Contrivance

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

Knowing how ingeniously Mr. Shei had laid his plans and guarded against every imaginable emergency, he had not been altogether certain that his artful contrivance would succeed, but the scientist’s acute distress was ample proof that Mr. Shei had been outmaneuvered and that The Gray Phantom was master of the situation.

This Inspector, when I first knew him, was a man of fourscore years, or thereabouts, and certainly one of the most wonderful specimens of winter-green that you would be likely to discover in a lifetime’s search. With his florid cheek, his compact figure, smartly arrayed in a bright-buttoned blue coat, his brisk and vigorous step, and his hale and hearty aspect, altogether he seemed—not young, indeed—but a kind of new contrivance of Mother Nature in the shape of man, whom age and infirmity had no business to touch. His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man’s utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion.

I mean to give something as slight and inexpensive as possible; but I have been so long out of the way of these things, that I am really quite at a loss, and must throw myself on your kindness, as I hope you will be with me, and also Mr. and Mrs. Gooch. You must arrange in such a manner as not to blush for your own contrivances.

And along with each of these go their images, not the things themselves, — they too have come about by godlike contrivance.

When the stamens of a flower suddenly spring towards the pistil, or slowly move one after the other towards it, the contrivance seems adapted solely to ensure self-fertilisation; and no doubt it is useful for this end: but, the agency of insects is often required to cause the stamens to spring forward, as Kölreuter has shown to be the case with the barberry; and curiously in this very genus, which seems to have a special contrivance for self-fertilisation, it is well known that if very closely-allied forms or varieties are planted near each other, it is hardly possible to raise pure seedlings, so largely do they naturally cross.

The Harry Hamlin character is a bit of a hypochondriac, a contrivance that exists for the sole purpose of bringing him into contact with the confused young doctor at the clinic.

The retrospective emphasis on these two specific stories—even their mention here, in the previous paragraph—has become a contrivance.