"Tangle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the trustiest of the crew, put on our diving suits, and soon we were walking the slippery decks once trodden by Spanish grandees and soldiers, and the scene of many a bloody fight I'll be bound. Their skeletons lay about the deck, wrapped in sea-tangle, and from every crevice of the galleon, tall, red, and green, and yellow, and purple weeds had sprung, that waved and shivered with the motion of the sea. Her decks were strewn with shells and sand, and in and ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... him, thoughtful to sadness, its dusky fairness set in black, but attentive, as always, to the sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at became at once more significant to him—the tangle of tenacious roots that thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods, the swift, awkward flight of a pheasant that crossed their way with a creaking ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Polly, looking up from the floor of her room, where Phronsie and she had thrown themselves, the piece-box of ribbons between them, "here comes Clem up the drive; now I 'most know she wants me to help her on that sofa-pillow," and she twitched a square of yellow silk into a tighter tangle. "How in the world did that spool get in here?" she exclaimed, ...
— Five Little Peppers and their Friends • Margaret Sidney
... 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 ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... others, as they stood gazing down at the scarlet-coated figure lying with its face hidden by a drooping tangle of hops caused by the breaking of ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... haste was evidently 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 and ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... the thickest. Why, I had Gerrish fairly by the throat at last, and I was just reaching for the balm of Gilead with my other hand to give him a dose that would have done him for one while! Ah, it's too bad, too bad! Well! well! But—haw! haw! haw!—didn't Gerrish tangle himself up beautifully in his rhetoric? I guess we shall fix Brother Gerrish yet, and I don't think we shall let Brother Peck off without a tussle. I'm going to try print on Brother Gerrish. I'm going to ask him in the Hatboro' Register—he ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... into his car and took the wheel; and Stull watched them threading a tortuous path through the traffic tangle of Broadway. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... refuses to honor Sanderson's check. Claim money belongs to Bransford estate. Legal tangle. Must have cash or ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... who had access to his rooms often wondered how he ever got out of them looking so immaculate, for they were a perfectly impassable jungle to the stranger. Such a tangle of trunks, hand-bags, rug bundles, clothes, boots, pajamas, newspapers, scrap-books, B. & S. bottles, could hardly be found anywhere else in the world. He had a fondness for newspaper clippings, and had trunks of them, sorted into bundles or pasted ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... discussion and dispute throughout Great Britain. Archibald's title to the Douglas lands was contested by the Duke of Hamilton and the Earl of Selkirk, the former claiming as heir-male, the latter under settlements made by the Duke's father. Clever brains were set to work to solve the tangle in which the birth of the mysterious twins was involved. Emissaries were sent to France to collect evidence on one side and the other; notably Andrew Stewart, tutor to the young Duke of Hamilton, who seems to have been a perfect sleuth-hound of detective ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... as 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
... a certain wild music in words or rhythm as dithyrambic, like the dithyrambus, that is, the wild choral-singing of the worshippers of Dionysus. But Dithyrambus seems to have been, in the first instance, the name, not of the hymn, but of the god to whom the hymn is sung; and, through a tangle of curious etymological speculations as to the precise derivation of this name, one thing seems clearly visible, that it commemorates, namely, the double birth of the vine-god; that [26] he is born once and again; ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... dispatched; and in a few moments he returned, accompanied by a half dozen prisoners; one was a slim, dark young man with a nervous, expressive look, and a great tangle of curling black hair. The face was haggard and drawn; the eyes were frightened; the whole manner of the ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... ahead was a tangle of small flat-tops, crisscrossed by a network of badland washes and cut-bank draws, and for two miles he eluded the dog pack by sheer brainwork and cunning. But the hounds pressed him hard. Their speed was greater than his own and each time they lost sight of him ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... Bare-headed, tangle-haired, his clothes torn, no collar, blood on his shirt, on his hands, on his face, blood everywhere, a wound in his neck, another on his lip, unrecognizable, horrible to look at, but magnificent in energy, heroic and triumphant: such was the appearance presented ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... together, falling with a slow drift toward the dark forest under us. The trees seemed huge and spindly, a porous growth something on the Martian style, with huge leaves and a tangle of matter vines. They came mounting up at us as we fell with slowly ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... couple of years earlier with its newest plaything, Libya,—and concealed the bills. But Giolitti had prudently retired to his little Piedmont home in Cavour. All the winter he had kept out of Rome, leaving the Salandra Government to work out a solution of the knotty tangle in which he had helped to involve his country. Nobody knew precisely what Giolitti's views were, but it was generally accepted that he preserved the tradition of the Crispi statesmanship, which had made the abortion of the Triple Alliance. If he could not openly ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... imagine that John Bulmer debated an exposure of de Soyecourt. "Live and let live" was the Englishman's axiom; the exuberant Cazaio was dead, his men were either slain or dispersed, and the whole tangle of errors—with judicious reservations—had now been unravelled to Gaston's satisfaction. And Claire de Puysange was now Duchess of Ormskirk. Why, then, meddle with Destiny, who appeared, after all, to possess a ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... church harmonized perfectly with the poetic tangle of the humble exterior, the luxury and art of which was bestowed by Time, for once in a way charitable. Within, the eye first went to the roof, lined with chestnut, to which age had given the richest ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... several. I shall come to this third sister presently, of whom I make but passing mention here. She was our flower, our pearl, our little ewe-lamb—the loveliest and the last—and I must not trust myself to linger with her memory now, or I shall lose the thread of my story, and tangle it with digression. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... woods, deserted and neglected old graveyards—the most lonely and forlorn of all sad places—by their broken and fallen headstones, which surround a half-filled-in and uncovered cellar, show that once a meeting-house for New England Christians had stood there. Tall grass, and a tangle of blackberry brambles cover the forgotten graves, and perhaps a spire of orange tiger-lilies, a shrub of southernwood or of winter-killed and dying box, may struggle feebly for life under the shadow of the "plumed ranks of tall wild cherry," and prove that once ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... had advanced six pages into it. Then he veered about to the story itself. He enlarged on the amount of wealth harbored by a national bank. He explained how this vast wealth was hoarded and protected, the massive walls, the steel vaults, the steam flood pipes, the ever-watching attendants, the tangle of articulate wires that a touch would make garrulous, the time locks, the floors of cement and railway iron, the contact mats which reported the slightest footfall ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... electrician's. The only trouble, however, in buying small quantities is that you may have to pay a large price in proportion. If you get it on 1/2 lb. spools you can handle it much better (see App. 23) than you can if you have it in a tangle. It is well to have 1/2 lb. of No. 24 or 25 for electro-magnets, current-detectors, etc., etc. 1/2 lb. of No. 30 will not be too much, if you make induction coils. If you handle your wire carefully, single cotton-covered ...
— How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus • Thomas M. (Thomas Matthew) St. John
... who had the other team, they were lowered by means of an Alpine rope into the crevasse until they could get at the dogs. They, found the poor animals swinging round, snapping at one another and howling dismally, but in an awful tangle. The dogs were rescued a pair at a time and, fortunately for all concerned, they lay down and rested when hauled up to the surface by Uncle Bill and "Cherry." When all the animals were up and Scott and Meares themselves had regained safety, a dog fight ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... there was more discussion of the strange tangle of events, which now seemed to be about to be cleared up. Indeed, it took many days for them to thrash the subject out completely, but it would hardly do to write another book on matters now essentially explained so we must ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... hung from the fine patent rod which I carried over my shoulder. I never could undo the tangle of how it all came about; but, in my embarrassment, I must have handled things not quite so gracefully as I intended—the line had become unwound, and the hook dangling at the end of it as I attempted to lower the rod caught in my coat collar behind, and the more I tugged the ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... matter, the whole civilized world, has to deal, is the problem which has for one side the betterment of social conditions, moral and physical, in large cities, and for another side the effort to deal with that tangle of far-reaching questions which we group together when we ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 not bring himself to violate the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... and unexpected the assault had been that the whites reached the gates before the frightened natives could bar them, and in another minute the village street was filled with armed men fighting hand to hand in an inextricable tangle. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... down and cried in that patient, helpless, miserable way of hers. She didn't know just what she was crying for, herself or the children. Life was a hopeless, unmanageable tangle that seemed to give her nothing and take her all. So Mrs. Sears sat and cried. It was ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... member was a picked and trained champion. Then there was the amazing enthusiasm, experience, and skill of Father Robert, as he called himself; who knew human nature as an anatomist knows the structure of the human body; to whom the bewildering tangle of motives, good, bad and indifferent, in the soul, was as plain as paths in a garden; who knew what human nature needed, what it could dispense with, what was its power of resistance; and who had at ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... tangle of undergrowth and driftwood, they soon emerged on the loose sand above the beach. As Amos Swan had said, the rains had not yet washed away the black embers of the great bonfire, and near by lay a barrel with staves caved in. ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... am afraid that is about all that we can do for him at present," said I, as I moved across the sluggishly rolling deck toward Cunningham. I stooped beside him, and at his direction lifted the tangle of rigging beneath which the boatswain was lying, while he proceeded to cast off the lashings that had saved the inert body from being washed overboard. Then between us we dragged the man out to a clear spot on the deck, where Cunningham knelt, supporting the head and shoulders, while ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... have said, you are quite mistaken. There's a mystery somewhere. Keep his letter and show it to me. I may, perhaps, be able to unravel the tangle. I'm more than ever convinced that what I said to you last night was perfectly true. We ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... one of Milly's favourite views," said the laird, pulling up, and pointing with his whip to the scene in front, where a range of purple hills formed a fine background to the loch, with its foreground of tangle-covered stones; "she revels in depicting that sort ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... the top of the highest hill in Overstrand, the chimneys of a house showed above a thick tangle of fir-trees. Between the trees and the road rose a wall, high, compact, forbidding. Carl opened the gate in the wall and pushed his bicycle up a winding path hemmed in by bushes. At the sound of his feet on the gravel the bushes new apart, and a man ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... deep. Under the battered pith-helmet his face was as dark as the Eurasian's; but the eyes were blue, bright and small-pupiled, as they are with men who live out-of-doors, who are compelled of necessity to note things moving in the distances. The nose was large and well-defined. All framed in a tangle of blond beard and mustache which, if anything, added to the general manliness of his appearance. He, too, wore khaki, but with the addition of tan riding-leggings, which had seen anything but rocking-horse service. The man was yellow ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... booth on booth, until Nick wondered where the gardens were; and such a maze of lanes, byways, courts, blind alleys, and passages that his simple country footpath head went all into a tangle, and he could scarcely have told Tottenham Court road ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... hours of rest Wherein to seek thyself in thine own breast; A transient silence wherein truth could say Such was thy constant hope, and this thy way?— O burden of life that is A livelong tangle of perplexities! ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... in regard to the end of a play arises partly because it is everywhere easier to get things into a tangle than to get them out again; partly also because at the beginning we give the author carte blanche to do as he likes, but, at the end, make certain definite demands upon him. Thus we ask for a conclusion that shall be either quite happy or else ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... silence—trying to love this dear child as she had always loved her, even in certain evil moments of an irresistible jealousy. But she felt immensely far from Vere, distant from her as one who does not love from one who loves; yet hideously near, too, like one caught in the tangle of an enforced intimacy rooted in a past which the present denies and rejects. Directly dinner was over they parted, driven by the mutual desire ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Duvall got was that of utter confusion. People were darting here and there, in ordinary clothes, or in all sorts of makeups. Stage carpenters were creating a terrific racket, building a new scene. A tangle of electric light cables, a blinding glare from the arcs, a confusion of voices, a wilderness of scenery and "props" all combined to create an impression quite the reverse of what he had expected. Here, he felt, was something very different from the theater, something ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... coming back," she said, "if I have to tie binding twine across the road to tangle up Pleurisy's long legs. He's on his way to Cowan's, I know. Ab Cowan has quinsy. Never mind, Thursa, we'll get him. I hope now that the old doctor is too full to come—oh, no I don't either, I just hope he's away and Dr. Clay will have ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... high elevation—almost a mountain compared with the surrounding hills for miles—whence the sea could be descried, a misty mystery, not so far away; and around which sudden fogs wreathed themselves, shutting in those unfortunate enough to be on its heights in a rare tangle of perplexity when it thus chose to wrap itself up in this sullen mood. For there were ugly holes, pitfalls, and crevices in its ragged sides, making its descent a serious thing, except for adepts in climbing and scrambling down, even in the fair light of day. Moreover, there was on one side a disused ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... he tried to unravel this fresh tangle. Why was Jim Crow shadowing him? In the interests of the Indians? Again he pulled out his watch. And the woman beside him saw that his hand was shaking as he held it out to the light ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... the lock-up, a new building in the rear of the town-house. There this tangle of humanity, torn from its rock and afloat on the social sea, drifted trailing into a bare brilliant room, and at its head, cast down but not destroyed, went heavy-laden Clare, with so much in him, but only his misery patent to eyes too much used to misery to ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... could give the proper thought to the matter I surveyed the place with a clever expert and made terms for having it put in order. I was sorry to do this, for personally I liked it better as it was, with its weeds and its wild, rough tangle, its sweet, characteristic Venetian shabbiness. I had to be consistent, to keep my promise that I would smother the house in flowers. Moreover I formed this graceful project that by flowers I would make my way—I would succeed by big nosegays. I would batter the ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... all know, in great measure upon energy and good sense, but it also depends not a little upon pure luck—that is to say, upon connections which are in such a tangle that it is more easy to say that they do not exist, than to try to trace them. A neighbourhood may have an excellent reputation as being likely to be a rising one, and yet may become suddenly eclipsed by another, which no one would have thought so promising. A ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... the birds, but they were drowsy, and longed to sleep on. At last the snowdrops came up and looked shiveringly about; and a primrose leaf peeped through the ground, and died of cold. Then some violets opened their blue eyes, and, hidden beneath the tangle of the wood, listened to the twittering of the birds. The little ragged boy came by; he saw the tender flowers, and, stooping down, gathered them one by one, and put them into a wicker basket that hung upon ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... what I contrived to say at last. Struck speechless first by my relief, I continued silent from a very different cause. A new tangle of emotions tied my tongue. Raffles had failed—Raffles had failed! Could I not succeed? Was it too late? Was there ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... trading intent, and was often combined with one or both. But outlawry and fine by no means closed the incident invariably, though they sometimes did so far as the feud was concerned: and there is hardly one saga which does not mainly or partly turn on a tangle ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... the tangle. He dragged himself to his knees and hammered with his fist at an upturned face beside him. Battered, bleeding, and winded, he got to his feet and shook off the hands that reached for him. Dodging ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... 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 ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... to me, Andrei Pavlovitch!" cried Lida half peevishly, half coquettishly. "You've got my hair into such a tangle! Now I ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... by broken columns that edged the ravine and commanded the great view on which Lucrezia had been gazing. On the wall of this terrace were stone vases, in which scarlet geraniums were growing. Red roses twined around the columns, and, beneath, the steep side of the ravine was clothed with a tangle of vegetation, olive and peach, pear and apple trees. Behind the cottage rose the bare mountain-side, covered with loose stones and rocks, among which in every available interstice the diligent peasants had sown corn and barley. Here and there upon the mountains distant cottages were visible, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fate of, say, a brig sailing into the China Sea in all the perfection of order of the British Marine: at, perhaps, Hong Kong, sold to a native firm, she would be refitted under an extravagant flag, and slowly the order would depart until, in a slovenly tangle of rigging and defilement, she'd be seen yawing on secret and ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... fire in her snow-powdered silk hood, seemed in comparison a female of another and an older race. She might well, from the look of her, have come a nearer and straighter road from the inmost heart of things, from the unpruned tangle of woods and undammed course of streams, from all primitive and untempered love and passion and religion, than this gentlewoman formed upon the models of creeds ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... not think so, but he was in too dispirited a mood to argue the point. It had not been good for his peace of mind to sit and watch the color come and go in Mona's cheeks, and the laughter spring unheralded into her dear, big eyes, and the light tangle itself in the ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... the leaf-covered slope so brown and sear, and the shaggy thickets, and tried to pierce the black tangle of spruce patches. All at once, magically it seemed, my gaze held to a dark shadow, a bit of dense shade, under a large spruce tree. Something moved. Then a big bear rose right out of his bed of leaves, majestically as if disturbed, and turned his ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... next step. To each of them life had a new and terrible significance. From a calm sea it had changed to wind-rent chaos. It was revealing its potentialities,—lamb-like when asleep, lion-like when roused. Tangle-haired Tragedy had stalked forth into the midst of men ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... ready to strike quick and hard when the moment came, after an hour of casting. Half the time you would not see your fish at all, but only hear the savage plunge as he swirled down with your fly. At other times, as you struck sharply at the plunge, your fly would come back to you, or tangle itself up in unseen snags; and far out, where the verge of the firelight rippled away into the darkness, you would see a sharp wave-wedge shooting away, which told you that your trout was only a musquash. Swimming quietly ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Her lawyers sent for her, you know. Something about a tangle in her father's business. Funny you hadn't heard; she ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... it is That keeps the 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 gallop headlong ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... shop. While he was still trying to lay hold of an end of the spinning tangle of his thoughts and draw it forth in the hope that all would follow, she returned, fright in her eyes. She clasped her hands nervously and her cheeks blanched. "Mr. Feuerstein!" she exclaimed. "And he's coming here! ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... his daughter's birthday. It was a delightful evening, and the wide French windows which led on to the verandah were open, letting in a gentle breeze from the ocean. Outside there was a kind of screen of tropical plants, and through the tangle of the boughs the guests, seated at the table, could just see the waters of the bay glittering in the pale moonlight. Brian was seated opposite to Madge, and every now and then he caught a glimpse of her bright face from behind ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Over the cabin hung an air of neglect which even Samson was swift to note, and most significant of all, Elsa's knitting had fallen to the floor and become the plaything of a kitten, which evoked no reprimand, tangle the yarn ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... long life before him to undertake. I do it in a half-jesting spirit, refusing to take death seriously. I pledge myself to an act of helpfulness which I regard at first as merely an incident in my career of beneficence. I am gradually caught in the tangle of a drama which at times develops into sheer burlesque, and before I can realise what is going to happen, it turns into ghastly tragedy. I am overwhelmed in grotesque disaster—it is the only word. Instead of creating happiness all around me, I have played havoc with ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... a little grassy lane that skirted the stunted oaks. A few hundred feet from the street stood a cottage built of yellow "Milwaukee" brick. It was quite hidden from the street by the oak grove. The lane ended just beyond in a tangle of weeds and undergrowth. On the west side there was an open, marshy lot which separated the cottage in the trees from Stoney Island Avenue,—the artery that connects Pullman and the surrounding villages ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... was over, that Miss Nelson was going to marry the Duc de Divonne (she went out of the room to get engaged to him). For Sir Samuel, a telegram from his London solicitors advising him to hurry home and straighten out some annoying business tangle. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... to me all this came out in a haphazard tangle of unfinished sentences, interruptions, fresh starts, questions, answers, repetitions ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... family. It's a big one—all brothers." Thus the sergeant disposed his men quietly and quick through the labyrinth till they became invisible to each other; and all the while flights of Indians passed, half seen, among the tangle, fleeting visions of yellow and red through the quiet-colored twigs. Others squatted stoically, doing nothing. A few had guns, but most used arrows, and had these stacked beside them where they squatted. Keyser singled out a somewhat central figure—Fur Cap was his name—as his ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... short sentences he explained to the inspector the facts about the letter and the cipher. MacDonald sat with his chin on his hands and his great sandy eyebrows bunched into a yellow tangle. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lights began to appear like fireflies, up and down the Grand Canal, I sat in a little balcony of my hotel watching the scene. A serenading party, backing their boats out into the stream, had formed a small blockade, and in the group of gondolas that awaited the unraveling of the tangle I spied Enrico. He had a single passenger, a lady in the inevitable black mantilla, holding in her hands the inevitable fan. A second glance at the lady—and sure enough! it was Mona Lisa. I ran downstairs, stepped out across the moored line of gondolas, took up a hook, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... midst of wools, knitting, and fancy work, lay the white kitten fast asleep! This was not the worst, for it had evidently amused itself first by a game of play. All the skeins of wool were twisted up in a tangle, and a quantity of silk was wound ...
— Black, White and Gray - A Story of Three Homes • Amy Walton
... then, invoking the saints of heaven, and imploring her in their name—she who was so wise and strong—to discover some way out of this tangle in which his madness had ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... humour of it brought us down screaming with laughter in a tangle on the slag-heap. A searchlight broke out from the back of the Hun trenches and began ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... stone over the grave, that you may know where it lies. It must be so, the body cannot be here any longer. Take the thing, which lies there. I had tried before to cut it out for you, for you complained yesterday that your hair was all in a tangle because you had not a comb, so I tried to carve you one out of bone. There were none at the shop in the oasis, and I am myself only a wild creature of the wilderness, a sorry, foolish animal, and do ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "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 of ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into a cuplike ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... the Governorship of East Africa, was Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University. Equally admired are his researches into Chinese linguistics and his monograph, the first in the language, on that most obscure subject, Finnish grammar.[88] Will it be believed that in her account of the Balkan tangle Miss Durham does not quote Sir Charles Eliot, but Mr. Horatio Bottomley? It seems that Mr. Bottomley has not devoted much attention to the Balkans, since in November 1920 he poured the vials of his wrath upon ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... imagine for themselves. Perhaps humanity likes to be told how black it is, how far it is from the perfectness after which Nature is blundering and staggering. I know not; but it is manifest that when this grim old man, with the ivory face, the black, flashing eyes, the tangle of white hair and the tangle of beard, leans over the rostrum and calls sin 'beastly' and 'devilish' and 'nasty' the people sit as white and spellbound as ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... clink, clank! tingle, tangle! tingle, tangle! Are demons smiting ringing hammers into Mr. Verdant Green's brain, or is the dreadful bell summoning him to ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the joy of reunion with her father; for both were adepts in the fine art of loving, the touchstone of every human relation. And in talk with him she could straighten out her tangle of impressions, her secret doubts ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... off successfully, save that a German operator in a Bleriot came to grief, crashing down to the ground, wrecking his machine, and breaking an arm. But he only laughed at that, and coolly demanded another cigarette, as he crawled out of the tangle of wires, ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... and bent over her to say goodbye, she put her arms round him, that seemed such frail and childish arms now, yet withal so deadly in power. Her soft arms round his neck, her tangle of hair over his face. And yet, even as he kissed her, he felt her deadly. He wanted to be gone. He wanted to get out of her arms and her clinging and her tangle of hair and her curiosity and ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... Boston for a week-end, had separated momentarily at its end, to meet at the last of the afternoon trains for Gotham. A had the joint finances and tickets for the trip; but B, hurrying through the traffic tangle of South Station, just ninety seconds before the moment of departure, knew that he would find him already in the big Pullman observation car. He was not asked to show his ticket at the train gate. Boston, with the fine spirit of the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... high noon is as silent as "sunless retreats of the ocean," gay-plumaged birds are not sitting on every bough singing plaintive, melodious notes; such lovely pictures exist solely in the mind of the poet or of him who has never visited the tropics. In the thick tangle of leaves and branches overhead, the larger birds are seen with difficulty, even after considerable practice, and the smaller birds appear as but a flash of light, as they dart through the interlacing palms and vines; the apparition, with its sudden gleam and instant disappearance, starts the ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... the spring, when the garden was bursting into bloom in the warm southern sunshine, Grandmother and Lindsay would sit in the arbor, where the vines crept over and over in a tangle of bloom, and listen to a serenade. Music, music everywhere! Over their heads, behind their backs, the little brown bees would fly, ...
— Mother Stories • Maud Lindsay
... disclose to sift this mystery of Colonel Weatherby to the bottom, if possible, and then to fix the guilt where it belongs. By accident you have come into possession of certain facts that would be important in unravelling the tangle, but through your unfortunate affliction you are helpless to act in your own capacity. You need an ally with more strength and experience than yourself, and I propose you accept me as that ally. Together we ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... for the next week and 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, ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... before he went back to his own home, now so strange to him, he was out with her, searching for some lost turkey-chicks, and found one with its foot caught in a tangle of rusty wire. The little creature had beaten itself almost to death in its struggle to get away. Kneeling in the grass, and feeling the wild palpitations of its heart under his rescuing hand, he had ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... to fall impotently on the body of the man who now grappled with him, face to face, Hector Hall throwing himself into the tangle from the rear. Mackenzie, seeing his assault shaping for a speedy end in his own defeat, now attempted to break away and seek shelter in the dark among the bushes. He wrenched free for a moment, ducked, ran, only to come down in a few yards with Hector Hall ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... which leaves the brows unmarred by those corrugations known as frowns. Yet his thoughts were far from philosophic. Indeed, his soul was in mad turmoil. He could have thrown his arms toward the blue sky and cursed aloud the fates that had set this new tangle at his feet. He longed for the jungles and some mad beast to vent his wrath upon. But he gave no sign. He had returned with a purpose as hard and grim as iron; and no obstacle, less powerful than death, should divert or control him. Abduction? Let the public ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... matter, but I am thoroughly convinced of one thing. If you can find the murderer of Morris Barnes, you will solve, at the same time, the mystery of Bentham's death. It is the same affair; part and parcel of the same tangle." ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... left the Gardens and walked rapidly towards Portland Place. He had hardly got past the fountain presented by Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy in wasted benevolence, than he heard the deafening report of the bomb which had wrecked his studio, reduced it to a tangle of iron girders and stanchions, strewn its floor with brick rubble and thick dust, and left his wife a human wreck, lying unconscious with a broken spine, surrounded by splinters of glass, broken jars, porcelain trays, and nasty-looking ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... smothered in a dark tangle of shrubbery. Peter called twice before he heard the shuffle of house slippers, and then saw the Captain's ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... the library's resources. Then I took up picture puzzles. Mr. Tracy brings them out to me every week, but we both get cross about them because they interest us so that we spend half his precious day over them! Just now I am trying to teach myself to knit, out of a book, and I'm in a dreadful tangle. I think the chamber-maid knows how, and I mean to ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... and slated houses passed before Mrs. Munt's inattentive eyes, a series broken at one point by six Danish tumuli that stood shoulder to shoulder along the highroad, tombs of soldiers. Beyond these tumuli habitations thickened, and the train came to a standstill in a tangle that ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... continual and steep circle, is immense. They slip and slide, and get their legs over the traces, and are dragged up against the rocks; carriage, horses, harness, all a confused heap. The Brave, and I, and the postilion, were constantly at work, in extricating the whole concern from a tangle, like a skein of thread. We broke two thick iron chains, and crushed the box of a wheel, as it was; and the carriage is now undergoing repair, under the window, on the margin of the lake: where a woman in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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 close to the Terror, snuggled against him, and put an ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... most difficult pass in the mountain, where the trail stumbled over broken masses of rock and through a thick tangle of laurel. The walls of the pass were high and the trees at the top shut out the sunlight. It was damp and ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... struggled in the water, was like a fly in the web of a spider, for every effort seemed only to increase the tangle. He could not break that which yielded on every side, but with fresh lengths coming over the lugger's side to tangle him the more. Even if he had had an open sharp knife in his hand he could hardly have cut himself free, and in the horror of ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... of her upper works—I swear I could see the tangle of ropes and slatting canvas—came a voice that rang in my ears for many a day, no matter how the others heard ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... Brahmanism, and Hinduism respectively. The first is the period of the Vedas, or earliest sacred books; the second, of the Brahman philosophy, fundamentally pantheistic; the third is the period of "a confused tangle of divine personalities and incarnations." Sir M. Monier Williams' standard work on the religion of the Hindus is "Brahmanism and Hinduism." "Hinduism," he tells us, "is Brahmanism modified by the creeds and superstitions of Buddhists ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... another the seven beads or globes of the same size in coadunition to form this earth chain. To the student who is thoroughly grounded in the eastern physics this interweaving of the physical and metaphysical presents no difficulties; but to the western mind just beginning the study it is a tangle. ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... to Fate without unseemly wrangle: Such complications frequently occur— Life is one closely complicated tangle: Death is the only ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... midday sun however clouded as the afternoon passed on. The thickets and forests grew more dense. From the distance came now and then the faint, sweet call of a trumpet, but everything was hidden from sight by the dense tangle of the Wilderness, a wilderness as wild and dangerous as any in which Henry Ware had ever fought. How it all came back to him! Almost exactly a year ago he had ridden into it with Jackson and here the armies were ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... table, and began to drag at the canvas and tangle of rope, and blocks, but there was no attack made upon him, and he struggled on till he was obliged to give up ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... smoking he watched her lazily. She handled his books with a great deal of awe. She opened one of them and sat on the floor in the childlike way she often had. She read several sentences aloud. It was a tangle of technical words on ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... to go to the Opera as she intended, and chose to stay at home the whole evening. But once alone she pulled the flowers from her hair and stamped upon them; she tore off the gown and scarf and trampled them underfoot, like a goat caught in the tangle of its tether, which struggles till death comes. Then she went ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... and down another avenue into the thick tangle of traffic, which scared them both, and so back to the hotel, the Captain saying: "My! my! but she has grown. 'Tis twenty years ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... little while Mr. Crow stood like a black statue and peered at the tangle where Dickie Deer Mouse had disappeared. But Mr. Crow couldn't see him anywhere. And at last his patience ...
— The Tale of Dickie Deer Mouse • Arthur Scott Bailey
... of these incidents 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 ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... jutting rock. Only a bush wren could have hidden its nest more completely—Bruce had been lucky in spying it out. He told White that there was but one unprotected approach—a long unused trail that led down from the cliff-top and ended in a briar tangle fifty feet above the ledge. That trail, it was evident, 'Kep' Queen did not ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the ghoul in the grave was a long tangle of black hair defiled with clay: but this was such an anti-climax that it received little attention. Suddenly, with a short exclamation and a gesture of excitement, the young man unearthed a fragment of grayish rock, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce |
