, or knight, An orator, a lawyer, or a priest, A nabob, a man-midwife;[539] but the wight[hk] Mysterious changed his countenance at least As oft as they their minds: though in full sight He stood, the puzzle only was increased; The man was a phantasmagoria in Himself—he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... she enjoyed the lawn with its roses, and the beautiful river. Fresh from the poor little cabin on the hill-top, she nevertheless fell with the greatest ease into the ways and habits of her new life. It did not puzzle or disturb her in the least to live in large rooms, be waited on by servants, or have nice things about her; she took to all these naturally. For a few days Mr. and Mrs. Grant watched with some anxiety, fearing to discover a flaw in their treasure, but ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... I want to make him happy. But there are so many things, so many different aims and motives, that complicate life, that puzzle one. One doesn't know how much to give of ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of Royal ferns and Hartstongues spring up in moister parts. The trees are conifers, cycads, and trees akin to the ginkgo, or Maidenhair Tree, of modern Japan. Cypresses, yews, firs, and araucarias (the Monkey Puzzle group) grow everywhere, though the species are more primitive than those of today. The broad, fan-like leaves and plum-like fruit of the ginkgoales, of which the temple-gardens of Japan have religiously preserved ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... such a charming puzzle that I would like to domesticate it and study the eternal mystery ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... dear boy!), is that you?" said Betto; "there's glad I am! You are late to-night, and I was beginning to puzzle." ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... ungloved hand she offered him; and if, in token of reconciliation, he did press it a little more fervently than Henry Warner would have thought at all necessary, he only did what, under the circumstances, it was very natural he should do. From the first Maggie Miller had been a puzzle to Arthur Carrollton; but he was fast learning to read her—was beginning to understand how perfectly artless she was—and this little incident increased, rather than ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... of spiritual transmigration Is somewhat pleasant, therefore let it be; It seems delightful to my contemplation But what of that, it's all the same to me! In fact, to tell the truth, I cannot see Wherefore Pythagoras did puzzle o'er This tiresome philosophy when he Must truly have considered it a bore, I think it so, and, doubtless, so do ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... so pure, so upright, and so far of from winking at the least sin, that He doth by that law, without any favour, condemn the sinner for that sin (Gal 3:10). Now, when He hath brought the soul into this praemunire,13 into this puzzle, then, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... seen in the hide-and-seek of darkness and light? There the wind is wild and restless, everything is dance and swift movement—will it not puzzle ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... trouble of hunting up half a dozen men of the same name, and have addled your wretched brains in the attempt to patch the half dozen men—turning up at different periods and in different places—into one man, they all tumble to pieces like a child's puzzle, and you find yourself as far as ever from the man you want. However, you won't have to do any of that work," added Mr. Sheldon, who was almost in a passion when he remembered the trouble he had gone through. "The ground has been all laid out for you, by Jove, as smooth as ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... can spring[143] anything to my mind, whereas in town, whilst I am following one character, it is ten to one but I am crossed in my way by another, and put up such a variety of odd creatures in both sexes, that they foil the scent of one another, and puzzle the chase. My greatest difficulty in the country is to find sport, and in town to choose it. In the meantime, as I have given a whole month's rest to the cities of London and Westminster, I promise myself abundance of new game upon ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... greatly at this, and I could think of no answer to the puzzle, save that Naomi must have won the servant's heart, as she won all hearts. Or, perhaps, he knew what it was to love, ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... languages are all hard, and the beginner can never go far enough to get a rule fixed soundly in his mind without meeting exceptions which puzzle and confuse him. Esperanto is as clear, logical, and consistent as arithmetic, and, like arithmetic, depends more upon intelligence than upon memory work. If Esperanto were adopted as the first foreign language to be taught in schools, and all grammatical teaching were postponed ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... yourself. Of course no one is to blame if it is a case of sleep-walking,—only it will be a great anxiety for the future. You had better get up now and dress. I will take these things down; they may help to explain what is such a puzzle to us all, ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... answer my summons, bringing me the frugal measure of bread and wine wherewith it was my custom to break my fast. Then, whilst I munched my crust, I strode to and fro in the little chamber and exercised my wits to their utmost for a solution to the puzzle his Eminence ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... strung on wires, and it would be easy enough to do that with one's eyes shut; but it always did puzzle me to see how blind people can tell one color from another with ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... and disobey; and unprofitable, because it cannot at all relax the former sentence of condemnation. Now obedience, being a present duty, cannot pay old debts, or satisfy for our former rebellions, and so it must leave a man to seen condemnation. I fear this is a puzzle that all consciences must come unto here, or elsewhere. Here ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... think, must be manifest even to the foreign offices most concerned. They must see already ahead of them a terrible puzzle of arrangement, a puzzle their own bad traditions will certainly never permit them to solve. "God save us," they may very well pray, "from our own cleverness and sharp dealing," and they may even welcome the promise of an enlarged outlook that ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... innocently. Her mind was occupied with the puzzle of the income which, womanlike, ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... poor Mr. Taylor as he went by. Mr. Taylor shrank from meeting his eye, and hurried along till he reached the Serpentine, where he stood still for a few minutes, drinking in the fresh breeze. But the breeze could not blow his puzzle out of his brain. Was it a crime, or merely an escapade? What had she said to the young man? What had her feelings been or become towards the young man? Moreover, what had she caused the young man's feelings to be for her? When he came to think it over, Mr. Taylor ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... light on his puzzle, Ben turned into the stone gateway, and strode up to the east porch to let himself in as usual, with his latch key. As he was fitting it absently, all the while his mind more intent on Pickering and his changed demeanor than on his own affairs, he heard ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... aisles had the usual round-headed windows, with the unusual (for England) circular windows above. There were flat buttresses; but I must reject the flying-buttresses of some restorers. The clerestory windows are a puzzle. Everybody maintains they were Pointed, and, if so, they would have been inserted at the same time as the new roof; but there seems to be no trustworthy authority for this. In Finden's engravings after Hollar they are taken at a peculiar angle which is apt to mislead. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... esteem for him," she went on; "I want him to think well of me. If I am a puzzle to him, do me a little service. ...
— The Diary of a Man of Fifty • Henry James
... that mosquitoes would not breed freely in open rivers or in large ponds or lakes, but why this should be the case was a puzzle. One day an enthusiastic mosquito student brought home a number of eggs of different species, which he had collected from the neighboring marshes, and put them into his laboratory aquarium for the sake of watching them develop and identifying their ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... bitterer things in letters from friends than even these, which merely puzzle and distress, but do not infuriate. For I feel cheated by casual glimpses of affairs which concern me not; I resent odd scraps of information, not chosen for my palate; I am indignant at news culled from the public prints, and frantic at thermometric and meteorological intelligence. But stay! ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... must alter the colour of your hair, then you must have a false nose, and put a spot on some part of your face, or a wart, or a few hairs." I laughed, and said, "Help me to contrive this for the next ball; I have not been to one for twenty years; but I am dying to puzzle somebody, and to tell him things which no one but I can tell him. I shall come home, and go to bed, in a quarter of an hour."—"I must take the measure of your nose," said he; "or do you take it with wax, and I will have a nose made: you can get a flaxen ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... puzzle," I admitted. "I suppose they might very well be father and daughter. It is certain that she is fresh from some convent boarding-school. I don't like the way she looks at the man, do you? It is as though she were terrified to death. I wonder if he ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that friend Pullingo will be able to help us in finding the dear young childher," he said. "I can soon make him understand that they are lost; and though he hasn't book-learning, he's got notions in his head which would puzzle some of us. The thought came across me in the night, when not a rap more sleep could I get; and I've been waiting till daylight ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... pointed with her finger across the river, but ventured not to turn her eyes in that direction. "Nay, but speak plain, most generous damsel," said the knight, who, for once, was puzzled as much as his own elegance of speech was wont to puzzle others, "for I swear to you that I comprehend nought by the extension ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... eager patron first introduced what became a wearisome tangle, lasting a whole generation, concerning my claims to a certain post, which gradually became in my life what the French call une scie, an irritating puzzle, in which I myself took no part, but which attached itself to ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... hair-breadth for them," and he walked in to supper as if he were at home and had an absolute right to be there. He had been at the table but a few moments, however, before the aspect of the Jocelyn family began to puzzle him exceedingly. Belle appeared as if she had been crying; Mrs. Jocelyn looked perplexed and worried, and in Mildred's eyes there were anxiety and trouble. Mr. Jocelyn had not lost his serenity in the least, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... enjoy it hugely. 'Twill be fine sport to so puzzle the King, and when he sees me as I am—" and Mistress Penwick turned proudly to ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... she said to her mates one day, "here's some 'hot ones' Miss Brokaw has been handing the primes, and I believe they'd puzzle some of us big girls. Listen! 'What is longitude?' Sue Mellen came to me, puzzled, about that," chuckled Jennie, "and I told her longitude is those lengthwise stripes ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... thoughts—a difficult attempt, as the image of her mother was the one which insisted on taking the pre-eminence in her mind. She ordered it down, with a sort of bitterness. Had her mother been alive, she would have gladly fled from this puzzle into which her life had tangled itself, and gone back to America to rest and mother-love. So she told herself, at least. But then followed the reflection that in her mother's death the refuge of love's calm and protection was ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... saved out of all those souls who sailed from Melbourne in the Lady Jermyn. Why should I have been the favored one; I with my broken heart and now lonely life? Some great inscrutable reason there must be; at my worst I did not deny that. But neither did I puzzle my sick brain with the reason. I just waited for it to be revealed to me, if it were God's will ever to reveal it. And that I conceive to be the one spirit in which a man may contemplate, with equal sanity ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... LET school-masters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning; Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives 'genus' a better discerning. Let them brag of their heathenish gods, 5 Their Lethes, their Styxes, and Stygians: Their Quis, and their Quaes, and their Quods, They're ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... looked out equally excited, but with a very different interest. "Come, this will do,' thought I; 'she is after us; and if old Dick Casket brings that fiery sea—breeze he has now along with him, we shall puzzle the smuggler, for all his ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... a beating heart, recounted to Madame Berthe Louison all the occurrences in Delhi, when they were left alone in the great banker's vast parlors. "She is a puzzle, this strange woman!" mused Hawke, for a serene and stately triumph shone in ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... a perfect puzzle to us by what process the standard of music has become so lowered, as to make what is ordinarily served up under that name be received as the legitimate descendant of harmony. There is but one step from the sublime to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... the condition of the Ms. Until Wlker's text and the photographic fac-simile of the original Ms. are in the hands of all scholars, it will be better not to introduce such matters in the school room, where they would puzzle without instructing. ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... down at Wentworth's desk, and came upon an obstacle at the very beginning. He did not know how to address the young woman. Whether to say 'My dear Miss Longworth,' or 'My dear madam,' or whether to use the adjective 'dear' at all, was a puzzle to him; and over this he was meditating when Wentworth came ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... staring, and something bewildered in the middle of the room. The love, the pity, the admiration of which the lad's heart had been full an hour before, still hungered for expression; but it was not easy to vent such feelings before Louis, nor at a moment when the Syndic's cold eye and the puzzle of his presence there chilled for the time the ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... she brought a note from Rose, that was as great a puzzle to the engineer as was the curious acting ...
— Five Thousand Dollars Reward • Frank Pinkerton
... "whether it would puzzle a monkey?" He had forgotten the needs of his Growing Nation, and was earnestly parting the white-thorn ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... contrivance we managed to puzzle and mystify the uninitiated, English and French alike. The intelligent reader, who sees it all in print, will not be so easily ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... than my eldest brother was a remarkably interesting boy. His name was Pe-taw-wan-e-quot, though he was afterwards called William. He was quick to learn Paw-pa-pe-po, and very curious and interesting questions he would often ask of his father, which would greatly puzzle ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... could work up his catalogues, study his famous collections, make his own bibliographical notes, or run off here and there by 'bus or train in quest of books for a customer; he could swallow down his Greek verbs or puzzle out his French for Barbier in the intervals of business; the humbler matters of the shop prospered ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it of Loria also, when they met—as secretly as if the bond between them had been a forbidden love. But if the truth about the yachting trip had been told, even he had no solution ready for the puzzle. ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... only a moment's sober thought, once satisfied she was alone, to suggest as one reasonable solution to the puzzle that the owners had fled town for the week-end, leaving the establishment in care of untrustworthy servants, who had promptly elected to seek their own ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... a fellow, Tom," said Frank. "But I say, old man, we must puzzle our heads once again ...
— Crusoes of the Frozen North • Gordon Stables
... his figure, nor his clothes. Unfortunately, the translation of these writings is no easy task. Those of Central America are still an unsolved riddle. Those of Babylon have been slowly pieced together like a puzzle, a puzzle to which the learned world has given its most able thought. Yet they are not fully understood. In Egypt we have had the luck to stumble on a clew, the Rosetta Stone, which makes the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... into his serious face. "From our—from Hindu point of view, greatest richness of life come from greatest possible difference between men and women. And most of all it is so in Rajputana. But over here...." She sighed, a small shivering sigh. The puzzle and pain of it went too deep with her. "All this screaming and snatching and scratching for wrong kind of things hurts my heart; because—I am woman and they are women—desecrating that in us which is a symbol of God. Nature made women for ministering to Life and Love. Are they ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... too, on my part, to bring them to so speedy an end; for what I owe to those dear little things I am powerless to express. Those entertaining people who sit speechless, and only answer yes and no with an eternal smile on their faces: give them a puzzle. There is no further effort to amuse them required on your part. They are at once absorbed in "shot." Their only idea is to successfully get them into their places. They never do; but being good thorough-going characters will never ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... could not fix his attention upon problems in Euclid with that greater problem unsolved—how the honour of the school was to be saved, and the new boy got rid of? That was really what Taylor and one or two leading spirits had decided must be done; but how to do it was the puzzle! ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie
... hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspring rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for every one; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any incident in the beaten round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt, can set his fancy rolling through the music-halls, and thence ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... "and Julius Caesar was born in 100 B. C., which makes him fifty-six years old when he died. Can you puzzle that ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... places still left where men can handle big things with a light touch, and take more for granted in five minutes than an Englishman at home could puzzle out in a year. But one would not meet many English at a lunch in a London club who took the contract for building London Wall or helped bully King John into signing ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... and barns, and stackyards, and merry-makins at winter ingles, and courtship aneath trees, and at the gable-end of farm houses, 'tween lads and lasses as laigh in life as the servants in her father's ha'. That's the puzzle, and that's the praise. But ae word explains a'—Genius—Genius, wull a' the metafhizzians in the warld ever expound that mysterious ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... delicious sense of mystery. The rose and humming-bird seemed to me the chief actors in the magic pantomime, and they were some way connected with my dear Aunt Linny and the black-eyed young man; but what it all meant was the great puzzle of my busy little brain. It has sometimes been a matter of curious speculation to me, what share that diminutive flower had in the development of my mind and character. With it, so it seems to me, began the first dawn of a conscious inner life. I can still recollect with wonderful distinctness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... but it must be the one stolen from Lemuel Mace. How does it happen, though, that Dan has it here? Why is it all battered up? Where is Jem? Why wasn't it sold to the man, Staggers? Say, here's a big puzzle, but I've got the bracelet, and this man Dan can be made to explain all about it when he gets ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... 75, p. 215.) The want of the Latin 'V' obliged the Greeks to employ their 'beta'; nor do they regard quantity. Till he recollected the true language, these strange sentences might puzzle ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... surrogateship by the curiosity with which men view ingenious and puzzling contrivances. Hence it comes that most objects alleged to be beautiful, and doing duty as such, show considerable ingenuity of design and are calculated to puzzle the beholder—to bewilder him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the improbable—at the same time that they give evidence of an expenditure of labor in excess of what would give them their fullest efficency for ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... venison. Thus no animal is spared whose flesh can be passed off for deer. Fortunately, their guns are so common that they will not shoot with accuracy beyond ten or fifteen paces, or there would be no game left within a few years. How these common guns stand the heavy charges of powder is a puzzle. A native thinks nothing of putting four drachms down a gun that I should be sorry to fire off at any rate. It is this heavy charge which enables such tools to kill elephants which would otherwise be impossible. These natives look upon a ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... active eyes around him in the blackness, that watched his every movement, and he kept moving since that seemed to puzzle them. Also he wondered, as a drowning man might wonder about things, how long it would be before Colonel Kirby would send for him to ask about the murdered trooper. Something would happen then, he felt ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... far too much about these things, as I have said. No Englishman should be able to translate object-letters. But Trejago spread all the trifles on the lid of his office-box and began to puzzle them out. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... puzzle is easily found. Sir Francis had conceived an utter distaste for the persons and political principles of the Reformers of Upper Canada. There was an inherent antagonism between the nature of this shallow, feather-brained ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... as if it were all my fault," she began. "Things lie so still here; we seem so shut in. Cynthia has been like a child to me—I haven't thought ahead and I just played with her and worked out—my puzzle piece by piece. It was only a week ago that I felt sure; I meant to tell Cynthia slowly and little by little—and ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... sense; but I don't wonder, with such a mother! A girl who gets a reputation for being learned and saying brilliant things might just as well give up matrimony altogether. Men are either afraid of them or detest them: gentlemen don't like to puzzle their brains over a witticism, nor do they admire chaffing that is beyond their comprehension. Courtship should be made easy. My Jane was clever, and vexed me a great deal in consequence, daughters of that kind are so unmanageable: give me the most stupid in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... of the pattern seldom gave an expression of its character. "Dove in the Window," "Rob Peter to Pay Paul," "Blue Brigade," "Fan-mill," "Crow's Foot," "Chinese Puzzle," "Fly-wheel," "Love-knot," "Sugar-bowl," are simply whims of fancy. Floral names, such as "Dutch Tulip," "Sunflower," "Rose of Sharon," "Bluebells," "World's Rose," might suggest a love of flowers. Sometimes designs are appliqued on with some regard for coloring. I once saw a quilt that was ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... my stars! Some knot!" Leila flipped the undesired net from Marjorie. Rolling it up she tucked it under her arm. "Unmasking is at nine-thirty. Let us be there. We can just make it, and it will puzzle some persons to tell who interrupted them tonight. Our talk will wait until after unmasking. Then we can dodge into one of the side ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... you'd expect him not to be offended, and to understand that your remarks were neither personal nor untactful, if you said the church was a nuisance and ought never to have been invented. By Jove, but you're a puzzle!" ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... specialists keen on their own particular hobbies. But so much of the information Shann had thus picked up to store in a retentive memory he had not understood and could not fit together. It had been as if he were trying to solve some highly important puzzle with at least a quarter of the necessary pieces missing, or with unrelated bits from others intermixed. How much control did a trained animal scout have over his furred or feathered assistants? And was part of that mastery a mental rapport built ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... few mechanical principles more widely known than that of so-called centrifugal force; an action which, though still a puzzle to students, has long been thoroughly understood. It is, however, comparatively recently that it has been applied in practice. One of the earliest examples was perhaps the ordinary governor, due to the genius of Watt. Every boy knows that if he takes a weight hanging from a string and twirls ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... Miss Hannah, to see if there was anything wanting to be done, and I found this boy lying on the floor with the Bible open before him trying to puzzle out the letters for himself. And as soon as he saw me he up and struck a bargain with me to teach him to read. And I'll tell you what, Miss Hannah, he's going to make a man one of these days! You know I've been a colored schoolmaster, among my ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... considered is the derivation of the word mandragora. Dr. Mingana tells me it is a great puzzle to discover any adequate meaning. The attempt to explain it through the Sanskrit mand, "joy," "intoxication," or mantasana, "sleep," "life," or mandra, "pleasure," or mantara, "paradise tree," and agru, "unmarried, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... nobly to death in defence of the prerogatives of his "apostolic succession"; and has not the slightest doubts that he can make out his spiritual genealogy, without a broken link, from the first Bishop of Rome, downwards!—though, poor fellow, it would puzzle him to say who was his great-grandfather. E——, you are aware, has long since joined the Church of Rome, and has disclosed such a bottomless abyss of "faith," that whole cart-loads of mediaeval fables, abandoned even by Romanists (who, by the way, stand fairly aghast at his insatiable appetite), ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... a clever chap, as ye say; but I knowed a cleverer. 'Twas my uncle Levi. Uncle Levi made a snuff-box that should be a puzzle to his friends to open. He used to hand en round at wedding parties, christenings, funerals, and in other jolly company, and let 'em try their skill. This extraordinary snuff-box had a spring behind that ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... bows of his pudgy little person, and Laverick was left with another puzzle to solve. He was not in the least conceited, and he did not for a moment misinterpret this woman's interest in him. Her invitation, he knew very well, was one which half London would have coveted. Yet it meant nothing personal, he was sure of that. ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... into his foolish laugh. "And yet neither you nor I had the worst of the puzzle," he cried. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... mentioned as a sort of foxhound in miniature, and nothing can well be more perfect than the shape of these small dogs. But how different are they in their style of hunting! The beagle, which has always his nose to the ground, will puzzle for a length of time on one spot, sooner than he will leave the scent. The foxhound, on the contrary, full of life, spirit, and high courage, is always dashing and trying forward. The beagle, however, has extraordinary perseverance, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... and interesting inquiry presents itself to our minds, which is intimately related to this subject of the habitats of fungi. It shapes itself into a sort of "puzzle for the curious," but at the same time one not unprofitable to think about. How is the occurrence of new and before unknown forms to be accounted for in a case like ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... was, in a sense, the Bible of the Greeks, and as society improved in morals, and thought was directed more and more fearlessly towards religious questions, the puzzle as to the immoralities of the gods became acute. The religious and intellectual developments of the sixth century B.C. led to various ways of explaining the old stories. Sophocles is conciliatory, conceiving religion in a sunny good temper which will make ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... can't help being hopeful about it. There is something romantic in it,—out of the common way,—just what everything that happens to you ought to be. And Philip will adore you like a husband in a fairy tale. Oh, I shall puzzle my small brain to contrive some plot that will bring everybody into the right mind, so that you may marry Philip when I marry—somebody else. Wouldn't that be a pretty ending to all my poor, poor ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... levies, joined them on the day after his leaving Madras. The French and Riza Sahib let slip the opportunity of attacking these bodies, before they united. They were well aware of their movements, and had resolved upon tactics, calculated in the first place to puzzle the English commander, to wear out his troops, and to enable them finally to surprise and take him entirely ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... were flung at him with a venom that, to me, was half shocking and half comical. The soldier habit of making the Hurrah for Lincoln our answering war-cry to the Hurrah for Davis of our enemies in the field, made a bewildering puzzle of such an outburst. The meeting with the Southern commissioners was denounced as a weak compromising of our cause. He saw no force in the argument that weak hearts among us would be strengthened when they saw that now ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... engagement to tour for a limited number of weeks. If so, she gazes in despair at her small wardrobe, trying to puzzle out three costumes to be used in the play, for actresses going on tour have usually to provide their ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... cold northern-born man is a strange puzzle. It can only be compared in its first awakening to a very backward spring. In the first place, the previous absence of anything like love has bred a rough and somewhat coarse scepticism about the existence of passion at all. Young Boreas scoffs ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... picture puzzle in one of my boyhood books. The scene depicted was to all appearances a sylvan, peaceful one, with two happy lovers seated on a log beside a brook; but presently, as one gazed at the picture, the head ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... present moment Signol is dead, but Olivier Merson is left; vacuity all along the line. We need not take into account the got-up absurdities and paintings to puzzle Rosicrucian simpletons; nor, again, the feeble imagery of the wealthy idlers or the worthy youths who fancy that if they paint a woman larger than life, that makes her mystical. Silence would befit the subject, only that, unluckily, a well-meaning publisher was struck by ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... to himself. From the looks of the museum, it was highly unlikely that the cat ever would be noticed, even if it stood there forever. If one of the Egyptologists ever did happen to see it, there would be a new puzzle to solve. Which dynasty ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the object of these paradoxes, some have answered that they are a mere logical puzzle, while others have seen in them an Hegelian propaedeutic of the doctrine of Ideas. The first of these views derives support from the manner in which Parmenides speaks of a similar method being applied to all Ideas. ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... no answer in her own consciousness to this puzzle, yet Nona kept the problem at the back of her mind during the following week of strenuous work. Nursing inside the bleak fortress at Grovno was of a more difficult character than any work the three American ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... she finds scarce one stone left upon another at Schloss Hrvoya, she can't cry off her bargain, so it's easy to understand why the Prince is no longer anxious. Exactly why he should seem so eager to get us to our destination is more of a puzzle; but perhaps, as Beechy thinks, it's because he hopes to influence Aunt Kathryn to rebuild. And certainly he has influenced her in some way, for she could hardly wait to leave Venice ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... President's, infrequent receptions by Mrs. Monroe, card-parties and conversation-parties, which at the British minister's were very "elegant," and at the French minister's were more gay. Mons. de Neuville, at his dinners, used to puzzle and astound the plain-living Yankees by serving dishes of "turkeys without bones, and puddings in the form of fowls, fresh cod disguised like a salad, and celery like oysters;" further, he scandalized some and demoralized others by having dancing on (p. 103) Saturday ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... all night, Strake," said Syd, "and it was as great a puzzle to me. I heard the gurgling of water that day when Mr Dallas was hurt, and thought it must be the sea coming in through some crack, and I never thought of it again till I felt that I was dying. Then it came ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... deposit their eggs in accordance with time-honoured plans, and successfully rear large families. Why some individuals should be at such pains to defeat the universal instinct for the propagation and preservation of their species, is a puzzle. Moreover, hundreds of these anomalous nests are excavated some distance beyond high-water, in country where the growth of grass is so strong and dense as to form an almost impenetrable barrier to those infantile turtle which have the fortune to get ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... moderation, as befits sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician. For Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quibbling puzzle of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow. Poor Diodorus went home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died in despair, leaving five "dialectical daughters" behind him, to be thorns in the sides ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... and received none; she could only puzzle over the problem. Why did Miriam behave with so strange a coldness? Her new way of regarding life ought to have resulted in her laying aside that austerity. Mrs. Lessingham hinted an opinion that the change did not go very deep; Puritanism, the ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... are not noble!" cried Margaret, gazing in bewilderment from Belasez to Doucebelle, as if she expected one of them to help her out of the puzzle. ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... this unfortunate, who knew not how to avoid them. He soon learned to distinguish the shriek of a coming shell, and would race off in one direction, looking fearfully back over his shoulder, until a similar sound in another quarter would so puzzle and terrify him that he would stand still awhile until the noise of an explosion utterly demoralized him, when he would frantically dig up the ground, as if ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... invaders, on which a king of a deeper turn of thought, more mindful than others of the law which dooms all the works of men to decay, has caused a relation of the principal events of his reign to be engraved in those curious characters which have for centuries been a puzzle and an enigma. Many tombs also, besides the remains of the renowned or wealthy dead, for whom they have been erected at a cost as extravagant and with art as elaborate as the abodes of the living, contain the full description ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... whole, may puzzle his head over many paragraphs in the Notes, but he will hardly find explanations each time. What the reader has to remember is that the Notes are material used by C. in his creative activity and as such it throws a great deal of light on C.'s ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... obvious effort he wrenched his thought from his present urgency, and brought it to focus upon a puzzle which now seemed oddly like an echo from a ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... I get more enjoyment from the poetry of the verses entitled "The Valley of the Black Pig" because Mr. Yeats's note tells us that it is the scene of Ireland's Goetterdaemmerung, though it is an unquestionable gratification to the puzzle interest I have with my kind, and I would at times be more comfortable were I sure that the "Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door" was he who keeps the gates of the Other World, the real world we shall enter when death sets us ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Mother Graham's demand to know what Dicky had written to me had been appeased by Lillian's offhand remark that country mails were never reliable, and that my letter would probably arrive later, the elder woman went to her own room to puzzle anew over her son's letter, which simply said over again what he had told her over ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... circular 'twould go. The more he tried, the ringlet less inclined To drop the curvature so closely twined. How's this? said Satan, never have I seen Such stubborn stuff wherever I have been; The shades below no demon can produce, That could divine what here would prove of use: 'Twould puzzle hell to break the curling spring, And make a line ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... suffering with numerous boils