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More "Speculate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... your back on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy. The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing, one very windy, but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Indian differ from the Negro, and the European from both? This is a question on which we can only speculate. But we shall find it profitable to study the paths by which these diverse races found their way to America from man's primeval home. According to the now almost universally accepted theory, all the races of mankind had a common origin. But where did ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... of being sold. But this rise in prices is not instantaneous and equal for all things. Sharp men, brokers, and men of business, will not suffer by it; for it is their trade to watch the fluctuations of prices, to observe the cause, and even to speculate upon it. But little tradesmen, countrymen, and workmen, will bear the whole weight of it. The rich man is not any the richer for it, but the poor man becomes poorer by it. Therefore, expedients of this kind have the effect of increasing the distance which separates wealth from ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... met my cavalry friends at dinner that evening it was amusing to hear them speculate upon the remarkable occurrence which had, in fact, upset the wits of the whole town. Priests and vergers and sacristans had visited the campanile, and one of them had brought away a flattened piece of lead, which looked as if ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... brought a fortune on her marriage, and it enabled my father to speculate successfully. I have been looking out for an eligible property to invest my money upon, and East Lynne will suit me well, provided I can have the refusal of it, and we can agree about ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... The American temperament and the chances of American history have brought constant temptation to speculation, and plenty of our people prefer to gamble upon what they love to call a "proposition," rather than to go to the bottom of the facts. They would rather speculate than know. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... thinking of Mrs. Bardell and her cruel charges. Still, it was strange that a man should have reached to fifty, have grown round and stout, without ever offering his hand. The first picture in the book, however, helps us to speculate a little. Over his head in the room at Dulwich hangs the portrait of an old lady in spectacles, the image of the great Samuel; his mother certainly. He evidently regarded her with deep affection, he had brought the picture to Dulwich and placed it where it should always ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... one of the two passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again slid away into the bank and ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... us drink, dear friends, let us drink; Time that flies beckons us to it! Let us profit from life as much as we can. Once we pass under the black shadow, Goodbye to wine, our loves; Let us drink while we can, One cannot drink forever. Let fools speculate On the true happiness of life. Our philosophy Puts it among the wine-pots. Possessions, knowledge and glory Hardly make us forget troubling cares, And it is only with good drink That one can be happy. Come on then, wine for all, pour, boys, pour, ...
— The Middle Class Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere
... bid. It is also true that a fortunate drop of the King or Queen of the long suit, with a little help from the partner, would make the next to the last the strongest of the three. It is idle, however, to speculate on what the partner may have. In such close cases it is most important to invariably follow some fixed rule. The player who guesses each time may always be wrong, while the player who sticks to the sound bid is sure to be right ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... The name of the river has gone, but not that of the three buoyant logs lashed together with strips of cane which with sullen lurch, take the wash of the boat. The boys jerk their heads in the direction and murmur "wur-gun," and speculate on the last user. The day is young. For the time being the best the ancient river has to show—the quintessence of the season, superb October—shall be ours. The cloudless sky is richly blue, lighter in shade than the shapely mountain ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... recondite departments of each science and branch of inquiry has been alluded to above. It is not to be inferred that, as a consequence of this tendency, he blinded himself, at any period of his life, to the necessity and the duty of practical exertion. He was always eager to act as well as speculate; and, in this respect, his character preserved an unbroken consistency and harmony from the epoch when, on commencing his residence at Cambridge, he voluntarily became a teacher in a parish Sunday-school, for the sake of applying ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... currents of the world's history move not by chance; and how, moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms of political existence that made her what she was? Yet, standing before some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... be he had for years not allowed himself to speculate. Unbidden at times the memory of certain revealing looks or acts of his father's floated into his mind:—a dread if not terror that on occasion dilated the elder man's eyes, and a steadfast driving of himself at work as if to obliterate painful and despairing ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... Then came a time when the hallucinations of Dona Rita and the faithful Rose left him altogether. Next came a period, perhaps a year, or perhaps an hour, during which he seemed to dream all through his past life. He felt no apprehension, he didn't try to speculate as to the future. He felt that all possible conclusions were out of his power, and therefore he was indifferent to everything. He was like that dream's disinterested spectator who doesn't know what is going to happen next. Suddenly for the first time in his life he had the soul-satisfying consciousness ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... it is difficult to exculpate the Graevenitz, seeing she herself refused to deny her magic practices, and there is little doubt that she possessed that magnetic or hypnotic power, the use whereof our ancestors called witchcraft. It is curious to speculate how much of this power, in wonderfully subtle and varied forms, exists in every human being of whom we say: 'They have great ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... turned out a remarkable woman. She married an eminent dissenting minister, and became the mother of Dr. John Aiken and Mrs. Barbauld, and in her granddaughter, Lucy Aiken, her matrimonial name still survives; so that the curious in such matters may speculate how far the instructions of Doddridge contributed to produce the "Universal Biography," "Evenings at Home," and "Memoirs of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... him be your minister.' The authority over the ten cities is the capacity and opportunity of serving and helping every citizen in them all. What that help may be let us leave. It is better to be ignorant than to speculate about matters where there is no possibility of certainty. Ignorance is more impressive than knowledge, only be sure that no dignity can live amidst the pure light of the heavens, except after the fashion of the dignity of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... strayed off on account of having no guide, and would ultimately come in all right to Camp Supply or make their way back to Fort Dodge; a very unsatisfactory view of the matter, but as no one knew the direction Elliott had taken, it was useless to speculate on other suppositions, and altogether too late to make any search for him. I was now anxious to follow up Custer's stroke by an immediate move to the south with the entire column, but the Kansas regiment ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... people began to talk about it and speculate on what its real, inner meaning might be. They said it was a "mood picture," a "study in soul-tones" and a lot more like that. They even asked the guilty man what he thought of it. When he coldly responded that he thought it "looked like the devil" ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... reinforced by the scanning process. Sensory data, coming in from the outside world as it does, is probably permanent. But the thought patterns originating within the mind itself, the processes that correlate and cross-index and speculate on and hypothesize about the sensory data, these are much more fragile. A man might glance once through a Latin primer and have each and every page imprinted indelibly on his recording mechanism and still be unable to make sense out ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... fixed upon the line, I had completely given up my thoughts to the story of the poor German boy, who had been snatched from poverty by the interference of the parish clerk's daughter; and I contrived to speculate on what I should have done under such circumstances, imagining all sorts of extravagances in which I should have indulged, to testify my gratitude to so amiable ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Introduction to Pride and Prejudice—that she considered herself overpaid for the labour she had bestowed upon it, absolutely nothing seems to have been preserved by her descendants respecting her first printed effort. In the absence of particulars some of her critics have fallen to speculate upon the reason which made her select it, and not Pride and Prejudice, for her debut; and they have, perhaps naturally, found in the fact a fresh confirmation of that traditional blindness of authors to their own best work, which is one of ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... because I'm beginning to get used to it," I thought. Then I began to speculate as to what would happen now if the sergeant was right, and we were to be attacked front and rear; and what it would feel like if I were hit, as seemed very likely now that the enemy were getting so near. But I glanced right and left at my companions, ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... Nicholas's five sleeps were accomplished, the Boy began to curse the hour he had laid eyes on Father Wills. He began even to speculate desperately on the good priest's chances of tumbling into an air-hole, or being devoured by a timely wolf. But no, life was never so considerate as that. Yet he could neither face being the cause ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... unintelligible to both men; but putting two and two together in their great anxiety, they made out that the chief could lead them where they would find something of interest to themselves. They had not dared to hope he knew the whereabouts of both their sons, or to speculate which they should find; they did not even know whether they were being taken to the ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... appreciation. "I'm going to ask a favour of you," he said. "I want to leave the general run of my investments and interests here in your hands, to keep track of I don't want to speculate at all, in the ordinary meaning of the word. Even after I bury a pot of money in non-productive real estate, I shall have an income of 50,000 pounds at the very least, and perhaps twice as much. There's no fun in gambling when you've got such a bank as that ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... fruitless thing in the world than to speculate how life would have gone if this thing or that had not happened. Yet I cannot help but wonder how far I might have travelled along the lines of my present work if I had gone to America and not met Gidding, or if I had met him without visiting America. The man and his country are inextricably ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... Atlantic with me on my return. He always, morning, noon, and night, had one either in his hand or projecting out of his mouth. It signified not what was his occupation, the little stiletto was always to the fore. We used to speculate on board if he so slept, and the ayes ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... were at once hurried unceremoniously along until we reached a large village not far from the bank of the river which we could see flowing tantalisingly by us. We had no time to exchange remarks with each other, or to speculate as to what was to be our fate. At first we fancied that the ugly black was the king of the place, but this we soon discovered was not the case, for, as we were dragged up the main street, we saw issuing from a house of more pretentions than its neighbours another ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... around me—what could I ask for more? I was satisfied and filled. But, by and by, my dream of life was disturbed—my sleep broken. Natural questions began to propose themselves for my solution, such, I suppose, as, sooner or later, spring up in every bosom. I began to speculate about myself—about the very self that had been so long, so busy, about everything else beside itself. I wished to know something of myself—of my origin, my nature, my present condition, my ultimate fate. It seemed to me I was too rare and curious a piece of work to go to ruin, final and inevitable—perhaps ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... include the inevitable disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine only, but also reduces all ideas to commercial form, has yet to have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new phase of the ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... trouble himself to speculate as to how the door happened to be open, but, picking up the spade, wandered forth into the garden. The gate gave no trouble. He walked fast, and long before Marianne came back to her sweeping he had gained the woods, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... want to speculate a little," said he pleasantly. "Good boys. That's right. Won't work yourselves; won't even let your money work honestly: want to set it to cheating somebody. Well, you must remember that the biter ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... record, and as we know so little of what is, any hint of unknown possibilities falling from unknown regions, should, even as a stranger, receive the welcome of contemplation and conjecture, so long as in itself it involves no moral contradiction. The man who will not speculate at all, can make no progress. The thinking about the possible is as genuine, as lawful, and perhaps as edifying an exercise of the mind as the severest induction. Better lies still beyond. Experiment itself must follow in the ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... before his death he published a thin volume of verses which were for the most part written on a sick bed. In this little volume Cotter showed fine poetic sense and a free and bold mastery over his material. A reading of Cotter's poems is certain to induce that mood in which one will regretfully speculate on what the young poet might have accomplished had he not been ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... Scott is to marry her, when the strife ends," he would speculate. "Ah, Monsieur Scott, if to that time you defer your nuptials, they shall take place in heaven —or in hell." For the furtherance of his diabolical personal aims he now began to assume a benignant, fatherly tone, and when he issued his famous "Proclamation ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... really haven't troubled to speculate Who can tell how one may, quite unconsciously, give offence—even to those ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... ma'am," answered Polwarth, "it is for myself alone. I know the sacredness of married life too well to speculate irreverently on its affairs. I believe that many an awful crisis of human history is there passed—such, I presume, as God only sees and understands. The more carefully such are kept from the common eye and the common judgment, the better, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... with her usual aristocrat's passivity, and he went. But it was late indeed that night before she ceased to speculate on what the real effect of her words had been ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... They began to speculate as to the time of its arrival; and while they spoke, still watching eagerly, they did not notice how the sky darkened. The horizon still remained light; it even grew brighter; but the brightness was ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... which preceded the sound of an answering boom from the iron lips of the fortress. This was repeated many times, the hoarse cannon barks alternating between gun-ship and shore, in an awe-inspiring exchange of courtesies. As the girls grew used to the thunderous sounds they delighted to speculate from which bastion, or ledge, or flowering bush, would come that little puff of smoke, to be followed by the lightning and thunder of man's invention, scarcely less terrible than those of ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... precise causes which conduced to unusual Tartar activity at the dawn of Chinese true history: in the absence of any Tartar knowledge of writing, it seems impossible now that we ever can know it. Still less are we in a position to speculate profitably how far the movements on the Chinese frontier, in 800-600 B.C., may be connected with similar restlessness on the Persian and Greek frontiers, of which, again, we know nothing very illuminating or specific. It is certain that the Chinese had no conception of ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... Prusa (who lived in Rome in the first century before Christ), and by his pupil Themison (B.C. 50). The third school of medical thought, that of Empiricism, taught that experience was the only teacher, and that it was idle to speculate upon remote causes. The Empirics based these views upon the teaching of philosophers known as Sceptics or Zetetics, followers of Parmenides and Pyrrho, who taught that it was useless to fatigue the mind in endeavouring to comprehend what is beyond its range. They were the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... by a large concourse of people—very different from that of Joel's mother, whom three selectmen followed to the grave. When it was over, Joel and his daughter went back to their desolate house, while the village set to work to speculate as to whom the widower would marry. 'Such a match! So rich, and only one child! Emily Parks would make him a good wife; only Emily was rather old—at least twenty-seven or eight—and Mr. Burns would marry a young girl, of course. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Congress—in the cabinet itself—receives him;"—and Ichabod grew more than ever pleased and satisfied with the idea, when he reflected that Jared had all along been held to possess a goodly person, and a very fair development of the parts of speech. He even ventured to speculate upon the possibility of Jared passing into the White House—the dawn of that era having already arrived, which left nobody safe from the crowning ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... the Republic by the incessant calls of active life, now asserted itself in all earnest characters, and would not be content without satisfaction. Virgil was cut off before his philosophical development was completed, and therefore it is useless to speculate what views he would have finally espoused. But it is clear that his tone of mind was in reality artistic and not philosophical. Systems of thought could never have had real power over him except in so far ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... South Sea Bubble, which would have brought to life anything, and for a wild short season the quacks and alchemists and Jews came back: the ball rooms and the gaming saloons filled again. New houses were built; "amongst them that of Baron Swasso." To speculate as to who Baron Swasso may have been is agreeable: but the baronial hall could not save Epsom. Even a more powerful attraction than Baron Swasso failed to do so; or, rather, refused to try. She was Miss Wallin, whom the vulgar addressed as Crazy Sally; but ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Paul. There was no doubt in Paul's mind as to the quality of his patron. He had at once recognized the Greatest Pitcher. He ceased to speculate as to whether this assured young man owned the high office-building. That was now of ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... needed neither salutation nor signature to identify its sender? That Stuart had penned the note and contrived to find some one he could trust to mail it was obvious. And yet Christopher, fingering it, could not but speculate as to how it had struggled to freedom. Through what strange hands had it passed,—what mazes of strategy and concealment? Ah, it was futile to attempt to trace its devious trail. Here it was in his possession, and with a sudden inrush of joy, his bewildered senses stirred to action, and he ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... began to speculate about sexual matters and to observe the coupling of dogs with newly acquired interest. At 10 years he often lay awake, listening to a woman of 25 singing to a piano accompaniment. The woman's voice seemed very beautiful, and so strongly impressed him that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... population outnumbering the white in the proportion of ten to one. Here there is a Portuguese admixture. From Maha, the chief town of the Seychelles, to Madagascar, is five hundred and seventy-six miles—a fact to be borne in mind when we speculate upon the origin of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... to speculate on what the conditions precedent to such a pacific league of neutrals must of necessity be; but it is not therefore less difficult to make a shrewd guess as to the chances of these conditions being met. Of these conditions precedent, the chief and foremost, without which any other favorable circumstances ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the crowd can be replaced in a man's imagination, how far some substitute for that social backing can be made to serve the same purpose in neutralizing fear. He wrote with the calm of a man who weighs the probabilities ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... the sixties there were only new fields to conquer. The great enterprises were forced to speculate upon the development of the public domain and to find their profits in the business of communities to which they themselves gave birth. Natural waterways and roads extended little west of Chicago. The new fields were entered by the railroads without prospect ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... from hard-drinking Southern ancestors. Altogether, he gave himself little time for thought, and if he felt at times an inclination to dream he thrust it from him with an almost superstitious fear. He would speculate no longer, but neither would he run the risk of invoking the laughter of cynical gods. If unimaginable disaster awaited him, at least he would not weaken his defences by a sojourn in the paradise ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the news of victories gained by the French over the Austrians seemed to occupy every attention, and threw a dark shade over all expectation of present liberty. I learned, however, and a prisoner's mind would not fail to speculate thereon, that my detention was well known in Paris, and thought to be hard; but it was also said, that I was considered in the same light as those persons who were arrested in France, as hostages for the vessels and men ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... see his wife and family. He had also made a handsome addition to my father's income, which the death of my two uncles had enabled him to do. Against all this, my uncle's wife was reported to be again in the family way. I cannot say that I was pleased when my father used to speculate upon these chances so often as he did. I thought, not only as a man, but more particularly as a clergyman, he was much to blame; but I did not know then so much of the world. We had not heard from ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... light in No. 401; but then it was too late. Had he been delayed ten seconds, or had he gotten off at the fourth floor, he would have—. However, I anticipate; or rather I speculate on what would have happened under hypothetical conditions—which is fatuous in the extreme; hypothetical conditions ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... used well." She had been sold four times in her life. In the first instance the failure of her master was given as the reason of her sale. Subsequently she was purchased and sold by different traders, who designed to speculate upon her as a "fancy article." They would dress her very elegantly, in order to show her off to the best advantage possible, but it appears that she had too much regard for her husband and her honor, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... gathering of neighbors at the Bascoms' on this particular July afternoon. No invitations had been sent out, and none were needed. A common excitement had made it vital that people should drop in somewhere, and speculate about certain interesting matters well known to be going on in the community, but going on in such an underhand and secretive fashion that it well-nigh destroyed one's ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doubtless, intended to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly. Therefore, being desirous, too, of telling the truth in this matter, I must confess that Lucy did speculate with some regret on what it would have been to be Lady Lufton. To have been the wife of such a man, the owner of such a heart, the mistress of such a destiny—what more or what better could the world have done for her? And ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... escape of a spy. The court had found him guilty and its findings had been submitted to the higher authorities and endorsed by them. A copy of these reports now lay on his desk. All this his Adjutant, Forbes, knew as well as the General himself, but if Forbes had thought it worth while to speculate on the extent of his commander's interest he might have guessed for years without ever drawing one logical conclusion from all the hints that that impassive face ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... his horizon aglow with the smile of fortune. Everything was coming propitiously for him, even this unexpected visit of Miriam Kirkstone. He did not trouble himself to speculate as to the object of her visit, for he was grappling now with his own opportunity, his chance to get away, to win out for himself in one last master-stroke, and his mind was concentrated in that direction. The time was ripe to ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... might have been justly exposed to the torments of hell forever. But where is the proof? Is it found in the word of God? This tells us what is, what has been, and what will be; but it is not given to speculate upon what might be. For aught we know, if there had been no salvation through Christ, as a part of the actual constitution and system of the world, then there would have been no other part of that system whatever. We are not told, and we do not know, what it would have been consistent with the ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... be difficult to analyze the effect of tho punishment Kirsty had given him, but its influence was upon him through the whole of the terrible time—none the less beneficent that his response to her stinging blows was indignant rage. I dare hardly speculate what, had she not defended herself so that he could not reach her, he might not have done in the first instinctive motions of natural fury. It is possible that only Kirsty's skill and courage saved him from what he would never have surmounted the shame ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... head—shook a long negative. And Fenwick looked up quickly, and uttered a little sharp "Ah!" as though something had struck him. The slow head-shake said as plain as words could have said it, "I wish I could say yes." So expressive was it that Fenwick did not even speculate on the third alternative—a separation without a divorce. He saw at once he could make it easier for her if he spoke out plain, treating the bygone as a thing that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... believe that in "variable stars" we have another star, following that of the dullest red star, in the dying of suns. The light of these stars varies periodically in so many days, weeks, or years. It is interesting to speculate that they are slowly dying suns, in which the molten interior periodically bursts through the shell of thick vapours that is gathering round them. What we saw about our sun seems to point to some such stage in the future. That is, however, not the received opinion about variable stars. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... you know. And she gets worried because people discuss the condition of 'the departed' (that's what we call them in the boarding-house). Rhoda is sure they are in nothingness. I told her it was impossible for me to speculate on such things. How can one, you know? People have so much imagination. Mine always sticks at a certain point and won't move on. Could you do it if someone asked you to imagine Denis, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... the subject further, beyond saying that I should feel glad when the autumn came, and Lupin would be of age and responsible for his own debts. He answered: "My dear Guv., I promise you faithfully that I will never speculate with what I have not got. I shall only go on Job Cleanands' tips, and as he is in the 'know' it is pretty safe sailing." I felt somewhat relieved. Gowing called in the evening and, to my surprise, ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... alongside you may have a talk with them if you know the language or have an interpreter; or you may amuse yourself with a little pantomime, if articulate speech is impossible. Now you encounter a long train of camels marching along with solemn, stately step, and speculate as to the contents of the big packages with which they are laden. Now you encounter the carcass of a horse that has fallen by the wayside, and watch the dogs and the steppe eagles fighting over their prey; and if you are murderously ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... world—what for? I have five hundred a year, and when my mother goes over to the majority (long distant be that day, for I'm very fond of the dear old lady), I shall have five thousand—more than enough to satisfy any sane man who doesn't want to speculate on the Stock Exchange. Your case, my good Mac, is different. You will be a celebrated Scotch divine. You will preach to a crowd of pious numskulls about predestination, and so forth. You will be stump-orator ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... quiet wonder, for with an entire neighborhood intent upon this end, it was rather surprising that I was not double by this time. Had they succeeded I should now occupy a very different attitude. It is only old bachelors and old maids who speculate and theorize on marriage; when people are really about it, they say little, and (it ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... men who man the raiders certainly do not speculate about you and your state of mind. When back home, some of them may wonder what feelings they have inspired in the people below, but at the time the job's the thing and ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... he had carefully scanned the path he was to tread and was prepared for every emergency. When the fatal exposure came, which he had hoped until the last might be withheld, he was determined that none should know aught from his lips concerning its truth or falsity. They might speculate as to the significance of his death by his own hand, but he would neither say nor do anything that would throw additional light ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... speculate about that future life upon which religion insists so much and communicates so little. Was it perhaps in other planets, under those wonderful, many-mooned, silver-banded skies? She perceived more and more a kind of absurdity in the existence all ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... at any price. Slowly, slowly the victims emerge from the lower depths of gloom, feebly smile, faintly joke, pick fearfully but wistfully at once-rejected dishes; talk about getting up, but don't do it; read a little, look at their sallow countenances in hand-glasses, and speculate upon the good effects of travel upon the constitution. Then they suddenly become daring, gay, and social; rise, adorn themselves, pervade the cabins, sniff the odours of engine and kitchen without qualms, ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... Dick. Oddly enough, it had scarcely occurred to him before to speculate on what he might be doing in his absence; he had thought chiefly about himself. But now he gave his attention to the subject, what new horrors it opened up! What might not become of his well-conducted household ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... was only two miles from us, but we were most mercilessly jolted over a plank-road, where many of the planks had made a descent into a sea of mud, on the depth of which I did not attempt to speculate. Even in beautiful England I never saw a prettier sight than the assembling of the congregation. The church is built upon a very steep little knoll, the base of which is nearly encircled by a river. Close to it is a long shed, in which the horses ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... the higher they raise their prices; soon, they sell only at an exorbitant rate, and worse still, stop selling and store their goods or products, in the expectation of selling them dearer. In this way, they speculate on another's wants; they augment the general distress and become public enemies. Nearly all the agriculturists, manufacturers and tradesmen of the day, little and big, are public enemies—farmers, tenant farmers, market-gardeners, cultivators of every degree, as well as ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... venison hams, and gourds for drinking cups, and bags of seed, and my father's best hunting shirt; also, in a neglected corner, several articles of woman's attire from pegs. These once belonged to my mother. Among them was a gown of silk, of a fine, faded pattern, over which I was wont to speculate. The women at the Cross-Roads, twelve miles away, were dressed in coarse butternut wool and huge sunbonnets. But when I questioned my father on these matters he would give ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... felt when examining volcanic islands, and I can remember even particular rocks which I struck, and the smell of the hot, black, scoriaceous cliffs; but of those HOT smells you do not seem to have had much. I do quite envy you. How I should like to be with you, and speculate on the deep and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... blossoms of the fringed gentians whispering scandals about the flaming Indian paint brushes that flourished in the opening in the woods where the sun's ray could reach and warm the dark earth. As I listened I could not help but speculate a great deal as to the possibilities of the odd old man of this forest being in some way connected with my father's history, but the story of the wolf-man as given to me by my big companion was so varied and so mixed with the superstitions of ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... one thing to theorize, to speculate, to advise, when the Prioress was safe in her Nunnery. It was quite another, to know that she was being carried through the streets of Worcester, helpless, upon a stretcher; that when that blue pall was lifted, she would find herself in a hostel, alone with her lover, surrounded by men, ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... quietly, "am I to understand that you advised me to buy stock in which you yourself did not venture to speculate?" ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... fish, and every other player four; then three cards are given to each, by one at a time, and another turned up for trump. The cards are not to be looked at, except in this manner: The eldest hand shows the uppermost card, which, if a trump, the company may speculate on, or bid for—the highest bidder buying and paying for it, provided the price offered be approved of by the seller. After this is settled, if the first card does not prove a trump, then the next eldest is to show the uppermost card, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... that of a man lying full length in the soft tender grass of some retired spot of Forest park—with his face hidden in his folded arms. To the few who may see him, if they speculate at all about him he sleeps or he rests his body after a day's fatigue. "Am I never to be the brave man?" thought Hosmer, "always the coward, flying ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... enough to stare and speculate, for it was two hours before he was summoned. He went into the office building, where a company timekeeper interviewed him. The superintendent was busy, he said, but he (the timekeeper) would try to find ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... watching the patient, nor the good-looking young surgeon, who seemed to be the special property of her superior. Even in her few months of training she had learned to keep herself calm and serviceable, and not to let her mind speculate idly. She was gazing out of the window into the dull night. Some locomotives in the railroad yards just outside were puffing lazily, breathing themselves deeply in the damp, spring air. One hoarser note than the others struck familiarly on the nurse's ear. That was the voice of the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... low window, and looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys again, began to dream; for it had been the uniform tendency of this man's life—so much was wanting in it to think about, so much that might have been better directed and happier to speculate upon—to make him ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... of that; but I was not so sure about Alb, who wore a clouded brow. Whether he was worrying over his own affairs, or whether friend Robert had commandered his hero's sympathy, I could not guess, and dared not ask. Nor had I much time to speculate upon Alb's business, for I saw by Freule Menela's eye that my own was pressing, and all my energies were bent in steering clear of her during the good-by excursion ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... afterward. For a few minutes no one spoke, Tom whistled and Maud hummed but Fan and Polly were each soberly thinking of something, for they had reached an age when children, girls especially, begin to observe, contrast, and speculate upon the words, acts, manners, and looks of those about them. A good deal of thinking goes on in the heads of these shrewd little folks, and the elders should mind their ways, for they get criticised pretty sharply and imitated ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... begin to speculate about the future of this country there is no end. And the past of the nation has rather little to do with estimating its future. We have been a wide-open immigration country. In twenty years we have transformed ourselves ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... face, as when Jacobs came to him this spring, and said he was going to marry old Miser Jerrold's daughter. He wanted to quit father's employ, and he thanked him in a real manly way for the manner in which he had always treated him. Well Jacobs left, and mother says that father would sit and speculate about him, as to whether he had fallen in love with Eliza Jerrold, or whether he was determined to regain possession of the box, and was going to do it honestly, or whether he was sorry for having frightened the old man into ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... reached with safety only after materials from many sources have been obtained. It will not be safe for the collector to speculate much upon that which he observes. His own theory or explanation of customs will be of little worth, but the theory and explanation given by the Indians will be of the greatest value. What do the Indians ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... only light was this. Powerfully significant and touching as these efforts were in their success, they are far more significant and touching in their failure. For they did fail. It requires no philosophy now to speculate on the adequacy or inadequacy of the Religion of Nature. For us who could never weigh it rightly in the scales of Truth it has been tried in the balance of experience and found wanting. Theism is the easiest of all religions to get, but the most difficult to keep. Individuals ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... benevolence;—the child comes, I say, with his heart full, and the answer he receives from the dull disciple is—"God has said nothing about that in his word, therefore we have no right to believe anything about it. It is better not to speculate on such matters. However desirable it may seem to us, we have nothing to do with it. It is not revealed." For such a man is incapable of suspecting, that what has remained hidden from him may have been revealed to the babe. With the authority, therefore, of years ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... through which it is possible to convey force by means of vibrations,—and that vibrations can be started by the power of Sound. These we have found to be well established facts of ordinary science, and taking them as our starting-point, we may now begin to speculate as to the possible workings of the known laws under ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... inhabitants of one planet because it is too hot, or of another because it is too cold, of one body because it is too deeply immersed in vaporous masses, or of another because it has neither atmosphere nor water, we have only to speculate about the unseen worlds which circle round those other suns, the stars; or, instead of changing the region of space where we imagine worlds, we can look backward to the time when planets now cold and dead were warm with life, or forward to the distant future when planets now glowing with fiery ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... and, of course, the multitude of the people were overwhelmed with alarm. As no one could do anything to ward off what seemed a certain catastrophe, the situation was all the more dreadful. Men could only watch the monster, speculate as to the result, and wait, with horrible suspense, for the inevitable. The circle of revolution was now becoming so small that the crisis was hourly expected. Men everywhere left their houses and sought the shelterless fields, ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... on just that, as I told you, Mr. Graves, when you and I fust met. He got some South Denboro folks to invest money along with him; sort of savin's account, they figgered it; but I found out he was usin' it to speculate with. So that's why we had our row. I took pains to see that the money was paid back, but he and I never spoke afterwards. Fur as my own money was concerned, I hadn't any kick, but.... However, I'm talkin' ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... rolled on some lazy coach of ancient merchant or withered maiden, unconscious of any life but that creeping through their own languid veins. And before the house in which Catherine died, there loitered many stragglers, gossips, of the hamlet, subscribers to the news-room hard by, to guess, and speculate, and wonder why, from the church behind, there rose the merry peal of ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... least like any of my forecasts; but that was not for want of trying to foresee it all. I don't seem to possess any of that quiet gift of waiting to deal with each development on its merits, as and when it comes. I have to speculate, and speculation is ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... was his instructions. He paid little heed, but fixed his eyes upon the fire, listening to the rain that continued to beat against the window panes, and began to speculate about the future. Was he to be successful or not? He was not without solicitude, but he felt no small measure of hope. At nine o'clock he began to feel drowsy, and intimated as much to his host. The old man conducted him to an upper chamber, ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... single-storied cot in Lockwood, Abe Lockwood was born, a Lockwoodite by double right, and though age has seriously told upon its appearance, it stands to this day. We sometimes see little old men living on, and year by year growing less and less, until we begin to speculate about the probable time it will require at their rate of diminution for nothing to remain of them; and the same may be said of the little old house in which Abe Lockwood was born; it was always little, but as years have slowly added to its age, it has gradually begun to look less, and now, ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... we came up, the cutwater was between us, and I didn't see him again, though I heard his convulsive gurgling and screaming from the other side of the ship. Then the sounds stopped, and I think he must have gone under; but I was too busy with myself to speculate much. I was trying to get a finger-nail grip on that smooth, black side slipping by me, but could not. There was nothing to get hold of, and no ropes were hanging over. Then I thought of the rudder and the iron bumpkin on it that the rudder-chains ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... Boyle had been had he come into touch with the movement ten years earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was not a young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the Abbey Theatre in London and was impelled to write plays for it. He was, though, able to adapt the experience he had had as a story-writer to the stage in ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... value, abounded. Nobody appeared without them; but I could not see any of an antique make. The men seemed to be contented with rings—huge, heavy rings of solid gold, worked with a rough flower pattern. One young fellow had three upon his fingers. This circumstance led me to speculate whether a certain portion at least of this display of jewellery around me had not been ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... had almost as markedly as the gift of speech; he at once perceived that his guest was no ordinary man, and by a sort of instinct he had discovered on what subjects he was best calculated to speak, and wherein they could gain most from him. Charles Osmond's thoughts she could only speculate about; but that he was ready to take them all as friends, and did not regard them as a different order of being, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... assurance that this latest discovery cleared Helen completely. She couldn't have fired a rifle from the rear seat of the automobile, nor could she have put those bullet holes into the back of the car. In my joy that I had found proof of my sister's innocence, I forgot to speculate on who could have committed the murder. My second thought was really a continuation of the first, that I must bring the coroner and Simpson at once to ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... with vastly more plausibility, deny that Paul was the author of his Epistles, because he employed an amanuensis, or, for the same reason, deny that Milton was the author of Paradise Lost. It is useless here to speculate upon the reasons which induced God to ordain and bring sin to pass. We are now concerned with the fact merely, and we hence conclude that he is the author of sin and the only being ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... "Physics are concerned with things which have a principle of motion in themselves; mathematics speculate on permanent, but not transcendental and self-existent things; and there is another science separate from these two, which treats of that which is immutable and transcendental, if indeed there ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... remains of houses situated at a great height, where it is extremely cold and sterile. At first I imagined that these buildings had been places of refuge, built by the Indians on the first arrival of the Spaniards; but I have since been inclined to speculate on the probability of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... brood over the mystery long. As the minutes passed slowly by and Martin did not come back, the youth began to speculate on the chances ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield
... us in this way? When we were both girls, it was quite the other way. My father practically adopted Frances Tremont. She was married from our house. But you see, Anna, she made a better marriage than I. Oh, why was your father so reckless? I warned him not to speculate in the rash way he was accustomed to doing, but he would never take my advice. If he had, we would not be as we are now." And again the poor lady was overcome with ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... that wild career of mad speculation which has since worked so much misery to thousands. I suffered in common with many others who invested money in sheep at the same time, and who left the Colony. Nevertheless, I look upon sheep as one of the best descriptions of stock in which a man can speculate, provided that he keeps within reasonable bounds as to price. Good ewes purchased from 20s. to 25s. per head, will, nine times out of ten, pay their proprietor from fifteen to twenty per cent, for his outlay. To do this, they must of course be properly ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... Hugh was an athletic, well proportioned, handsome man; of a sanguine temper, prone to pleasure, a frequenter of wakes and fairs, and much addicted to speculate; particularly in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... most nearly guessed the answer to that riddle belongs the future Empire of the Seas. It is interesting to guess for oneself and to speculate upon the possibility of a kind of armoured mother-ship for waterplanes and submarines and torpedo craft, but necessarily that would be a mere journalistic and amateurish guessing. I am not guessing, but asking urgent questions. What force, what council, how many imaginative and inventive men has ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... one sunny afternoon, (when the trouts were unwilling to visit the dry land,) drawn to the little stone in the corner, of which we have just made mention, and recollecting, at the same time, that Porter was the name of the pool, as well as of the person buried, we began to speculate upon the possibility of there being some connection betwixt the two circumstances—the name of the individual, and the well-known designation of the blackest and deepest pool in the Closeburn part of the river. Near to this solitary restingplace of the ashes of our forefathers—the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... each other, until in 1749 each people proceeded at last to take possession of the Ohio country after its own fashion. The French sent a military expedition which sank and nailed up leaden plates; the English formed a great land company to speculate and make money, and both set diligently to work to form Indian alliances. A man of far less perception than Lawrence Washington, who had become the chief manager of the Ohio Company, would have seen that the conditions on the frontier ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... tells me he has no doubt that Carlyle suffered all his life from a duodenal ulcer. "One may speculate," he says, "on the difference there would have been in his writings if he had undergone the operation ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... second set of drawings that is somewhat different, though of a simpler shape and design, on which other scientists aboard can speculate, and which can be sent to Earth to confuse ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... sadly sure that he will never come forward, that I have never taken the trouble to speculate as to whether, if he did, my greediness would make ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... pitiful thing is this delight of self-interest and cupidity, wallowing in the slough of the 2nd of December! Faith! let us live, let us go into business, let us speculate in zinc and railway shares, let us make money; it is degrading but it is an excellent thing; a scruple less, a louis more; let us sell our whole soul at that rate. One runs to and fro, one rushes about, one cools his heels in anterooms, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... back to Littlebath, intent on enjoying her short reprieve. Something might happen; she did not ask herself what. The old gentleman might not last long; but she certainly did not speculate on his death. Or;—she had a sort of an idea that there might be an "or," though she never allowed herself to dwell on it as a reality. But on one point she did make up her mind, that if it should be her destiny to keep house for either of those ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... painful, half amused, he realised how great a factor in his own life this slim young girl might be. As lady of the Court and his own patron, she would have it in her power to ensure his comfort or the reverse. Ah, well, well, it was too early to speculate! The child had a sweet, good face; no doubt all ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of temperance and fortitude. It may direct the understanding, and ultimately the members of the body, in order to the production of some practical result in the external world, as a bridge. Lastly, it may direct the understanding to speculate and think, contemplate and consider, for mere contemplation's sake. Happiness must take one or ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... chronicler nor Mistress Plodgitt got any further information from the prudent Carmen, and must fain speculate upon certain facts that ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... say, nephew, but you are too young to marry. You can't marry and go to sea. Follow your profession, Newton; speculate in ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the cool, green shadow of the woods, to smell the sweet, sharp smell of the earth, and watch the dapplings of sunlight through the leaves overhead. Even the boys succumbed to the spell, and for the first half-hour asked nothing better than to roll about on the grass, poke in the roots of trees, and speculate concerning rabbit-holes and nests; but the half-hour over, one and all were convinced that watches were wrong and they were right in deciding that it was beyond all manner of doubt full time for lunch; so the cloth was spread on a level piece of turf, and the good things were consumed ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was—had two effects. It dispelled, for a time, the gloom that had come with the news of Will Ford's disappearance, and it gave the girls something to talk about, to speculate over and ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... arise needle experts who, upon microscopic examination and scientific test, will refer all specimens to positive date and peculiar function, and by so doing let in floods of light upon ancient customs and habits. It is idle to speculate upon a condition which does not yet exist, for, happily, needles for actual hand sewing are yet in sufficient demand to allow us to indulge in their ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... her lovely eyes that seemed to spread up and around her white forehead and beautiful hair like a supernatural lustre. There was a fire that animated her which nobody who saw its glow or felt its warmth could question. Without that altar of music—But why speculate on what she might have been if she had not been what she was? That would be to consider not Benigna, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... time inclined to think that he had made a mistake in not going home on the Ida. Apart from the exciting movements of Irish affairs about which he could only speculate, he felt sure that it was in London, not on the island, that the most important developments of the Salissa mystery would take place. He wanted to know what Steinwitz was doing, and whether Konrad Karl was still enjoying his spendthrift holiday in Paris. He would have liked to be in a position to ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... least idea, and we have no more time to speculate. There! Didn't you hear a strange noise on the island? I declare, that store man must be right. Those ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... good it would at least strike somewhere in the midst of the debris and add more or less to the wreckage. As to whether the Boche commander-in-chief had been caught napping and buried in the ruins, was a matter about which they could only speculate. ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... neither had I a net to catch small fish; I was therefore obliged to bait with pieces of hippopotamnus. Fishing in such a pool as that of the Atbara was sufficiently exciting, as it was impossible to speculate upon what creature might accept the invitation; but the Arabs who accompanied me were particular in guarding me against the position I had taken under a willow-bush close to the water, as they explained, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... was folding his paper; it was growing too near the hour to speculate longer on Wayne ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... long after something which he did not have, and being yet in the woods returning home, he came to a bush which was growing in the shape of a man's hand, and which he stopped to look at and speculate upon. He wondered at it, and his heart was disturbed and began to boil. He fell down upon his knees by the bush, striking his hands into it, and prayed: "Oh God! you cause to come before me a sign or image of what I want ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... with things which have a principle of motion in themselves; mathematics speculate on permanent, but not transcendental and self-existent things; and there is another science separate from these two, which treats of that which is immutable and transcendental, if indeed there exists ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... at length to speculate on what had happened. One thing was clear: it was because they were fighting that the man had come; but it was not so clear who the man was. He could not be Christian, because Christian went over the river! ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... experience of the last eight years, during which the system has been in force, may be taken as a reliable guide, the experiment shows many signs of success. It has certainly checked the tendency to speculate in lands with a view to a rise in price, which threatened to become a great, as it certainly was a growing, evil. It has been found that it will not pay to do this in the face of taxation, and particularly of the graduated tax; and owners of large areas of land have ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... a window, and looked across the ancient street at the opposite houses, recalling how I had watched them on wet afternoons, when I first came there; and how I had used to speculate about the people who appeared at any of the windows, and had followed them with my eyes up and down stairs, while women went clicking along the pavement in pattens, and the dull rain fell in slanting lines, and poured out of the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... loaferish looking men, whiling away their time upon the wharf; but as they confined themselves to simply asking a few questions as to what part of the world we came from, and received satisfactory answers, they soon lost all interest in us, and began to speculate what time the ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... him?" But she shook her head—shook a long negative. And Fenwick looked up quickly, and uttered a little sharp "Ah!" as though something had struck him. The slow head-shake said as plain as words could have said it, "I wish I could say yes." So expressive was it that Fenwick did not even speculate on the third alternative—a separation without a divorce. He saw at once he could make it easier for her if he spoke out plain, treating the bygone as a thing that could ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... that I innocently believed you came to propose we should work in company, and speculate, both of us, with the money of Monsieur de Frescas, of which I have entire control—and here you talk to me of something entirely different! Frescas, my good friend, is one of the legal titles of this young man, who has seven in all. Stringent reasons prevent him from revealing ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... seeing she herself refused to deny her magic practices, and there is little doubt that she possessed that magnetic or hypnotic power, the use whereof our ancestors called witchcraft. It is curious to speculate how much of this power, in wonderfully subtle and varied forms, exists in every human being of whom we say: ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... displaying an extreme inconstancy, and flitting from Kennedy's Red Discovery to Kennedy's White, and from Hood's Sarsaparilla to Mother Seigel's Syrup. And there were, besides, some mildewed and half-empty bottles, the labels obliterated, over which Nares would sometimes sniff and speculate. "Seems to smell like diarrhoea stuff," he would remark. "I wish't I knew, and I would try it." But the slop-chest was indeed represented by the plugs of niggerhead and nothing else. Thus paternal laws are made, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Twiller had not been Van Twiller, if he had been a man of no family and no position and no money, if New York had been Paris and Thirty-fourth Street a street in the Latin Quarter—but it is useless to speculate on what might have happened. What did ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... the world. Five hundred thousand strangers expended their fortunes, in hope of making greater ones. Twelve hundred new coaches were set up in the city. Lodgings could scarcely be had for money. The highest price was paid for provisions. Widow ladies, clergymen, and noblemen deserted London to speculate in stocks at Paris. Nothing was seen but new equipages, new houses, new apparel, new furniture. Nothing was felt but universal exhilaration. Every man seemed to have made his fortune. The stocks rose every day. The higher they rose, the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... of looking at things. Surely there is much of interest in the crowd. Surely there is an unending fund from which to speculate, in that crowd way down on the street ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... was uncanny. He could speculate on these things as if they were matters affecting none of us there. In that fourpenny doss-house he remained as aloof as a god, and in some vague way the calmness of the man in face of this infringing realism ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... heavens and the new earth are the same in which we now live, righteously inhabited by the meek, with their deeper-opened eyes. What if the meek of the dead be thus possessing it even now! But I do not care to speculate. It is enough that the man who refuses to assert himself, seeking no recognition by men, leaving the care of his life to the Father, and occupying himself with the will of the Father, shall find himself, ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... Pole, with a little dry laugh at her own joke. But, like many people who think they have made a severe and sarcastic speech, which yet is clever of its kind, she began to relax in her grimness from the moment when she made this allusion to the surgery; and we turned to speculate on the way in which Mrs Jamieson would receive the news. The person whom she had left in charge of her house to keep off followers from her maids to set up a follower of her own! And that follower a man whom Mrs Jamieson had tabooed as vulgar, and inadmissible ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... he really did not like to speculate; for at this point feelings stirred within him which he ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... lest you should expect any thing of Elaborate or Methodical in what you will meet with here, I must confess to you before-hand, that the seasons I was wont to chuse to devise and try Experiments about Colours, were those daies, wherein having taken Physick, and finding my self as unfit to speculate, as unwilling to be altogether idle, I chose this diversion, as a kind of Mean betwixt the one and the other. And I have the less scrupled to set down the following Experiments, as some of them came to my mind, and as the Notes wherein I had set down the rest, occurr'd ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... last recovery, and during the long evenings, as they sat together or walked under the stars in the park, the thought of these talks was often in Sam's mind and he found himself beginning to speculate on her present attitude and to wonder how bravely she would meet the idea of a separation. In the end he decided that no such thought was in her mind, that face to face with the tremendous actuality she clung to him with a new dependence, and a new need of his companionship. The conviction of the ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... bring him fifty per cent. He invested in the traffic of usury what had sufficed to save a hundred such as I am from perdition, and he lost it all. It was nearly his whole fortune; but he lives and has his luxuries still: be cannot speculate, but he can save: he cared not if I starved, for he finds an hourly happiness in ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... subterfuge. And now he found it impossible to pronounce the words he had so carefully thought out. Jacky was not the woman to approach easily with sentiment, she was so "deucedly practical." So Bill said to himself. It was useless to speculate upon her feelings. This girl never allowed anything approaching sentiment to appear upon the surface. She knew better than to do so. She had the grave responsibility of her uncle's ranch upon her shoulders, therefore all men must be kept ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... success in literature stimulated the strong mind of his son to seek occupation of more certain profit; and those who feel interest in the whereabouts of celebrated men, may think upon the days when William Hogarth wrought in silver, as the apprentice of Ellis Gamble, in Cranbourne Street, and speculate upon the change of circumstances, wrought by his own exertions, when, as a great painter, in after time, he occupied the house, now known as the Sabloniere Hotel, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... was probably through the Church. The career of Warburton, who rose from a similar position to a bishopric might have been rivalled by Johnson, and his connexions with Lichfield might, one would suppose, have helped him to a start. It would be easy to speculate upon causes which might have hindered such a career. In later life, he more than once refused to take orders upon the promise of a living. Johnson, as we know him, was a man of the world; though a religious man of the world. He represents the secular rather ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... Peter said. 'The First of April, as I think. Five little weeks will soon be fled: One scarcely will have time to wink! Give me a year to speculate— To buy and sell—to drive a trade—' Said Paul 'I cannot change the date. On May the Fourth it must ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... under any other aspect, mechanical, electrical, chemical, or what not. It is beside the question to point to the fact that in Nature 'new elements are making their appearance and old elements disappearing,' for though we may speculate as to the manner of formation of uranium and thorium, and though the production of radio-active matters in Nature at the present time and always seems to be a well-established fact, such phenomena have not even an analogy with those of ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... curious puzzle, which his brain in its excited state was scarcely able to tackle. His thoughts got somewhat confused and broken as he approached his chambers. He was so near the letter now—a few minutes and he would no longer need to wonder or speculate about it, but would know exactly what she said. He turned and stood for a minute or so at the Temple gates, looking out upon the busy Strand. It was still as lovely as a summer night could be overhead, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... that now, two days before Christmas, The Cedars was suddenly plunged into a state of subdued excitement. What might happen next not even little Roger dared speculate about. ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... the surface of things. How did she know that this laughing, light-spoken gallant, seemingly so open and artless—oh! more infantile than her very self!—was not deep and complex? Or that it was not he and Flora on whose case she was being lured to speculate? The boat, of whose large breathings and pulsings she became growingly aware, offered no reply. Presently from the right shore, off before them, came a strain of band music out of ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... familiar knowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked whether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on their way from school. "I sometimes go in there, mother," she confessed; "but I generally speculate outside." ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... their tenure; the power of executing their office will be held at the pleasure of those who deal out fame or abuse as they think fit. They will begin rather to consult their own repose and their own popularity, than the critical and perilous trust that is in their hands. They will speculate on consequences when they see at court an ambassador whose robes are lined with a scarlet dyed in the blood of judges. It is no wonder, nor are they to blame, when they are to consider how they shall answer for their conduct to the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... country so much inclined to speculate, to philosophize, and to reason on everything, it is not surprising that a fundamental law, as vaguely expressed as the charter, should leave ample room for discussion. We find that our own long experience in these written ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of her manner she might have been paying him a compliment—"is that he has never been steady. He doesn't stick at anything long enough to make it a success. If he were left to himself he would speculate wildly, and this is why his father is obliged to overlook all that he does in the office. It is just here that you can be of such wonderful help to him, Gabriella, by your influence. This is why I am ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... that when an air-raid was on any person at all might knock at the door of any house he pleased and claim admittance. If he were not admitted at once he could call a policeman, who would have to see that he was admitted. We used to speculate on what would happen if some hobo knocked at the front door of the town house of the Duke of Westminster, say, and demanded of the butler in plush knee-breeches ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... comb—that was added—then how could we stand the sun without starch to cool our faces? This included the powder-bag; then I must save that beautiful lace collar; and my hair was tumbling down, so in went the tucking-comb and hair-pins with the rest; until, if there had been any one to speculate, they would have wondered a long while at the singular appearance of a girl who is considered as very slight, usually. By this time, Miriam, alarmed for me, returned to find me, though urged by Dr. Castleton ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... is useless to speculate about that, because you grow worse instead of better. You are like one of those people who, apparently unharmed themselves, carry about with them the germs of typhoid and scatter destruction wherever they go. The sooner the world is rid of ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... to the ethical theory of Feuerbach, the Bourse is the highest temple of morality, only provided that one speculate rightly. If my pursuit of happiness leads me to the Bourse, and I, in following my business, manage so well that only what is agreeable and nothing detrimental comes to me, that is that I win steadily, Feuerbach's precept is carried out. In this way I do not interfere with the similar ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... in a pleasing reverie on this subject, while I rambled from the spot where it originated towards an adjacent house, in which died the late Mr. Pitt, a man who had the opportunity of executing that which I have the power only to speculate upon, and who, though resident in this tract, was blind to its capabilities. Ah! thought I, perhaps in a less selfish age, this very heath, and all the adjoining heaths, waste tracts, and commons, from Bushy to Wimbledon, and from ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... government in the world,—just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power maintain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of authority. The old prerogative enthusiasts, it is true, did speculate foolishly, and perhaps impiously too, as if monarchy had more of a divine sanction than any other mode of government,—and as if a right to govern by inheritance were in strictness indefeasible ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... pistol and at the window as he prepared to go up to her ladyship's room before lunch on the Wednesday morning. It certainly could be done, he said to himself, telling himself at the same time that all that had been passing in his own mind was no more than a vague speculation. A man is apt to speculate on things which have no reality to him, till they ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... ask the fulfilment of these wishes both for the city and for the people, and may the wisest of us cause her opinion to be accepted. But woe to those women who break their oaths, who speculate on the public misfortune, who seek to alter the laws and the decrees, who reveal our secrets to the foe and admit the Medes into our territory so that they may devastate it! I declare them both impious and criminal. Oh! almighty Zeus! see to it that the gods protect ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... and creating, which were all done before he took up the pen. "You know," he writes to his father, "that I am immersed in music, as it were, that I am occupied with it all day long, that I like to study, speculate, reflect." He was often absent-minded and even followed his thoughts while playing billiards or nine pins, or riding. Like Beethoven, he walked up and down the room, absorbed in thought, even while washing ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... idea, and we have no more time to speculate. There! Didn't you hear a strange noise on the island? I declare, that store man must be right. ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... of her father's illness did not reach her for some weeks. But, as it happened, when Charlotte's letter detailing the sad event arrived, Julius was particularly in need of something to wonder over and to speculate about; and of all subjects, Seat-Sandal interested him most. To be master of the fine old place was his supreme ambition. He felt that he possessed all the qualities necessary to make him a leader among the Dales gentlemen. He foresaw, through them, social influence and political power; ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... invention the telegraph was truly epoch-making. It came at a time when steam navigation on land and water was yet in its infancy, and it is idle to speculate on the slow progress which this would have made had it not been for the assistance ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... between the farmer and the consumer but tends, as stated above, to come out of the farmer to a large degree. It has other vicious results in that it also stimulates dealers and manufacturers to speculate their profits away in unsound business, rather than to pay it to the government. It does sound well to tax the great manufacturers, but to make them the agency to collect taxes from the population ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... speak only from hearsay; what then I have heard I have no scruple in telling. And perhaps it is most becoming for one who is about to travel there, to inquire and speculate about the journey thither, what kind we think it is. What else can one do ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... he should be once tempted to go out of his depth, so that he would be compelled to sell whether at gain or loss, in order to make good his payments, he would most probably sink never more to rise. But if he would never speculate beyond the compass of his actual means, he might easily clear fifty per cent. per annum on the ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... interference of his friends Peg Dotting and old Doubleyear, whose great age, even among the present company, gave them a certain position of respect and consideration. So all the rest now went their way, leaving the three to examine and speculate on the prize. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... were for the most part written on a sick bed. In this little volume Cotter showed fine poetic sense and a free and bold mastery over his material. A reading of Cotter's poems is certain to induce that mood in which one will regretfully speculate on what the young poet might have accomplished had he not been cut off ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... employed, the little detour it had made in order to get at her, was a novel species of flattery. She recognized the ring of a distinctly new note in his voice; but, strangely enough, the note lost its unfamiliarity in an instant. Margaret recognized that fact also, and as she swiftly speculate don the phenomenon her pulse went ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... search and reverence for a Jewish king. But something told them that the new King, though born a Jew, was of universal interest and was more than human; they forefelt his divinity. Therefore they were come to the King, not to gratify their curiosity, not to speculate and debate and frame a new creed, but to worship him. There was no war between the science and the theology of these wise men. Their science did not kill their religion, and their religion did not strangle their ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... hour I left him lying dead in the library every worldly plan prospered with me. If I invested in land, it trebled in value. Did I speculate in houses, they were sought after as investments. I grew rich, respected, a man of standing. I had sold my soul to the devil, and he paid me even higher wages than those for which I engaged—but there was ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... much of the musical taste and cultivation of Boston. The old Odeon is replaced by the stately Music Hall. The Journal of Music, which sprang from the impulse of those days, now, after a generation, is suspended; nor need we speculate why musical Boston, which demands the Passion music of Bach, permits a journal of such character to expire. Amid all these changes and disappearances two things have steadily increased—the higher musical taste of the country, and the good name of the critic whose work has most ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... from office before charges of corruption, shall the historian add that the Senate treated the demand of the people for its judgment of condemnation as a farce, and laid down its high functions before the sophistries and jeers of the criminal lawyer? Shall he speculate about the petty political calculations as to the effect on one party or the other which induced his judges to connive at the escape of the great public criminal? Or, on the other had, shall he close the chapter by narrating how these things were detected, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... dead. There was no more buying and selling and speculating. Nobody had anything to buy or sell. There was nothing in which to speculate. "Put the stock gamblers to work," said Goliah; "give those that are young, and that so desire, a chance to learn useful trades." "Put the drummers, and salesmen, and advertising agents, and real estate agents ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... nights on board the yacht in the harbour, where, no doubt, that same illness had been contracted. But she resisted the inclination to attempt further discovery. She even resisted the inclination to speculate regarding all this. What Richard might elect to tell her, that, and that only, would she know, lest, seeking further, bitter and vindictive thoughts should arise in her and mar the calm, pathetic sweetness of the present and her deep, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... could be found, the house was eventually pulled down, and a row of fine modern buildings now occupy the site. As the history of the place could never be traced with any degree of authenticity, one can do no more than speculate as to the cause of the disturbances, which, I am inclined to think, were due to the phantoms of people and animals that had once actually lived and ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... on these occasions, mingled with some real nobility of feeling. Counter-jumpers and work-girls secure comfortable positions from which to see the processions, groups of calculating shopkeepers with advertisements of pictures and medals of hateful ugliness speculate on the generosity of the crowd, and others push with all the force of their bodily weight to obtain and keep the front places for themselves. Frau Ellrich had sent Wilhelm two tickets, hoping that he would make use of them. Dr. Schrotter ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... teaching his people to acquire, the taste and habit of sudden and unexpected happenings. It having been the habit of Bismarck to speculate on things foreseen, it was inevitable that his jealous adversary should speculate on things unforeseen. Moreover, the King-Emperor is dominated by that law of compensation, from which neither men nor things can escape, and from which it follows logically that Germany, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... faultless that there seemed to be no possibility of failure. To take his fair-minded son—with the mother's eyes—into the game would be suicidal. The young fellow would turn from him forever. Bansemer never went so far as to wonder whence came the honest blood in the boy's veins, nor to speculate on the origin of the unquestioned integrity. He had but to recall the woman who bore him, the woman whose love was the only good thing he ever knew, the wife he had ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... through what we call all time and all space; but seeing that there is a nature or fixed order in all things known to us, it is conformable to the nature of our minds to believe that this universal Nature has a cause which operates continually, and that we are totally unable to speculate on the reason of any of those disorders or evils which we perceive. This I believe is the answer which may be collected from all that Antoninus ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... and the latter were growing more and more distant. The congregation seemed to suspect the priest of having an ulterior motive in his eulogies, and the priest seemed to suspect the congregation of a frivolous desire to waste his time. He had begun to speculate openly as to why they were there at all. Once, when a particularly repellent statuette of a nude female with an unwholesome green skin had been offered at two dollars and had found no bidders—the congregation appearing silently grateful for his statement that it was ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... Sewatis said, in a tone of satisfaction, and then he turned his attention to his followers, leaving Walter to speculate upon the good fortune which had come ...
— Neal, the Miller - A Son of Liberty • James Otis
... introspection. But anything that serves to make a human being exercise the function for which his brain was originally intended should be regarded with thankfulness. It is a thousand times better for the development of the mind to speculate about the motives of acquaintances, or to philosophize on the shortcomings of the maid-of-all-work, than to babble off the dates of the Sovereigns from William the Conqueror, or to construe Horace's Odes without taking in a ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... the stairs, not daring to speculate upon the nature of the bad news. But his face was pale beneath its sunburn, and his hand trembled on the balustrade; for he knew—in his heart he knew. There could be only one piece of news which would make his haste or tardiness matters of ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... analyze the effect of tho punishment Kirsty had given him, but its influence was upon him through the whole of the terrible time—none the less beneficent that his response to her stinging blows was indignant rage. I dare hardly speculate what, had she not defended herself so that he could not reach her, he might not have done in the first instinctive motions of natural fury. It is possible that only Kirsty's skill and courage saved him from what he would never have surmounted the shame of—taking ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... that he would never make a man of business. He made matters worse by replying that this was the best chance of his not being a man of speculation. If he were allowed to think of nothing but money, he should speculate for the sake of ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... muscle in an effort to breathe naturally, like one asleep, the boy counted the seconds while he waited for the clutch of a savage hand. And as the moment passed and the attack did not come he tried to speculate on what the strangers were doing. A guttural half exclamation soon allowed him a quick breath of temporary relief. The Indians were ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... together (though both of them, and especially Edith, had altered somewhat with the passage of years) without being reminded of the former love affair in which Lambert's double had been the hero. Did this also occur to Edith? It could hardly have been otherwise, and it would be interesting to speculate on her feelings in the matter; but I have only the story to tell. At all events, they never did marry, though they became very tender friends. At the end of seven years Colonel Saltine died of jaundice; he had been failing in his mind for some time previous, and had always ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... also denied. Nor can they properly be called unjust. The right of property in their slaves the people of North Carolina regarded as settled by the Constitution of the State and that of the United States. Theorists might speculate whether African slavery was consistent with the American Declaration of Independence as they pleased, but the right of property in slaves was undisputably recognized and secured in the fundamental laws of the land. As to the moral question ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... cottagers and their masters, threw their stakes into the claimant's lucky-bag, from which they were afterwards to draw 'all prizes and no blanks.'" Men of loftier position, also, were not averse to speculate upon the chances of this newly-discovered heir. Poor John Montgomerie gave him every penny he had saved, and every penny he could borrow, and after mortgaging his little property, was obliged to flee to America from ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... people in office, to conform blindly to everything which flattered their views and projects; above all, to prefer to the sure and modest society of good farmers, simple citizens, and honest artisans, that of distinguished personages who speculate so patriotically in the public funds, in the lands, and in the paper ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... because her father had loved to ride here. She could think about him here undisturbed by the confusion and bustle at the ranch-house. And there were some things—things about her father and the sad conversation they had had together before his taking away—that Helen wanted to speculate upon alone. ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... the room, and Ernshaw lit his pipe and sat down to speculate as to the cause of Dora's somewhat singular request, but fifteen minutes had not passed before the door was thrown open, and she came in white to the lips and shaking from head to foot, ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... perfect paroxysm of sneezing. Her clothes, which were very greasy and never brushed, hung together by strings, tatters, and safety-pins. Her hands and face were begrimed with several coats of dirt, and a top coat of poudre de riz. No ordinary imagination dared speculate on what lay hidden beneath those tattered rags she wore. She gesticulated much, and discoursed on the subject of some lecture she was to give, in the intervals of volleying forth abuse and swearing ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... rigidity, it is no wonder that his master could not accept Mrs. Marston's simple excuse for Uncle Simon's dereliction, "that the old man needed rest." For the time being, the good lady might have her way, as all good ladies should, but as for him, he chose to watch and wait and speculate. ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... about those things—though you have divined truly that I have doubted them lately—but the doubts don't distress me. Actually, Aunt Bell, for a woman to lose faith in her God seems a small matter beside losing faith in her husband. You can doubt and reason and speculate and argue about the first—it's fashionable—people rather respect unbelievers nowadays—but Oh, Aunt Bell, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... perceived that his guest was no ordinary man, and by a sort of instinct he had discovered on what subjects he was best calculated to speak, and wherein they could gain most from him. Charles Osmond's thoughts she could only speculate about; but that he was ready to take them all as friends, and did not regard them as a different order ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... these lots. You may be sure they did not reserve the worst for their use, nor did they place about themselves undesirable neighbors. Immediately after the assignments had been made, various people began at once to speculate in buying and selling according to the location. The spiritual power immediately anathematized this. No one was permitted to trade over property. Any sales were made on a basis of the first cost ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... wish to embarrass her by a straightforward gaze. He gave her a little time in which to recover herself, too; he spoke of indifferent subjects in an indifferent tone, so that when five minutes had elapsed Janetta was quite herself again, and had begun to speculate upon her chance of an engagement to ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... seeds for each one she chooses for growth, so we can only speculate as to the selection of the seed from which sprung this storied pine. It may be that the cone in which it matured was crushed into the earth by the hoof of a passing deer. It may have been hidden by a jay; or, as is more likely, it may have grown from one of the uneaten cones which a ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... debate which will then be going on, and will probably be noticed; whereas, after the division on leave to bring in the Bill, it would be less opportune. The article on Ireland is complete, and it would be premature to speculate on the details of ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... meat. These shops are therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents' worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable, would find the system perfected here, where you ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... himself. He was enjoying himself in a quiet way—smoking, and skimming his papers, and taking a bird's-eye view now and again at the landscape that was flying past him at the rate of forty miles an hour. Few people who cared to speculate as to his profession would have hesitated to set him down as a military man, even had not the words, "Captain Ducie," painted in white letters on a black portmanteau which protruded half-way from under ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... under its proper form and name, or refined and disguised after the modern fashion. And the same is true of the baptized infidelity imported from Germany. The German mind is cramped and diseased by the bands which confine it. It is not allowed to speculate freely on politics, and the many questions most nearly touching present interests. Therefore, on the records and on the doctrines which pertain to eternal interests, it falls with an insane avidity for innovation, and runs into licentiousness a liberty no ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... useless to speculate on the motives of this abstinence, or on the part which he might have played in Parliamentary life in the years when the too brief career of Mr. Lucas was drawing to its close, and a great opportunity seemed to offer itself for a leader to ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... is of even more interest to the amateur astronomer, because he can study it with less optical power, and see more of the changes upon its surface. Every work on astronomy tells in a general way of the belts of Jupiter, and many speculate upon their causes. The reader of recent works knows that Jupiter is supposed to be not a solid mass like the earth, but a great globe of molten and vaporous matter, intermediate in constitution between the earth and the sun. The outer surface which we see is ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... firm, his habits so completely those of a well-bred, well-born IRISH GENTLEMAN—mingling, as only Irish gentlemen can do, the suavity of the French with the dignity of English manners—that there is little to write about, or speculate upon, beyond ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... sidewalk in front of the Cafe des Exiles; one could not often or for long at a time succeed in reading a book held open in one's lap, below the level of the cashier's desk, Mama Therese was too brisk for that; one had to do something with one's mind; and it was sometimes diverting to watch and speculate ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... sound of an answering boom from the iron lips of the fortress. This was repeated many times, the hoarse cannon barks alternating between gun-ship and shore, in an awe-inspiring exchange of courtesies. As the girls grew used to the thunderous sounds they delighted to speculate from which bastion, or ledge, or flowering bush, would come that little puff of smoke, to be followed by the lightning and thunder of man's invention, scarcely less terrible than those of nature's ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... the basement and were passed in by the grille-keeper, whose manner betrayed a discreet consciousness of something in the air. It was unnecessary to speculate why. In the distance, muffled by the armoured passages, an authoritative voice boomed like a ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... too much preoccupied to notice his extreme agitation, or speculate upon its cause if ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... agriculturist, who appears to be watching them. He is in the careless and ever-admitted picturesque position of leaning over a garden fence; but whether the invariables are aware of the little gentleman, and are consequently conversing in an undertone, we leave every beholder to speculate and settle for himself. Behind the worthy small farmer, and coming from the door of his residence, most cleverly introduced, is his wife (we know it to represent the wife, from the clear fact of the lady's appearance being typical of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... unscanned for a long enough period, it fades into illegibility, never reinforced by the scanning process. Sensory data, coming in from the outside world as it does, is probably permanent. But the thought patterns originating within the mind itself, the processes that correlate and cross-index and speculate on and hypothesize about the sensory data, these are much more fragile. A man might glance once through a Latin primer and have each and every page imprinted indelibly on his recording mechanism and still be unable to make sense out of Nauta in ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Mr. and Mrs. Tracy asked of themselves and each other many times during the hours which intervened between their retiring and rising. But speculate as they might they could reach no satisfactory conclusion, and were obliged to wait for what the morning and the train might bring. The party had been a success, and Frank felt that his election to Congress was almost certain; but of what avail would all this be ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... him what had happened. But each time she cringed away from her pen and paper. After all, what could she write? The fact said all there was to say, and he knew the fact by this time. When she said that, her mind, drawn by some horrible curiosity, would begin to speculate as to how he had heard the fact? Who told him? What did he say? How did he—? and here she would groan aloud in an effort not to know "how" he took it! To save herself from this speculation which seemed to dig into ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... in a high northern latitude in Baffin's Bay, who appear to be so isolated, and so unconnected with their brethren of South Greenland, as to justify us in connecting them rather with the numerous ruined habitations found westward as far as Melville Island, and lead the mind to speculate upon some more northern region,—some terra incognita, yet to be visited by us,—encourages us, aye, urges us not to halt in our exploration. Humanity and science are united in the cause: where one falters, let a love for the ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... this was enough to make him recall all that had happened. This led him to speculate on all that might be about to happen—how much he could not at that moment even imagine. Neither line of ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... justice helped me afterwards to see that God could not have done it either, for that it was not justice. Some perception of this must have lain at the root of the heresy that Jesus did not suffer, but a cloud-phantom took his place on the cross. Wherever people speculate instead of obeying, they ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... visit was the signing, on August 19th, of an agreement for the suspension of arms for four months. Torcy's reception of Bolingbroke was so managed that the bon vivant peer had as pleasant a time as he could well have wished. How much influence that had on Bolingbroke we can only speculate; but it is certain that he would have made a separate peace with France, after his return, had Oxford been willing. See Torcy's "Memoires" (vol. ii., p. 202). "Bolingbroke avoit conseille a la Reine sa maitresse de preferer une paix particuliere a la suspension ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... without a single syllable having been uttered. Manicamp, who was less intimate with his royal highness than the Chevalier de Lorraine, vainly endeavored to detect, from the expression of the prince's face, what had made him so ill-humored. The Chevalier de Lorraine, who had no occasion to speculate about anything, inasmuch as he knew all, ate his breakfast with that extraordinary appetite which the troubles of one's friends but stimulates, and enjoyed at the same time both Monsieur's ill-humor and the vexation of Manicamp. He seemed delighted, while he went on eating, ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... heart can be staunched. But when He draws near, alive from the dead, and says to us, as He did to the disciples on the evening of the day of Resurrection, 'Peace be unto you,' and shows us His hands and His side, then we do not only speculate or think a future life possible or probable, or hesitate to deny it, or hope or fear, as the case may be, but we know, and we can say: 'All things are ours ... death' amongst others. The fact that Jesus Christ has died changes the whole aspect of death ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... that a story-root may be as prolific of heterogeneous offspring as a word-root. Just as we find the root spak, "to look," begetting words so various as sceptic, bishop, speculate, conspicsuous, species, and spice, we must expect to find a simple representation of the diurnal course of the sun, like those lyrically given in the Veda, branching off into stories as diversified as those of Oidipous, Herakles, Odysseus, and Siegfried. In fact, the types upon which stories ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... extension of the farming area by means of pumping, this continuing nearly to the Gila River, out upon the Pima reservation. Now there is further extension eastward, and the great plain that stretches as far as Florence is being settled by population very generally tributary to Mesa. It would be idle to speculate upon the future of the city, but its tributary farming country is fully as great as that ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... in the system of navigation shortly after the projection of the undertaking. For these Telford was not responsible. He was called upon to make the canal, and he did so in the best manner. Engineers are not required to speculate as to the commercial value of the works they are required to construct; and there were circumstances connected with the scheme of the Caledonian Canal which removed it from the category of mere commercial adventures. It was a Government project, and it proved ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... dear, speculate on the possible early death of your brother," said Abel Force, gravely and tenderly, but without the slightest shade ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... saw in a pew a few feet in front of me a young person whose robust outline seemed familiar. I looked again. It was Falstaff Carter in the get-up of a curate. Trembling with indignation, I crept out of the church. I hardly dared speculate on what low device he had planned for winning his ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... not saying there is anything buried there," said the Colonel hastily. "I only said it was remotely possible. The Indians have been gone from this region for so long that it is not safe to speculate upon anything they might have left. I only know that from time to time things have ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... the future we shall not now speculate; but if past history throws any light on the character of our population, one thing may be confidently predicted. If Home Rule should be ultimately conceded to Ireland, the political party which may be responsible for the carrying of the scheme, ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... as was his astonishment, he was left no time to indulge in it, or speculate how his old "crammer" came to be there. For close behind the Dictator's carriage followed another, holding one who had yet more interest for him than Don Ignacio—Don ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... Government urged that no half-breed had actually been dispossessed of his river-front claim, and that many who were demanding scrip had already received land in Manitoba. It contended further that the agitation of the half-breeds was fanned by white settlers in Prince Albert, eager to speculate in scrip, and hinted darkly at mysterious forces and personages in the background, in Canada and elsewhere. No attempt was made, however, to prove the truth of these latter charges or to bring the guilty to justice. ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... man of talent who was an industrious collector and accurate describer of fossil bones, of a high order to be sure, but analytical rather than synthetical, of one knowing well the value of carefully ascertained and demonstrated facts, but too cautious, if he was by nature able to do so, to speculate on what may have seemed to him too few facts. It is also the work of one who fell in with the current views of the time as to the general bearing of his discoveries on philosophy and theology, believing as he did in the universality ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... are singularly idle; for the main currents of the world's history move not by chance; and how, moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms of political existence that made her what she was? Yet, standing before some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... than ever pleased and satisfied with the idea, when he reflected that Jared had all along been held to possess a goodly person, and a very fair development of the parts of speech. He even ventured to speculate upon the possibility of Jared passing into the White House—the dawn of that era having already arrived, which left nobody safe from the crowning ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... had not yet cultivated the intimate relations with Judge Barnard which he subsequently sustained. When the Drew party applied for an order from Judge Gilbert in Brooklyn, enjoining Barnard's injunctions, the petitioner who accused that ornament of the New York bench of a corrupt conspiracy to speculate in Erie stock, was none other than Fisk's partner, Mr. Belden. The next morning Barnard issued an order of arrest for contempt, and Fisk, with the whole Erie Directory, fled to Jersey City, carrying $7,000,000 of money and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... the couriers, and what had become of them? What fate had attended Blakely in his lonely and perilous ride? What man or pair of men could pierce that cordon of Indians lurking all around them and reach the beleaguered command? What need to speculate on the fate of the earlier couriers anyway? Only Indians could hope to outwit Indians in such a case. It was madness to expect white men to get through. It was madness for Blakely to attempt it. Yet Blakely was gone beyond ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... said Breckon, a little restively, "that I have allowed myself to speculate about ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... possibilities. It involves the physical attractiveness of every woman in History and permits one to speculate wildly as to what might have happened if Cleopatra had weighed forty pounds heavier, if Elizabeth had been a gaunt and wiry creature, or if Joan of Arc had been so bulky that she could not have ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... vicinity of Pittsburg may one day wake the lyre of the Pennsylvanian bard to strains as martial and as sweet as Scott; ... believe me, I should tread with as much reverence over the mausoleum of a Shawanee chief, as among the catacombs of Egypt, and would speculate with as much delight upon the site of an Indian village as in the gardens of Tivoli, or ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... chromosphere. The "rose-coloured region!" How little astronomers will ever know of its real nature, even though hundreds of eclipses furnish them with the indisputable evidence of its presence. The sun is so thickly surrounded by a shell of this "red matter," that it is useless for them to speculate with only the help of their physical instruments, upon the nature of that which they can never see or detect with mortal eye behind that brilliant, radiant ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... you,' exclaimed the other ladies; and then they began to talk about bonnets, and about Mr. Smithson, to speculate how much money this house and all his other houses had cost him, and to wonder if he was really rich, or if he were only one of those great financial windbags which so often explode and leave the world aghast, marvelling ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... was resumed, and Mr. Fogo left to speculate on these dark sayings. But as the boat drew near the column of blue smoke that, rising from the hazels on the left bank, marked the whereabouts of the Dearloves' cottage, he grew aware of a ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... descendants might have claimed the "Lordship of Ireland." There can be no doubt that he and they might have claimed it; but whether they could have held it is quite another consideration. It is generally worse than useless to speculate on what might have been. In this case, however, we may decide with positive certainty, that no such condition of things could have continued long. The English kings would have looked with jealousy even on the descendants ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... to see its relation to other theories of the universe and its phenomena, with which it is more or less connected. His work on the "Origin of Species" does not purport to be philosophical. In this aspect it is very different from the cognate works of Mr. Spencer. Darwin does not speculate on the origin of the universe, on the nature of matter, or of force. He is simply a naturalist, a careful and laborious observer; skillful in his descriptions, and singularly candid in dealing with the difficulties ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Bacon came by his death gives a good idea of how he tried to make use of his philosophy. He was not content with thinking and speculating, that is, looking at ideas. Speculate comes from the Latin speculari, to spy out. He wanted to experiment too. And although in those days no one had thought about it, we now know that Bacon was quite right and that meat can be kept by ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... did he make himself a voice of the evil as well as the good in human nature that occasionally one has heard people speculating as to whether he can have led so reputable a life as the biographers make one believe. To speculate in this manner, however, is to blunder into forgetfulness of Browning's own answer, in How it Strikes a Contemporary, to all such ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Sergeant, take him to his quarters." Then he held up his hand. "No, let him stay where he is." He turned to Steve. "Come on, Steve. You too, Kit. Let's see if we can't get a report from the electronics section before we speculate any further." ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... better, a letter comes to hand Astin' how I'd like to dicker fer some Illinois land— "The feller that had owned it," it went ahead to state, "Had jest deceased, insolvent, leavin' chance to speculate,"— ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... drinking cups, and bags of seed, and my father's best hunting shirt; also, in a neglected corner, several articles of woman's attire from pegs. These once belonged to my mother. Among them was a gown of silk, of a fine, faded pattern, over which I was wont to speculate. The women at the Cross-Roads, twelve miles away, were dressed in coarse butternut wool and huge sunbonnets. But when I questioned my father on these matters he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Aristocracy," which has hitherto been credited to him, but was really sent in by Gilbert a Beckett), "Singular Letter from the Regent of Spain," with the three amusing cuts of sailors who, having found a bottle at sea, speculate as to its contents as they open it—"Sherry, perhaps," "Rum, I hope!" "Tracts, by Jove!!" Then, to select the chief and longest series, came "The History of the Next French Revolution," in nine parts (Volume VI.), contributions which were leavened by pleasant attacks levelled ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of Hamilton at this time, and Betsey but little more. He worked in his library or office for fourteen hours of the day, while the country teemed with conjectures of his coming Report. A disposition to speculate upon it was already manifest, and more than one friend endeavoured to gain a hint of its contents. Not even Madison, to whom he had talked more freely than to anyone, knew aught of the details of that momentous Report, what recommendations he actually should make to Congress; for none knew better ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... house was known to be there. "It's Theodore," said his wife, jumping up and going out to meet him. "I'm so glad that you have been here a little before him, because now I feel that I know you. When he's here, I shan't get in a word." Then she went down to her husband, and Harry was left to speculate how so very charming a woman could ever have been brought to love a man who cleaned his boots ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... ten years would show a splendid volume of work from the new power and understanding to which he had been coming in these later days. But just as it seems to me not the occasion to lament our own loss, so does it seem idle to speculate with regret upon what art may have lost by this sudden stroke. It is, rather, well to be glad that so few years have borne so abundantly. Not only is the work that Lovat Fraser has left full in volume, it is decisive in character ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... episode T. began to speculate about sexual matters and to observe the coupling of dogs with newly acquired interest. At 10 years he often lay awake, listening to a woman of 25 singing to a piano accompaniment. The woman's voice seemed very beautiful, and so strongly impressed him that he fell in love with her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... countess hunting a young marquis so resolutely that all the world should be able to look on and speculate whether her game would be run down by that staunch toothless old pursuer—that is an amusing sport, isn't it? and affords plenty of fun and satisfaction to those who follow the hunt. But for a heroine of a story, be she ever so clever, handsome, and sarcastic, I don't think for my ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than in Scotland, or vice versa—among women than among men? Is this a lie I am telling now? If I am talking about you, the odds are, perhaps, that it is. I look back at some which have been told about me, and speculate on them with thanks and wonder. Dear friends have told them of me, have told them to me of myself. Have they not to and of you, dear friend? A friend of mine was dining at a large dinner of clergymen, and a ...
— English Satires • Various
... have been tempted to connect with this spot is the entry of Louis d'Orleans in 1452, who is said to have lodged in the "Hotel d'Estellan, Rue Petit Salut." But the house is worth visiting if only to speculate on the dungeon windows in the corner of the little street outside, and to look up the Impasse Petit Salut a little further on, where the Tour de Beurre rises with an extraordinary effect of solitary beauty above the twisted ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... had seen nothing of the lady of the house; and I was just beginning to speculate as to whether that crowning ornament could be wanting to this pleasant home, when the door at the further end of the room suddenly opened, and there glided out into the sunshine—"The White Lady of Avenel." A fairer apparition I have seldom seen,—stately, pale, and fragile as a lily—blond ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Conscious of my inability to run or ride, savagely hungry, and desperately tired, I enter Quang-shi with the spirit of a hunted animal at bay. With revolver pulled round to the front ready to hand, and half expecting occasion to use it in defence of my life, I grimly speculate on the number of my cartridges and the probability of each one bagging a sore-eyed Celestial ere my own lonely and reluctant ghost ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... not watching the patient, nor the good-looking young surgeon, who seemed to be the special property of her superior. Even in her few months of training she had learned to keep herself calm and serviceable, and not to let her mind speculate idly. She was gazing out of the window into the dull night. Some locomotives in the railroad yards just outside were puffing lazily, breathing themselves deeply in the damp, spring air. One hoarser note than the others struck familiarly on ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... this steady labour. As we worked, I turned his project over in my mind, and presently objections and doubts began to arise; but I worked there all the morning, so glad was I to find myself with a purpose again. After working an hour I began to speculate on the distance one had to go before the cloaca was reached, the chances we had of missing it altogether. My immediate trouble was why we should dig this long tunnel, when it was possible to get into the drain at once down one of the manholes, and work back to the house. It seemed to me, too, that ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... he feared it would be so, although he could not yet speak with any degree of certainty; and getting away as soon as he could, went home to con Newman's letter once more, and speculate ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... York, the escape would have been impossible, and General Washington and his army of 15,000 men must have been taken prisoners. Whether this misfortune would have proved conclusive of the war it is now too late to speculate; but so splendid an opportunity was never before let slip by an English general, and the negligence was the more inexcusable inasmuch as the fleet of boats could be seen lying alongside of the American position. Their purpose ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... Caliph Omar. The little army marched along slowly, "on sands and shores and desert wildernesses," past ruins of huge buildings,—relics of three civilizations that had died out,—mostly mere stones to Eaton, whose mind was too preoccupied by his wild enterprise to speculate much on what others had done there before him. Want of water, scarcity of provisions, the lazy dilatoriness of the Arabs, who had never heard of the American axiom, "Time is money," gave him enough ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... very name. Don't do the thing weakly. Act on the advice of that great man BARRY LYNDON, and speculate grandly. Take the history of one out of thousands of fortunes made by me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... too practical to speculate when she should act. It was clearly her duty to speak to Thurston on the subject, and, repugnant as the task was, she resolved to perform it. It was some time ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Corrie first noticed that Gerard and Rupert simultaneously disappeared for an hour and a half every morning. No one knew why, or had interested enough to speculate, it seemed. Gerard always sent Corrie off on some duty, at that time each day, and only accidental circumstances awoke the young driver's attention to a ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... who can write much better than we can. When we say their cause, we mean the right of equality they would claim with our sex and not subjection to it. Reading my Lady Morgan the other day, which, next to conversing with her, is one of the greatest treats we know of we began to speculate upon what were the causes which had subjected woman to man; in other words, how was it that man had got the upper hand, and kept it? That women's minds were not inferior to men's we were forced to admit; that their aptitude for cultivation is often greater, was not to be ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... exclusively in the Palladian order that Albert Pike and his confidants propagated transcendental religion, as it is said to have been understood by them. In other words, while the Scotch Rite continued to speculate, the Palladium betook itself to magic and succeeded so well that there was a perpetuity of communication between Charleston and the unseen world. It does not appear from the evidence either when or why Albert Pike and his collaborators transferred ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... the time long past, the times when the Shell and Cave people were one, times when there were monstrous things abroad and life was hard to keep. To all these legends the hearers listened wonderingly, and upon them afterward Ab and Oak would sometimes speculate together and question ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... wish to invest in real estate here, you can do so with the help of a "guide," which is distributed on the steamer, and tells you of numerous bargains in corner lots, etc.; for here, as in that part of the West which lies much farther east, people live apparently only to speculate ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... remote, and inaccessible than any the genius of mankind has ever evolved after its own image and out of the needs of its own heart—inscrutable, unthinkable, unspeakable; above all human passions, beyond the reach of any human appeal; One upon whose attributes it was futile to speculate—One whose name ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... so for all his weary days The best of chances failed him; He lived in strange and troublous ways And never knew what ailed him; He'd go to skate when ice was thin; He'd join in deeds unlawful, He'd lend his name to worthless notes, He'd speculate in stocks and oats; 'Twas positively awful, For he couldn't say "No!" He couldn't say "No!" He would veer like a weather-cock turning so slow; He'd diddle, and dawdle, and stutter, but oh! When it came to the point he could ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... intended to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly. Therefore, being desirous, too, of telling the truth in this matter, I must confess that Lucy did speculate with some regret on what it would have been to be Lady Lufton. To have been the wife of such a man, the owner of such a heart, the mistress of such a destiny—what more or what better could the world have done for her? And now she had thrown all that aside ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... some from celestial virtue which is in the natural heat of the seed, as Aristotle and the other Peripatetics. Thus the Sciences are the cause in us of the induction of the second perfection; by the use of which we can speculate concerning the Truth, which is our ultimate perfection, as the Philosopher says in the sixth book of the Ethics, when he says that Truth is the good of the intellect. Because of these and many other resemblances, it is possible to call ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... had time to speculate further, the mayor reappeared with drum and drum-sticks in one hand and a pair of sabots in the other. He flung the sabots on the grass, and Jacqueline, quite docile now, slipped both ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... use in the debate which will then be going on, and will probably be noticed; whereas, after the division on leave to bring in the Bill, it would be less opportune. The article on Ireland is complete, and it would be premature to speculate on the details of an ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... the sergeant's offer, for I might in some way have been dragged into the venture, and of a verity I had had enough in that line of work to last me so long as I might live. It is all very well when a fellow is beyond reach of danger to speculate upon what might be done to gain a name for himself; but quite another matter to take his life in his hand any oftener than may ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... of society—French society—as it is. The author of Le Peau de Chagrin, Le Physiologie du Marriage, Le Dernier Chauan, Eugene Grandet, and the Scenes de la Vie Parisienne, and Scenes de la Vie de Province, was one of the marks of the era, and being dead, we will speculate upon him. At present we can only translate for the International the following funeral oration by Victor Hugo, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... departments, coextensive with that which would be necessary for a government of the whole. The entire separation of the States into thirteen unconnected sovereignties is a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates. The ideas of men who speculate upon the dismemberment of the empire seem generally turned toward three confederacies—one consisting of the four Northern, another of the four Middle, and a third of the five Southern States. There is little probability ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... and pig, it has assumed the greatest possible variety. Many naturalists have treated these varieties as species; but those writers of greatest authority agree in considering all the domestic breeds as having originated from one common stock; and it would be idle here to speculate ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... if all efforts at conciliation emanate from one side, and if Germany and Austria can speculate on the abstention of Great Britain, Austria's demands will remain inflexible, and an agreement between her and Russia will become impossible. I am profoundly convinced that at the present moment, the more Great Britain, France and Russia ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... and ate their simple meal and went back, to wonder and speculate and devise new ways of getting some message to the outside world; but nothing came of it. They could do nothing more than scribble notes on pages torn from the diary and throw them from the tops of the windows into the light-well, where they fell harmlessly into the rubbish heap that gathered ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... then began to speculate as to whether their pursuers could overtake them on foot or on horseback, and as it seemed only too probable that they could, their hearts sank again with anxiety. Ere long, however, the moon rose; the objects that loomed on the banks and were mirrored ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... settlements upon our soil. Upon the political economy of Defoe's project, and the accuracy of his calculations, and the more or less resemblance of his scheme to the system of free grants of land in unsettled regions beyond the sea, each reader will speculate in his ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... Wegg, musing. 'And what are you now? Are you in the Funns, or where are you? Have you lately come to settle in this neighbourhood, or do you own to another neighbourhood? Are you in independent circumstances, or is it wasting the motions of a bow on you? Come! I'll speculate! I'll invest a ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... relief; yet neither sensation rose at any time far above the level commonly designated as indifference. She belonged to him: the certainties of that position were so well defined, and the reasonable probabilities of its issue so bounded that she could not speculate on contingencies. Taking no further interest in herself as a splendid woman, she acquired the indifferent feelings of an outsider in contemplating her probable fate as a singular wretch; for Bathsheba drew herself and her future in colours that ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... Gibson's epoch-making novel "Neuromancer" (though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's "True Names" (see the {Bibliography} in Appendix C) to John Brunner's 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider"). Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly na"ive and tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived but innovative "Max Headroom" ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... would speculate too much,' said Mr. Bennett to himself; 'but how could he have got such a blow as this? I saw him the day after his return, and he said everything had gone well in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... yet found in Israel. But the most striking declaration of Jesus, and one singularly overlooked, concerning the character of the heathen, is to be found in his description of the day of judgment, in Matthew (chap. XXV.). It is very curious that men should speculate as to the fate of the heathen, when Jesus has here distinctly taught that all good men among them are his sheep, though they never heard of him. The account begins, "Before him shall be gathered all the Gentiles" ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... other signs; and it seemed to him that the world had gone well with her. She had a kind of settled look, almost a sleekness, as though anxiety never came near to her pillow. She had married, surely, and married well. The jewels she wore were evidence, and Linforth began to speculate which of the party was her husband. They were young people who were gathered at the table. In her liking for young people about her she had not changed. Of the men no one was noticeable, but Violet Oliver, ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... of my present purpose to discuss the point historically, or to speculate on the formation of either Canon. Rather, such inquiries are altogether alien from the great object of my pursuits and studies, which is to convince myself and others that the Bible and Christianity are their own sufficient evidence. But it concerns both my ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... were busy with Dick. Oddly enough, it had scarcely occurred to him before to speculate on what he might be doing in his absence; he had thought chiefly about himself. But now he gave his attention to the subject, what new horrors it opened up! What might not become of his well-conducted household under the rash rule of a foolish schoolboy! The office, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... too has all but succumbed, of recent years, to the existing tendency for new and more rapid methods of conducting business. The object of the Sale dinner was to induce the great distributing houses and the retail booksellers to speculate, and buy an increased supply of books on special terms. Speculation has now almost ceased in consequence of the enormous number of books published, which makes it difficult for a bookseller to keep a large stock of any single work, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... anything, and for a wild short season the quacks and alchemists and Jews came back: the ball rooms and the gaming saloons filled again. New houses were built; "amongst them that of Baron Swasso." To speculate as to who Baron Swasso may have been is agreeable: but the baronial hall could not save Epsom. Even a more powerful attraction than Baron Swasso failed to do so; or, rather, refused to try. She was Miss Wallin, whom the vulgar addressed as Crazy Sally; but she ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... mysterious resignation—an episodical and futile attempt to re-construct a Whig government—and the return of Sir Robert Peel to power. Still there was no explanation. Men were left to guess, as they best might, at the Eleusinian drama performing behind the veil of Isis—to speculate for themselves, or announce to others at random the causes of this huge mystification. "The oracles were dumb." This only was certain, that Lord Stanley was ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... on deck in the moonlight and with a light breeze pushing in the sails, for the weather in the main was steady, and he'd smoke a fat cigar, and look at the little shining clouds. He'd talk and speculate, sometimes shrewd, and then again it was like a matter of adding a shipload of pirates to the signs of the zodiac, and getting the New Jerusalem for a result. By-and-by, I felt that way myself, as if, supposing you kept on sailing long enough, you might run down ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... the question. There's no chance of him asking me. You can't speculate on whether you'll marry a man until he asks you—your mind is biassed ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... tiptoe he entered the lofty hall, high above the first story. The dust lay thick on a large marble table—but what was that?—a streak across it, brushed sharply through the middle of the dust! It was strange! But he would not wait to speculate on the agent! The room to which the earl had directed him was on the first floor, and he ascended to it at once—by the great oak staircase which went up the ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... apprehensions had been occasionally so far quieted as to leave him nearly free of them altogether; while his wife had felt the utmost confidence in the chief, from the very commencement of their acquaintance. It would be useless, perhaps, to attempt to speculate on the causes; but it is certain that there are secret sources of sympathy that draw particular individuals toward each other and antipathies that keep them widely separated. Men shall meet for the first time, and ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... Some people speculate in what are called refuse slaves; i. e. the poor diseased ones. Many of them die in the piazzas of the auctioneers; and sometimes, in the agonies of death, they are sold as low ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... just to appetize my hunger." As she betrayed a familiar knowledge of the tariff of an attractive confectioner, she was asked whether she and her sisters had been frequenting those little tables on their way from school. "I sometimes go in there, mother," she confessed; "but I generally speculate outside." ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... happened to which for five and twenty years all Bismarck's enemies had looked forward. The foundation on which his power rested was taken away; men at once began to speculate on his fall. The noble presence of the Crown Prince, his cheerful and kindly manners, his known attachment to liberal ideas, his strong national feeling, the success with which he had borne himself on the uncongenial field of battle, all had made ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... times, that nothing can be really known about this Intermediate State, that all that can be asserted of it is mere guess and vain conjecture, and even that it betrays a too curious intrusion into things unseen to speculate about the condition of souls after death. Yes! if we only speculate, but not surely if we seek humbly to find out what the Bible has taught us. S. Paul did not think it a too presumptuous intrusion ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... gorilla and chimpanzee ancestors in Africa, he concludes that "it is useless to speculate on this subject." If the uselessness of speculation had occurred to him at the beginning of his investigation he might have escaped responsibility for shaking the faith of two generations by his guessing on the whole ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... and barbel fishing was illustrated by the sequel to our day on the Thames. Our adventures were told to the members of a certain society on the evening of our return, and no doubt they were envious, miserable, or glad as it might happen. We can only speculate as to that, but what can be told is that by the first trains next morning six brethren from different quarters of London went down and made their way to Hawkins. They had not whispered their intentions to one another, and looked rather sheepish as they stood in a cluster to receive the announcement ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... Gila River, out upon the Pima reservation. Now there is further extension eastward, and the great plain that stretches as far as Florence is being settled by population very generally tributary to Mesa. It would be idle to speculate upon the future of the city, but its tributary farming country is fully as great ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... gentleman, for his manner was so perfectly considerate, so ever kind. She did not realize that she was thinking of him as a lover; but she dreamed, there, of the girls down in the bluegrass and wondered how it must seem to them to have lovers such as he. She could but very vaguely speculate as to their emotions or appearance, but her speculations on both points, vague as they might be, made her suffer strangely and cast queer, furtive little side-glances at him. In her heart were stirrings of keen jealousy ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... which we cannot pass, where the walls rise from the water's edge, so that we cannot land, and where the water is so swift that we cannot return. Such places have been found, except that the falls were not so great but that we could run them with safety. How will it be in the future t So they speculate over the serious ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... closed eyes, she commenced to speculate upon the future, and terrifying fears were conjured by a vivid imagination, she had but to raise her lids and look upon that noble face so close to hers to dissipate ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... yet amidst them; the slow rending of the bonds which make this body a home, so that it turns half alien, while yet some bonds unsevered hold the live thing fluttering in its worm-eaten cage—but God knows me and my house, and I need not speculate or forebode. When it comes, death will prove as natural as birth. Bethink thee, Lord—nay, thou never forgettest. It is because thou thinkest and feelest that I think and feel; it is on thy deeper consciousness that mine ever floats; thou knowest my frame, and rememberest ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... defence. While the greater part remained attached to France, some leaned to the English, who bought their produce and paid them in ready coin. Money was rare with the Acadians, who loved it, and were so addicted to hoarding it that the French authorities were led to speculate as to what might be the object of these careful savings. [Footnote: Beauharnois et Hocquart au Ministre, 12 ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... same strain to Lord Grey, he speaks of his "rude rimes, the which a rustic muse did weave, in salvage soil." It is idle to speculate what difference of form the Faery Queen might have received, if the design had been carried out in the peace of England and in the society of London. But it is certain that the scene of trouble ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Amrou, general of the Caliph Omar. The little army marched along slowly, "on sands and shores and desert wildernesses," past ruins of huge buildings,—relics of three civilizations that had died out,—mostly mere stones to Eaton, whose mind was too preoccupied by his wild enterprise to speculate much on what others had done there before him. Want of water, scarcity of provisions, the lazy dilatoriness of the Arabs, who had never heard of the American axiom, "Time is money," gave him enough to think of. But worse than these were the daily outbreaks of the ill-feeling which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... was of course impossible, and would have been ridiculed. There was no original thinker in this age. Caesar himself was probably more suited by nature to reason on facts immediately before him than to speculate on abstract principles. Varro, the rough sensible scholar of Sabine descent, was a diligent collector of facts and traditions, but no more able to grapple hard with problems of philosophy or theology than any other Roman of his time. The life of the average wealthy ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... heard, the boys breathing softly around me—those wonderful boys who could sleep even when they were excited—and I felt that I was getting the better of them in thinking while they slept. I remembered the prefect who had told me that we were there only for a spell, but I did not speculate as to what would follow afterwards. All that I had to do was to watch myself ceaselessly, and be able to explain to myself everything that I felt I and did. In that way I should always be strong I enough to guard ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Victorian area, or,—which is perhaps more important, though we do not seem to hear of any communication on this line,—how far there is a stock of folktales common to the Darling district and the central area, it is obviously idle to speculate as to how it comes that an Eaglehawk myth is told in both areas. The physical anthropology of the Australian natives is at present a little-worked field, in which, singularly enough, the French have done more than the English, to our shame be it said. Possibly a somatological survey might ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... journey, and it is singular enough that one which offers considerable prospect of advantage has just presented itself on the confines of Persia. Think not, however, that motives of lucre would have been sufficiently powerful to tempt me to the East at the present moment. I may speculate, it is true, but I should scarcely have undertaken the journey but for your pungent words inciting me to attack the Persians. Doubt not that I will attack them on the first opportunity. I thank you heartily for putting me in mind of my duty. I have hitherto, to use your own words, been ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... To speculate upon those phases of aboriginal life and character which go to establish the antiquity of the race and its profound unprogressiveness, is no part of the present purpose, which is merely to relate commonplace incidents ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... a great mystery. It is a matter of faith, not of reasoning. You must believe it, and not speculate about it. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... allowing the escape of a spy. The court had found him guilty and its findings had been submitted to the higher authorities and endorsed by them. A copy of these reports now lay on his desk. All this his Adjutant, Forbes, knew as well as the General himself, but if Forbes had thought it worth while to speculate on the extent of his commander's interest he might have guessed for years without ever drawing one logical conclusion from all the hints that that impassive face and figure ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... however this might be, turned their backs with exaggerated delicacy, as if to avoid the reproach of interfering. Seeing in time how little he had in common with them—it was by them he first observed it; they proclaimed it with complete humility—his companion was moved to speculate on the mysteries of transmission, the far jumps of heredity. Where his detachment from most of the things they represented had come from was more than an observer could say—it certainly had burrowed under ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... take a practical case: Here are the Australians, roaming in small bands, without more formal rulers than 'headmen' at most; not ancestor worshippers; not polytheists; with no departmental deities to select and aggrandise; not apt to speculate on the Anima Mundi. How, then, did they bridge the gulf between the ghost of a soon-forgotten fighting man, and that conception of a Father above, 'all-seeing,' moral, which, under various names, is found all ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... to sharpen reason and to develop the mind, but they failed for want of data. Indeed, this has been the common failure of man, for in the height of civilization men speculate without sufficient knowledge. Even in the beginning of scientific thought, for lack of facts, men spent much of their time in speculation. The scholastic philosophers were led to consider many unimportant questions which could not be well settled. They asked the church authorities ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... fortunate speculators, he continued to speculate and became unfortunate. He lost the bulk of his winnings in the stock market and—well, to be quite frank, Captain Hall has been a broken man, mentally as well as physically, since his wife's death and his own serious illness. You, yourselves, must have noticed the change in his ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... chasm issued a red flash of lightning, which was followed almost immediately by a roar of thunder, so loud and terrific that the whole people became fearfully agitated as they stood round the blaze. It was extremely difficult, indeed, for ignorant persons to account for, or speculate upon, this strange and frightful phenomenon. As they stood in fear and terror, with their faces apparently bathed in blood, they seemed rather to resemble a group of hideous murderers, standing as if about to be driven into the! flames of perdition itself. To compare ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... likewise from all care and anxiety regarding domestic concerns; the latter being provided for him when on board the Beagle, or arranged by those who accompanied him on his travels overland and by river. The elimination of these minor cares tended to leave his mind free and open to absorb and speculate at comparative leisure upon all the strange phenomena which presented themselves throughout ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... that there might yet be a shared life of happiness for them without the matrimonial chains. He considered whether it would be possible to influence Sabina in that direction; he even went so far as to speculate on what would be his future feelings for her if she insisted upon the sanctity of ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... outcome of the discussions, the dish-washings, the walks, the leanings over the bridge at the trysting-place, we may only speculate now. For a time the outlook for this "romance of real life" seemed promising, then came disillusion. Gibbs, alas, had a bent which at first we did not suspect, but which in time became only too manifest. It had its root in a laudable desire—the desire to destroy anything resembling strong ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... meat and venison hams, and gourds for drinking cups, and bags of seed, and my father's best hunting shirt; also, in a neglected corner, several articles of woman's attire from pegs. These once belonged to my mother. Among them was a gown of silk, of a fine, faded pattern, over which I was wont to speculate. The women at the Cross-Roads, twelve miles away, were dressed in coarse butternut wool and huge sunbonnets. But when I questioned my father on these matters he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to let me come in," the hero of the play answers. Instantly I know he's not English. He has one of those nice American voices, with a slight drawl, that somehow sound extraordinarily frank. I don't speculate about his name. I don't stop to wonder who he is. I think only of what he is. I forget that Madame has exploited him as a millionaire. I don't care whether or not he buys a picture. I want nothing, except the pleasure of talking with him, and ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... vain to speculate upon the future of electric lighting. The question of artificial illumination has had much to do with the progress of the human race, particularly when aggregated into cities. Doubtless the old systems of ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... door was opened, a hollow jarring sound followed as the door was sharply closed. Stella went back into the room. The letter had been delivered; at this moment Henry Thresk was reading it; and with a sinking heart she began to speculate in what spirit he would receive its message. Henry Thresk! The unhappy woman bestirred herself to remember him. He had grown dim to her of late. How much did she know of him? she asked herself. Once years ago there ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... sleeping babe in his arms, his wife asleep, her head on his shoulder, and in her lap the head of a sleeping youngster. The man's eyes were wide open. He was staring out over the water and thinking, which is not a good thing for a shelterless man with a family to do. It would not be a pleasant thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this I know, and all London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing their wives and babies is ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... philosophies, and framed no great theories of government. Even their literature was, in part, an imitation of the Greek, though possessing many elements of native strength and beauty. They were a people who knew how to accomplish results rather than to speculate about means and ends. Usefulness and effectiveness were with them the criteria of the worth of any idea or project. They subdued and annexed an empire, they gave law and order to a primitive world, they civilized and Romanized barbarian ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... but the merest dullest assumption. Neither is there a single scientific argument, so far as I know, against the continued existence of the animals, which would not tell equally against human immortality. My hope is, that in some way, concerning which I do not now choose to speculate, there may be progress, growth, for them also. While I believe for myself, I must hope for them. This much at least seems clear—and I could press the argument further: if not one of them is forgotten before God—and one of them yet passes out of being—then is ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... should expect any thing of Elaborate or Methodical in what you will meet with here, I must confess to you before-hand, that the seasons I was wont to chuse to devise and try Experiments about Colours, were those daies, wherein having taken Physick, and finding my self as unfit to speculate, as unwilling to be altogether idle, I chose this diversion, as a kind of Mean betwixt the one and the other. And I have the less scrupled to set down the following Experiments, as some of them came to my mind, and as ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... their very name. Don't do the thing weakly. Act on the advice of that great man BARRY LYNDON, and speculate grandly. Take the history of one out of thousands of fortunes made ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... seamen had free access to the shore. Under similar circumstances nowadays, if the fruit happened not to be ready, the ship would have been off, after ten days' relaxation, to survey other islands, or speculate on coral reefs, or make astronomical observations; in short, to do something or other to keep the devil out of the heads of the crew.'[8] Bligh would appear to have been sensible of this on his next expedition in the Providence, for on that occasion he collected more bread-fruit ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... erotic subjects play a sad and powerful part. Nothing is too filthy to be used to stimulate the base sensuality of the public. Frivolous songs, licentious novels and plays, obscene dances, pornographic pictures, all without any trace of artistic merit, speculate on the erotic instinct of the masses in ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... nothing more. And that Faith we still have. How weak we were in comparison with that Power, our enemy, with its three-quarters of a million of soldiers, of which it has sent some 250,000 to fight us! How could we have entered into such a struggle if we had not done so in Faith? We could only speculate on help from Natal and the Cape Colony. Some said that Natal and the Cape Colony would stand by us, but now we miss the persons who said that. They are lost to us, but we have not lost them on the battlefield, for they sit amongst the enemy, and many of them are even ...
— The Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell
... is not necessary to speculate on this matter. For the present we may accept the fact, that the proportion of potash, phosphoric acid, and nitrogen in the crop is no indication of the proper proportion in which these ingredients should be applied to the soil for these crops ...
— Talks on Manures • Joseph Harris
... movement from one of the two passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again slid away into the ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... that goads us with fiercer despair (Those who buy, you perpend, stock, debenture or share, Such as speculate mainly; investors are rare—) Than this growl ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... sister. To speculate upon my title and my rank in order to make a wealthy marriage? To quit my nomad's tent for a fixed residence other than that where the Prerolles have succeeded one another from generation to generation? Never! Of all our ancient prejudices, that ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... negro can develop no inventive faculties or genius for the arts." For although the elephant may be taught to plow, or the dog to carry your market-basket by his teeth, you cannot teach them to shave notes, to speculate in gold, or even to vote; whereas, the experience of all political parties shows that men may be taught to vote, even when they do not know ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... hopeful. For my part I heartily go along with you. The fabric consolidates itself more and more, even while the earthquake rocks it; for, with a thousand drawbacks and deductions, love grows larger, zeal warmer, truth firmer among us. It makes the mind sad to speculate upon the question how much better all might have been; but our mourning should be turned into joy and thankfulness when we think also how ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... region!" How little astronomers will ever know of its real nature, even though hundreds of eclipses furnish them with the indisputable evidence of its presence. The sun is so thickly surrounded by a shell of this "red matter," that it is useless for them to speculate with only the help of their physical instruments, upon the nature of that which they can never see or detect with mortal eye behind that brilliant, radiant zone ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Church—why ain't the Church and the rest of the believers in a future life lookin' for immortality at the other end of life, too? If we're immortal, we always have been; then why don't they ever speculate on what we were before we were born? It's because they're too blame selfish—don't care a flapdoodle about what WAS, all they want is to ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... make an interesting picture of me? I had done it with the broom, and the milk wagon, and the rain spout. It was not what a thing was that made it interesting, but what I was able to draw out of it. It was exciting to speculate as to what Miss Hale was going to draw out ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... but in this was agreeably disappointed. The Signorina V. is modestly lodged, lives in the frugal style of the middle class, and refuses to accept a title, though she is thus debarred from going to court. Were it not indiscreet to speculate on a lady's age, I should put hers at somewhat above thirty. Though without the Duchess's commanding elegance she has, I believe, more beauty of a quiet sort: a countenance at once soft and animated, agreeably tinged with melancholy, yet lit up by the incessant play ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... important functions, of the female reproductive apparatus. This delicate and complex mechanism is liable to be aborted or deranged by the withdrawal of force that is needed for its construction and maintenance. It is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon the prospective evil that would accrue to the human race, should such an organic modification, introduced by abnormal education, be pushed to its ultimate limit. But inasmuch as the subject is not only germain to our inquiry, but has attracted the attention ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... He draws near, alive from the dead, and says to us, as He did to the disciples on the evening of the day of Resurrection, 'Peace be unto you,' and shows us His hands and His side, then we do not only speculate or think a future life possible or probable, or hesitate to deny it, or hope or fear, as the case may be, but we know, and we can say: 'All things are ours ... death' amongst others. The fact that Jesus Christ has died changes the whole aspect of death to His servant, inasmuch as in that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... concerning the inability of the human will and the monergism of grace, but emphasizes that, in reading De Servo Arbitrio, one must heed and not overlook his frequent admonitions to concern oneself with God as He has revealed Himself in the Gospel, and not speculate concerning God in His transcendence, absoluteness, and majesty, as the One in whom we live and move and have our being, and without whom nothing can either exist or occur, and whose wonderful ways are past finding out. (CONC. ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... been a Frenchman, he probably would have imagined his wife's heart to be touched by the graces of the Perpetual Curate; but, being an Englishman, and rather more certain, on the whole, of her than of himself, it did not occur to him to speculate on the subject. He was quite able to content himself with the thought that women were incomprehensible, as he went back to his study. To be sure, it was best to understand them, if you could; but if not, it did not so very much matter, Mr Morgan thought; could in this pleasant condition of mind ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... adventurers who had met with strange experiences in the frozen North and the lonely West. Some of them had hard faces and a predatory air, but that added to their interest. Margaret Keith liked to watch them all and speculate about their mode of life; that pleasure could still be enjoyed, though as she sometimes told herself with humorous resignation, she could no longer take a very active part ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... the whirling wings of his wondrous machine. From the mill we could see other objects of deep interest. These were, the vessels from St. Michael's, on their way to Baltimore. It was a source of much amusement to view the flowing sails and complicated rigging, as the little crafts dashed by, and to speculate upon Baltimore, as to the kind and quality of the place. With so many sources of interest around me, the reader may be prepared to learn that I began to think very highly of Col. L.'s plantation. It was just a place to my boyish taste. There ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all the while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar atmosphere. It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad. You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train. You think ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... only ultimate relation between man and the universe; his dogma of an absolute fiat, creating arbitrary and once for all, as the only relation between the universe and its Maker: and further it was not lawful to speculate. The idea which I believe unites both physic and metaphysic with man's highest inspirations and widest speculations—the Alexandria idea of the Logos, of the Deity working in time and space by successive thoughts—he had not heard of; for it was dead, as I have ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... while the population increased only slightly over 50 per cent. Thus it is evident that divorces are increasing in the United States three times as fast as the increase of population. It becomes, therefore, a matter of some curious interest to speculate upon what will be the end of this movement. If divorces should continue to increase as they have during the past forty years, it is evident that it would not be long before all marriages would be terminated by divorce instead of by death. In 1870, 3.5 per cent of all marriages were terminated ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... those persons who speculate on making railways general throughout the kingdom, and superseding every other mode of conveyance by land and water, we deem them and their visionary schemes unworthy of notice.... The gross exaggeration of the locomotive ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... early ages of this world there was far more laughter than is to be heard now, and that aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles universal—every one, always, mildly, slightly, smiling. But it is less useful to speculate as to mankind's past and future than to observe men. And you will have observed with me in the club-room that young men at most times look solemn, whereas old men or men of middle age mostly smile; and also that those young men do often laugh loud ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... and the scale upon which their operations were carried on, are duly considered, it must be regarded as a war fully equal in magnitude to the successful invasion of France by Germany in 1870. If the mind be allowed to speculate on the course that events will take in centuries to come, as they flow surely on with varying swiftness to the ocean of the unknown future, the influence which the result of this Confederate war is bound ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... themselves to the utmost; and Wilfred, determined to rise to the occasion, threw off his sadness, ceased to speculate as to the chances of the insurrection {xvi}; that night, at least, he would give to joy—he would encourage his people who loved him so ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... sour : acida, malgaja. source : fonto, deveno. south : sudo. space : spaco; (of time) dauxro sparrow : pasero. "-hawk", akcipitro. spawn : fraj'o, -i; fisxosemo spear : lanco, ponardego special : speciala. spectacles : okulvitroj. speculate : spekulacii, teoriigi, konjekti. spell : silabi; sorcxajxo. spend : elspezi. sphere : sfero. sphinx : sfinkso. spice : spico. spill : disversxi, dissxuti. spin : sxpini. spinach : spinaco. spiral ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... stage of querulous self-pity. 'Twas monstrous, this burying a man alive, ill, fettered, uncared-for, to live or die in utter solitude as might happen. I could not remotely guess to whom I owed this dismal fate, and was too petulant to speculate upon it. But the meddler, friend or foe, who had bereft me of my chance to die whilst I was fit and ready, came in for a Turkish cursing—the curse that calls down in all the Osmanli variants the same pangs in duplicate upon ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... sat sometime upon the ground, gazing at the chinks, and listening to the advancing and receding footsteps of his guard, the man stood still upon his post. Barnaby, quite unable to think, or to speculate on what would be done with him, had been lulled into a kind of doze by his regular pace; but his stopping roused him; and then he became aware that two men were in conversation under the colonnade, and very near the door of ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... "Why you should speculate on anything so abnormal!" cried the doctor, impatiently. "I suppose your remark applies to Oliver Marsham. Is she breaking her own heart?—that's all ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... really commenced; and until it is seen how this vast population bears its hardships, how the forts resist the guns which may be brought to bear upon them, and how the armed force conducts itself under fire, it is impossible to speculate upon results. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... husband of a buyer of bargains. My wife has somewhere heard, that a good housewife never has any thing to purchase when it is wanted. This maxim is often in her mouth, and always in her head. She is not one of those philosophical talkers that speculate without practice; and learn sentences of wisdom only to repeat them: she is always making additions to her stores; she never looks into a broker's shop, but she spies something that may be wanted some time; and it is impossible ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... dogs of Caneville were little disposed to speculate that day, or I was very awkward in my occupation, but no one seemed willing to make a trial of my "fire-flies." In vain I used the most enticing words to set off my goods, even going so far as to say that cigars lighted with these matches ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... seem much room for doubt concerning that, sir," Mr. Skinner said; "but I never speculate. I will bring you the facts to-night between eight and eleven. Now as to the business side ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have wrought sad and overwhelming changes," answered the Marquis, with cold contempt, "but it has not yet so utterly abased us that we bring ourselves to speculate upon the purposes ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... you; so has every one who knows them, and who does not? So will General Yozarro and his barbarians, if they ever rouse the anger of my people. But why do we speculate? It seems we can do nothing but wait. Manuela, can we not steal away ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... destined to discover. What special imp prompted Betty to sally forth for a walk after dinner, thereby missing a call from Yorke (who came thus early to prevent Gulian's intended interview), it would be vain to speculate; but when the maid returned, feeling more like her old happy self than she had done in weeks, the irony of fate prompted an encounter with her brother-in-law at ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... wireless in the world could have saved your little hut," answered Mr. Fernald kindly. "It was nothing but a pasteboard house and wireless or no wireless it would have gone anyway. I often speculate as to how ships ever dared to go to sea before they had the protection of wireless communication. Ignorance was bliss, I suppose. They knew nothing about it and therefore did not miss it. When we can boast no better ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... policy. It would lead to fraud, oppression, and corruption. As a sworn minister of the courts of justice, the attorney ought not to be permitted to avail himself of the knowledge he acquires in his professional character, to speculate in lawsuits. The precedent would tend to corrupt the profession, and produce lasting mischief to the community."[48] "This is not the time nor place," says Chief Justice Gibson, "to discuss the legality of contingent fees; though it be clear that if the British ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... there is anything buried there," said the Colonel hastily. "I only said it was remotely possible. The Indians have been gone from this region for so long that it is not safe to speculate upon anything they might have left. I only know that from time to time things have been ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... considering the next. When he can't think of any more lies, he starts on the truth, but in this he is a decided failure. He is afraid of being found out. For instance, a merchant will approach a Boer respecting an overdue account. The Boer will at once plead poverty, and speculate on how he can possibly manage to liquidate his liability. If the merchant knows the ropes sufficiently (and the majority of merchants do), he will drop the subject for half an hour, at the end of which time he will ask the Boer if he wants to sell any cattle or produce, as he (the merchant) can ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... lamp—amidst a blaze of morocco and russia coating, which brings to your recollection the view of the Temple of the Sun in the play of Pizarro! You will also find, in the vender of these volumes, courteous treatment and "gentlemanly notions of men and things." Again, if you wish to speculate deeply in books, or to stock a newly-discovered province with what is most excellent and popular in our own language, hire a vessel of 300 tons' burthen, and make a contract with Messrs. Longman, Hurst, and Co., who are enabled, from their store ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... "And if I might be allowed to speculate, Captain, I would say that we are finished unless we can make a planetfall. Only then would I be able to remove the lower port tube, weld the cavity, seal the ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... at the chain that turned the axle. And on the bridge that led from the Old Ghetto to the New, where the canal, though the view was brief, disappeared round two corners, how absorbing to stand and speculate on what might be coming round either corner, and which would yield a vision first! Perhaps there would come along a sandolo rowed by a man standing at the back, his two oars crossed gracefully; perhaps a floating raft with barefooted boys bestriding ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... is eager for the trifles the possession of which would highly satisfy his vanity, his innate desire for luxury, and his more noble and more respectable love of the beautiful: upon this the dealers in this class of articles speculate. To tax fancy and elegance is no less odious or absurd than to tax circulation: but such a tax is collected by a few fashionable merchants, whom general infatuation protects, and whose whole merit generally consists in warping taste and generating ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... elephant. It moved again, and once more halted. I now made out that it was a tiger; but although I could distinguish yellow and black stripes, I could not possibly determine any head or tail, therefore I could only speculate upon its actual attitude. It struck me that it would probably be facing me, but crouching low. The elephants were now about 150 yards distant, approaching in a crescent, as the high grass was not more than the same ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... race command our first attention: we cannot stop to think and speak of every less detail. Therefore, now would I carry my companion across the patriarchal times at once to the era of the Deluge. Let us speculate, as hitherto, antecedently, throwing our minds as it were into some angelic ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... desecration to enter the chamber of Father Beret's soul and look upon his sacred and secret trouble; nor must we even speculate as to its particulars. The good old man writhed and wrestled before the cross for a long time, until at last he seemed to receive the calmness and strength he prayed for so fervently; then he rose, tore the letter into pieces so small that not a word remained ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... poor man was probably through the Church. The career of Warburton, who rose from a similar position to a bishopric might have been rivalled by Johnson, and his connexions with Lichfield might, one would suppose, have helped him to a start. It would be easy to speculate upon causes which might have hindered such a career. In later life, he more than once refused to take orders upon the promise of a living. Johnson, as we know him, was a man of the world; though a religious man of the world. He represents the ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... commenced and continued by the mere force of reasoning and persuasion, the preceding analogy would be inadmissible. We should never speculate on the future obsoleteness of a system perfectly conformable to nature and reason: it would endure so long as they endured; it would be a truth as indisputable as the light of the sun, the criminality of murder, and other facts, whose evidence, depending ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... out by a landscape-gardener. Its beauty is absolutely conventional. Nobody will blame you if you admire it. To rave over it is like going to church—it is the proper thing to do. People will raise their eyebrows if you don't, and watch what you eat, and speculate on your ancestry, and wonder about ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... "If ye who speculate and doubt as to the existence of a hell but peer into the hearts of those vile creatures who slew poor Cook, you will draw back in terror; for hell, black hell is there. To give birth to a deed of such infamy, their hearts must ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... which the law had no claim. His wife, however, joined him in the act of renunciation, and they stood together penniless. Beyond this point there could be no legal, and, to many minds, no moral responsibility for the debts of his firm. One can speculate upon the force of the temptation to take advantage of the position. Mark Twain was sixty years old, and ill at that. Having sacrificed all he possessed to meet the demands of his creditors, he might justly claim the benefit of what remained of capacity ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... answer that question, for their principal support is the ignorance of the popular masses. They speculate on it, they work upon it by a demagogy which ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... reaching the fir-wood, and as, long before morning, all traces were obliterated, the facts remained a mystery. Janet thought that David had some wonderful persuasion about it; but he was never heard even to speculate on the subject. Certain it was, that Hugh had saved Margaret's life. He seemed quite well next day, for he was of a very powerful and enduring frame for his years. She recovered more slowly, and perhaps never altogether overcame the effects of Death's embrace ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... deeper meaning in this text than we at first see. Of "these three," two concern ourselves; the third concerns others. When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... not an impeachment was to be expected from the House of Representatives was a point on which the Senate had no constitutional right to speculate, and in respect to which, even had it possessed the spirit of prophecy, its anticipations would have furnished no just ground for this procedure. Admitting that there was reason to believe that a violation of the Constitution and laws had been actually committed by the President, still it ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... a poor girl, who, after spending not only the interest, but the solid capital of her small fortune in dress, and frivolous extravagance, fails in her matrimonial expectations (as many do merely from not beginning to speculate in time). She finds herself at five or six-and-thirty a burden to her friends, destitute of the means of rendering herself independent (for the girls I speak of never think of learning to play ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... darkness shutting down, I was forced to await the rising of the moon, and given an opportunity to speculate on the question of the wisdom of my chase. Possibly I had conjured up impossible dangers, like some nervous old housewife, and when I should catch up with Powell would get a good laugh for my pains. However, I am not prone to sensitiveness, and the following of a ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... followed the lane for hours without meeting a soul, without hearing a human sound beyond the echoes of one's own footsteps sent back from the depth of a copse. For miles it went, turning now this way, now that, until a stranger would wonder whither it was leading him, and speculate whether, at the end, he might not find himself on the same high road which he had left long ago. At one part, for a mile or more, the lane skirted a forest, where, down short vistas, could be seen deeper depths beyond, solemn gloom which might serve to hide in, or might contain ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... inconstancy, and flitting from Kennedy's Red Discovery to Kennedy's White, and from Hood's Sarsaparilla to Mother Seigel's Syrup. And there were, besides, some mildewed and half-empty bottles, the labels obliterated, over which Nares would sometimes sniff and speculate. "Seems to smell like diarrhoea stuff," he would remark. "I wish't I knew, and I would try it." But the slop-chest was indeed represented by the plugs of niggerhead and nothing else. Thus paternal laws are made, thus they are evaded; and the schooner put to sea, like plenty of her neighbours, liable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as unwholesome as too little, notwithstanding of any extraneous means to work it off. "Slow and sure," is their motto—"Carpe diem," essentially that of their antagonists. And yet in one thing, we believe, most individuals holding these opposite opinions will be found to concur. They all speculate. Heraclitus signs his contract with a shudder, and trembles as he places his realized premium in the bank. Democritus laughingly subscribes his name to thousands, and chuckles as he beholds his favourite stock ascending in the thermometer of the share-market. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... would be an imprudent avidity. If he should be once tempted to go out of his depth, so that he would be compelled to sell whether at gain or loss, in order to make good his payments, he would most probably sink never more to rise. But if he would never speculate beyond the compass of his actual means, he might easily clear fifty per cent. per annum on the amount of ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... this passion, of which Noel was disturbing the ashes. Perhaps, he felt it all the more keenly on account of those expressions which recalled his own youth. He understood how irresistible must have been the strength of such a love and he trembled to speculate as to the result. ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... possibility of her return. Alas! he already knew its every line too well; for, as Hilda refused to undertake the task, he had but a week before drafted it himself. But Philip was growing hardened to deception, and found it possible to read it from end to end, and speculate upon its contents with Maria without blush ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... to devote themselves to the most minute description of the mental experiences and to explain the mental life in a way which was modeled after the pattern of exact natural sciences. Their aim was no longer to speculate about the soul, but to find the psychical elements and the constant laws which control their connections. Psychology became experimental and physiological. For more than thirty years the psychologists have also had their workshops. Laboratories ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... supplying with water, and the like. For private individuals there remains the most important part of the task, namely, the building of an improved class of small houses. In this good work the employers of labour may be expected to come prominently forward. Many a man will speculate in all kinds of remote undertakings; and it will never occur to him that one of the most admirable uses to which he might put his spare capital, would be to provide fit dwelling places for the labouring population around him. He is not asked to build alms houses. On the contrary, let ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... whose duty it is to take cognizance of these characters. Whilst the present system is pursued, of allowing so many old offenders to escape with trifling punishments, the evils will be increased, and the business of the court go on augmenting, by its own errors. The thief is now encouraged to speculate on his chances—in his own phraseology, "his good luck." Every escape makes him more reckless. I knew one man who was allowed a course of seventeen imprisonments and other punishments before his career was stopped by transportation; a sentence which does, however, sooner or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... [Myth.]. V. see, behold, discern, perceive, have in sight, descry, sight, make out, discover, distinguish, recognize, spy, espy, ken [Scot.]; get a sight of, have a sight of, catch a sight of, get a glimpse of, have a glimpse of, catch a glimpse of; command a view of; witness, contemplate, speculate; cast the eyes on, set the eyes on; be a spectator of &c 444; look on &c (be present) 186; see sights &c (curiosity) 455; see at a glance &c (intelligence) 498. look, view, eye; lift up the eyes, open one's eye; look ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... verses which were for the most part written on a sick bed. In this little volume Cotter showed fine poetic sense and a free and bold mastery over his material. A reading of Cotter's poems is certain to induce that mood in which one will regretfully speculate on what the young poet might have accomplished had he not been cut off ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... 2, would be very much stronger than the example justifying the bid. It is also true that a fortunate drop of the King or Queen of the long suit, with a little help from the partner, would make the next to the last the strongest of the three. It is idle, however, to speculate on what the partner may have. In such close cases it is most important to invariably follow some fixed rule. The player who guesses each time may always be wrong, while the player who sticks to the sound bid is sure to be right most of the ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... the "find," "speak in a language man knows no more." She charms us with etchings or scratchings of mammoths on mammoth-bone, and invites us to explore mysterious caves, to picnic among megalithic monuments, and speculate on pictured Scottish stones. In short, she engages man to investigate his ancestry, a pursuit which presents charms even to the illiterate, and asks us to find out facts concerning works of art which have ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... is not their tenure; the power of executing their office will be held at the pleasure of those who deal out fame or abuse as they think fit. They will begin rather to consult their own repose and their own popularity, than the critical and perilous trust that is in their hands. They will speculate on consequences when they see at court an ambassador whose robes are lined with a scarlet dyed in the blood of judges. It is no wonder, nor are they to blame, when they are to consider how they shall answer for their conduct to the criminal ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... trouble about those things—though you have divined truly that I have doubted them lately—but the doubts don't distress me. Actually, Aunt Bell, for a woman to lose faith in her God seems a small matter beside losing faith in her husband. You can doubt and reason and speculate and argue about the first—it's fashionable—people rather respect unbelievers nowadays—but Oh, Aunt Bell, how the ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... had determined to be done." We might, with vastly more plausibility, deny that Paul was the author of his Epistles, because he employed an amanuensis, or, for the same reason, deny that Milton was the author of Paradise Lost. It is useless here to speculate upon the reasons which induced God to ordain and bring sin to pass. We are now concerned with the fact merely, and we hence conclude that he is the author of sin and the only being properly ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... the margin between the farmer and the consumer but tends, as stated above, to come out of the farmer to a large degree. It has other vicious results in that it also stimulates dealers and manufacturers to speculate their profits away in unsound business, rather than to pay it to the government. It does sound well to tax the great manufacturers, but to make them the agency to collect taxes from the population is not altogether ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... unfold the nature of God, of man, and of the universe, entertained the curiosity of the philosophic student; and according to the temper of his mind, he might doubt with the Sceptics, or decide with the Stoics, sublimely speculate with Plato, or severely argue with Aristotle. The pride of the adverse sects had fixed an unattainable term of moral happiness and perfection; but the race was glorious and salutary; the disciples ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... follow them thence, beside placing him well to the rear of the red men from whom the harm was dreaded. It was this fact which disturbed Deerfoot, but there seemed no other course open. He could easily speculate as to the routes by which to head off the warriors, but the mistake just made warned him that he had no time guesses of ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... ceased one by one; the clump of willows by the river grew darker and darker; the stars came out and shone with that magnetic brilliancy that fixes our gaze upon them, leading one to speculate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... me be permitted, in conclusion, to bring together a few observations which have been scattered through the text, touching the relations of the Philippines with foreign countries, and briefly speculate thereon. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Empiricus, who lived in the second century, under the Emperor Antoninus Pius, writ ten books against the mathematicians or astrologers, and three of the Phyrrhonian opinion. The word is derived from the Greek SKEPTESZAI, quod est, considerare, speculare. [To consider or speculate] ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... was soon known that Helen Ward was at the rectory, but to the Misses Woodhouse, at least, her presence was not of enough importance to speculate or gossip about. Gifford had merely said Helen had changed her mind about going, and would be in Ashurst a few days longer, and the little ladies had such an absorbing interest of their own they did not ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... extent of the original tribe whence the Indo-European languages have sprung, we can only speculate. It probably was not large, and very likely formed a compact racial and linguistic unit for centuries, ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... back on a rock in a pasture on the top of some bare hill at midnight, and speculate on the height of the starry canopy. The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing, one very windy, but bright moonlight night, when the stars were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
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