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More "Ingenuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... collecting the junior boarders, who came to her meeting out of sheer curiosity to see what she could possibly want with them. For once blunt plain-spoken Merle was silver-tongued, and advocated her club with all the ingenuity of ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... library of his new cathedral in the western transept, with an ingenuity of contrivance and a dignity of conception peculiarly his own. On the level of what in a Gothic church would have been the triforium, he constructed, both on the north and south side, a large and lofty room. It was his intention that each of these rooms should be used as ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... only in trivial quantities, at enormous expense and with exceeding labour; it is so volatile that you cannot keep it for three days. I have sometimes thought that with a little ingenuity I might make it more stable, I might so modify it that, like radium, it lost no strength as it burned; and then I should possess the greatest secret that has ever been in the mind of man. For there would be no end of it. It would continue to ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... lately finished planting," grandfather explained to me. "The crows are very bold this spring. Halstead and Addison have been displaying their ingenuity out there, to ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... have been felt more and more deeply, as the years have rolled on, by students of human society. To ward them off, theory after theory has been put on paper, especially in France, which deserve high praise for their ingenuity, less for their morality, and, I fear, still less for their common-sense. For the theorist in his closet is certain to ignore, as inconvenient to the construction of his Utopia, certain of those broad facts of human nature which ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... by the General Council of the Cherokee Nation, for his ingenuity in the invention ...
— Se-Quo-Yah; from Harper's New Monthly, V. 41, 1870 • Unknown
... agreeable; and he longed to make an exchange of partners without exciting the jealousy or shocking the morality of Dee. This was a difficult matter; but to a man like Kelly, who was as deficient in rectitude and right feeling as he was full of impudence and ingenuity, the difficulty was not insurmountable. He had also deeply studied the character and the foibles of Dee; and he took his measures accordingly. The next time they consulted the spirits, Kelly pretended to be shocked at their language, and refused to tell Dee what they had said. Dee ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... on the accumulation of wealth and the attainment of a certain point of maturity. Canals are a still later result of civilization, and are undoubtedly the greatest efforts for the encouragement of barter, and the developement of industry, to which human power and ingenuity have yet given birth. But after all, what are these artificial channels of communication, these ne plus ultras of human contrivance, compared with those natural mediums of intercourse, those mighty rivers which pervade every quarter of the globe? What are they ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... one of their enemies and one of the finest specimens in the whole herd. As, at the time of his death, he had been standing in a shallow part of the river, it was possible with great trouble to drag the huge carcass out, but it took the strength of ten horses and the ingenuity of as many ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... rightly understood had nothing but the present world in view, it would be very insufficient; for there are many sacrifices which can only find their recompense in another; and whatever ingenuity may be put forth to demonstrate the utility of virtue, it will never be an easy task to make that man live aright who has no thoughts of dying. It is therefore necessary to ascertain whether the principle of interest rightly ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... acquaintance with individual objects; the operations of the rational faculties, on the other hand, if allowed to go on without a constant reference of external things, can lead only to empty abstraction and barren ingenuity. Real speculative knowledge demands the combination of the two ingredients—right reason and facts to reason upon. It has been well said, that true knowledge is the interpretation of nature; and therefore it requires both the interpreting mind, and nature for its ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... ingenuity in screening the craft from sight. Inasmuch as Otto had forgotten himself so far as to sit down on the very tree for which he was searching without once suspecting his forgetfulness, it is not to be supposed he would have discovered the boat at all ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... purchaser—is the original work of a great man fed for as many days as are necessary on bread and water, or perhaps we may say with as many onions as will keep him in good humour. That is the way by which you will always get most for your money; no mechanical multiplication or ingenuity of commercial arrangements will ever get you a better penny's ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... idea of using carbon in the form of small granules. And one of the Bell experts, named White, improved the Hunnings transmitter into its present shape. Both transmitter and receiver seem now to be as complete an artificial tongue and ear as human ingenuity can make them. They have persistently grown more elaborate, until today a telephone set, as it stands on a desk, contains as many as one hundred and thirty separate pieces, as well as a saltspoonful of glistening ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... so much bodily suffering that I was seldom told of any worldly cares, still I often fancied things were going ill both within and without our doors. Jael complained in an under-key of stinted housekeeping, or boasted aloud of her own ingenuity in making ends meet: and my father's brow grew continually heavier, graver, sterner; sometimes so stern that I dared not wage, what was, openly or secretly, the quiet but incessant crusade of my existence—the ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... putta di undici anni," and exhibited the most remarkable turn of satirical observation and humour I have ever seen before or since. Horrible in a manner as it was, it would have redeemed any performance. This demon of ingenuity and wit was little more than fourteen years old, and sang like an angel of Paradise. Another of them was the Lucrezia, the Roman matron—put into the short skirts, spangles, and mischievous peering glances of Colombina. Belviso would ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... At length a compromise was extorted from the reluctant hands of the Vice-Chancellor, and the Club was allowed to take into consideration public affairs of a date anterior to the century. It required less ingenuity than the leaders of the Union had at their command to hit upon a method of dealing with the present under the guise of the past. Motions were framed that reflected upon the existing Government under ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... with this plan of action she presented an untroubled front at breakfast, went out riding with little Ann, and shopping with her mother afterwards. Owing to this news of Miltoun the journey to Scotland had been postponed. She parried with cool ingenuity each attempt made by Lady Valleys to draw her into conversation on the subject of that meeting at Gustard's, nor would she talk of her brother; in every other way she was her usual self. In the afternoon she even volunteered to accompany ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "Saturdayers," Communist and non-Communist, and all alike spoke of these Saturday afternoons of as kind of picnic. On the other hand, I have met Communists who were accustomed to use every kind off ingenuity to find excuses not to take part in them and yet to preserve the good opinion of their ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... request, that the finest reward that could come to these young Americans who have shown such loyalty to your son, with such ingenuity and mechanical ability, is that they be encouraged to complete their technical education and then, with your son, to use their talents in a commercial way. Again congratulations for your son and those young Americans and—the best ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... is rotated. The film of iron must be exceedingly thin, because of its opacity, and hence, though the intrinsic rotating power of iron is undoubtedly very great, the observed rotation is exceedingly small and difficult to observe; and it is only by a very remarkable patience and care and ingenuity that Dr. Kerr has obtained his result. Mr. Fitzgerald, of Dublin, has examined the question mathematically, and has shown that Maxwell's theory would have enabled Dr. Kerr's ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... this obvious necessity we get an immense abstraction, worked out with all the subtle ingenuity and learning of the Cambridge professor. Mr. Cook has, in fact, used the materials he has collected with such amazing care to project therefrom just those mythological conceptions which Celt and Teuton would have worked out for themselves if they, like the Hindu ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... tempting her from word to word with a merciless ingenuity; yet she kept to her purpose; and however hopeless it seemed, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in the collection of taxes. Suppose this were true; yet the constitution allows only the means which are necessary, not those which are convenient. If such a latitude of construction be allowed this phrase, as to give any non-enumerated power, it will go to every one; for there is no one which ingenuity may not torture into a convenience, in some way or other, to some one of so long a list of enumerated powers. It would swallow up all the list of enumerated powers, and reduce the whole to one phrase. Therefore it was ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... a delicacy of sentiments did not extremely belong to my character at that time, I confess, against myself, that I perhaps too readily closed with a proposal which my candor and ingenuity gave me some repugnance to: but not enough to contradict the intention of one to whom I had now thoroughly abandoned the direction of all my steps. For Mrs. Cole had, I do not know how unless by one of those unaccountable ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... And, indeed, help used to come whenever the distress of the holy society became too urgent. One day the foundress had not a single penny left, and was, to use a common expression, at her wits' end. But, thank God, there is something better than human wits or human ingenuity in such extremities; and that is prayer. The Sister who acted as housekeeper placed her bills before the Superioress, and asked for money to buy food for the day. Mdlle. —— told her to wait a little, and went out, not knowing very well what to do next. ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... demand for a great deal of music has outstripped the supply of muscle for its production; but the ingenuity of man has partially made up for his lack of physical strength, and the sublimer harmonies may still be rendered with tolerable effectiveness, and with little actual fatigue to the artist. As we retrograde towards the condition of Primeval Man-the man with the ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... be nothing I could say?" she asked, lifting her eyes to his. "I wonder if there'd be no countercharge ingenuity could bring?" ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... were spirited and good of their kind; and though we wonder now that some of them could take in an expert, it is by no means assured that we are even to-day acquainted with the whole of Surtees' frauds. Why a man otherwise honourable, kindly, charitable, and learned, exercised his ingenuity so cruelly upon a trusting correspondent and a staunch friend, it is hardly possible to guess. The biographers of Surtees maintain that he wanted to try his skill on Scott, then only known to him by correspondence; and that, having succeeded, he was afraid to risk Scott's ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... The ingenuity and resources of the officers at South Norwalk had been fully exerted, and no result further than that already mentioned had been achieved. The evidence against Bucholz, although circumstantially telling against him, was not of sufficient weight or directness to warrant a conviction upon the ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... been disorganized for a moment by the extraordinary ingenuity of a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, was now resuming the offensive and was winning all along the line from the first. Lupin's two great adversaries, Shears and Ganimard, were put away. Isidore Beautrelet was disabled. The police were powerless. For the ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... were no hostile life-forms, there was no need for a closely knit community. Everyone who had seen it agreed that his house was the most attractive one of all, for, although it was only a standard prefab, he had used taste and ingenuity to make it a little different from ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... Mound Builders is known as Fort Ancient. Its colossal size, ingenuity in design and perfection in construction give it first rack in interest among all prehistoric fortifications, and it represents the highest point attained by this lost race in their earth-work structures. Why make a journey to Europe to ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Lamarck, genera and species have been evolved, in the main, by exactly the same process as that by which human inventions and civilisations are now progressing; and this involves that intelligence, ingenuity, heroism, and all the elements of romance, should have had the main share in the development of every herb ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... few scattered villages, surrounded with extensive cultivation, at one of which, called Buggil, we passed the night in a miserable hut, having no other bed than a bundle of corn-stalks, and no provisions but what we brought with us. The wells here are dug with great ingenuity, and are very deep. I measured one of the bucket-ropes, and found the depth of the well to be ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... professed to be a photograph of Mrs. Kirk Winfield, in which she was alluded to with reverence and gusto as one of society's leading hostesses. In the course of the article reference was made to no fewer than three freak dinners of varying ingenuity which she had provided for ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... all injuries, of which he receives, in his own opinion, a large number. He has an accurate memory for all promises made to his advantage, and he is relentless in exacting payment to the uttermost farthing. He not seldom displays a singular ingenuity in interpreting ambiguous terms for his own behoof. A youth of this kind is reported to have demanded (and received) eight apples from his mother, who had bribed him to temporary stillness by the promise of a few of that fruit, his ground being ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... speaker does not expect to be taken at his word. The love of superlatives and the want of good faith may be considered as prominent characteristics. "The readiness with which they break a promise or an agreement (wrote Colonel Hall forty years ago) can only be equaled by the sophistical ingenuity with which they defend themselves for having done so." The Quitonians, who are sensible of their shortcomings, have this standing apology: "Our vices we owe to Spain; our ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... realised how helpless man, with all his ingenuity, became in the midst of such a storm. Absolutely nothing could be done but trust themselves to the hands of God, and wait patiently ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... fought for seven years, declared that the British form of government was the best that the ingenuity of man had ever devised; and when John Adams said to him, 'without its corruptions;' 'Why,' said he, 'its corruptions are its greatest excellence; without the corruptions, it would ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... every morning went forth from the Danish camp-fires. Every noon they returned, amid a taunting racket, with armfuls of ale-skins, back-loads of salted meats, and bags bulging with the bread which they had forced the terrorized farm-women into baking for them. "They have the ingenuity of fiends!" Father Ingulph was wont to groan ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... days as the transport is tedious. That part of the capital of an individual which is employed in the carrying of his goods to and from market, is so much abstracted from his means of producing more of the article in which he exerts his ingenuity and labour, whether it be in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... Mexico an established power on her continent, with considerable opportunities for good or evil in the influence of international matters in North and Central America, and with her own future well mapped out in so much as the ingenuity of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... could offer, on the spur of the moment, the alternative explanation she demanded. Indeed it would have taken a good deal of ingenuity to construct one. It was safer, anyway, just to go ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Hyde. I have listened also to the remarks of counsel, with high interest—and especially will I commend the masterly and irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents the plaintiff. But gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of equity, to influence us at a moment so solemn as this. Gentlemen, it ill becomes us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of Heaven. It is plain to me that Heaven, in its ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet {17} will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there is nothing ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... the consequences of this saying; for the peace of the Princess, she retorted quickly: "In France, the princesses are so kind and obliging as to follow the fashions; but the good examples and good tone come to us from our princes, and our only merit is to imitate them with ingenuity." ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... rude in application. A fair degree of adaptability to purpose and environment is seen, indicating that the Casa Grande was one, and not the first, building of a series constructed by the people who erected it and by their ancestors, but the degree of skill exhibited and amount of ingenuity shown in overcoming difficulties do not compare with that found in many northern ruins. As architects, the inhabitants of the Casa Grande did not occupy the first rank ...
— Casa Grande Ruin • Cosmos Mindeleff
... doctors on so wealthy an island as Nevis, and she recovered completely, although forced to shroud not the least of her desires. But the wild despair of Warner while she was in danger, and his following devotion, his inspired ingenuity in diverting her during her term of sadness and protest, made her feel that to cherish disappointment even in her inmost soul would be flying in the face of providence; her spirits struggled up to their normal high level, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... 'My ingenuity obtained my pardon: the lady being unable to forbear laughing throughout the whole affair, to find both so uncommonly tricked; her gaoleress her prisoner, safe locked up, and as much pleased as ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... stage of literature than Shakespeare, is even more exposed to this difficulty. Shakespeare was free to take his plots where he chose, and took these old wives' tales at his own risk. The epic poet has matter of this sort forced upon him. In his treatment of it, it will be found that ingenuity does not fail him, and that the transition from the unreasonable or old-fashioned part of his work to the modern and dramatic part is cunningly worked out. "He gets over the unreason by the grace and skill of his handling,"[9] says Aristotle of a critical ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... AGE AND THE PRESENT.—A writer in the last number of Fraser's Magazine says well that, "there is in periodicals and elsewhere, a vast amount of really poetic imagery, of true and tender feeling, and cultivated ingenuity, scattered up and down in the form of verse. We have no new great poets, but very many small ones—layers, as it were, and seedlings from the lofty geniuses of the last generation, showing in every line the influence of Scott, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... as I went to and fro, I was considering the visit and departure of Bellairs. That he had got the address, I was quite certain: that he had not got it by direct questioning, I was convinced; some ingenuity, some lucky accident, had served him. A similar chance, an equal ingenuity, was required; or I was left helpless, the ferret must run down his prey, the great oaks fall, the Raphaels be scattered, the house let to some stockbroker suddenly made rich, and the name which now filled the mouths ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... from the time when he violated the Prussian constitution, shortly before the war with Denmark, until the day when through her efforts and statecraft he was driven from office,—a vanquished foe. He had used in vain every weapon against her that his ingenuity could devise. He had even gone so far as to publicly charge her with treason in betraying to the English, and through them to the French, military secrets which had been imparted to her by her husband, during the war of 1870. He had, in short, done everything that lay in his ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... were kept up during the winter, and the utility of amusements in such a settlement was not forgotten. Ingenuity was taxed to give variety to the social entertainments. Snow describes a "party" that he gave in his family mansion—"a one-story edifice about fifteen by thirty feet, constructed of logs, with a dirt roof, a ground floor, and a chimney ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... "I've had some bad times with her on that account," he said. "She shows incredible ingenuity when it's a case of getting hold of liquor. At first she couldn't eat hot food at all, she was in such a state. She's altogether fearfully shattered in soul and body, and causes ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... minister's sympathy and courage I returned to my uncle's lodging in Blackfriars Wynd, and continued to devote myself to his craft in the back of his booth in the High Street, which appealed to me greatly for ingenuity and skill. ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... the compass has been assumed for the ulterior course and termination of that river, and however wrong subsequent discovery has proved this speculative geography to have been, it is not to be regarded as useless. Theories may be far short of the truth, but while they display the ingenuity and reasoning powers of their authors, they tend to keep alive that spirit of inquiry and thirst for knowledge ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... for the reverend sleuth that he nearly always happens to be in either at the death or immediately after it, instead of being summoned a day or two later when the grotesque circumstances of the crime have baffled the panting ingenuity of Scotland Yard. You find him now in this part of England, and now in that, now in America, and now in Italy. He is, in fact, a hedge-priest and has not even a cure of souls in Baker Street. But wherever he goes with his flapping hat and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... doing what is right, of righteous conduct, surrounded by righteous friends, of sweet speech, possessed of agreeable features, capable of leading men, well-versed in policy, possessed of accomplishments, energetic in action, active, possessed of ingenuity, of a sweet temper, modest in address, patient, brave, rich, and capable of adapting his measures to the requirement of place and time. That king who succeeds in obtaining such a minister can never be humiliated or overpowered by any one. Indeed, his kingdom gradually spreads over the earth like ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... All eyes were turned towards the conqueror of Hohenlinden, and while the Procureur Imperial read over the long indictment and invoked the vengeance of the law on an attempt against the head of the Republic, it was easy to perceive how he tortured his ingenuity to fasten apparent guilt on the laurels of Moreau. The good sense of the public discerned proofs of his innocence in the very circumstances brought forward against him. I shall never forget the effect produced—so ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of dancing, and display great ingenuity in devising many grotesque and fanciful costumes for wearing upon such occasions. Every beast, bird and fish almost of which they have any knowledge, is represented in some form—the heads of bear, seal and other animals ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... home grapes in a basket. Almost always sowing, in Northern work. By Spenser, with his usual exquisite ingenuity, employed in gathering in the general harvest, and portioning it out with the Scales, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Racine, as well as Shakespeare and Milton. After that they can read what they like, but they will have a standard by which to judge other authors." He was afraid that the students wasted too much time in painting play-bills and other similar exercises of ingenuity, which lead to ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... sins a person may commit is well-nigh incalculable, which is only one way of saying that the malice of man has invented innumerable means of offending the Almighty—a compliment to our ingenuity and the refinement of our natural perversity. It is not always pleasant to know, and few people try very hard to learn, of what kind and how many are their daily offenses. This knowledge reveals too nakedly ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... For while the fact that there are indeed such things as mysteries, unsearchable judgments, and incomprehensible ways in God is plainly taught in the Bible, their nature, their how, why, and wherefore, has not been revealed to us and no amount of human ingenuity is able to supply the deficiency. Hence, in as far as God is still hidden and veiled, He cannot serve as a norm by which we are able to regulate our faith and life. Particularly when considering the question ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... society will always have its active and its passive membership. How to increase the latter from without, and how to transfer recruits from the passive to the active list, are problems that have taxed the ingenuity of not a few and have not infrequently been abandoned as insoluble. It has so long been said, "This missionary work always has to be carried on by a few," that the expression has come to have something of the force of axiomatic ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 8, August, 1889 • Various
... at that time of the wealth of other discoveries that was soon to increase enormously the complexity of their problems; or of the inferences that would be drawn from them with an ingenuity and an assurance that would task to the utmost the ability and the patience of the defenders of the ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... higher opinion of him. He is certainly well described by Coleridge as the "king of men of talent." It is curious, by the way, to compare what M. says of C.: "It is impossible to give a stronger example of a man, whose talents are beneath his understanding, and who trusts to his ingenuity to atone for his ignorance.... Shakespeare and Burke are, if I may venture on the expression, above talent; but Coleridge is ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... slowly downstairs, step by step, the perplexed man of business had time enough to reflect, that if it be possible to put a fair gloss upon a true story, the verity always serves the purpose better than any substitute which ingenuity can devise. He therefore told his learned visitor, that although his son had been incommoded by the heat of the court, and the long train of hard study, by day and night, preceding his exertions, yet he had fortunately so far recovered, as to be in condition to obey upon the instant ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... of simple and accurate costumes by the young people taking part; the collecting of suitable stage properties such as hearthbrooms, Indian pipes, and dishes of pewter. The greater the research, the keener the stimulus for imagination and ingenuity, two things that go to the making of every successful production. Fortunately, the patriotic play is inherently simple, its appeal is along broad general lines, so that it requires no great amount of money or energy to adequately produce it. And, as history is made ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... very modern, which some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human; he was also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, or rather perhaps a fanciful social system, with something of the ingenuity of Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially with much more than the flippancy attributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to charge the Utopian notions upon his morality; but their subjects and suggestions ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... constructed in the death battle from floating boards and timbers, were agonized men, women and children, their heartrending shrieks for help striking horror to the breasts of the onlookers. Their cries were of no avail. Carried along at railway speed on the breast of this rushing torrent, no human ingenuity could ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... belief or order, those who maintain that such a hidden revolution took place are bound to bring positive evidence to the fact. This history of the Church during the second century has been likened with more of ingenuity than of poetical beauty to the passing of a train through a ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... a maxim which I laid down soon after a separation which I had, never to say or do to my late colleague what he could say or do against me in return. I knew that I had the personal superiority, but what his own ingenuity could not suggest, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... cook of the camp while the boat was being built. Then, loading the craft with barrel-pork, hogs, and corn, they started on their voyage south. At a place called New Salem the flat-boat ran aground; but Lincoln's ingenuity got it off. He rigged up a queer contrivance of his own invention and lifted the boat off and over the obstruction, while all New Salem stood on the bank, first to criticise and ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... tired of directing his most scathing satire; but while this is entirely praiseworthy it tends a little to give a false impression of his attitude towards two of the most delightful sports which modern ingenuity has invented. After all, the scorcher and the road-hog are the least representative followers of the sports which their conduct brings into question, and it is very easy to ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... amidst the rides, biding your time, consoling yourself with cigars, and not swearing at the vile perfidious, unfoxlike fox more frequently than you can help. For the fox on such occasions will be abused with all the calumnious epithets which the ingenuity of angry men can devise, because he is exercising that ingenuity the possession of which on his part is the foundation of fox-hunting. There you will remain, nursing your horse, listening to chaff, and hoping. But even when the ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... unfair of him, considering that in this matter Elisabeth, and not Fate, was entirely to blame. But Christopher was always ready to find excuses for Elisabeth, whatever she might do; and this, it must be confessed, required no mean order of ingenuity just then. Elisabeth was as yet young enough to think lightly of the gifts that were bestowed upon her freely and with no trouble on her part, such as bread and air and sunshine and the like; it was reserved for her to learn ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... evil germs of such depravity should nowhere revive. Therefore, she directed her provident vigilance to the newly-discovered regions of Africa, Asia and America, for a report had reached her that the leaders of the expeditions, Christians though they were, were wickedly making use of their arms and ingenuity to establish and impose slavery on those innocent nations. Indeed, since the crude nature of the soil which they had to overcome, nor less the wealth of metals which had to be extracted by mining, required very hard work, unjust and inhuman plans were entered into; for a new traffic ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... and praised by the human nits and lice of the Seamy Side, just as the achievements in a legitimate field of a Hill or a Schwab or a Rockefeller might be talked of among petty shopkeepers and little business men. He had, as the phrase goes, everything—imagination, resource, ingenuity, ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... withdrawal of the legions is a matter which scarcely falls within the scope of this paper. Whether the place was abandoned, like other Roman walled towns, such as Silchester, etc., or whether it maintained a population throughout the dark ages, are questions which have exercised the ingenuity and imagination of several antiquarian authorities,[72] but it must be confessed that the evidence is insufficient to enable one to settle ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... effect even on the oppressed hearts of the other two. They knew now that, even if death should be their lot, Argutis would be faithful to their father and sick brother, and the slave at once showed his ingenuity and shrewdness; for, while the young people were vainly trying to think of a hiding-place for Heron and Philip, he suggested a spot which would hardly be discovered even ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of a preposterous Anti-German League. Disregarding the essential evils of the Prussian idea, this mischievous organisation has set itself to persuade the British people that the Germans are diabolical as a race. It has displayed great energy and ingenuity in pestering and insulting naturalised Germans and people of German origin in Britain—below the rank of the Royal Family, that is—and in making enduring bad blood between them and the authentic British. It busies itself in breaking up meetings at which sentiments friendly ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... affords no scope for ingenuity of conjecture! The foolish rime to which bishop Aylmer refers, is undoubtedly ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various
... epistle for different churches, leaving a blank space to be filled as occasion should require; and then it becomes impossible to explain how the reading "in Ephesus" should have been so universal in the manuscripts and versions. There is no occasion for any of this ingenuity. The omission of these words from single manuscripts is not wonderful. It finds a parallel, as Alford remarks, in the omission of the words in Rome (Rom. 1:7) from one manuscript, whether from oversight ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the cabin, the brave man betrayed the ingenuity of his preparations for his perilous Venture, and verified ed his confident statement to Renie, that she need have no fear, as in good time he would come ashore again to tell ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... suffering. A single person can experience it. But consider, my dear sir. How can you add one man's agony to another's? They are not addable quantities. Each is an individual pain, unaffected by the other. The limit of anguish which ingenuity can inflict is that utmost pang which one man ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... She had the sagacity which comes from great tenderness and loyalty, combined with a passionate nature. In such a woman's soul there is sometimes an almost supernatural instinct. She will detect danger and devise safety with a rapidity and ingenuity which are incredible. But to such a nature will also come the subtlest and deepest despairs of which the human heart is capable. The same instinct which foresees and devises for the loved ones will also recognize ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... dog o' mine always barks at sic a troop o' mendicants," remarked Cousin Ronald quietly. "I ken mendicant's the word, lads and lasses, and ye hae acted it out wi' commendable ingenuity and success." ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... fully, as I used to think, and perhaps had not altogether lost even in this strangely changed society with all its wonders. Ellen seemed delighted with my pleasure at this, that, or the other piece of carefulness in dealing with the river: the nursing of pretty corners; the ingenuity in dealing with difficulties of water-engineering, so that the most obviously useful works looked beautiful and natural also. All this, I say, pleased me hugely, and she was pleased at ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... and intelligence. One of them presented me with a small basket wrought from a species of tough grass, and ornamented with the plumage of birds of a variety of brilliant colours. It was a beautiful specimen of Indian ingenuity. ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... a little ingenuity, a bed was made up of chairs and cushions, which Molly was too worn out to resist; and having seen her sink at once into an uneasy slumber, the two returned to the larger room, where the others still held ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Finally, the half of a cocoanut shell, lined, and furnished with soft cushions of thistle down, made a good bed for the little wonder; and the nursery maid, wife of a neighboring clockmaker, and a person of ingenuity, conceived the admirable idea of suspending the cocoanut cradle from the pendulum of a great clock, in order that the infant might be rocked all the time. Madam Tom Thumb was enchanted with the invention. ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... something of a scholar-like and literary air. After allowing me a sufficient time to inspect the puppets, he advanced with a bow and drew my attention to some books in a corner of the wagon. These he forthwith began to extol with an amazing volubility of well-sounding words and an ingenuity of praise that won him my heart as being myself one of the most merciful of critics. Indeed, his stock required some considerable powers of commendation in the salesman. There were several ancient friends of mine—the novels of those happy days when my affections wavered ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it was not properly my talent, said that we, being by nature rational and lovers of ingenuity, are delighted with and admire everything that is artificially and ingeniously contrived. For as a bee, naturally loving sweet things, seeks after and flies to anything that has any mixture of honey ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... in old German towns, and the rural scenes depict a variety of agricultural instruments, together with many details of home life in the olden time. The colours of the birds and flowers are as bright as if only finished yesterday. The ingenuity of the design is very striking; no two objects are alike. It would have taken hours to have looked over ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... gratitude. At the other extreme stand relations like that with Anne Park, the heroine of Yestreen I had a Pint o' Wine, which were purely passionate and transitory. Between these come a long procession affording excellent material for the ingenuity of those skilled in the casuistry of the sexes: the boyish flame for Handsome Nell; the slightly more mature feeling for Ellison Begbie; the various phases of his passion for Jean Armour; the perhaps partly factitious reverence for Highland Mary; ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Ross had little ingenuity in the line of excuses or she would never have offered such a threadbare one as that. I wanted the chance to annihilate her and here it was. I called up Bentonville and asked if Miss Ross was there. She was, and I said, "Isn't it possible for you to invent a better excuse than ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... the Waverley Novels generally display much ingenuity, and are interestingly involved; but there is not one in the conduct of which it would not be easy to point out a blemish. None have that completeness which constitutes one of the chief merits of Fielding's Tom Jones. There is always either an improbability, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... the sunny faces of childhood were marked with unwonted thoughtfulness; the shadow of the common bereavement fell over the play-ground and nursery. The little girl remembered, with tears, how her broken-limbed doll had taxed the surgical ingenuity of her genial old friend; and the boy showed sorrowfully to his playmates the top which the good Doctor had given him. If there were few, among the many who stood beside his grave, capable of rightly measuring and appreciating ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... from chafing. Rough and ready they were, nevertheless they fitted well and tightly to their feet; but it was found that the want of a joint at the instep rendered it difficult to walk with these soles on, and impossible to run. Roy's ingenuity, however, soon overcame this difficulty. He cut the soles through just under the instep, and then, boring two holes in each part, lashed them firmly together with deerskin, thus producing a joint or hinge. Eager to try this new invention, ...
— Silver Lake • R.M. Ballantyne
... Henry, he had increased his pecuniary resources by his own enterprise and ingenuity; with this difference, that his speculations were connected with the Arts. He had made money, in the first instance, by a weekly newspaper; and he had then invested his profits in a London theatre. This latter enterprise, admirably conducted, had been rewarded by ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... all this, and in insisting upon the merit of Daumier may appear to make light of the finer accomplishment of several more modern talents, in England and France, who have greater ingenuity and subtlety and have carried qualities of execution so, much further. In looking at this complicated younger work, which has profited so by experience and comparison, it is inevitable that we should perceive ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... when the war came it developed that the hotel builder probably had a subsidy from the Government. For sandbags, machine guns, and quick-firers quickly converted the hotel into an excellent fort, which dominated the famous ravine. Thanks to the hardiness and ingenuity of their picked Alpine troops, the Italians, after a week of hard fighting, cleared the mountains above the ravine and dropped upon ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... that student it is very superfluous for anyone to make a fool. But though the dramatist's jests are always serious and generally obvious, he is really affected from time to time by a certain spirit of which that climate theory is a case—a spirit that can only be called one of senseless ingenuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis of wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of its speed. Perhaps it is connected with the nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of roots, this remoteness from ancient instincts and traditions is responsible for a certain bleak and heartless extravagance of ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... remember that they had not then the word of God, nor any means of communicating to the minds of the people any general enlightenment and instruction. They were obliged, therefore, to resort to the next best method which their ingenuity could devise. ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Rabbis," said he, "to study only those portions of our holy literature on which they can whet their ingenuity. But from all writings which would promote piety and fear of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... called into force for the performance of "The Rivals," which was given a week or so before the end of the voyage. It went off wonderfully well; but I confess I enjoyed the preparations more than the play itself: the ingenuity displayed was very amusing at the time. You on shore cannot imagine how difficult it was to find a snuff-box for "Sir Anthony Absolute," or with what joy and admiration we welcomed a clever substitute ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... hardened into a stock-jobbing prestidigitator, and made the world the poorer by so much as he was the richer? On the other hand, he might perhaps have been a poet. Certainly a man of his temperament and ingenuity might by practice have come to write rondeaus, ballades, and those other sorts of soap-bubble verse just now in fashion; and if he had been so lucky as to be disappointed in love at the outset of his career, it is quite within the limits of possibility ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... because they think they must either take the cats along when they return to the city, where they would be a trouble and an encumbrance, or leave them in the country, houseless and homeless. These people have no ingenuity, no invention, no wisdom; or it would occur to them to do as I do: rent cats by the month for the summer and return them to their good homes at the end of it. Early last May I rented a kitten of a farmer's wife, by the month; then I got a discount ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... seven-feet high, upon wheels; sends a man to drive it through the streets; hoping to be saved thereby. He has not attempted to make better hats, as he was appointed by the Universe to do, and as with this ingenuity of his he could very probably have done; but his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made such! He too knows that the Quack has become God. Laugh not at him, O reader; or do not laugh only. He has ceased to be comic; he is fast becoming tragic. To me this all-deafening blast ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... extremities of war there is no example of courage and intrepidity to exceed this. Happy those ages which knew not the dreadful fury of artillery!—those instruments of hell (where, I verily believe, the inventor is now receiving the reward of his diabolical ingenuity), by means of which the cowardly and the base can deprive the bravest soldier of life. While a gallant spirit animated with heroic ardor is pressing to glory, comes a chance ball, sent by one who perhaps fled in alarm at the flash of his own accursed weapon, and in an instant cuts short ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... his unpleasant seat, and rendering thanks to the king for the lesson he had given him, firmly resolved to amend his life. All who were present commended the ingenuity of ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... man at the last. Courage, loyal obedience, patient endurance, the abnegation of selfishness,—these are the lessons the sea teaches. Why must the shore make such diabolical haste and try such fiendish ingenuity to undo them? The sea is pure and free, the land is firm and stable,—but where they meet, the tide rises and falls, leaving a little belt of sodden mud, of slippery, slimy weeds, where the dead refuse of the sea is cast up to rot in the hot sun. Something such is the welcome the men of the sea ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... repairs and in reloading. Here, for the first time, we were impressed with two characteristics in our driver: first, his ability to swear, surpassing anything that we had ever heard; second, his astonishing skill and ingenuity in repairing any accident or break, which happened on the road. Before our journey was over, we learned that both these qualities are common to his profession. It was four o'clock in the morning before we were again upon our way. All hope of reaching Union Hidalgo at the promised ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... occasions where quiet was needed. The only exception tolerated at this time was in the case of one man who offered a solemn pledge, that, if unable to restrain his cough, he would lie down on the ground, scrape a little hole, and cough into it unheard. The ingenuity of this proposition was irresistible, and the eager patient ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... ordnance, manufacture their own muskets, shot, powder, and cartridge-boxes; in fact, every instrument or weapon used in civilized warfare is manufactured in Nepaul, often clumsily enough, but the mere fact of their being capable of being used, and used with effect, is highly creditable to the ingenuity ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... their hospitable host, could see nothing in the least suspicious. But, when desired, this duck-pond could be made to swing round on a pivot, and underneath it was a most convenient recess which was an admirable storehouse for such things as it was not expedient for the Preventive men to see. The ingenuity fostered by smuggling was notorious, but surely few cleverer devices than this were ever conceived for the evasion of ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... blankets, and boasted a sacking pillow. From the ridge-pole hung a candlestick, roughly fashioned from a knot of wood, and the furniture was completed by a rustic table and chair, made from branches, and showing considerable ingenuity in their fashioning. Wallaby skins thrown over the chair and upon the floor lent a look of comfort to the tiny dwelling; and a further touch of homeliness was given by many pictures cut from illustrated papers and fastened to the canvas walls. The fly of the tent projected ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... the wants of that Government, because the Spanish statesmen of 1862 are as unwise as were any of their predecessors, most of whom treated the dollar as if it contained twelve dimes. "To spend half a crown out of sixpence a day" requires the possession of as much ingenuity as would, if rationally employed, serve to convert the sixpence into a crown; but Spain rarely permits common sense to govern her action, and prefers debt to prosperity, when she can fairly make her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers— just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians— by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery. Witness the marvels of Parrott, Dahlgren, and Rodman. The Armstrong, Palliser, and Beaulieu guns were compelled to ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... famous story of the contest in song at Chalcis. In later times the modest version in the "Works and Days" was elaborated, first by making Homer the opponent whom Hesiod conquered, while a later period exercised its ingenuity in working up the story of the contest into the elaborate form in which it still survives. Finally the contest, in which the two poets contended with hymns to Apollo [1104], was transferred to Delos. These developments certainly need no consideration: are we ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the meaning was discovered, and the solution is equally remarkable for its ingenuity and for the morality it inculcates:—"O superbe quid superbis? tua superbia te superabit. Terra es, et in terram ibis. Mox eris quod ego nunc."—"O vain man! why shouldst thou be proud? thy pride will be thy ruin. Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return. Soon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... the British columns. De Lisle, Fanshawe, Byng, Rimington, Dawkins, and Rawlinson were all snatching at him and finding him just beyond their finger-tips. The master-mind at Pretoria had, however, thought out a scheme which was worthy of De Wet himself in its ingenuity. A glance at the map will show that the little branch from Heilbron to Wolvehoek forms an acute angle with the main line. Both these railways were strongly blockhoused and barbed-wired, so that any force ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an accepted fact. Mr. Frazer came to see the Captain, who received him in the dining-room—the combined ingenuity of the family could not make the down-stairs room presentable. The interview was short, but satisfactory; so also was the one with Mrs. Polkington which followed; with Violet it was longer, but, no doubt, equally satisfactory. Lunch, too, was all that could be desired. Mrs. Polkington's ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... had which was called a "blowing tub," or by a very ancient machine known as a "trompe" in which water running through a wooden pipe was very ingeniously made to furnish air to a furnace. It is when the means are small that ingenuity is actually shown. If the later man is deprived of the use of the latest machinery he will decline to undertake an enterprise where it is required. The same man in the woods, with absolute necessity for his companion, will show an astonishing capacity for persevering ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... always looked at two sides of a penny: and he tried to purchase this mass a trifle under the usual terms, on account of the pitiable circumstances. But the good cure gently but adroitly parried his ingenuity, and blandly screwed him up to ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... help smiling at Jim's earnestness and ingenuity, but his proposition was so sudden and strange, and she had so long ago given up any thought of marrying, that it was impossible for her to give him an answer then, unless she should give him ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... outskirts of the city that day, and I was much struck with an example of Chinese ingenuity. The suburban inhabitants all seem to keep poultry, and all these fowls were of the same breed—small white bantams. So, to identify his own property, Ching Wan dyed all his chickens' tails orange, whilst Hung To's fowls scratched about with ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... to the entrance; but the ingenuity of the architect, for want of a better lock to the door, which itself was but of wattles curiously twisted, had contrived a mode of securing the latch on the inside with a pin, which prevented it from rising; and in this manner it was at present fastened. Conceiving that this was some precaution ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... serviceable, it can accomplish nothing. Suppose the maker passes his life in making probably the most intricate and perfect mechanism which has been made. Is he a genius? We may admit that the products manifest great ingenuity on the part of their creator, yet we feel repelled when we think of calling ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... L'Encuerado, full of ingenuity, managed to fix some pieces of fox-skin on some old soles, and made for Lucien a pair of buskins as strong as they were inelegant. He promised to make us some like them, and Sumichrast, who succeeded only tolerably well in his cobbling, nominated the Indian ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... during the week and helped out in a grocery store on Saturday, and his earnings helped slightly, but not much. Midwinter taxes on two houses ate up more than two weeks' income. With almost superhuman ingenuity Migwan apportioned their expenses so the money covered them. This she had to do practically alone, for her mother was as helpless before a column of figures as she would have been in a flood. Meat practically ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... to Day's mechanical skill everyone paid tribute. The heating, lighting and ventilating arrangements [Page 278] of the hut had been left entirely in his charge, and had been carried out with admirable success. The cook's corner was visited next, and Scott was very surprised to see the mechanical ingenuity shown by Clissold. 'Later,' he says, 'when I found that Clissold was called in to consult on the ailments of Simpson's motor, and that he was capable of constructing a dog sledge out of packing-cases, I was less surprised, ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... Darwin's argument our own private ingenuity has not hitherto enabled us to pick holes of any great importance; and judging by what we hear and read, other adventurers in the same field do not seem to have been much more fortunate. It has been urged, for instance, that in his chapters on the struggle for existence and ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... but every animal exhibits for its young affection and forethought and endurance and unselfishness. We call the bee wise, and celebrate its "making the yellow honey,"[47] flattering it for its tickling sweetness; but we neglect the wisdom and ingenuity of other creatures, both as regards the birth and bringing up of their young. For example, the kingfisher after conception weaves its nest with the thorns of the marine needle, making it round and oblong in shape like a fisherman's basket, and after deftly and closely weaving it together, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... and better toys than more of an inferior quality. The thing to keep in mind is that a toy is neither an artistic model, an aesthetic ornament, nor a mechanical spectacle, but should be a stimulus to call forth self-activity, invention, ingenuity, imagination, and skill. ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... the toy shop, we are confronted by a multitude of objects, the variety and quantity of which are distracting. Everything that the ingenuity of man could devise is here presented to our astonished eyes, and children gaze upon the great spectacle and are delighted. If we go to the store just to be amused or to buy something, a very indefinite something for a child of ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... his ingenuity could never amuse Harry with such things, but he determined to buy some toys that very evening, and to try his hand at winning the child's heart the next evening. Jane took very little notice of any of them and after putting the baby to bed, announced that she had shopping to do, and ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... in a striking degree all the characteristics of the successful soldier. His methods were all stamped with tenacity of purpose, with originality and ingenuity. He depended for his success more upon the powers of invention than of adaptation, and the fact that he has been compared, at different times, to nearly every great commander in history is perhaps the best proof ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Germans against that half-savage mate of hers who had cunningly annoyed and harassed them with a fiendishness of persistence and ingenuity that had resulted in a noticeable loss in morale in the sector he had chosen for his operations. They had to charge against him the lives of certain officers that he had deliberately taken with his own hands, and one entire section of trench that had ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of all kinds for the hero and his friends, whose pluck and ingenuity in extricating themselves from awkward fixes are always equal to the occasion. It is an excellent story full of honest, manly, patriotic efforts on the part of the hero. A very vivid description of the battle of ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... winter of 1901-02, while rummaging an old closet in the shed-chamber of my father's house, I unearthed a salt-box which had been equipped with leather hinges at the expense of considerable ingenuity, and at a very remote period. In addition to this, a hasp of the same material, firmly fastened by carpet-tacks and a catch of bent wire, bade defiance to burglars, midnight ...
— The Real Diary of a Real Boy • Henry A. Shute
... that he would use the great advantage which chance and the ingenuity of his friend had thrown in his way; but that necessity of putting money in his purse was a sore grievance to him, and it occurred to him that it would be a grand thing if he could induce his brother to help him in this special matter. If he could only ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... to have erected a dam (Shass) at Blackwall, and by these means to have grounded the Danish fleet. The Danes held a treaty, and eventually withdrew into Cambridgeshire and Gloucestershire; the Londoners came down to the scene of Alfred's ingenuity and destroyed or appropriated the ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... pitched, in a cleared space amid pines and cedars; and the ingenuity of the "couriers," as messengers and orderlies were called in the Southern army, had fashioned alleys and walks leading to the various tents, the tent of the commanding general occupying the centre. Of the gentlemen of General Lee's staff we have not considered it necessary ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... advertised, and physical, as well as moral, degradation frequently results. Crime is often inculcated—even the crime of murder, that the nostrum manufacturer may profit thereby. Cures for incurable diseases are promised, and guaranteed. Every scheme that human and devilish ingenuity can devise to wring money from its victim is resorted to, which can be employed without actually bringing the advertisers into court. All this wicked quackery parades under the guise of 'patent' medicines, and asks the protection of our ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... days the ingenuity of man was concentrated upon extending by any means short of the criminal the duration of the leave. When Robert first went on leave he was young and innocent. He had four days given him; he left his unit on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... is the very thing I want, for it's starved wid the cowld I am," said the shivering creature, who with characteristic ingenuity had failed to apprehend the meaning of the menace addressed to him. But a sudden flash and the dull thud of a bullet against the ice beside him interpreted to his sluggish brain the ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... ladies and gentlemen, for myself, that from first to last I have never uttered one syllable that could be twisted by any ingenuity into encouragement by the Boers. No, I have never even expressed ordinary pity for, or sympathy with them, because I did not wish to run the risk of being misunderstood. What I have done, and what ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... the ingenuity and address of Almona that he made her his wife. Zadig departed, after having thrown himself at the feet of his fair deliverer. Setoc and he took leave of each other with tears in their eyes, swearing an eternal friendship, and promising that the first of them that should acquire ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... mechanicians in the world, are engineers— just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians— by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery. Witness the marvels of Parrott, Dahlgren, and Rodman. The Armstrong, Palliser, and Beaulieu guns were compelled to bow ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... always barred his way, distrust of a mind and character to which problems appear as exercises in ingenuity rather than questions of right and justice. His greatest opportunity for constructive statesmanship was offered in the making of the New York State constitution. But when it became known that Mr. Root had dominated the Constitutional Convention, that the proposed constitution ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... et Decadence des Romains, c. viii. He illustrates the nature and use of the censorship with his usual ingenuity, and with uncommon precision.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... nonsense, for with such a clever savage as Ebo and our own ingenuity and tools we could have built another boat—not such a good one as we had arrived in, but quite strong enough to bear us over a calm sea to one or the other of the islands where trading ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... of this curious place is as black as a coal-mine, and a partition, more than half the way across, divides the part where Kynaston used to reside by day from that in which he slept and kept his horse, for he had actually the ingenuity to make the animal ascend and descend the stairs above-mentioned. The robber's initials, and the date of the year in which we may suppose he cut them, appear on the partition just opposite the entrance. The romance of the place was not a little augmented ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... Even such a man as Dugald Stewart declared that the discovery of Sanskrit was altogether fraudulent, and endeavoured to prove that the Brahmans had made it up from the vocabulary and grammar of Greek and Latin. Others exercised their ingenuity in picking the new discovery to pieces, and still others attributed it all ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... your critical observations,-which, not confined to works of utility or ingenuity, is equally open to those of frivolous amusement,-and, yet worse than frivolous, dullness,-encourages me to seek for your protection, since,-perhaps for my sins!-it intitles me to your annotations. To resent, therefore, this offering, however insignificant, would ill become the ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... speech known to Caspak or for that matter to the world—that employed by the Bo-lu. I found it far from difficult, and even though it was a great handicap upon my instructor that she could not speak my language, she did remarkably well and demonstrated that she possessed ingenuity and intelligence of ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had learned about them, but he knew that he had a reputation for being tough and that this reputation usually brought out the best in cadets. Early in his long and brilliant career he had learned that his life depended on the courage and ingenuity of his fellow spacemen. When he became an instructor at the Academy, he had determined that no cadet would ever be anything but the best, and that, when they blasted off in later years, they ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... elevated position we could do better battle for the country we all love than we possibly can from those lower ones where, from the force of habit, the prejudices of the past, and selfish hopes of the future, we are sure to expend much of our ingenuity and strength in finding fault with and aiming blows at each other. But since you have denied me this I will yet be thankful for the country's sake that not all Democrats have done so. He on whose discretionary judgment Mr. Vallandigham was arrested and tried is a Democrat, having ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... to perfumery is quite new; it is probable that the study of all the ethers or ethereal combinations already known, and of those which the ingenuity of the chemist is daily discovering, will enlarge the sphere of their practical applications. The capryl-ethers lately discovered by Bouis are remarkable for their aromatic smells (the acetate of capryloxide is possessed ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... zooelogist, to the laws which regulate the formation and the evolution of species, and the decision of Ellida, on which so much depends, is an amazing example of the limitation of the power of change produced by heredity. The extraordinary ingenuity of M. de Gaultier's analysis of this play deserves recognition; whether it can quite be accepted, as embraced by Ibsen's intention, may be doubtful. At the same time, let us recollect that, however subtle our refinements become, the instinct ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the welcome the Chevalier received. Mme. de Combray, her daughters, the nuns and the Chartreux friars used all their ingenuity to satisfy the slightest wish of this man, who modestly called himself "the agent general of His Majesty." They arranged a hiding-place for him in the safest part of the house, and Pere Lemercier blessed it. Acquet stayed there part of the day, and in the evening joined in ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... bold freedom which in so great measure distinguishes the Canterbury Tales; and the fact is easily explained when we remember that, in the earlier poem, Chaucer followed a beaten path, in which he had many predecessors and competitors, all seeking to sound the praises of love with the grace, the ingenuity, and studious devotion, appropriate to the theme. The story of the poem is exceedingly simple. Under the name of Philogenet, a clerk or scholar of Cambridge, the poet relates that, summoned by Mercury to the Court of Love, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... desire to bring about the action and if there is no better way to do it, we must use the drug, and there is still need for the druggist. As a matter of fact, the number of drugs at your disposal today is vastly greater than ever before, largely owing to the labor, and the ingenuity, of the analytical chemist. And there are still great classes of compounds of whose existence the chemist is assured, but which he has not even had time to form, much less to investigate. Among these may lurk remedies more valuable than any at our disposal today. It does not look, at any ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... what he could do to earn his living and still be true to the call of his genius. In his Journal of 1851 he says: "While formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experiences in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, so little capital is required, so little distraction from my wonted thoughts." He could range the hills in summer and still look after the flocks of King Admetus. He also ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... their fiction. Gradually this list of trained and capable, and consequently successful, writers for the screen is growing larger, for daily some new writer is demonstrating that the freshness, brightness, and ingenuity of his ideas warrant the editor's putting him on the list of those from whom good material may ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... once took it to pieces, and this so effectually that he succeeded in analysing it into a good many more pieces than its fabricator had ever dreamed of. To put it together again would have taxed the ingenuity of the same fabricator—no wonder that it was beyond the power of Jacky altogether. But this mattered nothing to the "little darling," as he did not understand his father's learned explanation of the uses of the instrument. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... council the full story of the means by which the crew of the Pluto had gained their liberty, showing how the recapture was entirely due to the initiative of Francis, and to the ingenuity with which he overcame all difficulties. ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... be soothing and diplomatic. She brought all her fund of talent and ingenuity to the fore, and presently had arranged things so well that she was able to rush to her desk in Mrs. Aylmer's boudoir and ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... her that Mark took any joke against himself badly, but she was determined to do it. I gave way reluctantly. Reluctantly, also, I told her the secret of the passage. (There is an underground passage from the library to the bowling-green. You should exercise your ingenuity, Mr. Gillingham, in trying to discover it. Mark came upon it by accident a year ago. It was a godsend to him; he could drink there in greater secrecy. But he had to tell me about it. He wanted an audience, even ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... be silly!" he said. "I am delighted to be of use for a change. I don't do much worth the doing, being more or less of a loafer. It is good for me to exercise my ingenuity now and then. It only gets rusty ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... closed. Rupert was as much amused as Crawford had been at seeing his sisters in their military attire. He fully approved of all Percy had done; and when he heard of the proposed dummies, he thought the idea excellent. While Crawford, who possessed a great deal of mechanical ingenuity, went in to assist Mrs Broderick, he hurried to the back of the house, where he found Mangaleesu and Kalinda employed in manufacturing Kaffir warriors. They had collected a number of poles and sticks, and had obtained from ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... Conundrums, Cryptographs, Enigmas, Logogriphs, Puzzles, Rebuses, Riddles, Transpositions, &c. Of these there are such a variety, that they are suited to every capacity; and they present this additional attraction, that ingenuity may be exercised in the invention of them, as well as in their solution. Many persons who have become noted for their literary compositions may date the origin of their success to the time when they attempted the composition of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... of a more serious and decidedly lurid sort. The horses had led him a pace through the Bad Lands westward out over the prairie, and night overtook him not far from Mingusville, a primitive settlement named thus with brilliant ingenuity by its first citizens, a lady by the name of Minnie and her husband by the name of Gus. The "town"—what there was of it—was pleasantly situated on rolling country on the west bank of Beaver Creek. Along the east side of the creek were high, steep, cream-colored buttes, gently rounded ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... editor of the new series of "Hymns for the Ages," who boldly appends to the poem, "Milton, 1608-1674." Yet Mrs. Child's early ventures in the way of writing speeches for James Otis and sermons for Whitefield should have made her a sharper detective of the ingenuity of others. Those successful imitations, published originally in her novel of "The Rebels," have hardly yet ceased to pass ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the other trees are stripped and maimed and, with miracles of strength and ingenuity, are pushed away as far as possible in order to make with them a solid and reliable ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... crimson of the beeches and the gold of the elms, we shall do well to emulate the serene magnanimity of Nature and console ourselves with the reflection that the rural philosopher, if only assured of a sympathetic hearing in an enlightened Press and provided with a suitable equipment by the ingenuity of its directors, may contemplate the vagaries of tyrannical misgovernment with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... few days, along comes Angus, fills, out into the world from college to make a name for himself. By ingenuity or native brute force he had contrived to graduate. He was nice as ever and told me he was going to look about a bit until he could decide what his field of endeavour should be. Apparently it was breaking his neck in outdoor sports, including loop-the-loop in his ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... perfect, while at the same time they all possess the fresh and unconscious grace which marks the productions of primitive times." Now, there is some truth in this criticism; for it is a mark of man's early ingenuity, in many arts, to seek complexity (where you would expect simplicity), and yet to lend to that complexity an infantine naturalness. One can see this phenomenon in early decorative art, and in early law and custom, and even in the complicated structure of primitive ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... to me that in a valley connected with civilization by only a trail there should be found McCormick's reapers and Pitt's threshers. Parts too large for a mule's pack had been cut in two and afterwards reunited. By some dint of ingenuity even a millstone had been hauled over the roadless mountains. The wheat we harvested was ground at the Hoopa mill and the flour was shipped to the ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... intense story, that of the long wanderings and the close hiding of the dangerous secret. Among all those who had known that a man who was an impassioned patriot was laboring for Samavia, and using all the power of a great mind and the delicate ingenuity of a great genius to gain friends and favor for his unhappy country, there had been but one who had known that Stefan Loristan had a claim to the Samavian throne. He had made no claim, he had sought—not a crown—but the final freedom of the nation for which ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... with masses of mushrooms, flower-like in hue,—bronze, pink, snow-white, green, and yellow; and Osip cooked them delicately, in sour cream, to accompany the juicy young blackcock and other game of our host's shooting. Osip was a cordon bleu, and taxed his ingenuity to initiate us into all the mysteries of Russian cooking, which, under his tuition, we found delicious. The only national dish which we never really learned to like was one in which he had no hand,—fresh cucumbers sliced ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... not forbidden to cross the line. Then there are stools, one stool at least indispensable to human nature; and the inside of this, once you open it, is a chest-of-drawers, containing paper, ink, new literature and much else. No end to Munchow'a good-will, and his ingenuity is ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... photographs, showing the various positions assumed by the figure during the process of excavation, can be consulted upon the second page following. This work of art was raised by Dr. Le Plongeon, with the assistance of his wife and ten Indian laborers, by his own ingenuity, and without other engineering apparatus than he had contrived from the trees and vines, making use also of the bark, from which he constructed ropes. Dr. Le Plongeon, in a private letter to the writer, says, "The ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... so long as experiments in selective breeding had not produced varieties which were more or less infertile; and that insecurity remains up to the present time. But, with any and every critical doubt which my sceptical ingenuity could suggest, the Darwinian hypothesis remained incomparably more probable than the creation hypothesis. And if we had none of us been able to discern the paramount significance of some of the most patent and notorious ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... is possible. An advocate who is changing his clients is ill-advised in hampering himself with the enumeration of maxims which may from time to time be quoted against him. In such cases Mr. Hope-Scott almost converted a self-imposed difficulty into an additional resource. With marvellous ingenuity he proved that any competition scheme which he happened to support formed an exception to the rule which he carefully reasserted; and unsophisticated hearers admired the consistency with general principles which was found not to ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... now began to show itself in all kinds of inventions with which she mitigated the discomforts of the raw mining camp. As vegetables were exceedingly scarce, the diet of the miners consisted almost exclusively of meat, and Mrs. Osbourne made a great hit by her ingenuity in devising variations of this monotonous fare. She learned how to cook beef in fifteen different ways. Her great achievement, however, was in making imitation honey, to eat with griddle-cakes, out of boiled sugar with a lump ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... removing the eyebrows, Magdalen was free to combat the unfortunate impression produced on her companion's mind by every weapon of persuasion which her ingenuity could employ. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... principal cities of Europe. The necessities of the time have thus brought into prominence a modification of the art of the old Italian liutaro, in which there has to be displayed much more mechanical ingenuity if with very little or no originality; the high class of artisan has become strongly in evidence, while the artist has disappeared. It was in the consideration of these facts that the idea was first suggested that a work treating of the general ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... his writing-table, and took the letter from the drawer. Its ingenuity, its knowledge of local circumstance, astonished him as he read. He had expected something of a vulgarer and rougher type. The handwriting was clearly disguised, and there was a certain amount of intermittent ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P—— cannot conceive. But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he can do to realize them he has done in ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... de Courcy would do anything that was requested of him. Ellen was taken out of the ring of walkers, and mounted on a fine animal, and set by herself to have her skill tried in as many various ways as M. de Courcy's ingenuity could point out. Never did she bear herself more erectly; never were her hand and her horse's mouth on nicer terms of acquaintanceship; never, even to please her master, had she so given her whole ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... our modern kitchen-gardens is a semi-artificial plant, the produce of our agricultural ingenuity quite as much as of the niggardly gifts of nature. Spontaneous vegetation supplied us with the long-stalked, scanty-leaved, ill-smelling wilding, as found, according to the botanists, on the ocean cliffs. He had need of a rare ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Michilimackinac, or Mackinaw as it is now called, remained, and all the ingenuity of the chieftain was directed to the possession of these strongholds. The following plan, well worthy of his invention, was at length determined upon. During a temporary truce, and while Ponteac was holding forth proposals for an ultimate and durable peace, a ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence, it is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well said, it is not the business of a government to support its people, but of the people to support their government; ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... the canoe leave the ship's side, ceased to live intellectually. There was no need for more thinking, for any display of mental ingenuity. He had done with it all. All his notions were perfectly fixed and he could go over them in the same ghostly way in which he haunted the deck of the Emma. At the sight of the ring Lingard would return to Hassim and Immada, now ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... inmate, beloved of all. The party was waited on sedulously by an old servant of the Ursulines, Bonnehomme Michel, as she was called, who was the most faithful, hard-working, and devoted of creatures, and displayed the greatest ingenuity in contriving, out of the scantiest of materials, such dishes as should tempt the appetite of the sick Bishop, and make the rest forget that they were ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Some of his schemes for insuring the safety of his capital, for the resettlement of the greater part of the income by trustees—for combining, in fact, a maximum of growing power for the fortune with a minimum of enjoyment for the heir—were really marvels of ingenuity. ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... that kind which they could want. With the help of those tools they were so very handy that they came at last to build up their huts or houses very handsomely, raddling or working it up like basket-work all the way round. This piece of ingenuity, although it looked very odd, was an exceeding good fence, as well against heat as against all sorts of vermin; and our men were so taken with it that they got the Indians to come and do the like for them; so that when I came ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... and reserved man, but that was a matter of no moment to Obo, who threatened him in front, skirmished in his rear, charged him on the right flank with a reed spear, shelled him on the left with sweet potatoes, and otherwise harassed him with amazing perseverance and ingenuity. ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... and now there was hardly anything of which she could not suspect her girl to be capable. Lady Anna was watched, therefore, during every minute of the four and twenty hours. A policeman was told off to protect the house at night from rope ladders or any other less cumbrous ingenuity. The servants were set on guard. Sarah, the lady's-maid, followed her mistress almost like a ghost when the poor young lady went to her bedroom. Mrs. Bluestone, or one of the girls, was always with her, either indoors ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... towns, and the traditional mode of building was continued in the country. Some say that by this means our ancestors tried to protect the lower part of the house, the foundations, from the influence of the weather; others with some ingenuity suggest that these projecting storeys were intended to form a covered walk for passengers in the streets, and to protect them from the showers of slops which the careless housewife of Elizabethan times cast recklessly from the upstairs windows. Architects tell us that it was ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... letter of July 22d was the following characteristic account, conveying the impression that while he was willing to waste all the resources of his colored inks and literary ingenuity on our friendship, I must pay the freight. I think he had a superstition that it would cause a flaw in his title of "The Good Knight, sans peur et sans monnaie" if he were to add the price of a two-cent postage ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Napoleon, "Madame Remusat, your favourite, has made a fool of you, this is only to teach you that you shall not make a fool of me: Had not De Segur fortunately for him—had the ingenuity to extricate us from the dilemma into which my confidence and dependence on you had brought me, I should have made a fine figure indeed on the first day of my emperorship. Have patience, Madame; you have plenty of books to divert you, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... to escape. The time necessary to the accomplishment of this might also be profitably employed in acquiring a knowledge of Spanish, without which he fully realised that his attempt must inevitably fail; and he believed that, by the time he had thus paved the way for the great attempt, his ingenuity would have proved sufficient to gain without suspicion from his fellow-slaves a tolerably accurate idea of the perils and difficulties with which ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... sentiments of another denomination. The particulars of this change are given by Mrs. Judson in a letter to her friends. By her we are informed that for a long time her husband's new notions did not correspond with her own. With woman's ingenuity and skill, she sought to dissuade him from any public statement, and even from an investigation of the subject. She well knew to what such a step would lead. The friends who had been so kind to her, who were then supporting her, who were ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... straightway married an Egyptological young lady who had written upon the sixth dynasty, and having thus secured a sound base of operations he set himself to collect materials for a work which should unite the research of Lepsius and the ingenuity of Champollion. The preparation of this magnum opus entailed many hurried visits to the magnificent Egyptian collections of the Louvre, upon the last of which, no longer ago than the middle of last October, he became involved in a most strange ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the influence of old conservative families was still paramount. Altogether the Punjab Provincial Council is perhaps less representative of the whole electorate than in any other province in India. Some official ingenuity had been displayed in grouping remote towns together without any regard for geography, in order to prevent townsmen undesirably addicted to advanced political views from standing as candidates for the rural constituencies in which many ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... downstairs, picking up Brooke's stick on the way and beating poor Oliver about the head with it.... You know well enough how he was found. I only came to myself when it was done. And then, my wife—with all a woman's ingenuity—bundled me into bed, swore that I had never left it, and that Caspar Brooke had done it. It was a lie—she told me so afterwards. Eh, Mary?—Forgive me, old girl: I've got you into trouble now; but that is better than letting ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... truth, though supported by much ingenuity and brilliance, would seem to contradict the very idea of truth, and to be subversive of all moral values. If truth has no independent validity, if it is not something to be sought for itself, irrespective of the inclinations and interests of man, then its pursuit can bring ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... technological interest to bear on the new problems. Women had been able to thrust a stick into the earth and drop the seed and await a meager harvest. When man turned his attention to this matter, his ingenuity eventually worked out a remarkable combination of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms: with the iron plow, drawn by the ox, he upturned the face of the earth, and produced food stuffs in excess of immediate demands, thus creating the ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... quite fit for use by sundown, but the question was where to lay them. Every one naturally objected to the trees, and the ridge of the roof was no more inviting than on the first night. But a little ingenuity soon put all right. Timber was so plentiful with us that poles and planks lay piled up at the back of the house, and after a number of these had been hunted up, from where they had floated among the trees, and laid in the full sunshine, a platform was built up high above the muddy earth, ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... had been growing steadily less both in Europe and America. The ingenuity of the manufacturer showed itself in the make of cheaper substitutes, while the beavers that had been hunted so persistently were becoming scarce: there were few regions in which trapping could be ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... co-operative effort is the rule rather than the exception. That it is more difficult to effect satisfactory arrangements in farming must be conceded, else they would be more common. Doubtless it will often tax the ingenuity of father and son to devise the plans best suited ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who read the Commedia in their own mother tongue. It has been maintained as a satisfactory account of it—maintained with great labor and pertinacious ingenuity—that Dante meant nothing more by his poem than the conflicts and ideal triumphs of a political party. The hundred cantos of that vision of the universe are but a manifesto of the Ghibelline propaganda, designed, under the veil of historic images and scenes, to insinuate what it was dangerous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to our people's prosperity and well-being is the removal of restrictions upon the importation of the raw materials necessary to our manufactures. The world should be open to our national ingenuity and enterprise. This can not be while Federal legislation through the imposition of high tariff forbids to American manufacturers as cheap materials as those used by their competitors. It is quite obvious ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... the strongest and best book-cover paper obtainable. This paper is made in large quantities especially for these book covers and will protect books perfectly. The book covers themselves are a marvel of ingenuity, and, although they are in one piece and can be adjusted to fit perfectly any sized book without cutting the paper, they are also so simple that any boy or girl can use them; as they are already gummed they are always ready ...
— 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
... is the notice of Gallic ingenuity and skill, the acknowledgment must be made, that, for the invention of the trunk or well, with its attendant advantages, navigation is indebted to Commander Labrousse, of the French navy; and for a novel arrangement of the screw- propeller, which has not attracted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Company proceeded to build its dams and walls while the Lehigh Coal Company constructed the first roadway in America built on the principle—later adopted by the railway—of dividing the total distance by the total descent in order to determine the grade. Not to be outdone in point of ingenuity, the Lehigh Navigation Company, then suffering from an unprecedented dearth of water, adopted White's invention of sluice gates connecting with pools which could be filled with reserve water to be drawn upon ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... is often useful," said he. "When I recovered I managed, by a device which had perhaps some little merit of ingenuity, to get old Cunningham to write the word 'twelve,' so that I might compare it with the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... suit will do it; nothing very exclusive about those people. But the people of Limehouse, and, indeed, of any slum or foreign quarter, are exclusive; and to get into a Poplar dope-house on bargain night demands the exercise of more Oriental ingenuity ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... labour. Every trade—every profession in this respect, is subject to the same law—the lawyer, the physician, the tradesman, and the mechanic. This labour is required at our hands, even in an old community; how much more then is it called for in a new, where the ingenuity of men is put to trial to secure those means of accomplishing their ends which here are abundant. Now, it appears to me but consistent, that he who is obliged to leave his native country from want of means to hold his station there, can hardly expect to find, or rather to secure, abundance elsewhere ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... culinary process. The subject of cookery is too generally neglected by mistresses, as something beneath their notice; or if engaged in, it is to contrive a variety of mischievous compositions, both savoury and sweet, to recommend their own ingenuity. Yet it is quite evident that every good housewife ought to be well acquainted with this important branch of domestic management, and to take upon herself at least its entire direction and controul. This is a duty which her husband, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... and inside the case appeared the screw, which communicated with the bedtop below. Extra lengths of screw, freshly oiled; levers covered with felt; all the complete upper works of a heavy press—constructed with infernal ingenuity so as to join the fixtures below, and when taken to pieces again to go into the smallest possible compass—were next discovered and pulled out on the floor. After some little difficulty the subprefect succeeded in putting the ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... seating herself in the deep recess of another window, at a considerable distance from Robert Audley, settled to a large piece of Berlin-wool work—a piece of embroidery which the Penelopes of ten or twelve years ago were very fond of exercising their ingenuity upon—the Olden Time at ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... the real thing, with great ingenuity they proceeded to extemporise an imitation, the appearance of which they hoped would be sufficient to frighten off the foreigner. They purchased an English trading vessel, the Cambridge, intending to turn her into, at least in appearance, a man-of-war, and built some strange-looking little ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... Neither was our adventurer the least among the sufferers. Driven out of his previous employ—a sort of porter in a river-side warehouse—by this sudden influx of rivals, destitute, honest men like himself, with the ingenuity of his race, he turned his hand to the village art of chair-bottoming. An itinerant, he paraded the streets with the cry of "Old chairs to mend!" furnishing a curious illustration of the contradictions of human life; that he who did little but ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... his Father; but coming into the Senate, and hearing a Multitude of Crimes proved upon him, was so oppressed when it came to his turn to speak, that he was unable to utter a Word. The Story tells us, that the Fathers were more moved at this Instance of Modesty and Ingenuity, than they could have been by the most Pathetick Oration; and, in short, pardoned the guilty Father for this early Promise ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of the power of it, if we make our Saviour's most excellent life the pattern of our lives.' By our Saviour's life, as by a parenthesis you also express, you mean, as yourself hath in short described it (ch 5) viz., 'The greatest freedom, affability, courtesy, candour, ingenuity, gentleness, meekness, humility, contempt of the world, contention, charity, tenderness, compassion, patience, submission to the divine will, love of God, devoutest temper of mind towards him, mighty confidence and trust ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the prize must be big. A man of Enderby's caliber doesn't concoct a scheme of such ingenuity, and go into bondage with it, for nothing. Do you belong to ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... necessary mechanisms a great deal of ingenuity has been expended. With the advance of luxury and the increased worship of wealth, it becomes more and more necessary to guard one's belongings against the less scrupulous members ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... fell to the ground. Those who were obliged to reject the ridiculous legends which invested the whole of their Pantheon, together with the fabulous adjudgers of future punishments, could not but dismiss the punishments, which were, in fact, as laughable, and as obviously the fictions of human ingenuity, as their dispensers. In short, the civilized part of the world in those days lay in this dreadful condition; their intellect had far outgrown their religion; the disproportions between the two were at length become monstrous; and as yet no purer or more elevated faith ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... order and rabid foes of England. They drove men into battle by fear of the guillotine; they formed rapine and destruction into a system, and perverted to their detestable purposes all the talents and ingenuity derived from the civilization around them. He was careful, however, to correct the mis-statement of Fox, that the Government was struggling for the restoration of the French monarchy. While believing that that nation would live most happily under ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... "Talleyrand said that language was given to man to conceal ideas, and we all know the gentleman's ingenuity in the use of language. The proper time! When will that be?" Mr. Brooks then proceeded at some length to answer this question. He supposed the proper time would be as soon as the House was organized, and before ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... added. Sir Walter, after repeated perusals, considered "Udolpho" "a step beyond Mrs. Radcliffe's former work, high as that had justly advanced her." But he admits that "persons of no mean judgment" preferred "The Romance of the Forest." With these amateurs I would be ranked. The ingenuity and originality of the "Romance" are greater: our friend the skeleton is better than that Thing which was behind the Black Veil, the escapes of Adeline are more thrilling than the escape of Emily, and the "Romance" is not nearly so long, not nearly ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... born at Auchinleck, Ayrshire; was a manager of the Soho Works under Boulton and Watt, where he distinguished himself by his inventive ingenuity, and where on his suggestion coal-gas was first ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... my worthy and learned friend, Mr. Joseph Maynard, that such as did inhabitare montes gibberosos, were called Gubbings, such will smile at the ingenuity who dissent from ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... his popularity were: First, his addiction to dirt; second, his eccentricities of dress, heretofore enumerated; third, a reputation for political craft and long-headedness, not wholly unfounded, as his ingenuity in procuring the passage of resolutions supporting the policy of the Administration, in all the conventions of his party since he became postmaster, fully proved. This political sage walked about town with Post-Office documents and confidential communications from Washington ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... description of the present as compared with the past social life of the colonies, though I am quite prepared to agree with her remark, that 'in proportion as the conditions of life become more complex, they should be met by more ingenuity, more culture, and a deeper sense of duty;' and that 'the suddenness of our accumulation of wealth has scarcely prepared our little community for some necessary modifications of our social arrangements.' Therein lies the whole source of both what is best ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... against Europe, alone can be compared in the whole annals of mankind. They developed almost ideal civic virtues and gifts; generosity, faith, firmness; sympathy the most affecting, resources the most exhaustless, ingenuity the most magical. They brought forth the most beautiful and heroic character who in recent times has ever led a nation, the only blameless type of the statesman since the days of Washington. Under him they created the purest model of government which has yet been seen on the earth—a whole ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... any theatre in London. (Herein Artemus slightly exaggerated. The coloring of the theatre was white and gold, but it was inefficiently lighted with oil lamps. When Brigham Young himself showed us round the theatre, he pointed out, as an instance of his own ingenuity, that the central chandelier was formed out of the wheel of one of his old coaches. The house is now, I believe, lighted with gas. Altogether it is a very wondrous edifice, considering where it is built and who ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 6 • Charles Farrar Browne
... kill this young man ought really to be given up now. The job has been tried over and over again by villains and bad people of all kinds, but no one has ever succeeded. There has been an amount of energy and ingenuity expended in seeking to lay up that one man which, properly utilized, might have finished off ten million ordinary mortals. It is sad to think of ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... pears, but few vegetables; the cultivation, except of asparagus (of which there are two excellent beds), having been abandoned, as the bird monopoly of peas, caused every shilling's worth that came to table to cost five, and the ingenuity of the slugs and snails having completely baffled all amateur gardening schemes of defence against their slimy invasions. [Picture: Rustic bench] Among many experiments I may mention one. Some vegetables were protected by a circumvallum of salt; but, notwithstanding, the slugs and snails ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... dignity of a pageant. A real pageant we dearly loved, but the show was too expensive to be offered more than once or twice annually. We had to hire musicians as our own were too busy to serve. Then the costumes and banners and hangings took a good bit of money, though artistic ingenuity helped out amazingly. Where all the magnificence came from was a mystery, the splendors of purple and gold, of rich draperies, fine furbelows, shining garments and glittering adornments being really splendid. Bonico and I, as Heralds, for example, once were superbly ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... the doctrine, I cannot pretend to say. When it finds it convenient to explain things away, theology, like Voltaire's Minor Prophet, "est capable de tout"; and the need for reconciling the doctrine of original sin with the teaching of modern science has in recent years laid a heavy tax on its ingenuity. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... generally considered that the invention of a system of arbitrary and external signs to communicate thought is one of the greatest and most arduous achievements of human ingenuity, yet so universal is the disposition to make future generations acquainted with our condition and history,—a disposition the efficient cause of which can only be found in a sense of the value of such knowledge,—that you can scarcely find ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... observer in the "Munition Areas," as the public has learned to call them, of England and Scotland. That great spectacle, as it exists to-day—so inspiring in what it immediately suggests of human energy and human ingenuity, so appalling in its wider implications—testifies, in the first instance, to the fierce stiffening of England's resolve to win the war, and to win it at a lessened cost in life and suffering to our men in the field, which ran through the ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... they cheered him, privately expressed their regret that such a capital speaker, who might be anything, was not a practical man. Low prices, abundant harvests, and a thriving commerce had rendered all appeals, varied even by the persuasive ingenuity of Thornberry, a wearisome irritation; and, though the League had transplanted itself from Manchester to the metropolis, and hired theatres for their rhetoric, the close of 1845 found them nearly ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... him extremely. He was less of a conservative than many of his profession; he kept his mind open, and was not disinclined to examine into odd theories, and even, perhaps, to originate a few such himself upon occasion. The question that now confronted him and challenged his ingenuity was, What was the matter with Archibald? Why had the boy suddenly gone back to the primitive source of nourishment, not from mere childish whim, but from actual ignorance—as it seemed—that nourishment was obtainable in any other way? An obvious reply would be that the boy had become ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... good tale, written with charm, and full of remarkable happenings, dangerous doings, strange events, jealous intrigues and sweet love making. The reader's interest is not permitted to lag, but is taken up and carried on from incident to incident with ingenuity and contagious enthusiasm. The story gives us the Graustark and The Prisoner of Zenda thrill, but the tale is treated with freshness, ingenuity, and enthusiasm, and the climax is both unique and satisfying. It will hold the fiction ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... true frigates, with one complete battery of long guns and one interrupted one of carronades. That they were better than any other frigates was highly creditable to our ingenuity and national skill. We cannot, perhaps, lay claim to the invention and first use of the heavy frigate, for 24-pounder frigates were already in the service of at least three nations, and the French 36-pound carronnade, in use on ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the limitless ingenuity and invention of man, and portrays the works and achievements of a castaway, who, thrown ashore almost literally naked upon a desert isle, is able, by the use of his brains, the skill of his hands, and a practical knowledge of the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... of his achievements that he could not bear the idea of a rival. His sister had placed her son Perdix under his charge to be taught the mechanical arts. He was an apt scholar and gave striking evidences of ingenuity. Walking on the seashore he picked up the spine of a fish. Imitating it, he took a piece of iron and notched it on the edge, and thus invented the SAW. He put two pieces of iron together, connecting them at one end with a rivet, and sharpening the other ends, and made a PAIR OF COMPASSES. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... building caused the removal of books from a portion of the attic to the basement where further space had been made available. Other rooms have more recently been provided to store the books and periodicals in the Library and constant ingenuity is necessary to see that the most economical use is made of ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian - for the Year Ended 31 March 1958: Special Centennial Issue • J. O. Wilson and General Assembly Library (New Zealand)
... snaky, hissing sound-sensation as the idea unfolded of the dirk slipping through the flimsy fabric of the shift, cast on the bunker cot to remain the silent evidence of the tragedy. The very acme of touches came in the punctuation[8] of the concluding lines—pauses that emphasize with so much ingenuity the very question that lends the speculatively mournful ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... of glaciers and snow and other unpleasant things myself, and was merely going to say that, shortly after I last talked with you, I discovered another instance of an unknown enemy's ingenuity," he went on. "A wagon we had chartered upset down a steep ravine, and several costly pieces of machinery I had brought out from England, and can hardly replace, were smashed ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... The convict, in the hope of obtaining his pardon as a reward, had filed a guinea and some brass buttons, which, judicially mixed, made a tolerable pile of gold-dust, and this he carefully distributed over a small tract of sandy land. In lieu of the expected freedom, his ingenuity was rewarded with close confinement and other punishments. Thus ended the first idea of a gold-field in ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
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