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More "Bungle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to, but I know every idea I have would desert me directly I faced an audience. I'm all right with a definite part that I've got into my head, but I can't make up as I go along, and it's no use asking me. I'd only bungle and stammer, and make an utter goose of myself, and spoil the whole thing. Hallo! There's the supper ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... rogues soon betray themselves by some stupid bungle; but such was not the case with this man; he defended himself, as it were, on all sides, and always kept himself in position so as to oppose to each of his vices the proof positive of the contrary virtues. Thus, if accused of usury, he could prove that he had lent, without interest, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the Marquis is sceptical. I'll admit that I'm pitiably foolish, but I don't want Mrs. Durrand to know how I've bungled her matter until the bungle is corrected." ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... which there were neither roads, provisions, towns, nor navigable rivers. Armies were maneuvered and victories won upon the maps in the office of the Secretary of War. Generals were selected by some inscrutable process which decreed that dull-witted, pompous incapables should bungle campaigns and waste lives. ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... he said firmly, "we're going to move. I'll have enough to buy a young bungle-house up on the hill, even if I don't get anything from Archer. And then I'm going to make up to you for this year—see if ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... Yellow Jack! hie thee hack! hie thee back! To thy damp, drear abode in the jungle; I'll be sober and staid, And drink lemonade, Try and catch me—you'll make a sad bungle, Yellow Jack! ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the end of you, for those police would bungle everything. You need clever fellows with you if you go to sup ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... these staves for his 'mastership,' or a stupid apprentice who only put his nose into the workshop three days ago? Pull yourself together, lad: what devil has entered into you that you are making a bungle of things like this? My good oak wood,—and this your masterpiece! Oh! you awkward, imprudent boy!" Overmastered by the torture and agony which raged within him, Frederick was unable to contain himself any longer; so, throwing the adze from him he said, "Master, it's ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... counter-revolution have the bourgeois state generally on their side and enjoy the backing of the bourgeois establishment, its organizations and its facilities. Since their object is defense, they have no constructive program. Instead they stumble, fumble and bungle as their system flounders into one disastrous crisis ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... happens to me to-night, Lang, keep all this business to yourself until my son comes home. Tell him. No one else. We want to get to the bottom of this thing ourselves without any one else butting in to bungle ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... their side and enjoy the backing of the bourgeois establishment, its organizations and its facilities. Since their object is defense, they have no constructive program. Instead they stumble, fumble and bungle as their system flounders into one disastrous crisis ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... a rock and watched Casey distractedly bungle his cooking. She must have had a great deal of initiative for a squaw, for she plunged straight into the subject which most nearly concerned Casey, and she was frank to the point of appalling him with her bluntness. Casey is a rather case-hardened bachelor, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... without a footstool." Amilcare was to have been the footstool. But then Molly came into play. At first she seemed to make the simple thing simpler. Amilcare was a strong man, but stiff. Grifone was sure he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly handled. ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... tongue. She said: "Now I'M going to say something! After professing to snub Mr. Farmerson, you permit him to snub YOU, in my presence, and then accept his invitation to take a glass of champagne with you, and you don't limit yourself to one glass. You then offer this vulgar man, who made a bungle of repairing our scraper, a seat in our cab on the way home. I say nothing about his tearing my dress in getting in the cab, nor of treading on Mrs. James's expensive fan, which you knocked out of my hand, and for which he never even apologised; but you smoked all the way home without having the ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... understand each other, lest we bungle. As the plan was mine, I take the choice of parts. There is a stain upon my conscience, M'sieu." McElroy spoke simply from his heart, as was his wont. "Throughout this long journey it has lain heavy. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... that box hides some great mystery of science. We shall find that the light will open it in some way: either by striking on some substance, sensitive in a peculiar way to its effect, or in releasing some greater power. I only trust that in our ignorance we may not so bungle things as to do harm to its mechanism; and so deprive the knowledge of our time of a lesson handed down, as by a miracle, through ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... his German friends will let him forget it. They will find it hard to forgive a bungle that leaves a first-class munition factory absolutely undamaged in the hands of their enemies. I don't envy Schenk his job of persuading them that ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... gaucherie [Fr.], act of folly, balourdise^; botch, botchery^; bad job, sad work. sprat sent out to catch a whale, much ado about nothing, wild- goose chase. bungler &c 701; fool &c 501. V. be unskillful &c adj.; not see an inch beyond one's nose; blunder, bungle, boggle, fumble, botch, bitch, flounder, stumble, trip; hobble &c 275; put one's foot in it; make a mess of, make hash of, make sad work of; overshoot the mark. play tricks with, play Puck, mismanage, misconduct, misdirect, misapply, missend. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... can predict just what another person will do. However, I feel sure you can trust O'Connel. I never knew him to bungle anything yet." ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... the past week had so managed to bungle the slinging in of a small torpedo-boat on the "Vortigern", that the boat had broken the crutches in which she rested, and was herself being repaired in the dockyard under ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... that hypothesis at all; it's all very well to talk of facing the worst; but in a case of this kind a man's first duty is to his own nerve. Is there any answer to No. 3? Is there any possible good side to such a beastly bungle? There must be, of course, or where would be the use of this double-entry business? And—by George, I have it!' he exclaimed; 'it's exactly the same as the last!' And he hastily ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... boulevards and about Paris. Indeed, I have just seen a drunken couple full of wine and friendship, strongly reminding one of a duel ending in a jolly breakfast. And who is to blame for this? Nobody knows. All agree that it is a bungle,—the fault of maladministration and want of tact. Certainly the National Guards at Montmartre had no right to hold the cannons belonging to the National Guards, as a body, or to menace the reviving trade ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... scarce knew what was happening—only made out that she distinguished the right one, the one that should have been shown him, as blue or green or purple, and intimated that her other friend, her fellow-Olympian, as Berridge had thought of him from the first, really did too clumsily bungle matters, poor dear, with his officiousness over the red one! She went on really as if she had come for that, some such rectification, some such eagerness of reunion with dear Mr. Berridge, some talk, after all the tiresome music, of questions really urgent; while, thanks to the supreme ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... I turned the garment That no rent should be left behind, My eye caught an odd little bungle Of mending ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... and speedily too, or the resultant mischief cannot be undone. I appeal to you because you are a woman, and we men are prone to bungle ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir. Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises. —How long before this leg is done? Perhaps an hour, sir. Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (turns to go). Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... "There's been a bungle, and the sooner we are rid of it the better. There's a boat at ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... What makes you so white and queer?" his mother asked, trying to pull on her stockings, and in her trepidation jamming her toes into the heel, and drawing her shoe over the bungle thus made at the bottom of ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... will not make a bungle of things," the Colonel said; "I wonder who has started them upon the war-path?" Then going to the door ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... mother that's Lady Gloster still — I'm going to up and see her, without it's hurting the will. Here! Take your hand off the bell-pull. Five thousand's waiting for you, If you'll only listen a minute, and do as I bid you do. They'll try to prove me crazy, and, if you bungle, they can; And I've only you to trust to! (O God, why ain't he a man?) There's some waste money on marbles, the same as M'Cullough tried — Marbles and mausoleums — but I call that sinful pride. There's ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... resolution by the language employed by MR. ARROWSMITH in No. 189., where, with little modesty, and less courtesy, he styles the commentators on Shakspeare—naming in particular, KNIGHT, COLLIER, and DYCE, and including SINGER and all of the present day—criticasters who "stumble and bungle in sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness as not to tax the powers of a third-form schoolboy to explain." In order to bring me "within his danger," he actually transposes two lines ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... directly Rhetta Thayer's anxious, expectant, appealing brown eyes. "For if he should fail, bungle it, and have to throw down his hand before he'd won the game, it would be Katy-bar-the-door for that man. He'd have to know how far the people of this town wanted him to go before starting, and there's only one boundary—the limit of the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... was almost his usual self as he rose and came towards Caffyn; his hand, however, still trembled a little, causing him to bungle in replacing the letter and drop the envelope, which the other obligingly picked up ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... undisturbed of those who are decayed and petrified. I do not know if I make my meaning clear. As our habit, we ignore or minimize all sex difficulties as much as we can; we hesitate and compromise and bungle over every reform because we are afraid of what may happen if we probe down to the real bottom of what needs to be done. We have neither the courage of our bodies or of our souls. This is why so ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the matter, until it is all familiar to her. So of any other ordinary business. Yet when it comes to teaching, anything like definite study or observation of the mode of doing it, is almost unknown! It is really no exaggeration to say that many teachers bungle in their work as egregiously as would a woman who should put yarn into a churn, and expect, after a proper amount of churning, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... remains, you see; the evil is as great as ever, greater, indeed. But this is not all. Look at the warp which the plate has got near the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it! Instead of curing the original defect, we have produced a second. Had we asked an artisan practised in 'planishing,' as it is called, he would have told us that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting part. He would have taught us how ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... had used the blue kerchief at her neck for a tourniquet and had checked the hemorrhage, he was still patiently awaiting a better opportunity to employ his knife. It would not do to bungle the affair. And he thought he knew how it could be properly done—if he could get her head in the crook ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... anyone as yet?" remarked the inspector, with an air of dissatisfaction. In criminal mysteries the police often bungle from the outset, and to me it appeared as though, having no clue, they were bent ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... I'm not yet quite ready to spring my trap," she replied. "When the time comes, I must have assistance, but I want to get all my evidence shipshape before I call on the Secret Service to make the capture. I can't afford to bungle so important a thing, you know, and this ten dollar bill, so carelessly given the storekeeper, is going to put one powerful bit of evidence in my hands. That was a bad slip on old Cragg's part, for he has been very cautious in covering his tracks, until now. But I surmise that Mary Louise's pleading ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... said seriously, "Yes; he must go away. And I don't envy you having to tell him. I suppose you will bungle it, of course." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his first sight of hero and room simultaneously. The room must, as it were, be an anteroom, anon converted into a presence-chamber by the hero's entry. And let not the hero be in any fear that he will bungle his entry. He has but to make it. The effect is automatic. He will stand out by merely coming in. I would but suggest that he must not, be he never so hale and hearty, bounce in. The young man must not be startled. If the mountain had come to Mahomet, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... time for it," the president explained. "When the society was instituted, we took a few of them, but merely to get our hands in. We didn't want to bungle good cases, you see, and it did not matter so ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... given a man clear-eyed enough to see that a woman by ordinary is nourished much as he is nourished, and is subjected to every bodily infirmity which he endures and frets beneath, I do not often bungle matters. But when a fool begins to flounder about the world, dead-drunk with adoration of an immaculate woman—a monster which, as even the man's own judgment assures him, does not exist and never will exist—why, he becomes as unmanageable as any other maniac when ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... This amusing bungle of the French brother fairly represents my condition during the past few weeks. I have not been altogether sure that I was even "somewheres." Preaching one Sunday in Dover, N.H., the next in Talladega, Ala., the next at Santee Agency, Neb., the ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... didn't bungle," said the older man. "I never witnessed a finer—ahem! In fact, we all agree on that. My boy, you have a great future before you. You are ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... cal'late. And then Bos'n turns up right in your own town, right acrost the road from you! By the big dipper! it's enough to make a feller believe that the Almighty does take a hand in straightenin' out such things, when us humans bungle 'em—it is so! ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Gloster still. I'm going to up and see her, without it's hurting the will. Here! Take your hand off the bell-pull. Five thousand's waiting for you, If you'll only listen a minute, and do as I bid you do. They'll try to prove me a loony, and, if you bungle, they can; And I've only you to trust to! (O God, why ain't he a man?) There's some waste money on marbles, the same as McCullough tried— Marbles and mausoleums—but I call that sinful pride. There's some ship bodies for burial—we've carried 'em, soldered ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... condition of all reasoning; and in some cases not even a security. Our most familiar inferences are all made before we learn the use of general propositions; and a person of untutored sagacity will skillfully apply his acquired experience to adjacent cases, though he would bungle grievously in fixing the limits of the appropriate general theorem. But though he may conclude rightly, he never, properly speaking, knows whether he has done so or not; he has not tested his reasoning. Now, this is precisely what forms of reasoning do for us. We do not ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... that period London revolved in its usual course, reproducing its annual number of events—its births, deaths, and marriages; its plans, plots, and pleasures; its business, bustle, and bungle; its successes, sentiments, and sensations; its facts, fancies, and failures—also its fires; which last had increased steadily, until they reached the imposing number of about ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... knots, by which I can measure the exact places in which the tent-pegs should be struck, for the eye is a deceitful guide in estimating squareness. (See "Squaring.") It is wonderful how men will bungle with a tent, when they are not properly ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... the very edge of the ledge; went down with a cat-jump and landed with all four feet planted close together. He had no mind to go on sliding in spite of himself, and the bluff was certainly steep enough to excuse a bungle. ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... manner in which some of the underlings on the stage went through the little they had to say and do: there seemed no reason why the "sticks" should be so provokingly sticky; and it surprised me that a man who could accost one fluently enough at the stage door, should make such a bungle as some of them did in a message of some half dozen words "in character." But when I first became initiated into the mysteries of amateur performances, and saw how entirely destitute some men were of any notion of natural acting, and how they made a point ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... heart to refuse it, the poor drunken wretch having a wife and ten children; he withdraws the job from sober, plainly competent, and meritorious Mr. Sparrowbill, generally short of work too; discourages Sparrowbill; teaches him that he too may as well drink and loiter and bungle; that this is not a scene for merit and demerit at all, but for dupery, and whining flattery, and incompetent cobbling of every description;—clearly tending to the ruin of poor Sparrowbill! What harm had Sparrowbill done ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... lover could be expected to like. You must introduce me to Douglas Dale as your cousin, and by the name of Carton. It is sufficiently like my real name to prevent the servants knowing my name is changed, since they always bungle over the 'Carrington.' As Victor Carrington, Dale might refuse to know me, and certainly would not form any intimacy with me, and that he should form an intimacy with me ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... their patients, because they are not willing to take time for thorough preparation. Half-trained lawyers stumble through their cases, and make their clients pay for experience which the law school should have given. Half-trained clergymen bungle away in the pulpit, and disgust their intelligent and cultured parishioners. Many an American youth is willing to stumble through life half prepared for his work, and then blame society because he is ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... sluggish ass, or bullock slow; These mounted on the croup of centaur sit: Those perched on eagle, crane, or estridge, go. Some male, some female, some hermaphrodit, These drain the cup and those the bungle blow. One bore a corded ladder, one a book; One a dull file, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Marmont, impatient at the delay of his two brigades of infantry (which by some bungle in the starting did not reach the foot of the mountain before daylight), had pushed his horsemen up the hill and managed to cut off and silence the outposts without their firing a shot. Encouraged by this he pressed on to the very gates of the town, and had actually entered the ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... see what's the matter with me to-day," he said under his breath. "This is the first time I ever tried to mock anybody and made such a bungle of it.... Perhaps I'm trying to sing too fast," he added. "So I'll sing slower ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... lest Nature bungle, That in certain ways she errs: The cobra in the jungle, The crotalus in the sod, Evil and good are hers;— Murderers and torturers! Ye, too, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... treason, and on murther: And whatsoeuer cunning fiend it was That wrought vpon thee so preposterously, Hath got the voyce in hell for excellence: And other diuels that suggest by treasons, Do botch and bungle vp damnation, With patches, colours, and with formes being fetcht From glist'ring semblances of piety: But he that temper'd thee, bad thee stand vp, Gaue thee no instance why thou shouldst do treason, Vnlesse to dub thee with the name of Traitor. If that same ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of the flesh of citizens, and they never appear in society. The diplomatic impolitely dub them fools. Be they that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for conduct and integrity. This sort of social prizemen infests the administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They diminish and level ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... laughing; while the others who were looking on expected to see me bungle as the rest had been doing. My friends collected round me and prepared to help me up. I did not undeceive them, but suddenly jumping on one side I ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... willing," I said, before I had a chance to bungle it worse, "quite willing to exchange information on your people for the same about my own. However, I doubt that your people will find this planet congenial to an invader who ignores the natives ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... cried, "What do you call this? What work is this, Frederick? Has a journeyman been preparing these staves for his 'mastership,' or a stupid apprentice who only put his nose into the workshop three days ago? Pull yourself together, lad: what devil has entered into you that you are making a bungle of things like this? My good oak wood,—and this your masterpiece! Oh! you awkward, imprudent boy!" Overmastered by the torture and agony which raged within him, Frederick was unable to contain himself any ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... missed a trail that was to have cut the distance greatly. Billy clung breathlessly to his cramped position and waited. He hoped they wouldn't get out and try to find the way, for then some of them might see him, and he was so stiff he was sure he would bungle getting out of the way. But after a breathless moment the car started on more slowly, and finally turned down a steep rough place, scarcely a trail, into the deeper woods. For a long time they went along, slower and slower, into the blackness of night it seemed. There was no ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... what would the world be without us women?" thought Janice—and gave up all idea of running away and leaving Frank to bungle the situation. ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... displeased, that she might refuse to admit there was anything wrong and forbid him to refer to the matter again or even send him away altogether. And he felt he was not strong enough to risk that. No, he must know where he stood first. He must understand his position, so as not to bungle the thing. Hilliard was right. They must find out what the syndicate was doing. ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... fingering his wineglass. "I have always looked upon Oscar Fischer as a brilliant and far-seeing man. He was one of those who set themselves deliberately to win America for the Germans. A more idiotic bungle than he has made of things I could scarcely conceive. He has reproduced the diplomatic methods which have made Germany unpopular throughout the world. He has tried bullying, cajolery, and false-hood, and last of all he has plunged into crime. No German-American ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... one of his "filmy" seizures, was "in a frightful sort of dream," and bungled the murder: made an incomplete job of it. Half-strangled men and women have often recovered. In Jasper's opium vision and reminiscence there was no resistance, all was very soon over. Jasper might even bungle the locking of the door of the vault. He was apt to have a seizure after opium, in moments of excitement, and HE HAD BEEN AT THE OPIUM DEN THROUGH THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 23, for the hag tracked him from her house in town to Cloisterham on ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... began to put his plan into execution. He set himself conscientiously to hit the notes awry, or to bungle every touch. Melchior cried out, then roared, and blows began to rain. He had a heavy ruler. At every false note he struck the boy's fingers, and at the same time shouted in his ears, so that he was like to deafen him. Jean-Christophe's face twitched ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... "They may bungle through with a few bearings for a while," said Mr. Reisinger, "but they won't last long. It stands to reason that a woman can't do man's work and ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... green he's after. I wonder who told him about the two thousand." He scratched his head in sudden perplexity. "I wonder what's got into Dick Cronk. He's too blamed good, all of a sudden. That brother of his might try the job, but—no, he'd bungle it. Besides, he'd probably stick a knife into Davy if the kid made a motion." He began chewing a fresh cigar; his pop-eyes were leveled with unseeing fierceness at a certain patch in the "main top"; his brain was seeing nothing but that packet of banknotes. How to get it into ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... privilege justly. Constantly he rode his district on the business of his beloved Forest. His beautiful sorrel, Star, with his silver-mounted caparisons, was a familiar figure on all the trails. When a man wanted his first Special Privilege, he wrote the Supervisor. The affair was quite apt to bungle. Then California John saw that man personally. After that there was no more trouble. The countryside dug up the rest of California John's name, and conferred on him the dignity of it. John had heard it scarcely at all for over thirty years. Now he rather liked ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... tigers creeping Through the glade Where our prey lay sleeping, Unafraid, In some Eastern jungle? Better so. I am sure the snarling Beasts could never bungle Life as men do, darling, ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... and wonder what I shall do with my naked life sheltered only by the garment of this woman's love, which I have accepted and cannot repay. I groan aloud when I reflect on the irremediable mess, hash, bungle I have made of things. Did ever sick man wake up to such a hopeless welter? Can you be surprised that I regarded it with dismay? Of course, there is a simple way out of it, and into the shadowy world ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... good luck Bert managed to obey. But his nerve was gone for the afternoon. He made a sad bungle of all the work, though he was not ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... his "filmy" seizures, was "in a frightful sort of dream," and bungled the murder: made an incomplete job of it. Half-strangled men and women have often recovered. In Jasper's opium vision and reminiscence there was no resistance, all was very soon over. Jasper might even bungle the locking of the door of the vault. He was apt to have a seizure after opium, in moments of excitement, and HE HAD BEEN AT THE OPIUM DEN THROUGH THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 23, for the hag tracked him from her house in town to Cloisterham ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... and scathing, Mr. Stafford," he said; "but I do recognize the force of what you say. Scotland Yard is beneath contempt. I know of cases—but I will not detain you with them now. They bungle their work terribly at Scotland Yard. A detective should be a man of imagination, of initiative, of deep knowledge of human nature. In the presence of a mystery he should be ready to find motives, to construct them and put them into play, as though they were real—work till a clue was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... however, managed to bungle his pounce for the fraction of a second, and that is long enough for most of the wild-folk. Came a mad fluttering, a beating of wings, a quick mix-up, and, before he knew, that cat found himself frantically chasing that ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... speakin' why the sentence ain't proper? Here, take you a drink from the old whiskey flask. Ar' not dry? Well, I am, an' will drink ter yer, pard, An' wish that this court will not bungle this task. There, the old lasso circles your neck like a fixture; Here, boys, take the line an' wait fer the word; I am sorry, old boy, that your claim has gone under; Fer yer don't meet yer fate like ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... people who find it a hard struggle to live, or who exist in dreadful poverty and sometimes starve, instead of trying to understand the causes of their misery and to find out a remedy themselves, spend all their time applauding the Practical, Sensible, Level-headed Business-men, who bungle and mismanage their affairs, and pay them huge salaries for doing so. Sir Graball D'Encloseland, for instance, was a 'Secretary of State' and was paid L5,000 a year. When he first got the job the wages were only a beggarly L2,000, but as he found it ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... canny to bungle, With footsteps too cunning to swerve, They swing through the heights of the jungle, These stalwarts of infinite nerve; Blithe sailors who heed not the breezes Which play round their riggings and spars, Lithe gymnasts who live on trapezes ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... go to the country without plan, preparation, or vocation, to make a living. They usually start to build a bungalow but seldom get further than the bungle. Don't build anything without plan. Get a comfortable house proof against cold and heat as soon as possible and, above all, well ventilated. At present the air in the country is good, because the farmers shut all the bad air ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... begin with this one," said his father, pointing to a red-and-white heifer. "She is better-natured than the others, and, as I dare say your fingers will bungle a little at first, that is a ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... and Lewis have qualified for the College of Surgeons," says he. "They are both born anatomists. Your job under the arm was the worst bungle of the two, egad, for Lewis put his sword, pat as you please, between two of my organs (cursed if I know their names), and not so ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... still. I'm going to up and see her, without it's hurting the will. Here! Take your hand off the bell-pull. Five thousand's waiting for you, If you'll only listen a minute, and do as I bid you do. They'll try to prove me a loony, and, if you bungle, they can; And I've only you to trust to! (O God, why ain't he a man?) There's some waste money on marbles, the same as McCullough tried— Marbles and mausoleums—but I call that sinful pride. There's ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... That would be the end of you, for those police would bungle everything. You need clever fellows with you if you go to sup with ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... know every idea I have would desert me directly I faced an audience. I'm all right with a definite part that I've got into my head, but I can't make up as I go along, and it's no use asking me. I'd only bungle and stammer, and make an utter goose of myself, and spoil the whole thing. Hallo! There's the supper bell. ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... beings have misapplied the laws of life in such a way as to kill those who are dear to us; rather, I think, we have never learned those laws except in their merest rudiments. We are not yet prepared to do more than bungle the good things offered us on earth, and more or less misuse them. We misuse them ourselves; we teach others to misuse them; we create systems of which the pressure is so terrible that under it the weak can do nothing but die. We give them no chance. We squeeze the life out of them. And then ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... figure of despair, she leaned against the wall to support the faintness that had so suddenly stolen the strength from her limbs, trying desperately to think of some way to save her father from this madness. She was sure he would bungle it and be caught eventually, and she was equally sure he would never let himself be taken alive. Her helplessness groped for some way out. There must be some road of escape from this horrible situation, and as she sought blindly for it the ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... bungle of a camp but if the single occupant realized it he did not seem to care a whit for he sat serenely in the doorway of the tent so interested in a book that he did not hear Paul Nez and his ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... night. Vauquelin was a patriot hero, who had done well at Louisbourg the year before, and who was to do well at Quebec the year after. But, of course, he was not a member of the Bigot gang. So he was set aside in favour of a parasite, who made a hopeless bungle of the whole affair. ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... what order of government will best suit-in the event of our getting happily out of the Union!—our refined and very exacting state of society;—whether an Empire or a Monarchy, and whether we ought to set up a Quattlebum or Commander dynasty?-whether the Bungle family or the Jungle family (both fighting families) will have a place nearest the throne; what sort of orders will be bestowed, who will get them, and what colored liveries will best become us (all of which grave questions threaten us with a very extensive war of ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... away. During that period London revolved in its usual course, reproducing its annual number of events—its births, deaths, and marriages; its plans, plots, and pleasures; its business, bustle, and bungle; its successes, sentiments, and sensations; its facts, fancies, and failures—also its fires; which last had increased steadily, until they reached the imposing number of about ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... having a wife and ten children; he withdraws the job from sober, plainly competent, and meritorious Mr. Sparrowbill, generally short of work too; discourages Sparrowbill; teaches him that he too may as well drink and loiter and bungle; that this is not a scene for merit and demerit at all, but for dupery, and whining flattery, and incompetent cobbling of every description;—clearly tending to the ruin of poor Sparrowbill! What harm had Sparrowbill done me that I should so help to ruin him? And I couldn't save the insalvable ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... (gainst all proportion) didst bring in Wonder to waite on treason, and on murther: And whatsoeuer cunning fiend it was That wrought vpon thee so preposterously, Hath got the voyce in hell for excellence: And other diuels that suggest by treasons, Do botch and bungle vp damnation, With patches, colours, and with formes being fetcht From glist'ring semblances of piety: But he that temper'd thee, bad thee stand vp, Gaue thee no instance why thou shouldst do treason, Vnlesse to dub thee with the name of Traitor. If that same Daemon that hath gull'd thee thus, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... executioner is slow and awkward. He has seen butchery come quite too close to his own flesh! Still somewhat unnerved, he prepares himself for the task with clumsy movements and halting fingers. The master bids him hurry—Jean takes his time, he's not going to bungle the job.... ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... in his published letters, (he then commanded a Brigade in McCall's Division), writes October 24th, "Regarding Ball's Bluff, as far as I can gather, the whole affair was a bungle from beginning to end. The worst part of the business is that at the very time our people were contending against such odds, the advance of McCall's division was only 10 miles off and had we been ordered forward instead ...
— Ball's Bluff - An Episode and its Consequences to some of us • Charles Lawrence Peirson
... such an innocent old love," she went on, "that he did it badly. He had been told to do it by the Jesuits and he made a bungle of it. He thought that he could make a schoolgirl answer a question if she did not want to. And no one was afraid of him. He is a dear, good, old saint, and will assuredly go to Heaven. He is not a Jesuit, you know, but he is afraid of them, as everybody else is, I think—" She paused and ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... that," thought Morris. "Indeed, I don't know that I had better dwell on that hypothesis at all; it's all very well to talk of facing the worst; but in a case of this kind a man's first duty is to his own nerve. Is there any answer to No. 3? Is there any possible good side to such a beastly bungle? There must be, of course, or where would be the use of this double-entry business? And—by George, I have it!" he exclaimed; "it's exactly the same as the last!" And he hastily re-wrote ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... They seemed somehow to have missed a trail that was to have cut the distance greatly. Billy clung breathlessly to his cramped position and waited. He hoped they wouldn't get out and try to find the way, for then some of them might see him, and he was so stiff he was sure he would bungle getting out of the way. But after a breathless moment the car started on more slowly, and finally turned down a steep rough place, scarcely a trail, into the deeper woods. For a long time they went along, slower and slower, into the blackness ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... dark, and hang there reefing while the vessel jerked so that you might have fancied she must send his ribs through the skin. I say it was nothing, because he performed this feat nearly every winter night, after the midnight haul, and the spectacle grew common. I never knew him bungle over a rope or make a bad slip, and it was simply a pleasure to see him steer. He never threw away an inch, and his way of stealing foot by foot was worthy of any jockey. Sometimes when I was at the wheel and running a little to leeward of another vessel, he would say, "I reckon I can ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... asked for more men, and gave convincing reasons that they were needed, that the country responded. Day by day the newspapers made the best of bad news from the front, and day by day did the readers thereof conclude that England was doing well, and they "supposed that she would bungle through." No man of prophetic foresight had yet risen to say "This is a life and death struggle for us; we need every man in the country, and every shilling to win the war." The common talk was that we had stepped in to ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... chopper. "The conditions say with steel," he said; "only with steel, and I should bungle with a knife. You must look the other way. Now help ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... death (he seems to be preparing for this at 285). His buying poison might wreck this plan. But it may be that his objection to poison springs merely from contempt for Othello's intellect. He can trust him to use violence, but thinks he may bungle anything that requires adroitness. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... altogether was who you were. I naturally couldn't place you at all. I saw that you recognized one of us when you came in, and that you were watching our table pretty attentively in the glass. I had a horrible suspicion for a moment that you were a Scotland Yard man, and were going to bungle the whole business by arresting Hoffman. That was why I sent you my card; I knew if you were at the ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... there. He will commit in one meal every betise that a senllion fresh from the plow-tail is capable of, and he will continue to repeat those faults. He is as complete a heavy-footed, uncomprehending, bungle-fisted fool as any mem-sahib in the East ever took into her establishment. But he is according to law a free and independent citizen—consequently above reproof or criticism. He, and he alone, in this insane city, will wait at ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... in plenty. Isoult was able to feed herself and her husband, and keep both from exhaustion, without suspicion from him or much cost to herself. The second time of doing it, it is true, she went tremblingly to work, and was like to bungle it. What one may do on the flood one may easily miss on the ebb; moreover, it was night-time, she was tired, and not sure of herself. Nevertheless, she was fed, and Prosper was fed. Next morning she was as cool as you choose, singled out her hind as she walked into the herd, went on ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... have his first sight of hero and room simultaneously. The room must, as it were, be an anteroom, anon converted into a presence-chamber by the hero's entry. And let not the hero be in any fear that he will bungle his entry. He has but to make it. The effect is automatic. He will stand out by merely coming in. I would but suggest that he must not, be he never so hale and hearty, bounce in. The young man must not be startled. If the mountain had come to Mahomet, it would, we may be sure, have ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... on a horse without a bit; This backs the sluggish ass, or bullock slow; These mounted on the croup of centaur sit: Those perched on eagle, crane, or estridge, go. Some male, some female, some hermaphrodit, These drain the cup and those the bungle blow. One bore a corded ladder, one a book; One a dull file, or ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... answering directly Rhetta Thayer's anxious, expectant, appealing brown eyes. "For if he should fail, bungle it, and have to throw down his hand before he'd won the game, it would be Katy-bar-the-door for that man. He'd have to know how far the people of this town wanted him to go before starting, and there's only one boundary—the limit of the law. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... would the world be without us women?" thought Janice—and gave up all idea of running away and leaving Frank to bungle the situation. ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... the joking, but acted, after the manner of greenhorns, as though the Coal Tar Maggie required our undivided attention. I rounded her well to windward of the Ghost, and Nicholas ran for'ard to drop the anchor. To all appearances it was a bungle, the way the chain tangled and kept the anchor from reaching the bottom. And to all appearances Nicholas and I were terribly excited as we strove to clear it. At any rate, we quite deceived the pirates, who took huge ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... said, before I had a chance to bungle it worse, "quite willing to exchange information on your people for the same about my own. However, I doubt that your people will find this planet congenial to an invader who ignores the natives as ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... a turn up and down in silence, and then the Boy began again, boyishly: "I say, do you suffer from nerves? You made rather a bungle of it the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... loves a man she ought to be willing to trust him over a dreadful bungle until he could straighten things out and make good ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... anything that hurteth the common sort of our artificers more than haste, and a barbarous or slavish desire to turn the penny, and, by ridding their work, to make speedy utterance of their wares: which enforceth them to bungle up and despatch many things they care not how so they be out of their hands, whereby the buyer is often sore defrauded, and findeth to his cost that haste maketh waste, ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... the unimaginative and the uneducated, who are apt to ridicule the organs or to be repelled by them. Many women confess that they are revolted by the sight of even a husband's complete nudity, though they have no indifference for sexual embraces. I think that the stupid bungle of Nature in making the generative organs serve as means of relieving the bladder has much to do with this revulsion. But some women of erotic temperament find pleasure in looking at the penis of a husband or lover, in handling it, and kissing it. Prostitutes ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... muttered, clinching his fist involuntarily. "You don't deserve that such as she should dream of you. I'd kiss her myself if I was used to the business, but I should only make a bungle, as I do with everything, and might kiss you, little shaver," ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... should be eloquent beyond my best previous effort, there was little or no chance that anything I might say would avail to placate either magnate or to abate either's hostility toward me. And I knew that, in my dazed condition, the chances were that I would bungle ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... their dews upon a just man'. But that was written in Palestine, where rain is a rare blessing; there and then in the cold evening they would have done better to have warmed the righteous. There is no controlling them; they mean well, but they bungle terribly. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... said T. A. Buck. "You've rubbed up against life, and you know. They've always been sheltered, but now they want to know. Well, naturally they're going to bungle and bump their heads a good many times before ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... of terrified men carried off the first brigade along with it in hopeless rout. Ramses and Menna were left with only a few picked chariots of the household troops, and the whole Hittite army was coming on. But though King Ramses had made a terrible bungle of his generalship, he was at least a brave man. Leaping into his chariot, and calling to the handful of faithful soldiers to follow him, he bade Menna lash his horses and charge the advancing Hittites. Menna was no coward, but when he saw the thin line of Egyptian troops, and looked at the ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... as I have remarked," said the monk, "I could not order my speech to propose anything of this kind to a young maid; I should so bungle that I might spoil all. You ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... statements), and he determined on a diversion. He felt morally certain that the only "confidential" communication the veteran post commander had received from any superior in a week was the stinging rap from division headquarters anent the bungle he had made in Ray's affair, and on general principles he felt that he couldn't let ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... the first place she'll be sorry for you, because you will make such a bungle of it. Trial is your ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... Another stroke. Well, there is one, and another, and another. The prominence remains, you see; the evil is as great as ever, greater, indeed. But this is not all. Look at the warp which the plate has got near the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it! Instead of curing the original defect, we have produced a second. Had we asked an artisan practised in 'planishing,' as it is called, he would have told us that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting part. He would have taught us how to give ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Sammy, with fearful joy. "Bet that old basket would hold all the other cats too. Wish I had the bunch of 'em—Spotty, and Almira, and Popocatepetl, and Bungle, and Starboard, Port, Hard-a-Lee and Main-sheet! And Almira's got four kittens of her own somewhere. And ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... R. C. burst out. "Look at him! When the leader broke I thought he was lost. I'm sick yet. Didn't you almost bungle that?" ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... predict just what another person will do. However, I feel sure you can trust O'Connel. I never knew him to bungle anything yet." ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... commonplace things. He praised Scribe's works, which they had put on the stage again; he announced that the famous Guillery, his senior in the comedy line, would be execrable in this performance, and would make a bungle of it. He complained of being worried to death by the pursuit of a great lady—"You know, stage box Number Six," and showed, with a conceited gesture, a letter, tossed in among the jars of paint and pomade, which smelled of musk. Then, ascending to subjects ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... cooks. blunder &c (mistake) 495; etourderie gaucherie [Fr.], act of folly, balourdise^; botch, botchery^; bad job, sad work. sprat sent out to catch a whale, much ado about nothing, wild- goose chase. bungler &c 701; fool &c 501. V. be unskillful &c adj.; not see an inch beyond one's nose; blunder, bungle, boggle, fumble, botch, bitch, flounder, stumble, trip; hobble &c 275; put one's foot in it; make a mess of, make hash of, make sad work of; overshoot the mark. play tricks with, play Puck, mismanage, misconduct, misdirect, misapply, missend. stultify oneself, make a fool of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Duane viewed both Augustus approach and the man stop at the hospital, and having expected a bungle, sat to hear; but at Albumblatt's mottled face he stood up quickly and said, "What's the matter?" And hearing, burst out: "Casey! Why, he was worth fifty of—Go on, Mr. Albumblatt. What next did you achieve, sir?" And as the tale was told he cooled, ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... Billy Bungle (that was his name) was not by any means an idiot. He knew perfectly well that two and two made four, and yet, such a queer chap as he was, he would take any amount of pains ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... suspense and almost panicky apprehension, he was not going to act impulsively or thoughtlessly. He knew that if he could only present a convincing case to his superiors, they would forgive him his presumption. If he made a bungle it might go hard with him. Anyway, he could not, or ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... trooper fails to fasten the brooch. His hand shakes, he is nervous, and it falls off. "Would any one believe this?" says he, catching it as it drops and looking round. "I am so out of sorts that I bungle at an easy ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... sort of thing that an affianced lover could be expected to like. You must introduce me to Douglas Dale as your cousin, and by the name of Carton. It is sufficiently like my real name to prevent the servants knowing my name is changed, since they always bungle over the 'Carrington.' As Victor Carrington, Dale might refuse to know me, and certainly would not form any intimacy with me, and that he should form an intimacy with me is ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... shall not interfere, where even parents may not. Make your own matches, and let others make theirs; especially if you have bungled your own. One such bungle is ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... and hat. Then, having trundled me to the front gate, he picked me up—luckily I have always been a small spare man—and deposited me in the car. I am always nervous of anyone but Marigold trying to carry me. They seem to stagger and fumble and bungle. Marigold's arms close round me like an iron clamp and they lift me with the mechanical ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... should be spared in drilling the men to do it well. I like to use a piece of string, marked with knots, by which I can measure the exact places in which the tent-pegs should be struck, for the eye is a deceitful guide in estimating squareness. (See "Squaring.") It is wonderful how men will bungle with a tent, when they are not properly ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... step there; but it was just like me to bungle," continued Gaston. "I knew that the Jew, Henriques, often had transactions with the Marquis de Fleury. I took the diamonds to another Jew from whom I concealed my name, and suggested his taking them to Henriques, hinting that the marquis would probably become their purchaser. The ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... firmly, "we're going to move. I'll have enough to buy a young bungle-house up on the hill, even if I don't get anything from Archer. And then I'm going to make up to you for ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... the household, saving Sandyface, the cat, and her four kittens—Spotty, Almira, Popocatepetl and Bungle. And now there was the goat, ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... "I'm getting old too," I said. "And I'm useless at everything. I only make a bungle of everything I try. But I'll be your true friend to the end ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... After professing to snub Mr. Farmerson, you permit him to snub YOU, in my presence, and then accept his invitation to take a glass of champagne with you, and you don't limit yourself to one glass. You then offer this vulgar man, who made a bungle of repairing our scraper, a seat in our cab on the way home. I say nothing about his tearing my dress in getting in the cab, nor of treading on Mrs. James's expensive fan, which you knocked out of my hand, and for which he ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... you court at all, court scientifically. Bungle whatever else you will, but do not bungle courtship. A failure in this may mean more than a loss of wealth or public honors; it may mean ruin, or a life often worse than death. The world is full ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... what was happening—only made out that she distinguished the right one, the one that should have been shown him, as blue or green or purple, and intimated that her other friend, her fellow-Olympian, as Berridge had thought of him from the first, really did too clumsily bungle matters, poor dear, with his officiousness over the red one! She went on really as if she had come for that, some such rectification, some such eagerness of reunion with dear Mr. Berridge, some talk, after all the tiresome music, of questions really urgent; while, thanks to the supreme strangeness ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... up without a footstool." Amilcare was to have been the footstool. But then Molly came into play. At first she seemed to make the simple thing simpler. Amilcare was a strong man, but stiff. Grifone was sure he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... who was watching Jimmy and me at the station that night was probably acting on his own initiative. It was the same detective who had made such a bungle of following Jimmy in the afternoon and I guess it nearly cost him his job. He must have been feeling pretty well worked up at the way things turned out. If it hadn't been for Mr. Wade's timely arrival there's ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... drove Mr. Conant to Millbank and then the boy took the car to the blacksmith shop to have a small part repaired. The blacksmith made a bungle of it and wasted all the forenoon before he finally took Bub's advice about shaping it and the new rod was attached ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... to point out that since the sea presented an impassable barrier, the sand spit, drawn out to a fine point, was just the spot where a piccaninny might be easily rounded up, if it were detected in a preoccupied mood. I suggested that I might be at hand to encounter any untoward results in case of a bungle, but was met with the positive assertion that no "debil-debil," however young and unsophisticated, would "come out" if it smelt a ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Copperas? I have known many a butler bungle more at a cork than he does; and pray tell me who did you ever see wait ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... o' mug you are to be trusted with a job like this," said Braddle. "I did think Potter was better up in his work, I did. A pretty bungle he'll make ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... the rural, saw the head of a horse top the rise. In the saddle sat Ramon, hatless, his black hair flung back from his forehead, a gun in his hand. Waring drew a deep breath. Would Ramon bungle it by calling out, or would he have nerve enough to make an end of it on ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... considering only the desire to remain undisturbed of those who are decayed and petrified. I do not know if I make my meaning clear. As our habit, we ignore or minimize all sex difficulties as much as we can; we hesitate and compromise and bungle over every reform because we are afraid of what may happen if we probe down to the real bottom of what needs to be done. We have neither the courage of our bodies or of our souls. This is why so ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... yet quite ready to spring my trap," she replied. "When the time comes, I must have assistance, but I want to get all my evidence shipshape before I call on the Secret Service to make the capture. I can't afford to bungle so important a thing, you know, and this ten dollar bill, so carelessly given the storekeeper, is going to put one powerful bit of evidence in my hands. That was a bad slip on old Cragg's part, ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... confessed. "I never heard of any such bungle as this before by an engineer. Why, Harry, this hillside averages an eight and a third grade, yet Black's field notes show it to be only a three per cent. grade. Hang it, the fellow must have played the ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat, fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to ...
— Progress and History • Various
... the same ideas through the medium of Spanish, Lawrence made such a bungle of it that Manuela, instead of expressing sympathy, began to struggle so obviously with her feelings that the poor Englishman gave up the attempt, and good-naturedly joined his companion in a little burst of laughter. They were in the midst of this when the door ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... the outer boulevards and about Paris. Indeed, I have just seen a drunken couple full of wine and friendship, strongly reminding one of a duel ending in a jolly breakfast. And who is to blame for this? Nobody knows. All agree that it is a bungle,—the fault of maladministration and want of tact. Certainly the National Guards at Montmartre had no right to hold the cannons belonging to the National Guards, as a body, or to menace the reviving trade and tranquillity of Paris, by means of guns turned ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... designs for the plough, the caravan, the cart—or whatever other creature she models, be it but an asse's foal, you are sure to have the thing you wanted; and yet at the same time should so eternally bungle it as she does, in making so simple a thing as ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... them to the heart," another replied. "Each take one, and do not bungle over it. As you strike I will open the door ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... treason and on murder; And whatsoever cunning fiend it was That wrought upon thee so preposterously Hath got the voice in hell for excellence; And other devils that suggest by treasons Do botch and bungle up damnation With patches, colours, and with forms being fetch'd From glist'ring semblances of piety. But he that temper'd thee bade thee stand up, Gave thee no instance why thou shouldst do treason, Unless to dub thee with the name of traitor. If that ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... finely wrought out,' he thought to himself. 'Even damnation may be finely imagined for me in the night. I have come so far. Now I must get clarity and courage to follow out the theme. I don't want to botch and bungle even damnation.' ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... indisposition of matter. Whereas an omnipotent moving power, as it could dispatch its work in a moment, so would it always do it infallibly and irresistibly, no ineptitude and stubbornness of matter being ever able to hinder such a one, or make him bungle ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the depths of his experience with her, arranged a course of conduct. " If I just leave her to herself she will come around all right, but if I go 'striking while the iron is hot,' or any of those things, I'll bungle it surely." ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... had many ways to blind, but he was never clear at it by making a show of religion, though he cheated his wife therewith; for he was, especially by those that dwelt near him, too well known to do that, though he would bungle at it as well as he could. But there are some that are arch villains this way; they shall to view live a whole life religiously, and yet shall be guilty of these most horrible sins. And yet religion in itself is never the worse, nor ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Powers of Evil smiled sardonically when they noted that the light which she evoked for her pious exercise lit the hand of Moussa Isa to murder, providing opportunity. Moussa Isa weighed chances and considered. He did not want to bungle it and lose his revenge and his life too. Would he be seen if he struck now? The light fell on the very spot for the true infallible death-stroke. Should he strike now, here, in the ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... lest we bungle. As the plan was mine, I take the choice of parts. There is a stain upon my conscience, M'sieu." McElroy spoke simply from his heart, as was his wont. "Throughout this long journey it has lain heavy. Though I hold against you one grave offence, yet I grieve deeply that it ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... appear in society. The diplomatic impolitely dub them fools. Be they that or no, they augment the number of those mediocrities beneath the yoke of which France is bowed down. They are always there, always ready to bungle public or private concerns with the dull trowel of their mediocrity, bragging of their impotence, which they count for conduct and integrity. This sort of social prizemen infests the administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They diminish and level down the country ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... to be my wife's servant maid," he said. "When she is alive she will do all our work and mind the house. But you are not to order her around, Bungle, as you do us. You must treat ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... Kitwater. "If you know where he is, you ought to be with him yourself instead of down here. You are paid to conduct the case. How do you know that your man may not bungle it, and that we may ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... And then Bos'n turns up right in your own town, right acrost the road from you! By the big dipper! it's enough to make a feller believe that the Almighty does take a hand in straightenin' out such things, when us humans bungle 'em—it ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... river is the feature of Oxford, to my mind. I expect I shall take to boating furiously. I have been down the river three or four times already with some other freshmen, and it is glorious exercise, that I can see, though we bungle and cut ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... I do mean, Toc," returned Adams, with a grim smile. "Moreover, I want you to make no bungle of it. Don't let your narves come into play. Just take a grip like a brave man, heave away wi' the force of a windlass, an' ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... know," Reade confessed. "I never heard of any such bungle as this before by an engineer. Why, Harry, this hillside averages an eight and a third grade, yet Black's field notes show it to be only a three per cent. grade. Hang it, the fellow must ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... "The conditions say with steel," he said; "only with steel, and I should bungle with a knife. You must look the other way. Now help me with ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... there; but it was just like me to bungle," continued Gaston. "I knew that the Jew, Henriques, often had transactions with the Marquis de Fleury. I took the diamonds to another Jew from whom I concealed my name, and suggested his taking them to Henriques, hinting that the marquis would probably become their ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... plainly visible; that the visitor must see and be scornfully amused by it. Yet, with really extraordinary cordiality, he was holding out his right hand in salutation. Here again my awkwardness made me bungle. What he meant by his gesture I could not think. Some amusing trick, perhaps. It did not occur to me in that moment of self-abasement that he wished to shake ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... a question or two about the catastrophe. "Scandalous sort of bungle," he pronounced it, being alike ignorant of the strength of the rapids, and fain, as an honest soldier of Haviland's army, to take a discrediting view of anything done by Amherst's. He waxed ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... business of his beloved Forest. His beautiful sorrel, Star, with his silver-mounted caparisons, was a familiar figure on all the trails. When a man wanted his first Special Privilege, he wrote the Supervisor. The affair was quite apt to bungle. Then California John saw that man personally. After that there was no more trouble. The countryside dug up the rest of California John's name, and conferred on him the dignity of it. John had heard it scarcely at all for over thirty years. Now he rather liked the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... turned the garment That no rent should be left behind, My eye caught an odd little bungle Of ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... makes you so white and queer?" his mother asked, trying to pull on her stockings, and in her trepidation jamming her toes into the heel, and drawing her shoe over the bungle thus made at the bottom ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... and stab them to the heart," another replied. "Each take one, and do not bungle over it. As you strike I will open the ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... that suggest by treasons Do botch and bungle up damnation With patches, colours, and with forms being fetch'd From glistering semblances ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Nature bungle, That in certain ways she errs: The cobra in the jungle, The crotalus in the sod, Evil and good are hers;— Murderers and torturers! Ye, too, were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Through the glade Where our prey lay sleeping, Unafraid, In some Eastern jungle? Better so. I am sure the snarling Beasts could never bungle Life as men do, ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... know if it will strike the reader that I am setting out to discuss the queer, unwise love relationship and my bungle of a marriage with excessive solemnity. But to me it seems to reach out to vastly wider issues than our little personal affair. I've thought over my life. In these last few years I've tried to get at least a little wisdom out ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... a wise father knows his own son. And he is not wise, you know. Are you, most reverend? No, faith, or you would never have begot me. No, faith, nor enlist me to do murder neither. For I do but bungle it, you see. And make a fool of my ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... and things and bending them to his will, he felt, now, the same compulsive prod of mastery. He wanted to tell her that he loved her and that there was nothing else for her to do but marry him. And yet he did not obey the prod. Women were fluttery creatures, and here mere mastery would prove a bungle. He remembered all his hunting guile, the long patience of shooting meat in famine when a hit or a miss meant life or death. Truly, though this girl did not yet mean quite that, nevertheless she meant much to him—more, now, than ever, as he rode beside her, glancing ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... of Yarmouth must have pieced out the erosions of 'the vermin' by one or two hotheaded guesses of his own. But I am sure, both from the general matter of the letters, and from Squire's own bodily presence, that he did not forge them. Carlyle has made a bungle of the whole business; and is fairly twitted by the Athenaeum for talking so loud about his veneration for Cromwell, etc., and yet not stirring himself to travel a hundred miles to see and save such memorials ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... always the first to protest against the injustice of, say, Spain or Russia, without knowing what it is all about. I love you for it. But do you think you are helping things along? You rush at it and bungle it and the result is nil,—if not worse.... And, look you, your art has never been more weak and emaciated than now, when your artists claim to be taking part in the activities of the world. It is ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... demand," but, if not well paid for his labours, the tattooer could make his sitter suffer in more ways than one. He could adroitly increase the acute anguish which had, as a point of honour, to be endured without cry or complaint; or he could coolly bungle the execution of the design, or leave it unfinished, and betake himself to a more generous customer. A well-known tattooing chant deals with the subject entirely from the artist's standpoint, and emphasises the business principles upon which he went to work. It was this song that ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... I'M going to say something! After professing to snub Mr. Farmerson, you permit him to snub YOU, in my presence, and then accept his invitation to take a glass of champagne with you, and you don't limit yourself to one glass. You then offer this vulgar man, who made a bungle of repairing our scraper, a seat in our cab on the way home. I say nothing about his tearing my dress in getting in the cab, nor of treading on Mrs. James's expensive fan, which you knocked out of my hand, and for which he never even apologised; but you smoked ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... some accident in the Park, the man said. The pony had swerved and thrown little Lord Elster: thrown him right under the other pony's feet, as it seemed. The servant made rather a bungle over his news, ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... security. Our most familiar inferences are all made before we learn the use of general propositions; and a person of untutored sagacity will skillfully apply his acquired experience to adjacent cases, though he would bungle grievously in fixing the limits of the appropriate general theorem. But though he may conclude rightly, he never, properly speaking, knows whether he has done so or not; he has not tested his reasoning. Now, this is precisely what forms of reasoning do for us. We do not need them to ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... viewed both Augustus approach and the man stop at the hospital, and having expected a bungle, sat to hear; but at Albumblatt's mottled face he stood up quickly and said, "What's the matter?" And hearing, burst out: "Casey! Why, he was worth fifty of—Go on, Mr. Albumblatt. What next did you achieve, sir?" And as the tale was told he ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... dullness of comprehension. But whatever the cause, my failing to understand led to a rather careful study of the old Book itself until somewhat clearer light has come. And now in this convention I am anxious to put the truth as simply as I may that others may not blunder and bungle along and lose precious time ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... announced Phil after a bit, rising to his feet; while a look of growing concern began to come upon his face. "I was silly to let him take the risk. Ought to have known Larry would bungle it, if there was half a chance. And now, Tony, what had we better do, follow his tracks, or head straight in the direction ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... play, and my task is finished until the end of the rehearsals which will be looked after by my friend and collaborator, Paul Meurice. All his care does not prevent the working out of the first part from being a horrible bungle. One needs to see the putting-on of a play in order to understand that, and if one is not armed with humor and inner zest for the study of human nature in the actual individuals whom the fiction is to mask, there is much to rage about. But I don't rage any more, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... hang there reefing while the vessel jerked so that you might have fancied she must send his ribs through the skin. I say it was nothing, because he performed this feat nearly every winter night, after the midnight haul, and the spectacle grew common. I never knew him bungle over a rope or make a bad slip, and it was simply a pleasure to see him steer. He never threw away an inch, and his way of stealing foot by foot was worthy of any jockey. Sometimes when I was at the wheel and running a little to leeward of another vessel, he would say, "I reckon I ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... were neither roads, provisions, towns, nor navigable rivers. Armies were maneuvered and victories won upon the maps in the office of the Secretary of War. Generals were selected by some inscrutable process which decreed that dull-witted, pompous incapables should bungle campaigns and ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... through the jungle; They swim through a network of leaves; They clamber with never a bungle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... published letters, (he then commanded a Brigade in McCall's Division), writes October 24th, "Regarding Ball's Bluff, as far as I can gather, the whole affair was a bungle from beginning to end. The worst part of the business is that at the very time our people were contending against such odds, the advance of McCall's division was only 10 miles off and had we been ordered forward instead of back, we ...
— Ball's Bluff - An Episode and its Consequences to some of us • Charles Lawrence Peirson
... see her, without it's hurting the will. Here! Take your hand off the bell-pull. Five thousand's waiting for you, If you'll only listen a minute, and do as I bid you do. They'll try to prove me a loony, and, if you bungle, they can; And I've only you to trust to! (O God, why ain't he a man?) There's some waste money on marbles, the same as McCullough tried— Marbles and mausoleums—but I call that sinful pride. There's some ship bodies for burial—we've carried 'em, soldered and packed; Down in their wills ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... take that flask from Mr. Andersen's hands, and see what we can draw out of that. This, you know, is a liquid which we have just made up from copper and nitric acid, whilst our other experiments were in hand; and though I am making this experiment very hastily, and may bungle a little, yet I prefer to let you see what I do rather than ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... Marquis is sceptical. I'll admit that I'm pitiably foolish, but I don't want Mrs. Durrand to know how I've bungled her matter until the bungle is corrected." ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... a girl loves a man she ought to be willing to trust him over a dreadful bungle until he could straighten things out and make ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... the right one, the one that should have been shown him, as blue or green or purple, and intimated that her other friend, her fellow-Olympian, as Berridge had thought of him from the first, really did too clumsily bungle matters, poor dear, with his officiousness over the red one! She went on really as if she had come for that, some such rectification, some such eagerness of reunion with dear Mr. Berridge, some talk, after all the tiresome music, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... joking, but she said seriously, "Yes; he must go away. And I don't envy you having to tell him. I suppose you will bungle it, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "Bungle, my dear! You are too little to recollect—in fact, you weren't there. But the furniture was actually in the vans and on the move before the lease for Wickham Place was signed, and Emily took train with baby—who was ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... an innocent old love," she went on, "that he did it badly. He had been told to do it by the Jesuits and he made a bungle of it. He thought that he could make a schoolgirl answer a question if she did not want to. And no one was afraid of him. He is a dear, good, old saint, and will assuredly go to Heaven. He is not a Jesuit, you know, but he is afraid of them, ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... think so too, and they set about their work with the activity of wild-cats. But "the more hurry the less speed" is an old adage; and so it proved in the present case, the men on the mizzen topsail-yard managing so to bungle matters that when, on the expiration of two and a half minutes—the outside limit of time allowed by the skipper for reefing a topsail—Captain Pigot closed his watch with a snap and replaced it smartly ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... most places for three boats to row abreast. I expect I will take to boating furiously: I have been down the river three or four times already with some other freshmen, and it is glorious exercise; that I can see, though we bungle and cut crabs desperately ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... dwell on that hypothesis at all; it's all very well to talk of facing the worst; but in a case of this kind a man's first duty is to his own nerve. Is there any answer to No. 3? Is there any possible good side to such a beastly bungle? There must be, of course, or where would be the use of this double-entry business? And—by George, I have it!" he exclaimed; "it's exactly the same as the last!" And he hastily re-wrote ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... SCIENTIFICALLY.—If you court at all, court scientifically. Bungle whatever else you will, but do not bungle courtship. A failure in this may mean more than a loss of wealth or public honors; it may mean ruin, or a life often worse than death. The world is full of wretched ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... I said, before I had a chance to bungle it worse, "quite willing to exchange information on your people for the same about my own. However, I doubt that your people will find this planet congenial to an invader who ignores the natives as ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... drilling the men to do it well. I like to use a piece of string, marked with knots, by which I can measure the exact places in which the tent-pegs should be struck, for the eye is a deceitful guide in estimating squareness. (See "Squaring.") It is wonderful how men will bungle with a tent, when they are not properly drilled ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... be the end of you, for those police would bungle everything. You need clever fellows with you if you go to sup with ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... they are not willing to take time for thorough preparation. Half-trained lawyers stumble through their cases, and make their clients pay for experience which the law school should have given. Half-trained clergymen bungle away in the pulpit, and disgust their intelligent and cultured parishioners. Many an American youth is willing to stumble through life half prepared for his work, and then blame society because he ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... interfere, where even parents may not. Make your own matches, and let others make theirs; especially if you have bungled your own. One such bungle is one ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... fingers too canny to bungle, With footsteps too cunning to swerve, They swing through the heights of the jungle, These stalwarts of infinite nerve; Blithe sailors who heed not the breezes Which play round their riggings and spars, Lithe gymnasts who live on ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... "Loch Leven," about three-quarters of a pound, and in excellent condition. Only two years ago he was put into the stream with five hundred others as a yearling. The next two rising fish are too much for us, and we bungle them. One sees the line, owing to our throwing too far above him, and the other is frightened out of his life by a bit of weed or grass which gets hitched on to the barb of the hook, and lands bang on to his nose. These accidents will happen, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... believe it is moral to regulate life by fear, considering only the desire to remain undisturbed of those who are decayed and petrified. I do not know if I make my meaning clear. As our habit, we ignore or minimize all sex difficulties as much as we can; we hesitate and compromise and bungle over every reform because we are afraid of what may happen if we probe down to the real bottom of what needs to be done. We have neither the courage of our bodies or of our souls. This is why so ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... balourdise[obs3]; botch, botchery[obs3]; bad job, sad work. sprat sent out to catch a whale, much ado about nothing, wild-goose chase. bungler &c. 701; fool &c. 501. V. be unskillful &c. adj.; not see an inch beyond one's nose; blunder, bungle, boggle, fumble, botch, bitch, flounder, stumble, trip; hobble &c. 275; put one's foot in it; make a mess of, make hash of, make sad work of; overshoot the mark. play tricks with, play Puck, mismanage, misconduct, misdirect, misapply, missend. stultify oneself, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... or displeased, that she might refuse to admit there was anything wrong and forbid him to refer to the matter again or even send him away altogether. And he felt he was not strong enough to risk that. No, he must know where he stood first. He must understand his position, so as not to bungle the thing. Hilliard was right. They must find out what the syndicate was doing. ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... before? I might have known. It's the long green he's after. I wonder who told him about the two thousand." He scratched his head in sudden perplexity. "I wonder what's got into Dick Cronk. He's too blamed good, all of a sudden. That brother of his might try the job, but—no, he'd bungle it. Besides, he'd probably stick a knife into Davy if the kid made a motion." He began chewing a fresh cigar; his pop-eyes were leveled with unseeing fierceness at a certain patch in the "main top"; his brain ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... consider the faults to which he is liable. Deficiencies of person I have already handled; and the following I think is a fair statement of their mental imperfections. Pantomimes cannot all be artists; there are plenty of ignorant performers, who bungle their work terribly. Some cannot adapt themselves to their music; they are literally 'out of tune'; rhythm says one thing, their feet another. Others are free from this fault, but jumble up their chronology. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... what's the matter with me to-day," he said under his breath. "This is the first time I ever tried to mock anybody and made such a bungle of it.... Perhaps I'm trying to sing too fast," he added. "So I'll sing ...
— The Tale of Bobby Bobolink - Tuck-me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... service, my good man," he said. "Dispatch the business quickly and do not, I pray you, bungle ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... far as to say that we human beings have misapplied the laws of life in such a way as to kill those who are dear to us; rather, I think, we have never learned those laws except in their merest rudiments. We are not yet prepared to do more than bungle the good things offered us on earth, and more or less misuse them. We misuse them ourselves; we teach others to misuse them; we create systems of which the pressure is so terrible that under it the weak can do nothing but die. We give them ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... first sight of hero and room simultaneously. The room must, as it were, be an anteroom, anon converted into a presence-chamber by the hero's entry. And let not the hero be in any fear that he will bungle his entry. He has but to make it. The effect is automatic. He will stand out by merely coming in. I would but suggest that he must not, be he never so hale and hearty, bounce in. The young man must not be startled. If the mountain had come to Mahomet, it ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... it is not the sort of thing that an affianced lover could be expected to like. You must introduce me to Douglas Dale as your cousin, and by the name of Carton. It is sufficiently like my real name to prevent the servants knowing my name is changed, since they always bungle over the 'Carrington.' As Victor Carrington, Dale might refuse to know me, and certainly would not form any intimacy with me, and that he should form an intimacy with me is essential ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... not make a bungle of things," the Colonel said; "I wonder who has started them upon the war-path?" Then going to the door he ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again; I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir. Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises. —How long before this leg is done? Perhaps an hour, sir. Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (turns to go). Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... but I seen her,—the pretty lady,—your girl,—standing in the aisle right ahin' the c'ndct'r, jes' es I wuz pullin' the trigger knowed her right off, 'ith her eyes shinin' like two stars; an' I couldn't run no resks. I ain't never bin no bungler at my trade, but I hed to bungle this time 'cause I couldn't shoot your girl! So I turned it jes' in time an' took it mese'f. She seen how 'twas 'ith me that time at your house, an' she he'ped me git away. I sent her word I'd do the same fer her ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... talk (usually a carefully constructed monologue) was stately, formal and precise. He used no slang, and retained scarcely a word of his boyhood's vernacular. The only emotional expression he permitted himself was a chuckle of glee over an intellectual misstatement or a historical bungle. Novels, theaters, music ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... that I admitted to myself the true state of my mind. I felt sure Florence was innocent, but I knew appearances were strongly against her, and I feared I should bungle the case because of the very intensity of my desire not to. And I thought that Fleming Stone, in spite of evidence, would be able to prove what I felt was the truth, that Florence was guiltless of all knowledge of or complicity ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... defend yourself, isn't it?" and she almost laughed. "You're going to surprise them at the trial? You won't tell what your thoughts are to anyone, for fear they shall make a bungle of it? Half these barristers, I'm told, are very muddle-headed, and make all sorts of foolish admissions; and you're going to defend yourself in your own ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... and down in silence, and then the Boy began again, boyishly: "I say, do you suffer from nerves? You made rather a bungle of it the other day, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... men carried off the first brigade along with it in hopeless rout. Ramses and Menna were left with only a few picked chariots of the household troops, and the whole Hittite army was coming on. But though King Ramses had made a terrible bungle of his generalship, he was at least a brave man. Leaping into his chariot, and calling to the handful of faithful soldiers to follow him, he bade Menna lash his horses and charge the advancing Hittites. Menna was no coward, but when he saw the thin line ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... at Louisbourg the year before, and who was to do well at Quebec the year after. But, of course, he was not a member of the Bigot gang. So he was set aside in favour of a parasite, who made a hopeless bungle of the ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... the blue kerchief at her neck for a tourniquet and had checked the hemorrhage, he was still patiently awaiting a better opportunity to employ his knife. It would not do to bungle the affair. And he thought he knew how it could be properly done—if he could get her head in the crook ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... had climbed the altitudes of life; the cracksman still stumbled in the valleys. If he had a ready cunning in the planning of an enterprise, he must needs bungle at the execution; and had he not been associated with George Smith, a king of scoundrels, there would be few exploits to record. And yet for the craft of housebreaker he had one solid advantage: he knew the locks and bolts of Edinburgh as he knew his primer—for ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Evil smiled sardonically when they noted that the light which she evoked for her pious exercise lit the hand of Moussa Isa to murder, providing opportunity. Moussa Isa weighed chances and considered. He did not want to bungle it and lose his revenge and his life too. Would he be seen if he struck now? The light fell on the very spot for the true infallible death-stroke. Should he strike now, here, in the midst ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... be executed, I would desire nothing more delightful than to have one's head "done" by a Celestial executioner. The Coreans, on the contrary, have not developed the same skill in these difficult matters; and, what with their blunt and short swords, what with their misjudgment of distances, they bungle matters most cruelly. Of course, they are, nevertheless, supposed to kill their victims with single blows, instead of raining them down by the dozen, hacking the unfortunate creatures in a most fearful manner, and lopping off their arms or gashing their bodies before ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... Moses!" howled Duncan. "Ye can trust the Scotch to bungle things a'thegither. McLean was only meanin' to show ye all confidence and honor. He's gone and set a high price for some dirty whelp to ruin ye. I was just tryin' to show ye how he felt toward ye, and I've gone an' give ye that worry to bear. Damn ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... this is an occasion! I do hope everybody will have a good time. There's Blue Bonnet. I hear her voice. She's early, isn't she? Amanda, take a peek at the favors, will you, and tell Sarah not to get them mixed. I have explained it all to her a dozen times, but when one doesn't dance, one is apt to bungle." ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... "I bungle not," answered Achmet, sternly. "Forty years ago, on the third of next month, you, Jasper Southdown Kingsland, were born beneath this ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... frightened at singing before my mother; I cannot bear to distress her accurate ear with my unsteady intonation, and the more I think of it, the colder my hands grow and the hotter my face, the huskier my voice and the flatter my notes; I bungle over accompaniments that I have at my fingers' ends, and forget words I know as well as my alphabet; in short, I feel like a wretch, and I sing like a wretch, and I make wretched all my hearers. My mother's own nervous terror when she had ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... than usual, chiefly because I don't stammer and bungle, and take half an hour to read twenty verses of the Bible, and also because I discarded all the endless repetitions and unmeaning phrases, which took up half the time of their unmeaning harangues. About an hour sufficed for the morning-service; the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sunshine," interrupted Rosa, a tinge of contempt in her smile and accent. "Or—to drop metaphors, at which I always bungle—it is my belief that it is easy for happy people to be good. All this talk about the sweetness of crushed blossoms, throwing their fragrance from the wounded part, and the riven sandal-tree, and the blessed uses of adversity, is outrageous ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... sounds of the night. First the galloping of horses on the courtyard overhead; then the furious shouts of the soldiers, and, finally, the mad cries of the crowd. "Damn it—they've given us the slip." "Yes; they've crawled off like rats from a sinking ship." "Curse it all, it's only a bungle." This in the Spanish tongue, and then in the tongue of his own country Ben Aboo heard the guttural shouts of his own people: "Sidi, try the palace." "Try the apartments of his women, Sidi." "Abd er-Rahman's gone, but Ben Aboo's hiding." "Death to the tyrant!" "Down ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... ARROWSMITH in No. 189., where, with little modesty, and less courtesy, he styles the commentators on Shakspeare—naming in particular, KNIGHT, COLLIER, and DYCE, and including SINGER and all of the present day—criticasters who "stumble and bungle in sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness as not to tax the powers of a third-form schoolboy to explain." In order to bring me "within his danger," he actually transposes two lines ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... want you to think I bungle everything in that manner," he said, "for I don't. I want to work with you, and I want to ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... dispersing themselves about the outer boulevards and about Paris. Indeed, I have just seen a drunken couple full of wine and friendship, strongly reminding one of a duel ending in a jolly breakfast. And who is to blame for this? Nobody knows. All agree that it is a bungle,—the fault of maladministration and want of tact. Certainly the National Guards at Montmartre had no right to hold the cannons belonging to the National Guards, as a body, or to menace the reviving trade and tranquillity of Paris, by means of guns turned against ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... imagine that. He knows where he comes in, and doesn't pretend to be anybody or anything beyond what he is. Only it seems to me there is a streak of something original in him—almost of genius. He makes me feel sure he will never bungle any chance which comes in his way. And he has time to do so much, if chances do come"—this with a note of exultation. "His life is all before him, you see. He is so ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... up suddenly, answering directly Rhetta Thayer's anxious, expectant, appealing brown eyes. "For if he should fail, bungle it, and have to throw down his hand before he'd won the game, it would be Katy-bar-the-door for that man. He'd have to know how far the people of this town wanted him to go before starting, and there's only ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... food more solid than milk. There were deer in plenty. Isoult was able to feed herself and her husband, and keep both from exhaustion, without suspicion from him or much cost to herself. The second time of doing it, it is true, she went tremblingly to work, and was like to bungle it. What one may do on the flood one may easily miss on the ebb; moreover, it was night-time, she was tired, and not sure of herself. Nevertheless, she was fed, and Prosper was fed. Next morning she was as cool as you choose, singled out her hind as she walked into the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... being himself pleased with Mary. She in return found him amusing when he jested, but far astray in his opinions when discussing serious matters—in fact, on a later visit of his, she finds Hogg makes a sad bungle, quite muddled on the point when in an argument on virtue. In spite of being shocked by Hogg in matters of philosophy and ethics, she gets to like him better daily, and he helps them to pass the long November and December evenings with his lively talk. On one occasion he would describe an apparition ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... he fitted me with greatcoat and hat. Then, having trundled me to the front gate, he picked me up—luckily I have always been a small spare man—and deposited me in the car. I am always nervous of anyone but Marigold trying to carry me. They seem to stagger and fumble and bungle. Marigold's arms close round me like an iron clamp and they lift me with the mechanical certainty of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... said. "There's been a bungle, and the sooner we are rid of it the better. There's a boat at ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... that drew her to Joe. Almost every evening he would sit down at his piano and start playing idly. As a rule he played dance music, popular songs from Broadway. But sometimes leaning back he would drift into other music. And though his hand would bungle and only sketch it, so to speak—in his black eyes, scowling slightly over the smoke of his cigar, would come a look which Ethel liked. But vaguely she felt that Amy did not, that it even made her uneasy. For almost invariably ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... that fools project, Not only will not take effect, But proves destructive in the end To those that bungle and pretend. Some hungry Dogs beheld an hide Deep sunk beneath the crystal tide, Which, that they might extract for food, They strove to drink up all the flood; But bursten in the desp'rate deed, They perish'd, ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... the uneducated, who are apt to ridicule the organs or to be repelled by them. Many women confess that they are revolted by the sight of even a husband's complete nudity, though they have no indifference for sexual embraces. I think that the stupid bungle of Nature in making the generative organs serve as means of relieving the bladder has much to do with this revulsion. But some women of erotic temperament find pleasure in looking at the penis of a husband or lover, in handling it, and kissing it. Prostitutes do ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in my ear, "when that woman comes down, follow her! I'm afraid you will bungle the business, and I would not ask you to attempt it if big things were not at stake. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... he said, "It's simply amazing how anyone can get a matter tangled up the way you have. There was never a question of your becoming one of my companions. What I want is a man to go out to the Philippines and write a series of vigorous articles showing the bungle we've made of that business, and paving the way for an agitation in favor of giving the Islands their independence. There'll be a chance of getting that done if we elect a ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... been preparing these staves for his 'mastership,' or a stupid apprentice who only put his nose into the workshop three days ago? Pull yourself together, lad: what devil has entered into you that you are making a bungle of things like this? My good oak wood,—and this your masterpiece! Oh! you awkward, imprudent boy!" Overmastered by the torture and agony which raged within him, Frederick was unable to contain himself any longer; so, throwing the adze from him he said, "Master, it's all over; ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Of course I didn't get on with people's wives as well as with people themselves; women never do, you know. You should have heard me arguing questions with working men and shopkeepers! Mr. Dalmaine once told me I'd better keep out of politics, as I only made a bungle of it; but I've learnt a great deal since then. He admits now that I really do understand the main questions. Of course it's all his teaching. He puts things so clearly, you know. I suppose there's no one in the House who makes such clear ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... was watching Jimmy and me at the station that night was probably acting on his own initiative. It was the same detective who had made such a bungle of following Jimmy in the afternoon and I guess it nearly cost him his job. He must have been feeling pretty well worked up at the way things turned out. If it hadn't been for Mr. Wade's timely arrival there's no telling ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... all right. I gave Bradley very clear instructions. But, in any case," he added easily, "I'd prepared for the possible contingency that the old fool might bungle matters." ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... said, "but you will have to be very careful and not overdo the matter, for she isn't the kind that is easily fooled. She's had to keep her eyes and wits sharpened, else she wouldn't be on a newspaper, so I want you to be very careful and not bungle. Make a ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... things. He praised Scribe's works, which they had put on the stage again; he announced that the famous Guillery, his senior in the comedy line, would be execrable in this performance, and would make a bungle of it. He complained of being worried to death by the pursuit of a great lady—"You know, stage box Number Six," and showed, with a conceited gesture, a letter, tossed in among the jars of paint and pomade, ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... generally on their side and enjoy the backing of the bourgeois establishment, its organizations and its facilities. Since their object is defense, they have no constructive program. Instead they stumble, fumble and bungle as their system flounders into ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... on, fingering his wineglass. "I have always looked upon Oscar Fischer as a brilliant and far-seeing man. He was one of those who set themselves deliberately to win America for the Germans. A more idiotic bungle than he has made of things I could scarcely conceive. He has reproduced the diplomatic methods which have made Germany unpopular throughout the world. He has tried bullying, cajolery, and false-hood, and last of all he has plunged into crime. No German-American ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... next lesson he began to put his plan into execution. He set himself conscientiously to hit the notes awry, or to bungle every touch. Melchior cried out, then roared, and blows began to rain. He had a heavy ruler. At every false note he struck the boy's fingers, and at the same time shouted in his ears, so that he was like to deafen him. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... since the sea presented an impassable barrier, the sand spit, drawn out to a fine point, was just the spot where a piccaninny might be easily rounded up, if it were detected in a preoccupied mood. I suggested that I might be at hand to encounter any untoward results in case of a bungle, but was met with the positive assertion that no "debil-debil," however young and unsophisticated, would "come out" if it ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... panicky apprehension, he was not going to act impulsively or thoughtlessly. He knew that if he could only present a convincing case to his superiors, they would forgive him his presumption. If he made a bungle it might go hard with him. Anyway, he could not, or would not, ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... down his filthy tattered shirt with the finger of his mutilated left hand, "how nervous I am! But what a bungle Pedillo made of that marriage! And my good Ricardo, too! What a feast the sharks must have had on his oily, well-fed carcass! Misericordia! Ho, ho! I believe I'll ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... is with us, lad. She shall be delivered! The Lord is with us; but don't you bungle His plans!" ejaculated Father Holland for the twentieth time; and each time the French trapper looked waggishly over his ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... aptitudes to whatever passes through her hands, that whether she designs for the plough, the caravan, the cart—or whatever other creature she models, be it but an asse's foal, you are sure to have the thing you wanted; and yet at the same time should so eternally bungle it as she does, in making so simple a thing as ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... During that period London revolved in its usual course, reproducing its annual number of events—its births, deaths, and marriages; its plans, plots, and pleasures; its business, bustle, and bungle; its successes, sentiments, and sensations; its facts, fancies, and failures—also its fires; which last had increased steadily, until they reached the imposing number of about twelve hundred ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... me! what would the world be without us women?" thought Janice—and gave up all idea of running away and leaving Frank to bungle the situation. ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... creeping Through the glade Where our prey lay sleeping, Unafraid, In some Eastern jungle? Better so. I am sure the snarling Beasts could never bungle Life as men do, ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... I know every idea I have would desert me directly I faced an audience. I'm all right with a definite part that I've got into my head, but I can't make up as I go along, and it's no use asking me. I'd only bungle and stammer, and make an utter goose of myself, and spoil the whole thing. Hallo! There's the supper bell. ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... out; secondly, that they were afraid to tackle me by day but had to choose a dark night and a lonely place; and thirdly, that with such a splendid chance it must have been nerves that made them bungle it. ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... long to see I made an awful bungle of things," he confessed, half-shy and hesitant. "And it got worse and worse as I saw what I had done to you people. Yet I'd given my word. I guess you'll understand a lot more than I can say; as Allan will understand, ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... down to a trot, to a walk. He could afford to take his time and it was not part of his plan to bungle his work by undue baste. The fugitive was crossing through a patch of lilac and Pablo desired to overhaul him in a wide open space beyond, so he urged the mare to a trot again and jogged by on a parallel course, a ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... question or two about the catastrophe. "Scandalous sort of bungle," he pronounced it, being alike ignorant of the strength of the rapids, and fain, as an honest soldier of Haviland's army, to take a discrediting view of anything done by Amherst's. ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Armies were maneuvered and victories won upon the maps in the office of the Secretary of War. Generals were selected by some inscrutable process which decreed that dull-witted, pompous incapables should bungle campaigns ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... Muro is such an innocent old love," she went on, "that he did it badly. He had been told to do it by the Jesuits and he made a bungle of it. He thought that he could make a schoolgirl answer a question if she did not want to. And no one was afraid of him. He is a dear, good, old saint, and will assuredly go to Heaven. He is not a Jesuit, you know, but he is afraid of them, as everybody else is, I think—" ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... if not well paid for his labours, the tattooer could make his sitter suffer in more ways than one. He could adroitly increase the acute anguish which had, as a point of honour, to be endured without cry or complaint; or he could coolly bungle the execution of the design, or leave it unfinished, and betake himself to a more generous customer. A well-known tattooing chant deals with the subject entirely from the artist's standpoint, and emphasises the business principles upon which he went to work. It ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... depths of his experience with her, arranged a course of conduct. " If I just leave her to herself she will come around all right, but if I go 'striking while the iron is hot,' or any of those things, I'll bungle it surely." ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... had done well at Louisbourg the year before, and who was to do well at Quebec the year after. But, of course, he was not a member of the Bigot gang. So he was set aside in favour of a parasite, who made a hopeless bungle of ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... "I never heard of any such bungle as this before by an engineer. Why, Harry, this hillside averages an eight and a third grade, yet Black's field notes show it to be only a three per cent. grade. Hang it, the fellow must have ...
— The Young Engineers in Colorado • H. Irving Hancock
... berry-cake, by way of diversion, to lift the cat up by her tail. "I'm going to holler awful, and make you sit up and tell me about that little boy that ate the giant, and Cinderella,—how she lived in the stove-pipe,—and that man that builded his house out of a bungle of straws: and—well, there's some more, but I don't remember 'em just now, ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... excitable temperament. I was ambitious, proud, and extremely sensitive. I cannot deny that I had seen something of the world, and had contracted about the average bad habits of young men who have the sole care of themselves, and rather bungle the matter. It is necessary to this relation to admit that I had seen a trifle more of what is called life than a young man ought to see, but at this period I was not only sick of my experience, but my habits were as correct as those of any Pharisee ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... case," said Ed, "it's us for the Bungle. Come on, boys," and he pretended offence, ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... to do it well. I like to use a piece of string, marked with knots, by which I can measure the exact places in which the tent-pegs should be struck, for the eye is a deceitful guide in estimating squareness. (See "Squaring.") It is wonderful how men will bungle with a tent, when they are not ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... (usually a carefully constructed monologue) was stately, formal and precise. He used no slang, and retained scarcely a word of his boyhood's vernacular. The only emotional expression he permitted himself was a chuckle of glee over an intellectual misstatement or a historical bungle. Novels, theaters, music possessed no interest ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... pallid figure of despair, she leaned against the wall to support the faintness that had so suddenly stolen the strength from her limbs, trying desperately to think of some way to save her father from this madness. She was sure he would bungle it and be caught eventually, and she was equally sure he would never let himself be taken alive. Her helplessness groped for some way out. There must be some road of escape from this horrible situation, and as she sought blindly for it the path ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... will begin with this one," said his father, pointing to a red-and-white heifer. "She is better-natured than the others, and, as I dare say your fingers will bungle a little at first, that is a point ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... write her name upon the page with these—it were a shame to cheat of beauty by any bungle of description. Is not a fair spirit predestined conqueror of flesh and blood? Have we not read of the noble lady whose loveliness a painter's eye was the very first to discover? Where the likeness? The soul saw it, not the eye; and he understood, who, seeing it, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... trundled me to the front gate, he picked me up—luckily I have always been a small spare man—and deposited me in the car. I am always nervous of anyone but Marigold trying to carry me. They seem to stagger and fumble and bungle. Marigold's arms close round me like an iron clamp and they lift me with the mechanical certainty of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... she designs for the plough, the caravan, the cart—or whatever other creature she models, be it but an asse's foal, you are sure to have the thing you wanted; and yet at the same time should so eternally bungle it as she does, in making so simple a thing ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... him!" R. C. burst out. "Look at him! When the leader broke I thought he was lost. I'm sick yet. Didn't you almost bungle that?" ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... young, however, managed to bungle his pounce for the fraction of a second, and that is long enough for most of the wild-folk. Came a mad fluttering, a beating of wings, a quick mix-up, and, before he knew, that cat found himself frantically ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Harley in my ear, "when that woman comes down, follow her! I'm afraid you will bungle the business, and I would not ask you to attempt it if big things were not at stake. Return here; ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... be my wife's servant maid," he said. "When she is alive she will do all our work and mind the house. But you are not to order her around, Bungle, as you do us. You must treat ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... solution. Let us now take that flask from Mr. Andersen's hands, and see what we can draw out of that. This, you know, is a liquid which we have just made up from copper and nitric acid, whilst our other experiments were in hand; and though I am making this experiment very hastily, and may bungle a little, yet I prefer to let you see what I do rather ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... Lady Gloster still. I'm going to up and see her, without it's hurting the will. Here! Take your hand off the bell-pull. Five thousand's waiting for you, If you'll only listen a minute, and do as I bid you do. They'll try to prove me a loony, and, if you bungle, they can; And I've only you to trust to! (O God, why ain't he a man?) There's some waste money on marbles, the same as McCullough tried— Marbles and mausoleums—but I call that sinful pride. There's some ship bodies for burial—we've carried 'em, soldered and packed; Down in their wills they ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... it, Richard? What makes you so white and queer?" his mother asked, trying to pull on her stockings, and in her trepidation jamming her toes into the heel, and drawing her shoe over the bungle thus made at the bottom of ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... compact and entitled them to enter on a new one. Their demand had been blunderingly resisted by the authorities in India: but, it is to be presumed that the men were not far wrong, inasmuch as the bungle had ended in their being sent home discharged, in pursuance of orders from home. (There was an immense ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... proportion, didst bring in Wonder to wait on treason and on murder; And whatsoever cunning fiend it was That wrought upon thee so preposterously Hath got the voice in hell for excellence; And other devils that suggest by treasons Do botch and bungle up damnation With patches, colours, and with forms being fetch'd From glist'ring semblances of piety. But he that temper'd thee bade thee stand up, Gave thee no instance why thou shouldst do treason, Unless to dub thee with the name of traitor. ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]
... not yet quite ready to spring my trap," she replied. "When the time comes, I must have assistance, but I want to get all my evidence shipshape before I call on the Secret Service to make the capture. I can't afford to bungle so important a thing, you know, and this ten dollar bill, so carelessly given the storekeeper, is going to put one powerful bit of evidence in my hands. That was a bad slip on old Cragg's part, for he has been very cautious in covering his tracks, until ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... it all right. I gave Bradley very clear instructions. But, in any case," he added easily, "I'd prepared for the possible contingency that the old fool might bungle matters." ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... travelled; this time with Renton in company, and Renton mad as fire. It all turned out to be a bungle by some clerk that had taken to drink and forgetfulness; but it cost us a month or two before the Government of Senor Orrego, having no case, decided to do us justice without troubling the Courts. Renton ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to a chopper. "The conditions say with steel," he said; "only with steel, and I should bungle with a knife. You must look the other way. Now help ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... that before the soul can get quite away from the dust that—. (Begins to rake the paper towards him with his stick.) And here am I, sitting here raking more of it towards me!—No, let the thing lie! I won't soil my wings any more.—Poor Harald! He has to take up the burden now! What a horrible bungle it is, that we should be brought into the world to give each other as much pain as possible! (Decidedly.) Well, I am going to see what legacy of unhappiness I am leaving him! I want to have a vivid ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... where even parents may not. Make your own matches, and let others make theirs; especially if you have bungled your own. One such bungle is ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... hope of glory," said the other doctor gravely, "and Christ's glory was his usefulness and gift for helping others; I believe there's less quackery in our profession than any other, but it is amazing how we bungle at it. I wonder how you will get on with your little girl? If people didn't have theories of life of their own, or wouldn't go exactly the wrong way, it would be easier to offer assistance; but where one person takes a right ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... an agile chap, who is especially quick both at decisions and throwing. Even though he snatch up the ball, and thus make a fine stop, if his judgment is poor or his throwing arm lame, he can often bungle his work, and prove of little help to ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... It was indeed a bungle of a camp but if the single occupant realized it he did not seem to care a whit for he sat serenely in the doorway of the tent so interested in a book that he did not hear Paul Nez and his ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... equally obvious. To begin with it was one of extraordinary risk; the two guards or someone else behind them might wake up—for such people, like dogs, mostly sleep with one eye open, especially when they knew that they are being pursued. Or if they did not we might bungle the business so that they raised an outcry before they grew silent for ever, in which case both of us and perhaps Inez also would probably pay the penalty ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... as I turned the garment That no rent should be left behind, My eye caught an odd little bungle Of ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... What a bungle those boatmen are making of the steamer-ropes! They'll have that four-inch hawser chafed through in a minute. I told you so—there she goes! White foam on green water, and the steamer slewing round. How good that ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Tarare on the Berlin stage, the work of his deadly foe, conducted by Mozart himself!' 'You must certainly go,' he said, 'if it is only to be able to say in Vienna whether I had a hair clipped from Absalom's head. I wish he were here himself! The jealous old sheep should see that I do not need to bungle another person's composition in order to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... I said, laughing; while the others who were looking on expected to see me bungle as the rest had been doing. My friends collected round me and prepared to help me up. I did not undeceive them, but suddenly jumping on one side I ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... these savages will not make a bungle of things," the Colonel said; "I wonder who has started them upon the war-path?" Then going to the door ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... right," said Peace thoughtfully; "'cause when folks are watching and I want to be 'specially sweet and nice and helpful, I just make a dreadful bungle of it, and everyone laughs. It's the things we do without thinking that make folks happiest. That is what Saint Elspeth used to tell me. Some way I could understand her better than Miss Edith, I guess; but maybe it was 'cause I knew her better. When do you s'pose we can go ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... and studies the matter, until it is all familiar to her. So of any other ordinary business. Yet when it comes to teaching, anything like definite study or observation of the mode of doing it, is almost unknown! It is really no exaggeration to say that many teachers bungle in their work as egregiously as would a woman who should put yarn into a churn, and expect, after a proper amount of churning, to draw ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... that was written in Palestine, where rain is a rare blessing; there and then in the cold evening they would have done better to have warmed the righteous. There is no controlling them; they mean well, but they bungle terribly. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... find it a hard struggle to live, or who exist in dreadful poverty and sometimes starve, instead of trying to understand the causes of their misery and to find out a remedy themselves, spend all their time applauding the Practical, Sensible, Level-headed Business-men, who bungle and mismanage their affairs, and pay them huge salaries for doing so. Sir Graball D'Encloseland, for instance, was a 'Secretary of State' and was paid L5,000 a year. When he first got the job the wages were only a beggarly L2,000, but as he found it impossible to exist on less than L100 ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... of this before? I might have known. It's the long green he's after. I wonder who told him about the two thousand." He scratched his head in sudden perplexity. "I wonder what's got into Dick Cronk. He's too blamed good, all of a sudden. That brother of his might try the job, but—no, he'd bungle it. Besides, he'd probably stick a knife into Davy if the kid made a motion." He began chewing a fresh cigar; his pop-eyes were leveled with unseeing fierceness at a certain patch in the "main top"; his brain was seeing nothing but that packet of ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... he said frankly, "are too short to get up without a footstool." Amilcare was to have been the footstool. But then Molly came into play. At first she seemed to make the simple thing simpler. Amilcare was a strong man, but stiff. Grifone was sure he would bungle in his handling of Molly; this truth-telling beauty, this flawless jewel in a cup, would baffle him; he would neither see it the fine nor the delicate tool it was. He worked best with a bludgeon which, as it did brute's work, might be brutishly handled. So far well—he ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... impressed me now so painfully that I felt it must be plainly visible; that the visitor must see and be scornfully amused by it. Yet, with really extraordinary cordiality, he was holding out his right hand in salutation. Here again my awkwardness made me bungle. What he meant by his gesture I could not think. Some amusing trick, perhaps. It did not occur to me in that moment of self-abasement that he wished ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... it's hurting the will. Here! Take your hand off the bell-pull. Five thousand's waiting for you, If you'll only listen a minute, and do as I bid you do. They'll try to prove me crazy, and, if you bungle, they can; And I've only you to trust to! (O God, why ain't he a man?) There's some waste money on marbles, the same as M'Cullough tried — Marbles and mausoleums — but I call that sinful pride. There's some ship bodies for burial — we've carried 'em, ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
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