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More "Muddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ten years of effort, had its effect on Trevison. It fretted him; he looked years older; he looked worried and harassed; he longed for a chance to come to grips in an encounter that would ease the strain. Physical action it must be, for his brain was a muddle of passion and hatred in which clear thoughts, schemes, plans, plots, were swallowed and lost. He wanted to come into physical contact with the men and things that were thwarting him; he wanted ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... my!" complained Phelan bitterly. "Sure this is the worst muddle I ever got mesilf into! The sergeant will find him in that uniform, sure. It'll cost me me job, that's what it will! How late ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... of all peoples, from Iceland to Japan, from India to England, are the droll adventures and mishaps of the silly son, who contrives to muddle everything he is set to do. In vain does his poor mother try to direct him in "the way he should go": she gets him a wife, as a last resource; but a fool he is still, and a fool he will always be. ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... stay in that village long; we were neither of us used to keeping accounts, and we got them in a complete muddle. So I had to leave behind my little grave, and the only ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... said, are not much known. The chief of them, besides the breaking out of his lifelong war with Blackwood and the Quarterly, was, perhaps, his unlucky participation in the duel which proved fatal to Scott, the editor of the London. It is impossible to imagine a more deplorable muddle than this affair. Scott, after refusing the challenge of Lockhart,[12] with whom he had, according to the customs of those days, a sufficient ground of quarrel, accepted that of Christie, Lockhart's second, with whom he had no quarrel at all. Moreover, when his adversary had ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... all. No work will be carried out thoroughly without order and system. You see people who work all day and work hard, but never make any way, because they work in a muddle, and with no regular plan. At school the child is given the ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... a muddle tempered by the ink-bottle, like every incipient government. We shall not see our way through it for another ten years—we who have to do the governing; but private enterprise has sharp eyes.—So I am sending you there to make a fortune; I give ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... But you know" He paused. "It's all been a muddle, and I've no objection to your coming along ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... hold out faithfully for her, in the hope that Morgan would come—vain hope, fruitless dream! Morgan would not come. He was safe, far away from there, having his laugh over the muddle that he ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... With The Wild Duck fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of the fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... first, to overlook some of what we already know in a vague sort of way, but this insignificant loss is compensated by the clarity of what remains, and is, in any case, only temporary. For as the analysis proceeds we gradually replace the whole of the original mere muddle by clear and definite things and qualities. At first we may be able to distinguish only a few qualities here and there, and our preoccupation with these may possibly lead us, for a time, to pay insufficient attention to the rest ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... nothing since worth mentioning in the same breath with his two first works; and if his writings have been by comparison watery, unlike water, they have never risen by inherent quality to their original level. Of his latest book, called Sylvie and Bruno, I can make neither head nor tale. It seems a muddle of all sorts, including a little bit of Bible thrown in. It will be bought, because LEWIS CARROLL'S name is to it, and it will be enjoyed for the sake of Mr. FURNISS'S excellent illustrations, but for no other reason, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... window over," said Mr. Garvace pointing his bunch of fingers at Parsons. "Take all this muddle ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... in the use, of the possessive pronoun here and elsewhere, let it signify also the life of my life-partner—is beyond the range of ordinary experience, since it is immune from the ferments which seethe and muddle the lives of the many, I am assured that a familiar record will not be deemed egotistical, I am scolded because I did not confess with greater zeal, I am bidden to ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... a triumphant round of visits, did she show the vindicating sentence. Any soft young fool, she asserted, with the directness and not unattractive truculence of her generation, can get a commission and muddle through, but it took a man to enlist ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... refinement of speech, though a strong Somersetshire accent, Israel Veal would show nothing of himself to a stranger. Probably he would speak so little, though quite politely, that he would be put down as "one of those muddle-headed, stupid yokels with little or no mind," who, according to the townsman, "moulder" in country villages "till ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... diagnosis correct? Did I really know the human muddle? Has any man really mapped out civilization? It's so huge, complex, varied—so many disorganized forces—who can classify it—label it? It's bigger than our thought about it. We lay hands on only a few wisps of ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... the well-remembered winter of the King's execution, and the long frost, when he, Reuben, was last in London. His evidence was confused and confusing; and he drew upon himself much good-natured ridicule from the junior who opened the case. Out of various muddle-headed answers and contradictory statements the facts of Lord Fareham's unexpected appearance at the Manor Moat, his account of his lady's illness, and his hurried departure, carrying the young madam with him on horseback, were elicited, and the story of the ruse by ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... criminal law, and passed in the next years a series of acts consolidating and mitigating the law, and repealing many old statutes. A measure of equal importance was his establishment in 1829 of the metropolitan police force, which at last put an end to the old chaotic muddle described by Colquhoun of parish officers and constables. Other significant legal changes marked the opening of a new era. Eldon was the very incarnation of the spirit of obstruction; and the Court of Chancery, over which he presided for a quarter of a century, was thought to be ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Hill found herself alone with her lacerated feelings. After soothing them with a good cry, she set to work thinking seriously. There was no doubt she had muddled things badly, but there was no use leaving them in a muddle when a word or two fitly spoken might set ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... such a muddle, our things being heaped up against the wall. Presently they will have to be removed to another room while this one is whitewashed and then back again. To find things is almost an impossibility. By the end of the week we hope to ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... said I, "and it may just muddle you for to-morrow. Take an easy evening now, and go to bed early. You'll be all the ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... I went to see my beloved on that evening filled with a new faith in the outcome of our life together. I am afraid I muddle this matter in trying to tell it. A moment ago I said the other woman, the tobacconist's wife, went with me. I do not mean she went in fact. What I am trying to say is that something of her faith in her own desires and her courage in seeing things through went with ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... has to rap out his own orders. Sleeping men have to be roused, equipment thrown on, arms taken up. The men have to "fall in" in their right sections; have to be numbered, have to form fours. If there is any muddle whatever, a Battalion cannot move ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... a pretty muddle of it anyhow," said the Wallypug. "Do you know," he went on, "the Doctor-in-Law made us all pay sixpence each towards the catalogue, and then went around with us explaining the various groups. He had just ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... replied the Baron calmly. "In following it you have gained the resentment of your nobles, and have not even received the thanks of those pitiable hinds, the ploughman in the valley or the shepherd on the hills. You have impoverished us so that the clowns may have a few more coins with which to muddle in drink their already stupid brains. You are hated in cot and castle alike. You would not stand in your place for a moment, were not an army behind you. Being a fool, you think the common people love honesty, whereas, they only curse that they have not a share ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... said this good lady; "why, you all seem to be following the advice of my grandfather Twynintuft,—which was, to let the mind muddle after dinner. He thought it strengthened the voice,—gave it timber, as he called it. But, ah, dear! in these days so little attention is paid to elocution that it's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... piled up a little ahead. Every man of red blood and backbone wants to do his best work, wants to do work that he loves, work into which he can throw himself with heart and soul and with all his mind and strength. Merely to muddle through with some half-detested work, not making an utter failure of it, is no satisfaction when the day's work is done. Not only the man himself, but all of us, lose when he who might have been a great manufacturer and organizer of industry fritters ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... demand; and a reduced demand will send the price down again. It is not certain, therefore, after all, that the tax will really raise the price." A glance at the diagram will keep us out of such a bog of sophistry and muddle. For if we suppose the amount of the tax per unit of the commodity to be represented by Ss, the curve ss' (drawn, as it is, roughly parallel to SS') will represent the new conditions of supply after the tax has been imposed. ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... Without this, work cannot be got through satisfactorily either in offices, workshops, or households. By arranging work properly, by doing everything at the right time, with a view to the economy of labour, a large amount of business can be accomplished. Muddle flies before method; and hugger-mugger disappears. There is also a method in spending—in laying out money,—which is as valuable to the housewife, as method is in accomplishing her work. Money slips through the fingers of some people like quicksilver. We have already seen that many men are spendthrifts. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... having St. Alban in the crater of the pit. But he was wrong to measure him by his Prussian standard. St. Alban came on to London. He got the heads of the War Office together and told them. I was there. It was the devil's own muddle of a contrast. Outside, London was ringing with the man's striking act of personal heroism. And inside of the Foreign Office three or, four amazed persons were listening to the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... not come here, sir, to complain. I were sent for. Indeed, we are in a muddle, sir. Look round town—so rich as 'tis. Look how we live, and where we live, an' in what numbers; and look how the mills is always a-goin', and how they never works us no nigher to any distant object, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Travel, and the Roadway that thou beholdest is part of the great Railway System." "What is the Reason," said I, "that the Roadway I see rises out of a thick Mist at one End, and again loses itself in a thick Mist at the other?" "Monopoly and Muddle freely engender Mists," responded the Genius. "Examine now," said he, "the Roadway that is bounded with Darkness at both ends, and tell me what thou discoverest in it." "I see a Bridge," said I, "standing in the midst of the Roadway." "Consider ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... with elegantly severe authority, "I will not have this talking over the work. Miss Toppings, this whole skirt is an unmitigated muddle. Head-tucks half an inch too near the bottom! No room for your flounce. If you can't keep to your measures, you'd better not undertake piece-work. Take that last welt out, and put it in over the top. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... from isolation to individualism through gregariousness. They opened the new era of amalgamation by co-ordinating, on a vast scale, individual achievements, resources and labour, and directing them to a common end. The allied peoples were meanwhile content to muddle through in the old way. This difference explains much that seems puzzling in ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... conception according to which human beings have no proper place in nature but are mixtures of natural and supernatural—unions or combinations of animality and divinity. Such "solutions" contain no conception of natural law; scientifically judged, they are mythological absurdities—muddle-headed chattering of crude and irresponsible metaphysics—well-meaning no doubt, but silly, and deadly in their effects upon the interests of mankind, vitiating ethics, law, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... me, but really, Miss Pomeroy, she never put those things back as she found them, because I had that drawer looking very neat and now see the muddle it ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... that we're not within shouting distance of the future. We talk as if we could see the end, and we're nowhere near it, we're in all the muddle of the middle—that's why we're hampered with Miss Quincey and other ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... you, my money. Paid off t'dy. 'E knew it. Sly." Jameson had become almost sober. Out of the muddle one thing loomed clearly: he could not be revenged upon his cabin-mate without getting himself into deep trouble. Money; he'd stick ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... Mr. Waverton comes here to do his poor possible to make mischief between us. I suppose you saw that. He tells us that he went blundering with my father into a muddle of ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... help her with the work. Yet the house was always in confusion. Mrs. Gourlay had asked for another servant, but Gourlay would not allow that; "one's enough," said he, and what he once laid down he never went back on. Mrs. Gourlay had to muddle along as best she could, and having no strength either of mind or body, she let things drift, and took refuge ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... here,—but her book is a bad book, a thoroughly rotten book, an unblushing compilation from half-a-dozen works of established reputation, in pilfering from which she has almost always managed to misapprehend her facts, and to muddle her dates. Then she writes to me and asks me to do the best I can for her. I have ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... God, the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, the Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Were not all human needs provided for in that one comprehensive promise: the desperate need of man to be convinced that behind all the seeming muddle was a loving hand guiding towards good; the need of the soul in its loneliness for fellowship, for strengthening; the need of man in his weakness for the kindly grace of human ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... course. Gosh! What a muddle everything is. Sally," she said, suddenly stopping at the door, "you're not going to hate poor old Fillmore over ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... a certain way, and in strong hopes that, at all events, such a muddle would be established as to bewilder the jury, Mr. Jos. Larkin, with still an awful foreboding weighing at his heart, knocked at the vicar's door, and was shown into the study. A solitary candle being placed, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... way ahead. . . . Ryabovitch was with the first cannon of the fifth battery. He could see all the four batteries moving in front of him. For any one not a military man this long tedious procession of a moving brigade seems an intricate and unintelligible muddle; one cannot understand why there are so many people round one cannon, and why it is drawn by so many horses in such a strange network of harness, as though it really were so terrible and heavy. To Ryabovitch it was all perfectly comprehensible and therefore uninteresting. He had known for ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... were Miss Mavis's, for when I mounted to the deck at the end of half an hour I found her there alone, in the stern of the ship, her eyes on the dwindling continent. It dwindled very fast for so big a place. I accosted her, having had no conversation with her amid the crowd of leave-takers and the muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about the boat, our fellow-passengers and our prospects, and then I said: "I think you mentioned last night a name I know—that of ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... horses! Off to Canterbury! Tramp, tramp o'er pebble, and splash, splash through puddle; Hurrah! how swiftly speeds the post so merry! Not like slow Germany, wherein they muddle Along the road,[552] as if they went to bury Their fare; and also pause besides, to fuddle With "schnapps"—sad dogs! whom "Hundsfot," or "Verflucter,"[553] Affect no ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... allies, it might perhaps have been a long time before this consciousness of mismanagement became a general conviction, but as it was, the disorder was readily and naturally attributed to the stupid Germans, and everyone was convinced that a dangerous muddle had been occasioned ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... will be lonesome around here," Turkey Proudfoot agreed. "And I suppose things will be in a muddle in the farmyard by the time I get back, with nobody to keep ...
— The Tale of Turkey Proudfoot - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... from the time our sphere began revolving Until the present writing there had been A glimmer of a promise of resolving The muddle ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... terrible muddle, Alida. If God is so ready to forgive, how do you account for all the evil ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... mean the failure of the campaign. In order to get good water for troops nothing should be neglected or overlooked, and no kind of compromise should be permitted. There is perhaps not a single act in war more criminal and more worthy of death than to allow troops to muddle along and get what water they can, under local arrangements, when a ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... an unbridled moment Bas realized that he was acting the muddle-headed fool in revealing his fear to a subordinate, his hold over whom depended on an unbroken ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... simple enough. My sister must repay you; but you know the muddle in which her husband's affairs were left, and I'm sure you won't refuse to renew ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... limited amount of our knowledge, and the extent of our differences of opinion, while presumptuous incapacity attempts to teach us on the one hand, and designing iniquity, or pure prejudice, seeks to mislead us on the other, and misconception of one's meaning and motives all round makes such a muddle of the whole that—that—it seems to me the search after truth is almost hopeless, at least to ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... Michiel (1118-1130), the church was known as Santa Maria, or San Donato; and to-day it is called S. Donato. And when the time comes for the old sacristan to die, I hope (no matter what kind of a muddle his life has been) that S. Donato will be at hand, near the gate, to pull him through, for sheer faithfulness ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... which was worse—a Cresswell or an Alwyn? It was no sin that Alwyn had done; it was simply ignorant presumption, and she must correct him firmly, but gently, like a child. What a crazy muddle the world was! She thought of Harry Cresswell and the tale he told her in the swamp. She thought of the flitting ghosts that awful night in Washington. She thought of Miss Wynn who had jilted Alwyn ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... both these places I used to muddle and blur the effect by doing the business and speaking at the same time. By acting on Reade's suggestion I gained ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... which have been thus far published, there is a vagueness in the arguments on this branch of the subject, which betrays a want of definite conviction in the minds of the writers; and which tends quite as much to muddle as to enlighten the ideas of the reader. In so far as the directions are given, whether fortified by argument or not, they are clearly empirical, and are usually very much qualified by considerations which weigh with unequal ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... egregious that more knowledge would give us still greater shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things, remains merely virtual. The ideal usually comes before us only in revulsions which we cannot help feeling against some scandalous situation or some intolerable muddle. We have no time or genius left, after our agitated soundings and balings, to think of navigation as a fine art, or to consider freely the sea and sky or the land we are seeking. The proper occupation of the mind is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Marchmont agreed. "Only, you see, we like the muddle to be made by the other side. But, in this case, the muddle is on our side. The change, as you say, seems to leave our friend Stephen's interests unaffected. That is, of course, what poor Jeffrey Blackmore thought. But he was mistaken. The effect of the ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... have every right to do so, and yet they are kept apart by unreasonable and cruel-minded parents. They are young and know nothing of the law, and without help they would most certainly get into a muddle. Now, suppose I take their matter in hand, knowing the law thoroughly as I do, and being up to its weak as well as ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... year ago I was reminded of the existence of an old claim to an English estate, which has danced before the eyes of my family, at odd moments, any time these eighty years. I confess it's a bit of a muddle and a tangle, and am by no means sure that to this hour I've got the hang of it. You look as if you had a clear head: some other time, if you consent, we'll have a go at it, such as it is, together. Poverty was staring me in the face; I sat ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... used in time of war and tumults, and that he thought would never answer, inasmuch as he did not really know who was the enemy from which he would be delivered. It was hard to decide against Ethelyn and still harder to decide against "Dick," and so with his brains all in a muddle Andy concluded to take the prayer "for all sorts and conditions of men," speaking very low and earnestly when he asked that all "who were distressed in mind, body, or estate, might be comforted and relieved according to their several necessities." This surely covered ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... times,—which, by the accident of Pitt, are still memorable to us. But for Walpole,—burning like a small steady light there, shining faithfully, if stingily, on the evil and the good,—that sordid muddle of the Pelham Parliaments, which chanced to be the element of things now recognizable enough as great, would be forever unintelligible. He is unusually accurate, punctual, lucid; an irrefragable authority on English points. And if, in regard to Foreign, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... pencils and tore their hair, Down, a-down, a-down—hey down! But those blessed bills, they wouldn't come square, With a down; 'Midst muddle and smudge it is hard to fix If a six is a nine or a nine is a six, With a down ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... give her slave a chance to wilt. But Link only sat, blank-faced, staring at her. His mind was in a muddle. All his narrow world was upside down. He couldn't make his brain grasp ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... that denotes superiority" ("Though poor in thanks," Redfield, yet I thank thee.) "His speech upon taking the chair, was another event. It was the third good speech of the day and calculated to leave the believers of internal inferiority in something of a muddle. ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... kind, Mr. Freydon,' she said, as we stepped from the gangway to the steamer's deck. 'I was in a dreadful muddle by myself, and now, thanks to you, I have really enjoyed my afternoon in Naples. Believe me, I am grateful. And,' she added, with a faint blush, 'I shall now find even greater interest than before in ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... "And muddle it all up so they wouldn't understand it any better than you do your lawyer's letter," ...
— Comrades of the Saddle - The Young Rough Riders of the Plains • Frank V. Webster
... miss, the lieutenant would fire back, and he was cool enough to fire with effect. Well, he wouldn't miss; what should he miss for? As for the greasers, they would run at the first shot. Nevertheless, he did occasionally muddle over the idea of going off to California with his gold, and without doing this particular job. What kept him to his agreement was the hope of stealing the spare mules, and the fear that the draft might not be paid ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... most of them wouldn't have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... of the traction muddle was sufficient to afford a background of plausibility for this highminded renunciation. There was something likable in Charles Holton. His volubility, which had prejudiced her against him in the beginning, seemed now to speak for a frankness that appealed to her. There was no reason ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... are all the other way—with the many, the poor devils who run about the streets and don't go to church. Don't stare, Tom; mind, I'm telling you all that's in my heart—as far as I know it—but it's all a muddle. You must be gentle with me if you want to land me. Now I've seen a deal of this sort of religion; I was bred up in it, and I can't stand it. If nineteen-twentieths of the world are to be left to uncovenanted ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... new life, getting up from his bed of sickness, writing anew his great masterpieces. And he saw himself, Peter Westcott, learning at last from the Master the rule and discipline of life. All the muddle, the confusion of this lazy year should be healed. He and Clare should see with the same eyes. She should understand his need for work, he should understand her need for help. All should be happiness and victory in this glorious world and he, by ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... few hundred yards of the mission-house there was a jetty, and at the end of the jetty was Her Majesty's gunboat Badger, a small schooner-rigged wooden vessel commanded by Lieutenant-Commander Muddle, one of the most irascible men that ever breathed, and who had sat on more Consuls than any ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... Robert and his cousins from Bristol town will soon be here. I have not met with the cousins yet, but I've been told as they're very fine ladies—They stood in place of parents to my Robert, you know. 'Tis unfortunate we should be in such a sad muddle the ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... of a lady; had we known, we should certainly have taken our measures more fittingly. I crave your pardon. No one has yet accused Captain Lingo of rudeness to a lady. Ketch, put up thy cutlass and go straightway to the pool and wet this pocket-handkerchief. Be brisk, thou muddle-pated son of a ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... poor fellow's death, which has cut me up as much as anybody; though if they had known I had just come from the 'scene of the crime,' and actually lived in the house, they would probably have—let me alone." He laughed sarcastically. "They are a queer lot of muddle-heads are the police. Their motto is, 'First catch your man, then cook the evidence.' If you're on the spot you're guilty because you're there, and if you're elsewhere you're guilty because you have gone away. Oh, I know them! If they could have seen their way to ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... us we weren't to ask anybody else to do shopping for us," said Wendy demurely. "When you've not been told not to do anything, you're not disobedient if you don't do it—oh! I'm getting rather in a muddle, but you know what ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... these interrogations are sometimes more embarrassing for the interrogator than for the interrogated.... You made the observation yourself just now very aptly and wittily." (Raskolnikov had made no observation of the kind.) "One gets into a muddle! A regular muddle! One keeps harping on the same note, like a drum! There is to be a reform and we shall be called by a different name, at least, he-he-he! And as for our legal tradition, as you so wittily called ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... think water. The Elizabethans—Sidney and Shakspeare, Burleigh and Queen Bess, worked on beef and ale,—and you would not class them among the muddle-headed of the earth: Believe me, to write well, you must live well. If you take it out of your brain, you must put it in again. It's a question of fact. Try it for yourself." And off Tom went; while Lucia rushed back to her husband, covered him with caresses, assured him ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... on nothing and dreams touched with moonshine—and you make a Micawber. Put in a dash of assurance and a good thimbleful of hypocrisy, and Pecksniff is the product. Leave out the assurance, replacing it with cowardice, and the result is Doctor Chillip or Uriah Heap. Muddle the whole with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... had already become possessed by a dark suspicion concerning him. This is proved by the episode of Dr. Lind's visit during his fever. Then and ever afterwards he expected monstrous treatment at his hands, although the elder gentleman was nothing worse than a muddle-headed squire. It has more than once occurred to me that this fever may have been a turning point in his history, and that a delusion, engendered by delirium, may have fixed itself upon his mind, owing to some imperfection in the process of recovery. But the theory is too speculative ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... turpentine on a duster, and began to scrub the face of the Melancolia viciously. The paint did not smudge quickly enough. She took a palette-knife and scraped, following each stroke with the wet duster. In five minutes the picture was a formless, scarred muddle of colours. She threw the paint-stained duster into the studio stove, stuck out her tongue at the sleeper, and whispered, 'Bilked!' as she turned to run down the staircase. She would never see Torpenhow any more, but she had at least ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... but unfortunately for the good of the house, Faith was not troubled by appearances. Her eyes did not notice details, the details which mean so much, for her home had always been in more or less of a muddle. There were so many of them, Audrey, Faith, Tom, Deborah and baby Joan. Five of them ransacking and romping all over the house, until granny had come and taken Audrey away ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... be busy all the morning over my accounts; they've got into the most disgraceful muddle, and I want to put them straight. I shall be in the drawing room, for I keep all my household books in the davenport there. I mean to give you a holiday, Judy, but perhaps you won't mind reading some of your history to yourself, and doing ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... secondhand with the Americans, than I had ever guessed existed in all the time that I had been an inhabitant of the British Front. It is characteristic of us as a people that we like to pretend that we muddle our way into success. We advertise our mistakes and camouflage our virtues. We are almost ashamed of gaining credit for anything that we have done well. There is a fine dishonesty about this self-belittlement; but it is not ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... the New World. There were 6,000 British regulars and 9,000 American militia, with plenty of guns and all the other arms and stores required. Its general, Abercromby, was its chief weakness. He was a muddle-headed man, whom Pitt had not yet been able to replace by a better. But Lord Howe, whom Wolfe and Pitt both thought 'a perfect model of military virtue,' was second-in-command and the real head. He was young, as full of calm ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... go do up the sugar for Widow Smith, her boy is waiting," said my parent, seeing the muddle into which I was getting things. "I will attend to these ladies—twelve yards of the pillow-casing, did you say, ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... tea-cup, without any definite symbols, just a muddle of tea-leaves, is useless for the purpose of divination, beyond giving an indication of the state of the consultant's mind, so vague and undecided in its character that it obscures everything. Tell such a one the reason for the failure ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... and I feared for the poor half-perished creatures again and again as I saw them scrambling along the lee rail, stopping and holding on as the mountainous seas swept over the hull, and then creeping a bit further aft in the pause. There was a horrible muddle of spars and torn canvas and rigging under her lee, but we could not guess what a fearful sight was there until our hawser having been made fast to the wreck, we had hauled the lifeboat close under her quarter. There looked to be a whole ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... silence reached even them, and they crowded in the doorway to listen. Only the hostess held back, sending her husband an anxious look. 'Ah, dear me!' she sighed, half aloud, 'he is sure to make a muddle of it. He has already made all his speeches; what would he be ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... who only stares bored at a spot about ten feet behind the back of your head and answers most of your questions by blinkin' his eyes, it kind of gets on your nerves. Still, I couldn't let him get away. Why, Mr. Robert had been prospectin' for months to find the right man for that transportation muddle and when he finally got hold of this Nicky Wells he goes around ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... miserably on the shaken nerves. I know the burst of thankfulness and joy that would come, if some dismal load, never to be cast off, were taken away. And I would take it off. I would clear up the horrible muddle. I would make them happy: and in doing that, I know that I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... occurrence produced a terrible muddle, for there had not even been a copy taken of the plaint. The judge, that is to say, his secretary and the assistant debated for a long time upon such an unheard-of affair. Finally it was decided to write a report of the matter to the governor, as the investigation of the matter pertained more ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... French it meant that something grave was afoot. She was afraid that her unsteady English might muddle what she intended to say. Lady Everington knew that it must be another proposal; she had already dealt ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... of all this recent insubordination and violence is—curious. Exasperating too.... I don't quite grasp it.... It's the same thing whether you look at the suffrage business or the labour people or at this Irish muddle. People may be too safe. You see we live at the end of a series of secure generations in which none of the great things of life have changed materially. We've grown up with no sense of danger—that is to ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the creation of form. He understood immediately the Byzantine masters and the French and Italian Primitives. In the Renaissance painters, on the other hand, with their descriptive pre-occupations, their literary and anecdotic interests, he could see nothing but vulgarity and muddle. The universal and essential quality of art, significant form, was missing, or rather had dwindled to a shallow stream, overlaid and hidden beneath weeds, so the universal response, aesthetic emotion, was not ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... many deficiencies in Dame Quickly's mental make-up; but the one for us to notice here is her utter lack of the narrative sense. She would never be able to tell a story: because, in the first place, she could not select from a muddle of events those which bore an intelligible relation to one another, and in the second place, she could not arrange them logically instead of chronologically. She has no sense of series. And although Dame Quickly's mind is an exaggeration of the type it represents, the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... satirist who remarked that to love one's self is the beginning of a lifelong romance. We know this lifelong romance will resume its sway; we shall lose our tempers, be obstinate, peevish and crank. We shall fidget and fume while waiting our turn in the barber's chair; we shall argue and muddle and mope. And yet, for a few hours, what a happy vision that was! And we turn, on Christmas Eve, to pages which those who speak our tongue immortally associate with the season—the pages of Charles Dickens. Love of humanity endures as long as the thing it loves, and ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... bitter rage filled his eyes and made furrows on his encrusted cheek. Idiot that he had been, he had wrecked everything! What would Saskia and Dougal and Sir Archie do without a business man by their side? There would be a muddle, and the little party would walk into a trap. He saw it all very clearly. The men from the sea would overpower them, there would be murder done, and an easy capture of the Princess; and the police would turn up at long last ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... muttered, as he walked away. "What a muddle it all is! I ought to feel like strangling myself for permitting this doubting, cynical spirit to creep over me. Curse it all! her words and manner haven't the ring of absolute truth. It seems as if I heard a voice in the very depths of my soul, saying, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... competition would give place to the orderliness of associated effort, and under Socialism society would for the first time in history behave like an organism."[257] Private capitalism and consequent competition are responsible not only for waste and muddle, but also for the adulteration of food and other necessaries of life. "Every man who knows anything of trade knows how general is the knavish practice of adulteration. Now all adulteration is directly due to competition. Did not Mr. ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... a fortnight after I went back and was sent to a hospital in Burton-on-Trent. The M.O.'s have a positive genius for sending men to spots remote from their homes and kindreds—appalling sentence. In this case it was a blessing in disguise. By some muddle or another my name was omitted from the casualty list, or rather it was printed as 'Norton,' and never corrected publicly. I accepted the kindness of the gods. Imagine my relief. I had pictured sisters and cousins and the dear old Aunt dragging themselves ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... first session in despair, "I shall not go again. Monsieur Bongrand is right, you could never bear the sight. Everything is ticketed. All the town is coming and going just as in the street; the handsome furniture is being ruined, they even stand upon it; the whole place is such a muddle that a hen couldn't find her chicks. You'd think there had been a fire. Lots of things are in the courtyard; the closets are all open, and nothing in them. Oh! the poor dear man, it's well he died, the sight would ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... a gush of muddy, evil-smelling water, and then had to drag his shoe out with a loud sucking sound, while the foot he had not stamped was beginning to sink. "It's enough to drive any one mad," he muttered. "Just as I am entrusted with something important I go and muddle it all, and the more I try the worse the ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... it's easier than others; but sometimes there are so many firstlies and secondlies divided into other firstlies and secondlies that I get into a regular muddle. Uncle always says that it's a very good exercise for the memory, as well as teaching me about Church things. Sometimes Mr. Mackenzie preaches a sermon for children in the afternoon, and then it's quite different; I could remember every word. But the funny thing ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... : moskito. moss : musko. moth : ("clothes"—), tineo. motive : motivo. motto : devizo, moto. mould : model'i, -ilo; tero, sximo. mound : altajxeto, remparo, digo. mourn : funebri. "-ing," funebra vesto. move : mov'i, -igxi. movement : movo, movado. mow : falcxi. mud : koto, sxlimo. muddle : fusxi; konfuzi. muff : mufo. mug : pokaleto. mulberry : moruso. mule : mulo. mummy : mumo. murmur : murmuri. muscle : muskolo. museum : muzeo. mushroom : fungo, agariko. muslin : muslino. mussel : mitulo. must : devi. mustard : mustardo, ("-plant"), sinapo. mutual : reciproka. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... of certain papers, leaders which never fail to regret the enormous amount of divorce there is. If it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the Press, it is because the Press does not give news of an imaginary world that is a Utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. Does Chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the Divorce Courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions. It is useless Chesterton sighing that lawyers have become breakers of families; they have also become restrainers ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... this, and I honour you. I have been, like you, quite surprised at the want of originality in opposed arguments and in favour too. Gwyn Jeffreys attacks me justly in his letter about strictly littoral shells not being often embedded at least in Tertiary deposits. I was in a muddle, for I was thinking of Secondary, yet Chthamalus applied ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... at a spring on a hillside, when, looking up, what should he see but a Lamb just beginning to drink a little lower down. "There's my supper," thought he, "if only I can find some excuse to seize it." Then he called out to the Lamb, "How dare you muddle the water ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... that had come to him. It is hard, it is impossible, to give in print the effect of her radiant sweetness shining through the jungle of poor Skelmersdale's rough and broken sentences. To me, at least, she shone clear amidst the muddle of his story like a glow-worm in a ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... to bring-to first and at once. It is evident, however, that even the Sailing Instructions, cast-iron as they were, contemplated a fleet in order, not one in process of forming order; and that to bring-to helter-skelter, regardless of order, was to obey the letter rather than the spirit. Muddle-headed as Mathews seems to have been, what he was trying to do was clear enough; and the duty of a subordinate was to carry out his evident aim. An order does not necessarily supersede its predecessor, unless the two are incompatible. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... kiss frightened me, but—— Will I hate him when I see him with nice people? Can I introduce him to the Gilsons? Oh, I was mad; so wrought up by that idiotic chase with Dlorus, and so sure I was a romantic heroine and—— And I'm simply an indecisive girl in a realistic muddle!" ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the profits of which were to benefit the society, which drooped for want of funds. It was her first attempt at organization on a large scale, and she meant to achieve something remarkable. She meant to use the cumbrous machine to pick out this, that, and the other interesting person from the muddle of the world, and to set them for a week in a pattern which must catch the eyes of Cabinet Ministers, and the eyes once caught, the old arguments were to be delivered with unexampled originality. Such was the scheme as a whole; and in contemplation of it she would become ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... mystical. Mr. Waverton comes here to do his poor possible to make mischief between us. I suppose you saw that. He tells us that he went blundering with my father into a muddle of ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... him and winked. "That's cool," said he. "Next thing, you'll ask me to help you out of the muddle. I know I'm emissary of Providence, but not that kind! You get out of it yourself, like AEsop and the other fellow. Must be dreadful muddle for young orphan o' forty; leather ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... isn't a hanky cry, unless you make it worse. Lydia, I wish you and Anne would go away and let father and me muddle along alone." ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... then! Thou fat sedentary appetite, what a great god thine must be, that he can choose no cleverer servant than thee to muddle his affairs! While you were lulling me to sleep with dreams about a clue to be found in a cellar, she has already sucked the secret out from some cobra's hole and has sold it to the commissioner! As soon as he has ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... made a nice mess of things!" she had exclaimed, half crying. And Johnny had inwardly agreed with her more sweepingly than Mary V suspected. A nice mess he had made of things, truly! Everything was a muddle, and like the fool he was, he went right on muddling things worse. Even Mary V could see it, he told himself bitterly, and forgot that Mary V had said other things,—tender, pitying things,—before they had led ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... great, are but a small part of the mess. Doubtless many a marriage—and not in high life alone, either—has been put through, although the one party or the other or both have discovered that disaster was inevitable—solely because of the appalling muddle the sensible course would precipitate. In the case of the Norman-Burroughs fiasco, there were—to note only a few big items—such difficulties as several car loads of presents from all parts of the earth to be returned, a house furnished throughout ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... disorders it never occurred to me that the Government would be foolish enough to let the flour situation get worse. I was so used by this time to see the Duma keep a calm front in the face of imperial rebuffs that I thought Russia was going to continue to muddle on to the end of the war and, though I thought I was rather well-posted, I confess I was on the point of leaving Russia to return to the western front, where the spring campaign was about to begin with vigor. As late as ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... Act had caught her in its toils, she was being overwhelmed with terrible forms and schedules, searching into her profits, making strange inquiries as to minerals, muddling her with long words. Then out of all the muddle and welter finally emerged the startling fact that the Government expected to have twenty per cent. of her profits on the ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... 61; irregularity; anomaly &c (unconformity) 83; anarchy, anarchism; want of method; untidiness &c adj.; disunion; discord &c 24. confusion; confusedness &c adj.; mishmash, mix; disarray, jumble, huddle, litter, lumber; cahotage^; farrago; mess, mash, muddle, muss [U.S.], hash, hodgepodge; hotch-potch^, hotch-pot^; imbroglio, chaos, omnium gatherum [Lat.], medley; mere mixture &c 41; fortuitous concourse of atoms, disjecta membra [Lat.], rudis indigestaque ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... understand it, he was never quite sober at that time; he had begun to use drugs, and was often in a half- stupefied condition. As a matter of fact, the woman did what she pleased with him. There's no doubt about the validity of the marriage. And what makes it so desperate a muddle is that since the marriage she's taken good care to give no grounds upon which a divorce could be obtained for Harman. She means ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... Supreme War Council was, in spite of President Wilson's opposition to the plan, to continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as possible. To the American soldier at this distance it looks as though the French and British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle along till the American authorities could be shown the fitness or the necessity of supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was playing with a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great game of hazard. ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... left my shoes behind me, that's all"; and she ran indoors, jumping from mat to mat, and without even so much as bidding Tom goodbye, who rode home, not thinking much about his business, but lost in a muddle of most contradictory presentations, a constant glimmer of Catharine's ankles, wonderment at her accident—was it all true?—the strange look when she disclaimed the honour of his rescue and expounded her philosophy, and the fall between his shoulders. When he slept, his sleep was usually dreamless, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... perhaps the most important single issue now in controversy at the Peace Conference—a phase of the Asiatic muddle. In fact, it was an outline of the private agreement that has been reached as between our envoys and the envoys representing sundry friendly powers in regard to this particular question. If it should fall into the hands of a certain other power—and be ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the needless muddle was apparent. Evasions were of no use; therefore Dunois admitted that there was no way to correct the blunder but to send the army all the way back to Blois, and let it begin over again and come up on the other side this time, according ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... intervened, listening and watching him uneasily, "you'd better go yourself and tell them. He'll muddle it." ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... this good lady; "why, you all seem to be following the advice of my grandfather Twynintuft,—which was, to let the mind muddle after dinner. He thought it strengthened the voice,—gave it timber, as he called it. But, ah, dear! in these days so little attention is paid to elocution that it's of no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... "It is a muddle tempered by the ink-bottle, like every incipient government. We shall not see our way through it for another ten years —we who have to do the governing; but private enterprise has sharp eyes.—So I am sending ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... has left it. He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about "HEREDITY BEING ABLE TO WORK UP the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration," {61b} or of "the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... you know" He paused. "It's all been a muddle, and I've no objection to your coming along ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... been dispelled from every stage and process of the social training of men. Things long hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... intelligent soldier could do without any knavery or any corruption, 'John Bright might tell us,' but he couldn't. And here it may be well to observe that it was a favourite form of speech with him to refer to this illustrious public man in this familiar manner; but always to show what a condition of muddle and confusion must ensue if we followed the counsels that name emblematised; nor did he know a more cutting sarcasm to reply to an adversary than when he had said, 'Oh, John Bright would agree with you,' or, 'I don't think John Bright could ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 233.).—I have heard the word "maddle" often used in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in exactly the same sense as the word mairdil, as mentioned by MR. STEPHENS. And in this part the work-people would use the word "muddle" in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 232, April 8, 1854 • Various
... appeared at the head of the column, and was supplemented by a complete resume of the Blithers-Graustark muddle: ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons—although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift as humming-birds—yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed to me to mount. And there was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enormous amount of divorce there is. If it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the Press, it is because the Press does not give news of an imaginary world that is a Utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. Does Chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the Divorce Courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions. It is useless Chesterton sighing that lawyers have become ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... really cared for them, but because gifted writers had for centuries been setting up hypnotic suggestions that in this way was pleasure to be obtained. He had often seen men and women standing before a canvas of REMBRANDT, hating the grubby muddle of it in their hearts, but adoring it in their heads—all because some well-known critic had told them to. Their pleasure, however, was real, and therefore it should, in a world of sadness, be encouraged, and consequently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... stores on board till the last moment. If I were an owner I should tell all shippers that no goods would be received within five or six hours of the ship's time for sailing; that would give us a fair chance, instead of starting all in a muddle, just at the time, too, when more than any other one wants to have the decks free for making short tacks down these narrow reaches. I believe half the wrecks on the sands at the mouth of the river are due to the confusion in which the ships start. ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... Captain Jones," said I, "it wasn't anything that would have disturbed much either of us two," I said; and then, as if a light had been flashed into the muddle of his brain, poor old Jones found a last word of amazing profundity. He blew his nose, nodding at me dolefully: "Ay, ay! neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought so much ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... cleansing the Treasury has commenced, and brooms and scrubbing-brushes are at a premium—a little anticipative, it is true, of the approaching turn-out; but the dilatory idleness and muddle-headed confusion of those who will soon be termed its late occupiers, rendered this a work of absolute time and labour. That the change in office had long been expected, is evident from the number of hoards discovered, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... other people now came in, all calling for food, and I was really so weary from lack of sleep and proper rest that I could not remember what they were talking about two seconds after they had finished speaking. Most of the men were angry at the "muddle," as they called it, and said it was hopeless going on this way. One of the Austrian midshipmen told me that there had been altogether very little firing, and not more than a few dozen Chinese skirmishers engaged, but that the whole northern and eastern fronts ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... "ignorance" from the burthen of thinking about African problems, I find myself obliged, like most other people, to do so. In the interests of our country, our children, and the world, we common persons have to have opinions about these matters. A muddle-up in Africa this year may kill your son and mine in the course of the next decade. I know this is not a claim to be interested in things African, such as the promoter of a tropical railway or an oil speculator ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... Mr. Furnival's mind, keen and almost unerring at seizing legal points, went eagerly to work, considering what new evidence might now be forthcoming. He remembered at once the circumstances of those two chief witnesses, the clerk who had been so muddle-headed, and the servant-girl who had been so clear. They had certainly witnessed some deed, and they had done so on that special day. If there had been a fraud, if there had been a forgery, it had been so clever as almost to ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... fastidious little old English woman back with him as a housekeeper, a Mrs. Watson, and she looks both capable and practical. Notwithstanding the fact that she seems to have stepped right out of Dickens, and carries a huge Manx cat about with her, Percy said he thought they'd muddle along in some way. Thoughtful boy that he was, he brought me a portmanteau packed full of the newer novels and magazines, and a two-pound jar of ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... saw I could bring myself to meet with considerable philosophy. It meant a return to the quiet service of the Honourable George and that I need no longer face the distressing vicissitudes of life in the back blocks of unexplored America. I would not be obliged to muddle along in the blind fashion of the last two days, feeling a frightful fool. Mrs. Effie would surely not keep me on, and that was all about it. I had merely to make no defence of myself. And even if I chose to make one I was ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... in my other hand," I said, "and then I can always look at it easily, and it will always be in a different place, which ought to muddle him." ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... and we'd have missed this. It takes only about one season to muddle up their riding with the white man's booze—or the white man's treaty money. Why don't we leave well enough alone—that is, if they'd let ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... was always in confusion. Mrs. Gourlay had asked for another servant, but Gourlay would not allow that; "one's enough," said he, and what he once laid down he never went back on. Mrs. Gourlay had to muddle along as best she could, and having no strength either of mind or body, she let things drift, and took refuge in ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... in his power to conciliate the different parties, but has now concluded that Paris must be conquered by the troops of Versailles. Every day there comes more disturbing news. How will it all end? When shall we get out of this muddle? En attendant, we live ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... of mine called "The First Message," also in Gall's edition, was sent over by telegraph to America. What a miserable muddle, by the way, those meddlesome revisers have made of The Angel's Message;—preferring a dubious sigma to a comma, they have utterly spoilt that sublime trilogy by making "Peace upon earth, goodwill towards men," read "Peace upon ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... otherwise would have been chilled to a moral death. The love of women and of all those people who had not been called upon to fight went out to those poilus at the front, in waves of emotion which reached as far as the advanced trenches. By millions of letters, which in spite of an almost hopeless muddle of the postal service did at last reach the soldier, they knew that France, the very heart of France, was full of pity and hero-worship and yearning for them. By the gifts which came to them—after months of delay, sometimes—not only from their own kinsfolk but from unknown benefactors, school ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... sound of footsteps without. He sprang up, crying, "I 've been waiting so long for you!" A servant opened the door to bring him a message. Oakley dismissed him angrily. What did he want to go down to the Continental for to drink and talk politics to a lot of muddle-pated fools when he had a brother in Paris who was an artist and a letter from him lay unread in his hand? His patience and his temper were going. Leslie was careless and unfeeling. She ought to come; he was ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Mr. Mitchell slipped into a smoking jacket with a violent velvet lining and sat in his den—a den bedecorated after the manner known to the muddle-minded as artistic, but more aptly described by Sir Anthony Gloster as "beastly." To this den came now the ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... hardly believe that we have this sense of self-importance only to get rid of it," I said. "It all seems to me a dreadful muddle—to shut up these lovely little things inside millions of stones, and then to give us the wish to break a couple, only that we may reflect that they were not meant for us ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Jan's skepticism was amply justified. In the thirty-five-day trip thus begun—which should have been completed in sixteen days—Jan was given as striking an example of the effects of man's muddle-headed, slack-minded incompetence as that which Jean had furnished him of the effects of man's able-bodied, clear-headed competence and efficiency. Jan never worked it out in precisely this way, but after his own simple and direct fashion he came to the definite conclusion, before he ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... photograph almost reverently—"why, I'd go through fire and water but I'd keep myself decent; ain't you a silly old fool, now? We've made our piles, you can go back and take her a fortune, give her jewels and pretty dresses, and all the fal-de-lals that women love. You'll never do it if you muddle yourself up with that stuff. Pull yourself together, old 'un. Chuck the drink till we've seen this thing ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of this kind Nelson was a clear and accurate thinker, and in the admiral he had to do with a muddle-headed, irresolute superior. Hughes had already been badly worried and prodded, on matters concerning his own neglected duties, by his unquiet young subordinate, who was never satisfied to leave bad enough alone, but kept raising knotty points to harass an easy-going old gentleman, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... spite of the poor fellow's entreaties to be allowed to remain with him. Miss Macdonald had only passports for three and the danger was urgent. He was a faithful and affectionate friend, this O'Neal, if a little boastful and muddle-headed. He could shortly afterwards have escaped to France—as O'Sullivan did—in a French ship, if he had not insisted on going to Skye to try to fetch off the Prince. He missed the Prince, and fell into the ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... "Lor, lummy! Ain't we got no pigs in England? That there food won't be wasted. We'll be eatin' it in sausages w'en we goes acrost the Channel"; whereupon he dismissed the whole question from his mind. This seemed to me then the typical Anglo-Saxon attitude. Everywhere there was waste, muddle-headedness, and apparently it was nobody's business, nobody's concern. Camps were sited in the wrong places and buildings erected only to be condemned. Tons of food were purchased overseas, transported across thousands ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... roadmaster curled up in the caboose, for they had been routed out at an unseemly hour; the station agent amused himself reading the messages that rattled through to the South and back, telling of a muddle at headquarters. When a wrecking train is held for orders, it is safe to assume that ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... platitudes of the muddle-headed multitude are surely the only people for whom they are true. It is they alone who are the materialists, confusing as they do the spirit of romance with its worn-out garments of bygone fashions. Such people are so clearly out of court ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... help? I had no money to bolster up affairs! Wilmarth was awfully blue. I didn't suppose anything could be made of the business, it was in such a muddle. And it couldn't now, mother, if Floyd had not sunk thousands; I don't see how he expects to get it back ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... in that or in myself. But, 'du Himmel!' Thou shouldst have heard mine old love warble herself forth. To my utter astonishment, I was perfect master of the instrument. Is not this most strange? Thou knowest I had never learned it; and thou rememberest what a poor muddle I made at Marietta in playing difficult passages; and I certainly have not practiced; and yet there I commanded and the blessed notes obeyed me, and when I had finished, amid a storm of applause, Herr Thielepape arose and ran to me and grasped my hand, and declared that he hat never heert de flude ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... British relations with Afghanistan is one which illustrates the infinite capacity of our race to "muddle through" to some more or less satisfactory settlement. This was especially the case in the spring and summer of 1880, when the accession of Mr. Gladstone to power and the disaster of Maiwand changed the diplomatic and military situation. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... woods, in which abounded maize, fruits, and tobacco, with game of every kind, could possibly have induced content. Content, as Christians know, comes but with faith, and a true knowledge of the dogma is above liberty. Kindly, but muddle-headedly, he deplored their lot, their want of clothes, their want of interest in their God, their lack of knowledge of that God's commands. Then, coming to the point, he spoke of hell, and told the astonished Indians that it was quite impossible for them to avoid its flames, unless, ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... go into rights, Mr. Clark," the judge retorted, "the whole thing is a hopeless muddle. None of us in a very real sense has any rights—extremely ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... something. It's a clever trick, but it won't hold water. That blaze which was done to muddle you was cut with an axe; this which I made was done with a bowie-knife. It's the real one. We're not far off ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... ills—terrible destructions, madness even, the ruin of lives—for which the embrace of man and woman would be a remedy. No one thinks of questioning it. Terrible evils and a remedy in a delight and joy! And man has chosen so to muddle his life that he must say: 'There, that would be a remedy, but I cannot use it. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... never come to much good, Jenny Spinner," she cried. "What with a muck of dirty dishes in one corner and a muddle of ragged clouts in another, you're the very model of a wife for a farm hand! Can't sew a gown for yerself neither, but bound to send it into town to be made for ye, and couldn't put a button on a pair of breeches for fear ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... Lady Kellynch had that quiet dignity and natural ease and distinction sometimes seen in the widow of a knight, but unknown amongst the old aristocracy. It was generally supposed, or, at all events, stated, that the late Sir Percy Kellynch had been knighted by mistake for somebody else; through a muddle owing to somebody's deafness. The result was the same, since his demise left her with a handle to her name, but no one to turn it (to quote the mot of a well-known wit), and she looked, at the very least, like a ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... ordered, happier, finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in terms of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle and diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things with passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. Thousands ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... were themselves besieged, surrounded, and well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They killed a couple of "little fellows," or, rather, some of their hired Texas cowboys did it for them, but that was all they accomplished, except well-nigh to bankrupt Wyoming in the legal muddle, out of which, of course, nothing came. There were in this party of cattle men a member of the legislature, a member of the stock commission, some two dozen wealthy cattle men, two Harvard graduates, and a young Englishman in search of adventure. They made, on the whole, ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... marriage, familiarity, knowledge of words and ways, sweethearting and trafficking, so that they know the children of the Rom as the house-world does not know them, and they in some sort belong together. It is a muddle, perhaps, and a puzzle; I doubt if anybody quite understands it. No novelist, no writer whatever, has as yet clearly explained the curious fact that our entire nomadic population, excepting tramps, is not, as we thought in our childhood, composed of English people like ourselves. ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... go on digging and knowing all the time as them lads is breaking their necks over the cliff side. Never was in such a muddle as this before. Why didn't they say what they were going ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... much of the family pride in his composition, he resolved not to muddle the blood of the Witheringtons by any cross from Cateaton Street or Mincing Lane; and after a proper degree of research, he selected the daughter of a Scotch earl, who went to London with a bevy of nine in a Leith smack to barter blood for wealth. Mr. Witherington being so unfortunate ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... heard. Bald-headed: 'to go it bald-beaded;' in great haste, as where one rushes out without his hat. Bogue: 'I don't git much done 'thout I bogue right in along 'th my men.' Carry: a portage. Cat-nap: a short doze. Cat-stick: a small stick. Chowder-head: a muddle-brain. Cling-john: a soft cake of rye. Cocoanut; the head. Cohees: applied to the people of certain settlements in Western Pennsylvania, from their use of the archaic form Quo' he. Dunnow'z I know: the nearest your true Yankee ever comes to acknowledging ignorance. Essence-pedler: a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... treated badly that evening: 'your high-mindedness is admirable, quite admirable, but it won't work; it doesn't fit into modern conditions. Theoretically, Marriage is a Holy Mystery no doubt—in practice it's apt to be an Unholy Muddle, sometimes a Mess. Personally I believe ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... William, dig away! Why you do spuddle A'most so weak's a child. How you do muddle! Gi'e me the speaede a-bit. A pig would rout It out a'most so nimbly wi' ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... nature had transmuted his disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, were energy, self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the battles of life, in all honour and rectitude, so as to win. From the muddle of his father's affairs he had taken away a lesson of method, order, and punctuality in business and other arrangements. "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well," was not only one of his favourite maxims—it was ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... the Charlottetown Penhallows," explained Mrs. Frederick. "He is a lawyer there. He is a first cousin of Lucinda's and a second of George's—or is he? Oh, bother! You must go to Uncle John if you want the genealogy. I'm in a chronic muddle concerning Penhallow relationship. And, as for Romney, of course you can speak to him about anything you like except Lucinda. Oh, you innocent! To ask him if he didn't think Lucinda was looking well! And ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... bottom of them. The one thing I don't quite understand is how he came to know she was in Ballymoy. I'll find that out later on. In the meanwhile I think I'd better go into Ballymoy after all. It's a nuisance, for I was extremely comfortable on the yacht, but I can't leave things in the muddle they're in now, and there's nobody else about the place I could trust to ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... hour. Once in a hundred years a six months' carnival is allowable to so ponderous a body. Civilization here aims to see itself not simply as in a glass, but in a multitude of glasses. To steer its optics through the architectural muddle in the basin before us it will need the retina that lies behind ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... in one tint if you can help it, and mix them loosely. If you must use more colors, mix still more loosely. Put all the colors together, one beside the other, drag them together with the brush, scoop them up loosely on the end of it, and lay the tint on freely and frankly. Never muddle the color on the canvas. Don't put one color over another more than you can help; you will only get a thick mass of paint of one kind mixing with a mass of another, and the result will be dirty color, which of all things ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... 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. Poor Gen. HOWARD is in a muddle, and wishes, from the bottom of his heart, that we had free ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... of hope had begun to glow under Slavens' breath. Perhaps Walker and sheep were the solution of his life's muddle. He would find Walker before the young man took somebody else in with him, expose the true state of his finances, and see whether Walker would entertain a proposal to give him a band ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... or coffee. Blessed are they who draw their inspirations from the stars, the grand and beautiful in nature, and the glory of the human face divine, for such sources niggardly landlords and ignorant cooks can neither muddle nor exhaust. After the meeting we were invited into the Executive apartments and presented to Mrs. Fairchild, a woman of rare beauty, cultivation, and common sense. She, as well as the Governor, expressed great interest ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... fairly nauseated him. He looked at the child opposite as he ate, and she looked as beautiful as an angel, and as good as one to him. He thought how the little thing had come back to him, her unfortunate father, who had made such a muddle of his life, who had been able to do so little for her; how she had given up the certainty of a happy and comfortable home for uncertainty, and possibly privation, and the purest gratitude and love that was so intense possessed him. Looking at Charlotte, he almost forgot the hatred of the man who ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... "You fool, you muddle-headed blunderer!" he exclaimed, with a string of oaths. "Take these cuffs off! You'll lose your job for this trick. When I ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... last, Mr. Polwarth, a strange and very uncomfortable doubt has rushed in upon me, and I find myself altogether unfit to tackle it. I have no weapons—not a single argument of the least weight. I wonder if it be a law of nature that no sooner shall a man get into a muddle with one thing, than a thousand other muddles shall come pouring in upon him, as if Muddle itself were going to swallow him up! Here am I just beginning to get a little start in honester ways, when up comes the ugly head of the said doubt, swelling itself ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... have really gone, and if 'Gentleman Jim' knew anything about this, he would surely say, 'I 'spose their time hadn't come yet, little missie.' That's it, Carlo. Their time had not come yet. But they have left things in a fearful muddle, and we will have to work as we never worked before. The first thing to be ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... face of the Melancolia viciously. The paint did not smudge quickly enough. She took a palette-knife and scraped, following each stroke with the wet duster. In five minutes the picture was a formless, scarred muddle of colours. She threw the paint-stained duster into the studio stove, stuck out her tongue at the sleeper, and whispered, "Bilked!" as she turned to run down the staircase. She would never see Torpenhow any more, but she had at least ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... and he realised that there was more than one kind of courage. He, himself, had called Bob Nancarrow a coward, because he refused to enlist. Now he realised that there was more courage in Bob Nancarrow's cowardice than in his own bravery. Oh, it was all an awful muddle! He ought to tell Nancy what Lieutenant Proctor had related to him just before he was taken away to the hospital; but he couldn't. If he did, he would forfeit his own chance, and he might—yes, he was ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... candid opinion except on all-fours. A valuable testimonial, that! And how do you suppose I can take his money? No, Mr. Fakrash, if I have to go on all-fours myself for it, I must say, and I will say, that you've made a most frightful muddle ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... progress of his work, he was communicative to his few intimates, though never reading aloud extracts or allowing them to be seen. In 1872 he would speak pathetically of his "Crimean muddle," perplexed, as he well might be, by the intricacies of Inkerman. Asked if he will not introduce a Te Deum on the fall of Louis Napoleon, he answered that to write without the stimulus of combat would be a task beyond his energy; "when ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... marriage the perplexed girl had a talk with her father. Later she wondered if the hours alone with the sick man had not led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and advised the daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He abused Tom Willard, and that led Elizabeth to come to the clerk's defense. The sick man became excited and tried to get out of bed. When she would not let him walk about he began to complain. "I've never been let alone," he said. "Although I've worked hard ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... not tell him. I had never thought of such a possibility before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which Lord Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson, or any of those great scientific people might have understood, but which simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such a substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It was an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. "Yes," I said to it all, "yes; go on!" Suffice it for this story that he ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... of uneasy thought. Bob Hewett—so John said—had no knowledge of his sister's situation, otherwise Pennyloaf might have come to know about it, and in that case, perchance, Jane herself. Why not? Into what a wretched muddle of concealments and inconsistencies ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... go-between he offered the Whig leader his alliance for the overthrow of Addington and the formation of a Ministry of the talented men of all parties. Here, then, is the origin of the broad-bottomed or All the Talents Administrations which produced so singular a muddle after the death of Pitt. The Fox-Grenville bargain cannot be styled immoral like that of Fox and North in 1782; for it expressly excluded all compromise on matters of conviction. Nevertheless it was a tactical mistake, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... on his part was more angry and disgusted than ever. He began to see that there was a muddle somewhere, and that his identity was unsuspected still. This young man, for all his fair speaking and pretended shrewdness, was no conjurer after all. He was left to rely on his own resources, and he had begun to lose all confidence in their power ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... the famous last things over," said Madeline with a regretful little sigh. "I'm glad we had it before the alums, and the families begin to arrive and muddle everything up." ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... time had been wasted, legislative preparations had been thrown away, and everything was now back again in just the same condition as when the King made up his mind to dismiss the Melbourne Administration. The whole blame for the muddle rested on the King, who now found himself compelled to take up again with Lord Melbourne just as if nothing had happened. The King, indeed, made an attempt to induce Lord Grey to come out of his retirement and form another Ministry; but Lord Grey was not to be prevailed upon to accept ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Presently he returned, bringing with him a copy of his wife's poems. 'Will you take this as a record of what I hope is only the first of many meetings?' he said. 'I can't find any of my own in that muddle upstairs, but I would rather you would have this than any of mine.' Yes, I took it, as proud as a boy could be who receives such an honor from his chief idol; prouder than I shall ever be again as I read the inscription: 'With the best ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... up, what should he see but a Lamb just beginning to drink a little lower down. "There's my supper," thought he, "if only I can find some excuse to seize it." Then he called out to the Lamb, "How dare you muddle the water from which ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... sir," said the boy; "but they'll only make a muddle of it, sir. Fancy fat Sam and the cook ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... into his head that I went below because I thought he was making a muddle of the speed. As a matter of fact, he knows every blessed thing I do about our motors, and Williamson is loyal ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... all friendliness of manner to Staupitz in his affair, but neither Staupitz nor himself trusted the Italian when out of sight. If Caietan should use force against him, he would publish the written reply he gave him. Caietan might call himself a Thomist, but he was a muddle-headed, ignorant theologian and Christian, and as clumsy in giving judgment in the matter as a donkey with a harp. Luther added further that an appeal would be drawn up for him in the form best fitted to the occasion. He further ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... same reason that it produces so many unhappy men. But all the reforms were directed to rescuing the industrialism rather than the happiness. Poor couples were to be divorced because they were already divided. Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with the modern abuses. When the tares are found in the wheat, the greatest promptitude and practicality ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... singular muddle, he pointed out, seemed to be whether or not the poor fellow had known that the boat was upset. Well, who could say what he knew, an intoxicated man in a blind passion? Not Carlisle, certainly, plunged suddenly into the sea and intensely occupied with ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... scholar. Above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deepened meditation, while it enabled him to converse with his genius disengaged from those worldly influences which would have disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this sequestered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal visions of the "Faery Queen" and to giving ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... something," replied Trot seriously. "Things seem in an awful muddle here, jus' now, and they'll be worse if we don't stop this witch from doing ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the Church, the 'Pillar of the State!' There, all sorts of worthless, incompetent men are hastily thrust into livings by wealthy patrons who care not a jot as to whether they are morally or intellectually fit for their sacred mission,—and a disgraceful universal muddle is the result. From this muddle, which resembles a sort of stagnant pool, emerge the strangest fungus-growths,—clergymen who take to acting a 'miracle-play,' ostensibly for the purposes of charity, but really to gratify their own tastes and leanings ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... said, "don't muddle my brains any more with your idiotic reasonings! Take him along, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... knowledge, and the extent of our differences of opinion, while presumptuous incapacity attempts to teach us on the one hand, and designing iniquity, or pure prejudice, seeks to mislead us on the other, and misconception of one's meaning and motives all round makes such a muddle of the whole that—that—it seems to me the search after truth is almost hopeless, at least to ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... in particular there was a freckled underbred young man who handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what he called "my positions." Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the gospels, things ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... getting worse and worse you mislay your exercise-book, you drop your arithmetic in the mud, your pencil breaks, and when you open your knife to sharpen the pencil you split your nail. On such a day you jam your thumb in doors, and muddle the messages you are sent on by grown-ups. You upset your tea, and your bread-and-butter won't hold together for a moment. And when at last you get to bed usually in disgrace it is no comfort at all to you to know that not a single bit of it is ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... follower John Curzon that as their deaths were so near he felt a sudden interest in what had never interested him before—the story of John’s life before they had been brought so close to each other. The heroic but dull-witted soldier acceded to his master’s request, and the incoherent, muddle-headed way in which he gave his autobiography was full of a dramatic and subtle humour—was almost worthy of him who in three or four words created the foolish fat scullion in ‘Tristram Shandy.’ This he refused to print, in deference, I suspect, to ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... trace behind. With The Wild Duck fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... expectations from him,' said Peter, feeling that he was getting into a muddle. 'The fact is,' he said cordially, 'I shall be interested to hear news of the man if you can obtain ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... Athenians— See our ambassadors are always drunk. For when we visit Sparta sober, then We're on the alert for trickery all the while So that we miss half of the things they say, And misinterpret things that were never said, And then report the muddle back to Athens. But now we're charmed with each other. They might cap With the Telamon-catch instead of the Cleitagora, And we'd applaud and praise them just the same; We're not too ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... a terrible muddle, Alida. If God is so ready to forgive, how do you account for all the evil and suffering in ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... 'It does not muddle me; it's against the Bible, and I'd rather go by that than by Eva,' said Vava; and that ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation, imported from India by saintly Chinese missionaries at the epoch of our Middle Ages. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... misleading report without correction from the Post Office. It all may spell corruption: but it need not. No one familiar with the workings of a Government department is likely to be surprised at any amount of muddle and incompetence. Matters are forgotten and then in the effort to make up for lost time important steps are simply omitted. Officials are pig-headed and unreasonable. And as to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... his actions belong to romance. His clear, manly style, his sturdy commonsense, the rapier play of his epigrams, the formal, logical architecture of his thoughts, his complacent limitations, his horror of mystery and Gothic half-lights, his harsh contempt for all the sacred muddle of priestly traditions and aristocratic politics, his assurance, his intellectual courage, his humanity—all that, in its best and its worst, belongs to the century of Voltaire and the Revolution. In his spirit of adventure, in his passion for movement and combat, there Paine is romantic. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... hands. There were yards of them, rods of them, miles of them—they belonged to a six or sixteen horse set. I do not know which. I sat on them. They writhed in my lap, wrapped around my feet, and around the gun against my knee, in a hopeless and dangerous muddle. Of course the reins were twisted. I did not know one from the other. I gave a desperate jerk which sent the leaders plunging to the right, where fortunately they brought up against the rock wall. Had they gone the other way nothing ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... shame over Palmerston's bluster followed by a meek British inaction. The debate came on a vote of censure, July 8, in the course of which Derby characterized governmental policy as one of "meddle and muddle." The censure was carried in the Lords by nine votes, but was defeated in the Commons by a ministerial majority of eighteen. It was the sharpest political crisis of Palmerston's Ministry during the Civil War. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... that I did not regard mustard poultices as panaceas, the vox populi as the Vox Dei, or the policy of the other side as the machinations of the Devil; that politics was all a game of guess-work and muddle and compromise at the best; that, at the worst, as during a General Election, it was as ignoble a pastime as the wit of man had devised. To take it seriously would be the course of a fanatic, a man devoid of the sense ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... do any indexing? Three years ago Michael would have replied: "You? Nonsense, my dear. You'd only make a muddle of it. Much better stick to your housekeeping" (which as a matter of fact was done in those days by cook, butler and parlour-maid). But ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... left to its own courses, Shelby would have borrowed no further trouble, but a fortuitous matter of radishes and ice-water suddenly put the quarrel on an altogether different level. About the hour when Bernard Graves hobnobbed with Jasper Hinchey, the third factor in the Demijohn District's political muddle sat down to dinner in a neighboring city. "Chuck" O'Rourke was fond of his dinner. A childhood of squalid poverty had taught him the joy of a square meal. The story of the years linking the famished boy to the pudgy red-faced man of the restaurant is unessential,—an ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Why should it not be?" she rejoined, in a not very convincing tone. "Now I shall rely on you—and I am sure it will not be in vain—to respect my wishes. Things seem to be in a horrible muddle," she added with a rather dreary laugh, "but let's hope they ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... with each other. If only the Jacobin bayonets do not get in the way; if only the self-styled "scientific" theorists do not thrust themselves in to darken counsel! Or rather let them expound their muddle-headed theories as much as they like, provided they have no authority, no power! And that admirable spirit of organization inherent in the people, above all in every social grade of the French nation, but which they have so seldom been allowed to exercise, will ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... politely, scurrying with his best Eton manners to find a chair for the newcomer. 'It's an awful muddle, but that's Pamela!' ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was in a muddle,—heads, things, buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness, and in return came ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... meddles with the Church's business, it contrives to make a muddle. This familiar truth has been exemplified afresh by the decree which dedicated last Sunday[*] to devotions connected with the War. The Feast of the Epiphany has had, at least since the fourth century, its definite place in the Christian year, its special function, and ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... going to be busy all the morning over my accounts; they've got into the most disgraceful muddle, and I want to put them straight. I shall be in the drawing room, for I keep all my household books in the davenport there. I mean to give you a holiday, Judy, but perhaps you won't mind reading some of your history to yourself, and doing a few ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... heroes such as our stage has not yet seen; where are they to come from? Not from the air, but from the earth, for I believe you are in a good way to make them grow from the earth by dint of your inspiring care. Although our theatrical muddle is hopelessly confused, the best soil for all art is still to be found in our foolish actors and singers; their nature, if they have kept their hearts at all, is incorruptible; by means of enthusiasm you can make anything of them. Well then, as soon as you have produced Lohengrin ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Nat, feebly. "Why, I've got some here. Master Scar! Now, let me think. I'm all in a muddle like in the head, and can't tell what's been dreaming and what isn't; but I've got a sort o' notion that some one come in the dark, and talked to me or talked about me, and then said they'd ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... days when the C.I.V.'S did at last get to the front—and remained there: tales of horses mercifully shot, and sheep mercilessly poisoned, and oxen dropping dead as they dragged the convoys; tales of muddle and accident, tales of British soldiers slain by their own protective cannon as they lay behind ant-heaps facing the enemy, and British officers culled under the very eyes of the polo-match; tales of hospital and camp, of shirts turned sable ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... expressive power," madness not inappropriately rules the hour. Once in a hundred years a six months' carnival is allowable to so ponderous a body. Civilization here aims to see itself not simply as in a glass, but in a multitude of glasses. To steer its optics through the architectural muddle in the basin before us it will need the retina that lies behind the facets ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... and keep folks warm, and of Italian frame-makers, and of barbers, and of brokers, and of dealers in dogs and singing-birds. From these, in a narrow and a dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr Wegg selects one dark shop-window with a tallow candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct, save the candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two preserved frogs fighting a small-sword duel. Stumping with fresh vigour, he goes in at the dark greasy ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons—although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift as humming-birds—yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain brought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... daughter's garden by the lake. If your friend will do us humble folks so much honor, I beg he will step into our room; it is clean, is it not sir? and the cup I will give him to drink it out of would not disgrace the Emperor himself. Who knows what you will find up in the midst of all the muddle yonder?" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... muddle of it, I admit! My lord Faruskiar, of whom I had made a hero—by telegraph—for the readers of the Twentieth. Century. Decidedly my good intentions ought certainly to qualify me as one of the best paviers of a road to a certain place ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... one fact which stands out incontrovertibly from the whole weary muddle. It is quite clear that the inability to act in common arises from the fact that in the international sphere the European is still dominated by illusions which he has dropped when he deals with home politics. The political faith ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... depend on it, Captain Jones," said I, "it wasn't anything that would have disturbed much either of us two," I said; and then, as if a light had been flashed into the muddle of his brain, poor old Jones found a last word of amazing profundity. He blew his nose, nodding at me dolefully: "Ay, ay! neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... beyond the tenderness there was also an energy that made every move seem like an attack. In spite of her reserve there was impatience, and Olva's first judgment of her was that the last thing in the world that she could endure was muddle; she shone with the ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... before. He showed me by calculations on paper, which Lord Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson, or any of those great scientific people might have understood, but which simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such a substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It was an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. "Yes," I ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... lapping at a spring on a hillside, when, looking up, what should he see but a Lamb just beginning to drink a little lower down. "There's my supper," thought he, "if only I can find some excuse to seize it." Then he called out to the Lamb, "How dare you muddle the water from which I ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... To-morrow I'll give you twenty-four hours to clear out! ... Do you know, this combination of pitiful helplessness with the threatening cries was so killing that even the gloomy Simeon started laughing ... Well, now, apropos of Simeon ... I say, that life dumfounds, with its wondrous muddle and farrago, makes one stand aghast. You can utter a thousand sonorous words against souteneurs, but just such a Simeon you will never think up. So diverse and motley is life! Or else take Anna Markovna, the proprietress of this place. This blood-sucker, hyena, vixen and so on ... is the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... as the world, treasured up out of respect for ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation, imported from India by saintly Chinese missionaries at the epoch of our Middle Ages. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... exactly expectations from him,' said Peter, feeling that he was getting into a muddle. 'The fact is,' he said cordially, 'I shall be interested to hear news of the man if you ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... inculcated by incompetent counsellors, men find themselves in fields of benevolent action to which they are very poorly adapted; and the world is full of these blunders; but an honestly-loving heart and an ordinarily clear brain, that nobody has been allowed to meddle with and muddle, will tell a man where he belongs and what he ought to do. If a man have a gift for ministering to the sick, let him do it. If he have a gift for dealing personally with the poor, let him do that. If he have a gift for making money, and none for properly applying his ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... earlier disconnected essays—my Anticipations was the beginning. Originally I intended Anticipations to be my sole digression from my art or trade (or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up the muddle in my own mind about innumerable social and political questions, questions I could not keep out of my work, which it distressed me to touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... water and left my shoes behind me, that's all"; and she ran indoors, jumping from mat to mat, and without even so much as bidding Tom goodbye, who rode home, not thinking much about his business, but lost in a muddle of most contradictory presentations, a constant glimmer of Catharine's ankles, wonderment at her accident—was it all true?—the strange look when she disclaimed the honour of his rescue and expounded her philosophy, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... were ready to take, jarred against his abstract theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does run into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart of a matter. Truth will not underlie all facts, in this muddle of a world, in spite of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... entered the lists and fought against the others, Fourier and Saint-Simon; the combat between them or their disciples becoming so bitter and so blind that the truths common to them all were obscured and disfigured beyond recognition. Thence came the extraordinary muddle of the present hour; Bache with Saint-Simon and Fourier, and Morin with Proudhon and Comte, utterly failing to understand Mege, the Collectivist deputy, whom they held up to execration, him and his State Collectivism, in the same way, moreover, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... having his first despondent chill, and sneering at himself for having it, after all his fine talk about "backbone"; and finding reasons for despair thicken, the harder he tried to make elbow-room for hope, till altogether confounded at the muddle, he flung up thought, with "Brain's full and stomach's empty, and it's ill talking between a full man and a fasting," and set about cooking his rations. "But first catch your hare," cries Mrs. Glass. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... That's just it. My exotic flower of optimism withers at your feet. It's all exactly the muddle you say it is. Pray Heaven for a clear way out! Meantime thank whatever gods may ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... have brought it up against you, if you had. The awful thing was to stand by, and see you make a sinful muddle of it" ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... the family pride in his composition, he resolved not to muddle the blood of the Witheringtons by any cross from Cateaton Street or Mincing Lane; and after a proper degree of research, he selected the daughter of a Scotch earl, who went to London with a bevy of nine in a Leith smack to barter blood for wealth. Mr. Witherington being so unfortunate ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... gift of all. To throw it away, voluntarily, is an unpardonable sin. The suicide's punishment should be loss of immortality. Well, I found work to do, of all sorts, in America, and elsewhere. And a year ago—she died. I should have come straight home, only I was booked for that muddle on the frontier they called 'a war.' I got fever after Targai; was invalided home; and here I am recruiting and finishing my book. Now you can understand why loveliness in a woman, fills me with ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... on our subject, or rather a legend, not an anecdote. You reproach me with unbelief, you see, you say, yet you don't believe. But, my dear fellow, I am not the only one like that. We are all in a muddle over there now and all through your science. Once there used to be atoms, five senses, four elements, and then everything hung together somehow. There were atoms in the ancient world even, but since we've learned ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to me, never written a line to me. That's fine of him too. He loves me, I'm sure of it, and he wants me, but it is fine of him not to bother me, now isn't it? He knows he could drag me back into the muddle, he knows he could make a fool of me, and yet he will not take ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... the lady well. She has a good heart, but was ever muddle-headed. She thanked that wag with a smile, and I heard her later in the evening boring most evidently that literary lion with elongated praise of the "Cloister and the Hearth" and "Adam Bede." They were among the few books she had ever read, and talking about them came easily ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... you be startin' to talk that way. It's always the way with them dailers. Muddle the good man's head with whiskey, and then ...
— The Turn of the Road - A Play in Two Scenes and an Epilogue • Rutherford Mayne
... on digging and knowing all the time as them lads is breaking their necks over the cliff side. Never was in such a muddle as this before. Why didn't they say what they ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... don't quite understand is how he came to know she was in Ballymoy. I'll find that out later on. In the meanwhile I think I'd better go into Ballymoy after all. It's a nuisance, for I was extremely comfortable on the yacht, but I can't leave things in the muddle they're in now, and there's nobody else about the place I could trust ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... Deontology, which professes to represent Bentham's dictation. The Mills repudiated this version, certainly a very poor one, of their teacher's morality, and held that it represented less Bentham than such an impression of Bentham as could be stamped upon a muddle-headed disciple.[335] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... intricate pattern called Life, and having tangled and knotted together the crimson thread of passion, the golden thread of youth and the honest brown of a deep, undemonstrative love, she left the disentanglement of the muddle in the hands of ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... was certainly being treated badly that evening: 'your high-mindedness is admirable, quite admirable, but it won't work; it doesn't fit into modern conditions. Theoretically, Marriage is a Holy Mystery no doubt—in practice it's apt to be an Unholy Muddle, sometimes a Mess. Personally I ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... Watching it happen, he was suddenly overwhelmed again by the enormity of his solitude, and it looked as if it were going to turn into another of those periods when he sat with the gun in his hand, sobbing and swearing in a violent muddle of self-pity and helpless fury. He decided to knock off the lamenting and get good and drunk instead. And he would make it a drunk to top all drunks on this happy ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... toy with the new-born rill, a mere thread of water, build a Lilliputian dam, and muddle the clear outflow as it broke, and then build again. He had the thought that she had suddenly become younger, more like a child, and he ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... also "draws water." Therefore, logically, a Hydrographer is a ship. But a ship is never put into a witness-box, where it would be quite at sea, but in the dock, where it could be quite at home. "Truly," writes our Puzzled Correspondent, "there is a muddle somewhere." Q. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... about mamma. Uncle Dawne, however, and Dr. Galbraith both maintain that mamma is admirable, because she doesn't trouble her head about churches and creeds any longer. She used to do so once, but now she thinks only of what is morally right or wrong, and leaves the ecclesiastical muddle for the divines to get out of as best they can. Mamma used to dread bringing us to Morne when we were younger; we were always so outrageous here; and we told her it was Aunt Fulda who made us so, because she is too good, and the balance of nature has ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... was, in spite of President Wilson's opposition to the plan, to continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as possible. To the American soldier at this distance it looks as though the French and British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle along till the American authorities could be shown the fitness or the necessity of supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was playing with a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great game of hazard. Only those who went through ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... to pass peculiar; an' I allers allows if it ain't for the onforeseen way wherein things stacks up, an' the muddle we-alls gets into tryin' to find a trail, the Plaza Paloduro would have been a scene of bleatin' peace that day, instead of a stric'ly corpse-an'-cartridge occasion. The death rate rises to that degree in fact that the next roundup is shy on men; an' thar ain't enough cartridges in camp, ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... cellar, and some of our men who were there called "Here's a poor brute done in." Not a bit of it. I was not touched then either.... At last the bombardment stopped, and we all got out. I noticed about forty hens. Some were pulped. Others had had their heads and legs cut off. In the muddle three horses lay dead. Their saddles were in ribbons. Equipment, revolvers, swords, all that had been left above the cellar had vanished, but there were bits of them to be seen on the roof. My rifle, which had been torn from my hands, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... allowed that it was impossible that he should remain under the command of his present Colonel, but regretted that he should not continue in the service, declaring it the best school for a young man, and that he did not want to see his son-in-law a muddle-brained sporting country squire. He would have had Sir Amyas exchange into the line, and see a little service before settling down, but Maria Theresa had not as yet set Europe in a blaze, and in the absence of a promising war Sir Amyas did ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ever reads the leaders of certain papers, leaders which never fail to regret the enormous amount of divorce there is. If it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the Press, it is because the Press does not give news of an imaginary world that is a Utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. Does Chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the Divorce Courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions. It is useless Chesterton sighing that lawyers have become breakers of families; they have also ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... points were declared to be in doubt. Round the question of the length of time the Indemnities might be postponed, and the actual amount of the increase in the Customs Tariff, there appeared to be an inexplicable muddle largely owing to the intervention of so many agents and to the fact that the exchange of views had been almost entirely verbal, unofficial, and secret. It would be wearisome to analyse a dispute which belongs to the peculiar atmosphere ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... he shall do nothing of the kind," returned Mr. Liddell, in a weak, hoarse, impatient voice. "I saw him once, and I know him; he is an ignorant, addle-pated jackanapes. He shall not muddle my affairs; send him away; I can wait for Newton. I don't suppose I am going to ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... certainly their luggage could not have been in the way; and for their snuff, no doubt they husbanded it with care during the long two months, which in those days was thought a record run.*3* In the missions which they had so long tended with such care, giving their muddle-headed love to the Indians in their Machiavelian way, all was confusion in the space of six short months. Dean Funes and Don Feliz de Azara*4* are the only two contemporary writers who treat of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay outside ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... in quite a muddle (for them) about the carnival of authors, to be given in Boston. As soon as it was announced, their interests were excited, and they determined that ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... little ahead. Every man of red blood and backbone wants to do his best work, wants to do work that he loves, work into which he can throw himself with heart and soul and with all his mind and strength. Merely to muddle through with some half-detested work, not making an utter failure of it, is no satisfaction when the day's work is done. Not only the man himself, but all of us, lose when he who might have been a great manufacturer and organizer of industry fritters away his life and ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... restitution of conjugal rights—however unlikely he is to get it. Further, if in the future she has any children by her real husband (unless she has been married again to him, after divorce from her State-husband) these children will be illegitimate. This is the sort of muddle the Divorce Act has got us into. One course, and only one course, is open to the Church—to disentangle itself from all question of extending the powers of the Act on grounds of inequality, or any other real (and sometimes very real) or fancied hardship, and to consistently fight for the repeal ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... With a little management much can be accomplished, provided the mistress be industrious, energetic, and willing to lend a helping hand. Let washing-week be not the excuse for having everything in a muddle; and although "things" cannot be cleaned so thoroughly, and so much time spent upon them, as ordinarily, yet the house may be kept tidy and clear from litter without a great deal of exertion either on the part of the mistress or servant. We will conclude our remarks with an extract from ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... that M. M. —— actually obtained his wife, and that Mynheer Van Holland paid for her. I dare say all this can be reconciled with the eternal fitness of things; but I protest I don't see how it is to be done. It is "all a muddle," in my mind. I cannot even affirm that the banditti were ever hanged; and I am quite sure that the unlucky Dutch merchant, whose goods were so comically mixed up with this whole history, never had any poetical or material justice for his loss of them. But it is as much the reader's business as mine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... belied Miss Wozenham to one another that I was shamefaced, and I knew she had offended his pride and never mine, and likewise I felt timid that that Rairyganoo girl might make things awkward. So I says "My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs." And we had the tea and the affairs too and after all it was but forty pound, and—There! she's as industrious and straight a creeter as ever lived and has paid back half of it already, and where's the use of saying more, particularly when ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... you would indeed have a laugh. 'I must needs,' he explained, 'have the company of two girls in my studies to enable me to read at all, and to keep likewise my brain clear. Otherwise, if left to myself, my head gets all in a muddle.' Time after time, he further expounded to his young attendants, how extremely honourable and extremely pure were the two words representing woman, that they are more valuable and precious than the auspicious animal, the felicitous bird, rare flowers and uncommon plants. 'You may not' ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of the fantastic in place of any simple ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... sort very soon it might come to open hostilities. Isn't it surprising how the petty annoyances of life can wear away the strong bulwarks of trust and friendship formed by years of understanding? Our particular bulwarks were becoming quite shaky through nothing else but having to muddle through the dull sordid grind of cooking and housework by ourselves. We were getting disillusioned with each other. No 'jaundiced eye that casts discolouration' could look more jaundiced than Henry's when I asked him to dry up the ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... and let us talk things over like comrades while there is still time. Give me your hand. It would be a good thing for us to have an explanation, though they say that all explanations only lead to further muddle. But you are kind and intelligent and are sure to understand, even the things that I am unable ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... two or three times, but he became more thoughtful a moment later, and sat smoking and pondering. That would be a nice muddle if she, the niece of a Frenchman—an American, too—should fix her affections on a captain of Uhlans whose regiment he, Jack Marche, would avoid as he would hope to ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... good," said I, "and it may just muddle you for to-morrow. Take an easy evening now, and go to bed early. You'll be all ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... the same eaves, in excessively populous colonies; and it is impossible to follow the labours of any single Mason, whose cells, distributed here and there, are soon covered up with the work of her neighbours. All is muddle and confusion in the individual output of ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... complaints you have heard Germans make of our system, or rather want of system, and the bitter scorn poured on German fussiness by travelling Britons. The ways of one nation are certainly not the ways of another in this respect. Directly I cross the German frontier I know that I am safe from muddle and mistakes, that I need not look after myself or my luggage, that I cannot get into a wrong train or alight at a wrong station, or suffer any injury through carelessness or mismanagement. Everything is managed for me, and on long journeys in the corridor trains things ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... another? That is the question. Uncorrected evil multiplies itself, and the sum is a huge national disaster. I wish passionately that I had greater powers to make you see what to me is so plain. The mistake has been the muddle-headed thinking that sets apart these diseases from all other sicknesses of our bodies, obscuring the plain and comparatively simple question of cure with the entirely opposed problem of punishment; a confusion and losing of the way that leads ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... luck which had spared his life when so many of his comrades had fallen round him, did not speak with passion. He spoke with a bitter, mocking irony. He said that G.H.Q. was a close corporation in the hands of the military clique who had muddled through the South African War, and were now going to muddle through a worse one. They were, he said, intrenched behind impregnable barricades of old, moss-eaten traditions, red tape, and caste privilege. They were, of course, patriots who believed that the Empire depended upon their system. They had no doubt of their inherent ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... ability of the man who had been a slave to serve with the white man as a soldier. Necessity forced the acceptance of the Negro as a soldier. In spite of the long years of controversy with its arguments of racial inferiority,[47] out of the muddle of fact and fancy came the deliberate decision to employ Negro troops. This act, in itself, as a historical fact, refuted the former theories of southern statesmen. The Negro was thus a factor in both the Union and Confederate armies in the War of the Rebellion. These ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... tempest, with first some thunder, and then some rain, and then a gust of wind or two, such as Thor was wont to arrange, but a mixture of hail and wind and thunder and lightning and rain and snow, all raging together in a tremendous muddle, so that the earth folk thought the end of the ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... You would never understand my book-keeping. Just imagine the muddle you would make! No, I must get through them myself, and since I must spend the time somehow till you come home, why shouldn't ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... the latest papers from England, that Balfour says we'll muddle through this war somehow," he said. "He must have known you, Rigby. With the courage of the damned you carry a fearsome lot of impedimenta, and you muddle quite adequately. The lady you have traduced has herself been seriously ill, and that is why she is not at Brinkwort's Farm. What ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Just muddle him. Nancy would be the same girl, but he'd get to puzzling over her and tagging ideas on her—and to what end, Doris? The girl has the right to her own path and you have, by the grace of God, pushed obstacles from before her, in heaven's name ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... comforting or helping her when affliction comes—as of course it is bound to come! Each individual man or woman makes his or her own life,—we poor 'friends' can only stand and look on, waiting till they get into the muddle that we have always foreseen, and then doing our best to drag them out of it; but God Himself I think, could not save them from falling into the muddle in the first place. As for Sylvie, I have advised her to leave Rome and go back ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... all peoples, from Iceland to Japan, from India to England, are the droll adventures and mishaps of the silly son, who contrives to muddle everything he is set to do. In vain does his poor mother try to direct him in "the way he should go": she gets him a wife, as a last resource; but a fool he is still, and a fool he will always be. His blunders and disasters are chronicled in penny chap-books ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... I did not regard mustard poultices as panaceas, the vox populi as the Vox Dei, or the policy of the other side as the machinations of the Devil; that politics was all a game of guess-work and muddle and compromise at the best; that, at the worst, as during a General Election, it was as ignoble a pastime as the wit of man had devised. To take it seriously would be the course of a fanatic, a man devoid of the sense of proportion. Were such a man, I asked, fitted ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... way to Italy for the winter. As the coach approached Charlton Gate, the guard flourished his bugle and again struck up Rule Britannia, which lasted the whole breadth of the market-place, and length of Snargate Street, drawing from Mr. Muddle's shop the few loiterers who yet remained, and causing Mr. Le Plastrier, the patriotic moth-impaler, to suspend the examination of the bowels of a watch, as they ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... different things," he replied tolerantly,—"some fame, some pleasure. Mr. Dowling, for instance, has no other ambition than to muddle round the golf links a few strokes better than ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... children. She marked the place when the reading was interrupted with a crimson paper-knife, and often Jimbo would move it several pages farther on without any of them discovering the gap. Jane Anne, however, who made no pretence of listening to 'Daddy's muddle- stories,' was beginning to realise what went on in Mother's mind underground. She hardly seized the pathos, but she saw and understood enough to help. And she was in many ways a little second edition—a phrase the muddle-stories never knew, alas!—of her ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... said Leslie. "Learning, and behaving, and going, and doing, and seeing, and hearing, and having. 'It's all a muddle,' as the poor man ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Bacchante of passion, to be puling about your sins. You! You! Girl, you're mad! I tell you there is no such thing as damnation. It's a bogey invented by priests to enchain mankind. But if there is and if that muddle-headed old gentleman you call God really exists and if he's a just God, why then let him damn me and let him give you your harp and your halo while I burn for both. Essie, my mad foolish frightened Essie, can't you understand that if you give me up for this God of yours you'll drive ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... ones are the beggars to make a muddle. Their plans are clever enough, but they don't work, and then they make a mess of things much ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... of the aunts' clutches yesterday morning on the plea of going home to tidy up. Though the wedding took place from their house, all the preparatory muddle happened here, and it will take days and days to go through Kathie's rooms alone, and decide what to keep, what to give away, and what ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Samantha, to muddle up your head and hurt your feelin's by tellin' you what it's fur." And he went out quick and shet the door. But I got a splendid dinner and afterwards he told me ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... good lady; "why, you all seem to be following the advice of my grandfather Twynintuft,—which was, to let the mind muddle after dinner. He thought it strengthened the voice,—gave it timber, as he called it. But, ah, dear! in these days so little attention is paid to elocution that it's of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... boy had put a letter of his sister's in the band of the hat, I mused. How like her kid brother! It seemed that more or less families had Toddy-One-Boys to look after. Pshaw! what a muddle because a man couldn't keep his thoughts ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... of any kind, and should be very sorry to do so. I thought it was now generally admitted that the more work a man has to do, the less he can afford to muddle himself in any way. But as I have never tried the experiment in using either alcohol or tobacco, and cannot afford to do it, I have no comparative experience to offer. It might be beneficial; I do not believe it would, and prefer not to risk the ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... she is staring into the eyes of the first Lady Bantock]. I wonder what she would have done if she had ever got herself into a really first-class muddle? ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... gets not to care what one is eating, so long as one can satisfy one's hunger? I remember the time when, for a woman, I was almost an epicure, and now I can swallow Mohammed's dinners with positive relish. Do give me another help of that extraordinary muddle he calls ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Homo!" My girl fainted away in the middle of her big speech an hour ago. I have tucked her up in bed after a rub and a cup of hot milk and she is to sleep until noon. BROTHER'S brother tried pitifully, but he didn't get through a single speech without prompting. I'm terrified! Suppose they muddle it utterly, what will the Powers say to me—after not telling them of the change in cast? I wish I hadn't asked Michael Daragh to come to the matinee. I must stop. I know I won't sleep a wink, but I'll put out the light and lie down ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Handy- Andyism, as that intellectual disease may be named, after Mr. Lover's hero; like that of the Obeah-woman, when she tried to bribe the white gentleman with half a dozen of bottled beer; a case of muddle-headed craft and elaborate silliness, which keeps no proportion between the means and the end; so common in insane persons; frequent, too, among the lower Irish, such as Handy Andy; and very frequent, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Clothes-Philosophy, on what may be called the Habilatory Class of our fellow-men. Here too overlooking, where so much were to be looked on, the million spinners, weavers, fullers, dyers, washers, and wringers, that puddle and muddle in their dark recesses, to make us Clothes, and die that we may live,—let us but turn the reader's attention upon two small divisions of mankind, who, like moths, may be regarded as Cloth-animals, creatures that ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... word "Frenchified" was the ultimate term of contempt, there flowed through Bert's brain a squittering succession of thinly violent ideas about German competition, about the Yellow Danger, about the Black Peril, about the White Man's Burthen—that is to say, Bert's preposterous right to muddle further the naturally very muddled politics of the entirely similar little cads to himself (except for a smear of brown) who smoked cigarettes and rode bicycles in Buluwayo, Kingston (Jamaica), or Bombay. These were Bert's "Subject Races," and he was ready to die—by proxy ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... out of it. You'll spoil it if you do, for the interest of the story is more in the minds than in the actions of the people, and it will be all a muddle if you don't explain as you go on," said Meg, who firmly believed that this book was the ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... wouldn't have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get along, all ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... The Fall.—The theological muddle is largely caused by the inability of many people to free themselves from archaic notions which have really nothing to do with Christianity, although they have been imported into it. The principal of these, in relation to the question of sin, is the doctrine of ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... things if you really thought you were in a hopeless muddle. I have gone through it all this term, and I know. I have tried to laugh, and I have drunk until I didn't care what happened, but it is all no use. I have made a mess of everything, and there is no one to blame except myself. And then this utterly idiotic row comes ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... "why is it all such a muddle? Life—what you mean to do, and what you can do! John doesn't care, doesn't understand.... I'm such a fool, Vick!" She leaned her head on his shoulder and sobbed. He caressed her hand gently, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... speakers followed me and moved and seconded all sorts of things at random. We were all in a hopeless muddle, and all quite good-humoured about it; and we wound up by singing "God ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... use of thinking? My head's all in a muddle. It's bad, no matter how you look at it. I sold my very youth to one I cannot love, just for a piece of bread, and from one day to another he becomes ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... Mynheer Jacobus. "He hass a strong arm und a head with but little in it. It would be best that he know nothing of this, or he would surely muddle it." ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lookers-on. The windows to the south were occupied by curious citizens, gazing in from the wooden gallery. Those to the north, thrown wide open to let in the air, were clear, and looked out over a confused muddle of shingled roofs and stove-pipe chimneys. Hardly a whisper passed from lip to lip as the orderly bustled away. Members of the court fidgeted with their sash tassels, or made pretense of writing. Nevins, ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... sir, to complain. I were sent for. Indeed, we are in a muddle, sir. Look round town—so rich as 'tis. Look how we live, and where we live, an' in what numbers; and look how the mills is always a-goin', and how they never works us no nigher to any distant object, 'cepting always, death. Sir, I cannot, wi' my little learning, tell the gentleman what will ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... footsteps without. He sprang up, crying, "I 've been waiting so long for you!" A servant opened the door to bring him a message. Oakley dismissed him angrily. What did he want to go down to the Continental for to drink and talk politics to a lot of muddle-pated fools when he had a brother in Paris who was an artist and a letter from him lay unread in his hand? His patience and his temper were going. Leslie was careless and unfeeling. She ought to come; he was tired ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... admiration both as poet and scholar. Above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deepened meditation, while it enabled him to converse with his genius disengaged from those worldly influences which would have disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this sequestered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal visions of the "Faery Queen" and to giving his "soul ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... then invalided at Hector's Spruit Station, now sent word that we were to join him there without delay. He said I could send part of the commando by train, but the railway arrangements were now all disturbed, and everything was in a muddle. As nothing could be relied on in the way of transport, the greater number of the men and most of the draught ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... own comfort, but unfortunately for the good of the house, Faith was not troubled by appearances. Her eyes did not notice details, the details which mean so much, for her home had always been in more or less of a muddle. There were so many of them, Audrey, Faith, Tom, Deborah and baby Joan. Five of them ransacking and romping all over the house, until granny had come and taken Audrey away ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... were of good tarry cord and did not give a fraction of an inch. Tears of bitter rage filled his eyes and made furrows on his encrusted cheek. Idiot that he had been, he had wrecked everything! What would Saskia and Dougal and Sir Archie do without a business man by their side? There would be a muddle, and the little party would walk into a trap. He saw it all very clearly. The men from the sea would overpower them, there would be murder done, and an easy capture of the Princess; and the police would turn up at long last ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... at once all-knowing and all-loving, can see the end of the education while we only see it in process, and perhaps exclaim: 'What a frightful state of things,' or like your favorite 'Stephen Blackpool,' 'It's all a muddle.'" ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... personal prowess, or crime, are the facts proper to secular history." What is the harm of this? But this writer says, "Verily his [Dr. Newman's] idea of secular history is almost as degraded as his idea of ecclesiastical," p. 24, and he ends with this muddle of an Ipse ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... one occasion, but that, while at Eton he had already become possessed by a dark suspicion concerning him. This is proved by the episode of Dr. Lind's visit during his fever. Then and ever afterwards he expected monstrous treatment at his hands, although the elder gentleman was nothing worse than a muddle-headed squire. It has more than once occurred to me that this fever may have been a turning point in his history, and that a delusion, engendered by delirium, may have fixed itself upon his mind, owing to some imperfection ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... to muddle your mind with the ravings of a lunatic, you are not what I took you for. Why, it's regular spiritualism! Kingdoms of the air indeed! And his cloud of ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... us,' but he couldn't. And here it may be well to observe that it was a favourite form of speech with him to refer to this illustrious public man in this familiar manner; but always to show what a condition of muddle and confusion must ensue if we followed the counsels that name emblematised; nor did he know a more cutting sarcasm to reply to an adversary than when he had said, 'Oh, John Bright would agree with you,' or, 'I don't think ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of all this muddle? Why was she masquerading as an opera singer, when fortune and ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... speakers no longer find the recognition and reward which they once did. The Consistorial advocates no longer prepare anything but the introductions to their speeches, and deliver the rest—a confused muddle—on the inspiration of the moment. Sermons and occasional speeches have sunk to the same level. If a funeral oration is wanted for a cardinal or other great personage, the executors do not apply to the best orators in the city, to whom they would have to pay a hundred pieces of ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... that Meryl cared for you; I have known it a long time. Yet she was going to marry van Hert. And van Hert cared ... well, he cared for someone else too, yet he was going to marry Meryl. It was just a silly muddle altogether, do you see?... Honestly, I was at my wits' end-to know how to prevent them making fools of themselves. Then came Mrs. Grenville's letter. Mrs. Grenville had seen you. She had discovered that you cared for Meryl, and she told me so. I didn't stop ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... it had been the other way about, and you had gone and they had stayed, by the stars of God, I should have been disappointed. But things being as they are, we'll muddle ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... orderliness of associated effort, and under Socialism society would for the first time in history behave like an organism."[257] Private capitalism and consequent competition are responsible not only for waste and muddle, but also for the adulteration of food and other necessaries of life. "Every man who knows anything of trade knows how general is the knavish practice of adulteration. Now all adulteration is directly due to competition. Did not Mr. John Bright once ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... private adventurer. There is nothing new in the story; the air was attacked and mastered in the English fashion. When we are confronted with great issues, it is our habit, or so we are fond of saying, to 'muddle through'. Foreign nations, and especially enemy nations, do not so describe our activities. But we are great self-critics, and not free from that kind of inverted self-esteem which makes a man speak of his own achievements with deceitful and extravagant modesty. The business of ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... no pigs in England? That there food won't be wasted. We'll be eatin' it in sausages w'en we goes acrost the Channel"; whereupon he dismissed the whole question from his mind. This seemed to me then the typical Anglo-Saxon attitude. Everywhere there was waste, muddle-headedness, and apparently it was nobody's business, nobody's concern. Camps were sited in the wrong places and buildings erected only to be condemned. Tons of food were purchased overseas, transported across thousands of miles of ocean, only to be thrown into refuse barrels. The Government ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... I've got the ill name of Chancery. I don't mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don't notice me, but I notice him. There's no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi, Lady Jane!" ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... boy, muddling! And a truly artistic muddle have we made. It's been a game of 'General Post' with the books. The dictionaries have taken the atlases' place, the Greek grammars have deposed the ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... wouldn't know him now. He looks like Merry Christmas all the year round. You should see him gaze at Sherm. Marian says it makes her want to cry, and Mother says it is the most wonderful manifestation of Providence she has ever known. It seems to me Providence would show more sense not to muddle things up so in the first place. Sherm is as pleased as can be to find he really is somebody, and he's awfully fond of the Captain, but you see he'd got so used to loving the Darts as his own folks that he can't get unused to it all of a sudden. He choked all up when he tried to call Captain Clarke ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... need to find a scapegoat to suffer for this miserable muddle sent him outside with a stride and malignant intentions at heart. Never again while he toured with his family would he drink iced stimulants, however damnably hot it was ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... a knight, but unknown amongst the old aristocracy. It was generally supposed, or, at all events, stated, that the late Sir Percy Kellynch had been knighted by mistake for somebody else; through a muddle owing to somebody's deafness. The result was the same, since his demise left her with a handle to her name, but no one to turn it (to quote the mot of a well-known wit), and she looked, at the very least, like a peeress in her own right. ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... get it into his head that I went below because I thought he was making a muddle of the speed. As a matter of fact, he knows every blessed thing I do about our motors, and Williamson is loyal to ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies • Victor G. Durham
... he. "I sha'n't need your money. Only don't you let Weedie have it, to muddle away ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... the horses! Off to Canterbury! Tramp, tramp o'er pebble, and splash, splash through puddle; Hurrah! how swiftly speeds the post so merry! Not like slow Germany, wherein they muddle Along the road,[552] as if they went to bury Their fare; and also pause besides, to fuddle With "schnapps"—sad dogs! whom "Hundsfot," or "Verflucter,"[553] Affect no more ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the mouldings of the ceiling, while a jumble of thoughts mix and muddle themselves in my head. Was Brindley Wood a dream? or is this a dream? Surely one or other must be, and, if this is not a dream, what is it? Is it reality, is it truth? And, if it is, how on earth did any thing so monstrous ever come about? How ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... No work will be carried out thoroughly without order and system. You see people who work all day and work hard, but never make any way, because they work in a muddle, and with no regular plan. At school the child is ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... what the world calls a success, would be proud of me; and Penelope, who has learned to think with the rest of the world, would be proud of me—proud to present me to her friends—to splendid fellows like Talcott and his muddle-headed companion." He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee with his long forefinger, and his face broke into a bitter smile as he spoke more quietly. "David, I have seen Penelope. I came to New York just to be near her, and many a night I ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into a puling, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... that straight wisp to Don Jones—but what else could she do to keep him from telling? Oh, life is a muddle! And here, in less than a week, Aunt Isabel would come by and whisk her off to the ends of the earth; and she might have to go without really knowing what ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... queer fellow, Graham," said Langton. "I almost think you might. I'd like to know what becomes of you, anyway. Forgive me—I don't mean to be rude—but you may make a parson yet. But don't found a new religion for Heaven's sake, and don't muddle up man-made laws and God-made instincts—if they are ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... "don't muddle my brains any more with your idiotic reasonings! Take him along, and give me ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... with ideas positively horrible—as in that grand Glenallan tragedy which is as appalling as the OEdipus or The Cenci. None of these great men would have tolerated for a moment being talked to (as the muddle-headed amateur censors talk to artists to-day) about "wholesome" topics and suggestions "that cannot elevate." They had to describe the great battle of good and evil and they described both; but they accepted ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... as their work was done, or no longer required? These, and other such problems, rose up before him, crude and sharp, asking to be solved. Feeling himself quite unable to give any but one answer to them—viz. that he was getting out of his depth, and that the whole business was in a muddle—he had recourse to his old method when in difficulties, and putting on his cap, started off to Hardy's rooms to talk the matter over, and see whether he could not get some light on it from ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... water at pleasure by a pneumatic operation upon the entral air tube pervading its shell. Its tentacula, sent abroad over the summit of the shell, searched the sea for prey. The creature had an ink-bag, with which it could muddle the water around it, to protect itself from more powerful animals, and, strange to say, this has been found so well preserved that an artist has used it in one instance as a paint, wherewith to ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... to manage successfully the finances of a nation, but his own were left in a sorry muddle: at his death it took forty thousand pounds to cause him to be worth nothing. His debts were paid by the nation. And this indifference to his own affairs was put forth at the time as proof of his probity and excellence. We think now ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... seldom urge the horse to make a noise all night like the nightingale; that when submerged for some long time under water, he is less happy than the haddock; and that when he is cut open pearls are less often found in him than in an oyster. He is not content to answer (though, being a muddle-headed horse, he does use this answer also) that having an undivided hoof is more than pearls or oceans or all ascension or song. He reflects for a few years on the subject of cats; and at last discovers in the cat "the characteristic equine quality of ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... in time of war and tumults, and that he thought would never answer, inasmuch as he did not really know who was the enemy from which he would be delivered. It was hard to decide against Ethelyn and still harder to decide against "Dick," and so with his brains all in a muddle Andy concluded to take the prayer "for all sorts and conditions of men," speaking very low and earnestly when he asked that all "who were distressed in mind, body, or estate, might be comforted ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... reproduced opposite pages 74 and 80. The first represents the Steen family. The jolly Jan himself is smoking at the table; the old brewer and the elder Mrs. Steen are in the foreground. I doubt if any picture exists in which the sense of innocent festivity is better expressed. It is all perhaps rather a muddle: Mrs. Steen has some hard work before her if the house is to be restored to a Dutch pitch of cleanliness and order; but how jolly every one is! Jan himself looks just as we ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of the grate of Ireland. And having so dealt with capital and coal the predominant partner next proceeded by a logical development to muddle transportation. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... single word of his bettering himself—of his doing anything but muddle on here—having a "crack" with this farmer and that—and painting pictures he's a sight too good for, since I came this morning; and we've talked for hours. No—I may as well have it out—I'm a one for plain speaking; I'm a bit disappointed in you both. As for you, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 83; anarchy, anarchism; want of method; untidiness &c adj.; disunion; discord &c 24. confusion; confusedness &c adj.; mishmash, mix; disarray, jumble, huddle, litter, lumber; cahotage^; farrago; mess, mash, muddle, muss [U.S.], hash, hodgepodge; hotch-potch^, hotch-pot^; imbroglio, chaos, omnium gatherum [Lat.], medley; mere mixture &c 41; fortuitous concourse of atoms, disjecta membra [Lat.], rudis indigestaque moles [Lat.] [Ovid]. complexity ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... flight, emptied half a bottle of turpentine on a duster, and began to scrub the face of the Melancolia viciously. The paint did not smudge quickly enough. She took a palette-knife and scraped, following each stroke with the wet duster. In five minutes the picture was a formless, scarred muddle of colours. She threw the paint-stained duster into the studio stove, stuck out her tongue at the sleeper, and whispered, "Bilked!" as she turned to run down the staircase. She would never see Torpenhow any more, but she had at least done harm to the man who ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... like so much water; it did not muddle his brain, it cleared it, it nerved him for that interview ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... involves progress if the enterprise itself is dully conceived and most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived. In the absence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may set up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert" quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs multiply ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... always trying to muddle me. I was saying that Angelique gets on my nerves. I should prefer a part with more meat in it, something out of the ordinary. This evenings especially, the part gives me ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... now turn to Afghanistan. Generally speaking, the story of our dealings with that country has been a record of stupid, arrogant muddle. From the days of the first Afghan war, when an ill-fated army was despatched on its crazy mission to place a puppet king, Shah Shuja, on the throne of Afghanistan, our statesmen have, with some notable exceptions, ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... of manner to Staupitz in his affair, but neither Staupitz nor himself trusted the Italian when out of sight. If Caietan should use force against him, he would publish the written reply he gave him. Caietan might call himself a Thomist, but he was a muddle-headed, ignorant theologian and Christian, and as clumsy in giving judgment in the matter as a donkey with a harp. Luther added further that an appeal would be drawn up for him in the form best fitted to the occasion. He further ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... war and tumults, and that he thought would never answer, inasmuch as he did not really know who was the enemy from which he would be delivered. It was hard to decide against Ethelyn and still harder to decide against "Dick," and so with his brains all in a muddle Andy concluded to take the prayer "for all sorts and conditions of men," speaking very low and earnestly when he asked that all "who were distressed in mind, body, or estate, might be comforted and relieved according ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... beddings, furniture, provisions for four months, etc., and the boat's people have been more than civil, really kind and attentive to us; but a bad dahabieh would have cost forty, so I am greatly the gainer. Nothing can exceed the muddle, uncertainty and carelessness of the 'administration' at Cairo: no coals at the depots, boats announced to sail and dawdling on three weeks, no order and no care for anybody's convenience but the Pasha's own. But the subordinates on board the boats do their work perfectly well. We go only ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... without any definite symbols, just a muddle of tea-leaves, is useless for the purpose of divination, beyond giving an indication of the state of the consultant's mind, so vague and undecided in its character that it obscures everything. Tell ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... are right there. The house is all in a muddle from the wedding, and we are to have a sort of nondescript meal at eight. Herrick, old fellow, I want you to put me up for a couple of nights. You are coming down to Staplegrove on Tuesday, so I told Dinah that we might as well ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... around for some one on whom to cast the blame for the Cretan muddle. The present idea is that England is the guilty party. This last report may not have any more truth in it than that about Russia, but it is now, said that England is bent upon conquering the Transvaal, and securing South Africa for herself, and that she has stirred up all this Cretan ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... times. Look at Greece, and that whole shabby muddle. But I am not sorry to be alive and privileged to look on. If I were not a hermit I would go to the House every day and see those people scuffle over it and blether about the brotherhood of the human race. This has been a bitter year for English pride, and I don't like ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... digging and knowing all the time as them lads is breaking their necks over the cliff side. Never was in such a muddle as this before. Why didn't they say what ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... of business he approved of the advertised formula: "Business as Usual." He understood it to mean that the duty which England expected every man to do was to stay in the place he was most fitted for and to go where he was most wanted. Nothing but muddle and disaster could follow any departure from ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... could have seen Eagle just once again," I heard myself thinking, as one hears the ticking of a watch under a pillow. But I felt a strange, throbbing eagerness to know quickly the great secret of what comes next after this world, with its seeming muddle of injustice and disappointment, its joys and broken aspirations. "Why! it was like this with me when we had our accident in the Golden Eagle!" I thought. And even as the remembrance flitted ghostlike through my brain, I saw tearing through the sky, far above the big bulk of the Zeppelin, ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to shed this habit of jumping impulsively to conclusions—and generally wrong conclusions—if you want to succeed in Scotland Yard. This letter of Hill's only strengthens my previous opinion that a damned muddle-headed jury let a cold-blooded murderer loose on the world when they acquitted Fred Birchill of the charge of shooting Sir Horace Fewbanks. Why, man alive, Holymead no more believes Hill is guilty than I do. He set himself to bamboozle the jury and he succeeded. If he had to defend Hill ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... was Edith Symmes, who sat almost directly before it. To the left of her was Marcia, pale and sad, and close beside her Horace Penfield. Heavens! He jumped impatiently to his feet. He was simply getting into a morbid muddle sitting here brooding over this matter. He must have action, action of some kind, and obeying a sudden impulse, he decided to see ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... these things if you really thought you were in a hopeless muddle. I have gone through it all this term, and I know. I have tried to laugh, and I have drunk until I didn't care what happened, but it is all no use. I have made a mess of everything, and there is no one to ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... looks like Merry Christmas all the year round. You should see him gaze at Sherm. Marian says it makes her want to cry, and Mother says it is the most wonderful manifestation of Providence she has ever known. It seems to me Providence would show more sense not to muddle things up so in the first place. Sherm is as pleased as can be to find he really is somebody, and he's awfully fond of the Captain, but you see he'd got so used to loving the Darts as his own folks that ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... war with Denmark was renewed. There was a general feeling of shame over Palmerston's bluster followed by a meek British inaction. The debate came on a vote of censure, July 8, in the course of which Derby characterized governmental policy as one of "meddle and muddle." The censure was carried in the Lords by nine votes, but was defeated in the Commons by a ministerial majority of eighteen. It was the sharpest political crisis of Palmerston's Ministry during the Civil War. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... more words over that. Lars found everything all wrong somehow at Ovrebo. In the old days he used to do his work and sing songs after for the company at the house; now, it was all a mess and a muddle, and no sense in any way of doing things. Ploughing, indeed! ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... profession. Beggary has long been a recognised profession, with its traditions, customs, and past-masters, and it is time that philanthropy should now be admitted to an equal status. There is no reason in the world why it should be left in the hands of amateurs, who muddle away funds by their lack of science and experience. Supposing a man sees his way to doing good—founding a home for incurables, or drunkards, or establishing a dispensary, or anything you please—why should he not make a living by it? What if he ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... had said. Look at her, in the warm vigour of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the germs and dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... when, spreading over a number of books, it pursues no order, and thus results in a muddle of faint impressions each blurring the rest. Books must be allowed to help one another; they must be skilfully called in to each other's aid. And that this may be accomplished some guiding principle is ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... unprivileged humanity. The mood of the evening was doubtless foolish, boyish, but it was none the less keen and convincing. He had never before had the inner, unknown elements of his nature so stirred; had never felt this blind, raging protest. It was a muddle of impressions: the picture of the poor soul with his clamor for a job; the satisfied, brutal egotism of Brome Porter, who lived as if life were a huge poker game; the overfed, red-cheeked Caspar, whom he remembered to have seen only once before, when the young polo captain ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... builds under the same eaves, in excessively populous colonies; and it is impossible to follow the labours of any single Mason, whose cells, distributed here and there, are soon covered up with the work of her neighbours. All is muddle and confusion in the individual ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... the Melancolia viciously. The paint did not smudge quickly enough. She took a palette-knife and scraped, following each stroke with the wet duster. In five minutes the picture was a formless, scarred muddle of colours. She threw the paint-stained duster into the studio stove, stuck out her tongue at the sleeper, and whispered, 'Bilked!' as she turned to run down the staircase. She would never see Torpenhow any more, ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... And the day goes on and on, getting worse and worse you mislay your exercise-book, you drop your arithmetic in the mud, your pencil breaks, and when you open your knife to sharpen the pencil you split your nail. On such a day you jam your thumb in doors, and muddle the messages you are sent on by grown-ups. You upset your tea, and your bread-and-butter won't hold together for a moment. And when at last you get to bed usually in disgrace it is no comfort at all to you to know that not a single bit of ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... for town that very day. On the other hand, Sir Tancred was averse to going to the police; he knew what the provincial police were. What was excellent evidence to him would seem no evidence at all to them; and they would move too late, or, if they moved in time, would muddle the whole business, and let the Biggleswades know they were suspected. Besides, it hurt his self-love to seek aid from anyone. No, the proper game was to rob the robbers, and he had seven shillings ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... on drainage which have been thus far published, there is a vagueness in the arguments on this branch of the subject, which betrays a want of definite conviction in the minds of the writers; and which tends quite as much to muddle as to enlighten the ideas of the reader. In so far as the directions are given, whether fortified by argument or not, they are clearly empirical, and are usually very much qualified by considerations which weigh with unequal ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... fine nature had transmuted his disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, were energy, self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the battles of life, in all honour and rectitude, so as to win. From the muddle of his father's affairs he had taken away a lesson of method, order, and punctuality in business and other arrangements. "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well," was not only one of his favourite maxims—it was the rule of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... size of the needless muddle was apparent. Evasions were of no use; therefore Dunois admitted that there was no way to correct the blunder but to send the army all the way back to Blois, and let it begin over again and come up on the other side this time, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... continuing his cigar, 'that ar nigger's sassy enough for three legations. Pierce sent him here;—for what, no one about the establishment can tell. Anyhow, seeing it's you, I was about giving out an idea of what an interminable muddle Pierce would get everything into if he had but his own way; but, as there isn't time now, and as you won't join me in a cigar, suppose we send out and ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... caused much alarm to the inhabitants of Esher proper. We do not use the expression "Esher proper" from any prudish reason, but merely because Little Esher, a mile down the road, might in the reader's mind become a factor to promote muddle if we did not take care to indicate ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... coming and going with them; and when I saw once the millions of books in the Rue de la Musee, I asked the keeper what use they were for, and he said, 'to make men wise, my dear.' But Bac the cobbler, who was with me,—it was a fete day—Bac, he said, 'Do you not believe that, Bebee? they only muddle folk's brains; for one book tells them one thing, and another book another, and so on, till they are dazed with all the contrary lying; and if you see a bookish man, be sure you see a very poor creature who could not hoe a patch, or kill a pig, or stitch ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... cried Trot indignantly, and turning to Cap'n Bill, she added, "I'm not goin' to leave you down here in all this mess, Cap'n, and don't you think it. If one of us gets out of the muddle we're in, we'll both get out, so don't you make any bargains with Zog ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... our foreign policy, he says, that he has learnt what our journalists denounce as "the doctrine of the bully, of the materialist, of the man with gross ideals: a doctrine of diabolical evil." He frankly accepts that doctrine from us (as if our poor, honest muddle-heads had ever formulated anything so intellectual as a doctrine), and blames us for nothing but for allowing the United States to achieve their solidarity and become formidable to us when we might have divided them by backing ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... "I have made you rich; you shall be happy in your old age; but I will not let you muddle away my life any longer. Miserable wretch! I am hungry—where is my dinner? ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... subject of the criminal law, and passed in the next years a series of acts consolidating and mitigating the law, and repealing many old statutes. A measure of equal importance was his establishment in 1829 of the metropolitan police force, which at last put an end to the old chaotic muddle described by Colquhoun of parish officers and constables. Other significant legal changes marked the opening of a new era. Eldon was the very incarnation of the spirit of obstruction; and the Court of Chancery, over which he presided for a quarter of a century, was thought to be the typical stronghold ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... work will be carried out thoroughly without order and system. You see people who work all day and work hard, but never make any way, because they work in a muddle, and with no regular plan. At school the child is given the ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... gregariousness. They opened the new era of amalgamation by co-ordinating, on a vast scale, individual achievements, resources and labour, and directing them to a common end. The allied peoples were meanwhile content to muddle through in the old way. This difference explains much that seems puzzling in ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... children of the storm. The left flank swung forward and encircled the base of an imposing kopje. The men swarmed up with tiger-like activity, quickly, and in broken and irregular lines; but there was no confusion, no wretched tangle, no helpless muddle. They did not rush madly to the top and stand on the sky-line to be a mark for their foes. When they almost touched the summit they paused, formed their broken lines, and carefully and wisely topped the black brow; and as they did so the Boer rifles spoke from a ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... graduate of the second degree. Were I to enter into details, you would indeed have a laugh. 'I must needs,' he explained, 'have the company of two girls in my studies to enable me to read at all, and to keep likewise my brain clear. Otherwise, if left to myself, my head gets all in a muddle.' Time after time, he further expounded to his young attendants, how extremely honourable and extremely pure were the two words representing woman, that they are more valuable and precious than the auspicious ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Muddle pushed the King's nose back and began spreading his cheek into place. Instead of hands and feet, the Middlings had gnarled and twisted roots which curled up in a perfectly terrifying manner. Their teeth were gold, and their eyes shone like ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... away! Why you do spuddle A'most so weak's a child. How you do muddle! Gi'e me the speaede a-bit. A pig would rout It out a'most so nimbly ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... which enjoins on the prudent dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, Mid-Channel, is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... trains undecided whether to go on or to go back, and general confusion. It certainly did not look as if our train could be extricated for hours, but it proved there was method in this apparent muddle, and we suffered no delay worth speaking of. The station was densely packed with Staff officers and soldiers. Presently someone elbowed a way through the crowd to make way for the General, just arrived from Bloemfontein. A momentary interest was roused as an elderly, soldierly ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... hateful of me, but really, Miss Pomeroy, she never put those things back as she found them, because I had that drawer looking very neat and now see the muddle it is in!" ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... his power to conciliate the different parties, but has now concluded that Paris must be conquered by the troops of Versailles. Every day there comes more disturbing news. How will it all end? When shall we get out of this muddle? En attendant, we live in a ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... father was, or is, seems very slight. So much the better, for one of your unconventional order is not the sort of person I should care to have know. 'Even though you were her father himself.' Humph! So he does me the doubtful honor to suppose I may be? It is a nasty muddle all through. I never dreamed of walking into such a net as this. But something must be done, and that is clear; no use trying to shirk it, for Seldon is sure to run across them sooner or later up here—sure. And if he took a hand in it—as ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... little master or as anything else took place when he reached home; Katie was busy at the washhouse, and he met no one amidst all the dreary litter of last night's festivities till he came on his mother in the back kitchen. The piled dresser showed a muddle of unwashed dishes, and the floor was gritty with mud. Annie looked, and was, dirty with exertion; and even the steam that wreathed upwards from the washbowl added a sense of uncleanness to the air. Ishmael was too young to be depressed by dirt, which he rather liked, but the greyness ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... was alone in the world. I had been reading, reading, reading; my brain was one dark and misty muddle of Kant, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and a few others. I read them one after another, as quickly as possible; the mixture had the same effect upon my mind as the indiscriminate contents of taffy-shop would have upon Sigmund's stomach—it ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... of a muddle, but I'll try it," assented Sally finally. "And I suppose I could spare ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... "hail to the man who can muddle questions. But to return to our peasant-woman. Not being satisfied, naturally, with Maitre Pigoult's reception of her news, she went into the market-square, and there by the help of a legal practitioner from her village, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... sounds like the other end of nowhere, or (what is worse) of everywhere. It suggests a sort of derisive riddle; where does London End? As I came up through the vast vague suburbs, it was this sense of London as a shapeless and endless muddle that chiefly filled my mind. I seemed still to carry the cloud with me; and when I looked up, I almost expected to see the chimney-pots ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... this very book, half-way out of this muddle. There are poems in it, just as strong as The Inn Album, but with the ineffable spirit of imaginative emotion and thought clasped together in them, so that the strong is stronger, and the humanity deeper than in the pieces he thought, being deceived by the Understanding, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... sake don't hulloa till you're out of the wood!" he said; "they may catch up on you yet. Seventy-five isn't such a big score after all. If you don't look out you'll muddle your chance away, and ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons—although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift as humming-birds—yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he is! That's just it. My exotic flower of optimism withers at your feet. It's all exactly the muddle you say it is. Pray Heaven for a clear way out! Meantime thank whatever gods may ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... go, Evan!" pleaded Gantry. "I haven't known half the time where I'm at in this latest muddle. Is this another little blind lead of ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... anything. Clemens attempted to work, but put in most of his time footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of his income. It was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment. About the muddle of June they closed Viviani. Susy Clemens went to Paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the operatic stage. Clemens took Mrs. Clemens, with little Jean, to Germany ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... War Council was, in spite of President Wilson's opposition to the plan, to continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as possible. To the American soldier at this distance it looks as though the French and British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle along till the American authorities could be shown the fitness or the necessity of supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was playing with a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great game of hazard. Only those who went through it can ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... this is a beastly muddle! Look here, George, promise me you won't do anything stupid for a day or so.... I have been so pestered by people ... I don't know which way to turn. Why not stay ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... family pride in his composition, he resolved not to muddle the blood of the Witheringtons by any cross from Cateaton Street or Mincing Lane; and after a proper degree of research, he selected the daughter of a Scotch earl, who went to London with a bevy of nine in a Leith smack to barter ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... that pass. But you know that you've overdrawn at your bank, that you've overdrawn at your brokers, and that you can no more get out of the muddle you've got yourself into without one of the biggest public scandals there's been in ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... next to impossible to straighten out the muddle, and she came at length reluctantly to the conclusion that it was beyond her powers. Wondering what the Reverend Stephen would have said to such a crime, she abstracted a few shillings from her own purse and fraudulently made up the deficit that had ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... do now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works of ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Caesar's Camp, might be taken at a blow by the Imperialists, the English, the Dutch, now masters of Valenciennes, the one important thing was to teach the Generals of the Republic to conquer or to die. To see yonder feeble-witted muddle-pated veteran losing himself under cross-examination among his maps as he had done before in the plains of Northern France, Gamelin longed to yell "death! death!" with the rest, and fled from the Hall of Audience to ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... her toy with the new-born rill, a mere thread of water, build a Lilliputian dam, and muddle the clear outflow as it broke, and then build again. He had the thought that she had suddenly become younger, more like a child, ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... wasn't so horribly particular," said Avis, tidying her possessions ruefully a few days afterwards. "She says she's going to look at all our desks this afternoon, and give forfeits for any that are in a muddle. I haven't rummaged to the back of mine for ever so long. I scarcely know what's in it. Why, what's this? It's actually a box of fusees. I remember now, I brought them from home. I'd quite forgotten I ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... very well as far as it goes; but then it is equally true that M. M. —— actually obtained his wife, and that Mynheer Van Holland paid for her. I dare say all this can be reconciled with the eternal fitness of things; but I protest I don't see how it is to be done. It is "all a muddle," in my mind. I cannot even affirm that the banditti were ever hanged; and I am quite sure that the unlucky Dutch merchant, whose goods were so comically mixed up with this whole history, never had any poetical or material ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the end of the first year in Earth time he had spent in the cabin. Watching it happen, he was suddenly overwhelmed again by the enormity of his solitude, and it looked as if it were going to turn into another of those periods when he sat with the gun in his hand, sobbing and swearing in a violent muddle of self-pity and helpless fury. He decided to knock off the lamenting and get good and drunk instead. And he would make it a drunk to top all drunks on this ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... few yards ahead of the team, and they are all on top of him before one can say "knife"! Then one has to rush in with the whip—and everyone of the team of eleven jumps over the harness of the dog next to him, and the harnesses become a muddle that takes much patience to unravel, not to mention care lest the whole team should get away with the sledge and its load, and leave one behind.... I never did get left the whole of this depot journey, but I was often very near it, and several ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight, this terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and disciplined' by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The awful muddle that was in England during the first two years of the war has not yet been told in print; but thousands know it, and some day it will be written, and it will finish forever the prestige of the British ruling caste. They ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage Ottawa. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... to Cobhurst to-day," she said to herself, "but I do not propose to go with him. I shall get there first and see how the land lies, before he comes to muddle up things with his sordid anxieties about his future ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... had put a letter of his sister's in the band of the hat, I mused. How like her kid brother! It seemed that more or less families had Toddy-One-Boys to look after. Pshaw! what a muddle because a man couldn't keep ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... letter this morning from that stupid banker, Henriquez. He has made a muddle of buying those three pictures we wanted, and that Englishman who was so crazy about them will get the lot after all, unless ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... and all day long, to help her with the work. Yet the house was always in confusion. Mrs. Gourlay had asked for another servant, but Gourlay would not allow that; "one's enough," said he, and what he once laid down he never went back on. Mrs. Gourlay had to muddle along as best she could, and having no strength either of mind or body, she let things drift, and took refuge ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... and over again, and nothing has come of it. For my part, I don't care which way it goes. After the muddle that was made of it thirty years ago it does not seem to me more likely that we shall get rid of the Hanoverians now. Besides, the hangings and slaughterings then, would, I should think, make the nobles and the heads of clans think twice ere they ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... know, this combination of pitiful helplessness with the threatening cries was so killing that even the gloomy Simeon started laughing ... Well, now, apropos of Simeon ... I say, that life dumfounds, with its wondrous muddle and farrago, makes one stand aghast. You can utter a thousand sonorous words against souteneurs, but just such a Simeon you will never think up. So diverse and motley is life! Or else take Anna Markovna, the proprietress of this ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Street, a weaving turmoil of farmers' wagons, buggies, delivery carts, about a noisy, fuming centre of motor vehicles. High in the centre would be the motor truck of Trimble Cushman, loaded with cases and nursed through the muddle by a cool, clear-eyed youth, who sat with delicate, sure hands on a potent wheel. Never did he kill or maim either citizen or child, to the secret chagrin of Judge Penniman. Traffic jams to him were a ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... meet. It was the largest yet seen in the New World. There were 6,000 British regulars and 9,000 American militia, with plenty of guns and all the other arms and stores required. Its general, Abercromby, was its chief weakness. He was a muddle-headed man, whom Pitt had not yet been able to replace by a better. But Lord Howe, whom Wolfe and Pitt both thought 'a perfect model of military virtue,' was second-in-command and the real head. He was young, as full of calm wisdom as of fiery courage, and the idol of Americans ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... dusting, clearing away breakfast things, folding, starching, and ironing the fine things. With a little management much can be accomplished, provided the mistress be industrious, energetic, and willing to lend a helping hand. Let washing-week be not the excuse for having everything in a muddle; and although "things" cannot be cleaned so thoroughly, and so much time spent upon them, as ordinarily, yet the house may be kept tidy and clear from litter without a great deal of exertion either on the part of the mistress or servant. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Sidhe wrong no one. Their message to you was true; but their messengers were women, and you were a warrior. That is why the mischance came, for it is ever the way with a woman to become foolish over a warrior, and then there is always a muddle. And when Emer comes—," he checked his indiscreet utterance by pretending to have a difficulty in restraining the horses, and then added confusedly: "Besides, I'd rather be in your plight than ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... looked like he wanted to show me a good time, so I went, and that's what started it." Now that she had begun, she babbled on with her story, at times incoherently; full of excuses, made to herself more than to Ariel, pitifully endeavoring to convince herself that the responsibility for the muddle she had made ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... to see the rough way in which some people allow themselves to be served, and the muddle in which they prefer to live rather than do anything themselves that they consider menial; as if an untidy house, slovenly servants, badly cooked and coarsely served food, are not likely to do much more to lower their self-respect than any amount of so-called drudgery. 'A gentlewoman,' it has ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... an instant; then set off sharply, so that now and again she had to run a few paces to keep up with him. He took her round by the back of the theatre and into a muddle of streets that led thence. The quiet of the night closed about them; Truda was embarked upon ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... things over herself, don't you think so, ma'am? No one went in there to murder her. But how came she to have those clothes on. She was dressed quite different when I let her in. I say it's all a muddle, ma'am, and it will be a smart man as ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... shouldn't," answered Madame promptly. "What do you make the proper total, my dear, of that account Miss Rabbit made a muddle of?" ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... up to him, with a voice that betrays excitement). Paul, do not listen to that nonsense out there! Don't let them muddle your head! ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... have damn poor luck gettin' ye TO say anything. I dinna ask fra tears, nor faintin' like a woman. Be a mon, and let me into the secret of this muddle. There is a secret, and ye know it. What is it? Why are ye breaking the heart o' Mary Malone? Answer me, or 'fore God I'll wring the answer fra ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... seems to avoid me," he said. "I wanted to explain to him; I was afraid you might think my father was severe, but he really didn't beli—he didn't suppose—that is, the young people we've known—" He stopped, looking awfully red and embarrassed, then ended up with, "I'm afraid I'm making an awful muddle of it, but I'm really very sorry; I hope you and your ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... catemeran!" cried Mr. Whitelaw savagely, "and a drunken old fool into the bargain.—Why do you let her muddle herself with the gin-bottle like that, Ellen? You ought to have more respect for my property. You don't call that taking care of your husband's house.—As for you, mother Tadman, if you treat me to any more of this nonsense, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... that are likely to be put forward in the course of a war in order to excuse and ensure its continuation, are only excuses to gain time, put forward in hope that the chances of a further campaign may enable the government concerned to retrieve some apparent advantage out of the disastrous muddle through which they drifted into the first declaration of war. Having drawn the sword in a moment of embarrassment, they have now jolly well got to pretend that it was the right thing to do, and are not going ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... here's something of a muddle, Josephine," he began with a deprecating smile. "Mallory, who was coming down here with his daughter, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... any kind, and should be very sorry to do so. I thought it was now generally admitted that the more work a man has to do, the less he can afford to muddle himself in any way. But as I have never tried the experiment in using either alcohol or tobacco, and cannot afford to do it, I have no comparative experience to offer. It might be beneficial; I do not believe it would, ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... unpardonable sin. The suicide's punishment should be loss of immortality. Well, I found work to do, of all sorts, in America, and elsewhere. And a year ago—she died. I should have come straight home, only I was booked for that muddle on the frontier they called 'a war.' I got fever after Targai; was invalided home; and here I am recruiting and finishing my book. Now you can understand why loveliness in a woman, fills me with a sort of panic, even while a part of me still leaps ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... behind. With The Wild Duck fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and on more than one occasion he had thought, with a queer, detached interest, of the relief which morphia might bring to his tormented nerves; but with the thought came another—the picture of Iris Wayne who had bidden him remember that this was not the way out of the tragic muddle into which his life had been ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... are no laws to prevent young women falling in love, or the world would not be in such a confounded muddle as it frequently is. Don't be downhearted, Pryme; you stick to her, and it will all come right; and look here, if they won't ask you to Shadonake, I ask you to Kynaston; drop me a line, and come whenever you like—as soon as you ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... The girls are so tiresome and have made such a muddle about the Krampuses for the staff. The money didn't come out right and Keller said that Markus had taken some but Markus said not taken only kept. Of course Markus complained to Frau Doktor and her father went to the ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... it not be?" she rejoined, in a not very convincing tone. "Now I shall rely on you—and I am sure it will not be in vain—to respect my wishes. Things seem to be in a horrible muddle," she added with a rather dreary laugh, "but let's hope they will right themselves ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... men find themselves in fields of benevolent action to which they are very poorly adapted; and the world is full of these blunders; but an honestly-loving heart and an ordinarily clear brain, that nobody has been allowed to meddle with and muddle, will tell a man where he belongs and what he ought to do. If a man have a gift for ministering to the sick, let him do it. If he have a gift for dealing personally with the poor, let him do that. If he have a gift for making money, and none for properly ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... because he could see no prospect of peace or happiness for her at home. He very often in those days sighed deeply from a heavy heart, for his home was very different from what he had hoped it would be. It was true that things were more orderly, but the old careless joyousness, the muddle and confusion, seemed ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... there should be no sorrow or suffering," which of all sentiments was the most likely to appeal to Dick Dudley, for he is one of those who look upon sorrow and suffering as bad management on the part of some one, since the world is really such an awfully jolly place, if only people didn't make a muddle of their lives. He says it is all very well to talk of high ideals, you can't live up to them, the best you can do is to live up to the highest practical ideal. But then his standard of ideal is very much higher since he saw Pauline for the ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived. In the absence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may set up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert" quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... hair,' calling themselves 'Saltiers,' may derive their name from the dance, 'Saltarello.' Gallimaufry is 'Galimathias,' a muddle, or hotch potch. (See ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... favourite jests of all peoples, from Iceland to Japan, from India to England, are the droll adventures and mishaps of the silly son, who contrives to muddle everything he is set to do. In vain does his poor mother try to direct him in "the way he should go": she gets him a wife, as a last resource; but a fool he is still, and a fool he will always be. His blunders and disasters ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... entire history of the growth of the Christian doctrine in those disordered early centuries is a history of theology by committee; a history of furious wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still more hasty attempts to clinch matters by anathema. When the muddle was at its very worst, the church was confronted by enormous political opportunities. In order that it should seize these one chief thing appeared imperative: doctrinal uniformity. The emperor himself, ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... confounded Miss West, and made a greater muddle of her former and her present identities ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... road. Never again shall I return to that life. I have saved my wages this summer and am going back into the world to begin life all over again. This time, with God's help, I shall not make such a muddle of ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... I'm lookin' for is some big business stuff; maybe a straight tip on how this new shift in Europe is going to affect foreign exchange, or a hunch as to what the administration means to put over in regard to the railroad muddle. He's a solemn-faced, owl-eyed old party, this Mesaba Matt. Looks like he was thinkin' wise and deep about weighty matters. You know. One of these slow-movin', heavy-lidded, double-chinned old pelicans who never mention any sum less than seven figures. So I'm putting ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... a short-sport!" she burst forth. "Any fellow that'll go on making debts when he can't pay his old ones, that'll get things in a muddle and run off and let somebody else face the ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... volunteers will find it easy to work in unison and keep in touch with each other. If only the Jacobin bayonets do not get in the way; if only the self-styled "scientific" theorists do not thrust themselves in to darken counsel! Or rather let them expound their muddle-headed theories as much as they like, provided they have no authority, no power! And that admirable spirit of organization inherent in the people, above all in every social grade of the French nation, but which they have so seldom been allowed to exercise, will initiate, ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... game plentiful. Then the men of the settlement seem to have but a hazy notion about its bein' a place of happiness, but they can't tell why or wherefore in a very comprehensible sort o' way, and, as far as I can see, they're in no hurry to get there. It seems in a muddle somehow, an' that's a thing that surprises me, for the works o' the Almighty—hereaway in the mountains—are plain and onderstandable, so as a child might read 'em; but man's brains don't seem to be ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... There was a further muddle of words, then, "I think my motor's going to conk out. Shall I backtrack, FHQ? Come ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... long since overdrawn our account. Our successes in the past, sometimes the result of fortuitous circumstances, more often of the blunders of our rivals, inspire a presumptuous confidence in successes for the future and a conviction that come what may we are destined to muddle through. A special providence is watching over us—a cousin German to the Kaiser's "good old God." In truth we are tempting Fate, postulating an exception to the law of cause and effect, and looking for Hebrew miracles in the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... me. We went pig-sticking together once—years ago, and I chanced to head off Piggie at a critical moment for young Akbar. On the strength of that, he wants me to go and be his political adviser for a few months. It seems the State is in rather a muddle. His father was a shocking old shuffler, and there are plenty of budmashes about, if report says true. But this young Rajah is anxious to get things straightened out, and the Commissioner wants a report made and so on. Altogether," Nick paused with a smile on his yellow face, "they ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... Member of Parliament, "I mean to put my shoulder to the wheel, and do the very best that can be done. I cannot believe but what a man in earnest will find out the truth. Politics are not such a hopeless muddle but what some gleam of light may be made ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... punishment as I or any could desire. I think with you this estate business should some way be settled, and if it is to be his, I have no mind to leave the thing in doubt, and if it be mine or my father's, I for one do not want it. I have enough, and no wish to muddle away my life as ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... this he failed. The jury, muddle-headed, obstinate country folk, had made up their minds that Lord Loudwater was the kind of man to be murdered, and that, therefore, he had been murdered. They brought in the verdict that Lord Loudwater had been murdered by some ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... the theatres have got up a plot," continued the manager; "they will even hiss the piece, but I have made arrangements to defeat their kind intentions. I have squared the men in their pay; they will make a muddle of it. A couple of city men yonder have taken a hundred tickets apiece to secure a triumph for Florine and Coralie, and given them to acquaintances able and ready to act as chuckers out. The fellows, having been paid twice, will go quietly, and a scene of that sort always ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... one by one—and re-formed in the center of the cops' muddle. Malone saw one cop raise his billy and swing it at Mike. Mike watched it come down and vanished at the last instant. The cop's billy descended on the head of another cop, standing just ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... then she threw the book down in disgust. "What's the use of cramming?" she said to herself. "If I keep on I won't even be able to remember that 'the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.' I'm in a muddle over these triangles now. I'll find the girls and get them to go to the woods with me. I really ought to collect a few more ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... hardly be given him for first using, so effectively too, the professional sea-life of his country: a motive so richly productive since through Marryat down to Dana, Herman Melville, Clark Russell and many other favorite writers, both British and American. In Smollett's hands, it is a strange muddle of religion, farce and smut, but set forth with a vivid particularity and a gusto f high spirits which carry the reader along, willy-nilly. Such a book might be described by the advertisement of an old inn: "Here is entertainment for man and beast." As to characterization, if ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... irregularity; anomaly &c. (unconformity) 83; anarchy, anarchism; want of method; untidiness &c. adj.; disunion; discord &c. 24. confusion; confusedness &c. adj.; mishmash, mix; disarray, jumble, huddle, litter, lumber; cahotage[obs3]; farrago; mess, mash, muddle, muss [U. S.], hash, hodgepodge; hotch-potch[obs3], hotch-pot[obs3]; imbroglio, chaos, omnium gatherum[Lat], medley; mere mixture &c. 41; fortuitous concourse of atoms, disjecta membra[Lat], rudis indigestaque moles [Lat][Ovid]. complexity &c. 59a. turmoil; ferment &c. (agitation) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... papa" had confined himself to scathing criticism of the incompetence of females who could not teach their menials to "cook a dinner which was not a disgrace to any decent household." When not virulently aspersing the mutton, he was expressing his opinion of muddle-headed weakness which would permit household bills to mount in a manner which could only bring ruin and disaster upon a minister of the gospel who throughout a protracted career of usefulness had sapped his intellectual manhood in the useless effort to support ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... arrive be such as you approve or as you disapprove, will nevertheless help to clear the course. In this and in all complicated matters we must remember a saying of Bacon, which may be freely translated thus: "Consistent error is very often vastly more useful than muddle-headed truth." At any rate, if there be any error in the conclusions I shall put before you, I will do my best to make the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... the Europeans looked upon the United States as a doomed country, thinking I, like some members of our wealthier classes, had come to escape disruption and dislocation at home. Only in England did I find the belief prevalent that the Americans would somehow muddle through because afterall theyre the same sort of chaps we are, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... if you are called to do a man's work, do not exact a woman's privileges—the privileges of inaccuracy, of weakness, of the muddle-head. Submit yourselves to the rules of business, as men do, by which alone you can make God's business succeed. For he has never said that he will give his blessing to sketchy, unfinished work. And I would especially guard young ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... been a long time before this consciousness of mismanagement became a general conviction, but as it was, the disorder was readily and naturally attributed to the stupid Germans, and everyone was convinced that a dangerous muddle had been occasioned by ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... hour he wouldn't talk at all; just sat there wooden-faced, smoking vile little cigars that made me think I was getting hay-fever. But I wouldn't give up; and after I had worn out all the commonplaces I began on the Trans-Western muddle. At that he woke up all at once, and before I knew it he was giving me an expert legal opinion on the case; meaty and sound and judicial. Miss Van Brock, that man is a lawyer, and an exceedingly able one, ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... answered Mat; "I don't suppose I should understand you if you could find 'em. If you want the picter put up again, I'll do it. And if you want the carpenter's muddle head punched, who put it up before, I shouldn't much mind doing that either," added Mat, looking at the hole from which the clamp had been torn with an expression of ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... open secret that the men behind Mar are starving, and that the whole east and the city of Savannah were within a day of being deserted. How long is this disorganisation to go on? How long is that bloated bondholder to go prancing round on horseback, wall-eyed and muddle-headed, while his men are starved and butchered, and the forces of this great country are at the mercy of clever rogues like Potty, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pounds' worth of property to set off against his vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions. This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised nothing. I cannot claim that a single ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... Method. Without this, work cannot be got through satisfactorily either in offices, workshops, or households. By arranging work properly, by doing everything at the right time, with a view to the economy of labour, a large amount of business can be accomplished. Muddle flies before method; and hugger-mugger disappears. There is also a method in spending—in laying out money,—which is as valuable to the housewife, as method is in accomplishing her work. Money slips through the fingers ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing going on about me. That's the way I've got the ill name of Chancery. I don't mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don't notice me, but I notice him. There's no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. Hi, Lady Jane!" ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... my friends that I should make a first-class job of it, that they all dropped in to discuss the plan with me, and to give me some advice, until—thanks to their thoughtful kindness—my head would have been in a muddle had the contemplated structure been a cheap barn instead of ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... logically, a Hydrographer is a ship. But a ship is never put into a witness-box, where it would be quite at sea, but in the dock, where it could be quite at home. "Truly," writes our Puzzled Correspondent, "there is a muddle somewhere." Q. E. D. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... inquest think that Kit Rhodes did come back to do that shooting, and you know Conrad and the very smooth rat of the Charities Society are accountable for that opinion. The Mexican who dragged in Kit's name is one of Conrad's men; it all means something! It's a bad muddle, but Kit Rhodes and Cap Pike will wander back here some of these days, and I mean to have every bit of evidence for Kit to start in with. He suspected a lot, and all Granados combined to silence ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... endorsed Ingred, "and a most uncomfortable one, I should say. I went to his house once for a music lesson, and it looked in a fearful muddle. Good old Bantam! We must give her congrats! She'll soon get things into order there! I believe she adores little Kenneth. I've often seen her taking him about the town. She shall have ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... form new individuals (changes which would not have occurred if those germ-cells had perished!), but rather a correlation between the age of the parents and the quality of their offspring. How cleverly the biometricians have involved one muddle within another will be evident not only from considering the evident absurdity of supposing—as their argument, analyzed, necessarily supposes—that a man's body can be affected by the diverse fates of germ-cells that have left it, but also when we observe that one of the ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... care! You'll muddle all my papers. [Taking bills out of his hands, and closing down the writing-desk.] I want to have a little talk with Renie—you'd better join them at ...
— Dolly Reforming Herself - A Comedy in Four Acts • Henry Arthur Jones
... I to enter into details, you would indeed have a laugh. 'I must needs,' he explained, 'have the company of two girls in my studies to enable me to read at all, and to keep likewise my brain clear. Otherwise, if left to myself, my head gets all in a muddle.' Time after time, he further expounded to his young attendants, how extremely honourable and extremely pure were the two words representing woman, that they are more valuable and precious than the auspicious animal, the felicitous bird, rare ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the same reason that it produces so many unhappy men. But all the reforms were directed to rescuing the industrialism rather than the happiness. Poor couples were to be divorced because they were already divided. Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with the modern abuses. When the tares are found in the wheat, the greatest promptitude and practicality is always shown in burning the wheat and gathering the tares into the ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... made a hideous muddle of things.' he said at last—'a hideous muddle. Nothing to fear, for everything has happened. Nothing to hope for, for nothing can happen any more. Fortune wasted, friends wasted, genius wasted, heart wasted, life wasted. Ah, well! I ought ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... alone in the world. I had been reading, reading, reading; my brain was one dark and misty muddle of Kant, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and a few others. I read them one after another, as quickly as possible; the mixture had the same effect upon my mind as the indiscriminate contents of taffy-shop would have upon Sigmund's stomach—it made it sick. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... laughing-stock of Europe. Among and beneath the rotten weeds and garbage of old systems and abuses the new seed was being sown. But England saw no signs of the crop; saw only the stubborn husbandmen begrimed with the dust and dirt, and herself hopelessly involved in the Egyptian muddle: and so in utter weariness and disgust, stopping her ears to the gibes and cat-calls of the Powers, she turned towards other lands ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... now. He looks like Merry Christmas all the year round. You should see him gaze at Sherm. Marian says it makes her want to cry, and Mother says it is the most wonderful manifestation of Providence she has ever known. It seems to me Providence would show more sense not to muddle things up so in the first place. Sherm is as pleased as can be to find he really is somebody, and he's awfully fond of the Captain, but you see he'd got so used to loving the Darts as his own folks that he can't get unused to it all of a sudden. He choked all up when he tried ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... come to his office to help him with his books. The nurse who somewhat inadequately supplied her place was having an afternoon off. The Doctor had been glad to see her, and had told her so. "I am afraid things are in an awful muddle." ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... her revenge. The man she married was a crack-brained weakling who got into the army the fag end of the war, fell in love with her pretty face, married her, then they quarrelled, and he drank himself into a muddle-head. She ran him into debt; then he gambled away government funds, bolted, was caught, and would have been tried and sent to jail, but some powerful relative saved him that, and simply had him dropped;—never heard of him again. She was about a month grass-widowed when Waring ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... of gypsiness. If there be not descent, there is affinity by marriage, familiarity, knowledge of words and ways, sweethearting and trafficking, so that they know the children of the Rom as the house-world does not know them, and they in some sort belong together. It is a muddle, perhaps, and a puzzle; I doubt if anybody quite understands it. No novelist, no writer whatever, has as yet clearly explained the curious fact that our entire nomadic population, excepting tramps, is not, as we thought in our childhood, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Grandmamma," Winifred exclaimed, looking up at it, "to help me clear up the muddle in my mind! I have a kind of ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... house. Some things had been turned over and others had gone, plainly. All Melier's clothes were gone. The lodger was not in, and under his bedroom window, where his box had stood, there was naught but an oblong patch of conspicuously clean wallpaper. In a muddle of doubt and perplexity, Bob found himself at the front door, staring up and down the street. Divers women-neighbours stood at their doors, and eyed him curiously; for Mrs. Webster, moralist, opposite, ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... said Mills, taking a chair, "The fact is, there's been a bit of a muddle about Blazer. That ass Simson, when he wrote out the tickets, wrote Blazer twice over instead of Blazer and Catterwaul. They were both such regular outsiders, it didn't seem worth correcting it at the time. I'm awfully sorry, you know, but ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... comes to pass peculiar; an' I allers allows if it ain't for the onforeseen way wherein things stacks up, an' the muddle we-alls gets into tryin' to find a trail, the Plaza Paloduro would have been a scene of bleatin' peace that day, instead of a stric'ly corpse-an'-cartridge occasion. The death rate rises to that degree in fact that the next roundup is shy on men; an' thar ain't ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... son by her second marriage of Nesta, the Welsh royal mistress of Henry Beauclerk, and his cousin, Maurice Fitzgerald, the leaders into Ireland of the Geraldines, were no more clear in their minds about this than Strongbow, and it is to the original muddle thus created that Professor Richey doubtless rightly refers the worst and most troublesome complications of the land question in Ireland. The distinction between the King's lieges and the "mere Irish," for example, is unquestionably ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... reserved for England. It is from our foreign policy, he says, that he has learnt what our journalists denounce as "the doctrine of the bully, of the materialist, of the man with gross ideals: a doctrine of diabolical evil." He frankly accepts that doctrine from us (as if our poor, honest muddle-heads had ever formulated anything so intellectual as a doctrine), and blames us for nothing but for allowing the United States to achieve their solidarity and become formidable to us when we might ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... lay in bed all day, and sat up all night, talking unceasingly for hour upon hour to Dr. Meryon, who alone of her English attendants remained with her, Mrs. Fry having withdrawn to more congenial scenes long since. The doctor was a poor-spirited and muddle-headed man, but he was a good listener; and there he sat while that extraordinary talk flowed on—talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of an abolished past—stories of Mr. Pitt and of George III., vituperations against Mr. Canning, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... years. He keeps his distance in the gallery, Till banish'd by some coxcomb's raillery; For 'twould his character expose, To bathe among the belles and beaux. So have I seen, within a pen, Young ducklings foster'd by a hen; But, when let out, they run and muddle, As instinct leads them, in a puddle; The sober hen, not born to swim, With mournful note clucks round the brim.[8] The Dean, with all his best endeavour, Gets not an heir, but gets a fever. A victim to the last essays Of vigour in declining days, He dies, and leaves his mourning mate ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch was rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one's back one would have seen nothing but muddle and confusion—clouds turning and turning, and something yellow-tinted ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... jams on River Street, a weaving turmoil of farmers' wagons, buggies, delivery carts, about a noisy, fuming centre of motor vehicles. High in the centre would be the motor truck of Trimble Cushman, loaded with cases and nursed through the muddle by a cool, clear-eyed youth, who sat with delicate, sure hands on a potent wheel. Never did he kill or maim either citizen or child, to the secret chagrin of Judge Penniman. Traffic jams to him were a ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... carriage by going out into the street behind the one in its way. At the same time their carriage started forward, and the inebriate, instead of going with her, started the other way to meet it, and so, there she was alone on the slippery pavement in this muddle of prancing horses and yelling terriers. If you can get any bets that I was more than two seconds getting out there to her, take them all, and give better than track odds if necessary. Then I guess she got rattled, for ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... merely good manners but a good manner, and with real refinement of speech, though a strong Somersetshire accent, Israel Veal would show nothing of himself to a stranger. Probably he would speak so little, though quite politely, that he would be put down as "one of those muddle-headed, stupid yokels with little or no mind," who, according to the townsman, "moulder" in country villages "till they ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... up-stairs. Presently he returned, bringing with him a copy of his wife's poems. 'Will you take this as a record of what I hope is only the first of many meetings?' he said. 'I can't find any of my own in that muddle upstairs, but I would rather you would have this than any of mine.' Yes, I took it, as proud as a boy could be who receives such an honor from his chief idol; prouder than I shall ever be again as I read the inscription: 'With the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... borough of Clavering time out of mind in the house. "If that man is wanted for a division," Hotspur said, "ten to one he is to be found in a hell. He was educated in the Fleet, and he has not heard the end of Newgate yet, take my word for it. He'll muddle away the Begum's fortune at thimble-rig, be caught picking pockets, and finish on board the hulks." And if the high-born Hotspur, with such an opinion of Clavering, could yet from professional reasons be civil to him, why should not Major Pendennis also have reasons of his own for ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I, 'it can't. You may, if you choose, make a muddle of it without a lawyer, but you can't ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Was it?—was it just as my prick now is?" Her story was exciting me, I pulled her belly up to mine, and my prick, a right good stiff one was between us. "I suppose it were," said she, "I don't recollect, all seems in a muddle, he hurt me dreadful, I screamed, he put something over my mouth, and I don't know no more; but he was doing it right up, and I were hollowing,—and then ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... I wanted the confirmation of your own lips, my dear child. The knowledge emboldens me to offer you an asylum under my own roof for the next few months—or longer. Ulick, as you say, is but a boy, half hot, half muddle-head. He, perhaps, could be ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... one is eating, so long as one can satisfy one's hunger? I remember the time when, for a woman, I was almost an epicure, and now I can swallow Mohammed's dinners with positive relish. Do give me another help of that extraordinary muddle he ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... strong man and the mother of his sturdy children. The world was made for you and for your offspring; and in time your children will occupy this world and make the laws for us irrelevant folk that scribble and paint and design all useless and beautiful things, and thus muddle away our precious lives. No, you may not wisely mate with us, for you are a shade too terribly at ease in the universe, you ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... it into his head that I went below because I thought he was making a muddle of the speed. As a matter of fact, he knows every blessed thing I do about our motors, and Williamson is ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... fact I went to see my beloved on that evening filled with a new faith in the outcome of our life together. I am afraid I muddle this matter in trying to tell it. A moment ago I said the other woman, the tobacconist's wife, went with me. I do not mean she went in fact. What I am trying to say is that something of her faith in her own desires and her courage ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... put to the trouble and expense of a general election, valuable time had been wasted, legislative preparations had been thrown away, and everything was now back again in just the same condition as when the King made up his mind to dismiss the Melbourne Administration. The whole blame for the muddle rested on the King, who now found himself compelled to take up again with Lord Melbourne just as if nothing had happened. The King, indeed, made an attempt to induce Lord Grey to come out of his retirement and form another Ministry; but Lord Grey was not ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... fine muddle. I'm as sweet as honey on the lasses, but when a fellow's sinned with 'em it's ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... have seen Eagle just once again," I heard myself thinking, as one hears the ticking of a watch under a pillow. But I felt a strange, throbbing eagerness to know quickly the great secret of what comes next after this world, with its seeming muddle of injustice and disappointment, its joys and broken aspirations. "Why! it was like this with me when we had our accident in the Golden Eagle!" I thought. And even as the remembrance flitted ghostlike through my brain, I saw tearing through the sky, far above ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... is, if there is any. But come round, and gnaw the old hambone—what? I think we got some claret and I know George's got a drop of Three-Star. Young Beryl's off to-morrow on the Northern tour with the White Bird Company, so of course we're in a devil of muddle. George's sister's round there, packing her. But if you'll put up with the damned old upset, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... decision of the Supreme War Council was, in spite of President Wilson's opposition to the plan, to continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as possible. To the American soldier at this distance it looks as though the French and British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle along till the American authorities could be shown the fitness or the necessity of supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was playing with a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great game of hazard. Only those who went ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Mister Robert and his cousins from Bristol town will soon be here. I have not met with the cousins yet, but I've been told as they're very fine ladies—They stood in place of parents to my Robert, you know. 'Tis unfortunate we should be in such a sad muddle the day ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... come from? Note the confusion of thought, so difficult for us to understand, which characterises idolatry. What a hopelessly inconsequential cry that was, 'Make us gods, which shall go before us!' and what a muddle of contradictions it was that men should say 'These be thy gods,' though they knew that the thing was made yesterday out of their own earrings! It took more than a thousand years to teach the nation the force of the very self- evident argument, as it seems to us, 'the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... the road. Never again shall I return to that life. I have saved my wages this summer and am going back into the world to begin life all over again. This time, with God's help, I shall not make such a muddle of ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... elders were making various absurd inquiries, when Richard sent his chair to the floor, crying, "What a muddle you're in, Rip! You're mixing half-a-dozen stories together. The old lady I told you about was old Dame Bakewell, and the dispute was concerning a neighbour of hers who encroached on her garden, and I said I'd pay the money to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... time-table in the muddle-headed way peculiar to railway porters, and stroking his chin with his hand to assist cerebration, announced, after a severe internal struggle, that the 3.45 down, slow, ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... very book, half-way out of this muddle. There are poems in it, just as strong as The Inn Album, but with the ineffable spirit of imaginative emotion and thought clasped together in them, so that the strong is stronger, and the humanity deeper than in the pieces he thought, being deceived by the Understanding, were more strong ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... single shot in self-defence. It is an open secret that the men behind Mar are starving, and that the whole east and the city of Savannah were within a day of being deserted. How long is this disorganisation to go on? How long is that bloated bondholder to go prancing round on horseback, wall-eyed and muddle-headed, while his men are starved and butchered, and the forces of this great country are at the mercy of clever rogues like Potty, or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... girls shall learn all I can teach them about it, even if they give up the Latin, Algebra, and half-a-dozen ologies it is considered necessary for girls to muddle their poor brains over now-a-days. Amy means to make Bess an accomplished woman, but the dear's mite of a forefinger has little pricks on it already, and her mother has several specimens of needlework which she ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... the station was in a muddle—heads, things, buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... there was a freckled underbred young man who handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what he called "my positions." Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the gospels, things of ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... give. The appetite for food and drink, if left to itself, would run away with us. Our liking for what tastes good, if allowed to have its own way, would lead us to eat and drink such things and in such quantities as to weaken our stomachs, enfeeble our muscles, muddle our brains, impair our health, and shorten our lives. Temperance puts bits into the mouth of appetite; holds a tight rein over it; compels it to go, not where it pleases to take us, but where we see that it is best for us to go; ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... after ten years of effort, had its effect on Trevison. It fretted him; he looked years older; he looked worried and harassed; he longed for a chance to come to grips in an encounter that would ease the strain. Physical action it must be, for his brain was a muddle of passion and hatred in which clear thoughts, schemes, plans, plots, were swallowed and lost. He wanted to come into physical contact with the men and things that were thwarting him; he wanted to feel the thud and jar of blows; to catch the hot breath of open antagonism; he yearned ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of the mammas seemed to think that first come would be first served, and sent their husbands over before he was fairly squatted. Various and contradictory were the accounts they brought home. Men are so stupid at seeing and remembering things. Old Mr. Muddle came back bemused with sherry, declaring that he thought Mr. Puffington was as old as he was (sixty-two), while Mrs. Mousetrap thought he wasn't more than thirty at the outside. She described him as 'painfully handsome.' Mr. Slowan couldn't tell whether the drawing-room furniture was chintz, or ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... allegiance of monarchies. He was seldom "with the largest crowd" himself. Writing much of our foreign affairs, then in a good deal of a muddle, he assailed so fearlessly and fiercely measures which he held to be unjust that he was caricatured as an armed knight on a charger and as Huck Finn with ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Upon the Swede's deathly pale checks were two spots brightly crimson and sharply edged, as if they had been carefully painted. Scully placed the light on the table and sat himself on the edge of the bed. He spoke ruminatively. "By cracky, I never heard of such a thing in my life. It's a complete muddle. I can't, for the soul of me, think how you ever got this idea into your head." Presently he lifted his eyes and asked: "And did you sure think they were going ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... human thing, from his momentous setting out upon his life in early manhood to the least decision of his present passing day. It is a very proper emblem of a beginning. It may lead him to that kind of muddle and set-back which attaches only to beginnings, or it may get him fairly into the weather, and yet he may find, a little way outside, that he has to run for it, or to beat back to harbour. Or, more generously, ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... that I ought not to put on so much manure," replied his father. "The gentry, that is M. le Marquis, M. le Comte, and Monsieur What-do-you-call-'em, say that I am letting down the quality of the wine. What is the good of book-learning except to muddle your wits? Just you listen: these gentlemen get seven, or sometimes eight puncheons of wine to the acre, and they sell them for sixty francs apiece, that means four hundred francs per acre at most in a good year. Now, I make twenty puncheons, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... With wireless telegraphy, the airplane and the automobile annihilating time and space, what else? Turning from the material to the ethical it seems of the very nature of the human species to meddle and muddle. On every hand we see the organization of societies for making men and women over again according to certain fantastic images existing in the minds of the promoters. "Mon Dieu!" exclaimed the visiting Frenchman. "Fifty religions ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... individuals he is perpetually disillusioned; as to causes he is as obstinate as his mother. And independently of the Glenwilliam affair, that is why, I think, in the end she preferred Coryston to Arthur, who will 'muddle through,' not knowing whither, like the ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... generous, but spasmodic and impulsive in all their actions. Their greatest fault lies in their impulsiveness and lack of self-control, and unless a good Line of Head be shown on the hands, they rush madly into all kinds of difficulties and dangers and often make a complete muddle of their opportunities and the magnificent powers of leadership that they nearly ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... and France have groped their way through centuries towards a vague ideal. America proudly began her existence by a proclamation of the equal rights of man. She proudly proclaims them now; but the world is involved in such a complicated muddle, that the utterances of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (to say nothing of their intellectual and political ancestor Jean Jacques Rousseau) require amplification. The political thought of the older nations of Europe is tired out. It is for the fresher genius of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... dey dell her de moon von pig green scheese she swar it ish so; put dese dings dell der druf, und der great laws vork on for efer no matter vat voolish beoples perlieve. It vas all law und vorce, und it vould be von pig muddle in der heafens if it vas all vat ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... anything out of the undecipherable inscriptions in an unknown tongue and mysterious characters on the Iapygian monuments, and so for years have pronounced them unguessable, he who would presume to meddle where the doctors muddle would be likely to be reminded of the Arab proverb about proffered advice. Thus, it seems hardly possible to designate "the old Greeks and Romans" by their legitimate, true name, so as to at once satisfy the "historians" and keep on the fair side of truth and fact. However, since in the Replies ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... no stimulants of any kind, and should be very sorry to do so. I thought it was now generally admitted that the more work a man has to do, the less he can afford to muddle himself in any way. But as I have never tried the experiment in using either alcohol or tobacco, and cannot afford to do it, I have no comparative experience to offer. It might be beneficial; I do not believe it would, and prefer ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... instant; then set off sharply, so that now and again she had to run a few paces to keep up with him. He took her round by the back of the theatre and into a muddle of streets that led thence. The quiet of the night closed about them; Truda ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... through his sensitive blood like wine,—the sunlight was warm and comforting, and altogether there seemed nothing wrong with the world, particularly as the morning's newspapers had not yet come in. With them would probably arrive the sad savour of human mischief and muddle, but till these daily morbid records made their appearance, May-day might be accepted as God made it and gave it,—a gift unalloyed, pure, bright and calm, with not a shadow on its lovely face of Spring. The Stoic spirit of Epictetus himself had even seemed to join in the general delight ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... me! Oh, what an abominable mix and muddle it all is! And I was going to start the New Year ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation, imported from India by saintly Chinese missionaries at the epoch of our Middle Ages. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... leaders which never fail to regret the enormous amount of divorce there is. If it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the Press, it is because the Press does not give news of an imaginary world that is a Utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. Does Chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the Divorce Courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions. It is useless Chesterton sighing that lawyers ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... "What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried. "What a fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been! She drives us into indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even get the children which are her only excuse for her mischief. See what a fantastic thing I am when ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... presumptuous incapacity attempts to teach us on the one hand, and designing iniquity, or pure prejudice, seeks to mislead us on the other, and misconception of one's meaning and motives all round makes such a muddle of the whole that—that—it seems to me the search after truth is almost hopeless, at least ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... self-criticism. It does not involve a great additional band of officials, if you take into account the time now spent vainly by special investigating committees, grand juries, district attorneys, reform organizations, and bewildered office holders, in trying to find their way through a dark muddle. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... mistress recumbent in an easychair before an open window, and not to profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved at my habit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad muddle since she came to me. The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... faintest light of Clothes-Philosophy, on what may be called the Habilatory Class of our fellow-men. Here too overlooking, where so much were to be looked on, the million spinners, weavers, fullers, dyers, washers, and wringers, that puddle and muddle in their dark recesses, to make us Clothes, and die that we may live,—let us but turn the reader's attention upon two small divisions of mankind, who, like moths, may be regarded as Cloth-animals, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... considerable philosophy. It meant a return to the quiet service of the Honourable George and that I need no longer face the distressing vicissitudes of life in the back blocks of unexplored America. I would not be obliged to muddle along in the blind fashion of the last two days, feeling a frightful fool. Mrs. Effie would surely not keep me on, and that was all about it. I had merely to make no defence of myself. And even if I chose to make one ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Kate demanded with turbulent gesture. "Talk about balling things up! I like you; I want you to stay; and when I come in here and try and induce you to stay what do I do but muddle things so that you'll probably walk right out of the house! Why was I born like that?" she demanded in ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... silly pride, foibles, hopes founded on nothing and dreams touched with moonshine—and you make a Micawber. Put in a dash of assurance and a good thimbleful of hypocrisy, and Pecksniff is the product. Leave out the assurance, replacing it with cowardice, and the result is Doctor Chillip or Uriah Heap. Muddle the whole with stupidity, and Bumble ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... out, An' hitches up the sorrels, An' rides ten miles tew meetin', he Ain't braced for pious quarrels: No, sir, he ain't! that waggon rolls From corduroy to puddle, An' that thar farmer gets his brains Inter an easy muddle. ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... but him and me had so often belied Miss Wozenham to one another that I was shamefaced, and I knew she had offended his pride and never mine, and likewise I felt timid that that Rairyganoo girl might make things awkward. So I says "My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs." And we had the tea and the affairs too and after all it was but forty pound, and—There! she's as industrious and straight a creeter as ever lived and has paid back half of it ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... rejoinder. "There are no laws to prevent young women falling in love, or the world would not be in such a confounded muddle as it frequently is. Don't be downhearted, Pryme; you stick to her, and it will all come right; and look here, if they won't ask you to Shadonake, I ask you to Kynaston; drop me a line, and come whenever you like—as soon as ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... Mediaevals would simply have said that such a man might well scream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he could make. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream should be added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thought it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man for being horribly sinful and for ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... shall we do now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Boyle afforded another illustration of his "strange admixture of shrewdness and muddle-headedness." On an occasion when, it must be emphasized, he was entirely sober, he was discovered going out into the garden at twelve o'clock at night with a hand-candle in order to ascertain what was the correct time by ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... of "scauting." The axle of a wheelbarrow revolving without grease, and causing an ear-piercing sound, is said to be giving forth a "scrupeting" noise. What can be more explicit, and at the same time so aggravating, as to be told that you are a "mix-muddle"? A person who mixes up his commissions may feel a little abashed. A person who muddles his affairs may not be altogether proud of his achievements. But to be a mix-muddle, to both mix and muddle, to morally fumble without tact, and ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... alone, in the stern of the ship, her eyes on the dwindling continent. It dwindled very fast for so big a place. I accosted her, having had no conversation with her amid the crowd of leave-takers and the muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about the boat, our fellow-passengers and our prospects, and then I said: "I think you mentioned last night a name I know—that ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... once, Ruben Dario's verse is like those doorways of the Spanish Renaissance where French and Moorish and Italian motives jostle in headlong arabesques, where the vulgarest routine stone-chipping is interlocked with designs and forms of rare beauty and significance. Here and there among the turgid muddle, out of the impact of unassimilated things, comes a spark of real poetry. And that spark can be said—as truly as anything of the sort can be said—to be the motive force of the whole movement of renovation in Spanish poetry. Of course ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... abounded maize, fruits, and tobacco, with game of every kind, could possibly have induced content. Content, as Christians know, comes but with faith, and a true knowledge of the dogma is above liberty. Kindly, but muddle-headedly, he deplored their lot, their want of clothes, their want of interest in their God, their lack of knowledge of that God's commands. Then, coming to the point, he spoke of hell, and told the astonished Indians that it was quite impossible for them to avoid its flames, unless, taught ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... her marriage the perplexed girl had a talk with her father. Later she wondered if the hours alone with the sick man had not led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and advised the daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He abused Tom Willard, and that led Elizabeth to come to the clerk's defense. The sick man became excited and tried to get out of bed. When she would not let him walk about he began to complain. "I've never ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... him come in here or next door, an' he came up the steps. But nobody could have got in without some of youse seein' him. That's a lead pipe." The officer pushed any doubt that remained from his mind. "Only a muddle-headed Swede." ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... positions on the paper, and one that entailed more work than most. To kick at Mel would be rank ingratitude. It was not likely he had made a mess of things wittingly. Therefore the only alternative, since neither Mel's pride nor his own would permit them to confess to the muddle, was to pay the outstanding bill and slip the rest of the cash as quietly as possible ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... for almost every square foot of surface in the place—floor, chairs, tables, shelves, and every other "coign of vantage"—was piled up with books, reports, law papers, printers' proofs, and other literary matter, begrimed with dust, and apparently in the most hopeless condition of muddle. On the table itself was the opened correspondence of the day, and although it was very early morning, a separated portion, consisting of fifteen or twenty documents, and an equal number of letters already written, folded, and neatly ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... came," said Stewart, bluntly. "We're in a muddle here. I've insisted that you and Flo be kept close to us. I'll explain later. If you can't stop your ears I beg you to overlook ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... Bald-headed: 'to go it bald-beaded;' in great haste, as where one rushes out without his hat. Bogue: 'I don't git much done 'thout I bogue right in along 'th my men.' Carry: a portage. Cat-nap: a short doze. Cat-stick: a small stick. Chowder-head: a muddle-brain. Cling-john: a soft cake of rye. Cocoanut; the head. Cohees: applied to the people of certain settlements in Western Pennsylvania, from their use of the archaic form Quo' he. Dunnow'z I know: the nearest your true Yankee ever comes to acknowledging ignorance. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... you muddle-headed thing," he muttered. "Don't make that noise in the middle of the night.—They always do that at home when ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... Godfrey Isaacs allowed to issue a misleading report without correction from the Post Office. It all may spell corruption: but it need not. No one familiar with the workings of a Government department is likely to be surprised at any amount of muddle and incompetence. Matters are forgotten and then in the effort to make up for lost time important steps are simply omitted. Officials are pig-headed and unreasonable. And as ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Flick declared abruptly. 'Look here, we have made a muddle of this. My comrade in this business has been managing things pretty badly; he always wanted to boss the show too much. Now I am getting sick of all that, don't you see? I have had the dangerous part always, and he has had the pleasure ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... like a clumsy giant, and hours were required to execute the simplest movement. When, for instance, we changed front, my brigade marched nearly, if not quite, a mile to take position in the new line. The waving of banners, the flashing of sabers and bayonets, the clattering to and fro of muddle-headed aids-de-camp on impatient steeds, the heavy rumble of artillery wagons, the blue coats of the soldiers, the golden trappings of the field and staff, made a grand scene for the disinterested spectator to look upon; but with the ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... thus came into being, not, as eloquent persons have pretended, by the sovereign people consciously and definitely assuming power—I imagine the sovereign people in France during the first Revolution, for example, quite amazed and muddle-headed with it all—but by the decline of old ruling classes in the face of the quasi-natural growth of mechanism and industrialism, and by the unpreparedness and want of organization in the new intelligent elements in the State. I have compared the human beings in society to a great ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... was troubled. "It's all a muddle, anyhow," said he. "You can't blame the bluejay, because he was born so, and it's bluejay nature to act like that when it gets the chance. But there's the other bird—it looks bad. It is bad. For a thief to come into ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... know, as, with much use, the gold-lettering is almost obliterated from mine, and all I can make out is the word "Eagle"), and the convalescent author may do all his work in comfort, without mess or muddle; and hereto, once again, I set my hand and seal, so know all men by these presents, all to the contrary nevertheless and notwithstanding. B. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... of muddle to have got oneself into.' he thought to himself as he walked along the asphalte pavement in front of the sea-wall: 'a most confoundedly awkward fix to have got oneself into with a pretty girl of the lower classes. She's beautiful certainly; that there's no denying; the handsomest woman on ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... safely turn them loose on the world. It certainly is not safe to turn them loose without education—but I begin to wonder what we are all coming to. I don't mind telling you that I have got into a pretty psychological muddle, and I don't see much to hold ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... is one of the Charlottetown Penhallows," explained Mrs. Frederick. "He is a lawyer there. He is a first cousin of Lucinda's and a second of George's—or is he? Oh, bother! You must go to Uncle John if you want the genealogy. I'm in a chronic muddle concerning Penhallow relationship. And, as for Romney, of course you can speak to him about anything you like except Lucinda. Oh, you innocent! To ask him if he didn't think Lucinda was looking well! And ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... friendliness of manner to Staupitz in his affair, but neither Staupitz nor himself trusted the Italian when out of sight. If Caietan should use force against him, he would publish the written reply he gave him. Caietan might call himself a Thomist, but he was a muddle-headed, ignorant theologian and Christian, and as clumsy in giving judgment in the matter as a donkey with a harp. Luther added further that an appeal would be drawn up for him in the form best fitted to the occasion. He further hinted to his Wittenberg friends at the possibility of his having ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... know what you're talking about, and I wish you wouldn't muddle us with new names. Fire just happens. Nobody does it—not as a deed, you know,' Cyril explained. 'If they did the Phoenix wouldn't help them, because its a crime to set fire to things. Arsenic, or something they call it, because it's as bad as poisoning people. The Phoenix wouldn't help ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... you. I fear we must go and that it leaves the Expedition in a bad muddle. But we have been to the Pole and we shall die like gentlemen. I regret only for the women we ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... abstraction, doubtless—he found it difficult to escape without loss of self-respect. He still held that the deed, impossible to him as a pauper, might be performed without sacrifice of dignity or importance by a man of his present fortune. So the muddle-headed youth saw his duty straight ahead of him; and he regretted it heartily, but did not attempt ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... "Win your races and, when the time comes, drop foals as handsome as yourself, and thank your stars you're under orders, and so have small chance to muddle your affairs—as with your good looks, my dear, you most assuredly would—like all the rest ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... had always been, he had still found abundant time for the wooing of Diana. He had assumed a kind of guardian's attitude in the matter of her relations to the Vavasours—who in business affairs had proved both greedy and muddle-headed; he had flattered her woman's vanity by the insight he had freely allowed her into the possibilities and the difficulties of his own Parliamentary position, and of his relations to Ferrier; and he had kept alive a kind of perpetual interest and flutter in her ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... being done in some fugitive medium; and the walls are now covered with the works of Vasari himself and his pupils and do not matter, while the ceiling is a muddle of undistinguished paint. There are many statues which also do not matter; but at the raised end is Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the first Medici Pope, and at the other a colossal modern statue ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... overthrow of Addington and the formation of a Ministry of the talented men of all parties. Here, then, is the origin of the broad-bottomed or All the Talents Administrations which produced so singular a muddle after the death of Pitt. The Fox-Grenville bargain cannot be styled immoral like that of Fox and North in 1782; for it expressly excluded all compromise on matters of conviction. Nevertheless it ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the progress of his work, he was communicative to his few intimates, though never reading aloud extracts or allowing them to be seen. In 1872 he would speak pathetically of his "Crimean muddle," perplexed, as he well might be, by the intricacies of Inkerman. Asked if he will not introduce a Te Deum on the fall of Louis Napoleon, he answered that to write without the stimulus of combat would be a task beyond his energy; "when I took the trouble to compose that fourteenth ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... know best, of course. Gosh! What a muddle everything is. Sally," she said, suddenly stopping at the door, "you're not going to hate poor old Fillmore over ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... knew more than Mangan, most of them wouldn't have joined if they had known as much. You see they had never had any money to handle or any men to manage. Every year I expected a revolution, or some frightful smash-up: it seemed impossible that we could blunder and muddle on any longer. But nothing happened, except, of course, the usual poverty and crime and drink that we are used to. Nothing ever does happen. It's amazing how well we get ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... year and we'd have missed this. It takes only about one season to muddle up their riding with the white man's booze—or the white man's treaty money. Why don't we leave well enough alone—that is, if they'd let ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... and follower John Curzon that as their deaths were so near he felt a sudden interest in what had never interested him before—the story of John’s life before they had been brought so close to each other. The heroic but dull-witted soldier acceded to his master’s request, and the incoherent, muddle-headed way in which he gave his autobiography was full of a dramatic and subtle humour—was almost worthy of him who in three or four words created the foolish fat scullion in ‘Tristram Shandy.’ This he refused to print, in deference, I suspect, to a ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... declared to be in doubt. Round the question of the length of time the Indemnities might be postponed, and the actual amount of the increase in the Customs Tariff, there appeared to be an inexplicable muddle largely owing to the intervention of so many agents and to the fact that the exchange of views had been almost entirely verbal, unofficial, and secret. It would be wearisome to analyse a dispute ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... perhaps I am cruel; but we must be hard if we wish to triumph. Don't listen to young men when they try to mock and muddle you. They don't care for you; they don't care for us. They care only for their pleasure, for what they believe to be the right of the stronger. The stronger? I am ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... explain to him; I was afraid you might think my father was severe, but he really didn't beli—he didn't suppose—that is, the young people we've known—" He stopped, looking awfully red and embarrassed, then ended up with, "I'm afraid I'm making an awful muddle of it, but I'm really very sorry; I hope you and ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... done, the next had undone, and the permanent War Office Officials had given more attention to buttons and braids and caps than to business-like organisations of fighting efficiency. The administration was, as it always had been, a chaos of muddle. The higher ranks were rotten with inefficiency, and the lower, aggravated and bewildered by change after change, had come to look upon soldiering as a sort of game, the rules of which ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... may be gauged by anyone who will read pp. 481-484 in William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, by the late Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton. Cuthbert was a puzzle-pated old boy. The silence as to Will's authorship on the part of this muddle-headed old Cuthbert, in 1635-36, cannot outweigh the explicit and positive public testimony to his authorship, signed by his friends and ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... you are called to do a man's work, do not exact a woman's privileges—the privileges of inaccuracy, of weakness, of the muddle-head. Submit yourselves to the rules of business, as men do, by which alone you can make God's business succeed. For he has never said that he will give his blessing to sketchy, unfinished work. And I would especially guard young ladies from fancying themselves like Lady Superiors, with ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... days ago, and now this man Smithson has been too much for me. They treat me like a tailor, and expect me to cut my scenery to fit their theatre.... I wish you'd come back, chicken. I'm in a dreadful muddle. I've been working till I can't see, and I've been reading The Tempest till my mind is as salt as a dried haddock.... But I've drawn a marvellous Caliban, part fish, part frog, part man ... Life emerging from the sea. I'm sure now that we're all spawned from the sea, ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... been thinking of him all the afternoon and evening. But it was so. Darius Clayhanger had been nervous as to the manner in which the boy would acquit himself in the bit of business which had been confided to him. It was the boy's first bit of business. Straightforward as it was, the boy might muddle it, might omit a portion of it, might say the wrong thing, might forget. Darius hoped for the best, but he was afraid. He saw in his son an amiable irresponsible fool. He compared Edwin at sixteen with himself at the same age. Edwin had never had a care, never ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... in the Rue de la Musee, I asked the keeper what use they were for, and he said, 'to make men wise, my dear.' But Bac the cobbler, who was with me,—it was a fete day—Bac, he said, 'Do you not believe that, Bebee? they only muddle folk's brains; for one book tells them one thing, and another book another, and so on, till they are dazed with all the contrary lying; and if you see a bookish man, be sure you see a very poor creature who could not hoe a patch, or kill a pig, or stitch an upper-leather, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... to her brother over the hopelessness of their position, used the child's time-honoured reproach against the parent. "Papa and mama should not have had children if they were going to make such a muddle as this," she argued. Bessie had not wanted to be born, she declared. Her father and mother were responsible. They must at least say what was to be done. Papa, she declared to Bernard, should be ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... done all in his power to conciliate the different parties, but has now concluded that Paris must be conquered by the troops of Versailles. Every day there comes more disturbing news. How will it all end? When shall we get out of this muddle? En attendant, we ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Clark had been at his house a good many nights writing up these private books; but that was because Clark had been in a sort of muddle last winter,—his wife was sick, or one of his dozen children had met with an accident,—or something,—Livingstone ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... the ends meet. I would cut off all those wretched cares which jar miserably on the shaken nerves. I know the burst of thankfulness and joy that would come, if some dismal load, never to be cast off, were taken away. And I would take it off. I would clear up the horrible muddle. I would make them happy: and in doing that, I know that I should make ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... made a muddle about a run and found themselves in the common but embarrassing position of being both at the wicket-keeper's end. The ball had gone to Eric and he had only to throw it in to Charles, who was bowling, for Charles to put the wicket down. But in one of those flashes of inspiration which betray ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... "Learning, and behaving, and going, and doing, and seeing, and hearing, and having. 'It's all a muddle,' as the poor man ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... throw it away, voluntarily, is an unpardonable sin. The suicide's punishment should be loss of immortality. Well, I found work to do, of all sorts, in America, and elsewhere. And a year ago—she died. I should have come straight home, only I was booked for that muddle on the frontier they called 'a war.' I got fever after Targai; was invalided home; and here I am recruiting and finishing my book. Now you can understand why loveliness in a woman, fills me with a sort of panic, even while ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... most part, to fictitious characters) saves her half-brother Caesarion from his actual death, and, after the due thousands of pages, unites him happily to Queen Candace of AEthiopia. There is the same odd muddle (which made a not unintelligent Jesuit label this class of books "historia mixta") with many other persons. Perhaps the most curious of all episodes of this kind is the use made of Ovid's "fusca Cypassis." If Mrs. Grundy could be supposed ever to have read the Amores, the mere sight of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... it isn't a hanky cry, unless you make it worse. Lydia, I wish you and Anne would go away and let father and me muddle along alone." ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... Chancery. I don't mind. I go to see my noble and learned brother pretty well every day, when he sits in the Inn. He don't notice me, but I notice him. There's no great odds betwixt us. We both grub on in a muddle. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... are so tiresome and have made such a muddle about the Krampuses for the staff. The money didn't come out right and Keller said that Markus had taken some but Markus said not taken only kept. Of course Markus complained to Frau Doktor and her father went to the head and complained too. Frau Doktor said we know quite well that collections ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... you must use more colors, mix still more loosely. Put all the colors together, one beside the other, drag them together with the brush, scoop them up loosely on the end of it, and lay the tint on freely and frankly. Never muddle the color on the canvas. Don't put one color over another more than you can help; you will only get a thick mass of paint of one kind mixing with a mass of another, and the result will be dirty color, which of all things in ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... good way for you to get out of the muddle unscathed, wouldn't it?" she flashed in. "How chivalrous! Why don't you elope with some one—the dark, clinging girl—and let me free? You want me to suffer, not yourself. Just ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... calculations on paper, which Lord Kelvin, no doubt, or Professor Lodge, or Professor Karl Pearson, or any of those great scientific people might have understood, but which simply reduced me to a hopeless muddle, that not only was such a substance possible, but that it must satisfy certain conditions. It was an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at the time, it would be impossible to reproduce it here. "Yes," ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... like some years ago, The traffic stopping in a row In Piccadilly! The Vestry does not care a pin For all the muddle that we're ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... known to an engineer on duty; the division car repairer and the roadmaster curled up in the caboose, for they had been routed out at an unseemly hour; the station agent amused himself reading the messages that rattled through to the South and back, telling of a muddle at headquarters. When a wrecking train is held for orders, it is safe to assume that ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan's gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
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