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If, then, we could have Professors who were mere abstractions and phantoms, marrowless in their bones, and without speculation in their eyes; or if they could only open their mouths on their own special subject, and in their scientific pedantry were dead to the world; if they resembled the well known character in the Romance, who was so imprisoned or fossilized in his erudition, that, though “he stirred the fire with some address,” nevertheless, on attempting to snuff the candles, he “was unsuccessful, and relinquished that ambitious post of courtesy, after having twice reduced the parlour to total darkness,” then indeed Voltaire himself might be admitted, not without scandal, but without risk, to lecture on astronomy or galvanism in Catholic, or Protestant, or Presbyterian Colleges, or in all of them at once; and we should have no practical controversy with philosophers who, after the fashion of the author I have been quoting, are so smart in proving that we, who differ from them, must needs be so bigotted and puzzle-headed.
Cotsdean was a puzzle-headed being, making his calculations by the rule of thumb; but he had put down the date, and there could be no possible mistake about it. He got up disposed to smile at the poor man's ignorance and fussy restlessness of mind. "I have never left him in the lurch, he may trust to me surely in the future," Mr.
The old man was not vain; he knew that a world very different from his own extended round about him. But he was puzzle-headed, and had never been shaken from his life-long complacency by circumstances. He had been disappointed in love as a young man, and only married late in life. He had no son, and was a widower facts that, to his mind, quite dwarfed his good fortune in every other respect.
But we were always tilting at each other. I saw an opening and pushed my uncandid thrust. "You have a ghastly imagination," I said with a cheerfully sceptical smile. "Well, and if I have," he returned unabashed. "But let me remind you that this situation came to me unasked. I am like a puzzle-headed chief- mate we had once in the dear old Samarcand when I was a youngster.
The smart bonnets and dresses which Mrs Greenways and her daughters wore on Sundays in spite of hard times and poor crops and debt were the wonder of the whole congregation, and in Mrs White's case the wonder was mixed with scorn. "Peter's the only one among 'em as is good for anything," she sometimes said, "an' he's naught but a puzzle-headed sort of a chap."
This puzzle-headed woman I mean the charitable woman pondering over the fate of the race, as if she could do anything to advance or retard its destiny!" "You always liked those stories, dear. You said that you would write them." "Yes, but I'm afraid the pathos is a little deeper than I could reach; only Turgenieff could write them. But here we are at the Dog's Home."
His promise, good easy man, was pretty sure to be the prize of the first applicant; but this did not render it less valuable to his young lordship, who came back all glorious with an eighth part of the victory, and highly delighted with the excellent apothecary's most judicious and gratifying sentiments, namely, all his own eager rhetoric, to which the good man had cordially given his meek puzzle-headed assent.
The common man plainly has no slightest material interest in the nationality or the place of residence of those who conduct this traffic; though all the facts go to say that in some puzzle-headed way the common man commonly persuades himself that it does make some occult sort of difference to him; so that he is commonly willing to pay something substantial toward subsidising businessmen of his own nationality, in the way of a protective tariff and the like.
Bewildered between them, he took them to his sister, who, being as puzzle-headed as himself, and only hearing his involved history of the affair, confused him still more; so he wrote to Philip, saying he was sorry the fellow had turned up, but he would guard against him.
Men who had never before in their lives tried to follow a logical argument began at last to store up in their memory reasons and figures in support of the fascinating doctrine, and if they were puzzle-headed over it, they were not more so than their leaders. Besides, in their case merely to have begun is much. Look at the situation.
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