"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the edge of the water, Bunny saw a place where a tangle of vines, growing over an old stump, had made a place like a little tent, or bower. All at once Bunny remembered a story his mother had read to him. Back he ran to where ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue • Laura Lee Hope
... his fingers closed quickly on the generous tip and once more he lashed his horse. For some time they continued at a rapid pace, now skirting the confines of the park, now plunging into a puzzling tangle of streets; but wherever they went, the other cab managed always to keep them in sight. It even began to creep up, nearer. From his pocket John Steele drew a weapon; his eyes gleamed ominously. The pursuing hansom drew closer; ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... Creatures of his choosing filled the army, handled the supplies, controlled the Indians; and when the King's reproof became too sharp, Bigot simply threatened to resign, which wrought consternation, for no man of ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot's dishonesty during a critical war. Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher. The French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation. The whole era is a theme for ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... go up through the mowing field, The headless aftermath, Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew, Half closes the garden path. And when I come to the garden ground, The whir of sober birds Up from the tangle of withered weeds Is sadder than any words. A tree beside the wall stands bare, But a leaf that lingered brown, Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought, Comes softly rattling down. I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... as to what he might do. This remained ungratified, for he never did anything. He only let it appear by the most indefinite signs possible that he saw what she saw, peering over his paling, and she in the picturesque tangle outside ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... 'what is this? I never asked for anything! Indeed I had no time, for the messenger ran away before I had unravelled my tangle.' ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... morning at the end of my watch, about 4 o'clock, we came to the buoys, proving our anticipations right concerning the crossing of the cables. I went to bed for four hours, and on getting up, found a sad mess. A tangle of the six-wire cable hung to the grapnel, which had been left buoyed, and the small cable had parted and is lost for the present. Our hauling of the other day must have done ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beside him, looking down. From the tangle of leaves and twigs an evil yellow face looked up at us. The features were contorted with agony, but the malignant eyes, wherein light was dying, regarded us with inflexible hatred. The man was pinned beneath the heavy bough; his back ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... humour of it brought us down screaming with laughter in a tangle on the slag-heap. A searchlight broke out from the back of the Hun trenches and ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... sounds, and when a great multitude of birds sing together the sound at a distance of fifty or sixty yards is as of a high wind among the trees, but on a nearer approach the mass of sound resolves itself into a tangle of thousands of individual sounds, resembling that of a great concourse of starlings at roosting time, but more musical in character. It is as if hundreds of fairy minstrels were all playing on stringed and wind instruments of various forms, ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... interlaced with vine and creeper, were all ablaze with blossoms, for this was the wet season, in which nature runs riot. Great trees of strange character rose out of the tangle, their branches looped with giant cables and burdened with flowering orchids or half hidden beneath other parasites. On every hand a vegetable warfare was in progress—a struggle for existence in which the strong overbore the weak—and every trunk was distorted ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... and you will see what troubles it led me into. I never failed to "speak twice," but often forgot the thinking altogether. Margaret means Daisy; but if I was like any flower at all, I should say it was "the lady in the bower." You know it, Prudy, how it peeps out from a tangle of little tendrils? Just so I peeped out, and was dimly seen, through a wild, flying head of hair. Your grandma was ashamed of me, for if she cut off my hair I was taken for a boy, and if she let it grow, there was danger of my getting ...
— Aunt Madge's Story • Sophie May
... midst of this white tangle of trees and bushes and vines, which were like a wild, dumb multitude of death-things pressing ever against him, trying to crowd him away. When he hit them as he passed, they swung back in his face with a semblance of life. If a squirrel chattered ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... cold attic, where the wind wailed mournfully through every open crack, a little girl sat sobbing as if her heart would break. She hugged an old doll to her breast. The paint was gone from its face; the yellow hair was in a tangle; its clothes hung in rags. But she only hugged it closer. It was her doll. They had been friends so long, shared hunger and hardship ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... Like none of these. It does not make men talk and sing and tell their secrets and reveal their love and their hate, and knock their heads against the stars and tangle their feet one ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... voice that called from a huddled group of urchins in the forefront of the crowd, but the child flashed past without heeding, straight up the stone steps where stood a beautiful baby smiling on the crowd. With his bundle of papers held high, and the late morning sunlight catching his tangle of golden hair, Mikky flung himself toward the little one. The sharp crack of a revolver from the opposite curbstone was simultaneous with their fall. Then all ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... circle of light a dozen steps ahead, and showed a litter of sharp stone fragments. And, scattered over them, a tangle of bones shone white; one skull stood upright to stare mockingly from hollow sockets. The sudden white of them was ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... for eighteen months—he often said that life Would not be worth the living, if I would not be his wife. My eyes, though brown, were "blue" to him, my hair a "silken tangle," He'd given me his photograph, and such a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... know! I'm all in a tangle, I guess," answered the American; "but I'll go down and ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... President, Hamilton Fish renewed the negotiations through Motley, the American minister at London, but the latter was unduly influenced by the extreme views of Sumner, chairman of the Senate committee on foreign relations, to whose influence he owed his appointment, and got things in a bad tangle. Fish then transferred the negotiations to Washington, where a joint high commission, appointed to settle the various disputes with Canada, convened in 1871. A few months later the treaty of Washington was signed. Among other things it provided for submitting the Alabama Claims to an arbitration ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... the same weakness that she had encouraged in him was helping take him away from her. And the pitiful tragedy of it was that Peter was helping too, and then challenging her to accept still graver dangers through him. It was a pitiful tangle, and yet one that she ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... mood was not there certainly, but then, now the finishing of the book had become a pressing necessity, the mood never was there; it was like a tantalizing butterfly that flitted a second in his face and then led him a desperate chase through a tangle of undergrowth that ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... Marchen may have been originally suggested by nature-myths. The all-swallowing and all-disgorging beast, wolf, or ogre, may have been derived from a view of Night as the all-swallower. But to disengage natural phenomena, mythically stated, from the human tangle of Marchen, to find natural phenomena in such a palimpsest as Perrault's courtly and artificial version of a French popular tale, is a delicate and dangerous task. In many stories a girl has three balls—one of silver, one of gold, one of diamond—which she offers, in succession, as bribes. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... set out to explore one of these minor streams in your canoe, you have no intention of epoch-making discoveries, or thrilling and world-famous adventures. You float placidly down the long stillwaters, and make your way patiently through the tangle of fallen trees that block the stream, and run the smaller falls, and carry your boat around the larger ones, with no loftier ambition than to reach a good camp-ground before dark and to pass the intervening hours pleasantly, "without offence to God or man." It is ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so, most of all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what he had been feeling about the circle of petticoats. They were all such petticoats! It was just the fineness of his tangle. The sense of that, in its turn, for us too, might have been not unconnected with his putting to his visitor a question that quite passed over her remark. "Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... bushes stir a few rods in front of her, and raised her gun into position, still hiding in the tangle. Albert discovered a movement in front of him, and he took the ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Isobel. The bush behind which he had concealed himself was less than a dozen paces away. He noticed this, and then he observed things which made his heart sink in a strange, cold way. A path had led into the forest at the point where he stood. Now it was almost obliterated by a tangle of last year's weeds and plants. Rookie must have made a new path, he thought. And then, fearfully, he looked about the clearing and at the cabin. Everywhere there was the air of desolation. There was no smoke rising from the chimney. The door was closed. There were no evidences ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... a puzzling and at times a fearful thing. It seems so noble, and it starts as one with morality. But it is a dangerous guide, and can lead us away not only from what is gracious, but also from what is good. Agnes, in this tangle, had followed it blindly, partly because she was a woman, and it meant more to her than it can ever mean to a man; partly because, though dangerous, it is also obvious, and makes no demand upon the intellect. She could not feel that Stephen had full human rights. He was illicit, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... others, some of those beautiful "weeds"—green, red, or brown—which have their use as well as their beauty; for they help to purify the water, just as plants do the air. Perhaps I should not promise more than the brown Tangle and the green Ulva, with its bright lettuce-like leaves; for red seaweeds belong to deep water, and are not easy to find. Many an hour have I spent peering and groping in the little pools at low water in search of these same much-prized rosy-tinted "flowers ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... of the moon glittering through the bushes at the bottom of the chasm. For a moment it looked as though the smooth disc, falling from its place in the sky upon the earth, had rolled to the bottom of that precipice: its ascending movement was like a leisurely rebound; it disengaged itself from the tangle of twigs; the bare contorted limb of some tree, growing on the slope, made a black crack right across its face. It threw its level rays afar as if from a cavern, and in this mournful eclipse-like light the stumps of felled trees uprose very dark, the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the river, a couple of huge trees had at some time been blown down. Round their great trunks as they lay on the ground, young trees and a mass of elder-bushes and other brushwood had sprung up, making a dense thicket. The two logs lay side by side, and in between them, with the tangle of bushes all round and the branches of the other trees overhead, there was a complete ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... physician struggled from his pew across the sittings of three stout dowagers, and knelt, with practiced finger on the little fluttering pulse. The bride's stepmother roused to solicitous and anxious attention. The organ came smartly up again in a hopeless tangle of chords and modulations, trying to get its poise once more. People climbed upon their seats to see, or crowded out in the aisle curiously and unwisely kind, and in the way. Then the minister asked the congregation to be seated; and amid the rustle of wedding finery into seats suddenly ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... Did I seem cross? What a brute you must think me. But to get you into this infernal tangle!—If this old woman is out in the boat she'll have to come back some time. She can't stay out ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... desired, then as a thing, urgent indeed, but private and personal and, therefore, of secondary importance, a thing that must perforce stand over until the settlement of his father's affairs, till finally (emerging from the inextricable tangle in which it had become involved) it presented itself as it was, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... as your leader, your guide, your mentor, we shall go forth into the open, to seek out the bosky dell; to pierce the wildwood tangle; to penetrate the trackless wilderness. Our tents shall be spread alongside the purling brook, hard by some larger body of water. There, in my mind's eye, I see us as we practise archery and the use of the singlestick, both noble sports and much favoured by the early ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... dog had ever deigned to notice, and his master regarded it as an act of treason on the part of his four-footed favourite. When my arms were tired with nursing, I had only to lay my baby on my cloak on deck, and tell Oscar to watch her, and the good dog would lie down by her, and suffer her to tangle his long curls in her little hands, and pull his tail and ears in the most approved baby fashion, without offering the least opposition; but if any one dared to approach his charge, he was alive on the instant, placing his paws over the child, and growling furiously. He would have been ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the grass-stalks, which cannot possibly have anything to do with honey. I watched one fellow to-day through a series of positive trapeze movements from top to bottom and bottom to top of a grass-tangle. When he got through he shook himself, and smoothed off his legs exactly as the circus-men do. Then he took a long pull at a ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... or how anything looked. She had no Aunt Izzie to look after things, so her room soon got into a dreadful state. It was full of dust and confusion, and dirty spoons and phials of physic. She kept the blinds shut, and let her hair tangle every which way, and altogether was ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... other doors of the third tower, or what lay within the towers I did not enter. So that I have had to go on ever since with the knowledge I then acquired, that whatever Reality may ultimately be, it is in the life of the affections, with all its confused tangle of loves and hates, attractions, repulsions, and, worst of all, indifferences, it is in this intricate commerce of souls that we may come nearest to apprehending what perhaps we shall never wholly apprehend, but the quest of which alone, as I believe, gives any significance to life, and makes ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the same. The one who used to sell Corroded tangle-foot to us, is rotting now in hell. This one has got a plate-glass front, he combs his hair quite low, He looks just like the one we knew some ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... said Jane. Mechanically she withdrew the bolt of the gate, which forthwith collapsed in a tangle of barbed wire. Tramping over this snare, Jane faced the doctor as he wiped his brows. "I aint much hand with children," she reminded him. "You better ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... lay nestled within the bosom of this cone at a depth of just where, on the outside, the green began. The sun had set early upon it and it now lay a grayish-blue surface surrounded by a luxuriant tangle of growing things. In a circle about it stood the dark buttress of the lava sides. It was like a turquoise set in stone. The contrast to its surroundings was as startling as a living eye of faultless blue in a ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... unasked," he retorted, and summoned the tangle-headed girl. "Bring us better wine than ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... of sap and new buds in the February haze, a glimmer of green on southern slopes, a distant bird note, tentative, then confident, rippling from the gray tangle of naked thickets. Here and there in hollows the tips of amber-tinted shoots pricked the soil's dark surface; here and there in the sparse woodlands a withered leaf still clinging to oak or beech was forced to let go by the swelling bud at its base and fell ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... and sympathy for our failings, patience for our inadequacies ... we give and get only disappointment.... Partly this is because our needs are the things we hide most jealously from each other, partly because we only see needs subjectively ... this is the explanation of most of the sex muddles that tangle life." ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... unconventional arrangement, as if I had expected in those solitary hours of the night to get on terms with the ship of which I knew nothing, manned by men of whom I knew very little more. Fast alongside a wharf, littered like any ship in port with a tangle of unrelated things, invaded by unrelated shore people, I had hardly seen her yet properly. Now, as she lay cleared for sea, the stretch of her maindeck seemed to me very fine under the stars. Very fine, ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... there in its course stood out quaintly-shaped rocks, some drenched with the fulness of the glorious bath, others catching now and again a sprinkling shower. On each side of the river the sea, clear to its depths where alternate sand and rock made a tangle of capriciously mingled light and shade; its surface, here blue as the still waters of the Grotta Azzurra, there green as the olive, here again red-brown as Carthaginian marble, lay waveless, as with a sense that the beauty was too perfect to be disturbed. Suddenly the scene ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... a complete severance from him, formed ties that would bind her irrevocably to the life she had chosen? He turned from the picture wearily. It was all a tangle. He could only ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... busy in a small cove where a jagged tangle of drift made a mat dating from the last high-water period. She was finishing a hearty breakfast, the remains of a water rat being buried thriftily against future need after the instincts of her kind. When she was done she ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... pritty loud, ez if he'd been hittin' up ther tangle juice, an' ther other feller wuz tryin' ter make him put on ther soft pedal, what Clay calls talkin' pianissimo. But when the booze is in ther wit is out, an' ther feller would shut it down some fer a while, then he'd get a good lungful o' air an' ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... under a jutting rock. Only a bush wren could have hidden its nest more completely—Bruce had been lucky in spying it out. He told White that there was but one unprotected approach—a long unused trail that led down from the cliff-top and ended in a briar tangle fifty feet above the ledge. That trail, it was evident, 'Kep' Queen did ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... had now set in, and many of the stock succumbed almost at the outset, whilst their route proved a veritable tangle of steep spurs and deep ravines. On the 11th of February they came into collision with the natives, and Grey was severely wounded in the hip with a spear. When he had recovered sufficiently to be lifted on to one of the ponies, a fresh start ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... all directions flowing over the brown sandstone. The country is like some parts of rural England—Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleenwort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut. This is the landscape which the two sixteenth-century novelists of Siena, Fortini and Sermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of literature absorbing ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... is natural, I own, that one should tremble to essay These perils, dare the lures that there waylay; But from doubt's tangle you must now break free,— Be of good cheer ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... the purpose of doing business in great waters, are never supposed to stand up, but to squat in the ancient patient manner; and coast, or lake steamers are constructed with a view to render this attitude only possible. Observing an open door in the port side of the cabin, I picked my way over a tangle of bodies and limbs—among them a pair of fairy legs belonging to a dancing-girl—and found myself presently in another gangway, also roofed, and choked up to the roof with baskets of squirming eels. Exit there was none: so I climbed back over all the legs and tried the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... any sort of life as he approached his ranch were a surprise. The few head of cattle and horses he usually met, when riding home along the creek, were nowhere to be seen. Evidently the raid had been made. To survey the whole scene without exposing himself, Laramie rode out of the tangle along the creek bottom and took the first draw that would bring him out among the southern hills. As he emerged from the narrow gorge, his eyes turned in the direction of the house. But where the house should be he saw above the green field, only a black spot with little patches of white smoke drifting ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... expressions, the more we become convinced of the truth of these words. It is not hard to see that our human ties are closely knit with everything and everyone, but it is not always easy to understand how they have come to their sometimes almost hopeless tangle. ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... trampling brought him to his feet. He turned the corner of the saloon just in time to see the buckskin lunge back. The reins snapped like a thread. The pony shook its head and trotted away, circling. Pete followed, hoping that the tangle of dragging rein ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... See, there is one of Milly's favourite views," said the laird, pulling up, and pointing with his whip to the scene in front, where a range of purple hills formed a fine background to the loch, with its foreground of tangle-covered stones; "she revels in depicting that ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... eyes; she wandered blindly on through the wood till she was conscious of sudden light and space. She had come to a clearing, where several huge beeches had been torn up by a storm some years before. Their place had been filled by a tangle of many saplings, and in their midst rose an elder-bush, already showing leaf, amid the bare winterly wood. The last western light caught the twinkling leaf buds, and made of the tree a Burning Bush, first ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... triumphant peacock strutting before his mild little mate, past a fountain whose spray flung out to them a welcome. She led the way with the accustomed step of one who knew and loved the place. They came to a marble seat, half hidden by a tangle of vines and scarlet blossoms, and sheltered by overhanging oleander branches; there she sat down and moved her skirts aside that he might sit close to her. Her brown eyes, raised now to his hungry gray ones, looked at him with ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... after an hour in this bewildering tangle, with the universe filled with sound and strangeness, and the scent of wood smoke mingling with the heat of the air, and the lust of the chase in our veins, we drew to the spot where the animal was guessed to be hiding, and knew that ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... in the season for many new stuffs and trinkets, and the settlement of some affairs, instead of turning all over to Destournier. The goods had come at an exorbitant price, but there had been a great tangle in money matters, and at his death his concessions had passed ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... be best; send him back to the Brothers and to the wise Bishops. They can unravel this tangle. I cannot; I cannot ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... far merely as is necessary to account for the actions of the characters in this or that case; when also the incidents are so accumulated, that little room is left for display of character; when the plot is so wrought up, that the motley tangle of misunderstandings and embarrassments seems every moment on the point of being loosened, and yet the knot is only drawn tighter and tighter: such a composition may well be called a Play of Intrigue. The French critics have made it fashionable to consider this kind ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... fellow Nap is the principle obstacle. He stirs up hell and tommy wherever he goes, and he's never absent for long. Lucas himself admits that his brothers are a care to him. Oh, it's all an infernal tangle. I sometimes think family ties are the ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... Dodging through the tangle of undergrowth and driftwood, they soon emerged on the loose sand above the beach. As Amos Swan had said, the rains had not yet washed away the black embers of the great bonfire, and near by lay a barrel with staves caved in. Looking at the scene, Jeremy ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... when the salmon are spawning in the upper waters of the coast rivers, they become so fat they can hardly move. Certainly I have never been in a country where bear signs were so plentiful. The wood was an almost impassable tangle of vines and undergrowth, and the thought of really ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... utmost caution the two boys approached the fort at a point where its walls extended close to the river's edge. Here, beneath a tangle of wild-grape vines, Has'se removed a great piece of bark that closely resembled the surrounding soil, and disclosing an opening so narrow that but one man at a time might pass it. Leading the way into the passage, that extended underground ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... Things were as bad as ever again, and even worse, because of their contrast with the past I'd conjured up. Grief for the death of Jimmy Beckett mingled with grief for Brian, and anxieties about money, in the dull, sickly way that unconnected troubles tangle themselves together ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... doing already, it wants a man to bring his mind right down to the fact of the present case and its immediate needs. Now the present case, as the doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before,—a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his business to wind as much thread out of as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He has seen just such noses and just such eyes and just such mouths, but he never saw exactly ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... still occupied at the time Clay entered it showed no sign of life. Clay picked his way over the grass-grown paths to the statue of Bolivar, the hero of the sister republic of Venezuela, which still stood on its pedestal in a tangle of underbrush and hanging vines. The iron railing that had once surrounded it was broken down, and the branches of the trees near were black with sleeping buzzards. Two great palms reared themselves in the moonlight at ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... he perceived that the roadway was now a crying mass of wagons, teams, and men. From the heaving tangle issued exhortations, commands, imprecations. Fear was sweeping it all along. The cracking whips bit and horses plunged and tugged. The white-topped wagons strained and stumbled in their ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... silence. For she could not tell him: neither could she answer hotly and break with him for good. Throughout the coming week, at least, their intimacy must remain intact; and beyond it her mind refused to look. She saw herself caught in a tangle of her own making: a hot wave of vexation at her helplessness, at her cruelly false position, fired her face from ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... out. What was that he saw in the vines—not on the snow of the ground, but half way up in the tangle of small branches clinging close to the stone of the lower story, just beneath this window? He would see. Something that glistened, something that could only have got there by falling from this window. Could ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... twisted, and, always threading their way amid a tangle of flowers, the children suddenly passed a corner and found themselves in a forest clearing, where there were a lot of pointed huts—the huts, as they knew at once, ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... never even seen you yet," she exclaimed with something like a smile. "I only know you as two eyes over a tangle of hair that I don't believe you ever either brush or comb. Do you ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... Hedgehog With his sleepy eyes looked at him, Shot his shining quills, like arrows, Saying with a drowsy murmur, Through the tangle of his whiskers, ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... voice was flowing along. It was an article in the Saturday Review she had picked up, and I did not take in what it was about. I was gazing into the glowing logs, and trying to see visions, and gain any inspiration of how to find a way out of this tangle of false impression. I must wait and see, and endeavor when we get more accustomed to one another—somehow to let ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... escaping from the tangle of the thicket, made direct for the spot occupied by his masters—thus ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... I can't do with that knife! Every time I look at it I find somethin' new. Now, I wonder what that is," pointing to a particularly large and ferocious-looking implement which projected from the steel tangle. "I cal'late I've sized up about everything else, but I can't seem to make out what that's for. What do you cal'late ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... is man's soul, like a hound through the woodland, On through the tangle of trees and the green and the gold. Yes, for the senses are goads, but the lineage noble, Not for the warren or hutch to be cornered and sold, Then there is freedom and ease, and a dream that persuades one ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... Bears, an old one and four cubs. "Run for the woods," growled the Mother Grizzly, for she knew that men carried guns. Not that she feared for herself; but the idea of such things among her darlings was too horrible to think of. She set off to guide them to the timber-tangle on the Lower Piney. But ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... follow her path through the tangle of trees, but I could go around, and I did. On a dead spruce wedged in among the living ones I saw the object of her solicitude; a lovely sight it was! Two young bluejays huddled close together on a twig. They were "humped up," with heads drawn down into their shoulders, and breast feathers ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... great voice frightened him still more, and he jumped right up on the dam. There was nothing for him to do now but go across, and it wasn't the best of going. No, indeed, it wasn't the best of going. You see, it was mostly a tangle of sticks. Happy Jack Squirrel or Chatterer the Red Squirrel or Striped Chipmunk would have skipped across it without the least trouble. But Peter Rabbit has no sharp little claws with which to cling to logs and sticks, and right away he was in a peck of trouble. He slipped down between ...
— The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver • Thornton W. Burgess
... have reduced me to silence because you have interrupted me. Ah! there, you have tangled my hair. How provoking you are! It will take me an hour to put it right. You are not satisfied with being a prodigy of impiety, but you must also tangle my hair. Come, hold out your hands and take this ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... and a half the Big Ravine is a narrow cut between perpendicular rock walls thickly clothed to their very summits with bamboo and a tangle of thorny vines. In the bottom of the gorge a mountain torrent foams among huge bowlders but becomes a gentle, slow moving stream when it leaves the cool darkness of the canon to spread itself over the ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... enlivening company of an alarum clock, Jake retired to his couch, which consisted of a flax-stuffed mattress resting on a wooden bedstead, and there he quickly buried himself in a weird tangle of dirty blankets, and went ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... begin to suspect him; on the other hand to leave these in the lurch would be to invite prompt suspicion. Still, they were fifty yards or more in advance, their horses were good, and more space would be gained before the tangle at the gate could be straightened out; therefore he waved his arm, as if making some signal, and, turning again in his saddle, rode on, but ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... easily be "explained away." In fact, the rationalistic explanation of the whole thing is patent and on the surface. There is only one little difficulty, and that, I fancy, is by no means insuperable. In any case this one knot or tangle may be put down as a queer ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels and tangle my hair ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... pathless forest. When he was on such an expedition, and became entangled in dense brush, and maybe a network of "slash" and swamp, he was like an old wizard, as he looked here and there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a thicket, and muttering to himself, "There ain't no speckerlation there." And when the way became altogether inscrutable,—"Waal, this is a reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole." As some one remarked, "The dictionary in his hands is like clay in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... by the crown. A new tithe bill was, however, introduced, by which the clergy should accept something short of what they were entitled to by law. Not only was the tithing system an apparently inextricable tangle, but there was trouble about the renewal of the Coercion Act. Lord Grey, wearied with political life, resigned the premiership, and Lord Melbourne succeeded him,—a statesman who cared next to nothing for reform; not an incapable man, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... against his hitting me, but I knew that the report would bring spectators, and those I most particularly didn't want. Still, I could not see any means of getting the weapon into my own hands without its going off. It was impossible to "rush" him. The dozen yards which separated us was one solid tangle of scrub-bushes interwoven with brambles. It would have taken at least forty seconds to tear through them, and in that time he could most assuredly snap off all six chambers, however big a duffer he might be. This would bring up some of the ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... and with a chessboard fastened to its knees, sat cross-legged on a box-like structure. Upon dropping a coin into a slot in the flat top, two folding-doors in front of this box would open for a few moments, showing a glass-covered interior, which, as far as the back of the box, was filled with a tangle of wheels and pulleys, seeming to preclude the possibility that a human being could hide therein. As soon as these doors closed, a flat space in the chest of the Sheik opened, with a faint purr of machinery to expose internal organs ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... we love our own voice that we cannot bear to hear it mixed with that of others—perhaps drowned; and then our bashfulness tongue-ties us in the hush expectant of our "golden opinions," when all eyes are turned to the speechless "old man eloquent," and you might hear a tangle dishevelling itself in Neaera's hair. But all alone by ourselves, in the country, among trees standing still among untrodden leaves—as now—how we do speak! All thoughts—all feelings—desire utterance; left to themselves they are not happy till they have evolved ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... them steadily; the conspicuous curve of her upper lip came into full play, and her eyes flashed disdainfully, but she said nothing. Her silence exasperated a tangle-haired, cat-faced girl of seventeen years, who, more than half drunk, sat on the ground, clasping her knees with both arms and rocking herself ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... sun-kisses and andromeda; now fording the broad bend of Peter's Creek where it flows, sapphire in the sunshine, out from the moss-draped live-oaks between high banks of red and yellow clays and soft gray sand, to lose itself in a tangle of flowering shrubs; now losing and finding our way among the intricate cross-roads that lead by Bradley's Creek and Darbin Savage's tramway and the "new-blazed road" of the county clerk's itinerary. Suddenly the sky grew dark: thunder began to roll, and—were we in the right road? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell. And the shaggy tossing water shall be bounded on either bank with high granite walls, and on one bank shall be a fretted spire soaring with a jangle of bells, from amid a tangle of masts, and underneath the bells and the masts shall go streets rising up from the strand, streets full of faces, and sweet with the smell of tar and the sea. O captain! will it be morning or night when we come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... toward the land; she saw the wooded island with its fringe of silver birches standing like sentinels to guard the water's edge; she saw the lovely tangle of asters and golden- rod that gave it its name of Royal Island, and the strip of sand on which the waves were lapping gently; but she saw nothing of the west ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... for so long a time that the professor had opportunity to think of many things. And, as he thought, his heart went down—and down. She would refuse. He knew it. The clean edge of her mind would cut through all his tangle of words right to the core of the real issue, And the core of the real issue was not as sound as it would need to be to satisfy her demands. For in that core still lay a possibility, the possibility of love. He had not eliminated love. Many a man has loved after thirty-five. Many a girl ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... spread a fair garden, a tangle of flowers and fruit-trees, watered by a score of streams descending from the slopes of Mount Orontes, and made musical by innumerable birds. But all colour was lost in the soft and odorous darkness of the late September night, and all sounds were hushed in the deep charm of its silence, ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... a lazy eddy, birch-bark canoes were lined two and three deep. Ivory-bladed spears, bone-barbed arrows, buckskin-thonged bows, and simple basket-woven traps bespoke the fact that in the muddy current of the river the salmon-run was on. In the background, from the tangle of skin tents and drying frames, rose the voices of the fisher folk. Bucks skylarked with bucks or flirted with the maidens, while the older squaws, shut out from this by virtue of having fulfilled ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... help recalling the Chancellor's "revelations," but dismissed them as soon as they had crept into his brain. No matter where the clue to the tangle might lie, he told himself that it was not in any act of which Helen ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... threaded the streets—into drays and past clanging cars and through the tangle of wheels and horses and noise—and she told him the story, shouting it above the rumble and hurry of the streets, into the dark ear ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... necessities. His intention was to wander for a couple of months. It would help him to clear his brain from the tangle of financial matters which still obsessed it against his will. He wanted to sweep out the Hudson Bay scheme, Lars Larssen, Olive, and many other matters from the living-room of his mind. He wanted ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... branches were cautiously parted where the foliage was thinnest, but Peace was too much absorbed in watching the topmost boughs—for the music seemed to come from overhead somewhere—to see the startled eyes looking at her through the tangle of leaves and blossoms. All unconscious of her hidden audience, she joyously ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... "Then Sam has ruined our lives." He stood a moment in dazed horror, striving to grasp the terrible tangle. Then he burst forth. "This is some of your cursed Rabbinical laws, it is not Judaism, it is not true Judaism. God ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... come back into such a tangle as this. I did my best but you see I didn't have a minute to get out and take care ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... line was broken down at a point about 200 Yards from Cape Grisnez, and it turned out that a Boulogne fisherman had raised it on his trawl and cut a piece away, thinking he had found a rare species of tangle with gold in its heart. This misfortune suggested the propriety of arming the core against mechanical injury by sheathing it in a cable of hemp and iron wires. The experiment served to keep alive the concession, and the next year, on November 13, 1851, a protected ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... source of the doctrine's strength lies in its simplicity. It is a great mental relief to drop the tangle of confusing considerations, to stop trying to reason out one's course of action, and follow a supposedly reliable guide. The intuition-theory goes naturally with a moral conservatism which dreads the chaos and uncertainty that follow upon the doubt of established moral habits. It ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... really concerned with generalities or great moral principles. He was trying to decide whether he should worm a secret out of Hubbard to throw as a sop to that vile cursed cad, Irons, to keep his foul mouth shut about Ninitta. Heavens! What a tangle he had got into simply because he wanted a decent model for his picture! The abominable prudery and hypocrisy of the time lay behind the whole matter. But this would never do. He must work now; not think of these exciting things. It was hardly ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... of the maid of the loch which rose before him struck him as no unpleasant one. He remembered for one thing how the sun shone through the tangle of her hair. But he had quite forgotten, on the other hand, at what part of his exegesis he had left off. It was, however, a manifest impossibility for him to slip out again. Besides, he was in mortal terror lest Mr. Welsh should ask for his Hebrew ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... reply to further questions: "On a re-examination you will perceive that Mountfort physically did kill Ginotti, which must appear from the latter's paleness." The truth seems to be that Shelley was weary of his puppets, and had no desire to extricate them from the tangle in which they were involved, though he was impatient to see St. Irvyne in print, and spoke hopefully of its "selling mechanically ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... all these specious arguments was that the only way out of the tangle was for her to consent to a nominal engagement to him that would bind her to nothing, and yet would give him the right to send her to New York if Madam Bartlett refused to do so. In answer to Eleanor's doubts and misgivings, he assured her in polyphonic prose that he knew her far better than she ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... once the idea struck her: could it possibly, under any circumstances, have been better for her favorite Grisha if he had never existed? And this seemed to her so wild, so strange, that she shook her head to drive away this tangle of whirling, mad ideas. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy |
