"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as not to offend the eye and yet to accomplish the results. He will cease from trying to put the new ideas of the twentieth century into the old houses of the eighteenth or fifteenth even, and that beauty, which is fitness, will come forth from the tangle of ugliness everywhere. If, as the economist tells us, "cost measures lack of adjustment," then the perfectly adjusted house will not be costly in reality, it will be adapted to the production and protection of effective ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... green, the dazzling sweet lights on the meadows, playing upon the meadow-sweet and elder bushes; at last we came to the lovely glades of Carriglass. It seemed to me that we had reached an enchanted forest amid this green sweet tangle of ivy, of flowering summer trees, ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... Aurelian Gate. There, in a little wood of venerable trees, piously allowed their own way, age after age—ilex and cypress remaining where they fell at last, one over the other, and all caught, in that early May-time, under a riotous tangle of wild clematis—was to be found a magnificent sanctuary, in which the members of the Arval College assembled themselves on certain days. The axe never touched those trees—Nay! it was forbidden to introduce any iron thing whatsoever within the precincts; not only because the deities ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... Celestial. For it rained like Westmorland for five endless days, while I kicked my heels in an inn and turned a canto of Aristo into halting English couplets. By-and-by it cleared, and I headed westward towards Bozen, among the tangle of rocks where the Dwarf King had once his rose-garden. The first night I had no inn but slept in the vile cabin of a forester, who spoke a tongue half Latin, half Dutch, which I failed to master. The next day was a blaze of heat, the mountain-paths lay thick with ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... boy slipped into a tangle of brush that marked the upper end of his patch of timber. The bare summit of the ridge stretched away in the half-light to merge in a mysterious blur with the indistinct valley of the Ten Bow. The wind was blowing ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... spread a fair garden, a tangle of flowers and fruit-trees, watered by a score of streams descending from the slopes of Mount Orontes, and made musical by innumerable birds. But all colour was lost in the soft and odorous darkness of the late September night, and all sounds were hushed in the deep charm of its silence, ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... saw the man, for whose reappearance I was so earnestly waiting, step casually out on to the pavement. He attempted to cross the street and was quickly lost to sight in a tangle of vehicles. A second later I could have sworn that I saw him back again at the entrance ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a roller. As Bauer felt the water closing over him he had a momentary glimpse of two figures on the south bank of the river running and gesticulating, one a man, the other a woman. He felt himself struggling in a confused tangle of wagon wheels, floundering horses, yelling driver, boxes and muddy water. Then something struck him on the head. He struggled to help himself, throwing his arms out blindly, was aware that someone had hold of his hair and was striking ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... largish town, historical and ancient, as its narrow and crooked streets sufficiently attest. At that period of the year it was exceedingly malodorous, and in the gutters tangle-headed children fished for spoil, or with noise and clangour dragged the damaged dead cat and the too-long-drowned puppy from the green ooze of one midden ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... to do harm in the world. By this time the ship was about to cast off, and the recruits, ranged in line along the bulwarks of the lower deck, were looking in silence towards Marseilles, which, with its tangle of tall houses, its forest of masts, its long, ugly factories and workshops, now represented to them the whole of France. The bronchial hoot of the siren rose up menacingly. Suddenly two Arabs, in dirty white burnouses ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... and unobstructed ahead, she stepped down on the accelerator and watched the needle climb up and past the legal 65-mile limit. The sound of her tires on the smooth concrete was soothing and the rush of wind outside gave the morning an illusion of coolness. She edged away from the tangle of cars that had pulled onto the freeway with her and momentarily was alone on the road, with her rear-view mirror blank, the oncoming lanes bare, and a small rise shutting off ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant
... trolley tracks uprooted, twisted fantastically. I saw wide wounds in the street. Water flooded out of one. A deadly odor of gas from a broken main swept out of the other. Telegraph poles were rocked like matches. A wild tangle of wires was in the street. Some of the wires wriggled and ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the cart as usual, I see;" she said, joining good-humoredly in the laugh the others found it impossible to suppress. "It's an old trick of my age, that increases with my advancing youth, till I sometimes wonder what I'm coming to; the words will tangle themselves up in the most troublesome fashion; but if you know what I mean, I suppose ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... a man of remarkable appearance. A fierce bull-dog face was framed in a tangle of hair and beard, and two bold, dark eyes gleamed behind the cover of thick, tufted, overhung eyebrows. He saluted and stood sailor-fashion, turning his cap ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the joy of reunion with her father; for both were adepts in the fine art of loving, the touchstone of every human relation. And in talk with him she could straighten out her tangle of impressions, her secret ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... leave de hall'. One old nigger, Andy Stewart, a ring leader shouted: 'To hell wid Parliment law, I's got to git out of here.' Still de doorkeeper stood firm and faithful, as de boy on de burnin' deck, as Marster Glenn lak to tell it. One bright mulatto nigger, Jim Mobley, got out de tangle by movin' to take a recess for ten minutes, but befo' de motion could be carried out de croton-oil had done its work. Half de convention have to put on clean clothes and de court house steps have to be cleaned befo' they could walk up them again. You ask any old citizen 'bout it. Him will 'member ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... down. Round their great trunks as they lay on the ground, young trees and a mass of elder-bushes and other brushwood had sprung up, making a dense thicket. The two logs lay side by side, and in between them, with the tangle of bushes all round and the branches of the other trees overhead, there was a ...
— Bear Brownie - The Life of a Bear • H. P. Robinson
... on their native heath. Looking back I saw that only three were following direct, and I guessed that the others had fetched a circuit to cut me off. My lack of local knowledge might very well be my undoing, and I resolved to get out of this tangle of glens to the pocket of moor I had seen from the tops. I must so increase my distance as to get clear away from them, and I believed I could do this if I could find the right ground for it. If there had been cover I would have tried a ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... he ached all over for lack of sleep. A sudden trampling brought him to his feet. He turned the corner of the saloon just in time to see the buckskin lunge back. The reins snapped like a thread. The pony shook its head and trotted away, circling. Pete followed, hoping that the tangle of ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... tried to tell, but we soon made a tangle of it, the only thing coherent being the fact that the fellow was a crook and had left his trunk behind. This was so heavy that Chips ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... a fine view from the pass over the trackless mountain tangle to the north, some of the peaks towering almost eighteen thousand feet into the sky, but again the clouds and mist veiled everything from sight. All the rest of the day we were making our way down the steep east side, picking our steps ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... the very mouths of the spitting guns the last of the steers dropped, and the few that remained alive turned tail and fled wildly back the way they had come. In front of the trenches was a horrible tangle of trampled, wounded creatures, rearing as best they could and stabbing one another with their ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... these complaints they were nothing to those which the arbiter had to face. He got himself into a sorry tangle. No one was content. Arbitration pleased neither one side nor the other. According to them the judge could never succeed in holding the balance level. No wonder that at last the ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... of the tangle was a big black touring-car. Its one occupant was a girl—and such a girl! Her fawn-colored cloak was thrown open; her face was unveiled. Orme was thrilled when he caught the glory of her face—the clear skin, browned by outdoor living; the demure but regular features; ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... tower, or what lay within the towers I did not enter. So that I have had to go on ever since with the knowledge I then acquired, that whatever Reality may ultimately be, it is in the life of the affections, with all its confused tangle of loves and hates, attractions, repulsions, and, worst of all, indifferences, it is in this intricate commerce of souls that we may come nearest to apprehending what perhaps we shall never wholly apprehend, but the quest of which alone, as I believe, gives any significance to life, and ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... whip like body slashed hither and thither, and the scout had to do some lively sprinting to keep from getting a tangle and a squeeze. ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... to Akut's side. Meriem was just behind them. The three stood like carved statues gazing into the leafy tangle of the jungle. The noise that had attracted their attention increased, and presently a great ape broke through the underbrush a few paces from where they stood. The beast halted at sight of them. He gave a warning grunt ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... their sole conversation throughout the meal. Once, with a muttered imprecation, Kama leaped away, a stick of firewood in hand, and clubbed apart a tangle of fighting dogs. Daylight, between mouthfuls, fed chunks of ice into the tin pot, where it thawed into water. The meal finished, Kama replenished the fire, cut more wood for the morning, and returned to the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Inconceivable though it appeared, he was still on his own earth. For a moment he pondered, wondering if he had been caught up in tangle of time-displacement. Could it be that, instead of living in the present, he had somehow become entangled in the past ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... moment my companion did not move. A bird sang in the tree above us and the wind sent a shower of pink petals over the green mound. Then, stooping, he picked a white Castilian rose from a tangle of shrubbery and laid it at the base of the granite shaft. "In memory of the lovely Rafaela," he said softly; I unpinned a bunch of fragrant violets from my jacket and placed, them beside his offering, then we silently ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... observer is bound to do, and appending the Englishman's letter because it was the most mysterious document and might have had a bearing upon anything in this world or the next. An outsider would have translated all the tangle thus: "Look out! You laughed at me once, and now I am going to make you ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... with the continents, we find great quantities of floating seaweed, the entangled fronds of which often form a mass sufficiently dense to slightly restrain the speed of ships. When the men on the caravels of Columbus entered this tangle, they were alarmed lest they should be unable to escape from its toils. It is a curious fact that these weeds of the sea while floating do not reproduce by spores the structures which answer to the seeds of higher plants, ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... day—but he has one main theme to make clear to his hearers and must respect the modern canons of the Story-telling Art. Among the many things therefore he could tell, an he would, he selects that only which will unravel a particular thread of fate in the tangle of endless consequences; which will render plausible the growth of passions on which, in a continuous life-drama, is ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... and watched it, sometimes, when you could not see any water at all, but only a brilliant tangle of bright blazers, and gay caps, and saucy hats, and many-coloured parasols, and silken rugs, and cloaks, and streaming ribbons, and dainty whites; when looking down into the lock from the quay, you might fancy ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... that lie between the Orange River and the Limpopo. They, too, were engaged in incessant wars with the native tribes, who were, however, less formidable than the Zulus, and much cattle lifting went on upon both sides. Only one native tribe and one native chief stand out from the confused tangle of petty raids and forays which makes up (after the expulsion of the Matabili) the earlier annals of the Boer communities. This chief was the famous Moshesh, to speak of whose career I may digress ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... of the Irene Adler photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four, and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he could ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the hills were wooded to their base; the river, roaring and dashing over its rocky bed, followed the sweep of the hills to the left, leaving a wide, grassy expanse on the right which stretched to the foot of the hills, where it was broken up by a tangle of rocks, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... as a composer. He grows tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left something in the ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... Bare-headed, tangle-haired, his clothes torn, no collar, blood on his shirt, on his hands, on his face, blood everywhere, a wound in his neck, another on his lip, unrecognizable, horrible to look at, but magnificent in energy, heroic ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... of a legal tangle involving the land around Manti had reached Trevison's ears, and this morning he had jumped on Nigger, determined to run the rumors down. He made a wide swing, following the river, which took him miles from his own property and into the enormous basin which one day the engineers expected ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... accompaniment of gymnastics among the grass-stalks, which cannot possibly have anything to do with honey. I watched one fellow to-day through a series of positive trapeze movements from top to bottom and bottom to top of a grass-tangle. When he got through he shook himself, and smoothed off his legs exactly as the circus-men do. Then he took a long pull at ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... started abroad, while the mists of the night fled at the warmth of the advancing day; but wearily, wearily, slumbered the exhausted girl, crouching on the grass, with her pallid cheek in the hollow of her little hand, her hair a tangle of glory glinting in the sun, as it shone through the branches ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... the departments were arranged almost at random. Even a few years ago we sometimes saw factories in which the materials worked upon were moved upstairs, then downstairs, then back upstairs, hither and yon, until a diagram of their wanderings looked like a tangle of yarn. Even in offices, desks were placed at random and letters, orders, memoranda, and other documents and papers were moved about with all of the orderliness and method of a school-girl playing "pussy wants a corner." Modern scientific management, horrified at the ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... say. There was nothing in the words, but the glance that accompanied this simple remark spoke volumes. Michael drew a deep heavy sigh as he went upstairs. 'Poor fellow! how he worships her!' he thought;' what will be the end of this tangle?' And then he dressed himself hastily and took his place at the table to eat his dinner with what appetite he might, while Mrs. Ross discoursed to him placidly on the baby's beauty and on dear Geraldine's merits as ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... note in Allyn's voice. He was a reservist, which made it all the worse. Reservists have ten times the outside contacts we regulars do. In general when a regular and reservist tangle, the Academy men close ranks like musk-oxen and meet the challenge with an unbroken ring of horns. But somehow I didn't feel like ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... of the struggling sophomores. A poor thrower could not very well have missed that mark, and Ken Ward was remarkably accurate. He had a powerful overhand swing, and the potatoes flew like bullets. One wild-eyed Soph slipped out of the tangle to leap up the steps. Ken, throwing rather low, hit him on the shin. He buckled and dropped down with a blood-curdling yell. Another shook himself loose and faced upward. A better-aimed shot took him in the shoulder. He gave an exhibition of a high ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... two most popular melted-cheese dishes tangle, but they're held together with the common ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... lasso him with the rope it might stop him," thought Joe. "But I don't know how to manage a lasso, even if I could tie a noose in this rope. And I don't see how one lassoes a hippo anyhow. However, here goes! I'll do the best I can. Maybe I can tangle his feet up in the kinks of the ...
— Joe Strong, the Boy Fish - or Marvelous Doings in a Big Tank • Vance Barnum
... me and tried to think with calmness on the experience I had passed through. Bolting the door securely, I threw open one of the window blinds. To my surprise the first light of dawn was visible in the sky. My room was in the rear of the house. Between me and the high wall was a dense tangle of underbrush, barely visible in the dim light. Hastily undressing, I went to bed without further delay, and was soon in deep sleep. When I awoke it was near midday. Dressing as quickly as possible, I proceeded at once to the library, where my uncle ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... ignorant of what they once were, and hopeless of what they might yet be, look upon them with mere contempt; that the world, I say, thus busied and hurried, will one day wipe the slate, and be clean rid in her impatience of the whole matter with all its tangle and trouble. ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... a Christian himself, or ever having had the experience of salvation, Frank did not know how to unravel the tangle of thought that he had woven within Edwin's mind, and he was at a loss to ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... here set aside the earlier tangle of legend and fact which is called Oriental History, and for these reasons: (1) instead of promoting the solution of chronological problems, Oriental history is itself the most perplexing of those problems; (2) the perpetual straining after a high fabulous antiquity ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... to the sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at became at once more significant to him—the tangle of tenacious roots that thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods, the swift, awkward flight of a ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... next inner layers of the pileus grow less rapidly, so that the white layer beneath the brown is torn up into an intricate tangle of locks and tufts, or is frazzled into a delicate pile which exists here and there between well formed tufts. While all present the same general characters there is considerable individual variation, ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... when the moment came, after an hour of casting. Half the time you would not see your fish at all, but only hear the savage plunge as he swirled down with your fly. At other times, as you struck sharply at the plunge, your fly would come back to you, or tangle itself up in unseen snags; and far out, where the verge of the firelight rippled away into the darkness, you would see a sharp wave-wedge shooting away, which told you that your trout was only a musquash. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... mosaic a second time. But Nature has got over her grief, for all that. For see! All up these tortured and angular valleys the great evergreen bush is growing in luxurious profusion. Every slope is densely clothed with a glorious tangle of magnificent forestry. From the branches that wave triumphantly from the dizzy heights above, to those that mingle with the delicate mosses in the valley, the verdure nowhere knows a break. Even on the steep rocky faces the persistent vegetation somehow finds for itself a precarious foothold; ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... Equally admired are his researches into Chinese linguistics and his monograph, the first in the language, on that most obscure subject, Finnish grammar.[88] Will it be believed that in her account of the Balkan tangle Miss Durham does not quote Sir Charles Eliot, but Mr. Horatio Bottomley? It seems that Mr. Bottomley has not devoted much attention to the Balkans, since in November 1920 he poured the vials of his wrath upon the Serbs, who, according to his ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... more frightened than hurt. Will you please cut that line?" she asked, pointing to the tangle of the fish ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... she was punishing me for her own reluctance; but I flew, in that sense of the term, and easily overhauled them in the tangle of people coming and going in the path, and the nursemaids pushing their perambulators in either direction. Hat in hand I delivered my message. I could see that it gave the women great pleasure and the man some doubt. His mouth fell open ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... on the part of his four-footed favourite. When my arms were tired with nursing, I had only to lay my baby on my cloak on deck, and tell Oscar to watch her, and the good dog would lie down by her, and suffer her to tangle his long curls in her little hands, and pull his tail and ears in the most approved baby fashion, without offering the least opposition; but if any one dared to approach his charge, he was alive on the instant, placing his paws over the child, and ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... but assent to all these truisms—for I felt conscience-stricken. I knew I had always depended in all my housekeeping emergencies too much on my "talent for improvising," as Kate Wilson merrily entitles my readiness in a domestic tangle and stand-still. I had been in the habit of letting things go on as easily as possible, scrupulously avoiding domestic tempests, because they deranged my nervous system; and if I found a servant would not do a thing in my way, I would let her accomplish it in her own manner, and at her ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... if a sudden gleam of hope had flashed through the tangle of the old priest's mind. But Winfried's voice sank lower and a cloud of disappointment passed over his face as he replied: "Nay, miracles have I never wrought, though I have heard of many; but the All-Father has given no power to my hands save ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... hundred things, while her eyes went afield for every scrap of prettiness the country held. There were meadows of brilliant daisies, broken by clumps of silver poplars, white birches, and a solitary sentinel pine; and there was the roadside tangle with its constant surprises of meadowsweet and columbine, white violets—in the swampy places—and once in a while an early ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... somewhat lost sight of the daily drudgery that works on character chiefly as a preventive. 'He was at the bottom of it, little as he knows it,' she said to herself as she walked up the hill. 'How much harm is done by good beginnings of a skein left to tangle.' ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... called a "forelooper," who tugs at a rope fastened to the horns of the leading oxen, and in moments of general confusion invariably seems to pull the wrong string and get the whole team into an inextricable tangle of horns and yokes. Sometimes of a quiet Sunday morning these teams and wagons I see "out-spanned" on the green slopes around Maritzburg, making a picturesque addition to the sylvan scenery. Near each wagon a light wreath of smoke steals up into the summer ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... behaved unspeakably, trailing you everywhere, and I don't deny I have, according to your point of view. But the fact is, I didn't follow you to annoy you; I'm a half-way decent fellow. You have simply got to trust me until I've seen you through this tangle. After that, if you like you need never look ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... protest, and will tangle the supple legs of Henry Ward Beecher and other semi-pagans ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... She was disgusted with Gaga and his sickness. She was afraid and rebellious and exasperated. And as she lay there she felt Gaga moving, and heard his faint groaning, and shook with a frenzy that was a thousand times more than irritation at the tangle in which she was placed. Like all young people, she imperiously demanded a fresh start—to cut all this mess away, and begin again as though nothing at all had happened. She tried to repudiate her own actions. It was no good. She could not cancel them. What she had done was done, and ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... he is doing already, it wants a man to bring his mind right down to the fact of the present case and its immediate needs. Now the present case, as the doctor sees it, is just exactly such a collection of paltry individual facts as never was before,—a snarl and tangle of special conditions which it is his business to wind as much thread out of as he can. It is a good deal as when a painter goes to take the portrait of any sitter who happens to send for him. He has seen just such ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... come," observed the other aloud, looking up the street. There was a general turning of attention and concentration of the street's population toward the edge of either sidewalk. A force of police was clearing back into the by-streets a dense tangle of drays, wagons, carriages, and white-topped omnibuses, and far up the way could be seen the fluttering and tossing of handkerchiefs, and in the midst a solid mass of blue with a sheen of bayonets above, and every now and then a brazen ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... all that tangle of brushwood with your hands unprotected," she declared, obstinately shaking her head in response to his objections. "Don't be foolish, Mr. Percival. It won't take me five minutes to wrap them up. Sit down,—I ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... This must not be communicated to the London office. In all this tangle there is one clear point. Whatever the result, Sir Donald will shield William Dodge. That family must be found and kept from want. Delay and premature ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... led the way. And in a short time he stopped in front of a cave. A tangle of bushes hid the mouth of it. You'd have passed right by it without ever guessing that there was any ...
— The Tale of Nimble Deer - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... the odors of cedar and sweet old pine. Balmy and silent, save for a rebellious mocking-bird that trilled and trolled, and seemed trying to split its musical little throat in a honeysuckle bush before the open window of a little "two-story" log house set back from the road in a tangle of plum trees, wild rose-bushes, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... emissaries to carry the rope and jam it into the door through which pretty soon Eva would run to take refuge from the pursuing Automaton. Then they slunk back through a rear door, with muttered taunts to Locke, who struggled in the tangle of rope as he felt the stinging fumes of ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... I've been having, and if I'm a bit tuckered out in body I'm still invincible in spirit. For I've already triumphed over a tangle or two and now I'm going to see this thing through. I'm going to see Alabama Ranch ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... own, and have no notion how money is obtained. A whirl of the most fantastic notions took possession of his brain immediately after he had parted with Alyosha two days before, and threw his thoughts into a tangle of confusion. This is how it was he pitched first on a perfectly wild enterprise. And perhaps to men of that kind in such circumstances the most impossible, fantastic schemes occur first, and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a rhetorician, but he possessed also the qualities of an acute thinker. He displayed unusual sagacity in detecting the value of different arguments in persuasion. He could arrange in proper proportion the most complex tangle of facts, so as to make one clear impression. Such power made him one of the great Victorian masters of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... little cluster of Highland cattle, vividly coloured and fleecy in the evening light, their horns branching into the sky, pushing forward their muzzles inquisitively, to know what it was all about. Their eyes glittered through their tangle of hair, their naked ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... effect to every freckle on his honest face. A little behind was Mary, winding one of Blanche's silks over the back of a chair, and so often looking up to revel in the contemplation of Harry's face, that her skein was in a wild tangle, which she studiously concealed lest the sight should compel Richard to come and unravel it with ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Hedgehog With his sleepy eyes looked at him, Shot his shining quills, like arrows, Saying with a drowsy murmur, Through the tangle of his whiskers, ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... trustiest of the crew, put on our diving suits, and soon we were walking the slippery decks once trodden by Spanish grandees and soldiers, and the scene of many a bloody fight I'll be bound. Their skeletons lay about the deck, wrapped in sea-tangle, and from every crevice of the galleon, tall, red, and green, and yellow, and purple weeds had sprung, that waved and shivered with the motion of the sea. Her decks were strewn with shells and sand, and in and ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... the whole civilized world, has to deal, is the problem which has for one side the betterment of social conditions, moral and physical, in large cities, and for another side the effort to deal with that tangle of far-reaching questions which we group together when we speak ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... miles to Fontainebleau, bought his cobalt, and set his face homewards about three o'clock. When he was halfway home, he turned aside into a tangle of young beech wood, parted the branches, and found a shady corner where he could rest and think. The sun was very hot, the high road was scorched by it. But it was not heat or fatigue that had made ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I had missed my proper Denver connection, owing to the wreck delay. But, a passenger agent directing me, I found the evening Union Pacific train waiting at another platform. A short half-hour later the tangle of railroad yards in the river "bottoms" was left behind and the overland train was boring westward into ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... Who'd have thought it? What a powerful handsome woman you have made, to be sure! to be sure! Well! well! The very saints up in glory can't begin to tell what children will turn out! Lean your face this way. Why, you a'n't no more like that little bare-footed, tangle-haired, rosy-faced Edna that used to run around these woods in striped homespun, hunting the cows, than I, Dorothy Elmira Wood, am like the Queen of Sheba when she went up visiting to Jerusalem to call on Solomon. ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... dodging of enemies. His left ear was split from a fight, or an owl's claw, probably, that just missed him as he dodged under a root. He was at once the shyest and boldest of the lot. For a day or two he came with marvelous stealth, making use of every dead leaf and root tangle to hide his approach, and shooting across the open spaces so quickly that one knew not what had happened—just a dun streak which ended in nothing. And the brown leaf gave no sign of what it sheltered. But once assured of his ground, he came boldly. This great man-creature, ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... Stevens. He had inspected both cards to make certain of that, and had seen with carefully concealed joy that she had compared them as minutely as he had. He saw confusion going on all about him, laughing young people attempting to straighten out the tangle, and the dance was slow ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... There he lay, his nose between his paws, listening with quiet interest to the uproar below. Occasionally he raised his head as some young dog scurried near, yelping maledictions upon a perfect tangle of fox tracks, none of which went anywhere. Suddenly he sat up straight, twisted his head sideways, as a dog does when he sees the most interesting thing of his life, dropped his tongue out a bit, and looked intently. I looked too, and there, just below, was old Roby, the ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... they; and their flashing battle-gear Cast they about them: forth the ships they poured Clad in the rage of fight as with a cloak. Then front to front their battles closed, like beasts Of ravin, locked in tangle of gory strife. Clanged their bright mail together, clashed the spears, The corslets, and the stubborn-welded shields And adamant helms. Each stabbed at other's flesh With the fierce brass: was neither ruth nor rest, And all the Trojan soil ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... like that,' she ended simply, 'for months before he died.' She sank into the corner of a sofa by the window, as though relaxing her body after an effort. For a few moments both were silent. Trent was hastily sorting out a tangle of impressions. He was amazed at the frankness of Mrs Manderson's story. He was amazed at the vigorous expressiveness in her telling of it. In this vivid being, carried away by an impulse to speak, talking with her whole personality, ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... leaf-distilled perfume, I came where just above a balcony, and almost beyond reach from it, a light burned dimly in one narrow window. I did not ask myself why I did it, but in another moment I had clambered to the place, and, standing there, I bent forward to my right, pulled away the tangle of ivy that filled half the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... just loosened a whole tangle of wreckage, and had straightened herself up with a long, triumphant "Ah-h!" of relief, as the current rushed it away, when a shadow fell over the mouth of the cave. Looking about in quick, instinctive fear, she saw Warren ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... a fist, but the tangle of bodies immediately became confusing beyond belief as the other ...
— Satellite System • Horace Brown Fyfe
... blows seemed to fall impotently on the body of the man who now grappled with him, face to face, Hector Hall throwing himself into the tangle from the rear. Mackenzie, seeing his assault shaping for a speedy end in his own defeat, now attempted to break away and seek shelter in the dark among the bushes. He wrenched free for a moment, ducked, ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... as a child counts over its toys. In the 'Song of Pleasant Things' there is no distinction between the pleasantness of sea-gulls playing, of summer and slow long days, of the heath when it is green, of a horse with a thick mane in a tangle, and of 'the word that utters the Trinity.' 'The beautiful I sang of, I will sing,' says Taliesin; and with him the seven senses become in symbol 'fire and earth, and water and air, and mist and flowers, and southerly wind.' And touches ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... business-troubles we had no time to live. We never really got to know each other. I used to think my mother was hard and unsympathetic because her view of life wasn't mine—as if it could be. It was a miserable tangle. There was my father, whose love for us made him leave us that horrible legacy of investments. And my mother was so busy providing for us she had no leisure to love us. And my brother and I were so different in temper and age and inclination ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... he was also strong, so that when beef and muscle both went hard against the ball it traveled. It looked as if it were going a mile straight up. All the infielders ran to get under it. They got into a tangle, into which the ball descended. No one caught it, and thereupon the Natchez players began to rail at one another. Bo stormed at them, and they talked back to him. Then when Tom Lindsay hit a little slow grounder into the infield ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... lives day and night. Knock at that door and you will find him at home. Touch upon some vital need in his business— some defect or tangle that is worrying him—some weak spot that he wants to remedy—some cherished ambition that haunts him—and you will have rung the bell of his interest. A few openings that are designed to get the reader's attention and induce him to ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... the tribe to flow; As when the briny surge That Thrace-born tempests urge (The big wave ever gathering more and more) Runs o'er the darkness of the deep, And with far-searching sweep Uprolls the storm-heap'd tangle on the shore, While cliff to beaten cliff ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... for it was crossed at this point by an old-fashioned wooden fence of slender, rounded pickets. In the middle of the fence was a wide carriage gate, with a smaller gate for foot passengers at each side, and beyond it the shabby, neglected garden and the tangle of pepper, and eucalyptus, and weeping willow trees that half hid the old Holly mansion. Once this had been the great house of the village, but now it was empty and forlorn. Captain Holly had been dead for five or six years, and the last of the sons and daughters ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... an imitation of bread, and even a piece of meat, when it arrived from a market-place kitchen. Here I spent Sunday, with the extreme lassitude following an extended tramp in the hungry wilderness. The doctor turned up in the afternoon, an imposing monument of a man from Texas with a wild tangle of dark-brown beard, and the soft eyes and gentle manners of a girl. He had spent some months in the region, more to the advantage of the inhabitants than his own, for disease was far more wide spread than wealth, and the latter was extremely elusive even where it existed. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... difficult pass in the mountain, where the trail stumbled over broken masses of rock and through a thick tangle of laurel. The walls of the pass were high and the trees at the top shut out the sunlight. It was damp and ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... to the lock-up, a new building in the rear of the town-house. There this tangle of humanity, torn from its rock and afloat on the social sea, drifted trailing into a bare brilliant room, and at its head, cast down but not destroyed, went heavy-laden Clare, with so much in him, but only his misery patent to eyes too much used to misery to reap ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... dreary muddle, cold, wind-swept, and filthy, with the accumulated dirt incident to the passage through of many divisions. Their train came in at seven one night, and they waited in line until one while a military tangle was straightened out somewhere ahead. Officers ran up and down ceaselessly, calling orders and making a great uproar. It turned out that the trouble was due to the colonel, who was in a righteous temper ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... went around the base of the hill to the street, where his house was the first upon the right-hand side. The gate creaked on its hinges and he went quickly up the walk, passing the grey tangle of last Summer's garden, where the marigolds had died ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... one deed as was possible. For, as a king he had sinned against his nation, as a friend he had sinned against his companion, as a captain he had sinned against his brave subordinate, as a husband he had sinned against his wife, and he had sinned against Bathsheba. And yet, with all that tangle of offences against all these people, he says, 'Against Thee, Thee only.' Yes! Because, accurately speaking, the sin had reference to God, and to God alone. And I wish for myself and for you to cultivate the habit of connecting, thus, all our actions, and especially our imperfections and our ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... experiences in some ways warped American ideas of war and politics, and their influence perhaps survives to this day. The extent of the President's authority and his position in regard to the advice he could obtain have been explained. An examination of the tangle in which military policy was first involved may make the chief incidents of the war ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... moment of ineffectual tugging, Ellen removed a pin from the soft, thick coil. Loosed by their efforts with the tangle, her hair shook down and tumbled in a lustrous mass below her waist. She felt Kilbuck's fingers working at the strands about ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... drizzling rain made it almost impossible to see beyond a few yards ahead, but then the German trench was not more than fifty yards off and the space between was criss-crossed and interlaced and a-bristle with the tangle of barb-wire defences erected by both sides. For the twentieth time the look-out peered and twisted his head sideways to listen, and for the twentieth time he was just lowering his head beneath the sheltering parapet when he stopped and stiffened into rigidity. ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... from nature, and the words few and simple, that spoke to the hearts of these sons of the forest. "The broad woods," he pursued, "would stretch beneath their eyes, when the mountain summits were gained, one extended tuft of blossoms. The cane was a tangle of luxuriance, affording the richest pastures. The only paths through it were those made by buffaloes and bears. In the sheltered glades, turkeys and large wild birds were so abundant, that a hunter could supply himself ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... twinkling he swooped up Mike's small coin, which had rattled to the pavement, and vanished with them in a struggling tangle of horse cars and omnibuses before Mike finished his desperate yell of, ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... time the land was given over to cutlass and fire. But again there was a halting in the affairs of man, and the rubber saplings were not planted or were smothered; and again the jungle smiled patiently through a knee-tangle of thorns and blossoms, and the charred clumps of razor-grass sent forth skeins of saws and hanks ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... suddenly looked up, in Courtier's face. She seemed to him very young, and touching, at that moment. Her eyes had a gleam of faith in them, like a child's eyes; as if she relied on him to straighten out this tangle, to tell her not only about Miltoun's trouble, but about all life, its meaning, and the secret of its happiness: ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tale, and each tale more beer. Even dreamy Learoyd's eyes began to brighten, and he unburdened himself of a long history in which a trip to Malham Cove, a girl at Pateley Brigg, a ganger, himself and a pair of clogs were mixed in drawling tangle. ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... comprehension. Nor were their lives unregulated by principles and laws; they were ruled by canons and conventions as powerful as those of Europe, as merciless as the caste code of India; their social life was rooted in a tangle of relationships and customs as intricate as any in the world. The basis of the community was the House, at the head of which was a Master or Chief, independent and autocratic within his own limited domain, which consisted merely of a cluster of mud-huts in ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... brake-fern, whips of native cherry, and all the threads and tangle of the earth's green russet vestment hide the feet of trees which lean and lounge between us and the water, their leaf heads tinselled by ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... tangle and confusion, at the end of which the twins found themselves free of their grips and being piloted into the waiting-room by ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... other dooms its way Crossed, that none may rule alone, In one speech-outstripping groan Forth had all this passion flown, Which now murmuring hides away, Full of pain, and hoping not Ever one clear thread to unknot From the tangle of my soul, From a heart of ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... Sender got through a celebrated tangle with me, arousing my admiration by the ingenuity with which he discovered discrepancies and by the adroitness with which he explained them away, he said: "I do enjoy reading with you. Sometimes, when I read by myself, I feel lonely. Anyhow, I love to have you around, ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Martha and the governess had literally overwhelmed him. Just when he thought he had the end of the thread in his hand, the tangle had become worse than ever. And so it had been from the commencement. At every step he took, the problem had become more complicated than ever. At every effort he made, the darkness, instead of being dispelled, had become deeper. Not that he as yet doubted Jacques's ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... moon through the garden boughs frail, overladen, O faint murmuring tongue of the dream-tide triumphant, That wouldst tell me sad tales in the times long passed over, If somewhat I sicken and turn to your freshness, From no shame it is of earth's tangle and trouble, And deeds done for nought, and change that forgetteth; But for hope of the lips that I kissed on the sea-strand, But for hope of the hands that clung trembling about me,— And the breast that was heaving with words driven backward, By longing I longed for, by pain ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... demolition. From the other side life had not departed wholly as yet. Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open. The only human being making use of the alley besides the Professor, coming stalwart ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... foreshore, just below where the falls of the Beaver River thundered into the chasm which the centuries of its flood had hewn in the granite rock, that Standing had founded his great mill. It lay there, in full view from the hillside, amidst a tangle of stoutly made roads, where seven years ago not even a game track had existed. He had set it up beside his water-power, and had given it the name which belonged to the ruined trading post he had found ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... a complete severance from him, formed ties that would bind her irrevocably to the life she had chosen? He turned from the picture wearily. It was all a tangle. He could only wait, and ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... led the way down through the tangle of forest and across the open glades until they reached the narrow track that wound like a monstrous brown ribbon through the enormous gums. At the edge of the road they both dismounted and tethered their horses to convenient trees. Then, stepping ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... I know! I'm all in a tangle, I guess," answered the American; "but I'll go down and ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... graceful spray, now bowed in beauty by the river's brink, is a group of young red birches, and this bunch of downy brown twigs, two feet above the snow, sparkling with frost particles, is the downy viburnum. The great tangle of vine and lace work mixed with snow is ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... gentle eyes, looked out at me from a tangle of willows, and then I knew the brown lodge was the game-keeper's house. A hay meadow, green with after-grass, stretched ahead of me, but there was no sign of ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... park, and down another avenue into the thick tangle of traffic, which scared them both, and so back to the hotel, the Captain saying: "My! my! but she has grown. 'Tis twenty years ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... and presently found a dense tangle, with several large trees growing near the center of it, the trunk of one of them hollowed out by time. In the opening they put their bags of powder, part of their bullets and other supplies, and then, wrapped in their blankets, sat down ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... collar, only an old tartan scarf knotted round his neck, and from the shrunk sleeves of the old jacket his hands, red and bony, appeared abnormally large. But when she looked at his face, at the eyes which looked out from the tangle of his hair, she forgot all the rest, and her heart warmed to him before he had ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... go up or downward, and let politicians wrangle, Let the parsons and philosophers grope in a wordy tangle, Let those who want them scramble for their dignities or dollars, Be millionnaires or magnates, or ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... was concerned he could go without regrets. He left his career behind him with no frayed edges that could tangle. He had fulfilled all his ambitions. He had "bought back Kilmoriarty and got a title too," as he promised his aunt he would while still a boy in his teens. He had collected an almost unprecedented number of honours, been decorated no ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... all but over and leaping to its culmination when Collins arrived. Castlemon was just being dragged out, and as Collins ran he could see the two men drop him to the ground so that they might slam the cage-door shut. Inside, in so wildly struggling a tangle on the floor that it was difficult to discern what animals composed it, were Alphonso, Jack, and Michael looked together. Men danced about outside, thrusting in with iron bars and trying to separate them. In the far end of ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... me an easy one. Said he wanted a thirty by forty. There it is on the easel," and Fred moved a chair out of his way, hung his wet coat and hat on a peg behind the door, and started to clear up a tangle of artillery harness that ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... was storming the broken ranks, his little green figure conspicuous even in the tangle of men and weapons, with the flaming red moustaches and the crown of laurel. Bowles slashed at his head and tore away some of the wreath, leaving the rest bloody, and, with a roar like a bull's, Wilson ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton |
