"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... radio was not neglected. It served to cheer the monotony. Not only were the boys alive to the advertised concerts and entertainments, but they caught a tangle of outside waves that was often ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... played the leading parts. There had been many journeyings back and forth on the part of the boys and Charlton and her uncle, Buck Rutherford. They had a way of getting off into a corner of the corral and talking low for hours at a time. And now Street had come into the tangle. Were they watching him for fear he might be ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... tangle of alder and sumach that bordered the lane and saw her suspicions confirmed. Annie was at the gate, her blue dress set against the white background of some blossom-laden cherry-boughs, while down the road, the long limbs of this probable descendant of ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... caught the trees felled in the forest above and floated down for the great maw that had already swallowed so much. These trees, trimmed of all but their larger branches, were being drawn to the shore by the surer footed men and several teams of horses; the river bottom down there was a tangle of trunks ready to feed to ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... restrictive railway legislation was followed by the states, on a nation-wide scale. Hours of labor were regulated, liability for accidents defined, railroad commissions given larger powers, and freight and passenger rates determined. The result was a tangle of local regulations, many of which were designed to embarrass the roads and others of which were passed with slight knowledge of the practical ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... building its own fate with tireless fingers, and finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered, unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one gulf ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... tangle of impure whimsies has this notion of an immaculate conception, an Ebionite tradition, as I think, brought into the Christian Church! I have sometimes suspected that the Apostle John had a particular view to this point, in the first half of the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Strong, Professor Hemmingwell, and Dave Barret stared unbelievingly at the tangle of wires and smashed tubes on the main deck ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... beams of the ceilings and pillars of the porch and wide, hospitable rooms were of tree-trunks with the bark on them. With a little work it could be made roughly but artistically habitable. Gardley had it cleaned up, not disturbing the tangle of vines and shrubbery that had had their way since the last owner had left them and which had made a perfect screen from ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... the northward, stretching his short legs to the longest possible stride, until he counted twenty paces. It brought him not to a hackmatack tree, but to the middle of several spruce trees. He returned to the rock and tried again. This time he was led to a tangle of brush to the left of the spruce trees into which his former effort had taken him. He ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... no doubt that he had made a tangle; that the big job as a whole was not under his hand, but was just running itself as best it could. Bannon, who, since the days when he was chief of the wrecking gang on a division of the Grand Trunk, had made a business of rising to emergencies, was obviously the man ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... Mexico needed a wise and clever ruler to straighten out the tangle into which its affairs had fallen, and it was supposed that Maximilian, backed by his beautiful and clever wife, would be just the man for the post. As Mexican affairs were in a very turbulent state, Napoleon ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1. No. 23, April 15, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... triumph produced an "Alcock's porous plaster," which he vehemently assured Vincent would be sure to burn, and was a real English medicine, imported with great trouble and expense, and certain to cure the ailment from which he was suffering. How Vincent would have got out of the tangle, or convinced the chemist's assistant that he was not in need of medical aid, is uncertain, but at that moment Irene, who was walking with Lorna in the square, spied him through the window, and brought her chum to the rescue. Lorna's Italian was excellent; she soon unravelled ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... "I'll meet them later, after your father and I have straightened out this tangle—if it can be done. I'll sit in the parlor, though I'm not used to it. No use wearing out the best carpet. Is anyone in the ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... apart; the city grows quiet between us, She hushes herself, for midnight makes heavy her eyes, The tangle of traffic is ended, the cars are empty, Five streets divide us, and ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... been in great trouble had she supposed that this woman still loved Martin and needed him, but that, from what Martin had said, was obviously not so. No, it was all quite clear. They would escape together, out of this tangle of unnatural mysteries and warnings, and live happily for ever after ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... was, in all probability, often made and as often lost again, until a growing habit of venturing beyond shore or river bank in search of better fishing, or of using the easy open waterways through the thick tangle of a primeval forest to reach fresh hunting grounds, established ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... looked with the drops trembling on those long, golden lashes, and staining the warm flush of her cheeks! One arm, from which the muslin sleeve had fallen back, lay under her head, half-buried in a tangle of curls; sobs broke at intervals through her parted lips, ending in long, ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... came the "Greys" like a pack of maddened wolves. But the Blues were coming too. Savagely they hurled themselves on the enemy, grasping, holding, tackling and brought them to the ground. Then from the tangle of legs and arms emerged Tom and Dick, and running like the wind put down the field to the help ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... up and watched her, his arms a-kimbo, a tangle at his brow. It was quite evident to Hermia Challoner that he hadn't the ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... and since then they have been as inseparable as their respective duties to husband and grandfather allow. And so the web of life is woven, the puzzling strands resolving themselves out of what has seemed to be a hopeless tangle ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... it. We wrote cautious editorials in carefully-balanced sentences demanding that the people keep cool. We advised both sides to realise that only good sense and judgment would straighten out the tangle. We demanded that each side recognise the other's rights and made both sides angry, whereas General Durham, of the Statesman, made his first popular stroke in a dozen years by insisting, in double leads and italics, that the tariff on hides was a divine institution, and that ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... number, from the hotel—than she sputtered and fizzed herself off up-stream. By this time it was the afternoon, and I almost despair of making you see the woodland beauty of that broad mere, fringed down to the water's edge on one side with shrubs and tangle of roses and woodbine, with ferns and every lovely green creeping thing. That was on the bank which was sheltered from the high winds: the other hillside showed the contrast, for there, though green indeed, only a few feathery tufts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... silence of the upper cloister, in the privacy of those families who were born and died among the stones of the Cathedral, did they dare to repeat the murmurs of the Church, the interminable tangle of tattle which grew over the monotonous ecclesiastical existence, the complaints of the canons against His Eminence, and what the cardinal said about the Chapter, an underground war which was reproduced at every archiepiscopal elevation, intrigues and heart-burnings ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and Jim consoled himself with pretty imaginative pictures in which Lucy was vividly represented sitting on the shady veranda at Macdougal's home stead, spotted with flakes of golden sunshine filtered through the tangle of vine and creeper. How sweet she was, how gentle, how tender, and yet brave of heart and keen-witted withal. She had understood him better than he had understood himself. That was very gratifying; it showed her deep interest in him, but he did not put it to himself in ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... would be nothing vague or shadowy about marriage with Trenby! That Nan realised. And, utterly weary of the persistent struggle in her heart, she felt that it might cut the whole tangle of her life once and for all if she passed through the strait and narrow gate of matrimony into the carefully shepherded fold beyond it. After all, most women settled down to it in course of time, whether ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... care-free eye on me from the top of a crab-tree, and I could have envied him as I stumbled by. It was perhaps fourscore yards through, and half-way I stopped to listen. Yes, there came to my ear the slow trot-ot-ot of hoofs on the hard road. I went on again until, through the leafless tangle, I began to get glimpses of the highway. My fate was dragging me on. In a month's time my shrivelling carcase might be swinging in chains on the top of Wes'on Bank, an ensample to evil-doers. The thought made me shiver, and I jerked out a broken prayer that my intended victim might turn ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... sinking into sleep I have the sensation of going into a dark forest or whether the hero of the story goes into a forest (which to be sure has still other interpretations), or whether the wanderer in the parable gets into a tangle of underbrush, all amounts to the same thing; it is always the introduction into a life of phantasy, the entrance into the theater of the dream. The wanderer, if he had not chosen for his fairy tale the first person, could have begun as follows: There was once a king whose greatest joy ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... of Woe must soon be closed to all Who linger now therein with tedium mortal, And of those lingerers a proportion small Again may pass its portal. There's many a one who o'er its threshold stole In Eighty-Six's curious Party tangle, Who for the votes which helped him head the poll In vain again may angle. The GRAHAMS and the CALDWELLS may look bold, So may the CONYBEARES, and COBBS and TANNERS; But the next House quite other men may hold, And (let's hope) other manners. They'd like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... made an undercurrent of soreness in her soul, which was externally being harrowed up by the near approach of the Red Cross concert and the worries connected therewith. The Reese cold had not developed into whooping-cough, so that tangle was straightened out. But other things were hanging in the balance; and on the very day before the concert came a regretful letter from Mrs. Channing saying that she could not come to sing. Her son, who was in Kingsport with his regiment, was seriously ill with pneumonia, and ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... strange metal, thread by thread, To stand out from my lady's head, Not moving much to tangle me. Beata ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... was standing in the kitchen when she arrived, his head towering into the tangle of strings that crossed and recrossed the small interior. Whatever his impression of the extraordinary spectacle he evinced no curiosity but remained as imperturbable amid the network that ensnared him as if such astounding phenomena were everyday ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... simply dynastic tragedies. In both the outlook is limited to the fortunes of a single house. In both we miss the great dramatist who looks upon life with a roving eye and intertwines his tale of private woe with the larger tangle of human destiny. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... slew the giant, and bore her off. But the assiduous giant had bound back the locks of the maiden, tightly twisting her hair in such a way that the matted mass of tresses was held in a kind of curled bundle; nor was it easy for anyone to unravel their plaited tangle, without using the steel. Again, he tried with divers allurements to provoke the maiden to look at him; and when he had long laid vain siege to her listless eyes, he abandoned his quest, since his purpose turned out so little to his liking. But he could ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... when she married. Told me she'd 'ad to work 'ard all her life to support her Ma, and she did think after she was married she was goin' to enjoy herself—but she 'adn't! Ah, she was a nice lady, Sir; she'd got her 'air in sech a tangle it took me three weeks to get it right! I showed her three noo ways of doin' up her 'air, and she says to me, "What a clever young man you are!" Her very words, Sir! Trim the ends of your moustache, Sir? Thankee, Sir. Yes, she was ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... world alive. If all at once Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless Across would drop in terror to the earth; Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins Would tangle in the frantic hands of God And the worlds ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... meets such a tangle in the writings of any philosopher, I ask him to believe that it is not the human reason that is at fault—at least, let him not assume that it is. The fault probably lies with a ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... You're under arrest. I'm a Secret Service man, sent here to prevent the revolution that's been brewing all spring and summer. I guess I've done it, all right." He stared at her with growing bitterness in his eyes. His hurt began dully to ache again. "Helen May, what in God's name did you tangle up with 'em for?" he flashed in a sudden ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... physician struggled from his pew across the sittings of three stout dowagers, and knelt, with practiced finger on the little fluttering pulse. The bride's stepmother roused to solicitous and anxious attention. The organ came smartly up again in a hopeless tangle of chords and modulations, trying to get its poise once more. People climbed upon their seats to see, or crowded out in the aisle curiously and unwisely kind, and in the way. Then the minister asked ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... life and wrote about it." They saw the wild, loud complexity of their world expressed in his verse; and yet were dimly conscious, to their consolation, that he was aware of a central peace where the noise was quieted and the tangle unravelled. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... three successive tiers of woodland, roofs, and crosses whole—lies exquisitely mirrored in the river below, where hollow willows, grotesquely shaped (some of them rooted on the river's banks, and some in the water itself, and all drooping their branches until their leaves have formed a tangle with the water lilies which float on the surface), seem to be gazing at the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... silent for so long a time that the professor had opportunity to think of many things. And, as he thought, his heart went down—and down. She would refuse. He knew it. The clean edge of her mind would cut through all his tangle of words right to the core of the real issue, And the core of the real issue was not as sound as it would need to be to satisfy her demands. For in that core still lay a possibility, the possibility of love. He had not eliminated love. Many a man has loved after thirty-five. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... did not see until later. And there was also a queer, wild-animal smell, which Nero liked very much. It was almost like the smell of the jungle, and it made him homesick when he thought of the deep tangle of green vines, the thick trees and ...
— Nero, the Circus Lion - His Many Adventures • Richard Barnum
... I am doing all I can, but things are in a diabolical tangle. Some of our supplies are here; others are laid out on the road; some seem to be utterly lost. We have had to make substitutions of machinery, our bills are overdue, and—but what's the use! We need money. That's the crux of the whole affair. When ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... and tiles. Here, within the framework of slaughtered trees that surrounds us as a spectral background in the fog, there is no longer any shape. There is not even an end of wall, fence, or porch that remains standing; and it amazes one to discover that there are paving-stones under the tangle of beams, stones, and scrap-iron. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade! And lo! a little wind and shy, The smell of ships (that earnest of romance), A sense of space and water, and thereby A lamplit bridge ouching the troubled sky. And look, O look! a tangle of silver gleams And dusky lights, our River and all his dreams, His dreams of a dead ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... light plays on the brown, gray and green intertinged, The armfuls are pack'd to the sagging mow. I am there, I help, I came stretch'd atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the cross-beams and seize the clover and timothy, And roll head over heels and tangle my hair ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... pace, we were passing along what I saw to be a broad river. The Riola Amazonia[16] I afterward learned it to be. Heavy banks of luxurious foliage, dark and silent. Inundated in places. And after a few moments we slackened, turned sharply into one of the inundated coves and nosed slowly amid a tangle ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... noted for its fine scenery. Dense woods were its chief feature. And by dense I mean well-supplied not only with trees (excellent things in themselves, but for the most part useless to the nest hunter), but also with a fascinating tangle of undergrowth, where every bush seemed to harbour eggs. All carefully preserved, too. That was the chief charm of the place. Since the sad episodes of Morton-Smith and Ainsworth, the School for the most part had looked askance at the Dingle. ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... with daggers at their throats demanded their names, title and means. He who had made a good prize hurried him to the rear where his own servants could guard him, while he who was disappointed too often drove the dagger home and then rushed once more into the tangle in the hope of better luck. Clermont, with an arrow through the sky-blue Virgin on his surcoat, lay dead within ten paces of the hedge; d'Andreghen was dragged by a penniless squire from under a horse and ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not imperative, for he followed Miss Lady through the narrow winding paths, between a tangle of shrubs and vines, into the old-fashioned flower garden. The spiraea was just putting out its long, feathery plumes of white, and the lilacs nodded white ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... to where, at her feet, the hurrying stream rested an instant, to take breath, in a deep, dusky little pool, overhung by a tangle of eglantine. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... young people who are emerging from a theater with the magic of the play still thick upon them. They look up and down the familiar street scarcely recognizing it and quite unable to determine the direction of home. From a tangle of "make believe" they gravely scrutinize the real world which they are so reluctant to reenter, reminding one of the absorbed gaze of a child who is groping his way back from fairy-land whither the story has ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... the tangle all out," he said, with a sigh of relief; "and here comes Tony with some bait. What is it you've got? Bully for you, Tony! My! what a nice assortment of fat grubs. I just bet you the bass will grab at 'em like hot cakes. And strange to say, I'm actually feeling a little hungry ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... not 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 ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... in time to see Mr. Harbison throw up his arms, make a futile attempt to regain his balance, and disappear over the edge of the roof. One instant he was standing there, splendid, superb; the next, the corner of the parapet was empty, all that stood there was a broken, splintered post and a tangle of wires. ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... around in the other direction at the mainland to the northwest of Ellen's Isle. As she looked she saw the bushes waving near the shore and then from the tangle of branches there emerged first a pair of antlers, then a head and then a pair of front legs, followed by a dark body, and a large bull moose stood silhouetted against the leafy background. A moment it stood there, calm ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... daughter—he never writes a letter—that he would come over and straighten out the tangle in fifteen minutes. He is certain the Prince stole the diamonds, but he did not tell his daughter so. He informed her he was bringing her a present of a new typewriting machine, and also a young woman from ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... seen, where Sinclair himself was last seen alive in Medicine Bend, where Dicksie Dunning's horse dragged her senseless one wild mountain night, and where, indeed, for a time the affairs of the whole mountain division seemed to tangle in ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... not blench. She only gave her head a slight toss. "Ef you men can't get along with the coffee and flapjacks I'm going to give ye, made with my own hands, ye kin just toddle right along to the first bar, and order your tangle-foot there. Ef it's a barkeeper you're looking for, and not ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... she found herself overlooking part of a wilderness of garden, which revealed itself through an arch in an overgrown laurel hedge. She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park beyond a cuckoo ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Edwin Drood" (Chapman & Hall and Heywood, Manchester). From the solution of Mr. Walters I am obliged to dissent. Of Mr. Proctor's theory I offer some necessary corrections, and I hope that I have unravelled some skeins which Mr. Proctor left in a state of tangle. As one read and re-read the fragment, points very dark seemed, at least, to become suddenly clear: especially one appeared to understand the meaning half-revealed and half-concealed by Jasper's babblings under the influence of opium. He saw in his vision, "THAT, I never saw THAT before." ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... caitiff murmurs. 'This is the annual fancy dress ball at Brookwood Asylum. You and I and the doctors and attendants are the only sane people in the place. By-and-by the country gentry will be admitted, and then the tangle will be hopeless, for even in everyday life it's impossible to know who's mad and who isn't. How ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... came sharply, as 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 such as belongs ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... his words for his crime. He speaks of his "transgressions" and of his "sin." Looked at in one way, he sees the separate acts of which he had been guilty—lust, fraud, treachery, murder: looked at in another, he sees them all knotted together, in one inextricable tangle of forked, hissing tongues, like the serpent locks that coil and twist round a Gorgon head. No sin dwells alone; the separate acts have a common root, and the whole is matted together like the green growth on a stagnant pond, so that, by whatever filament ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... suffocatingly hot night and their foreheads reeked with sweat. Dim shapes on the walls of the room indicated what by day was a tangle of clockwork and recording instruments, connected by electricity with various buttons and switches upon the table. The brother of the big clock in the wireless operating room hung nearby, its face illuminated by a tiny electric lamp, showing the hour to be eleven-fifty. Occasionally ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... silence, Hagar shook the tangle of unkempt, black hair away from her moonlike face, and began talking in a soft monotone, her voice now and then rising to ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... as Elsley looked down, the beauty below invited him, and the coolness also; for the sun beat on the flat rock above till it scorched the feet, and dazzled the eye, and crisped up the blackening sea-weeds; while every sea-snail crept to hide itself under the bladder-tangle, and nothing dared to peep or stir save certain grains of gunpowder, which seemed to have gone mad, so merrily did they hop about upon the surface of the fast evaporating salt-pools. That wonder, indeed, Elsley stooped to examine, and drew back his hands ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... even worse, because of their contrast with the past I'd conjured up. Grief for the death of Jimmy Beckett mingled with grief for Brian, and anxieties about money, in the dull, sickly way that unconnected troubles tangle ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... was, that John one day slipped his foot on a tangle-covered rock, and fell into the sea. A small matter this, you will say, to a man who could swim, and in a climate so warm that a dip, with or without clothes, was a positive luxury. Most true; and had the wetting been all, Jarwin would have had nothing to annoy him; ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... will bring about in the minds of men will be psychological. Men will become habituated to the thought of common action for the common good. To get so far in civil life is a great step. Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interests and competitions. The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vast turning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring them face round to the Delectable City. When this psychological change ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... large life of the Ocean, heaving wide, His heart possessed with gladness and with pride, And he rejoiced to be alive.... Once more He heard the drenching waves on that rough shore Raking the shingles, and the sea-worn rocks Sucking the brine through bared and lapping locks Of bright, brown tangle; while the shelving ledges Poured back the swirling waters o'er their edges; And billows breaking on a precipice In spouts of spray, fell spreading like ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... of the Gillikin Country is a great tangle of trees called Gugu Forest. It is the biggest forest in all Oz and stretches miles and miles in every direction—north, south, east and west. Adjoining it on the east side is a range of rugged mountains covered with underbrush ...
— The Magic of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... emerging from the tangle, they saw the ruined old mill before them. And it certainly did look just as "spooky" as Sid had declared, when he suggested that they might find their ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... tangled and twisted the course of true love This ditty explains, No tangle's so tangled it cannot improve ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... 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
... be a daily clean up, though the writer has never met the public benefactor who makes all tidy in the early morning hours before the steamers have discharged their crowds. Possibly this is the same individual who keeps the tangle of blackberry and tamarisk pruned down so that while resting with "Sir Walter Scott" or "Shakespeare" we may duly admire the view across ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... 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 Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Suddenly the tangle of whirling limbs was dissolved as Erebus and Wiggins tore themselves free, gained their feet and fled. The princess and the Terror sat up, panting, flushed and disheveled. The princess wriggled ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... Jem, taking hold of the line, "let's get you off. What a tangle! why, it's reg'lar twissen all about your ankles. I must break it. Why, it's tough as—look ye here," he continued, tugging at the plaited silk, "it's strong enough to hold a whale. I shall have to cut it. Bob ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a gnarled hand grasping the latter's gunwale to hold the two together. With some difficulty Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in the cockpit, amid a tangle of cordage slippery with scales. The skipper followed, with clumsy expertness bringing the dory's painter with him and hitching it to a ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head. Then, pausing an instant to stare ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... soft, and she was very fond of kissing. Every morning Uncle John would lift Toby up and show him the garden, and Toby would slip out of his arms and walk among the trees and plants. And the place would grow bigger and bigger until it was all the world, and Toby would lose himself; amongst the tangle of trees and flowers and creepers. He would see butterflies there and tame animals, and the sky was full of birds of all colours, ugly and beautiful; but he knew that none of these was the bird, because their voices ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... 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 because he was a West Pointer, and the war ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... collar there sprang a head quite unmanageable and quite unmistakable, a bewildering bush of brown hair and beard that almost obscured the eyes like those of a Skye terrier. But the eyes did look out of the tangle, and they were the sad eyes of some Russian serf. The effect of this figure was not terrible like that of the President, but it had every diablerie that can come from the utterly grotesque. If out of that stiff tie and collar there ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... truth of Young's words: "How blessing brighten as they take their flight!" and they ring in our hearts to-day as we wander into this picturesque old way; and we love even more dearly than of yore the quiet, the grassy sides, the wild growths of roses and blackberry-bushes, the tangle of ivy and woodbine, and the lovely vistas through leafy framings of sunny hillsides and woods, of pastures dotted with grazing cattle, and of peaceful farm homes. It is a country idyll, sweet and restful! We may slacken our horses reins ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... jewel-weed and mint, the white setter in the lead swung suddenly west, quartered, wheeled, crept forward and stiffened to a point. Behind him his mate froze into a silvery statue. But Gordon walked on, gun under his arm, and the covey rose with a roar of heavy wings, driving blindly through the tangle deep ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... as summer gust, And gladsome as the first-born of the spring, Beckons me on, or follows from behind, 10 Playmate, or guide! The master-passion quelled, I feel that I am free. With dun-red bark The fir-trees, and the unfrequent slender oak, Forth from this tangle wild of bush and brake Soar up, and form a melancholy vault 15 High o'er me, murmuring like ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a place, an hour, The worst that e'er the tempter's power Could tangle me or you in; Sweet Nea, let us roam no more Along that wild and lonely shore. Such walks may ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... dogs, the yowling of cats, the grunts and squeals of hogs. In the black river, flowing past within a stone's throw of the hotel door, sounded the loud snorts of dolphins and the hideous night call of the foul beast of the mud—the alligator. Out from the matted tangle of trees and brush and great snakelike vines behind the town rolled the appalling roars of guaribas, raucous bird calls, dismal hoots, sudden scattered screams. And over all, whelming all other sound by the sheer might of its penetrating power, throbbed the rapid-fire ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... in safety; and inexorable iron crushed the tender leaves to atoms.—This morning at the end of my watch, about 4 o'clock, we came to the buoys, proving our anticipations right concerning the crossing of the cables. I went to bed for four hours, and on getting up, found a sad mess. A tangle of the six-wire cable hung to the grapnel, which had been left buoyed, and the small cable had parted and is lost for the present. Our hauling of the other day must have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so as to allow the dogs to pull to greater advantage than if all the traces were of the same length, causing the dogs to spread out like a fan. At every few miles the traces have to be unloosened and extricated from the most abominable tangle that it is possible to conceive. This comes from a habit the dogs have of constantly running under and over the other traces to avoid the whip, or in some cases merely from a spirit of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... whose joyful scorn, Edged with sharp laughter, cuts atwain The knots that tangle human creeds, [1] The wounding cords that [2] bind and strain The heart until it bleeds, Ray-fringed eyelids of the morn Roof not a glance so keen as thine: If aught of prophecy be mine, Thou ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... thing became evident soon after we began our work. This world that we had thought to be void of animal life, proved to be teeming with it. From out of the tangle of broken and harmless branches, thousands of animals appeared. The majority of them were quite large, perhaps the size of full-grown hogs, which Earth animal they seemed to resemble, save that they were a dirty yellow color, and had strong, heavily-clawed feet. These were the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... He could not keep his hands off any matter that interested him, and most matters did interest him. He had grown to have an idea that he could take hold of almost any sort of tangle or enterprise or concern and straighten it out. Probably it was because he was so exceedingly human.... Therefore he was drawn irresistibly to his purchasing department and to ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... No people are bound to starve while their soil produces food cultivated by their own hands. No other people in Europe would have submitted to such a fate. But the leader whom they were accustomed to follow had involved himself in a tangle of false doctrines by his unhappy "Peace Resolutions," and he exhorted them to endure all with patience and submission. His son had the amazing assurance to add that if they starved with complete resignation the repeal of the union ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... passed directly from the stairway into the kitchen, or living- room, her father turned from the hopeless-seeming tangle of soiled and torn netting on the floor before him, and looked at her half wistfully from under the glazed brim of ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... with Human or Divine, To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign, And lose your fingers in the tresses of The Cypress-slender ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... what was apt to happen. For himself he found that he had need of both his eyes with every step forward he took through that tangle, where trailing vines lay in wait to trip him up, and branches hung low as if seeking to catch in his hair, to ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... was a sunny one, perhaps that added to the lack of nervous fears they felt as they stopped the auto, and entered the place. This time they had gone to the mansion proper, having driven through what were once beautiful and extensive grounds. But they had long since fallen into a tangle ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... pull, and brought up a tangle of weeds. Again and again I cast out my line with aching arms, and drew it back empty. I looked at my uncle appealingly. "Try once more," he said; "we fishermen ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... large part of the actual herbage from which the hay is made. The bottom of a good crop of mowing grass springs from a tangle of clover and leguminous plants, all owning blossoms, and many of them of brilliant hues and exquisite perfume. Chief among these is the red meadow-clover, the pride of the hayfields. Few plants can match its perfume, or the cool freshness of its leaves. With ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... historian who asked only to learn enough to be as futile as Langley or Kelvin, made rapid progress under this teaching, and mixed himself up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fatigued senses. He wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly had he ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... a 3000-foot canyon, half a mile wide and three miles long, covered with fertile fields, peach and apricot orchards. It even contained a few fig trees. Below the village the canyon narrowed to a hundred yards, with a level bottom, covered with a tangle of wild grape vines, cactus, and cottonwood trees. This section contained the two largest falls, and came to an end about four miles below the first fall. Then the canyon narrowed, deep and gloomy, until there was little room for anything but the powerful, rapidly ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... she made her way slowly across the yard, his eyes bright with admiration for her womanly grace as she stopped, here and there, to pick a wild flower from the tangle of grass and weeds. Reaching the tree she seated herself and, laying her parasol on the grass by her side, began arranging the blossoms she had gathered—pausing, now and then, to look over the rolling country of field and woods that, dotted by farm houses with their buildings and stacks, ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... then, might have solved the Bolshevist problem by making up their minds which of the two alternative politics—war against, or tolerance of, Bolshevism—they preferred, and by taking suitable action in good time. If they had handled the Russian tangle with skill and repaid a great sacrifice with a small one before it was yet too late, they might have hoped to harvest in abundant fruits in the fullness of time. But they belonged to the class of the undecided, whose members continually suffer from the absence of a middle word between yes ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... to it to keep off the draught from that cracked pane in the window. His face, like his wife's, was weatherbeaten, and of the same broad, flat type as hers, with small, surprised, dazzled-looking, pale blue eyes, and a tangle of grizzled light hair under his chin. He was noticeable for the green smock-frock he wore, a garment which is so rapidly disappearing before the march of civilisation, and giving place to the ill-cut, ill-made coat of shoddy cloth, which is fondly ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... life. Sometimes, as in high latitudes, the cold is so great that only the simplest microscopic forms are able to maintain existence. In the tropics, animals and plants are abundant, and sometimes by their numbers colour great areas of water; or, as in the drift of the Gulf Stream, make a tangle of animal and plant life through which a boat travels only with difficulty. The basis of the food supply of this vast and hungry floating life is, as on land, vegetable life; for plants are the only creatures capable of building up food from the gases of the air and the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... pause, an interval, had been allowed for a serious revisal" of the last three volumes, and there can be little doubt that this chapter was one of the sources of his regrets. It is in fact a mere tangle. The Second and the Third Crusades are so jumbled together, that it is only a reader who knows the subject very well who can find his way through the labyrinth. Gibbon seems at this point, a thing very unusual with him, to have become impatient with his subject, and to have wished to hurry over ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... what was it she saw lying there? An old hat, a man's hat. Now, where might that have been washed overboard? She came nearer, and stopped to look at the hat. Ha! what was lying yonder? She shuddered; but it was nothing save a heap of sea grass and tangle flung across a long stone; but it looked just like a corpse: it was only sea grass and tangle, and yet she was frightened at it, and as she turned away to walk on much came into her mind that she had heard in her childhood; old superstitions of spectres by the sea shore, of the ghosts of ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... said, 'what is this? I never asked for anything! Indeed I had no time, for the messenger ran away before I had unravelled my tangle.' ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... your leader, your guide, your mentor, we shall go forth into the open, to seek out the bosky dell; to pierce the wildwood tangle; to penetrate the trackless wilderness. Our tents shall be spread alongside the purling brook, hard by some larger body of water. There, in my mind's eye, I see us as we practise archery and the use of the singlestick, both ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... more veraciously in Edom! The fool sighs for a fair woman,—what else should he do, being a fool? Ah, madonna, as in very remote times that notable jester, Love, popped out of Night's wind-egg, and by his sorcery fashioned from the primeval tangle the pleasant earth that sleeps about us,—even thus, may he not frame the disorder of a fool's brain into the semblance of a lover's? Believe me, the change is not so great as you might think. Yet if you will, laugh at ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... shawl-dance, it was the most exciting thing that ever was beheld; there was such a whisking, and rustling, and fanning, and getting ladies into a tangle with artificial flowers, and then disentangling them again! And as to Mr. Augustus Cooper's share in the quadrille, he got through it admirably. He was missing from his partner, now and then, certainly, and discovered on such occasions to be either ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the clear, safe pavement, was one thing; to venture unprotected into that waving, tripping tangle was another. Ardelia stepped cautiously upon the short grass near the house, and with jaw set felt her way into the higher growth. Suddenly she stopped; ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... would bear him or not, seized hold of the twisted vine trunks of the old Virginia creeper that partly covered the house from ground to roof. Fortunately they held, and up he went like a young squirrel, his bare toes clutching like claws in the tangle of the stems and twigs. He gained the roof, crawled rapidly along, and reached the bath-room window, only to find he could barely clutch the sill with the tips of his fingers. Standing on tiptoe, he got a little grip, ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... abound is soon killed out by their smothering growth; even so with a human heart set on riches and the allurements of pleasure—though it receive the living seed of the gospel it will produce no harvest of good grain, but instead, a rank tangle of noxious weeds. The abundant yield of thorny thistles demonstrates the fitness of the soil for a better crop, were it only free from the cumbering weeds. The seed that falls in good deep soil, free from weeds and prepared for the sowing, strikes root and grows; the sun's heat scorches it not, but ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... fringed with bulrushes and other aquatic plants; on the opposite bank there were some large alders lifting their branches above great masses of bramble and rose-briar, all together forming as rich and beautiful a tangle as one could find even in the most luxuriant of the wild, unkept hedges round the village. The briars especially flourished wonderfully at this spot, climbing high and dropping their long, slim branches quite down to the surface of the water, and in some places forming an ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... streets—into drays and past clanging cars and through the tangle of wheels and horses and noise—and she told him the story, shouting it above the rumble and hurry of the streets, into the dark ear ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... the bushes stir a few rods in front of her, and raised her gun into position, still hiding in the tangle. Albert discovered a movement in front of him, and ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... the Inspector answered carelessly. "Well, Mr. Coulson, I won't take up any more of your time. I am convinced that you have told me all that you know, and I am afraid that I shall have to look elsewhere to find the loose end of this little tangle." ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Asche, McGurk, even Delany, because the fleas upon his back were satisfied and he was planning ultimately to get rid of the whole damn tangle by having the indictment quietly dismissed when nobody was looking, by his friend O'Brien, to whom the case had been sent for trial. And everything being as it should be, and Tony being locked ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... their handbags, started across the great square before the station. Almost at once they found themselves in a tangle of vehicular traffic that quite confused Bess, and even troubled the ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but were crowded together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight with their ends closely applied to his chin and ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... travelling wrap it round both shoulders and so protect his skin from the rays of the sun, which, were he naked from the waist, would in a very short time raise blisters over the whole of his body. His wig, with its wild tangle of long hair, acted as a ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... rustle our water and we go to law," said old James, "does this here lawsuit tangle up things so's't we get plenty of water till the case ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... in the morning after the arrival of the motor girls at Crystal Bay, house, tent and bungalow were deserted—it was all a matter of motor boat. Moored to the brand new dock, at Tangle Turn, a brand new motor craft heaved with the incoming waves and tugged at its ropes whenever a sufficiently strong motion of the water gave it ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... after him, each one by a different opening, and we passed through it as quickly as the horses' legs and the difficulties of the ground would allow. On arriving at the further side I was glad to see my four companions emerging, almost at the same moment, from the thick woody tangle. I could see their grave and confident faces turned towards me. On the ridge in front of us, near a solitary tree, stood Vercherin, clear against the sky ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... scrambled to his feet again Hetty was sitting in the snow close by him, and Flora Schuyler creeping out of a wreath of it on her hands and knees. The sleigh lay on one side, not far away, with the Badger rolling and kicking amidst a tangle of harness, though the other horse was ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... replied musingly, as if half speaking to herself; "so strange that I cannot understand it. Life is a queer tangle at best. That is, it ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... said. "You are quite right; it is an ugly tangle I have got my life into. But remember, a man does not meet every day a woman whom he can—love; and I—I have been in deep ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... half the night, but without coming any nearer to solving the problem, and at last, thoroughly tired, I went to bed. Out of the whole tangle one thing only was plain—Etienne Cordel was playing a desperate game, and no scruples would prevent ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place she had ever ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the common lot of reconnaissances. We dismounted, loosened girths, ate tinned meat, and wondered what we should do next. We were on a billow of veldt that heaved across the valley: up it ran, road and rail; on the left rose tiers of hills, in front a huge green hill blocked our view, with a tangle of other hills crowding behind to peep over its shoulders. On the right, across the line, were meadows; up from them rose a wall of red-brown kopje; up over that a wall of grass-green veldt; over that was the enemy. We ate and sat and wondered what we should do next. Presently we saw the ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... tangle of bracken an old hound spoke sharply. A little thrill ran through her. She saw her father put his pipe in his pocket and pull his hat more firmly down on his forehead, while she held back Brunette, ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... like all ghost stories and spook spots in the world; all imagination, I guess. I do not take any stock in them, and dad laughs at the entire batch. The only reality about it is that the island itself is the most forbidding pile of rock, covered with the worst tangle of scrub spruce you ever saw, and the shore is full of deep fissures and cracks. The one mysterious fact is, that strange bellowing noise that you can't locate anywhere. You may clamber all over the island and all ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... nights on the hills. He had never before known freedom or leisure. And he was intoxicated by the sunshine. When he rode through the bush his head reeled a little at the beauty that surrounded him. The country was indescribably fertile. In parts the forest was still virgin, a tangle of strange trees, luxuriant undergrowth, and vine; it gave an impression that was ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... street would be deserted. Then they tied their scarves round their necks, for they scorned overcoats, as all the colliers' children did, and went out. The entry was very dark, and at the end the whole great night opened out, in a hollow, with a little tangle of lights below where Minton pit lay, and another far away opposite for Selby. The farthest tiny lights seemed to stretch out the darkness for ever. The children looked anxiously down the road at the one lamp-post, which stood at the end of the field path. If the little, luminous space ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence |
