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More "Conundrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the review, and finished a good lot of it. Mr. Stewart left us, amply provided with the history of Abbotsford and its contents. It is a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure, and I have great pleasure in it, for while it pleases a fantastic person in the style and manner of its architecture and decoration, it has all the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... to me and Bill this afternoon: 'Boys, one riddle have I for you gehabt haben. A young man who cannot riddles antworten, he is not so good by business for ein family to provide—is not that—hein?' And he hands us a riddle—a conundrum, some calls it—and he chuckles interiorly and gives both of us till to-morrow morning to work out the answer to it. And he says whichever of us guesses the repartee end of it goes to his house o' Wednesday night to his daughter's birthday party. And it means Laura for whichever ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... consider why she had gone to him and what might result from her visit; and up to a certain point, and in certain cases accurate guessing is easier than might be expected for either side to a political conundrum, in India, ample provision having been made for it by ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... question became more explicit, and the hypothesis of the play and the pill were excluded. 'What,' the new poster ran, 'is Ireland going to do for the Boers?' The public were not intensely anxious to find an answer to the conundrum thrust thus forcibly on their attention, but they became curious to know who the advertisers were who hungered for the information. Men blessed by Providence with sagacious-looking faces made the most of their opportunity, ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... why," remarked the little dog, in speaking to the tree, "Would you say that the heart of you is like the tail of me?" The tree gave the conundrum up. The pup, with wisdom dark, Explained the matter saying, "It is farthest from ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... quite depressed. "Did you think it was a conundrum?" I asked. "You so often remind me of ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Johnson. "Very different—in fact, different enough to make a conundrum of the question—what is the difference between a shoemaker and a poet? One makes the shoes and the other shakes the muse—all the difference in the world. Still, I don't see how we can exclude the poets. It is the ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... months comin' to his grave; begad he'd ha' sold the shebeen above our heads for ten minutes' quittance of purgathory. An' he did all he could. That's why I say ut takes a strong man to deal with the Ould Church, an' for that reason you'll find so many women go there. An' that same's a conundrum.' ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... kind, alloyed (I think) here and there with errors of taste. He might have spared many of the details of the bath scene, which, for the rest, tallies exactly with Mr. Thackeray's account of the same process. This little man with all his long letters remains as much a conundrum to me as ever. Your account of the domestic joys at Hunsworth amused me much. The good folks seem very happy—long may they continue so! It somewhat cheers me to know that such happiness does exist on the earth. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every original conundrum in hearing of his father. He begs the curious not to pry into the result—as it was of no consequence to any ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... charge made for these vehicles, the driver expecting, as in similar cases in Paris, Berlin, or elsewhere, a trifle as a pourboire at the end of the service for which he is engaged. Where these ruinous structures which pass for public carriages originally came from is a conundrum; but there can be no possible doubt as to their antiquity. Mexican fleas, like those of Naples and continental Spain, are both omnivorous and carnivorous, and these vehicles are apt to be itinerant ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... specimen of irrepressible fireworks, and Prince Paul had enough to do in facilitating conversation. There was no end to his politeness, but it was an impossible task for him now and then promptly to carry over a long sentence from German to Russian, and he would give it up like an invincible conundrum, with the patient smile and head-wag and hand-wave of an amiable Dundreary. Yet I began to surmise a mystery even in him. More than once he inadvertently betrayed a knowledge of Romany, though he invariably spoke of his friends around in a ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... of his"—bobbing his head at Frick—"and a conundrum," and he looked over and smiled at Curtis, "then one of mine after that. Won't that ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... assumed the editorial charge, emanated from his pen." Mr. Browne himself wrote to a friend: "Comic copy is what they wanted for "Vanity Fair." I wrote some and it killed it. The poor paper got to be a conundrum, and so ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... pick out what we'd have. As I stood there attemptin' to decide, I couldn't help thinkin' that selectin' that candy was a good deal like choosin' a wife. You couldn't have all the different kinds, an' makin' up your mind which you preferred was a seven-days' conundrum." ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... name of Polynices, one of OEdipus's sons, means in the original "much quarrelling." In the altercations between the two brothers, in AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, this conceit is employed; and it is remarkable, that so poor a conundrum could not be rejected by any of these three poets, so justly celebrated for their taste and simplicity. What could Shakspeare have done worse? Terence has his "inceptio est amentium, non amanthim." Many similar instances will ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... colours, and cut it into squares of equal size, fringing two sides of each. Have ready, burnt almonds, chocolate nuts, and bonbons or sugar-plums of various sorts; and put one in each paper with a folded slip containing two lines of verse; or what will be much more amusing, a conundrum with the answer. Twist the coloured paper so as entirely to conceal their contents, leaving the fringe at each end. This is the most easy, but there are various ways of cutting and ornamenting ...
— Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches • Eliza Leslie
... wouldn't have believed it. Would I? Squatted on the verandah chewing betel-nut, sighing and spitting all over the place for more than an hour, and as glum as an undertaker before he came out with that dashed conundrum. That's the kind of thing that isn't so funny as it looks. What was a fellow to say?—Good wife?—Yes. Good wife—old though. Started a confounded long story about some brass pots. Been living together for fifteen years—twenty years—could not tell. A ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... and my mother's in London, and what will she be doing?" the boy asked himself, as if it were a conundrum. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the question may rather be put—to borrow phraseology current among her critics: Had she oughter?—from a moral point of view, now. From a moral point, then, let us seek from analogy some light on the question of what, from its actual, practical bearings, may be dignified by the name Conundrum. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... this remark all four came to be again on the same terms as of old; but suddenly a servant announced that the Empress (Yan Ch'un) had despatched a messenger to bring over a lantern-conundrum with the directions that they should all go and guess it, and that after they had found it out, they should each also devise one and send it in. At these words, the four of them left the room with hasty ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... old school part of Hermione which I have not forgotten, and then two scenes from Scribe's pretty piece of "les premieres Amours." He acts French capitally, and, moreover, bestowed upon me the two following ridiculous conundrum puns, for which I shall ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... answer was, "A honey-comb in the body of a dead lion." To-day this sort of riddle survives in such a form as, "Why does a chicken cross the road?" to which most people give the answer, "To get to the other side;" though the correct reply is, "To worry the chauffeur." It has degenerated into the conundrum, which is usually based on a mere pun. For example, we have been asked from our infancy, "When is a door not a door?" and here again the answer usually furnished ("When it is a-jar") is not the correct one. It should be, "When it ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... beyond the legitimate domain of magic: and no intellectual development to which we may hereafter attain will bring us a step nearer their solution. But with the problems proper to magic, the case is different. Magic is distinctively not Divine, but human: a finite conundrum, not an Infinite enigma. If there has ever been a magician since the world began, then all mankind may become magicians, if they will give the necessary time and trouble. And yet, magic is not simply an advanced region of the path which science is pursuing. Science is concerned with results,—with ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... and of John, was dead; and he was not so constant a follower of Christ as his wife; so she is mentioned as the mother of Zebedee's children, which saying has passed into a conundrum, "Who was the mother of Zebedee's children?" Scott in his commentaries gives her name as Salome. Whatever her name, she had great ambition for her sons, and asked that they might have the chief places of honor and authority ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... able to guess a conundrum; b badgers; c in that field; d mortally offended; e my; h noticed by me; k properly trained in a Board-School; l rushing about ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... with the boat?" asked Jean. This was a conundrum, but the Chief, as usual, was equal ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... and sold. Whatever creates a use creates value, and a great increase in use forces an increase in value, provided that the supply does not increase equally fast; and with silver that is an impossibility. If you think government cannot add value to a metal, consider this conundrum: What would be the present value of gold if all nations should demonetize it? It can be calculated approximately. There is on hand enough gold to supply the arts for forty years at the present rate of consumption. ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... himself on the back of the sofa, and caressing his knees as he puffed his cigarette meditatively, "you have ask a conundrum. Gif to me an easier one! It is of truth that I make much of these thing to please Urania. But I shall confess all. Behold, I appear to you, my leetle brother, in my camisa—my shirt! I blow on ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... difficult to get three pints of liquid into a quart measure, and it was a conundrum of this sort that Christy was studying upon when he tried to make a parlor, bedroom, and dining-saloon of the very limited space in the forward part of the Florence. Though he could hardly get the three pints into the quart measure, he had done the best he could, and succeeded ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... distress which indicate too early roused young womanhood. The eventual reply seemed to be affirmative, albeit accompanied with a suppressed giggle, as if the young lady had just been discovered as an answer to an amusing conundrum. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... association had a feast. They exploited their humorous abilities, and all made merry, save one glum guest. At last, they insisted that this melancholy person should contribute to the entertainment. He consented, in response to much urging, to offer a conundrum: ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... soul present who could answer that conundrum, and after a fitting pause the chief was ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... second year he began the study of philosophy, and that added to his woes. He had nerves to feel the Big Conundrum, but not the brains to solve it; small blame to him for that, since philosophers have cursed each other black in the face over it for the last five thousand years. But it worried him. The strange and sinister detail of the world, that ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... find better progression.' Commentators have been tempted to discern some shadow before of the fatality four years later, when the patronage by Essex and his partisans of the play of Henry IV at the Globe Theatre became an article of indictment. The passage forms a conundrum to which the clue has not yet been found. If the reference be to Shakespeare's drama which Essex, Cecil, and Ralegh may have seen acted in this July, it constitutes the only ascertained association of the hand which could do all and the brain which ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... not altogether satisfactory, and Smith apparently was unable to grapple with the problem. It puzzled him; but then Handy himself was at all times more or less of a conundrum ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... consultation, Edwards entered to announce Mrs. Corcoran Dunn and Mr. Malcolm. The butler's giving the lady precedence in his announcing showed that he, too, realized who was ranking officer in that family, even though the captain's "conundrum" had puzzled him. Mrs. Dunn and her son entered at ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... obviously set his mind at rest, in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a law which authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their descendants, and millions of men, to serve as he was doing himself, and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or conundrum on ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... hazy, distorted first impressions," Mr Aberich Mackay calls them in his "Twenty-one days in India," that most amusing Indian classic. "What is it these travelling people put on paper?" he adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... the Minotaur's labyrinth, when the passage knotted itself into a low-roofed room, open at both ends, save for bomb screens, with a trench leading dismally off from an opposite doorway. "When is a door not a door?" was a conundrum of my childhood, and I think the answer was: "When it's ajar." But nowadays there is a better replique: A door is not a door when it's a dug-out. It is then a hole, kept from falling in upon itself by a log of ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... now, he was pointed out as a distinguished figure, and his quaint remarks were quoted. Few of these sayings are remembered to-day, though occasionally one is still unforgotten. At a party one night, being urged to make a conundrum, he said: ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... in the National Assembly against the minority, its speech remained monosyllabic, like that of the Christian, whose speech was to be "Aye, aye; nay, nay." It was monosyllabic, whether from the tribune or the press; dull as a conundrum, whose solution is known beforehand. Whether the question was the right of petition or the duty on wine, the liberty of the press or free trade, clubs or municipal laws, protection of individual freedom or the regulation of national economy, the slogan returns ever again, the theme ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... says Bobby, doggedly, "I never made out a conundrum in my life, except, 'What is most ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... one possible answer to that conundrum, and it doesn't take any guessing," said I. "The reply would have been: 'Cold 'am or beef, sir; chops, if you choose to wait.' Those words are probably now being spoken to some hundreds of sad travellers less fortunate than our favoured and ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... The conundrum was unanswerable. Baxter did not attempt to answer it. But there remained at the back of his mind a quaint idea that he had caught sight, as he woke, of the Honorable Frederick Threepwood, his face warningly contorted, vanishing through the doorway. Yet what could the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... sure enough, and that's all there is to it. Now, hang it, how could a fox have come aboard our boat with twenty feet of water separating us from the shore? That's a conundrum I give up," Thad was saying ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... What's that you say? They have been to the station? You ask if I have seen three suspicious people—a man, perhaps an old man, in a dark-blue, well-cut suit, wearing a Homberg hat and goggles, a girl, and a man of whose appearance you have no knowledge? Come now, that's a conundrum! I have seen many ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... Peter directly, but a sort of back-wash did catch him keenly through young Sam Arkwright and serve as a conundrum for ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... the world as an independent institution. Singers organized themselves into quartet bands; added a fiddle and tambourine to their instruments—perhaps we should say implements—of music; introduced the hoe-down and the conundrum to fill up the intervals of performance; rented halls, and, peregrinating from city to city and from town to town, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... farm served to secure Gudger against loss, while the mention of its existence caused the commissioner again to rub his head. Why in the world should a man——? He gave up the conundrum in despair, and applied himself to the ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... a conundrum which nobody seems to have solved yet, Susan. And I can make only a guess at ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... going to propound another conundrum of a kind I've heard before—why you should have so many things you don't particularly need, while Miss Hartley must go on sewing when she's hardly able for it in her most unpleasant shack? I don't know whether the ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... with a smile: "Woman is the eternal conundrum to which the wise man always leaves her herself to supply the answer. Doubtless one of these days you'll do it. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... his statement of the case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid last act ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... mention that it is "a cherry," but this is by no means the case with all Chinese riddles, many being exceedingly difficult of solution. So much so that it is customary all over the Empire to copy out any particularly puzzling conundrum on a paper lantern, and hang it in the evening at the street door, with the promise of a reward to any comer who may succeed in unravelling it. These are called "lamp riddles," and usually turn upon the name of ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... man of great natural ability. If you ask me, How pious is he? I treat it as a conundrum, and give it up. Personally he treated me with marked kindness throughout my ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... conversation between Vaura and her neighbour, but no, Mrs. Marchmont, though inwardly afraid of this squire of dames; and of his intellect, determined to appear at ease, and so talked on the one engrossing idea of her life; the last conundrum in fancy work, the last fashionable incongruity in the blending of colours. And poor, victimized Lionel longed to breathe in Vaura's refreshing breadth of thought; on his tormentor pausing to recover breath, it was not as balm to a wound to hear ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... was the first scientific builder? Answer.—Noah, when he invented arky-tecture. (N.B. This will do for a Sunday conundrum.) ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... turned two ways. In the morasses of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape. Nobody ever chewed a few wretched clues into such a pulp ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... the note to be some unauthorized impertinence of a foolish commentator. Secretly therefore, silently, stealthily—so as to draw as little attention as possible—Pope introduced into a note his wicked little brazen solution of his own wicked and brazen conundrum. France, such was the proposition, had worked a miracle upon English ground; as if with some magician's rod, she had called up spawn innumerable of authors, lyric, epic, dramatic, pastoral, each after his ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... laugh with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first conundrum of the new world. Why is it better to disagree than ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... beautiful really and in themselves, because they are mere conceits; the analogies in them are fortuitous, depending not on the nature of the things themselves, but on the private fancy of the writer, having no more real and logical coherence than a conundrum or a pun; in plain English, untrue, only allowable to Juliets or Othellos; while their self-possession, almost their reason, is in temporary abeyance under the influence of joy or sorrow. Every one must feel the exquisite fitness of Juliet's "Gallop apace, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... so too. But it is a great problem what to do for the best in this case. Mebby Solomon knew enough to grapple with the question, but Josiah don't, nor Arvilly, though she thinks she duz. Robert Strong is gittin' one answer to the hard conundrum of life, and Ernest White is figurin' it out successful. And lots of other good and earnest souls all over the world are workin' away at the sum with their own slates and pencils. But oh, the time is ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... the tall, slim figure Detective Inspector Wessex stared with a sort of wonder. Mr. Nicol Brinn of Cincinnati was a conundrum which he found himself unable to catalogue, although in his gallery of queer characters were many eccentric and peculiar. If Nicol Brinn should prove to be crooked, then automatically he became insane. This Wessex had reasoned out even before he had set eyes upon the celebrated ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... stories belong to a large group of tales to which we may give the name of the "Rival Brothers." This cycle assumes various forms; but the two things that identify the relationship of the members are the rivalry of the brothers and the conundrum or "problem" ending of the stories. Within this cycle we can distinguish at least three simple, distinct types, and a compound fourth made up of parts of two of the others. These four types may be very generally outlined ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... "That's a conundrum," returned Andy. "But I have heard it said that many city-born folks would rather die between brick walls than live ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... "That's the conundrum, Hope," answered her big brother. "I'll write to-night, and father will get the letter inside ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... confidence. It would have a very bad appearance to go along the highwayside asking after a man of whom I could give so scanty an account; and I should look like a fool, indeed, if I were to present myself at his door and find the police in occupation! The interest of the conundrum, however, tempted me, and I turned aside from my direct road to pass by Wakefield; kept my ears pricked, as I went, for any mention of his name, and relied for the rest on my good fortune. If Luck (who must certainly be feminine) favoured me as far as to throw ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the sturdy figures of the foreign circulation with the attenuated numerals of such visible returns as reach him, he is more puzzled in his mind than surfeited in his purse. But the relation of foreign publishers to "home talent" is an ancient and honorable conundrum, which it is not for this paper ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... a tree. How Green the Tree is! Can you See the Lightning? Oh, how red and Vivid the Lightning is! Will the Lightning Strike the Tree? Children, that is a Conundrum; we answer conundrums in our Weekly Edition, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... station or vice versa, there are also the large general express companies or carriers, which send articles all over the United States. One of the most characteristic of these is the Adams Express Company, the widely known name of which has originated a popular conundrum with the query, "Why was Eve created?" This company began in 1840 with two men, a boy, and a wheelbarrow; now it employs 8,000 men and 2,000 wagons, and carries parcels over 25,000 miles of railway. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... met at the Berlin station by her mother and Cousin von Briest. While drinking tea in the mother's room Cousin von Briest was asked to tell a joke, and propounded a Bible conundrum, which Effi took as an omen that no more sorrow was to befall her. The following day began the search for an apartment, and one was found on Keith street, which exactly suited, except that the house was ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... puzzling questions and clever replies is still as favourite a mental exercise in the East as it was in middle-aged Europe. The riddle or conundrum began, as far as we know, with the Sphinx, through whose mouth the Greeks spoke: nothing less likely than that the grave and mysterious Scribes of Egypt should ascribe aught so puerile to the awful emblem of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... did see so many Democrats in my life. Or was it Republicans? I forget. I had given 'em a good, hot, mixed Princeton paper,—dog, international law, society, industrial progress, footlight favorites, and the whole business; had Sermons from Many Lands, and a Conundrum Department, as well as a Household Corner—How to get Beautiful for the ladies, How to get Rich for the men, How to get Strong for the advertisers—why, if I do say it, I don't believe any one fellow was ever much more cosmopolitan in all his life, inside ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... "Well, the conundrum is solved, I reckon," he went on to say; "that is, if both of you agree with me that this chance is something like a gift dropped from the blue sky. We made up our minds a long time ago that it must be some sort of outing for us this summer, and the only thing that looked ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... I likes old Jeffords, an' considers him a pleasin' conundrum. About tenth drink time he'd take a cha'r an' go camp by himse'f in a far corner, an' thar he'd warble hymns. Many a time as I files away my nosepaint in the Oriental have I been ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the second repetition of this inscrutable conundrum, a lank and tall girl of some fifteen summers, arose and said, not without something of the sublime air becoming a solitary intelligence: "It's ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... of the identity of Paulus was like all court secrets and most secrets of intriguing governments, no mystery at all to hundreds, but to thousands an insoluble conundrum. The official propagandists of the court news, absolutely in control of all the channels through which facts could reach the public, easily offset the constant leakage from the lips of slaves and gladiators by disseminating artfully concocted ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... It couldn't be expected, perhaps; but I am still of the impression that this conundrum is gradually working towards a solution in the brain of the Commander-in-Chief. I hope it don't lay heavily there; I wouldn't do anything to distress him. If GOLDWIN SMITH were expounding political economy to him in one ear, and HORACE GREELEY ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... is not. The race is to a point 100 feet away and home again—that is, a distance of 200 feet. One correspondent asks whether they take exactly the same time in turning, to which I reply that they do. Another seems to suspect that it is really a conundrum, and that the answer is that 'the result of the race was a (matrimonial) tie.' But I had no such intention. The puzzle is an arithmetical one, as it ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... Langdon of the same regiment, the scholarly soldier, with the account of every great campaign in history at his fingers' ends. I recollect one evening, when we had been talking of the Peninsular War, I ventured to spring on him the ancient schoolboy conundrum: "What lines are those, the most famous ever made by an Englishman, yet that are never quoted?" "Lines?" said he, "lines?" though I don't think he had ever heard the jest. "They must be the Lines of Torres Vedras." How well I remember the musical box that used to arouse me at seven in the morning, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... which he calls a 'sphinx.' And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, With 'Whence am I?' ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... size of it," says I. "Danny had the bracelets all out. The conundrum is, though, Why I should do the goat act, instead of lettin' you two mix it up? But that's what happened, and now I guess it's up to you ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... them for social purposes during the Christmas party season. I do not know how it may be with others, but I have often found, when introduced to a lady, that I have said "Good evening," and then had absolutely nothing else to say. With the help of the conundrum book I would fill in any awkward pause by asking her who was the most amiable king in history. That would break the ice. Besides, if we kept the book reasonably clean, it might afterward make a very serviceable and acceptable present to Eliza's mother. I generally know ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... Tom Brangwen, and the company was listening to the conundrum, "an Angel can't be less than a human being. And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Whilst you were engaged in your grand Jenny Lind speculation, the following conundrum went the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... given up the examination of the premises, and given up the conundrum, and Christy was leading the way up-stairs. He went into his room, followed ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... but from sheer despair. By and by Therese drifted in. It was then late and, I imagine, she was on her way to bed. She looked the picture of cheerful, rustic innocence and started propounding to me a conundrum which began ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... or her loquacious landlady she heard of how Burgoyne's force, advancing from Canada, had captured Ticonderoga, and of how Sir William had put the flower of his army on board of transports and gone to sea, his destination thus becoming a sort of national conundrum affording infinite opportunity for ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... life was always to be a losing game for me, let me play my cards how I will. I begin to think there is a curse upon me, and that no act of mine will ever prosper. Who was that man, in your Greek play, who guessed some inane conundrum, and was always getting into trouble afterwards? I begin to think there really is a fatality in ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... worth doing, but as an apology for the unwarranted liberty they take in being alive. 'I am: why am I?' said the youth at prayer-meeting, and everybody gave it up. As an effort toward answering his own conundrum, he entered the ministry. Being alive, we have to make a pretense of doing something, which else might better remain undone. That is why books are written, and controversies waged; it explains most of our intellectual and moral activities. So with society: time must be killed, and we ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... shut up in the Oven. Not at all. You are quite mistaken. The thing shut up in the Oven was Eyebright herself! And the Oven was quite different from any thing you are thinking of,—cold, not hot; wet, not dry; with a door made of green sea-water instead of black iron. This sounds like a conundrum; and, as that is hardly fair, I will proceed to unriddle it at once and tell you ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... disappearance,—gone! Astounding development! Mysterious and hapless arrival, tremendous and mysterious passage, mysterious and alarming departure. No escaping it; no volition to enter it or to avoid it; no prospect of defeating it or solving it. Odd affair! Mysterious and baffling conundrum to be ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... of the lack of free trade in our country. The brick manufacturers must be protected, so a heavy tariff was placed on the foreign article. Our brick men, finding that they had a soft thing, tried to solve that conundrum which the Israelites gave up: "How do you make bricks without straw?" They made a patent brick, built the Howard Museum in Washington, (was it a museum or a college?) the thing tumbled down, and a Congressional committee sat among its ruins. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... "There are two kinds of men in this world, Charley, and which of them makes it go?" said he. "The ones who have too much to eat and too little to do, or the others who have to keep on doing something because they're hungry? Well, I needn't ask you, because the conundrum was answered long ago, and that kind of talking's no great use to anybody. That was a very fine mill, and I picked up a good deal down there. Still, we will scarcely want such a big ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... near the boil.' Elise rose with a strange little laugh and looked at a yellow silk stocking which dangled over the side of a wicker table. As if trying to solve a conundrum, she glanced from it to the shapely form of the young woman at her toilet. 'When the war's over,' she said ruminatingly, 'and our men find what kind of girls they married when they were ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... he said. "Razors have moods, and are known to sulk. But science has solved the conundrum of their antics. It has been discovered that whetting changes the location of the molecules of metal, that there is frequently left what is not a perfect edge after the supposed sharpening, but that, given time, the molecules will readjust ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... He came here long ago; But, before that, he'd been born somewhere: The conundrum started first, right there. Little shaver—afore he knew his name Or the place from whereabouts he came— On a wagon-train the Apaches caught him. Killed the old folks! But this cus'—they brought him Safe away from ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... came back, was to take a night-walk to Norwood, and, like the subject of a venerable riddle of my childhood, to go 'round and round the house, without ever touching the house', thinking about Dora. I believe the theme of this incomprehensible conundrum was the moon. No matter what it was, I, the moon-struck slave of Dora, perambulated round and round the house and garden for two hours, looking through crevices in the palings, getting my chin by dint of violent exertion above the rusty nails on the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... proofs. But this polemical motive can hardly have induced him to becloud an obvious text and invent interpretations which never occurred to any other ecclesiastical writer before or after his time. The conundrum can only be solved by the assumption that Augustine believed in a plurality of literal senses in the Bible and held that over and above (or notwithstanding) the sensus obvius every exegete is free to read as much truth into any given passage as possible, and that such interpretation ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... find a music-box is yet an unsettled conundrum. Such is likely to be the fate of the question raised with so much temper over the Passion Music of that great man by the English critics. Shame on all critics that condemn MOZART as a fogy and BACH as a nuisance. Of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... no sense of humour—never had. I am entirely destitute of it myself. Even in Scotland, even here, this family failing has been remarked—been the subject, I may say, of unfavourable comment. The Perilous of the period lost his head because he did not see the point of a conundrum of Macbeth's. We felt, some time in the fifteenth century, that this peculiarity needed to be honourably accounted for, and the family developed that story of the Secret Chamber, and the Horror in the house. There is nothing in the ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... what Mr. Hilton Cubitt, of Riding Thorpe Manor, Norfolk, is very anxious to know. This little conundrum came by the first post, and he was to follow by the next train. There's a ring at the bell, Watson. I should not be very much surprised if ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... parrot, or like a man with a dancing bear. He must excite the creature, make him talk or dance for the edification of the company. He sidles obsequiously towards his hero and, with utter irrelevancy, propounds a question of theology, a social theory, a fashion of dress or marriage, a philosophical conundrum: "Do you think, sir, that natural affections are born with us?" or, "Sir, if you were shut up in a castle and a newborn babe with you, what would you do?" Then follow more Johnsonian laws, judgments, oracles; the insatiable audience clusters around him ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... required. His banishment had, perhaps, a good effect upon the unborn generation, whose parents had not then entered the matrimonial state. Whatever other purpose it subserved, except to show to other communities the "latest novelty" from California, is the unfathomable conundrum. John Crowe was a noisy, blatant, meddlesome fellow, the keeper of a livery stable on Kearny street, and a fierce denouncer of the Committee. There was nothing else to his discredit, so far as I could learn at the time. Reub. Maloney was a compound character—a good deal of ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... anything of the object of its worship, that it can offer nothing in the shape of counsel or advice, but that its function is to sit in owl-like solemnity, contemplating nothing, meanwhile offering man an eternal conundrum that he must everlastingly give up, then, and not till then, there will be peace between science and religion. And this is called a reconciliation. Mr. Spencer finds two combatants engaged in deadly conflict, he murders one and offers ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... things, when there's so much going on around us; and how you, with all those children to look after, and their clothes to make, can care for fossils and bones, and bits of rock and mineral, is a conundrum to me." ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... "A conundrum! I never guessed one, so I shall have to give this up. But don't you see how it is, dearest? I try to be good to her, and she won't meet me half-way. On the contrary, she tries to nag me, I think. It wasn't my fault to-night. What right has she to run down my ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... important in the affairs of housekeeping than the choice of wholesome food. Apropos to this is an amusing conundrum which is as follows:—"A man went to market and bought two fish. When he reached home he found they were the same as when he had bought them; yet there were three! How was this?" The answer is—"He ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... heard read the other day a very interesting letter from Paris, from Mr. Appleton, Longfellow's brother-in-law, who is said to be a man of considerable ability, and who is giving himself wholly just now to the investigation of this spirit-subject, termed by him the 'sublimest conundrum ever given to the world for guessing.' He appears still in doubt whether the intelligence is external, or whether the phenomena are not produced by an unconscious projection in the medium of a second personality, accompanied with clairvoyance, and attended ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the meal; it was she who surveyed and improved the manners of her guests by sarcastic hints or friendly admonitions; and it was she who furnished intellectual entertainment in the shape of anecdote, historical story, or excruciating conundrum. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... to answer the conundrum, did not see fit to do so; and hence, on the 3d of November, the same parties deployed their forces to ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... long talking in the midst of a babbling Simonetta of echoes.' Inferior writers have copied the tones of the oracle without first making sure of the inspiration. They forget that a platitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as a conundrum. Pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honest discontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of the original degenerate in the imitators into a trick of unmeaning surprise and vapid ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... asked de Fronsac. "Is it a conundrum? In any case it is a poor substitute for a half a column of prose in La Voix. How on earth am I to arrive at the bottom of the page? If I am short in my copy, I shall be short in my rent; if I am short in my rent, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... rising from her seat Madge walked up and down the room, and wished some good fairy would hint to Brian that he was wanted. If man is a gregarious animal, how much more, then, is a woman? This is not a conundrum, but a simple truth. "A female Robinson Crusoe," says a writer who prided himself upon being a keen observer of human nature—"a female Robinson Crusoe would have gone mad for want of something to talk to." This remark, though severe, nevertheless contains several grains of truth, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... third largest city of India, the heat began to oppress us. Up to this time India had been unexpectedly and refreshingly cool, at night even cold. But now it was unpleasantly warm. The heat reminded us of the conundrum: "Why is India, although so hot, the coldest country on the globe?" Answer: "Because the hottest thing in it is chilly" ("chili" is the peppery sauce which the natives mix with other spices to form "curry"). We have learned to like curry. I cannot understand it; but if seems as if the hottest ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... under the influence of Buddhism in China, was identified with "the pearl that grants all desires" and is under the special protection of the Naga, i.e., the dragon. Arising out of this de Visser puts the conundrum: "Was the ball originally also a pearl, not ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... ever anticipated blooming out into a society blossom was a conundrum. Perhaps he had some secret method buried in the same box with his hoarded coin. His long evenings were passed reading the Family Herald and Weekly Star and the Ashcroft Journal by candle-light; for those were the only papers he would subscribe for. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... at his companions and shook his head as if the conundrum was beyond his guessing. ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... with her uncovered face is a conundrum and an object of intense curiosity, even in Teheran at the present day; and in provincial cities, the wife of the lone consul or telegraph employee finds it highly convenient to adopt the native costume, face-covering included, when venturing abroad. Here, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... "If it's a conundrum I'll give it up," said Rufus; "just tell a feller all about it, for I begin to think you're crazy, or else have come across some benevolent chap that's rather loose ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... yet called kin for courtesy's sake, had given up trying to understand her complexities, as she had likewise given up trying to explain herself. If they were pleased forever to consider her in the light of a conundrum, ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... absolute liberty of choice. It may be a personal narrative, like Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" or Hale's "My Double, and How he Undid me;" it may be impersonal, like Mr. F.B. Perkins's "Devil-Puzzlers" or Colonel De Forest's "Brigade Commander;" it may be a conundrum, like Mr. Stockton's insoluble query, "The Lady or the Tiger?" it may be "A Bundle of Letters," like Mr. James's story, or "A Letter and a Paragraph," like Mr. Bunner's; it may be a medley of letters and telegrams and narrative, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... this is not a conundrum. So you need not be chirping out, "On their feet, of course;" or some foolish answer of that kind. The real answer is, "Japan,"—at least, so I'm told, and there are such numbers of other queer things there, that I don't wonder ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... try to frame a reply, he could not find a frame. He knowed it wuz a conundrum boundless as truth and God's justice, and as solemnly deep in its sure consequences of evil as eternity, and as sure ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... waltz. But the question may rather be put—to borrow phraseology current among her critics: Had she oughter?—from a moral point of view, now. From a moral point, then, let us seek from analogy some light on the question of what, from its actual, practical bearings, may be dignified by the name Conundrum. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... a kind of conundrum I have dashed off this morning to amuse some sentimental goose ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... such as we are going to try to describe to you; possibly with the same effect upon yourself as the one we have to confess to in our own case—namely, that you have been left face to face with a problem to which you have never been able to supply a solution. You have given up a conundrum in despair, and no one has told ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... is almost insulting to our readers to mention that it is "a cherry," but this is by no means the case with all Chinese riddles, many being exceedingly difficult of solution. So much so that it is customary all over the Empire to copy out any particularly puzzling conundrum on a paper lantern, and hang it in the evening at the street door, with the promise of a reward to any comer who may succeed in unravelling it. These are called "lamp riddles," and usually turn upon the name of some tree, fruit, animal, or book, the direction ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... "but you never noticed the difference, although you often looked. I used to wonder how you could look so intelligently and see so little"—and she glanced down at herself, so unmistakably a woman now that he knew. She had been like a conundrum, the answer to which you would never have guessed for yourself, but you see it at once when you hear it, and then it seems so simple. She was rather inclined to speak to the Tenor in a half pitying, patronizing way, as to a ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... one of his"—bobbing his head at Frick—"and a conundrum," and he looked over and smiled at Curtis, "then one of mine after that. Won't that ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... may be told in the first person as in Stevenson's Pavilion on the Links, or in the third person as in Kipling's The Bridge Builders. Yet again it may be a conundrum as Stockton's famous The ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... a boot-leg—or two of them—under your head, they collapse and make a headrest less than half an inch thick. Just why it never occurs to people that a stuffing of moss, leaves, or hemlock browse, would fill out the boot-leg and make a passable pillow, is another conundrum I cannot answer. But there is another and better way of making a pillow for camp use, which I will describe ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... the Pelagians and Semipelagians with Scriptural proofs. But this polemical motive can hardly have induced him to becloud an obvious text and invent interpretations which never occurred to any other ecclesiastical writer before or after his time. The conundrum can only be solved by the assumption that Augustine believed in a plurality of literal senses in the Bible and held that over and above (or notwithstanding) the sensus obvius every exegete is free to read as much truth into any given passage as ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... . He wouldn't have believed it. Would I? Squatted on the verandah chewing betel-nut, sighing and spitting all over the place for more than an hour, and as glum as an undertaker before he came out with that dashed conundrum. That's the kind of thing that isn't so funny as it looks. What was a fellow to say?—Good wife?—Yes. Good wife—old though. Started a confounded long story about some brass pots. Been living together ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... accents. Emerson was before long talking in the midst of a babbling Simonetta of echoes.' Inferior writers have copied the tones of the oracle without first making sure of the inspiration. They forget that a platitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as a conundrum. Pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honest discontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of the original degenerate in the imitators into ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... enquiries about Nutter, and there appeared to have been no one hurt, and yet the parties on the ground—and no fighting—and yet no reconciliation—and, in fact, the general was so puzzled with this conundrum, and so curious, that he was very near calling after Puddock, when they parted at the bridge, and making him entertain him, at some cost of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... good-natured, is all this! How delightful is that notion of the pleasant Eastern people about knowledge, where the height of science is made to consist in the answering of riddles! and all the mathematicians and magicians bring their great beards to bear on a conundrum! ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of a dead lion." To-day this sort of riddle survives in such a form as, "Why does a chicken cross the road?" to which most people give the answer, "To get to the other side;" though the correct reply is, "To worry the chauffeur." It has degenerated into the conundrum, which is usually based on a mere pun. For example, we have been asked from our infancy, "When is a door not a door?" and here again the answer usually furnished ("When it is a-jar") is not the correct one. It should be, "When it is a negress ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... chiefly flourished was in the reign of King James the First. That learned monarch was himself a tolerable punster, and made very few bishops or privy-councillors that had not sometime or other signalized themselves by a clinch or a conundrum. It was therefore in this age that the pun appeared with pomp and dignity. It had been before admitted into merry speeches and ludicrous compositions, but was now delivered with great gravity from the pulpit, or pronounced in the most solemn manner at the council-table." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... truth. He came here long ago; But, before that, he'd been born somewhere: The conundrum started first, right there. Little shaver—afore he knew his name Or the place from whereabouts he came— On a wagon-train the Apaches caught him. Killed the old folks! But this cus'—they brought him Safe away from fire an' knife an' arrows. So'thin' ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... I suppose you're going to propound another conundrum of a kind I've heard before—why you should have so many things you don't particularly need, while Miss Hartley must go on sewing when she's hardly able for it in her most unpleasant shack? I don't know whether the fact that you found a mine answers the question; but if it doesn't ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first conundrum of the new world. Why is it better ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... study of womankind is woman! Indeed, from being a good deal overlooked in various ways, she has come to be almost the topic of the age, and strangely enough is she considered. According to the standpoint of the observer, woman is a riddle to be solved, a conundrum to be guessed, a puzzle to be interpreted, a mystery to be explained, a problem to be studied, a paradox to be reconciled. She is a toy or a drudge, a mistress or a servant, a queen or a slave, as circumstances may decide. She is at once ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a feast. They exploited their humorous abilities, and all made merry, save one glum guest. At last, they insisted that this melancholy person should contribute to the entertainment. He consented, in response to much urging, to offer a conundrum: ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... are slow to admit that they are unhappy. At a "Penny Readings" an entertainer caused some displeasure by a quite innocent joke in this connection. Coming through the village, he noticed the sign of one of the public-houses—The Happy Home—and invented a conundrum which he put from the platform: "Why was this a very miserable village?" But the answer, "Because it has only one Happy Home in it," gave considerable offence. For we are not used to these subtleties of language, and the point was missed, a good many folk protesting ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... more important in the affairs of housekeeping than the choice of wholesome food. Apropos to this is an amusing conundrum which is as follows:—"A man went to market and bought two fish. When he reached home he found they were the same as when he had bought them; yet there were three! How was this?" The answer is—"He ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... is to a point 100 feet away and home again—that is, a distance of 200 feet. One correspondent asks whether they take exactly the same time in turning, to which I reply that they do. Another seems to suspect that it is really a conundrum, and that the answer is that 'the result of the race was a (matrimonial) tie.' But I had no such intention. The puzzle is an arithmetical one, as ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... House of Commons, after congratulating him on his present enviable position, finished the confab with the following unrivalled conundrum:—"By the bye, which of your vegetables does your Tamworth speech resemble!"—"Spinach," replied Peel, who, no doubt, associated it with gammon.—"Pshaw," said the gallant Colonel, "your rope inions (your opinions), to be sure!" Peel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... nothing but a good-natured young fellow, whose palate could be pleased by her culinary skill; she treated him, I dare say, exactly as she would have treated one of her own sex. She seemed to think over my words, as one who considers a conundrum, then she apparently gave it up as hopeless, and shook her head lightly as though ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Archipelago, he may be wrong in quite a variety of ways, but even if he answered correctly he would still know just as little about the matter, while if he were to give the only proper reply to so ridiculous a conundrum, he would tell his tormentor that he did not care a rap where it was, that he had not put it there, and that he would tell his mother if the man did not leave him alone. What has he got to do with Labrador, Terra del Fuego, or the Isles of Greece? Give him ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... "Well, now, that's a conundrum," replied Jabez Holt, pondering. "Jake Farnum owns the yard. Jake is a young man, only a few years out of college. He inherited the business from his father, who's dead. Jake is considered a pretty good business man, though he don't know much 'bout boats, an' can't seem to learn a heap, nuther. ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... a pill or a cocoa would be recommended. Next morning the question became more explicit, and the hypothesis of the play and the pill were excluded. 'What,' the new poster ran, 'is Ireland going to do for the Boers?' The public were not intensely anxious to find an answer to the conundrum thrust thus forcibly on their attention, but they became curious to know who the advertisers were who hungered for the information. Men blessed by Providence with sagacious-looking faces made the most of their opportunity, and informed their friends that the thing was a new dodge of ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... we do with the boat?" asked Jean. This was a conundrum, but the Chief, as usual, was ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... answer the conundrum, did not see fit to do so; and hence, on the 3d of November, the same parties deployed their ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... not, for one," says Bobby, doggedly, "I never made out a conundrum in my life, except, 'What is most ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... it thus, Afore he hed to grapple With thet conundrum Satan rais'd About the blam'd old apple; He found Time sort ov smart tew pass Afore Eve ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... would have apprehended them. What's that you say? They have been to the station? You ask if I have seen three suspicious people—a man, perhaps an old man, in a dark-blue, well-cut suit, wearing a Homberg hat and goggles, a girl, and a man of whose appearance you have no knowledge? Come now, that's a conundrum! I ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... Whatever creates a use creates value, and a great increase in use forces an increase in value, provided that the supply does not increase equally fast; and with silver that is an impossibility. If you think government cannot add value to a metal, consider this conundrum: What would be the present value of gold if all nations should demonetize it? It can be calculated approximately. There is on hand enough gold to supply the arts for forty years at the present rate of consumption. What, then, is the present value of a commodity of ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... from making a most intolerable row on the roofs of the houses, or the dogs from being shot in the hot weather if they run about the streets unmuzzled. Life's a riddle; a most infernally hard riddle to guess, Mr Pecksniff. My own opinions, that like that celebrated conundrum, "Why's a man in jail like a man out of jail?" there's no answer to it. Upon my soul and body, it's the queerest sort of thing altogether—but there's no use in talking about ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... foreign circulation with the attenuated numerals of such visible returns as reach him, he is more puzzled in his mind than surfeited in his purse. But the relation of foreign publishers to "home talent" is an ancient and honorable conundrum, which it is not for this paper or ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... and the company was listening to the conundrum, "an Angel can't be less than a human being. And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... old Hildebrandt says to me and Bill this afternoon: 'Boys, one riddle have I for you gehabt haben. A young man who cannot riddles antworten, he is not so good by business for ein family to provide—is not that—hein?' And he hands us a riddle—a conundrum, some calls it—and he chuckles interiorly and gives both of us till to-morrow morning to work out the answer to it. And he says whichever of us guesses the repartee end of it goes to his house o' Wednesday night to his daughter's birthday party. And it means Laura for whichever of us goes, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... own personal quest, for all the time I was living with my mind turned two ways. In the morasses of the Haanebeek flats, in the slimy support lines at Zonnebeke, in the tortured uplands about Flesquieres, and in many other odd places I kept worrying at my private conundrum. At night I would lie awake thinking of it, and many a toss I took into shell-holes and many a time I stepped off the duckboards, because my eyes were on a different landscape. Nobody ever chewed a few wretched clues into such a pulp as I did during ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... identity of Paulus was like all court secrets and most secrets of intriguing governments, no mystery at all to hundreds, but to thousands an insoluble conundrum. The official propagandists of the court news, absolutely in control of all the channels through which facts could reach the public, easily offset the constant leakage from the lips of slaves and gladiators by disseminating artfully concocted news. ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... precisely the conundrum I intend to guess on the present occasion, and for which I have called this meeting without consulting Mr. Belgrave," replied Captain Scott, giving the wheel to Morris, with the course, and unfolding the blue roll. "The Guardian-Mother will go to Saigon before she comes ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... exclaimed. "And I shall never forget your 'Conundrum of the Anvil' which appeared in it. How often have I laughed at that most wonderful conceit, and how often have I ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton
... door-plate. When it came time to be meek, there was no boy this side of the planet Mars who could be meeker, on shorter notice. So he said, "Yes, sir," with that subdued and well pleased alacrity of a boy who has just been asked to guess the answer to the conundrum, "Will you ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... to the government house is the Gymkhana, and I venture to say that nobody who has not been in India can guess what that means. And if you want another conundrum, what is a chotohazree? It is customary for smart people to have their chotohazree at the Gymkhana, and I think that you would be pleased to join them after taking the beautiful drive which leads to the place. Nobody knows what ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... may be set free by the temperature of a burning building and get together. In respect to the old conundrum, "Will saltpetre explode?" Mr. A. A. Hayes, Prof. Silliman, and Dr. Hare's views were, as to the explosions in the New York fire of 1845, that in a closed building having niter in one part and shellac or other resinous material in another, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... clergyman. With this in view he contemplated moving to London where he had been offered the chaplaincy of the huge London Hospital. I remember his talking it over with me, and then asking if I had any idea what I wanted to do in life. It came to me as a new conundrum. It had never occurred to me to look forward to a profession; except that I knew that the heads of tigers, deer, and all sorts of trophies of the chase which adorned our house came from soldier uncles and others who hunted them in India, and I had always thought that their occupation ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... effervescences of his early youth. Like many young men of his caste, he had soon submitted all the baffling riddles of conduct to the thumb rule of Good Form. This Yoshiwara question was to him something more than a moral conundrum. It was a subtle attack by the wife of his bosom, aided and abetted by his old friend Reggie Forsyth and by the mysterious forces of this unfamiliar land as typified by Yae Smith, against the citadel of Good Form, against ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... "Sure," he said. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry." He took another sip as he hunted for suitable words. A beautiful girl, a golden wine ... and vice versa ... why couldn't he simply relax and enjoy himself? Did he have to go fretting about what was probably a perfectly harmless conundrum?... Yes. However, recreation might still ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... always tell by how late she was in the morning. She had a child's happy faculty of being able to make up for lost sleep. Well, when the day seemed over she drew a line through it. One day the chambermaid came below stairs (it was the first we knew of it) and propounded a conundrum. "When is a day not a day?" No one could guess. So she said, "When Mrs. Fulton doesn't draw a line through it." So it seemed that the forty-ninth day of her probation had not been a passage of time. Time had stood still. Why? Well, in the afternoon Mrs. Fulton had gone as crew with ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... dead open-and-shut cinch that the answer to the conundrum lies in that silly old black bunch of feathers," declared the other, conviction in his voice. "I looked up all about ravens in our big 'cyclopaedia as soon as I got downstairs this morning; and the more I read, ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... reputation, however, for it was very soon thrown on the table with a look of disgust, and rising from her seat Madge walked up and down the room, and wished some good fairy would hint to Brian that he was wanted. If man is a gregarious animal, how much more, then, is a woman? This is not a conundrum, but a simple truth. "A female Robinson Crusoe," says a writer who prided himself upon being a keen observer of human nature—"a female Robinson Crusoe would have gone mad for want of something to talk ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... to extricate his vessels and begin his retreat down the bayou. He was somewhat perplexed by the silence of the Confederates, from whom he had heard nothing since his mortars silenced their masked batteries. The conundrum was solved by the sound of wood-chopping in the forests ahead, and the discovery shortly after of two heavy logs lying athwart the bayou, and stopping the progress of the vessels. An hour's hard work with axe and saw removed this obstruction; and the tug, slipping through ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... "Andromaque" for them; my old school part of Hermione which I have not forgotten, and then two scenes from Scribe's pretty piece of "les premieres Amours." He acts French capitally, and, moreover, bestowed upon me the two following ridiculous conundrum puns, for which I shall be ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Governor Mark Twain." Everywhere, now, he was pointed out as a distinguished figure, and his quaint remarks were quoted. Few of these sayings are remembered to-day, though occasionally one is still unforgotten. At a party one night, being urged to make a conundrum, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... editor has issued a conundrum in a volume with the title Does Protection Protect? and undertakes to prove by statistics that answer is No. These Western people are in the habit, we know, of bragging a good deal of their exploits, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... used these words:— "If in the inconstant ferment of their minds The KING'S advisers can indeed discover No surer ground of principle than this; If we have here their final contribution To the most clamant and profound conundrum Ever proposed for statesmanship to solve, Then are we watching at the bankruptcy Of all that wealth of intellect and power Which has made England great. If that be true We may put FINIS to our history. But I for one will never lend my suffrage To that conclusion." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... the standing conundrum with all the women. They will not accept Ethel Newcome even. Perhaps we shall have to admit that Thackeray was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... different value) THE SCARLET LETTER; and by what discrimination are you to open your doors TO THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and close them on THE FAERY QUEEN? To bring things closer home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative called PARADISE LOST was written in English verse by one John Milton; what was it then? It was next translated by Chateaubriand into French prose; and what was it then? Lastly, the French translation was, by some inspired compatriot of George Gilfillan (and of mine) turned ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... know the truth about it," grumbled Andy, who never liked anything to puzzle him and would lie awake half the night trying to find the answer to a conundrum that had been offered to him by a ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... were required. His banishment had, perhaps, a good effect upon the unborn generation, whose parents had not then entered the matrimonial state. Whatever other purpose it subserved, except to show to other communities the "latest novelty" from California, is the unfathomable conundrum. John Crowe was a noisy, blatant, meddlesome fellow, the keeper of a livery stable on Kearny street, and a fierce denouncer of the Committee. There was nothing else to his discredit, so far as I could learn at the time. Reub. Maloney ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... could use them for social purposes during the Christmas party season. I do not know how it may be with others, but I have often found, when introduced to a lady, that I have said "Good evening," and then had absolutely nothing else to say. With the help of the conundrum book I would fill in any awkward pause by asking her who was the most amiable king in history. That would break the ice. Besides, if we kept the book reasonably clean, it might afterward make a very serviceable and acceptable present ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... anticipated blooming out into a society blossom was a conundrum. Perhaps he had some secret method buried in the same box with his hoarded coin. His long evenings were passed reading the Family Herald and Weekly Star and the Ashcroft Journal by candle-light; for those were the only papers he ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless and the deaf-mute Time! Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, With 'Whence am I?' and 'Wherefore did I come?' Deluded infants! will they ever know Some doubts must darken o'er the world below, Though ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... conundrum, Like enough you'll be wanting to try Whether one little girl contra mundum Can't lift the old thing with ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... my cards," answered Miss Graham, contemptuously. "It seems as if life was always to be a losing game for me, let me play my cards how I will. I begin to think there is a curse upon me, and that no act of mine will ever prosper. Who was that man, in your Greek play, who guessed some inane conundrum, and was always getting into trouble afterwards? I begin to think there really is a fatality ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Incorporated in the ink and wax. Besides, he gave me nothing, but still fed me With hopes and blows: and that was the inducement To this conundrum. If it please your worship To call to memory, this mad beast once caus'd me To urge you to drown or hang yourself; I'll do the like to him ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... The silly conundrum sprang at him from goodness knows what void—and over and over again he repeated it to himself, trying to remember the answer, trying ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... a double sense] Equivocalness — N. equivocalness &c adj.; double meaning &c 516; ambiguity, double entente, double entendre [Fr.], pun, paragram^, calembour^, quibble, equivoque [Fr.], anagram; conundrum &c (riddle) 533; play on words, word play &c (wit) 842; homonym, homonymy [Gramm.]; amphiboly^, amphibology^; ambilogy^, ambiloquy^. Sphinx, Delphic oracle. equivocation &c (duplicity) 544; white lie, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... spectacle, and at the same time tormented by a constantly increasing feeling of anxiety. How was it all to end? and would not the city suffer heavily should the army be defeated? The questions were hard ones to answer; he could not give a satisfactory solution to the conundrum when so much depended on circumstances, but none the less he was beginning to feel very uneasy for his factory and house in the Rue Maqua, whence he had already taken the precaution to remove his securities and valuables and bury them in a place of safety. He dropped in at the Hotel de Ville, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of everything else, but his soul was chiefly engaged in alternating vows to give her up and vows to make her his own in spite of herself; and he kept on trying to guess the conundrum she posed him in refusing to enlighten him as to those unmentionable years between his first sight of ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... my conundrum playing peek-a-boo all about his stolid features. After that the Dane treated me with an air of superiority—the superiority of thirty dollars per month over nothing ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Accordingly on their next encounter Peter saw at a glance that he had now, in the interval, divined and that, to sound his note, he was only waiting till they should find themselves alone. This he had soon arranged and he then broke straight out. 'Do you know your conundrum has been keeping me awake? But in the watches of the night the answer came over me—so that, upon my honour, I quite laughed out. Had you been supposing I had to go to Paris to learn that? Even ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... half." And he hired Issy because—well, because "most folks in East Harniss are alike and you can always tell about what they'll say or do. Now Issy's different. The Lord only knows what HE'S likely to do, and that makes him interestin' as a conundrum, to guess at. He kind of keeps my sense of responsibility from gettin' mossy, ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... The name of Polynices, one of OEdipus's sons, means in the original "much quarrelling." In the altercations between the two brothers, in AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, this conceit is employed; and it is remarkable, that so poor a conundrum could not be rejected by any of these three poets, so justly celebrated for their taste and simplicity. What could Shakspeare have done worse? Terence has his "inceptio est amentium, non amanthim." Many similar instances will occur to the learned. It is well known that Aristotle ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... he promised, with a thrill as he thought how the lesson would be learned. And went on: "There's another conundrum. Of course—that man—he's not on ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... cottony and muffled, in those various degrees of grievance and mental distress which indicate too early roused young womanhood. The eventual reply seemed to be affirmative, albeit accompanied with a suppressed giggle, as if the young lady had just been discovered as an answer to an amusing conundrum. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... also the large general express companies or carriers, which send articles all over the United States. One of the most characteristic of these is the Adams Express Company, the widely known name of which has originated a popular conundrum with the query, "Why was Eve created?" This company began in 1840 with two men, a boy, and a wheelbarrow; now it employs 8,000 men and 2,000 wagons, and carries parcels over 25,000 miles of railway. The Wells, Fargo & Company Express operates over ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... humour—never had. I am entirely destitute of it myself. Even in Scotland, even here, this family failing has been remarked—been the subject, I may say, of unfavourable comment. The Perilous of the period lost his head because he did not see the point of a conundrum of Macbeth's. We felt, some time in the fifteenth century, that this peculiarity needed to be honourably accounted for, and the family developed that story of the Secret Chamber, and the Horror in the house. There is nothing in the chamber whatever,—neither a family idiot ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... the first scientific builder? Answer.—Noah, when he invented arky-tecture. (N.B. This will do for a Sunday conundrum.) ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... had enough to do in facilitating conversation. There was no end to his politeness, but it was an impossible task for him now and then promptly to carry over a long sentence from German to Russian, and he would give it up like an invincible conundrum, with the patient smile and head-wag and hand-wave of an amiable Dundreary. Yet I began to surmise a mystery even in him. More than once he inadvertently betrayed a knowledge of Romany, though he invariably spoke of his friends around in a patronizing manner as "these gypsies." This was very odd, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Prudy, "or you'll wake grandma. Let me see; do you want me to tell you a conundrum? Why does an ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... in the high collar, tempered by regret in the soft ruche.... She would have been a problem and a poem; while I, in my cheerful reds, my dazzling white, my decisive short skirts, my piquant shoes, my audacious apron, am a conundrum, a pleasantry, an epigram." This would be very pretty on the stage, but a waiting-maid who calls herself an "epigram" passes our imagination under any other circumstances. In fact, Miss Howard seems to us to be altogether on a false tack in this novel,—to have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... whistled Larry, astonished in spite of his initiation into the mysteries of Italian bargaining. "Well, if you were to ask me the Shakespearian conundrum, Hath not a Jew eyes? I shouldn't give it up; I should say he has ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... wanton eye Transfixed his soul and kindled amorous flames, Chloe, or Phillis, he each circling glass Wisheth her health, and joy, and equal love. Meanwhile, he smokes, and laughs at merry tale, Or pun ambiguous, or conundrum quaint. But I, whom griping Penury surrounds, And Hunger, sure attendant upon Want, With scanty offals, and small acid tiff, (Wretched repast!) my meagre corpse sustain: Then solitary walk, or doze at home In garret vile, and with a warming puff Regale chilled fingers; ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... to frame a reply, he could not find a frame. He knowed it wuz a conundrum boundless as truth and God's justice, and as solemnly deep in its sure consequences of evil as eternity, and as sure to come ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... lookin' or actin' as Justice, and Robert Strong thinks so too. But it is a great problem what to do for the best in this case. Mebby Solomon knew enough to grapple with the question, but Josiah don't, nor Arvilly, though she thinks she duz. Robert Strong is gittin' one answer to the hard conundrum of life, and Ernest White is figurin' it out successful. And lots of other good and earnest souls all over the world are workin' away at the sum with their own slates and pencils. But oh, the time is long! One needs the patience of the Sphinx to set and see it go on, to labor and to wait. But ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... of the tall, slim figure Detective Inspector Wessex stared with a sort of wonder. Mr. Nicol Brinn of Cincinnati was a conundrum which he found himself unable to catalogue, although in his gallery of queer characters were many eccentric and peculiar. If Nicol Brinn should prove to be crooked, then automatically he became insane. This Wessex had reasoned out even before he had set eyes upon the celebrated American ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... life. Or was it Republicans? I forget. I had given 'em a good, hot, mixed Princeton paper,—dog, international law, society, industrial progress, footlight favorites, and the whole business; had Sermons from Many Lands, and a Conundrum Department, as well as a Household Corner—How to get Beautiful for the ladies, How to get Rich for the men, How to get Strong for the advertisers—why, if I do say it, I don't believe any one fellow was ever ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... propound a conundrum for you. Why did your greeting of the Brent girl remind me of that Louis Quinze tapestry for which you paid sixty thousand francs the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the Berlin station by her mother and Cousin von Briest. While drinking tea in the mother's room Cousin von Briest was asked to tell a joke, and propounded a Bible conundrum, which Effi took as an omen that no more sorrow was to befall her. The following day began the search for an apartment, and one was found on Keith street, which exactly suited, except that the house was not finished ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... reached Lake from Tom Twitters, of his club, who kept the Brandon Captain au courant of the town-talk; and it came to Dorcas in a more authentic fashion, though mysteriously, and rather in the guise of a conundrum than of a distinct bit of family intelligence, from no less a person than the old Dowager ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... day, This deep conundrum I will bring: Tell me the two good reasons, pray, I have, to say ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... have asked me a conundrum. I fancy I see Mrs. Armour's face when she gets the news,—at the breakfast-table, of course, and gives a little shriek, and says: 'General! oh, General!' But it is all very shocking, you know," she added, in a lower voice. "Still I think they will ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... this would make a great puzzle, truly an insoluble conundrum, to take back to bewilder his Martian friends. However, he was able to comprehend the remarks of Vigilantius, "who returned from a journey in Italy and the Holy Land disgusted with official Christianity. He protested ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... a able to guess a conundrum; b badgers; c in that field; d mortally offended; e my; h noticed by me; k properly trained in a Board-School; l rushing about ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... mind was maturer than might have been supposed. And the problem which confronted her she saw very clearly, although she was unable to solve it. The problem was not new, indeed, it has been Despair's conundrum since the world began: Whose fault that my life has been as it is? In her ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... Filipino stories belong to a large group of tales to which we may give the name of the "Rival Brothers." This cycle assumes various forms; but the two things that identify the relationship of the members are the rivalry of the brothers and the conundrum or "problem" ending of the stories. Within this cycle we can distinguish at least three simple, distinct types, and a compound fourth made up of parts of two of the others. These four types may be very generally outlined as follows: (I) A number of artisans (usually ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... why she had gone to him and what might result from her visit; and up to a certain point, and in certain cases accurate guessing is easier than might be expected for either side to a political conundrum, in India, ample provision having been made ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... give you two minutes,' rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently and kindly: insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum vein. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... shortly in their writings." Mr. Masson has so poured out his mind upon circumstances, that his work reminds us of Allston's picture of Elijah in the Wilderness, where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape where the very ravens could scarce have found him out, except by divine commission. The figure of Milton becomes but a speck on the enormous canvas crowded with the scenery through ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... number of anonymous contributions, only a very few of which were ever used, and of fewer still was the authorship placed upon record. Early in 1843, however (p. 82, Vol. IV.), Mr. Blackwood, of Edinburgh, sent in one of the earliest of Scottish witticisms, a conundrum; Joseph O'Leary, a reporter of the "Morning Herald," is said to have contributed a poem on "The English Vandal;" and R. B. Peake, who had adapted "A Night with Punch" for W. J. Hammond, began his little series of "Punch's Provincial Intelligence," of which the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... him if he knew what it was, and he gave the right answer, and said he hadn't heard that conundrum since ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... unlike you, Hubbard," he said, "for sometimes after I have been deliberating for days over some curious and perplexing conundrum, you have solved it the moment it has been put ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... stock of first impressions of Indian life. "Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions," Mr Aberich Mackay calls them in his "Twenty-one days in India," that most amusing Indian classic. "What is it these travelling people put on paper?" he adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, illusive, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... between BACH'S music find a music-box is yet an unsettled conundrum. Such is likely to be the fate of the question raised with so much temper over the Passion Music of that great man by the English critics. Shame on all critics that condemn MOZART as a fogy and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... and he was out of business himself. And he wanted Donald to keep still too. What motive had he for wishing his proposition to be kept in the dark? His object was not apparent, and Donald was obliged to give up the conundrum, though he had some painful doubts on the subject. As he thought of the matter, he turned to observe the position of the two boats to the southward of him. Directly ahead of Laud's craft was an island ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... do. The stomach will do it, unless that particular digestive function is lost. It is claimed by some who know more about ditch-digging than about physiology, that alcoholic beverages ruin the lining of the stomach, creating ulcers, and other disorders. This kind of teaching reminds me of a conundrum. 'Why is a scientific temperance man like a dead man in his ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... and imminent, not to be averted by human means, and yet hardly supernatural—here was a conundrum indeed! ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... we have a tree. How Green the Tree is! Can you See the Lightning? Oh, how red and Vivid the Lightning is! Will the Lightning Strike the Tree? Children, that is a Conundrum; we answer conundrums in our Weekly Edition, but not ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... to Janice, though from the doctor or her loquacious landlady she heard of how Burgoyne's force, advancing from Canada, had captured Ticonderoga, and of how Sir William had put the flower of his army on board of transports and gone to sea, his destination thus becoming a sort of national conundrum affording infinite opportunity for the wiseacres ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... were deep in consultation, Edwards entered to announce Mrs. Corcoran Dunn and Mr. Malcolm. The butler's giving the lady precedence in his announcing showed that he, too, realized who was ranking officer in that family, even though the captain's "conundrum" had puzzled him. Mrs. Dunn and her son entered ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the most obedient of your slaves, ma'am!' he cried. 'To hear was to obey, to obey was to fly! If it's Pitt's diamond you need, or Lady Mary's soap-box, or a new conundrum, or—hang it all! I cannot think of anything else, but command me! I'll forth and get it, stap me ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... complained bitterly of the "liberties" that Mr. Potter had taken with it. Those who had not read the book complained equally bitterly that Mr. Potter had not taken more of those "liberties" and made it better worth his while. To me, the book drama is a conundrum. It always has been, and now that it has nearly died out, I am still unable to solve it. When you read a book, you form mental pictures of its characters, and are generally discontented with those that confront you on the stage. And when ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... understand banking? The full ineptitude of this conundrum only dawned upon me by degrees. Manifestly, if I understood banking, I might do some specialised kind of work for the Government. But in that case I would not apply to the Munitions. Granted they wanted bankers. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... busy man myself, and thought little more of Hewitt's conundrum for some time; indeed, when I did think, I saw no way to the answer. A week after the inquest I took a holiday (I had written my nightly leaders regularly every day for the past five years), and saw no more of Hewitt ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... at the review, and finished a good lot of it. Mr. Stewart left us, amply provided with the history of Abbotsford and its contents. It is a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure, and I have great pleasure in it, for while it pleases a fantastic person in the style and manner of its architecture and decoration, it has all the comforts ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... big sliding door; for it made such a difference. It worked up and down like a window-sash, and always suggested the conundrum, When is a galley not a galley? For when it was down, it disclosed nothing and the galley was a galley; but when it was up, it disclosed a recess in which two little gasoline motors sat side by side, and the galley was ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... Sphinx could complete his statement of the case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid last act in ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... the boil.' Elise rose with a strange little laugh and looked at a yellow silk stocking which dangled over the side of a wicker table. As if trying to solve a conundrum, she glanced from it to the shapely form of the young woman at her toilet. 'When the war's over,' she said ruminatingly, 'and our men find what kind of girls they married when they were ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... expended from the speakers' tribune in the National Assembly against the minority, its speech remained monosyllabic, like that of the Christian, whose speech was to be "Aye, aye; nay, nay." It was monosyllabic, whether from the tribune or the press; dull as a conundrum, whose solution is known beforehand. Whether the question was the right of petition or the duty on wine, the liberty of the press or free trade, clubs or municipal laws, protection of individual freedom or the regulation of national economy, the slogan ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... her uncovered face is a conundrum and an object of intense curiosity, even in Teheran at the present day; and in provincial cities, the wife of the lone consul or telegraph employee finds it highly convenient to adopt the native costume, face-covering included, when venturing abroad. Here, in the capital, the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... "Here is a conundrum for you little folks," said Old Mother Nature. "When is a Red Fox not a Red Fox?" Everybody blinked. Most of them looked as if they thought Old Mother Nature must be joking. But suddenly Chatterer ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... other "hards." I studied the superscription at my leisure a whole day, but couldn't make it out. I then showed it to the best experts in handwriting attached to the office, and called on outsiders to test their skill; but what the writing meant, if it was writing, was a conundrum that we all gave up. Finally, in desperation, it was suggested, as a last resort, to send it to Chappaqua, which happened to be its place of destination.' Such is the literal history of the reason of an earnestly written denunciation of the inefficiency ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... These States boast soils that are blends of clay, sand, and loam in the desired proportions; and while some of them are better than others both soil and temperature are such that cotton can be grown in them. Given these two assets the rest of the conundrum is up to ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... portion, death, disappearance,—gone! Astounding development! Mysterious and hapless arrival, tremendous and mysterious passage, mysterious and alarming departure. No escaping it; no volition to enter it or to avoid it; no prospect of defeating it or solving it. Odd affair! Mysterious and baffling conundrum to be mixed ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat, and clear out. Not for any particular place; no, nearly any place will answer; they only want to be moving. The amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the conundrum for them. If it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it be fifty. If not, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in Washington, looking down the wide outer avenue named "Massachusetts," which goes bowling from knoll to knoll and disappears in the unknown hills of the east, has no notion that it leads anywhere, and gives up the conundrum. On the contrary, it points straight to the Washington Asylum, better known as the District Poor-House, an institution to become hereafter conspicuous to every tourist who shall prefer the Baltimore and Potomac to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; for the new line ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... said. "Razors have moods, and are known to sulk. But science has solved the conundrum of their antics. It has been discovered that whetting changes the location of the molecules of metal, that there is frequently left what is not a perfect edge after the supposed sharpening, but that, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... enigma, conundrum, intricacy, maze, crux, riddle, rebus, poser; confusion, quandary, perplexity, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... a beautiful white hand, but her handwriting is infamous; she writes fast and her chirography is of the door-plate order—her letters are immense. I gave her a conundrum, thus: ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of a picture, then? I don't care what you call it. My only anxiety, when you got a plain, simple, every-day conundrum like Miss Maybough to paint, was that you would try to paint the answer instead of the conundrum, and I dare say that's the trouble. You've been trying to give something more of her character than you found in her face; is that it? Well, you deserved to fail, then. You've ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... found in a small room, up a crooked and narrow stairs. Nothing was as large as the furniture. How to get it out was a conundrum. One of the survivors suggested to the farmer to knock off the roof of the house, and take it out that way. But he wouldn't hear of it. Finally, the cart was driven under the eaves, and while "those whose past services had endeared them to their countrymen" rolled the furniture out of the window ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... editor in Rhode Island noted for his love of fun—it came to him irresistibly—and he could not help saying just what came to his mind. He was appointed postmaster by Tyler. Some time after Tyler vetoed the Bank Bill, and came into disrepute with the Whigs, a conundrum went the round of the papers. It was as follows: 'Why is John Tyler like an ass?' This editor copied the conundrum and could not resist the temptation to answer it, which he did thus: 'Because he is an ass!' This piece of fun ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
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