upon his skin has often been a puzzle to his physician, who has in vain attempted to find some cause for the trouble in the general health alone. Had he known that every boil owed its origin to pus bacteria, which had infected a sweat ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... often see Men of dull and phlegmatick Tempers, arriving to great Estates, by making a regular and orderly Disposition of their Business, and that without it the greatest Parts and most lively Imaginations rather puzzle their Affairs, than bring ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... we resumed our journey, and after a long day of toiling through treacherous marshes and tangled brushwood came at sunset upon an object whose presence there was a wonder, and its past a puzzle,—a ridge or embankment of ten or twelve feet elevation, which, to our astonishment, ran high and dry through the swampy lowlands. In the heart of an interminable forest it stretches along one side of the tangled trail, in some places walling it in, at others crossing ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... character of its chronology. The Assyrian Chronicle has "in the land" for 712, that is, there was no campaign in that year. Yet for that very year, the Annals has an expedition against Asia Minor! It is prism B which solves the puzzle. In the earliest years, it seems to have had the same chronology as the Annals. Later, it drops a year behind and, at the point where it ends, it has given the Ashdod expedition as two years earlier than the Annals. ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead
... was interrupted by the tread of hurried footsteps on deck, and the sudden entrance of a silvery-haired man, whose black coat, vest, and pantaloons contrasted strangely with his heavy oilskin coat and sou'-wester, and tended to puzzle the beholder as to whether he was a landsman in nautical outer garments, or a seaman clothed partly in ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... it; regarding it as a name given to a series of conditions, each of which is necessarily rest. This dogma against the possibility of motion he maintained by four arguments; the second of them is the celebrated Achilles puzzle. It is thus stated: "Suppose Achilles to run ten times as fast as a tortoise, yet, if the tortoise has the start, Achilles can never overtake him; for, if they are separated at first by an interval of a thousand feet, when Achilles has run these thousand feet the tortoise ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the blood run till the sleeve was soaked and dripping, then Rube tore off a strip from his shirt and bandaged my arm up tight. We rolled the sleeve in a ball and threw it down, then took a turn, made a zigzag or two to puzzle the brute, and then went on our line again. For another ten minutes we could hear the barking get nearer and nearer, and then it stopped all of a sudden. On we went, and it was half an hour again before we heard it, and then it was a long ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... structure, suggestive both of warfare and refugee life, was a great puzzle to a party of city young men who not many years ago penetrated these forest solitudes, on a hunting excursion. They concluded that it was built at a time when defense against the Indians was necessary. A writer for a New ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... This puzzle was not on Monday night long in being resolved. Ollivarez entered, and a child in the gallery commenced crying with that persevering quality of tone which threatens long endurance. Mr. Yates could not resist the temptation; and Ollivarez, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... puzzle—to amuse thee, carinissima; for verily thy brain is dull. It is no wonder with the gravity of this court! But happily to-morrow—thou shalt see to-morrow how the people shout to him, for Cyprus doth owe him honor—and Her Majesty more than life. It is the Bernardini ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... glad to do with us. As we sat eating our lunch in the shelter of a hovel by the roadside, while the horses were baiting, a party of the fanatics watched us with growing malignity and a truculent interchange of sentiments of an evidently unfriendly nature. To puzzle them as to our status, I took the pains to repeat in conversation with my colleague the formula of adherence to the faith as it is in Islam, a scrap of Arabic I had learned in Crete, the repetition of which, according ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... laughter, and another strange sensation began to puzzle Mr. Walkingshaw. It was not so much something new as something forgotten which was beginning to return, and it concerned this very sympathetic widow. She was an uncommonly nice woman—really uncommonly: and what an odd pleasure he began to feel in her society! He felt ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... needed the foolish idealists, too. And maybe for a time here on Mars their kind of men and his kind of fools could make one more stab at the ancient puzzle ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... ambition of France and the cautious reactionary despotism of Spain, remained suspended. Students are left, face to face with the sixteenth century, to decipher an inscription that lacks its leading verb, to puzzle over a riddle whereof the solution is hidden from us by the ruin of a people. It must ever be an undecided question whether the Italians, undisturbed by foreign interference, could have passed beyond the artificial and exceptional stage of the Renaissance to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds |
