"Bungled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... account of your disposal of the rugs, for the moment you had left a very handsome young lady came along, and, looking at me, said, with such a pleasant smile, 'Why, what a pretty rug you have there; but how the steward has bungled it about you! Let me fix it,' and with that she gave it a touch here and a smooth down there, and the result was really so nice that I hated to go down to breakfast. It is a pity you went away so quickly yesterday morning. You might have had an opportunity of becoming acquainted ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... Elephant is a noble animal. His docility is perfect. He climbed up and down places so steep that a good horse would have bungled at them, pulled down trees when he was told to do it, held others which were slanting dangerously across the track high above our heads till we had safely passed under them, lifted fallen trees out of his way, or took huge steps ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... foot, and accordingly on February 22, 1909, just as the sun was sinking over the beautiful harbor of Singapore—that most valuable strategic Gate of the Far East, where Crown Colonial administration, however, is allowed by a lethargic British Government to become more and more bungled every year—we settled down on board the French mail steamer Nera, bound for Shanghai. My friends, good fellows, in reluctantly speeding me on my way, prophesied that this would prove to be my last long voyage to a last long rest, that the Chinese would never allow me to come out of China alive. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... not explain; and I had to listen. She said things that I did not believe she could have said to me, to anyone. Things that I did not think she could have thought . . . I dare say she was right in some ways. I suppose I bungled in my desire to be unselfish. What she said came to me in new lights upon what I had done . . . But anyhow her statements were such that I felt I could not, should not, remain. My very presence must have been a trouble to her hereafter. There was nothing ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... road, looking after her retreating figure. He had bungled. If he had begun in the right way, she would have been compelled to listen. What could he do to obtain a hearing? After two years of silence he could not wonder at her refusal to listen to ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... terrace,—she feeling that she wanted a wash; he feeling only that he had bungled it, because she was too worldly, too sophisticated ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... field. We all line up, about seventy-five field niggers, and go by de tool shed and git our hoes, or maybe go hitch up de mules to de plows and lay de plows out on de side so de overseer can see iffen de points is shart. Any plow gits broke or de point gits bungled up on de rocks it goes to de blacksmith nigger, den we all git on ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... have, to such luxuries as a straw bed; and I doubt whether you ever went hungry to bed as I have done many and many a time, for in the days when my father hoped to make an armourer of me I was sent off supperless whenever I bungled a job or neglected his instructions. I wonder what the earl can want ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... positive excellence of his performance, but in the sureness with which he avoids defects; and these defects he has learned by experimental failures. The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys. And if a man derives skill from his own failures, so does he from the failures of other men. Every unsuccessful attempt is, for him, so much work done; for he will not go over that ground again, but seek some new way. Every ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... called it, whenever I liked," he muttered, looking wistfully at the shot-gun; "and I've a big mind to give those lazy fellows in there a surprise. They spent the night out jacking, and didn't get any meat because Cyrus let Neal do the shooting, and he bungled it. It's my turn next to go after deer, but I'm not ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... noteworthy incident there was my humorous interview with the French Consul. I addressed that dignified functionary in execrable French, telling him that I was a French subject and wanted to be sent back to Europe. I bungled a great deal, and when my French failed I helped myself out with English. The Consul waited patiently till I had finished, stroking his beard the while, and looking at me in the ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... are no customs here," he retorted. "At least, I should have said so, this morning. Now I am not so sure." Then he laughed. "I've bungled that horribly, Miss Mellen. What I meant was that you have given me a ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... slightly, and took up the work without any enthusiasm. She made the first correct mystic passage with needle and thread; when she came to the loop she failed to go right, and the effect was bungled and incomplete. ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... "You bungled, you fool kids!" he said in disgust, "and Huldah, what did you want to let on to mudder for that he thought we was hers? You ought to have torn up the note he left and just said he'd put twenty-five thousand in the ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Jones to turn and look once more, while the old gentleman, still benevolent, said, "Yer langwidge means pleasanter than it sounds, kid." He glanced at the boy's holster, and knew he need not keep a very sharp watch as to that. Its owner had bungled over it once already. All the old gentleman did was to place himself next the boy on the off side from the holster; any move the tenderfoot's hand might make for it would be green and unskilful, and easily anticipated. The company lined up along the bar, and the bottle slid from glass ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... a move on, Billy! What are you monkeying about?" said the doctor quite crossly. He was anxious to escape from a position that had become intolerable to him. For months he had been looking forward to this meeting and now he had bungled it. In the first place he had begun by not knowing the girl who for three years and more had been in his dreams day and night, then he had carried himself like a schoolboy in her presence, and lastly had frightened her almost to death by his clumsy announcement of ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... something else; he never thought of a book so long as there were things to see. Some things were different from others, it is true. Things of the outer world, where he swaggered among his fellows and was thrashed, or bungled his lessons and was thrashed again, imprinted themselves vividly on his mind, and he hated the impressions. When Swipey Broon was hot the sweat pores always glistened distinctly on the end of his mottled nose—John, as he thought angrily of Swipey this afternoon, saw ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... our lives is like a piece of knitting, terribly botched and bungled in most cases. There are stitches which are dropped, sometimes to be swallowed up and forgotten in the superstructure, sometimes to be picked up again after a lapse of years. These stitches are ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... wonderful effect by which the darkness of Westminster Hall was suddenly illuminated by an ingenious arrangement of sconces that caught fire and carried on the message of light with great rapidity. The heralds in whose hands the ceremonial arrangements lay bungled their business badly, causing fierce heartburnings by confusions in precedence, and displaying a lamentable ignorance of the names and the whereabouts of many wearers of stately and ancient titles. When the King expressed ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... determine the suitableness of games. To illustrate, the author has known the game of Three Deep, which is one of the best gymnasium games for men, to be played with great interest and ability by a class of six-year-old boys; and the same game stupidly and uninterestedly bungled over by a class of much older boys who had not had previous training in games and were not alert and resourceful. Similarly, the comparatively simple game of Bombardment may be interesting and refreshing for a class of tired ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... the same question before. "What could he say? Anyway, if he had a statement to make, and his statement was worth taking, why, he'd be alive to-day! Raoul was the one witness that they wanted, if they only knew it. They've bungled pretty ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... toll, his eyes looked up in uncomprehending life. Conscience bent her face close to his and there was breath on his lips and nostrils. Eben had been a Machiavelli in spirit only. In effect he had bungled. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... energizing every detail—Harry Van Horn. Laramie, the man Doubleday and Pettigrew would have chosen, they had failed to enlist, and what was more serious—though this, perhaps, Doubleday did not realize—they had likewise failed to rid themselves of; Tom Stone had bungled. ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... underworld of the ancient world, and began seeking power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men, but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self-torture—in brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case of the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is not merely a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtain subjective satisfaction ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... he bungled sadly—his hearing suddenly failing as well as his memory, there was a dead stop. In vain the prompter, the scene-shifter, the candle-snuffer, as loud as they could, and much louder than they ought, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... he would have smiled, and felt truly that they had bungled in the word. Such and such things were simply his appurtenances; in London, the regard due to a gentleman who to a certain distinction in his manner of amusing himself added the achievement of a successful comedy, three lampoons quoted at all London tea-tables, and a piece of Whig invective, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... wait for the next morning to come. He bungled things horribly at first. It looked easy enough from the side lines—bringing in the plates of steaming food, doling out sugar for the tea, passing the dishpan about at the end of the meal for the inmates to yield up their knives and forks. But after the first day Fred was swept ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... at that, and drew his dagger from the sheath. I laid aside my doublet, and he followed my example, but his hands moved listlessly and his fingers bungled at the fastenings. I waited for him in some wonder, it not being like him to come tardily ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... still sit on, in the absolute silence, unconscious—unaware of any thing round me; living only in my thoughts, and with a resolution growing ever stronger and stronger within me. I will not tell her! I will never tell any one. I, that have hitherto bungled and blundered over the whitest fib, will wade knee-deep in falsehoods, before I will ever let any one guess the disgrace that has happened to me. Oh that, by long silence, I could wipe it out of my own heart—out of the book of unerasable ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... in some manner bungled the job? Or had he passed it up? He must find out how much the greener knew. The boss guessed that if the other had unearthed the plot, he would force an ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... stood there he fancied that the foot-pavement rocked beneath him; and thinking that he might perhaps lessen his sufferings by walking, he went straight on through the vegetables again. He lost himself among them. He went along a narrow footway, turned down another, was forced to retrace his steps, bungled in doing so, and once more found himself amidst piles of greenery. Some heaps were so high that people seemed to be walking between walls of bundles and bunches. Only their heads slightly overtopped these ramparts, and passed along showing whitely or blackly according to the colour of their ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Horror was first made popular by Poe, and he has had almost no successful imitators. It is unhealthy and morbid, full of a terrible charm if well done, but tawdry and disgusting if bungled. It requires a daring imagination, a full and facile vocabulary, and a keen sense of the ludicrous to hold these two in check. The plot is used only to give the setting to the story. Most any of Poe's tales would serve as an illustration, but "The ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... sent, adding that Aldobrandini was "probably not born to wear a dagger at his belt." He bade his brother present it to Filippo Strozzi, as a compliment from the Buonarroti family; but the matter was bungled. Probably Buonarroto tried to get some valuable equivalent; for Michelangelo writes to say that he is sorry "he behaved so scurvily toward Filippo ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... where Ruth had overheard Chavis and Kester, he dismounted and led his pony down it, using the utmost care. He was conserving the pony's strength. For he knew nothing of what might be required of the animal, and this thing which he had determined to do must not be bungled. ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... bungled it," Lady Carey said thoughtfully. "I will go back to him. There's that idiot of a partner of mine. I must go and ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... prepared to preach, Or rather, to make a nice serious speech; But it might as well have been written in Dutch for her, For the wind and the weather, conspiring together, Turned out to be, altogether too much for her; One half she forgot, and she bungled the rest of it, Though I finally managed to pick out the best of it. She asked her companion, who stood in the lee of her, For the wind spread her skirts to the bigness of three of her, "Who sent these ships to the rescue of those, Who have perilled ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... Bandinello used for his Hercules and Cacus was quarried for our incomparable Michel Agnolo Buonarroti. He had made the model for a Samson with four figures, which would have been the finest masterpiece in the whole world; but your Bandinello got out of it only two figures, both ill-executed and bungled in the worst manner; wherefore our school still exclaims against the great wrong which was done to that magnificent block. I believe that more than a thousand sonnets were put up in abuse of that detestable performance; and I know that your most illustrious Excellency remembers the ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... of his hand across his wet eyelids. His lips were growing numb, and he bungled over ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... found his courage returning as he clambered up the side of the Revenge and followed Joe aft to the quarter-deck. Unless they bungled it, there was a chance that they might escape when the pirates made their landing on the coast to refresh themselves and refit the ship. The mate on watch greeted them good-humoredly enough and bade them enter the cabin where the captain ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... I do everything that he could have done? And more. A bonehead like Jerry would have been certain to have bungled the thing somehow. I know him well. A good fellow, but in matters requiring intellect and swift thought dead from the neck up. It's a very lucky thing he is out of the running. I love him like a brother, but ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... had regarded Tom at that moment with a puzzled observation, as if she wondered if she had seen him before; and now, as Tom hesitated and bungled at the "Miss Smith," Peggy's own manner showed signs of consciousness, if not of embarrassment. Oh, oh! what could it all mean but that he had known everything from the first? "And I fancied at the first he acted as he did because he thought she wasn't quite fine enough; and ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... unrolled it, and fastened one end over the nose of the boat. Harris stood in the middle to take it from George and roll it on to me, and I kept by the stern to receive it. It was a long time coming down to me. George did his part all right, but it was new work to Harris, and he bungled it. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... for the ease and dexterity with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St. George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer hallway and saw that which caused ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... to depths of dumpy ugliness unworthy the name and dignity of mountains. I had formulated the idea that there should be world landscape-gardeners appointed, to work on a grand scale, and alter hills or mountains which Nature had neglected or bungled. But to-day, as we steamed down the long, narrow Lac de Bourget, sitting shoulder to shoulder, the light breeze fluttering butterfly-wings against our faces, I could not see that there was anything for the most fastidious taste to ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... muzzle and breech. Then fuses were set alight, and our men retired hastily beyond reach of the imminent explosion. After that engineers and artillerymen went back to make sure that their work had not been bungled, and saw with satisfaction that the gun-cotton had rent great holes through Big Ben's breech in two places, rendering him totally unfit for foreign service. This was the crowning act of a great achievement, and the force that had aided in its accomplishment ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... commit suicide, he had hastened upstairs to denounce Constant. He had then rushed to the girl's lodgings, and, finding his worst fears confirmed, planned at once his diabolically ingenious scheme of revenge. He told his landlady he was going to Devonport, so that if he bungled, the police would be put temporarily off his track. His real destination was Liverpool, for he intended to leave the country. Lest, however, his plan should break down here, too, he arranged an ingenious alibi by being driven to Euston for the 5:15 train to Liverpool. The ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... company was as good as an additional bottle of wine. His only chance of fame as a man of action arose from his connexion with the plot, which, however, in its issue covered him with infamy, as all bad things bungled, inevitably do to ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... a move for the door, but Mr. O'Connor stood solidly in the way. "Attention, Waverton. You have bungled your business, as usual. Your fellow Ned Boon hath been taken and lies in Newgate. He has confessed that he and his gang were hired for this murder by a certain ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... I. 'I'll admit that she surprised me. But it's the first time I ever knew one of 'em to manipulate a piece of business on time without getting it bungled up in some way,' ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... was hardly more at rest when he left her and walked to his rooms. He carried the regret of a protector of England who had bungled his task and let the wards of his suspicion break loose. The fault was not his, but he would never escape the reproach. He had no taste for taking revenge on the young woman. It would not salve his pride to visit on her pretty head ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... Others sought to ingratiate themselves by smiles of tender friendliness. He for his part employed what we would have called his knowledge of men and women upon the group, and in consequence blundered and bungled vividly, freezing with a glance an annoyed and importunate Arctic explorer who was come to talk of illustrations for an article that had been lavishly paid for in advance. The hero might have thought he was again in the northern ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... a scout. Laugh at him and make fun of him as you will, he was a scout. He was at once the littlest scout and the biggest scout that ever scouting had known. He boasted and bungled, but out of his bungling came triumph. He fell, oh such falls as he fell! But he always landed right side up. He could save the world with a blunder. And then boast ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... have put me completely beside myself again. It has been troubling me for over a year and I should like to get clear out of here. Nothing pleases me any more. The more distinctions I receive the more I feel that it is all vanity. My life is bungled, and so I have thought to myself I ought to have nothing more to do with strivings and vanities, and ought to be able to employ my pedagogical inclinations, which after all are my most characteristic quality, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... resistance offered by the Red River settlers to Canadian authority which was in question in the seventies, time would soon have brought understanding and forgetfulness. That the half-breed settlers had just grievances, that the Canadian authorities bungled badly their first experiment in national expansion, all {39} would have admitted. But the shooting in cold blood of Thomas Scott, an Orangeman of Ontario, by the order of Louis Riel, lit fires of passion ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... made no answer, nother; and thinkin' he didn't onderstand English, she tried him in Italian, and then in broken French, and then bungled out a little German; but no, still no answer. He took no more notice of her and her mister, and senior, and mountsheer, and mynheer, than if he never heerd them titles, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... butcher a hero, when a poet wants the brains to save him. It being therefore only necessary, according to the laws of the drama, that Sebastian should no more be seen upon the throne, I leave it for the world to judge, whether or no I have disposed of him according to art, or have bungled up the conclusion of his adventure. In the drawing of his character, I forgot not piety, which any one may observe to be one principal ingredient of it, even so far as to be a habit in him; though I shew him once to be transported from it by the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... that you had had a very experienced cook and waitress; dinner would, of course, not have been bungled, but it would have lacked something, somewhere, if you added nothing of your own personality to its perfection. It is almost safe to make the statement that no dinner is ever really well done unless the hostess herself ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the most eager attention, did not speak for a minute. The sense of failure was strong upon him. How he had bungled ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... with Imperial Union, but essential to it. Grattan and his Irish friends, ignorant of the true solution, honestly thought, in the intoxication of the moment, that they had solved the problem so disastrously bungled for America. The facts of ethnology and geography seemed to have been recognized. Ireland and England, united by a Crown which both reverenced, stood together, like Britain and the Dominions of to-day, as sister nations, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... happily allied. Provided that his clerk was good, What though he nothing understood? 70 In church and state, the sorry race Grew more conspicuous fools in place. Such heads, as then a treaty made, Had bungled in the cobbler's trade. Consider, patrons, that such elves, Expose your folly with themselves. 'Tis yours, as 'tis the parent's care, To fix each genius in its sphere. Your partial hand can wealth dispense, But never give a blockhead sense. ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... this was foolishness. Kenneth couldn't go—he admitted that himself—and Walter couldn't—thank goodness for that—and Jem and Jerry would have more sense. She wouldn't worry—she would enjoy herself. But how awkward Mark Warren was! How he bungled his steps! Why, for mercy's sake, did boys try to dance who didn't know the first thing about dancing; and who had feet as big as boats? There, he had bumped her into somebody! She would ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hall in no pleasant frame of mind. The whole affair had been bungled by his stupidity. He passed through the door which Hartmann presently opened at the end of the hall, and found himself in a long narrow passage, lit by a single electric lamp. Hartmann closed the door carefully behind him, and came on down the corridor, his footsteps echoing ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... last fortnight, and my play was damned last week! These are like 'the eight-and-twenty misfortunes of Harlequin.' But they must be borne. If I give in, it shall be after keeping up a spirit at least. I should not have cared so much about it, if our southern neighbours had not bungled us all out of freedom for these five ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... that quill-driver is like poison and brimstone to me. An ugly, contraband knave, smuggled into the world by some lewd prank of the devil—with his malicious little pig's eyes, foxy hair, and nut-cracker chin, just as if Nature, enraged at such a bungled piece of goods, had seized the ugly monster by it, and flung him aside. No! rather than throw away my daughter on a vagabond like him, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... not going to be the conventional massacre by any means. The First had scored an unconverted try five minutes after the kick-off, and it was after this that the Second began to get together. The school back bungled the drop out badly, and had to find touch in his own twenty-five, and after that it was anyone's game. The scrums were a treat to behold. Payne was a monument of strength. Time after time the Second had ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... primarily is that the attempt was made without obtaining my consent, and secretly," Velladon was saying, with a toothy grin but in a voice that shook with open fury. "And now it's been made and bungled, you have a nerve asking for our help. The problem is yours—and you better take care of it fast! ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... the packing room of the flour mill with the master's eye, he was in the cooperage, the center of a group round one of the hooping machines. It had got out of gear, and the workman had bungled in shutting off power; the result was chaos that threatened to stop the whole department for the rest of the day. Ranger brushed away the wrangling tinkerers and examined the machine. After grasping the problem in all its details, he threw himself flat upon ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... fantastic web. His editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be my place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... cover. I wanted Glenister, but you let him slip through your fingers—now it's war. What a mess you've made! If I had even ONE helper with a brain the size of a flaxseed, this game would be a gift, but you've bungled every move from the start. Bah! Put a spy in the bull-pen with those prisoners and make them talk. Offer them anything ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... home to themselves, they merely picked up and paid an ordinary Sicilian stabber who had no heart in the matter, who probably never heard of me before in all his life, and had no partisan hatred to drive him on. So he dallied, and bungled; and then you two intervened, and his game was hopeless. He'll not try it again, you ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... can,—even if I was silly enough to let my scow run into a reef to-night, that wasn't here in my day. They sent me to take charge of the job and to straighten out its mixups and to try to win where the others had bungled. I was doing it, too,—and it would have been a big feather in my cap, at Washington, when my good sense went to pieces on a reef named Claire Standish,—a reef I hadn't counted on, any more than I counted on the reef that stove in my scow, an ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... on deck in the foggy dawn, the dim island five miles off seemed only dawning too, a shapeless thing, half-formed out of chaos, as if the leagues of gray ocean had grown weary of their eternal loneliness, and bungled into something like land at last. The phrase "making land" at once became the simple and necessary expression; we had come upon the very process itself. Nearer still, the cliffs five hundred feet in height, and the bare conical hills of the interior, divided ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... "You have bungled the affair, Foster. It is not well-managed; it is not clever. You were to have brought him to me, to have let me know the instant he reached Paris. I would have seen him. Just as he was, I should have succeeded. Now it may be that this woman has warned him already. She is very clever. ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of Poritol's; nor was it likely that, as protector of the interests of his countrymen, he would go so far as to accompany them on their errands unless much was at stake. Perhaps Poritol was Alcatrante's tool and had bungled some important commission. It occurred to Orme that the secret of the bill might be connected with the negotiation of a big business concession in Alcatrante's country. "S. R. Evans" might be trying to get control of ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... subtle and delicate than the last; and that I might expect some very considerable recognition if I carried it through rightly. I longed to be at it. One half of my longing came from the desire to occupy my mind with something better than my poor bungled love-affairs; and the other half from a frantic kind of determination to shew my Mistress Dolly that I was better than she thought me; and that I was man enough to attend to my affairs and carry them out competently, ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... her friend upon the evening of her return. How was it that the lie had flowed so smoothly from her lips? To her knowledge she had never deliberately lied before. She would have supposed that, because of this fact, falsehood would come difficult to her, that she would have bungled, hesitated, stammered. But it was the reverse that had been the case. The facility with which she had uttered the lie was what now began to disturb and to alarm her. It argued some sudden collapse of her whole system of morals, some fundamental ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... Paul bungled that affair of his," Mayenne went on at his own pace. "It might have been a blunder to kill you; it had certainly been a pity. Though we Lorraines have two murders to avenge, I have changed my mind about beginning ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... v. Seyfried to direct my Opera, as I wish on this occasion to see and hear it myself from a distance; in this way my patience will at all events not be so severely tried as when I am close enough to hear my music so bungled. I really do believe that it is done on purpose to annoy me! I will say nothing of the wind-instruments; but all pp.'s, cresc., discresc., and all f.'s and ff.'s may as well be struck out of my Opera, for no attention whatever is paid ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... to me as you've bungled it somehow,' said Nimrod, gloomily. 'I ought to have gone and seen 'er myself, I was afraid you'd make a mess of it,' he added in a wailing tone. 'It's always the same; everything that I don't ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... sob and a couple more before she succeeded in heaving the saddle upon the back of the flinching sorrel. Because she took up the saddle by horn and cantle instead of doing it as Jean had taught her, she bungled its adjustment upon the horse's back. Then the sorrel began to dance away from her, and Robert Grant Burns swore under ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... good-humoredly. "I believe another month or two of it would have worn me out. It's considerably pleasanter and more profitable to act as your understudy; but a fairly proficient carpenter might have bungled the matter." ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... in learning to write down the letters than he was to read them. His hands were so accustomed to the rein, the bow, and the sword that they bungled over the work of forming letters. Nevertheless, by the time the Percys returned, three months and a half after his arrival at the castle, he could both read and write short and simple words; and as these formed a large proportion of English speech, at ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children. They were only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... of course. He would do so. He trembled with excessive nervousness, and but for the sharp, contemptuous directions given him by Miss Sparkes must have hopelessly bungled the undertaking. Indeed, it was not easy to carry out in the confusion before a theatre when the audience is leaving, and bearing in mind the regulations concerning vehicles. Their scheme was based upon the certainty ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... consented, but would not listen to her suggestion that in the meantime he should go to some watering-place. He would be quite well in a day or two, and there was no rest for him, he said, until the work so sadly bungled was properly done. He did not believe his plans were defective, and could not help doubting whether they had been faithfully carried out. But the builder, a man of honest repute, protested also that he could not account for the yielding of the wall, except he had had ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... flirtations its varying governments in different centuries have carried on with Ravenna, or Naples, or Florence. You can imagine no Residenz for Austria but the Kaiserstadt,—the gemuthlich Wien. But there are other capitals where men have arranged things and consequently bungled them. The great Czar Peter slapped his imperial court down on the marshy shore of the Neva, where he could look westward into civilization and watch with the jealous eye of an intelligent barbarian the doings of his betters. Washington is another specimen ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... pathos in this criminal's voice and attitude confused the listener. For the life of her she could not deal with the situation in any ordinary fashion; it seemed like a dramatic incident bungled by amateurs. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... went on. At last Mr. Granger mounted the pulpit and began to read his sermon, of which the text was, "But the greatest of these is charity." Geoffrey noticed that he bungled over some of the words, then suddenly remembered Beatrice had told him that she had written the sermon, and was all attention. He was not disappointed. Notwithstanding Mr. Granger's infamous reading, and his habit ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... difficulty, has been the suggestion of three-dimensional existences by pigments applied to a two-dimensional surface; and this problem has naturally been most successfully handled by the artists possessing most energy and imagination, and equally naturally shirked or bungled or treated parrot-wise by the artists of less energy and imagination. And, as energy and imagination also show themselves in finer perception, more vivid empathy and more complex dealings with shapes which are only two-dimensional, it has come about ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... he answered, still without getting up. There was no other chair near the awning, so I had to remain standing. I told him my name, hoping that Hassan had either not done so already, or else that he might have so bungled the pronunciation as to make it unrecognizable. I detected no sign of ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy |
