"Knotty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were dead, they had to set me in the jacket, buckled so tight ye could hear my bones crack. The warden ain't got no blame comin' from me, 'cause I smashed his face afore he'd done tellin' me. And I felled the keeper like that!" He raised a knotty fist and thrust it forth. "But it were all 'cause I wanted to be with her so, 'cause I couldn't stand the knowin' that she'd gone a callin' and a ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... was in its slippers and diplomacy in its dressing-gown. Statesmen who had just been outwitting each other at the hazard of European politics laughed good-humoredly as they laid their gold down on the color. Rivals who had lately been quarreling over the knotty points of national frontiers now only vied for a twenty-franc rosebud from the bouquetiere. Knights of the Garter and Knights of the Golden Fleece, who had hated each other to deadliest rancor with the length of the Continent between them, got friends over a mutually ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... own blue-veined knotty hands with the expression of one who is contemplating a phenomenon that is threatening to become a nuisance, and then dropping them quickly out of sight again, she glanced eagerly round the room ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... was, as has been observed, in the Tower for his practices against the present order of things, he being an advocate of extreme democratic principles; and he was there instructed in knotty points of law by Judge Jenkins, to enable him to torment and baffle the party in power. It was Jenkins who said of Lilburne that "If the world were emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John, and John ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... be as bad. "'Sinking, sinking, sinking!' I feel that I am 'sinking'." My medical attendant says that it is irregular gout, with nephritic symptoms. 'Gout', in a young man of twenty-nine!! Swollen knees, and knotty fingers, a loathing stomach, and a dizzy head. Trust me, friend, I am at times an object of moral disgust to my own mind! But that this long illness has impoverished me, I should immediately go to St. Miguels, one of the Azores—the baths and the delicious climate might ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... costume about 1848. He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was concocting a particularly knotty editorial. He told me to take the exchanges and skim through them and write up the "Spirit of the Tennessee Press," condensing into the article all of their contents ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain
... At Novi, the Apennines begin to rise. Their growth of timber is oak, tall, small, and knotty, and chestnut. We soon lose the walnut, ascending, and find it again, about one fourth of the way down, on the south side. About halfway down, we find figs and vines, which continue fine and in great abundance. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of the education of a prince to be a good chess player, and to continually exercise his mind in view of the judgements that he will be called upon to give and the knotty, tortuous, and perplexing matters which will obscure the issues which he must judge. Art, the son of Conn, was sitting at chess with Cromdes, his ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... devoted entirely to Madame de Rumain, and we were occupied with knotty questions till the evening. I left her well pleased. The marriage of her daughter, Mdlle. Cotenfau, with M. de Polignac, which took place five or six years later, was the result of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... King Charles to death?" they read interesting papers about it, and voted the unlucky monarch into or out of his grave with an energy which would have allowed him little rest if it could have taken effect. They marshalled many arguments to decide the knotty and important question, "Does our Country owe most to the Warrior or the Statesman?" and they made up their minds and voted about that too. The sallow young man was rather a distinguished member of the society, and had much to say ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... since things Greek and mythological had become the fashion, Arcadian nymphs and swains, beauteous goddesses and Athenian philosophers were judged the most fitting to stand before the English court. In scene after scene fair ladies talk of love, reverend sages display their readiness in solving knotty problems, lovers sigh into the air long rhapsodies over the charms of their mistresses, sharp-tongued (but rarely coarse) serving-boys lure fools into greater folly or exchange amusing badinage at the expense of their absent masters. The story ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... and it so happened that her way led through the identical lane in which she had met the fairy. Wonderful to relate, there, on the very same stone and in precisely the same attitude, sat the old lady, peering out from under her poke-bonnet, and resting her knotty old hands on ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... morning, however, the steadiness with which he adhered to his story obtained him some degree of credence; the immediate consequence of which was, that the two brothers, after wrangling a long time on the knotty question, which of them should try his fortune first, drew their swords and began fighting. The noise of the fray alarmed the neighbours, who, finding they could not pacify the ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... was upon me, I talked over all sorts of theological subjects with my Bruno, and it seemed to relieve me, even though I never received any enlightenment from him upon the knotty point that would be puzzling me at that particular time. What delighted him most of all was for me to tell him that I loved him very dearly, and that he was even more valuable to me than the famous dogs of St. Bernard were to benighted ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... received them with all military honour; and, lastly, to Smallbones, who received them with all humility. The lieutenant was about to step into the boat when a doubt arose, and he stopped in his advance, perplexed. It was one of no small importance— was Snarleyyow to accompany him or not? That was the knotty question, and it really was a case which required some deliberation. If he left him on board after the conspiracy which had been formed against him, the dog would probably be overboard before he returned; that is, if Smallbones were also left on board; for Mr Vanslyperken knew that it had been ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... and finally got to arriving at that hour in the afternoon when Maxwell could be found revising his morning's work, or lying at his wife's feet on the rocks, and now and then irrelevantly bringing up a knotty point in the character or action for her criticism. For these excursions Godolphin had equipped himself with a gray corduroy sack and knickerbockers, and a stick which he cut from the alder thicket; he wore russet shoes of ample tread, and very thick-ribbed stockings, ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... cannot stir; during which there reigns an awful silence throughout the galley. The Turk who is appointed the executioner, and who thinks the sacrifice acceptable to his prophet Mahomet, most cruelly beats the wretched victim with a rough cudgel, or knotty rope's end, till the skin is flayed off his bones, and he is near the point of expiring; then they apply a most tormenting mixture of vinegar and salt, and consign him to that most intolerable hospital where thousands under their ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... impersonation of the woman's part. He thought if another fellow should look in for a talk, which was his irreverent way of describing to himself the visit of the angel, it would be highly agreeable to have her there listening, and to clear up the knotty points for her when they should be alone. He had little doubt that Eve would have an opinion of her own, very favourable to his way of stating the subject, and would not mind criticising the other fellow, with a keen eye for any little ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... hands. His tongue would cleave to his mouth in a woman's presence, let alone his lying to her. That was the real Tim—the rare Tim. To my eyes he was but a small boy; to my mind he was a mighty man. The first reader that presented such knotty problems to his intellectual side was but part of the impedimenta of his youth, and was no fair measure of his real size. That very day he had fought with me and for me; not because I was in the right, but because ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... mass resembling indurated blacking. The middle lobe was in part permeable to air; and there were several small cysts containing liquid carbon, connected with minute bronchial ramifications. Various indurated knotty bodies were extended throughout its substance. In the upper lobe, the carbon was confined principally to the interlobular cellular tissue, and when pressed in the hand, gave out thick, black, frothy serum. The mucous membrane of bronchial ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... prevented from the discussion of the knotty point at which I had just made a full stop. All my fears and cares are of this world; if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it. I hate a man that wishes to be a deist; but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced inquirer must in some ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... hours in the library, G. W. had remained in the study-room to conquer a particularly knotty problem in addition, while Jack, eager for the tale, which was to be an unusually splendid one, ran on ahead. It happened that when G. W. reached the room he was the last, and the others ...
— A Little Dusky Hero • Harriet T. Comstock
... friend had discovered some very knotty point in the case with Mr. Marlow, and she rejoiced, for her object was not to emulate but to entangle. Sir Philip, however, went on to put her out of all patience by saying, "How the Romans, so sublimely virtuous at one period of their history, could fall into so debased and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... knowledge and faith of this redemption fortifieth the Christian against temptations. We that do believe, know what it is to be assaulted by the devil, and to have knotty objections cast into our minds by him. We also know what advantage the vile sin of unbelief will get upon us, if our knowledge and faith in this redemption be in the least, below the common faith of saints, defective. If we ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Lastly, by mixing the kernel with the liquor lodged within its cavity, and straining it through a cloth, they make a very good milk. The cocoa-nut tree resembles the date palm, except in not being so rugged and knotty. They will continue to thrive for an hundred years, or more, and two of them will maintain a family of ten persons in wine plentifully, if used by turns, each tree being drawn for seven or eight days, and then allowed to rest ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... assumed: they were in desperate and deadly earnest; so he thanked the stars which had brought him into active connection with an important crime, and gave his mind strictly to the business in hand. Several knotty points demanded careful if speedy decision. The chased automobile might prove to be an innocent vehicle, driven by a chauffeur above suspicion, and if its owner appeared in the guise of some highly influential person he, the roundsman, might be called to ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... could avert Case's doom. He was gloating over his gold. The creeping outlaw made no more noise than a snake. Nearer and nearer he came; his sweaty face shining in the sun; his eyes tigerish; his long body slipping silently over the grass. At length he was within five feet of the sailor. His knotty hands were dug into the sward as he gathered energy for ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... unusual surprises will await thee! For the term will pass, and thy creditors will begin to visit thee under pretence of paying homage. Thou wilt be like a deer hunted by dogs, or an Egyptian girl who, while raising water from the river, sees the knotty back of ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... knocked heavily upon this door, hitherto virgin to brutal touch! Redoubled knocks were given with some blunt implement, probably a knotty stick, wielded by a vigorous arm. With the strokes were mingled cries and calls. These words ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... his weather-beaten soft hat back on his head, and sat drumming on the oak table with his knotty fingers. He was a strong man, thickset and healthy, with grizzled hair and an intensely black beard. His wife was fat, and purple about the jaws and under the ears. She stood with her back to the hearth, looking at him, with a wooden spoon in ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... with the gander was very old. Her entire feather outfit was ice-gray, without any dark streaks. The head was larger, the legs coarser, and the feet were more worn than any of the others. The feathers were stiff; the shoulders knotty; the neck thin. All this was due to age. It was only upon the eyes that time had had no effect. They shone brighter—as if they were younger—than any of ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... you take me for?" Gore bellowed in unreasonable anger. He strode forward, the prisoners scattering before him. His large, knotty hand closed on Quirl's arm, and jerked, with the intention of whirling this reluctant prisoner across the room. But Quirl was heavier, and his arm harder, than Gore had supposed. The hand came away, and with a tearing scream, the beautiful ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... course growing wilder and wilder as we proceeded. For a considerable distance there was a causeway, built long ago of logs, to drag lumber upon; it was now decayed and rotten, a red decay, sometimes sunken down in the midst, here and there a knotty trunk stretching across, apparently sound. The sun being now low towards the west, a pleasant gloom and brightness were diffused through the forest, spots of brightness scattered upon the branches, or thrown down in gold upon the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... the tracks on Exmoor. The uphill and downhill of Devonshire scorns compromise or mitigation by detour and zigzag. But here geography is on a scale so far more vast, and the roadway is so far worse metalled than with us in England—knotty masses of talc and nodes of sandstone cropping up at dangerous turnings—that only Dante's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... hill, the peasants were gathering olives before the coming of the frost. There were scores of pickers wearing great gay-colored aprons in which they placed the olives as they gathered them from the trees. Ladders leaned against knotty tree trunks; baskets filled with the green fruit stood on the ground. Ladder and basket suggested the apple orchards of her native land, but the motley colors of kerchief and apron, yellow, magenta, turquoise, and ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... (greenish).—Stem 1 ft. high and 9 in. across, young plants being broader than high; the sides split up into about twenty ridges, which are again divided into knotty tubercles or waves. The spines are remarkable for their size and strength, those on large plants being 4 in. long by 1/2 in. broad at the base, gradually narrowing to a stiff point; there are four central spines of this size, the others, of which there are about a dozen, ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... water. These gallies I suppose were not so large as common fishing-smacks, for they were moved by two, three, and four oars of a side according to their different rates, biremes, triremes, and quadriremes. I know this is a knotty point not yet determined; and that some antiquarians believe the Roman gallies had different tires or decks of oars; but this is a notion very ill supported, and quite contrary to all the figures of them that are preserved on antient coins and medals. Suetonius in ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... behaviour,—not merely that we should sympathize one with another, as a father and mother for their child, but also that we should walk in love and gentleness one with another.[4] There are some men rough and knotty, like a tree full of knots,—so uncivil, that no one will readily have anything to do with them. Hence it happens that they are usually full of suspicion, and become soon angry; with whom none of their own choice are familiar. But there are gentle ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... the Agricultural Society of Ireland published their objections to the system of carrying out reproductive works laid down in the Chief Secretary's letter; and it was in commenting on their views that he wrote the passage quoted above by the Prime Minister. His second letter dealt with the knotty question of land tenure. In it he urges strongly and well a principle which has become a part of the Land Act of 1870, namely, the tenant's right to compensation. He says: "I begin with the subject of tenure: uniform experience of human nature ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... lay between Madame Le Maitre's house and the house allotted to Caius led, winding down a hill, through a stunted fir-wood. The small firs held out gnarled and knotty branches towards the road; their needles were a dark ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... laughed a hearty laugh, for the first time in many months. The knotty problem which had caused her many sleepless nights had at last found ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... Brixton was revolving this knotty question in his mind, and Bully Gashford was revolving questions quite as knotty, and much more complex, and Fred Westly was discussing with Flinders the best plan to be pursued in the event of Tom refusing to fly, there was a party of men assembled ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... courts, which kept steadily increasing for over twenty years, till declining health and partial deafness compelled him to withdraw from the courts of justice, and confine himself to office business. During this period, his opinion on abstruse and knotty points of law was often solicited by eminent counsel living outside of Massachusetts, and he sent written opinions to attorneys in nine different states. As Referee and Master in Chancery, he was called upon to arbitrate in a great number of difficult and complicated cases, involving ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... know; try to go to sleep, and you will feel better in the morning," was all the re- ply he could make to her knotty queries. It was a long time before she fell asleep; and a number of days before James felt in a mood to visit and entertain ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... the wild things that gambolled and bellowed on the grazing-grounds by the Waingunga. They had no time to patch and plaster the rear walls of the empty byres that backed on to the Jungle; the wild pig trampled them down, and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbows over the new-won ground, and the coarse grass bristled behind the vines like the lances of a goblin army following a retreat. The unmarried men ran away first, and carried the news far and near that the village was doomed. Who could fight, they ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... where a porcelain figure, the grotesque chef d'oeuvre of some great Chinese artist, leered at him with its everlasting grin. The young man smiled. "Perhaps that is the likeness of a mandarin—bulbous nose, hanging cheeks, moustaches drooping like plumes, a peaked head, knotty hands—a regular deformity. Reflecting on the ugliness of that idiotic race, there is much to be urged by way of excuse ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... glance showed him a change in the knotty tree-trunk; the seeming bulge was now the ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... or observe the various tints the autumn gave to them—At other times, the singing of a robin, or the noise of a water-mill, engaged my attention—partial attention—, for I was, at the same time perhaps discussing some knotty point, or straying from this tiny world to new systems. After these excursions, I returned to the family meals, told the children stories (they think me vastly agreeable), and my sister was amused.—Well, will you allow ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... Richard Avenel left his nephew sadly perplexed as to the knotty question from which their talk on the future had diverged—viz., should he write to the Parson; and assure the fears of his mother? How do so without Richard's consent, when Richard had on a former occasion so imperiously declared ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... Betty Cruise occurred the second day after her baby was born. In a way, this lamentable occurrence solved a knotty problem and pacified two warring sexes, so to speak. For, be it known, the women of the Doraine took a most determined stand against the manner in which the men, viva voce, had arrogated unto themselves the right to name the baby. Not that any one of ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn'orth appointed by Magna Charta. Whether from too much east wind or no—it was an easterly corner—the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman's rattle. When he laughed, certain jerks occurred in it, and the rattle sprung. Sooth ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... stump of a man, lean and knotty, all whose joints formed protuberances, proceeded at an easy pace down the ravine, searching at every opening through which a passage could be effected with the cautiousness of a ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... down dem biscuit, E't 'em faster dan a shoat. Dey wus a liddle tough an' knotty, But I ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... its size, it is loose and moveable, without pain or discolouration of the skin. It may continue in this state for many months, or even years; it then enlarges, the surface of the tumour becomes more or less knotty or uneven; it becomes hot and painful, and the pain is of a peculiar darting, piercing nature, or what the faculty technically call lancinating; and the patient's health, which had hitherto continued tolerably ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... angular, knotty protuberances denote perseverance and much vigorous, firm, harsh, oppressive, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... clutch at his heart which always told him, in the plainest manner possible, when he had hit upon the knotty point of a mystery. That grip of truth, that feeling of certainty never ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... messages of a great city. Business propositions, political deals, scientific talks, and words of comfort to the troubled, cross and recross each other over the black switchboard. The wonder is that each message reaches the ear it was meant for, and that all complications, no matter how knotty, are immediately unravelled. ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... than ten minutes Yetta wrinkled her forehead over this knotty ethical point; then she delivered ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... her supper, and helping what they could. There was a very small squirrel on her shoulder, sitting up, as those creatures do, and turning a rocky fragment of prehistoric chestnut-cake over and over in its knotty hands, and hunting for the less indurated places, and giving its elevated bushy tail a flirt and its pointed ears a toss when it found one—signifying thankfulness and surprise—and then it filed that place off with those two slender front teeth which ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... earthquake-wave, upon the shore. This vortex, moving often a hundred miles an hour, takes hold of the Bombax ceiba like an enormous proboscis, pulls it from the thin soil of the tropics despite the great lateral clutch of its knotty roots, and swallows it up. Houses, cultivated fields, men and animals, are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... balconies and cat-haunted grass-patches behind twisted railings. These houses too had once been private, but now a cheap lunchroom filled the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster of refuse-barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its curtainless windows, that the ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... grown to be twenty feet high, and his beauty increased in proportion. His hair he had never cut. Apollonius was allowed to ask him five questions, and accordingly asked for information on five of the most knotty points in the history of the Trojan War—whether Helen was really in Troy, why Homer never mentions Palamedes, etc. Achilles answered him fully and correctly in each instance. Then suddenly the cock crew, and, like Hamlet's father, he vanished from ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... not forget the prisoner in the grim military prison, nor the woman so faithful to the prisoner. Sergeant McGillicuddy spent a small fortune in such comforts as Lawrence was allowed to receive at Christmas time, and his knotty, weather-beaten face grew positively cheerful over the way ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... Master discuss these knotty points of honor and expediency together, do you, as a recreation from the Greek syntax? I should like to ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... knotty and perplexed part of my plan was to find a contrivance to make the gardener's son an actor in the plot. The thing is difficult, but not impossible. I have various stratagems and schemes, in the choice of which I must be guided by circumstances. That which pleases me most is ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... in my hands do I hold two measures—one of five pints, and the other of three pints. Pray show how it is possible for me to put a true pint into each of the measures." Of course, no other vessel or article is to be used, and no marking of the measures is allowed. It is a knotty little problem and a fascinating one. A good many persons to-day will find it by no means an easy task. Yet it can ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... a notable exception. He gave me one technical principle, expressed in a few simple exercises, which I have never heard of from any one else. The use of this principle has helped me amazingly to conquer many knotty passages. I have never given these exercises to any one; I am willing however, to jot ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... about which there clung the atmosphere of crime, as men said. When I saw him first, I was riding behind my brother, and he stopped us and tried to induce Ward to buy his land. He was mounted on a red roan horse, and looked like an old knotty spider. ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... the greater number of works that are offered to them. It is not supposed that in the majority of cases, the publisher himself decides the question upon the strength of his own judgment. He has his minister, or ministers of state, to decide these knotty questions for him. A great deal has been written at different times, about the baneful influence of this middleman, or "reader"—but we can see no more justice in the complaint than if it were raised against the system which places a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... not ashamed to tell us in loud and angry tones that it is fraud, downright fraud, in a congregation which has departed from its original doctrines to retain its original endowments. I believe, Sir, that, if you refuse to pass this bill, the Courts of Law will soon have to decide some knotty questions which, as yet, the Methodists ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... your Majesty— (I mean your Majesty that is to be.) Your future wife's ill-temper there's no bearing; Her tantrums and hysterics are quite wearing. A hundred times I was called up last night To try and set this knotty question right. I'd scarcely time my slippers to resume, Much less to dress in proper court costume. I just popped on my crimson satin breeches,— I fear I caught a cold; (sneezes) must put on leeches, A ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... sharp pangs of smarting pain My dear Redeemer bore, When knotty whips and ragged thorns His sacred ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... and evil, and vice and virtue themselves, might become confounded in the human mind by a like daring; and humanity sit down under every buffet of misfortune, without attempting to resist it: which, fortunately, is impossible. Plato cut this knotty point better, by regarding evil as a thing senseless and unmalignant (indeed no philosopher regards anything as malignant, or malignant for malignity's sake); out of which, or notwithstanding it, good is worked, and to be worked, perhaps, ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... them with grim determination as she might have a knotty problem in mathematics. She would not give heed to the small voice within her that counseled care. Miss Baxter never gave heed to anything but her own ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... of weakness against strength. This idea is uppermost in all the works of Plato, notably in the "Gorgias," where he maintains, with more subtlety than logic, the cause of the laws against that of violence,—that is, legislative absolutism against aristocratic and military absolutism. In this knotty dispute, in which the weight of evidence is equal on both sides, Plato simply expresses the sentiment of entire antiquity. Long before him, Moses, in making a distribution of lands, declaring patrimony inalienable, and ordering a general and uncompensated cancellation of all ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... way, than some young scamp would rise and solemnly move the previous question, which never failed to bring down a storm of hoots at the complete mystification of the perplexed chairman, who never to his last day was able to solve this knotty point ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... and Tyrol Alps they pasture in flocks of forty or fifty together; great numbers of them are killed by the people of Kerek and Tafyle, who hold their flesh in high estimation. They sell the large knotty horns to the Hebron merchants, who carry them to Jerusalem, where they are worked into handles for knives and daggers. I saw a pair of these horns at Kerek three feet and a half in length. ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... of the second mate brightened, for he prided himself not a little on his vast and varied stores of knowledge, and nothing pleased him so much as to be questioned, particularly on knotty subjects. ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... settler's horny and knotty hands trembled too much, and so did his wife's withered ones; so ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... forest of paper-trees spread knotty, alien branches, trying to catch the rays of the winter-waning sun. Whenever Wang thought of his grandfather's remarks about his ancestors, he always wondered, as a corollary, what those same ancestors would have ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... they?" said Stack. Journeyman brightened up, and he proceeded to lay before Stack's intelligence what he termed a "knotty point in ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... word. They beat him again, till their arms were tired, and staggered to bed. In the morning, however, the steadiness with which he adhered to his story obtained him some degree of credence; the immediate consequence of which was that the two brothers, after wrangling a long time on the knotty question, Which of them should try his fortune first, drew their swords and began fighting. The noise of the fray alarmed the neighbors, who, finding they could not pacify the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... supposed to be extinguished, and everybody in bed—Slocum and I would hang a blanket over the one window of our room and continue our studies—he guiding me around scores of stumbling-blocks in Algebra and elucidating many knotty points in other branches of the course with which I was unfamiliar. On account of this association I went up before the Board in January with less uneasiness than otherwise would have been the case, and passed the examination fairly well. When it was over, a self-confidence ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... this resolve into execution; but I was at a great loss about my tools. I had three large axes, and abundance of hatchets (for we carried the hatchets for traffic with the Indians); but with much chopping and cutting knotty hard wood, they were all full of notches, and dull; and though I had a grindstone, I could not turn it and grind my tools too. This cost me as much thought as a statesman would have bestowed upon a grand point of politics, or a judge upon the life and death of a man. At length I contrived ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... instinct dominates them. They are worthy descendants of progenitors who had to fight and kill to live. This incident furnished me much food for reflection. I foresaw that before this trip was ended I must face some knotty problems. I hated to shoot a squirrel even when I was hungry. Probably that was because I was not hungry enough. A starving man suffers no compunctions at the spilling of blood. On the contrary he revels in it ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... think more about him than they do about themselves, he is got into a track where he will find nothing but briars and thorns, vexation and disappointment. I can speak a little to this point. For many years of my life I did nothing but think. I had nothing else to do but solve some knotty point, or dip in some abstruse author, or look at the sky, or wander by the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... bein' timid," said the porter, rubbing the end of his nose, which was copper-coloured and knotty, "I don't think I ever knowed that there feelin', but it does take a feller aback to be told all of a suddent, after he's reg'larly laid up in port, to get ready to trip anchor in twelve hours and bear away over the North Sea—not that I cares ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... barns—I stipulate barns." Billy made a splendid, comprehensive gesture that took in all the points of the compass impartially. "One of us must take a few days off and go and hunt up a nice, inexpensive little Eldorado for us. There!—there, my friends, you have the solution of your knotty little problem in a nutshell. I gladly give ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... this apart. At another time we may resume. We were very pleased, we others. (He coughs and, bending his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand) You shall find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L.B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That is his appropriate ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... native German. Mr. Spiegelberg informed me that I had been elected an honorary member of the English and French Club, which flattered my vanity enormously at the time. In the light of more mature experience I quite understand that the presence of a youth to whom knotty points in both languages could be submitted would be a considerable asset to the Club, but I then attributed my election solely to my engaging personality. These Club evenings amused me enormously, though incidentally ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... hell and all the world must now be free of all the devils who have come together here to Eisleben, for my sake it seems. So hard and knotty is this business. There are fifty Jews here too' [marginally 'in one house'], 'as I wrote to you before. It is now said that at Rissdorff, hard by Eisleben, where I fell ill before my arrival, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... they sent to propose it to the Commandant, who rejected it with a menace to chastise them if they did not obey in a very short time, which he prefixed. {75} The Sun reported this answer to his council, who debated the question, which was knotty. But the policy of the old men was, that they should propose to the Commandant, to be allowed to stay in their village till harvest, and till they had time to dry their corn, and shake out the grain; on condition each hut of the village should pay him ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... up of nerve fibers and nerve cells is infrequent, if it ever occurs, in cattle. False neuromas, or neurofibromas, are knotty, spreading tumors of the size of a large potato, which are developed within the nerve sheaths and composed of nerve fibers and connective tissue bands interlaced. The commingling of these varied fibers is often so intricate that ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... mind—and it is to be presumed that by that standard Mark Twain's works will ultimately be judged—there is no more significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral responsibility for compassing Jim's emancipation. Nothing else is needed to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with the workings of human conscience in the unsophisticated mind and his conviction that, with the "lights that he had," Huck ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... was a club, for I, Mopo, saw it in after days. It was great and knotty, black as iron that had been smoked in the fire, and shod with metal that was ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... glances about him, appearing to be seeking someone among the 'longshoremen. His long, thick, brown moustache trembled like a cat's, and his hands, behind his back, rubbed each other, pressing closely together their twisted and knotty fingers. Even here, among hundreds of his own kind, he attracted attention by his resemblance to a sparrow-hawk of the steppes, by his rapacious leanness, his easy stride, outwardly calm but alert and watchful as the flight of the bird ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... trifling distance from Finsbury Square; and to be at Mr. Witherington's dinner-table at 6 P.M., with the necessity of appearing at parade every morning at 9 A.M., was a dilemma not to be got out of. Several letters were interchanged upon this knotty subject; and at last it was agreed that Mr. Templemore should sell out, and come up to Mr. Witherington with his pretty wife. He did so, and found that it was much more comfortable to turn out at nine o'clock in the morning to a good breakfast than to a martial parade. But Mr. Templemore ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... pluck. I find that lies at the bottom of all true dandyism. A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys make fun of him, looks very silly. But if he turns red in the face and knotty in the fists, and makes an example of the biggest of his assailants, throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-buttoned jacket, if necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened Astyanax. You remember ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... come at any conclusion on this knotty subject the door opened and Martin Rattler entered the room, followed ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if he were thinking out some knotty problem. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... "We are discussing a knotty question, Miss Ringgan," said Mr. Carleton, with a smile, as he brought a bergre for her; "I should like to have ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... upon it than upon others, because it is his last command, and so would be taken as most pungent and weighty. When your hearts rise up to question and dispute this matter, I pray you cut all these knotty objections with the sword of his commandment. You use to go about to loose them by particular answers and untie them at leisure with art and skill, but truly it would be a readier and wiser course to cut them in pieces at one stroke, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... alluding to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted existence! Why, the truths a man carries about with him are his tools; and do you think a carpenter is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty board with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail? I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... to lecture! [145] —if I may judge by your pace, and that volume in your hand. You were thinking hard as you came along, moving your lips and waving your arms. Some fine speech you were pondering, some knotty question, some viewy doctrine—not to be idle for a moment, to be making progress in philosophy, even on your way to the schools. To-day, however, you need go no further. We read a notice at the schools that there would be no ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... tired of admiration. Often have I halted on my journey to ride around and admire the prodigious height and girth of these trees. Their beautiful proportions render them the more striking; there are no gnarled and knotty stems, such as we are accustomed to admire in the ancient oaks and beeches of England, but every trunk rises like a mast from the earth, perfectly free from branches for ninety or a hundred feet, straight as an arrow, each tree forming a dark pillar to support its ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... flushed; his nose—if a sketch of his features be de rigueur for a person of his pretensions—was artistically beautiful enough to have been worth doing in marble by any sculptor not over-busy, and was hence devoid of those knotty irregularities which often mean power; while the double-cyma or classical curve of his mouth was not without a looseness in its close. Nevertheless, either from his readily appreciative mien, or his reflective manner, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... correct the exorbitancies of a rabid Protestantism, and show the world, by direct miracle, the necessity of submitting to the decision of their Church and the infallibility of the supreme Pontiff; who, as they truly alleged, could decide all knotty points quite as well without the Word of God as with it. On being reminded that the writings of the Fathers, on which they laid so much stress as the vouchers of their traditions, were mutilated by the same stroke which had demolished the Bible (all their quotations from the sacred volume being ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... town with it. He knew that I knew why, and so said no more than that it was to be private. It was pitiful to see that man, so fierce and bold as they say he once was, trembling as if doing something by stealth, and the great hard knotty hands so crumpled and shaky, that he had to leave all to me. And that they should fancy I could go and hurt him!' said Leonard, stretching his broad chest ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are found upon the crests of the mountains, and many of the mountain-ridges, with their numerous spikes and gigantic monoliths, some of which are tilted perilously from the perpendicular, give one a feeling of awe. Some of the monoliths appear like broken, knotty tree-trunks. Others stand straight and suggest the Egyptian obelisks. They hold rude natural hieroglyphics in relief. One mountain, which is known as Turret-Top, is crowned with what from a distance seems to be ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... well lighted, and the guest has not to third his way through knotty sentences, past perilous punctuation-points, to reach the table, nor to grope in the dark for the dainties when he has found it. We imagine that it is this charm of perfect clearness and accessibility which attracts popular liking to Mr. Aldrich's poetry; afterwards, its other qualities easily ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... these knotty reflections were interrupted for a space. In this spreading mart Cally chanced to fall in with ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... men on the farm, and several well-grown boys, yet the women could rarely prevail on any of them to split a single stick of wood. The wood for the house caused great trouble,—it was difficult to get it at all. Then when it did come, it was crooked and knotty, much of it such as a woman could not split. Yet whenever a stick or two was wanted, the females of the family must run out into the shed to chop and split it. They never could get an armful ahead, such was ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... among the cracker-boxes and flour-barrels, with a background of shelves laden with bright-coloured calicoes, and a line of tin pails hanging overhead, and stated his view of the case with vigour. He even pulled off his coat and rolled up his shirt-sleeve to show the knotty arguments with which he proposed ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... us Indra, armed with a wooden club, seizing a stone with which to pierce Vritra, the genius of evil.[83] Does not this call up a picture of the earliest days of man upon the earth? His first weapon was doubtless a knotty branch torn from a tree as be hurried past, or a stone picked up from amongst those lying at his feet. These were, however, but feeble means with which to contend with formidable feline and pachydermatous enemies. Man bad not their great physical ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... make one a perfect and accomplished gentleman; others, that all the useful arts were taught abroad, and no one who wished to improve the world in which he lived would stay at home another year. Old grandfather Rubra, standing tall and grand, and stretching his knotty arms, as if to give force to his words, said, "Of all arts, the art of building is the noblest, and that can only be learned by those who take the grand tour; therefore, all my boys have been sent long ago, and already many of my ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... productive classes; the French by carreaux, squares or lozenges—importing, perhaps, unity of interest, equality of condition, regularity of manners, and the indispensable duty of this class of men to deal with one another 'on the square.' The Spaniards made bastos, or knotty clubs, the emblem of the 'bold peasantry,' taken probably from the custom that the plebeians were permitted to challenge or fight each other with sticks and quarter-staves only, but not with the sword, or any arms carried by a gentleman; while the ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... closet, a clothes-press, a shelf in the house. Not a room was papered: all were covered with a coarse whitewash, smoked, fly-specked and momently falling in great scales. The floors were rough, knotty and warped; the wash-boards were rat-gnawed in every direction; all the woodwork was unpainted and gray ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... trouble begins to mix with it. We are to reserve so much employment only as is necessary to keep us in breath and to defend us from the inconveniences that the other extreme of a dull and stupid laziness brings along with it. There are sterile knotty sciences, chiefly hammered out for the crowd; let such be left to them who are engaged in the world's service. I for my part care for no other books, but either such as are pleasant and easy, to amuse me, or those that ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... simulated a great natural ravine in all its wild grandeur: here are caverns, abrupt rocks, a torrent, a cascade, islands. The trees, dwarfed by a Japanese process of which we have not the secret, have tiny little leaves on their decrepit and knotty branches. A pervading hue of the mossy green of antiquity harmonizes all this medley, which is undoubtedly ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... on one side of him and the waiting-maid on the other; but she was so dazzled that she did not recognize the Princess in her glittering garments. Now when they had eaten and drunk, and were merry, the old King asked the waiting-maid to solve a knotty point for him. "What," said he, "should be done to a certain person who has deceived everyone?" and he proceeded to relate the whole story, ending up with, "Now what sentence should be passed?" Then the false bride answered: ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... a hearty cheer. On one occasion, an old friend of his, who had once belonged to the bar, Mr. K——, a member of a most respectable family, called on O'Connell during the Assizes, to pay him a friendly visit. He found O'Connell engaged with a shrewd-looking farmer, who was consulting him on a knotty case. Heartily glad to see his old friend, O'Connell sprang forward, saying, "My dear K——, I'm delighted to see you." The farmer, seeing the visitor come in, cunningly took the opportunity of sneaking away. He had got what he wanted—the opinion; but O'Connell had not got ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... may smile at the conceit of a fat Hamlet, but I am satisfied that my theory is amply sustained by the text, as well as by the true solution of the alleged knotty points of Shakspeare's mental character, over which the ponderous but inflated brain of Dr. Johnson stultified itself. He accuses the Avon bard of introducing spirits, ghosts, myths, and fairies; of being guilty of exaggerations, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and very happy herself, she speedily forgot all about the knotty problem of the unequal distribution of this world's goods, whether they be potatoes or fudge parties. Occasionally she remembered again, and gave Helen a helping hand, as she had done several times already. But college is much like the bigger world outside. The fittest survive on ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... this could be good law, but he said he could not surely tell, but said the Lawman must settle this knotty point. ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... inches, or ten and a half; but my first impression, or feel of the man, was not of this, but of his strength. And yet, while he was of massive build, with broad shoulders and deep chest, I could not characterize his strength as massive. It was what might be termed a sinewy, knotty strength, of the kind we ascribe to lean and wiry men, but which, in him, because of his heavy build, partook more of the enlarged gorilla order. Not that in appearance he seemed in the least gorilla-like. What I am striving to express is this ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... with no common powers of general scholarship, he can easily master a knotty passage in Eschylus or Aristotle; and quote Juvenal and Horace as readily as the junior lads at Eton quote their 'As in praesenti:' moreover, he can enter, with equal ardour, into a minute discussion about the romance literature of the middle ages, and the dry though ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the point of never touching a tool. When tired of doing nothing, he sometimes let himself be prevailed upon to take a job. Then his comrade would look him up and chaff him unmercifully when he found him hanging to his knotty cord like a smoked ham, and he would call to him to come down and have a glass of wine. And that settled it. The zinc-worker would send the job to blazes and commence a booze which lasted days and weeks. Oh, it was a famous booze—a general review ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... was familiarly known in the neighborhood, Whisky Jo.—was a very important personage in those parts. He was apparently about forty years of age, a long, shock-headed fellow, with a corded face, a gnarled arm and a knotty hand like a bunch of prison-keys. He was a hairy man, with a stoop in his walk, like that of one who is about to spring upon something ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... the errors so common with writers for popular effect, that of slurring over the difficulties of the subject through the desire of making it intelligible and attractive to unlearned readers. He never tampers with the truth of science, nor attempts to dodge the solution of a knotty problem behind a cloud of plausible illustrations. The numerous illustrations which accompany every chapter are of unquestionable value in the comprehension of the text, and come next to actual experiment as an aid to the reader. ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... cawing tenants were now on the wing: they flew over the lawn and grounds to alight in a great meadow, from which these were separated by a sunk fence, and where an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty, and broad as oaks, at once explained the etymology of the mansion's designation. Farther off were hills: not so lofty as those round Lowood, nor so craggy, nor so like barriers of separation from the living world; but yet quiet and lonely hills enough, and seeming to embrace Thornfield ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... of the head, whilst the bark of the tree was regarded as a sovereign remedy for the ringworm. [18] Its leaves, too, when bruised and moistened with vinegar were used for ear-ache. For scrofulous glands, the knotty tubers attached to the kernel-wort (Scrophularia nodosa) have been considered efficacious. The pith of the elder, when pressed with the fingers, "doth pit and receive the impress of them thereon, as the legs and feet of dropsical persons do," Therefore the juice of this tree was reckoned ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... old stocks and stubs of trees, Whereon nor fruit nor leaf was ever seen, Did hang upon ragged knotty knees, On which ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... indeed, it is almost impossible for the copying of nature to be carried farther than in the fibres of the marble branches, and the careful finishing of the tendrils: note especially the peculiar expression of the knotty joints of the vine in the light branch which rises highest. Yet only half the finish of the work can be seen in the Plate: for, in several cases, the sculptor has shown the under sides of the leaves ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... have enjoyed Job's disputatious friends. There were several knotty points in doctrine that he had gone over while lying here, and he longed to argue them with someone. The days were very long and tedious to him, for he had never been ill a whole week ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... at the first. But, in this particular, there was nothing peculiar in their situation. It differed in no respect from that which fell to the lot of all the early colonists in America. The toil of felling trees, over whose heavy boughs and knotty arms the winters of centuries had passed; the constant danger from noxious reptiles and beasts of prey, which, coiled in the bush or crouching in the brake, lurked day and night, in waiting for the incautious ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... ink, which afterwards dries and produces a thicker layer of black sediment than those elsewhere. The variations of pressure upon the pen can be easily noticed by the alternate widening and narrowing of the band between these two furrows. The tracing appears knotty and uneven when made by an untrained hand, while it appears uniformly thin, and generally tremulous or in zigzags when made by a ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... great perturbation of mind and disorder of dress. He had no flower in his button-hole; his yellow kid gloves were certainly two days old. He had not above three of the ten chains he usually sports, and his great coarse knotty-knuckled old hands were deprived of some dozen of the rubies, emeralds, and other cameos with which, since his elevation to fortune, the poor fellow has thought fit ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... resolve to subdue and bring under guidance the disturbed realm of her emotions. She will determine to look on life steadily, as it is; to begin to learn its severe truths seriously, and to study its knotty problems closely, conscientiously. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... castles in the air—in imagination. But now and then she wanted another opinion, there were knotty points to decide. As 'all roads,' according to the old proverb, 'lead to Rome,' so all Celestina's meditations ended in the old cry, ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... the ring. Ospakar was great beyond the bigness of men and his arms were clothed with black hair like the limbs of a goat. Beneath the shoulder joint they were almost as thick as a girl's thigh. His legs also were mighty, and the muscles stood out upon him in knotty lumps. He seemed a very giant, and fierce as a Baresark, but still somewhat round about the ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... young stranger appeared much better disposed to partake of the good cheer, with which he had been so providentially provided, than to take up the cudgels of argument on this, or on any other of the knotty points which are so apt to furnish the lovers of science with the materials of a ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... edge of his bed watched him narrowly, not knowing what to make of his preoccupation and agitated by a vague fear lest he might refuse to fulfil his promise. At length Monte-Cristo appeared to have solved the knotty problem that had perplexed him and to have arrived at a decision. He came in front of the Italian, halted and, gazing ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... silver firs split into long peeled rails radiating like spokes of a wheel from a hole in the ground where the tree stood. But the Sequoia, instead of being split and shivered, usually has forty to fifty feet of its brash knotty top smashed off in short chunks, about the size of cord-wood, the rosy-red ruins covering the ground in a circle one hundred feet ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... was that Pool; and near it, then, Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen. It was not overgrown with boisterous sedge, Nor grew there rudely, then, along the edge A bending willow, nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leafed flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush: But here, well ordered, was a grove with bowers; There, grassy plots, set round about with flowers. Here, you might, through the water, see the land Appear, strewed o'er with white or yellow sand. Yon, deeper was it; and the wind, by whiffs, Would make it ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... charged upon the alcaldes-in-ordinary. A few days after that a denunciation was made; but, when the alcalde tried to enforce the penalty, the Sangleys appealed to the royal Audiencia. The matter seemed a knotty one to me, because the edict was notoriously a government measure, and it was not advisable for its proper execution that the Sangleys be allowed such delays. I considered it best to advise the auditors of this, quoting to them the royal decrees, which ruled that they should ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... death; and he leaps upon the back of the tall Bianor, not used to bear[36] any other than himself; and he fixes his knees in his ribs, and holding his long hair, seized with his left hand, shatters his face, and his threatening features, and his very hard temples, with the knotty oak. With his oak, {too}, he levels Nedymnus, and Lycotas the darter, and Hippasus having his breast covered with his flowing beard, and Ripheus, who towered above the topmost woods, and Tereus, who ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... slight active figure arrayed in the blue kirtle and scarlet bodice, on which the warm rays of the late sun fell with so much amorous tenderness. Poor little Lilla! A penknife would have made as much impression as her valorous blows produced on the inflexible, gnarled, knotty old stump she essayed to split in twain. Flushed and breathless with her efforts, she looked prettier than ever, and at last, baffled, she resigned her ax to Vincenzo, laughing gayly at her incapacity for wood-cutting, and daintily shaking ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... was at an end, and the doctor rose, when Mrs Braydon darted an imploring look at her husband, the two girls one of commiseration at their brother, whose forehead did not wrinkle, but became crumpled and pitted, just as it used to at the Friary when he had to deal with a knotty sum or equation. ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... can make a fresh rhyme, and has a knotty word to bring in, so will probably need a ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... said, and taking him by either ear, she kissed him between the eyes. "Now, I think I'll go to bed. I've a mighty knotty problem on hand and I've got to work it out ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... rusticity of 'Wuthering heights,' I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character. ...
— Charlotte Bronte's Notes on the pseudonyms used • Charlotte Bronte |
