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More "Meagre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to his meagre flock many an unclaimed goat of the world fell into that meek valley-path of Sunday mornings and came to hear, if not to heed, the voice of this quiet shepherd; so that now, as be stood delivering his final exhortation, his eyes ranged over wild, lawless, desperate countenances, ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... of the Past. Meagre it has necessarily been, though occupying more of your time than I could have wished, but the number of subjects demanding reference must ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... and the next instant his fist dealt Harold such a blow, as nearly knocked out all his breath. Setting his teeth, and swearing an oath, Dick was pouncing on the boy's arm, when from the road before them came bursting a meagre thing darting like a wild cat, which fell upon him, ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reader, any person meet, With rosy, smiling looks, and cheeks replete, The form not clumsy, you may safely say, A Papimanian doubtless I survey. But if, on t'other side, you chance to view, A meagre figure, void of blooming hue, With stupid, heavy eye, and gloomy mien Conclude at once a Pope-figir, ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... cloud went off from the pilgrim's brow, As a small and meagre book, Unchased by gold or diamond gem, From his folding robe he took. Here, lady fair, is the pearl of price;— May it prove as such to thee! Nay, keep thy gold—I ask it not; For the Word of ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... iss it? You will be getting tired early. And who is keeping you from a rest?" said Mackenzie, whose knowledge of contemporary slang was decidedly meagre. ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... ability to free themselves. The whole structure of society is full of separating walls; and it will sadden the heart of any Northern man, who travels in either of these three States, to see how poor, and meagre, and narrow a thing life is to all the country people. Even with the best class of townsfolk it lacks very much of the depth and breadth and fruitfulness of our Northern life, while with these others it is hardly less materialistic than that of their own mules and horses. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... wakes, and moping Pensiveness; With Meagre, discontented Looks they sit, And watch the wasting of the ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... presently reappeared, ushering in a small meagre man, sallow and dingy, with a restless wandering look in his dull eyes, and an excessive timidity about his deep reverences, which gave him the air of a man who had been long a solitary prisoner. Yet through all this squalor and wretchedness there were ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... thou not confirm me that before? and I would have hastened, not retarded thee; for, of a verity, my outward man warreth with the inward, and these supporters of the flesh," pointing with his forefinger to the thin and meagre limbs that scarcely merited the compliment, "grow weary in ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... to Caron and to the ambassadors in Paris, with which the reader has been made familiar, had thus been ransacked to find treasonable matter, but the result was meagre in spite of the minute and microscopic analysis instituted to detect ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in the market of affection! But what is thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of a foreign language is partially true even with the tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed, we all speak different dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose and meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond and fit upon the truth of fact - not clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the result? That the one can open himself more clearly to his friends, and can enjoy ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... properties and effects of air? Were I inclined to quibble, I would say, that the effects of air, at least, are best to be learned of Marcel. If you have quite done with l'Abbes Nolet, ask my friend l'Abbe Sallier to recommend to you some meagre philomath, to teach you a little geometry and astronomy; not enough to absorb your attention and puzzle your intellects, but only enough not to be grossly ignorant of either. I have of late been a sort of 'astronome malgre ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... them. This left the wires without current and effectually cut off Dayton. Bell rummaged around and found a lineman's "test set." With this he made his way to the roof of the building, "cut in" on the line to Phoneton and reported to Williamson, whose batteries were still in condition. Over this meagre equipment messages were exchanged by means of the underground wires of the company, which held up until after the noon hour Tuesday before the cable in which they were incased gave way. The break, however, was south ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... little wonder, then, that we have known practically nothing of the Apache and their customs beyond the meagre record of what has been given us by a few army officers; consequently their study was entered into with especial interest. Although much time was expended and much patience consumed before the confidence of their elders was gained, the ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... houses are so miserably supplied with household goods that even a rash and optimistic man would hesitate before offering a sovereign for an entire home, yet pawnshops flourish exceedingly, although the people possess nothing worth pawning. Children are half fed, for the earnings of parents are too meagre to allow a sufficient quantity of nourishing food; but public-houses do a roaring trade on the ready-money principle, while the chandler supplies scraps of food and half-ounces of ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... to the rocks! and thou wilt see, I wist, A lonely one, that bendeth in the mist Of moonlight, with a wild and raven pall Flung round him. Is he mortal man at all? For, by the meagre fire-light that is under Those eyelids, and the vizor shade of wonder Falling upon his features, I would guess, Of one that wanders out of blessedness! Julio! raise thee!—By the holy mass! I wot not of the fearless one would pass Thy wizard shadow. Where the raven hair Was ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... potentates. The Moors, too, may have left some traces of their race behind. They held the country from about A.D. 713 to 758, when they were finally expelled by Charles Martel and Eudes. One sees to this day their towers of meagre stonework, perched on the grand Roman masonry of those old amphitheatres, which they turned into fortresses. One may see, too—so tradition holds—upon those very amphitheatres the stains of the fires with which Charles Martel smoked them out; and one may see, too, or fancy that ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... our myriads of "special telegraph" men have sent you over details and anecdotes such as we shall never see. We get a meagre "communique official" and have to be content with that. It is now and then hard for me, who have ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... Greek colony can be pointed out further to the north, with the exception perhaps of the insignificant settlement at Black Corcyra (Curzola, about 174?). No adequate explanation has yet been given why the Greek colonization developed itself in this direction to so meagre an extent. Nature herself appeared to direct the Hellenes thither, and in fact from the earliest times there existed a regular traffic to that region from Corinth and still more from the settlement at Corcyra ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... but a meagre notion of the fulness and completeness of this admirable work. It will accomplish its object, if it send the reader to the book itself. The appearance of the volume is timely. Events and circumstances have prepared the minds of our countrymen to understand and to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... honor. She objects to doing this unless I obtain from you a written request that she should thus aid me. She fears you may consider her action 'premature and officious.' Write to her at once, requesting her to do this sisterly favor for you, setting forth your distance from the city, the meagre assortment of the goods to be had in the Richmond stores, etc., and giving her carte blanche as to cost and style. It will be an inestimable advantage to your appearance on the occasions named should she oblige you ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... easily see why some men are able to take out from the world's common stock of product so large an amount, while most men can take but a meagre allowance. By the law of supply and demand the price is far higher for the service which one man renders to the world than another. Let us take the operation of a large machine shop, for instance. Only one superintendent ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... Seville, chance made us acquainted with a highly extraordinary individual, a tall, bony, meagre figure, in a tattered Andalusian hat, ragged capote, and still more ragged pantaloons, and seemingly between forty and fifty years of age. The only appellation to which he answered was Manuel. His occupation, at the time we knew him, was selling tickets for ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... exhibited by Dr. Henderson[1]; while an outline of Russian literature in general is presented in the work of Otto[2]. Valuable information respecting the South-western Slavi is contained in the recent work of Sir J.G. Wilkinson.[3] But beyond this meagre enumeration, the English reader will find few sources of information at his command upon these topics. All these, too, are only sketches of separate parts of one great whole; of which in its full extent, both as a whole and in the intimate relation of its ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... with the nurse, before the story was ended, and then it had to be begun and told all over again,—the old, old story of a quarrel between the father and the "baby" of his family, of the hasty leaving home of the boy, of the meagre news of his early marriage, and lastly of the years that were empty of tidings. These Polly was able to fill up in part, when the story-teller turned listener, with interest almost as great as ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... upon an actual count and comparison, to contain more separate titles than any other Encyclopaedia ever published. Although the articles are generally brief, it must not be supposed that they are meagre, for they will be found to present a clear and comprehensive view of the existing information upon the particular topic, with a mastery which arises only from familiarity. Montesquieu said that Tacitus abridged all because he knew all; and no reader can peruse a number of this Encyclopaedia ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... was but a meagre repast. There was some very thin soup, then a stew, then macaroni. There were also bread and sour wine. However, the boys did not complain. They had footed it so far, and had worked so hard, that they were all as hungry as hunters; and so the dinner gave as great satisfaction as if it had been ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... successors ventured to attempt the title-role, hence the piece soon fell out of the repertory. In 1783, however, an alteration, made by Cooke the barrister for Mrs. Abington, was produced with great success at Covent Garden. In this meagre adaptation the Curate disappears. Shanks originally acted this part, but Lacy was the acknowledged 'Sir ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... inhabitants had flitted away, unable to bear its depressing influence, and leaving behind them only the crabbed old people at the corners of the streets, and the tattered beggars, who must make a meagre livelihood out of the falling temples and 24,000 rotten houses of the once handsome capital ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... envy. For the correspondents in the greatest of all wars the pickings had been meagre. "You are to be congratulated," I said. He brushed aside my congratulations. "For what?" he demanded. "I didn't go after the stories; they came to me. The things I saw I had to see. Couldn't get away from ...
— The Deserter • Richard Harding Davis
... screamed, "it's got my tippet; oh, Bill, Peter, catch hold!" Bill and Peter proved unequal to the occasion, but a gownsman seized the vanishing tippet, and after a moment's struggle with the great ape, restored a meagre half to the proper owner, while Jacko sat grinning over the other half, picking it to pieces. The poor woman had now had enough of it, and she hurried off with her two boys, followed by the few townspeople who were still in the show, to ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... fifth day after leaving Santa Fe, we entered the wretched little pueblo of Parida. It was my intention to have remained there all night, but it proved a ruffian sort of place, with meagre chances of comfort, and I moved on to Socorro. This is the last inhabited spot in New Mexico, as you approach the terrible desert, the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... we first begin to become really acquainted with ancestors of the people of to-day, even though we may have read in the pages of earlier writers of alien descent much that is of great concurrent interest. Through the medium of the native saga, epic, and meagre chronicle, we see for the first time their real though dim outlines, moving in and out of the mists that obscure the dawn of history; and these outlines become more and more distinct as the literary remains ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... heart. That she was tender and loving could be seen in every glance of her eyes, in every feature of her face, in every tone of her soft, musical voice. Surely, thought Williams, the girl could not kill a mouse. Where, then, would she find strength to kill a man? But she told him, in meagre outline, her story, and he learned that a great, self-controlled, modest strength nestled side by side with ineffable gentleness in the heart of this young girl; and that was the moment of Roger Williams's undoing, and the beginning of Rita's woe. Prior to that moment he had believed himself ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... affected his health, his hopes, and his whole soul, affected his temper too. Perkins called it being planet struck, and I am not sure he was ever completely the same man again." The notes of his conversation during the antecedent period are equally meagre.[1] He is described by Madame D'Arblay as taking a singular amusement in hearing, instigating, and provoking a war of words, alternating triumph and overthrow, between clever and ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Some had saddles, some blankets, some bridles, some halters, some with stirrups, some with none. The riders also were various and grotesque in their appearance. Some were old, some young, some hale, respectable looking men; others were pale, meagre, and shabbily dressed. Some had great coats,—others had blankets on their shoulders. The countenance of some was downcast, melancholy, dejected; that of others, stern, indignant, manifesting that they thought themselves undeserving such treatment. ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... lands which are now leased for terms of years, and covered with buildings, were occupied as suburban gardens at trifling rents. Eventually the Birmingham Free School will enjoy an income equal to the wants of a university as well as a school. Meagre accounts of the income and expenditure of this noble foundation are published annually, under the regulations of an Act of Parliament passed in 1828; but no report of the number of scholars, or the sort of education communicated, is attached to this balance sheet. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... It was rather a hovel than a house; but, poor as it was, it was as neat as misery could make it. The old woman was sitting up in her wretched bed, winding worsted; four meagre, ill-clothed, pale children were all busy, some of them sticking pins in paper for the pin-maker, and others sorting rags for ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... Nam-Bok's eyes roved over the scene, but there was not the charm about it that his recollection had warranted him to expect. During the years of his wandering he had looked forward to just this scene, and now that it had come he was disappointed. It was a bare and meagre life, he deemed, and not to be compared to the one to which he had become used. Still, he would open their eyes a bit, and his own ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... eighteen miles we encamped on the left shore near a rock in the centre of a bend towards the left, and opposite to two more islands. This valley has wide low grounds covered with high grass, and in many with a fine turf of green sward. The soil of the highlands is thin and meagre, without any covering except a low sedge and a dry kind of grass which is almost as inconvenient as the prickly pear. The seeds of it are armed with a long twisted hard beard at their upper extremity, while the lower part is a ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... of the Committee of Congress to the agents abroad were few, scanty, and meagre. This may be ascribed to two causes. First, there was really very little to communicate, which was not known through the public papers; and, secondly, it was not made the duty of any particular member of the ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... letter. The proportion of literacy among Hindus and Sikhs is three times as great as among Muhammadans. In 1911-12 one boy in six of school-going age was at school or college and one girl in 37. This may seem a meagre result of sixty years of work, for the Government and Christian missionaries, who have had an honourable connection with the educational history of the province, began their efforts soon after annexation, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its conquests, teach us more than this? Let us approach ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Like an owl in an ivy bush; a simile for a meagre or weasel-faced man, with a large wig, or very ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... new particulars respecting the knowledge of the ancients in geography: but these particulars, as must be obvious from the preceding part of this volume, are ascertained only after considerable difficulty; and when ascertained, are for the most part meagre, if not obscure. In the history of Herodotus, we, for the first time, are able to trace the exact state and progress of geographical knowledge; and from his time, our means of tracing it become more accessible, as well as productive of more satisfactory results. Within one hundred ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... my decision, once I had announced it, irrevocable. The sun-baked earth was already strewn with red vine branches and withered leaves; the holly-hocks and dahlias, grown tall as trees, had a few meagre blossoms at the tops of their long stalks; the blazing sun perfected and turned to gold the musk-scented grapes that always ripened a little late; but in spite of the excessive heat and the exquisite limpid blue of the sky one felt that summer ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... it was rather a hovel than a house; but, poor as it was, it was as neat as misery could make it. The old woman was sitting up in her wretched bed, winding worsted; four meagre, ill- clothed, pale children were all busy, some of them sticking pins in paper for the pin-maker, and others ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... not from the thickness but from the undisturbed horizontal character of the strata. Like the Silurian formations described elsewhere, they remain to this day nearly as flat and unaltered as they were originally laid down. Judged by mere vertical depth, they present but a meagre representative of the massive Devonian greywacke and limestone of Germany, or of the Old Red Sandstone of Britain. Yet vast though the area is over which they form the surface rock, it is probably only a small portion of their total extent; for they are found turned up from under the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... fortunes while submitted to this censorship." Both critics recognize the fact that such a volume would be entertaining and instructive; but, from another point of view, it would also be a somewhat doleful book. Even a reader of meagre imagination and rude sensibilities could not peruse such a volume without picturing in his mind the anguish and the heart-ache which those bitter and often vicious attacks inflicted upon the unfortunate victims whose ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... begun again. We hear that our ships are shelling Ostend from the sea. The news that reaches us is meagre, but I prefer that to the false reports ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an aptitude for technique, but not the soul of the artist. The youth has led the happy, careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American, and he cannot, with his meagre past, express the love, the longing, the passion and the tragedies of life and its happy phases as can the master who has lived life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his existence, a beautiful bit of human driftwood ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... interest, not only for the beauty of their contents but because they are our earliest examples of the Overture fashioned in complete Sonata form. Originally the Overture had been a prelude to the opening of a play, a prelude of the lightest and most meagre nature. Examples, beginning with Monteverde, abound in all the early Italian opera composers.[129] Lully of the French school and Alessandro Scarlatti of the Italian were the first to amplify these beginnings and to establish a definite standard of structure. In both schools this standard represented ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the benches which slope up from the centre, crowd the floor space, while the galleries for the press at one end, for strangers at the other, and for the use of the Lords and the Diplomatic corps at the sides give only meagre accommodation. I passed into the building at nightfall, getting soul-stirring glimpses into the great area of Westminster Hall, in which burned only one far-away light. Its grandeur was more impressive in the dimness than in the glare. The lofty associations ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... hauling the cut cane. But the villages they passed, single streets of unrelieved squalor in a dusty waste, they decided were immeasurably depressing. No one who could avoid it walked; lank men in broad straw hats and coat-like shirts rode meagre horses with the sheaths of long formidable blades slapping their miserable hides. Groups of fantastically saddled horses drooped their heads tied in the vicinity of a hands-breadth of shade by general stores. "I could burst into tears," Savina declared. But ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... night Merryon lay on his veranda, smoking his pipe in stark endurance while the dreadful hours crept by. Sometimes he held a letter from his wife hard clenched in one powerful hand. She wrote to him frequently—short, airy epistles, wholly inconsequent, often provocatively meagre. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... embonpoint of the French Princesses. They said that their nieces, by the exercise of religious principles, obtained the advantage of solid flesh, while the Austrian Archduchesses, by wasting themselves in idleness and profane pursuits, grew thin and meagre, and were equally exhausted in their minds and bodies! At this the Abbe Vermond, as the tutor of Marie Antoinette, felt himself highly offended, and called on Comte de Mercy, then the Imperial Ambassador, to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... several officers with their wives, about eight or nine in all, and we could have had a merry time enough but for the awful heat, which destroyed both our good looks and our tempers. The fare was meagre, of course; fresh biscuit without butter, very salt boiled beef, and some canned vegetables, which were poor enough in those days. Pies made from preserved peaches or plums generally followed this delectable course. ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... book had been written. I had clean forgotten its existence myself when it was recalled to my memory in this amusing fashion. My visitor from the Inland Revenue Office smiled sweetly when I explained to him why no profits from this publication had ever swelled my meagre income-tax returns. It was a case of the Spanish Fleet over again. I had never seen those literary profits even to the amount of sixpence, and I could not therefore be expected to cause the collectors of her Majesty's Revenue to ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... each of them should contribute to the pleasure of the company by personating some illustrious and unfortunate character, and relating his adventures in the first person. A contrivance so tame and meagre compared with the descent to the regions of the dead sketched with so much spirit by Sackville, that it must have preceded, in all probability, their knowledge at least of his performance. The first part of the work, almost entirely by Baldwyne, was written, and partly ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... for him unstinted sympathy and approval. He possessed talents in plenty, and these of an order peculiarly attractive to the amateur because tentative rather than commanding. Among his intimates he was seen and spoken of as one cloaked with the pathos of thwarted aspirations. Better health, less meagre private means and a backing of influence, what might he not have done? His star might have flamed to the zenith! Meanwhile it was a privilege to help him, to such extent as his extreme delicacy of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... staring eyes and tails like strings, kept near at hand, and seemed ready to commit any crime for the smallest particle of goose. String-tailed, goggle-eyed, meagre cats that seize your dinner if you do not keep watch over it, and when caressed promptly respond by scratching and swearing, appear to be held in high favour throughout this district. They are expected to live upon rats, and it is this that makes them so disagreeable, for although they kill ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... of their younger lives. Through the streaming glass they could see the strip of bog; and the half-naked woman, her soaked petticoat clinging about her red legs, piling the wet peat into the baskets thrown across the meagre back of a starveling ass. And farther on there were low-lying, swampy fields, and between them and the roadside a few miserable poplars with cabins sunk below the dung-heaps, and the meagre potato-plots ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... The meagre information from there, left him, as has been seen, to act very much on possibilities. These, however, were dark and storm-laden; he felt that England was confronted by her whole destiny in India. On the other ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... name, does not stand out so prominently as the figure of Pontiac in the later struggle. This may be partly because Pontiac's story has been told by such a magician as Mr. Francis Parkman. But it is partly because the data are too meagre. In all probability, however, the schemes of Sassacus the Pequot, of Philip the Wampanoag, and of Pontiac the Ottawa, were substantially the same. That Philip plotted with the Narragansetts seems certain, and the early events of the war point clearly to a previous understanding with ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... feeble was their hold on English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably recorded in Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign of George III, they were amenable to management. In the result, an opposition in the classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question to be considered was the personalities who were to share ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... children—survived altogether.[45] Within a very short time the cabins which he erected were ready to fall and the palisades could not keep out hogs. A tract of land called the "company's garden" yielded the company L300 annually, but this was a meagre return for the enormous suffering and sacrifice of life.[46] Dale took Pocahontas with him to England, and Lady Delaware presented her at court, and her portrait engraved by the distinguished artist Simon de Passe was a popular curiosity.[47] While in England she met Captain ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... collections of her plays and novels which appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century give us nothing; nay, they rather cumber our path with the trash of discredited Memoirs. Pearson's reprint (1871) is entirely valueless: there is no attempt, however meagre, at editing, no effort to elucidate a single allusion; moreover, several of the Novels— and the Poems in their entirety— are lacking. I am happy to give (Vol. V) one of the Novels, and that not the least important, The History of the Nun, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... have added itself to the history of the world; a great event, a great step forward, would have definitely taken place. He would have been received at Ventirose as a friend. He would be no longer a mere nodding acquaintance, owing even that meagre relationship to the haphazard of propinquity. The ice-broken, if you will, but still present in abundance—would have been gently thawed away. One era had passed; but then a ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... produced some more bread and cheese from his lodge, for both men were hungry. They sat down on the bench under the plane-tree and ate their meagre supper together in silence, for they had talked much during the long day. Then Pasquale bade Zorzi good night and went away, and Zorzi went into the laboratory, where all was dark. But he knew every brick of the furnace and ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... quiet hills, and the bulk of inland commerce was still being drawn by horses along the country roads. Yet Gourlay was the only carrier in the town. The wonder is diminished when we remember that it had been a decaying burgh for thirty years, and that its trade, at the best of times, was of meagre volume. Even so, it was astonishing that he should be the only carrier. If you asked the natives how he did it, "Ou," they said, "he makes the one hand wash the other, doan't ye know?"—meaning thereby that he had so many horses travelling on his own business, that he could afford to carry ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... this is the case, it must be the business of this paper to attempt to show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual, a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson, very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... of the circumstances, we have reason to feel no little perplexity in finding the materials for a life of this transcendent writer so meagre and so few; and amongst them the larger part of doubtful authority. All the energy of curiosity directed upon this subject, through a period of one hundred and fifty years, (for so long it is since Betterton the actor began to make researches,) has availed us little ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... lodge near by, a wooden gate showed the entrance to its grounds. Between the gate and the house he passed through a young plantation of larches and other firs for a quarter of a mile, and so came to an old wall with an iron gate in the middle of it, within which the old house, a gaunt meagre building—a bare house in fact, relieved only by four small turrets or bartizans, one at each corner—lifted its grey walls, pointed gables, and steep roof high into the pale blue air. He rode round the outer wall, seeking a back entrance, and ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... his countrymen. Thus, while Marion is every where regarded as the peculiar representative in the southern States, of the genius of partizan warfare, we are surprised, when we would trace, in the pages of the annalist, the sources of this fame, to find the details so meagre and so unsatisfactory. Tradition mumbles over his broken memories, which we vainly strive to pluck from his lips, and bind together in coherent and satisfactory records. The spirited surprise, the happy ambush, the daring onslaught, the fortunate escape,—these, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... instance, that on American Taxation, on the Reforms in our Household or Official Expenditure, or at that from the Bristol hustings (by its prima facie subject, therefore, a mere electioneering harangue to a mob). With what marvellous skill does he enrich what is meagre, elevate what is humble, intellectualise what is purely technical, delocalise what is local, generalise what is personal! And with what result? Doubtless to the absolute contemporaries of those speeches, steeped to the very lips in the passions besetting ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Major Sandars had appealed to the men, and they had sworn to stick together to the last, they had only made journeys of about a mile in length through the dense jungle. The guide was still delirious, and half the men down with sickness or wounds. Food they had had of the most meagre description, and that principally the birds they had shot. Their ammunition was fast failing, and the time seemed to have come that evening to lie down and die, so weak were they, and so pertinacious were the attacks of the enemy—when a thrill ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... seem to mean anything, must always seem to mean something within the scope of the mind hearing them. Words cannot convey the thought of a thinker to a no-thinker; of a largely aspiring and self-discontented soul, to a creature satisfied with his poverty, and counting his meagre faculty the human standard. Neither will they readily reveal the mind of one old in thought, to one who has but lately begun to think. The higher the reader's notion of what St Paul intends—the higher the idea, that is, which his words wake in him, the more ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... will lead to any revolution in the chemical philosophy. As far as "words" go, I have become a formidable chemist—having got by heart a prodigious quantity of terms, etc., to which I attach "some" ideas, very scanty in number, I assure you, and right meagre in their individual persons. That which must discourage me in it is, that I find all "power" of vital attributes to depend on modes of "arrangement", and that chemistry throws not even a distant rushlight glimmer upon this subject. The "reasoning", likewise, is always ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy cake, and administered instalments of those dainties to the young people: at the same time, sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of "something" to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman, but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather not. Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time tied on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... great straits for want of money at this time. She had scarcely enough to pay for their meagre fare, and her own clothes and the children's were almost beyond patching and darning. Beth surprised her several times sitting beside the dining-table with the everlasting mending on her lap, fretting silently, and the child's heart was wrung. There was some legal difficulty, and letters which ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... plentiful supper, and a bottle of good wine, of which the giver was not sorry to partake after the meagre dinner at three o'clock, to which I had been invited by the Campaigner; and it was midnight when I walked back with my friend to his house in the upper town; and all the stars of heaven were shining ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... an old patrician family, able, honest, but stubborn, a meagre, swarthy man, whom I never saw smile. The misfortune befell him that his only daughter was carried off by a friend of the family. He pursued his son-in-law with the most vehement prosecution: and because the tribunals, with their ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... at Gravesend, "the most peaceful and happy of any portion of my life," as he truly said, had left no other trace than his official work, of which the details must necessarily be meagre, there would have been a great blank in his life, and the reader would necessarily possess no clue to the marked change between the Gordon of China and the Gordon of the Soudan. Not that there was any loss of power or activity, but in the transition period philanthropy had come to occupy the foremost ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... rider was dressed in the plainest attire of a quiet citizen, though the material of his clothes and the few ornaments that were visible about his person indicated their owner to be one who was no meagre possessor of the riches of this world. Both rider and horse were as still as though they had been carved in marble instead of being living objects, save the quick, nervous motion, now and then, of the full-blooded animal's ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... from morning till night at an employment utterly unsuited to her sex and her strength, and which I should consider dangerous to her eyesight, to earn for her poor parents a half-penny per day. Think of this, ye who talk, not always without reason, of "factory slaves" and the meagre rewards of labor in America. In any community where labor is even decently rewarded, that child should have been enabled to earn every day at least as much as her fortnight's work on the stone-heap would command. And even in Galway, a concerted ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... good deal faster than usual, and little jealous sparkles shone in her cold gray eyes. She had never admired any man so much as she had admired this brilliant young painter. Many men had paid her compliments; as the rich Mr. Granger's sole daughter and heiress, she had been gratified with no meagre share of mankind's worship; but no words ever spoken had sounded so sweet in her ears as those few civil speeches that Mr. Austin had found time to address to her during his visits to the Rue de Morny. And after having taken so much ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... thickly stocked with men of ability in every important department should have had the misfortune to have her affairs entrusted to Ministers and officials who were childishly incompetent and ludicrously vindictive. Men of meagre mental calibre, who hold office under the Crown or anywhere else, are invariably fussy, pompous, overbearing, and stifling with conceit. This condition of things was in full swing during the Napoleonic regime and captivity, and that is the period we are concerned about. ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... he could securely depend, not only on the good faith of an English ministry, but also on the good plight of the British nation, which, like an indulgent nurse, hath always presented the nipple to her meagre German allies. Those, however, who pretended to consider and canvas events, without prejudice and prepossession, could not help owning their surprise at hearing an alliance stigmatized as pernicious to the system of public liberty, and subversive of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... elaborate preparation. Beyond the fact that a "Push" was to be inaugurated upon an entirely new and experimental form of advance, nothing was disclosed even to the men. The utter importance of maintaining absolute secrecy of this meagre information was earnestly reiterated. The slightest inkling of the impending intentions escaping to Fritz would have cast upon the troops engaged a disaster perhaps unequalled in the annuals ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... year of the first tribunate of C. Gracchus. The large number of these books has long been a stumbling-block to the learned, for we are expressly told that the annales maximi, as the records were called, were (in spite of their name) of a very meagre character; and many conjectures have quite recently been made to explain it.[581] But guessing is almost useless, seeing that there are no data for it. The editor may have added matter of his own, amplifying and adorning after the manner of writers of his day; or he may have worked in the contents ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... things; but for one entertainment in Paris at least thirty take place chez nous. Society is established with us on a wider and more splendid scale. The weekly soirees, on the other hand, which properly represent the society of this place, are dull, meagre, and formal to the last degree of formality. There is no brilliant point of reunion as at Almack's,—no theatre uniting, like our Italian Opera, the charm of the best company, the best music, and the best dancing. Of the thousand and one theatres boasted of by the Parisians, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... and a very meagre report of the Wainwright trip to the Far East, which had taken in some out-of-the-way places apparently, I hastened back to Kennedy. He was surrounded by bottles, tubes, jars, retorts, Bunsen burners, everything in the science and art of chemistry, ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... If any man can tell any tidings of a spruce, neat, apish, nimble, fine, foolish, absurd, humorous, conceited, fantastic gallant, with hollow eyes, sharp look, swart complexion, meagre face, wearing as many toys in his apparel as fooleries in his looks and gesture, let him come forth and certify me thereof, and he shall have for ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... trudged at the head of the meagre three-span ox-team. When, after a hard day's toil, he at length outspanned, the waggon-pole still faithfully pointed to the north-west. But before it was yet day the waggon began to move again, and it was to the north-east ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... let us enquire what we mean by giving many names to the same thing, e.g. white, good, tall, to man; out of which tyros old and young derive such a feast of amusement. Their meagre minds refuse to predicate anything of anything; they say that good is good, and man is man; and that to affirm one of the other would be making the many one and the one many. Let us place them in a class with our previous opponents, ...
— Sophist • Plato
... called me, my master showed me the best countenance that might be, and it was great joy to me to eat off clean platters once again, on white linen strewn with spring flowers. As the time was Lent, we had fare that they called meagre: fish from the Vienne water, below the town, and eggs cooked in divers fashions, all to the point of excellence, for the wine and fare of Chinon are famous in France. As my duty was, I waited on my master and on the maid Elliot, who was never silent, but babbled of all that she had heard since ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... delayed by the meagre native encouragement to effort of the better sort. The populace has been largely indifferent,—the inertia of all large bodies would explain that. A national, a constructive, and collaborative criticism ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... say that she forgave him, or to express any complaisance at the thought of the future. Imagination ran riot, and she saw as in a picture a little house in a smoky manufacturing town, and shrank with distaste from its narrow walls and meagre furnishings. Yes, indeed! Ned might well declare that she was the greatest sufferer, and it was only right that he should pity her. If this breakdown had happened three months before, her parents would not have consented to her engagement, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... timidities, we have chattered and pecked one another and fouled the world—like daws in the temple, like unclean birds in the holy place of God. All my life has been foolishness and pettiness, gross pleasures and mean discretions—all. I am a meagre dark thing in this morning's glow, a penitence, a shame! And, but for God's mercy, I might have died this night—like that poor lad there—amidst the squalor of my sins! No more of this! No more of this!—whether the whole world has changed ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... the waiter it may be said that Dickens left in a slight sketch what he might have developed through a long and strong novel. For Dickens had hold of one great truth, the neglect of which has, as it were, truncated and made meagre the work of many brilliant modern novelists. Modern novelists try to make long novels out of subtle characters. But a subtle character soon comes to an end, because it works in and in to its own centre and dies there. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... at Pedro with a judicial frown. Then he stuck out a finger at the horse, keeping the thumb hooked in his pocket. So meagre a gesture was felt by the ruffled Shorty to be no just way to point at Pedro. "What's the matter with that foreleg there?" ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... the last words low and slowly, and then, for a little, silence fell upon the pair. Vague and meagre though the message was, it accorded exactly with Estein's long-suppressed desires. So entirely did Atli believe in himself and the virtue of his counsel, that the young Viking was thoroughly infected with his faith; ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... children were making a terrible noise in the next room, and the racket shot pains through her head. On the morrow she was at work again, and kept it up to the end of the week. When she returned on Saturday, late in the afternoon, with her meagre pay-envelope in her ragged muff, she had forgotten all about her effort to ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... changes, until the time of Dean Monk, is meagre. Dean Tarrant (1764-1791) collected the fragments of stained glass and had them all inserted in the windows of the apse. He also repaved the church, but most unfortunately without carefully preserving the ancient ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... was productive of very meagre results. However, a singular combination of circumstances and of proper names will render the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... great source from which has sprung the vitalities of the country's faith. And who does not know that to be a poor, unsolid fiction,—a weak and hollow sham? And, on the other hand, some of our Free Churchmen are asserting that they are not morally bound to their forlorn teachers for the meagre and altogether inadequate salaries held out to them in prospect, when they were set down in their humble schools, divorced from all other means of support, to regulate their very limited expenditure by the specified incomes. Further, they virtually tell us that we cannot possibly take ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... had no appreciation at all, and he gave away what he earned beyond his most pressing requirements in secret and often ill-judged charities, whenever an occasion of doing so presented itself, though he never sought one. For himself, he was able to subsist on bread and water, and the meagre fare was scarcely a privation to his hardy constitution. If he chanced to have no money to spare for fuel, he bore the cold and buttoned up his old pea-jacket to the throat while he sat at work at his table. His self-respect made him wise and careful in regard ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... easy-chair, which was covered with pillows and almost hidden under various woolen draperies. He was dressed in a long coat of coarse, pale-blue cloth. He was bareheaded, and his long, white hair formed a weird frame for a face of bloodless hue and meagre proportions, from which two vacant eyes stared fixedly. He sat immovable and his arms hung limply ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... resolution of one man, George Washington. The fortunes of the colonies were never at a lower ebb than at that moment, and there was apparently nothing further to look forward to but a continuation of the disintegration until the end came. The meagre resources of the lax confederacy were already strained to the utmost, and the capture of a ship laden as this one was reported to be, would be of incalculable service. Clothes and shoes to cover the nakedness of the soldiery and protect them from the inclemency of the winter, now fast ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the singular custom, in common with the Collinas and Mauhes, of treating their young girls, on their showing the first signs of womanhood, as if they had committed some crime. They are sent up to the girao under the smoky and filthy roof, and kept there on very meagre diet, sometimes for a whole month. I heard of one poor girl dying under ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... quadroon's delicate, high-bred features, her skin almost paler than her young mistress's, her figure like the clove's after a hard winter—the more active that a little meagre—her head small, and its tresses soft as the crow blackbird's plumage, and the loyalty that lay in her large eyes, like strong passion, for her mistress, was turned to pride, and nearly scorn, when ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... period at which M. BOSC wrote, that he obtained his information from travellers to the further east, and has connected with the habitat universally ascribed to them from old KNOX'S work (Part 1. chap. vi.) a meagre description, more properly belonging to the land leech of Batavia or Japan. In all likelihood, therefore, there may be a H. Boscii, distinct from the H. Ceylanica. That which is found in Ceylon is round, a ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... addition. A certain wolf, in point of wit The prudent fisher's opposite, A dog once finding far astray, Prepared to take him as his prey. The dog his leanness pled; "Your lordship, sure," he said, "Cannot be very eager To eat a dog so meagre. To wait a little do not grudge: The wedding of my master's only daughter Will cause of fatted calves and fowls a slaughter; And then, as you yourself can judge, I cannot help becoming fatter." The wolf, believing, waived the matter, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... sergeant, who happened to belong to the same part of the country as himself. But the sergeant, after shrugging his meagre shoulders once, paid no further attention to the deep murmuring voice at his back. It was indeed strange that Gaspar Ruiz should desert. His people were in too humble a station to feel much the disadvantages of any form ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... author stands indebted for the composition of the Fortunes of Nigel, a novel, which may be perhaps one of those that are more amusing on a second perusal, than when read a first time for the sake of the story, the incidents of which are few and meagre. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... anglers. The implements were accordingly screwed together, and for half-an-hour we threw our flies with all our accustomed skill, and more than our usual patience; but we gathered little by the exercise of these qualities. A few grayling, with a trout or two of meagre dimensions, alone rewarded our care; and these, we judiciously concluded, were not of sufficient value to compensate for the loss of time that would be sustained in adding to their numbers. Besides we found that our strange attire and ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... gilded surrounding objects seemed inevitably to need to be when Miss Barrace—which was the lady's name—looked at them with convex Parisian eyes and through a glass with a remarkably long tortoise-shell handle. Why Miss Barrace, mature meagre erect and eminently gay, highly adorned, perfectly familiar, freely contradictions and reminding him of some last-century portrait of a clever head without powder—why Miss Barrace should have been in particular ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... hours and penury, and almost always of a bad disposition. The best description of him may be given in two familiar expressions—he was sharp and snappish. His cracked voice suited his sour face, meagre look, and magpie eyes of no particular color. A magpie eye, according to Napoleon, is a sure sign of dishonesty. "Look at So-and-so," he said to Las Cases at Saint Helena, alluding to a confidential servant ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... I trow, befit them well Who toil and moil when noon is at its height: Thy meagre love-tale, bumpkin, though shouldst tell Thy grandam as she wakes up ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... for both of them to a point whence he could sit and watch the track that led to Howrah and so help out the very meagre garrison. There, until the waning moon dipped down below the sky-line, they talked together—first about the task ahead of each of them; then about the sudden ghastliness of the rebellion, whose extent not one of them could really grasp as yet; last, and much ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... of the schools, little was to be expected at the beginning. With the meagre resources at their disposal, the directors had small choice in what was to be provided. In not a few cases the schools started out under conditions far from auspicious, and in some the circumstances in connection ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... me that Raphael was not gone, but had been ill for the last two months; that it was plain he would never leave the tower but for the churchyard; and the old man pointed with his meagre hand to the burying ground on the opposite hill. I asked if I could see Raphael. "Oh, yes," said the old man; "go up the steps, and draw the string of the latch of the great hall-door on the left. You will find him stretched on his bed, as gentle as an angel, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain—a domain which is miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. She has given him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining one-fifth—the naked bones stick up through it in most places. On the one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing else. So the valuable part ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was wound and screwed up tight, so as to hold no more than a little thin sandwich of fire. Everything was locked up; the coal-cellar, the candle-box, the salt-box, the meat-safe, were all padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle could have lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect of the place would have killed a chameleon. He would have known, at the first mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and must have given up the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... tranquil friend, to whom the novelist dedicated a novel. Neat, contented, active and self-respecting, she enjoyed a life-interest in two acres and a cottage, her live stock consisting of a goat, a pig and poultry, her invested capital government stock representing a hundred pounds. Meagre as may seem these resources, she was by no means to be pitied or inclined to pity herself, earning a few francs here and there by charing, selling her little crops, what eggs and chickens she could spare, above all ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... that no one had given him any explanation, himself telegraphed that the information had been based on a statement from General Grant, who had not informed them why the troops had not been sent. "General Grant," the President quaintly added, "is a copious worker and fighter, but a very meagre writer or telegrapher. No doubt he changed his purpose for some sufficient reason, but has forgotten to notify us of it." [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxiii. pt. ii. p. 561.] The reference to copious work as contrasted with the copia verborum ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... make enough of the coffin scene; your description is too meagre. You should have said, that the wind blew without in fierce gusts, the weathercocks screeched on the roofs, and caused you to dread that the ghost of the defunct was coming down the chimney; large flakes of snow were rushing through the half-open door; a ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... amazingly brilliant with stars. Below, the darkness was the denser for the depth of the hollow in the hills. Vaguely the one straight street of Borealis was indicated by the lamps, like a thin Milky Way in a meagre universe of lesser lights, dimly glowing and sparsely ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... very little food, they toiled on westward through miles and miles of swamp intersected by streams flowing southward to the Zambesi basin. One day Livingstone's ox, Sindbad, threw him, and he had to struggle wearily forward on foot. His strength was failing. His meagre fare varied by boiled zebra and dried elephant, frequent wettings and constant fever, were reducing him to a mere skeleton. At last on 26th March he arrived at the edge of the high land over which he had so long been travelling. "It is so steep," he tells us, "that I was obliged ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... oppression. Each of these great proprietors lived in the midst of his slaves like a petty prince, indolent and capricious. His house at Rome was like a palace; every morning the hall of honor (the atrium) was filled with clients, citizens who came for a meagre salary to salute the master[151] and escort him in the street. For fashion required that a rich man should never appear in public unless surrounded by a crowd; Horace ridicules a praetor who traversed the streets of Tibur with only five slaves in his following. Outside ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... look out from picturesque doorways. We can fancy the Cure de Tours emerging from the lovely Cloitre de la Psallette of St. Gatien or the still lovelier cloister of old St. Martin's; or we can see poor Felex de Vandenesse making his way across the park, Emile Zola, with his meagre lunch basket on his arm. We have not yet tasted the rillons and rillettes so prized by the school children of Tours, and so longed for by Felex when he beheld them in the baskets of his more fortunate companions. Lydia reminds us that Balzac was at some pains to ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... but when she laid, Wifelike, her hand in one of his, he veil'd His face with the other, and at once, as falls A creeper when the prop is broken, fell The woman shrieking at his feet, and swoon'd. Then her own people bore along the nave Her pendent hands, and narrow meagre face Seam'd with the shallow cares of fifty years: And here the Lord of all the landscape round Ev'n to its last horizon, and of all Who peer'd at him so keenly, follow'd out Tall and erect, but in the middle aisle Reel'd, as a footsore ox in crowded ways ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... slept little the night before, and kind Franz must have slept less; for he had given her his meagre bedroom and spent the night on the narrowest, hardest, most slippery of sofas in the sitting-room of the Bayswater lodging-house where Karen had found the Lippheims very cheaply, very grimly, not to say greasily, installed. It was no wonder that Franz's eyes had been ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... guide Jehoiakin, To me is meagre pleasure in The height of spires and domes, Of walls like ancient Rome's; Nor care I for the marts of trade, Or shelves of musty tomes, Nor yet for yonder colonnade Before your ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... mother, in tears, and on her lap, wrapped in an old faded shawl, was a dying infant. The woman tried to smile amid her tears as Abe came in, just the shadow of a smile, and then her poor face settled again to that look of anguish it had before, as if all her meagre joy were slowly dying with that little creature that lay feebly gasping on her lap. It was so like a woman to remember amid her grief, to give a sign of welcome ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... chocolates." She had mentioned all these things on the previous day, but she did not seem to have said anything memorable about them, and, so far as he could recollect, he had said nothing in reply but "Oh, yes" and "To be sure!" Could he sustain a lifetime of small-talk on these meagre responses? He saw in vision his most miserable tea-table—a timid husband and a mad wife glaring down their noses at plates. The picture leaped at him as from a cinematograph and appalled him. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... at its lowest and at every point of sand and shingle, meagre bands of gold puddlers were at work washing for gold in cradle rockers. To judge, however, from the shabbiness of their surroundings there was little fear that their gains would disturb the equilibrium of the ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... the streets of the new town, was formerly over-canopied with lofty and spreading trees, which this tempest leveled to the ground; it has now been planted with rows of young trees, which yield a meagre shade. In 1846 came another hurricane, still more terrific, destroying much of the beauty ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... The foregoing meagre notice is all that my space allows me to give concerning the life of this great master. I will conclude it with a quotation from Signor Morelli which I take from Sir Henry Layard's recent edition of Kugler's Handbook ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... the merits of any one to assert that, without frontiers-men like Kit Carson, the numerous scientific expeditions which have been sent out by the United States Government to explore the far West would have returned but sorry and meagre records for their employers. After reading some of the many printed accounts which parties of a more recent date have gathered from their experience while making their way overland to the Pacific, and also the sad fate of some brave men ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... gave up her book, and took her work-box instead. We were no longer moping and dull around the table. And bye and bye Henrietta, much alarmed, was sent to the piano, and her poor little music certainly sounded very meagre when ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... for Joyce's Country, and the graves of the mightiest men That ever had birth in Erin! Will their like e'er come again? Men of the thews of titans, of the strong, unwavering hand, Who wrested a meagre guerdon from the breast ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... alone away out here in a measly little joint like this when your old enemy is living like a king in the bosom of your family. Why, he's even robbed you of your daddy and mammy. You are dead, buried, and laughed at, Dick. I reckon you are not making much out of this thing?" Bradley swept the meagre stock and cheap fixtures with a ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... always replenished with beer, at the other a hearth with a wood fire constantly burning, and there was a table running the whole length of the room; at one end of this was laid a cloth, with a few trenchers on it, and horn cups, surrounding a barley loaf and a cheese, this meagre irregular supper being considered as a sufficient supplement to the funeral baked meats which had abounded at Beaulieu. John Birkenholt sat at the table with a trencher and horn before him, uneasily using his knife to crumble, rather ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and Knopfschrank came more rarely to the restaurant in Owl Street, while his meals on those occasions became more and more meagre. And then came a triumphal day, when he appeared early in the evening in a high state of elation, and ordered an elaborate meal that scarcely stopped short of being a banquet. The ordinary resources of the kitchen were supplemented by an imported dish of smoked goosebreast, ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... my brother I was talking with. But I have investigated thoroughly the whole subject of those blockade runners, and I believe the prospect of success is worth a giant effort for the recovery of some of that money from the sea. There must be untold quantities of it lying there, inviting even a meagre attempt to get it. The boats can be chartered cheaply; and I have learned that the necessary divers can be secured on an equitable division of the spoils. There are many details of the organization of the enterprise which ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... little meagre woman, who did not speak very good English, and who appeared to me to employ the major part of her time in bawling out from the top of the stairs to the servants below. I never saw her either read a book or occupy ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... willing to bear them. No, her point of view will be the opposite of this. "How much," she will ask, "can I do for my mother? Is there nothing in which I can relieve her from her toils? The utmost I can render her is but a meagre compensation for her countless sacrifices for ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... the Guides, under Lumsden, were hastening down from Lahore to give Edwardes that invaluable support which, however meagre in numbers, stout hearts, whose loyalty is above suspicion, afford to a harassed commander. Joyfully were they welcomed, as one sweltering day in June the Guides joined the little force which was besieging an army of equal or perhaps greater ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... in the flesh on earth, bear up His train, and hover near our hearts and join their whispers to the voice and inspiration of Him who loved us, and who will guide us with counsel here, and after that receive us into glory, where we shall meet those beloved ones—not as our forefathers dreamed, as meagre shadows flitting through dreary and formless chaos—but as we knew them once—the body of the flesh alone put off, but the real body, the spiritual body to which flesh and blood was but a husk and shell, living and loving more fully, more utterly, than even before, because it is in Christ ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... Davitt was a good man, zealous in his work, unpretentious, and kindly. More than once Eliphalet went to his home to tea, and was pressed to talk about himself and his home life. The minister and his wife ware invariably astonished, after their guest was gone, at the meagre result ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... undertaken during the reign of Henry VIII.; but the accounts which remain of them are rare and meagre. Some of them resulted in terrible disasters of shipwreck and death. Late in the century a courageous and determined navigator, Martin Frobisher, made three voyages to America, but without establishing ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... in the bay just mentioned, situated westward of the mouth of the Rio Capaya. We found there neither village nor farm, but merely two or three huts, inhabited by Mestizo fishermen. Their livid hue, and the meagre condition of their children, sufficed to remind us that this spot is one of the most unhealthy of the whole coast. The sea has so little depth along these shores, that even with the smallest barks it is impossible to reach the shore without wading through the water. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... sufficient remuneration to procure the coarsest food and the scantiest clothing, while it left him without any means whatever to assist his parents in their great distress, so that they had to continue recipients of meagre parish relief. Throughout, Clare had an innate consciousness of being born to a freer and loftier existence, and thus deeply felt the burthen of being condemned to the fiercest struggle with poverty and misery. The bitter feeling engendered by this thought ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his grandnephew, the last surviving human being, I suppose, of all those he had seen in the course ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... and smiled, while the men pulled again, and we went merrily along, getting a shot now and then, but the result for the game-bag was very meagre indeed, at which I was not surprised on my own account, but I fully expected Mr Brooke to ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... and abounding in others that were the portion only of the supernaturally clever. One day his friend made a great stride: it cleared up the question to perceive that Morgan was supernaturally clever and that, though the formula was temporarily meagre, this would be the only assumption on which one could successfully deal with him. He had the general quality of a child for whom life had not been simplified by school, a kind of homebred sensibility which might have been as bad for himself but was charming for others, and a whole ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... coachmen were put at his disposal. He was lodged in the same apartments in which Saxe had lived, when, at the height of power and glory, he visited Prussia. Frederic, indeed, stooped for a time even to use the language of adulation. He pressed to his lips the meagre hand of the little grinning skeleton, whom he regarded as the dispenser of immortal renown. He would add, he said, to the titles which he owed to his ancestors and his sword, another title, derived from his last and proudest acquisition. His style should run thus: Frederic, King of Prussia, Margrave ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... list as above set down, will be found every positively known fact of Shakespeare's life, lean and meagre as the invoice is. Beyond these details we know not a thing about him. All the rest of his vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures—an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... we arrived at our hotel in time to make up for our meagre lunch and rectify the danger of neglecting the inner man, as travellers are sometimes prone to do when so deeply interested in the objects around them. Later, in the cool of the evening, we had a deliciously pleasant walk through the town towards the beautiful gardens of Hesperides, ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... its disposal, from his simple childish point of view, seemed too clear for serious discussion. Once or twice he stole a look at his savings bank book, which his mother kept among her own papers, but no new entry appeared on its meagre credit side. By and by he almost lost sight of the whole incident, engrossed as he was with the experiences of the current hour, but the memory of it recurred fitfully, and in moments of dissatisfaction it tended to assume the shape of a grievance, if not a charge, against ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... were not a law of excess, the economy of life would have meagre results. I think it is Turgeniev who speaks somewhere of her as a gigantic Titan, working in gloomy silence, with the same savage intentness upon a subtler twist of a flea's joints as upon the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Edward Claire, smiling. "O no, not enough, by any means. Five hundred dollars a year is but a meagre sum. What does it procure for us? Only these two rooms and the commonest necessaries of life. We cannot even afford the constant service of ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... But when he had once established his position and gained the ear of the House, he gave a free rein to his prodigious powers of satire, which he used to the full in his attacks on Peel. In point of fact, vituperation and sarcasm were his chief weapons of offence. He spoke of Mr. Roebuck as a "meagre-minded rebel," and called Campbell, who was afterwards Lord Chancellor, "a shrewd, coarse, manoeuvring Pict," a "base-born Scotchman," and a "booing, fawning, jobbing progeny of haggis and cockaleekie." When he ceased ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... perches on the shoulders of the sentry in the sentry-box: she whispers the porter sleeping in his arm-chair: she glides up the staircase, and lies down between the king and queen in their bed-royal: this very night I daresay she will perch upon poor old Goody Twoshoes' meagre bolster, and whisper, "Will the gentleman and those ladies ask me again! No, no; they will forget poor old Twoshoes." Goody! For shame of yourself! Do not be cynical. Do not mistrust your fellow-creatures. What? Has the Christmas ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... reason that he did not obtain the liberal education that he should have had; besides that on account of weakness and delicate health, his mother would not let him exert himself, and his teachers forebore to urge him. He was meagre and sickly from the first, and hence had the nickname of Batalus, given him, it is said, by the boys, in derision of his appearance; Batalus being a certain enervated flute-player, in ridicule of whom Antiphanes ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... with a sum of money scraped together by his sister and brother-in-law, and goes to the capital, accompanied by Madame de Bargeton. His liaison there with the lady is but of short duration. In compensation, however, he becomes acquainted with a new literary world, into which he enters with his meagre stock of poems, plus a novel; and, after a number of adventures, turns journalist, a metamorphosis that supplies the author with an opportunity to rage furiously against all those of that ilk. The rest of the first ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... was to be expected in the interest of personal freedom, and it came very naturally from Greek influences. The Roman could not contemplate the exuberant development of Greek thought, art, literature, society, without bitterly feeling how confined was his own range, how meagre and empty his own life. Hence, very early, Roman society began to be Hellenized, but especially after the unification of Italy. To quote Mommsen once more: "The Greek civilization was grandly human and cosmopolitan; and Rome not only ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Liddell again roused herself, and managed to furnish very scantily the little home where Katherine sat thinking. But the addition to their income was but meagre compared to the expenses which followed in the train of Mrs Frederic Liddell and ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... treatise by a savant of York, Pa., Dr. R. McCormick Sturgeon. There may be others, but I have been quite unable to find them. Kissing, for all one hears of it, has not attracted the scientists and literati; one compares its meagre literature with the endless books upon the other phenomena of love, especially divorce and obstetrics. Even Dr. Sturgeon, pioneering bravely, is unable to get beyond a sentimental and trivial view of the thing he vivisects, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... are treacherous; one step too far plunged her into twenty feet of water, and the next moment she was spinning round and round in the current. She had learned to swim a few strokes in the creek on her father's farm, and her meagre skill now stood her in good stead, for she was able to keep afloat until the current threw her against a gravel bar that jutted into the river. She dragged herself ashore, very wet, and of a sudden, very frightened, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... Westcott, from the present town of Milford, erected a store nearly opposite the residence of D.M. Miller. These stores—Dinninny's, mentioned in the preceding chapter, Dietz's and Westcott's—were all of the most primitive order, and, especially the first named, contained but a meagre stock of goods, the stock generally consisting of a barrel of New England rum of the most violent nature, several old bull ploughs, a little crockery ware, a few cooking utensils, and a small amount of dry goods. There was but little money and the merchant's trade was carried ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... him at all. He had no recollection of him, and the picture that he had painted was constructed out of monthly rather uninteresting letters concerned, for the most part, with the care and maintenance of New Zealand sheep, and such meagre details as his Aunt Clare and Uncle Garrett had bestowed on him from time to time. From the latter he gathered that his father had been, in his youth, in some vague way, unsatisfactory, and had departed to Australia to seek his fortune, with a clear understanding ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... tell me to my face that you do not love me! Why have you sworn so often that you did?" He hadn't sworn it often. He had never sworn it at all since she had rejected him. He had been induced to admit a passion in the most meagre terms. "Do you own yourself ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... was not to be satisfied with the meagre knowledge furnished in the miserable schools he was able to attend at long intervals. His step-mother says: "He read diligently. He read everything he could lay his hands on, and when he came across a passage that struck him he would ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... vast store, And may I be so favoured as to make Of joy's too scanty sum a little more Let me not hurt, by any selfish deed Or thoughtless word, the heart of foe or friend; Nor would I pass, unseeing, worthy need, Or sin by silence when I should defend. However meagre be my worldly wealth, Let me give something that shall aid my. kind - A word of courage, or a thought of health, Dropped as I pass for troubled hearts to find. Let me to-night look back across the span 'Twixt dawn and dark, and to my conscience say - Because ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... with threads of sinew. Nam-Bok's eyes roved over the scene, but there was not the charm about it that his recollection had warranted him to expect. During the years of his wandering he had looked forward to just this scene, and now that it had come he was disappointed. It was a bare and meagre life, he deemed, and not to be compared to the one to which he had become used. Still, he would open their eyes a bit, and his own eyes sparkled ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... gorgeousness and glare and frivolity of the dinner. He was the last man to assert that good art can only associate itself with homely origins, that prosperity is a deadly foe to its growth. Nevertheless, he was fully conscious that Arlt in his meagre surroundings was much nearer to his own ideals than were the immaculate guests of the evening. Thayer loved luxury; but it must not be accompanied ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me, after slumbering so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming out now with all my years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a rush, devoid of invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly wanting in learning and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or annotations at the end, after the fashion of other books I see, which, though all fables and profanity, are so full of maxims from Aristotle, and Plato, and the whole herd of philosophers, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the mind of his unfortunate neighbour, while he carried out his purpose. In due time, under the assignment which had been made, Woodbine Lodge and a large part of the elegant and costly furniture contained in the mansion, were sold, and the ownership passed into other hands. With a meagre remnant of their household goods, the family retired to a humbler house. Some pitied, and stood at a distance; some felt a selfish pleasure in their fall; and some, who had courted them in their days of prosperity, ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... stain'd her cheeks, and from her mouth there came 150 Blue steaming poisons, and a length of flame. From every blast of her contagious breath Famine and drought proceed, and plagues and death. A robe obscene was o'er her shoulders thrown, A dress by Fates and Furies worn alone. She toss'd her meagre arms; her better hand In waving circles whirl'd a funeral brand: A serpent from her left was seen to rear His flaming crest, and lash the yielding air. But when the Fury took her stand on high, 160 Where vast Cithaeron's top ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... the playwright. Each night he left his boarding-place, drawn by an impulse he could not resist, to walk slowly to and fro opposite the theatre entrance, calculating with agonized eye the meagre numbers of those who entered. At times he took his stand near the door in a shadowy nook (with coat-collar rolled high about his ears), in order to observe the passing stream, hoping, exulting, and suffering alternately as groups from the crowd paused for a moment ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... school lands which are now leased for terms of years, and covered with buildings, were occupied as suburban gardens at trifling rents. Eventually the Birmingham Free School will enjoy an income equal to the wants of a university as well as a school. Meagre accounts of the income and expenditure of this noble foundation are published annually, under the regulations of an Act of Parliament passed in 1828; but no report of the number of scholars, or the sort of education communicated, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... for we feared word would be passed and the Bolos would try to prevent us from accomplishing our purpose. The inhabitants were given three hours to vacate. It was a pitiful sight to see them turned out of the dwellings where most of them had spent their whole simple, not unhappy lives, their meagre possessions scattered ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... is a man who could be esteemed, respected, and popular anywhere, no matter whether he was among Christians or cannibals." Then, in the same letter, comes the great incident. "A letter arrived here yesterday, giving a meagre account of the arrival, on the Island of Hawaii, of nineteen poor, starving wretches, who had been buffeting a stormy sea, in an open boat, for forty-three days. Their ship, the Hornet, from New York, with a quantity of kerosene on board had ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... heads some little notion of geography, wishing to make certain that they would sooner or later arrive in Rye without stumbling in on Belfast while on the way. My own knowledge of the face of the country was but meagre, so the landlord brought in a rough map of the south of England, and I cautioned the lads to get across London Bridge and make for the town of Maidstone, from where they could go due south, and if they happened on the coast they were to inquire for Rye and stay there until further ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... discounting ordinary intelligence to say that I sought with unwearying assiduity to figure my way into the stern father's good-will; that never did dullard apply himself to mathematics more patiently than I; that never did faithfulness achieve such meagre reward. Then I engaged a private tutor. His instructions met ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... but I took a greater number in consequence. The pasturage was still meagre and scarcely any water remained on the face of the earth. It was unusually low in the holes last year, but this season very few indeed contained any. The equinox however was at hand, and I could not suppose that it was never to rain again, however hopeless the aspect of the country appeared ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... the Devil Legion raves, And meagre Critics mutter in their caves: (Such Critics of necessity consume All Wit, as Hangmen ravish'd Maids at Rome.) Names he a Scribler? all the world's in arms, Augusta, Granta, Rhedecyna swarms: The guilty reader fancies ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... six o'clock—a fine morning—eight miles to Killin—the river Dochart always on our left. The face of the country not very interesting, though not unpleasing, reminding us of some of the vales of the north of England, though meagre, nipped-up, or shrivelled compared with them. There were rocks, and rocky knolls, as about Grasmere and Wytheburn, and copses, but of a starveling growth; the cultivated ground poor. Within a mile or two of Killin the land was better cultivated, and, looking down the vale, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... two-and three-fold appreciation, during and especially since the war, in the cost both of the cotton stuffs which the working man needs even for his scanty apparel and of the foodstuffs which constitute his meagre fare, discontent grew steadily more acute, and wages, though more than once enhanced, did not always keep pace with that appreciation. If in circumstances, often of undoubted hardship, labour had been sufficiently equipped to state its own case, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... crutch in his examination of the model, and which as it were dictates to the eye what it must see. So the ballet girl was Degas' escapement from the thraldom of common knowledge. The ballet girl was virgin soil. In her meagre thwarted forms application could freely be made of the supple incisive drawing which bends to and flows with the character—that drawing of which Ingres was the supreme patron, and of which Degas ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... is seldom seen in the streets by day: his most profitable season is the night. And what meagre pickings are his at the best! what despicable bits of paper, of twine, of coal-refuse, of rejected food, bones, potato-skins, he gathers carefully in his hoard! A bit of paper no larger than a postage-stamp he saves. A crust of bread no bigger than a walnut is a prize, for rare are the households ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... to give to Christ; yet it is a comfort to know that our friendship really is precious to him, and adds to his joy, poor and meagre though its best may be—but he has infinite blessings to give to us. "I call you friends." No other gift he gives to us can equal in value the love and friendship of his heart. When Cyrus gave Artabazus, one of his courtiers, a gold cup, he gave Chrysanthus, ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... the child led about upon the wide and withered common of knowledge, with the same sort of meagre fodder for all; we see it trained in mechanical memorizing, in barren knowledge concerning things and forms that are dead and gone; in ignorance concerning the life that is, in contempt for it, and in the consciousness of its privileged position, by dint of its ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... keeping in close touch with Seward, the relations between England and America at London were exceedingly meagre. All that the American Minister Dallas knew of Russell's intentions is summed up in his despatches to Seward of March 22 and April 9, 1861[102]. On the former date, he gave an account of an interview with Russell in which the latter simply refused to pledge himself against a recognition ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... fellow's humble past were spread before him in all their pathetic squalor. He saw, as though a living thing, the barren, inarticulate childhood. He heard, under compulsion, the tale of youth's indefinable longings, with the meagre story of a love which lacked not its own shabby tragedy. The delicacy of a gentleman, who had intruded where he had no right, had caused him to draw back with an apology; but the orderly had insisted on ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... came to examine the contents of the baskets, she was somewhat disappointed at the mess of pottage for which she had half bartered herself. Though every article the commissary had enumerated was to be found, it was in meagre quantities, and the girl was shrewd-witted enough to divine the giver's intention,—that she should be quickly forced again to appeal to him. Her mother's requirements and her own hunger, however, prevented dwelling on ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... places which seemed best fit for them, and which the men turned over to them because the work appeared to be of a character suitable to the feminine sex. But the modern woman has had enough of the meagre salary which is to be obtained by means of needle-work, and she has invaded the shop, the office, the desks of the banks and post office. In industry also she has taken her place by the side of the working-man, who has made room for her first with ironical grace, then with ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... dripping coat and crossed the room to hang it on a chair-back. The stranger drover followed the meagre, shirt-clad figure with shifty eyes; then he buried his face in ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... bull in a crock'ry sto'." In his duties of waiting on the troopers and clearing the table he had opportunities of purloining a goodly portion of the viands, for he remembered that he also had assumed the role of host with a very meagre larder to ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... immediately put to sea on July l0th. The new Bishop, with his faithful companion Ladrada and forty-five Dominican friars, embarked on the San Salvador. On that same date he entered into possession of his meagre episcopal revenues, for an ordinance that had been passed to oblige the bishops of American dioceses to stay in them, established that their incomes should begin from the date of their ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... example as much as possible; beyond this, nature must look after things. His view had much real wisdom. She was a quick and voracious reader, bad at remembering what she read; and though she had soon devoured all the books in Winton's meagre library, including Byron, Whyte-Melville, and Humboldt's "Cosmos," they had not left too much on her mind. The attempts of her little governess to impart religion were somewhat arid of result, and the interest of the vicar, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... meagre matron of forty-five, or thereabouts. Her dark scant hair was smooth, and divided down the middle. Acerbity spoke in every line of her face, which was of a dusky yellow, where it did not rather verge on the faint hues of a violet ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... been out into the winter fields and gathered the small white everlasting flowers that were still waving there, and twined them in the curls of the baby's hair, and strewed them upon the meagre gray sheet ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... they called me, my master showed me the best countenance that might be, and it was great joy to me to eat off clean platters once again, on white linen strewn with spring flowers. As the time was Lent, we had fare that they called meagre: fish from the Vienne water, below the town, and eggs cooked in divers fashions, all to the point of excellence, for the wine and fare of Chinon are famous in France. As my duty was, I waited on my master and on the maid Elliot, who was ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... hotel, nothing was known of the young man, only that he had taken a room, registered, slept one night, and gone, leaving all his things. Mr. Steadman was conducted to Number 17, and shown the meagre details of the young man's brief stay. His toilet articles, of sterling silver with his monogram, lay on the turkish towel, which at once concealed and protected the elm top of the bureau; his two bags, open and partly unpacked, ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... was bred Affliction's meagre child, Yet gratefully resigned, Loud hymning praises, smiled, And like a tower He stood unmoved, Supported by The ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... the grey sand, making a pillow of the low bushes. But they prefer to stand; and you may see them, reclining against a third pole stuck in the ground at the rear, contentedly knitting stockings, keeping the while one eye upon the flock of sheep anxiously nibbling at the meagre grass. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... service daily, and I had been appalled, rather than astonished, by what I saw and heard: the unintelligible service—the irreverent gabble of the choristers and readers—the scanty congregation—the meagre portion of the vast building which seemed to be turned to any use: but never more than that evening, did I feel the desolateness, the doleful inutility, of that vast desert nave, with its aisles and transepts—built for some purpose or other now extinct. The whole place seemed to crush and ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... though half the money spent in making the road an imperial plaything would have built a good, solid extension to that most important seaport; he sees that Nicholas dared not untie police regulations, and that commerce is wretchedly meagre. Contrary to what would obtain under a free system, this great public work found the country wretched and left it wretched. The traveller flies by no ranges of trim palings and tidy cottages; he sees the same dingy groups of huts here as elsewhere, the same cultivation looking for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... study of Arabic or Persian than there were then for the study of German." But it was not yet even 1813 in Hartford and its neighborhood, and in the middle of the eighteenth century the literary resources were meagre in the extreme. Learning was not concentrated in the towns, but the access to books there was easier. The country minister, who was the scholar, literary man, and school-master, fell back largely ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... discovering, and only one—namely, that her father had, many years before, made some attempt to establish his claims to the estates, but that he had failed for want either of sufficient proof, or of means to carry on the proces. Of even this circumstance only a meagre law-record remained, and she could succeed in learning no more. Since then, a claim has been advanced by a remote branch of the Sainte Aulaire family, and the cause is, even now, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... old patrician family, able, honest, but stubborn, a meagre, swarthy man, whom I never saw smile. The misfortune befell him that his only daughter was carried off by a friend of the family. He pursued his son-in-law with the most vehement prosecution: and because the tribunals, with their formality, were neither ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... only give you the most meagre information," said Mr. Farrington. He was white and shaky, a natural state for a law-abiding man who had witnessed wilful murder. "I heard voices and went down to the door, thinking I would find a policeman—then I heard two shots almost simultaneously, and opened the door and found ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... position or his place. If he sat in his great chair, padded with down to ease his weakness and the aching of his bones, his fingers were constantly plucking at his laces, or playing with the tags which fastened the fur-lined scarlet cloak he wore for a double purpose, to comfort the coldness of his meagre body, and that the death-like pallor of his face might be touched by its gay brightness to a reflected, fictitious glow of health. But to remain seated for any length of time jarred with his mood. ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... With his meagre frame incased in new black woollens, and wearing, as an incongruous added touch, the most brilliant of neckties, a necktie of the shade of a pomegranate blossom, he presently issued from Felsburg Brothers' and entered M. Biederman's shoe store, two doors below. Here Mr. Biederman fitted him with ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... under the old contract, and is now probably not above $7,500 per round trip.[E] These estimates are made exclusive of insurance, which is 9-1/2 per cent.; repairs, 10 per cent.; and depreciation, at least five per cent. Here, again, the Government gives but a meagre part of the large sum necessary to keep those packets running. Now, if naval vessels were carrying the same mails, and were deprived of the income which they receive for freight and passengers, it would evidently cost the Government six to eight times as much to ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... been of incalculable value. For that such men were well qualified to give an exact account of facts is beyond doubt. But the exclusive importance attached to active life made them indifferent to such memorials, and they were content with the barren and meagre notices of the pontifical annals and the yearly registers of magistrates in the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... stood sobbing and shivering in her airy muslin dress, her arms and neck bare, and her feet shod with the thinnest of white shoes. 'They have stolen my bright franc,' she sobbed. The woman gave her an angry shake, and it went to Estelle's heart to see how the thin, meagre little body shrank together after it. A tiny boy in a bright yellow and red costume, with yellow cap and bells, watched the scene; he had a puckered little face, down which the tears were washing off the paint. His little soul was full of ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... last, almost at the top of the mountain, they saw before them two dark spots in a little hollow, and when they reached it, there was the wolf, dead in a mass of frozen blood and trampled snow. It was a huge, gaunt, gray, meagre carcass, with the foam frozen about its jaws, and stabbed in many places, which showed the fight had been a close one. All the snow was beaten about, as if with many feet, which showed still more plainly what a tussle it had been. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... There is, of course, a bed or cot: it is about {215} half knee-high, and the heavy twine or light rope knitted together after the fashion of a very coarse fish-net is the only mattress. The coarse grain which serves for food is stored in jars; the meagre supply of clothing hangs in one corner of the room; there are no chairs, knives or forks. The stove or fireplace is a sort of small clay box for the fire, with an opening on top for the kettle or oven. In one corner of the room is the fuel: a few ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... also named John, was destined for the ministry, and had been three years at Oxford before coming to this country. On arriving here, thinking his preparatory work too meagre for his profession, he devoted himself to husbandry. He settled in Hull, in 1633. His son Samuel, the father of Thomas, was born in 1649, and his son chronicles of him, "That he was healthy and strong in body, vigorous and ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... Americanism," observed his wife, surveying her cards with masked displeasure and making it spades. "Louis, I never held such hands in all my life," she said, displaying the meagre dummy. ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... our first white man in sixteen days, an intelligent man of meagre education, with a great bent for versifying. A courteous approval of one set of verse brought upon us the accumulated output of years in the wilderness without much opportunity of audience, as one supposes, and most of the afternoon and evening was thus spent. Amidst the overwrought ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... like her father, generous to the point of absurdity with her meagre possessions. Mary admired a Spanish fan—a Mexican treasure that had come down from one of the grand ladies of the Court of the Emperor Maximilian. Polly's delight flamed like wild-fire. Mary found herself ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... laid, We shall go down into thy book, and tell The leaves, once blank, to build again for us Old summer dead and ruined, and the time Of later autumn with the corn in stook. So shalt thou stint the meagre winter thus Of his projected triumph, and the rime Shall melt before ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mortem consciousness as wisdom is distinct from mere animal intelligence. On the whole, therefore, there seems to be little real worth in Spiritism, even accepting it at its own valuation. The nourishment it yields the soul is too meagre; and—save on that one bare point of life beyond the grave, which might just as easily prove an infinite curse as an infinite blessing—it affords no trustworthy ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... is not Vintage, Drunk and weary wavers home— 'Tis a spectre, meagre, gloomy, As a nightmare ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... fifty years old, when he bequeathed to the Church a mass of manuscript that tourists will never know enough to estimate except by weight. His complete works, repeatedly printed, fill between twenty and thirty quarto volumes. For so famous a doctor, this is almost meagre. Unfortunately his greatest work, the "Summa Theologiae," is unfinished—like ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Louise was delighted with her solution of the problem. It was in keeping with her talent for deducing the truth from meagre facts by logically putting them together and considering them as a whole. It was seldom she erred in these deductions. But Alora seemed unimpressed and noting her glum look Mary Louise said again: "Doesn't ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... economics of production. Engineers, not under the influence of business, are qualified to open up the creative aspects of production to the workers and to convince them through their own experience that that there are adventurous possibilities in industry outside the meagre offerings of payday. Mr. Robert Wolf is one of the engineers who is ready for the venture. He told the members of the Taylor Society that "scientific managers have not been scientific enough in dealing with this very important ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... he was poor in spite of his regular salary and the occasional "rewards" he received for the performances of his Boys at Court; and doubtless he often cast about in his mind for some way in which to increase his meagre income. ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... indifferent observer, the Miss Mees were exactly alike, being meagre, dilapidated, white-haired old ladies, with the same beaked noses and receding chins; both wore rusty black frocks, each of which was decorated with a white cameo brooch; both walked with the same propitiatory shuffle. They were like a couple of elderly, moulting, decorous hens who, in spite of ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... ceased every sound Of war triumphant, and of love's sweet song, And all was silent—Creeping slow along, With eager eyes, that wandered round and round, Wild, haggard mien, and meagre, wasted frame, Bow'd to the earth, pale, starving Av'rice came: Clutching with palsied hands his golden god, And tottering in the path the others trod. These, one by one, Came and were gone: And after them followed the ceaseless stream Of worshippers, who, with mad shout ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... manhood. Morality is always affected by one's religious views. The moral binds us to our fellowmen, and the religious to our God; and a man may in many respects be better than his fellowman but he can never be better than his God. If a man has low and meagre ideas of God his ideas of man will be low and meagre whatever may be his conceptions of the law, government, and the character of his Creator will be his ideas of duty to wife, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... cloak which, somewhat tattered, permitted a soiled and faded under-dress to make itself perceptible, giving to the old man the appearance of indigence and slovenliness. Nothing, not even the face, or the thin and meagre hands he extended to his servants, was neat and cleanly; nothing about him shone but his eyes, those gray, piercing eyes with their fiery side-glances and their now kind and now sly and subtle expression. This ragged and untidy old man might have been taken for a beggar, had not his dirty ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... organization becomes eventually modified, and the modification is transmitted until a race is formed which is quite distinct from those descendants of the common parent stock which have been placed in favourable circumstances.[277] In a dry spring the meagre and stunted herbage seeds early. When, on the other hand, the spring is warm but with occasional days of rain, there is an excellent hay-crop. If, however, any cause perpetuates unfavourable circumstances, ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... see the movement of De Soto's reflective and cultivated mind. The expedition moved slowly along, awaiting the return of the courier. He soon came back with a very indefinite response, and with a present of two curiously carved stone cups, and some perfumery. The guarded reply and the meagre present excited some alarm in the Spanish camp. It was very evident that the expedition was not to anticipate a very cordial reception at the Peruvian court. Pizarro was much alarmed. He was quite confident that the Inca was trying to lure them on to their ruin. Having called a council ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... further delayed by the meagre native encouragement to effort of the better sort. The populace has been largely indifferent,—the inertia of all large bodies would explain that. A national, a constructive, and collaborative criticism ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... look at as we die! Mistaken, selfish, meagre, and unmeet; So graven on the hearts that cruelly We have deprived of many an hour sweet: O ill-wrought life we look at ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... country lanes, going out on to the balcony in the early morning to breathe the scent of honeysuckle, and sweetbriar, and lemon thyme, and all the dear, old-world treasures to be found in the gardens of well-conducted farmhouses. She had a craving for flowers in these hot summer days; not the meagre sixpennyworth which adorned the saffron parlour, but a wealth of blossom, bought without consideration of cost. And one day, with the unexpectedness of a fairy gift, her wish ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... undoubtedly is—which I must not omit mentioning. It relates to the representation of our Saviour. Whether as a painting, or as a piece of sculpture, this sacred figure is generally made most repulsive—even, in the cathedral. It is meagre in form, wretched in physiognomical expression, and marked by disgusting appearances of blood about the forehead and throat. In the church of St. Mary, supposed to be the oldest in Vienna, as you enter the south door, to the left, there is a whole length standing ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... level and sandy fields; and the monotony of the prospect only broken by scattered clumps of dwarf-pine and shrub-oak; a few stunted apple-trees, the remains of an orchard which the barren soil had refused to nourish; some half ruinous out-houses, and a meagre kitchen garden enclosed with a common rough ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... paintings of a Giotto and a Raphael, the sculpture of a Michael Angelo, the music of a Palestrina, and our politician might then ask himself which he thought had been the more beneficial as a social force. There still remain as our meagre heritage from these times of "faith," on the one hand the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed, on the other certain festivals and celebrations in the cathedral of a small Bavarian town, little known, scarcely noticed, but still in the full glory of ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... meditated on this meagre schedule of her rival's merits, the probability that even such a man as Constantine might sacrifice himself to flattery and to splendor stung her to ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... meaningless type, between attenuated saints or angels, and doll-like child-Christs in the one invariable attitude holding up two fingers of a baby hand to bless the spectator and worshippers, were for ever repeated. In a similar manner the instances of rude or meagre contemporary paintings with which the early Christians adorned their places of worship and the sepulchres of their dead in the basilicas and catacombs of Rome, are very curious and interesting for their antiquity and their associations, and as illustrations ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... more, the jailer went away, and Bumpus, after heaving two or three very deep sighs, attempted to partake of his meagre breakfast. The effort was a vain one. The bite stuck in his throat, so he washed it down with a gulp of water, and, for the first time in his life, made up his mind ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... write a full historical memoir of him within the limited space of this volume is impossible. All that can be attempted is to present a sketch of the man with a few of his more prominent surroundings against a very meagre and insufficient background of the history of the times. So it may be permissible to begin with a general outline of his figure, to be filled in, shaded, and colored as we proceed. At best our task is much more difficult of satisfactory achievement (p. 013) than an ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... continued in full force for three days and three nights—for Willy was roused up five or six times every night to administer the doses of mulled claret which Mr Bullock had prescribed for himself, who seemed, thin and meagre as he was, to be somewhat like a bamboo in his structure (i.e. hollow from top to bottom), as if to enable him to carry the quantity of fluid that he poured down his throat during the twenty-four hours. As for intoxicating him, that appeared to be impossible: ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... she was too poor, and her orders were too meagre, so that she had not the courage to insist on her rights just then. They waited ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... set himself resolutely to the work of self-education. His knowledge of the English language was meagre in the extreme; and he succeeded at last only by making for himself a kind of grammar by reading and observation. He then tried French, but his native indolence prevailed, and he gave it up in despair. He read with avidity whatever books came in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... colony can be pointed out further to the north, with the exception perhaps of the insignificant settlement at Black Corcyra (Curzola, about 174?). No adequate explanation has yet been given why the Greek colonization developed itself in this direction to so meagre an extent. Nature herself appeared to direct the Hellenes thither, and in fact from the earliest times there existed a regular traffic to that region from Corinth and still more from the settlement at Corcyra (Corfu) founded not long ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... bound by such a vow, And women were as phantoms. O, my brother, Why wilt thou shame me to confess to thee How far I faltered from my quest and vow? For after I had lain so many nights A bedmate of the snail and eft and snake, In grass and burdock, I was changed to wan And meagre, and the vision had not come; And then I chanced upon a goodly town With one great dwelling in the middle of it; Thither I made, and there was I disarmed By maidens each as fair as any flower: But when they led me into hall, behold, The Princess of that castle was the one, Brother, and that ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... drawn by four or six oxen, hauling the cut cane. But the villages they passed, single streets of unrelieved squalor in a dusty waste, they decided were immeasurably depressing. No one who could avoid it walked; lank men in broad straw hats and coat-like shirts rode meagre horses with the sheaths of long formidable blades slapping their miserable hides. Groups of fantastically saddled horses drooped their heads tied in the vicinity of a hands-breadth of shade by general stores. "I could ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... enemy is living like a king in the bosom of your family. Why, he's even robbed you of your daddy and mammy. You are dead, buried, and laughed at, Dick. I reckon you are not making much out of this thing?" Bradley swept the meagre stock and cheap fixtures with ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... supposes he hasn't any business using up a month's meagre savings and three small checks for poems that he has hoarded since April in going out to St. Louis Friday. Mr. Alley wasn't too pleased with letting him take Saturday and half Monday off to do it, too. But ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... do so. The porter led me through a great farmyard, then through a doorway into a room, in the centre of which was a large table, and in the corners were four very small and low wooden bedsteads with meagre mattresses, a couple of sheets, and ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... free. Two urns by Jove's high throne have ever stood, The source of evil one, and one of good; From thence the cup of mortal man he fills, Blessings to these, to those distributes ill; To most he mingles both: the wretch decreed To taste the bad unmix'd, is cursed indeed; Pursued by wrongs, by meagre famine driven, He wanders, outcast both of earth and heaven. The happiest taste not happiness sincere; But find the cordial draught is dash'd with care. Who more than Peleus shone in wealth and power What stars concurring bless'd his natal hour! A realm, a goddess, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... maiden, in high glee; and at evening she went home with her goat, and found an earthen dish which her sisters had left her filled with their leavings. She did not touch it; and the next morning she went off again without taking the meagre breakfast which was left out for her. The first and second time she did this the sisters thought nothing of it; but when she did the same the third morning their attention was roused, and they said, ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... Constance, in ignorance of everything except the absolute truth, sat in the meagre room of the little stone hotel. She wondered if there would ever be any change in her manner of life, if there would ever be anything but this continuous following of her father from one commercial battle into another. She wondered why Dan Anderson did not come. Surely he was here. Surely his ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... Mayer. His father, or uncle, was Minister of Agriculture, or Commerce, or something, in his native land; and he himself was attached in some nominal capacity to the Brazilian Legation, in the Rue de Teheran, whence, on state occasions, he enjoyed the privilege of enveloping his meagre little person in a very gorgeous diplomatic uniform. He was beardless, with vague features, timid, light-blue eyes, and a bluish, anaemic skin. In manner he was nervous, tremulous, deprecatory—perpetually bowing, wriggling, stepping back to let you pass, waving ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... moreen curtains of his ancient bed, and thrust his head into a beam of sunshine that caused him to wink and withdraw it again. This transitory glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a flannel night-cap, fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair, and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage, which was crossed and criss-crossed with a record of his long life in wrinkles, faithfully written, no doubt, but with such cramped chirography of Father Time that the purport was illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch to get out of bed any ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are alluding to the labours of missionaries in foreign lands?" I observed. "But I have heard it said, that in spite of all the money expended, their preaching produces but meagre results. In India, for instance, the Company will not admit them. In Africa, the climate destroys them. The fanatical Turks and other Mohammedan nations will not listen to their message; and it would be but time lost and energies wasted were they to attempt to preach to the cannibals of New ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... sides, at the bottom of which rushed a foaming torrent: the formation of the hills was slate with a superstratum of limestone. On emerging from the Akrob[a]d Pass, where there was not a breath to disturb the meagre foliage, we were suddenly surprized by a bleak piercing wind, which we were told invariably blew across the table land on which the fort is built. Although in the height of summer, the wind was intensely cold, ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... a sleek well-conditioned pastor, such as is often found in a snug living in the vicinity of a rich patron's table; but I was disappointed. The parson was a little, meagre, black-looking man, with a grizzled wig that was too wide, and stood off from each ear; so that his head seemed to have shrunk away within it, like a dried filbert in its shell. He wore a rusty coat, with great skirts, and pockets that would have held the church Bible and prayer-book; ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... forty six years old, tall, meagre, red-haired, with one of those trivial ordinary faces you meet with every where, and go about unheeded and un-mentioned. In her youth she had been kept by a gentleman, who, dying, left her forty pounds a year during her life, in consideration of a daughter he had by her: which daughter, at the ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... foyer, which troubled me very much. Mlle. Brohan was to play the part of the Marquise de Prie. At this time she was so fat as to be almost unsightly, while I was so thin that the composers of popular and comic verses took my meagre proportions as their theme and the cartoonists as a ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... they seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't done a little more for them. They looked at each other as with the feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't been so stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... entered together the other cabin belonging to Dan Kennedy. Dan and his wife, and another man, his brother, were there. Dan was a sullen, surly, brutal looking ruffian, about fifty years old, and his wife was a fitting mate for such a man; she was dirty, squalid, and meagre; but there was a determined look of passion and self-will about her, which plainly declared that whoever Dan bullied, he did not, and ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... for Lincoln's motto, "keep pegging away," and that not merely in a perfunctory way, but by pushing more and more vigorously. In this moral warfare, volunteers must be encouraged. There is no need of special bounties, nor of drafting; only furnish the means to meet the meagre salaries, and the recruits will crowd to the field in abundance, but their numbers must be greatly enlarged. Hence the great need, as in the dark days of the war, of multiplying the means of equipment. The money should be poured out with a lavish hand to sustain a ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... whose understanding of the truth is very one-sided and meagre have been greatly used and blessed in their work. It is striking how a man who has been rescued from a life of open sin, and who goes into Christian service with tremendous earnestness, will have great power. His emphasis of truth may be one-sided. It is quite apt to be. He tells what he has ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... retreating royalists. Separated from his men, he fell among the royal guard at the gate of the castle. There was a vehement assault resisted as vehemently by his meagre escort. Several fell and Charles himself received a sword wound on his neck where his armour had slipped. Recognised by the French, he might have been taken or slain in his resistance, when the Bastard of Burgundy rode in and rescued him. Very desperate seemed the count's condition. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... contemptuously put aside, preferring drums; and a sword or a gun was valued at much more than a doll's house. In some respects her father brought her up strictly; she was fed, like her brothers, on a simple and even meagre diet, and trained to habits of prompt obedience; but he did nothing to discourage her taste for more violent exercises than are commonly permitted to ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... wanton gambols with the wind Upon supposed fairness, often known To be the dowers of a second head; The scull that bred them in the sepulchre. Thus ornament is but the treacherous shore To a most dangerous sea! Thou meagre lead casket, Which rather rebuffs than dost promise aught, Thy plainness moves me more than eloquence, And here choose ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... press, but that which boasted Sawyer Lenthal for its speaker was its friend (at all events, at first, though afterward, as we shall notice by and by, it displayed some animosity against its early protege), and from this meagre beginning took its rise that which is beyond doubt one of the most important domestic functions of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... experiencing any uncomfortable sensations; but he had read the poets, and he grew disgusted, nauseated. He was dying with desire to get away, and the princess suspected it. She kept him always in sight, she held him close, she paid him quarterly, shilling by shilling, his meagre allowance. She said to herself: 'So long as he has nothing, he cannot escape.' She mistook; he did escape, and he was so afraid of being retaken that for some time he hid like a criminal, pursued by the police. He fancied that this woman was always on his track. It was then, ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... more unsatisfactory to the philanthropist than our meagre and inadequate system of education,—a system which aims to cram the memory with acquired knowledge, which does not develop original thought, and which does not elevate the moral nature. Such a system will never elevate society, will ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... too enchanted with Medora Giles to be able to keep away from her, but the approach of Adrian Bond—he was a great studio dawdler—presently put her to rout. For Adrian was much too small. He was spare, he was meagre; he was sapless, like his books; and the part in his smoothly plastered black hair scarcely reached to her eyebrows. She felt herself swelling, distending, filling her place to repletion, to suffocation, and rose to flee. She was ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... bank ever since he left school, and yet, under pressure, he discovered a natural neat-handedness and a manual dexterity justly envied by some of his fellow-pioneers. His outfit was not more conspicuously meagre than O'Flynn's, yet the Irishman was held to be the moneyed man of his party. Just why was never fully developed, but it was always said, "O'Flynn represents capital"; and O'Flynn, whether on that account, or for a subtler ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... admitted by our hero's valet-de-chambre, whose visage, being naturally meagre and swarthy, was adorned with artificial whiskers; so that he became the Persian dress which he wore, and seemed a very proper master of the ceremonies to an Oriental necromancer. Having crossed his arms upon his breasts, with an inclination of the head, he stalked in solemn ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... yes! If any man can tell any tidings of a spruce, neat, apish, nimble, fine, foolish, absurd, humorous, conceited, fantastic gallant, with hollow eyes, sharp look, swart complexion, meagre face, wearing as many toys in his apparel as fooleries in his looks and gesture, let him come forth and certify me thereof, and he shall have ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... sorry that he was a bank clerk; it had a poor and meagre sound. It was not for him that she had been trained. She had been made to slave for herself, and was to make a "continental" marriage with the highest bidder. Eve's heart had been pretty well schooled out of her, and yet, before dinner came ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... conspicuous defect in North Wales, considered as a region of fine scenery. The few lakes I have since become acquainted with, as that near Bala, near Beddkelert, and beyond Machynleth, are not attractive either in their forms or in their accompaniments; the Bala Lake being meagre and insipid, the others as it were unfinished, and unaccompanied ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... fine. Wheresoever he had passed the hours of darkness, his condition sufficiently betokened that many of them had been spent beneath the open sky. Besmeared with mire; his saturated clothes clinging with a damp embrace about his limbs; his beard unshaven, his face unwashed, his meagre cheeks worn into deep hollows,—a more miserable wretch could hardly be, than this man who now cowered down upon the widow's hearth, and watched the struggling ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... that the altitude is about 12 too small. No land visible for twenty miles. No animal life observed. Lower Clark's tow-net with 566 fathoms of wire, and hoist it up at two and a half miles an hour by walking across the floe with the wire. Result rather meagre—jelly-fish and some fish larvae. Exercise dogs in sledge teams. The young dogs, under Crean's care, pull as well, though not so strongly, as the best team in the pack. Hercules for the last fortnight or more has constituted ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... could be matched only by the sword. But Gleim was a man of spirit and considerable power. The shock of Frederic's military successes made him suddenly drop the pen with which he had been inditing Anacreontics, and weak, rhymeless Horatian moods. His grenadier-songs, though often meagre and inflated, and marked with the literary vices of the time, do still account for the great fame which they acquired, as they went marching with the finest army that Europe ever saw. Here is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to this call was so meagre that he began to mistrust his countrymen, and he asked if, in case he lost his ship, the town would reimburse him, considering that he was risking his all in their defence. After much debate the ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... to kill the man at my stirrup, who looked beseechingly up to me for protection. Why he selected me I have no idea, and I did not relish the compliment at all. Our escort formed a meagre ring around us, and we were ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... with considerable ability. But he grew restless under restraint; and at length, taking advantage of the managing editor's absence, he published articles on prohibited subjects, which lost the paper half its subscribers, and him his situation. When next heard of, he was gaining a meagre subsistence by writing theatrical puffs,—employment for which he was indebted to the kindness of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... prepositions sometimes come together; as, "Lambeth is over against Westminster abbey."—Murray's Gram., i, 118. "And from before the lustre of her face, White break the clouds away."—Thomson. "And the meagre fiend Blows mildew from between his shrivell'd lips."—Cowper. These, in most instances, though they are not usually written as compounds, appear naturally to coalesce in their syntax, as was observed in the tenth chapter of Etymology, and to express a sort of compound ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy cake, and administered instalments of those dainties to the young people: at the same time sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of "something" to the postboy who answered that he thanked the gentleman, but, if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather not. Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... Meagre and pale, with a worn, anxious face as one who had suffered much, the friar, holding aloft two pieces of wood from the Mount of Olives tied together in the form of a cross, harangued the crowd. His words poured forth in a fiery stream, kindling the hearts, and stirring ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... the threatened cut in the already meagre salaries of his missionaries, rendered necessary by the disproportion between the growth of the funds and ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... forced to fall back to stubborn marching. Their path swung to the right, and past many straggling houses where the good housewives were just up and kindling their fires, with no inkling of what was about. To them nothing was ahead but the meagre routine of another day. Occasionally they caught a glimpse of the passing men and returned, startled, to drag out their sleepy spouses and all the children. The sun had warmed the whole of this little world now and trees and houses stood out clean and distinct ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... vividly sensitive. His being, cleaned and sensitized by pure grandeur, "felt" people—for a time at any rate—with an uncommon sharpness of receptive judgment. He returned to a life somehow mean and meagre, resuming insignificance with his dinner jacket. Out with the sand he had been regal; now, like a slave, he strutted ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... farm, and his father had emigrated to eastern Oregon, in which mining country Elam's boyhood was lived. He had known nothing but hard knocks for big stakes. Pluck and endurance counted in the game, but the great god Chance dealt the cards. Honest work for sure but meagre returns did not count. A man played big. He risked everything for everything, and anything less than everything meant that he was a loser. So for twelve Yukon years, Elam Harnish had been a loser. True, on Moosehide Creek the past summer he ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... looking forward to a visit to Valenciennes which Antony Watteau had proposed to make. He hopes always—has a patient hope—that Antony's former patronage of him may be revived. And now he is among us, actually at his work-restless and disquieting, meagre, like a woman with some nervous malady. Is it pity, then, pity only, one must feel for the brilliant one? He has been criticising the work of Jean-Baptiste, who takes his judgments generously, gratefully. Can it be that, after all, he despises and is no true ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... atmosphere pervaded Headquarters, where it was realized that the issue hung in the balance. And more proclamations, a la Napoleon, were issued to sustain and hearten those who were finding bread and onions meagre fare, to shame the hesitating, the wavering. As has been said, it was Rolfe who, because of his popular literary gift, composed these appeals for the consideration of the Committee, dictating them ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... coat which seemed to extinguish his thin form, Joe Pillin entered. It was snowing, and the cold had nipped and yellowed his meagre face between its slight grey ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ridges step by step till they became a blurred, gray monotony of tone fading away until it lost itself in the glittering white of the snowcaps. Everything he beheld in a new light. No longer did those hills represent the battle-ground where he and the Padre fought out their meagre existence. They had suddenly become one vast and beautiful garden where life became idyllic, where existence changed to one long joy. The torrents had shrunk to gentle streams, babbling their wonderful way through a fairy-land of scented gardens. The old forceful ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... over the top of the Fourteen Hundreds—the border had grown wider, had left its meagre allowance of three or four inches, and was fast acquiring a foot in width. This meant more detail, a broader design, coarser flowers, bigger fruit, and these spraying over the galloon, and all but invading the picture. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... had shared the meagre lunch of the noble French army surgeon, who had conceived such an ardent admiration for the trio of young Americans. Josh was already heard saying that he felt as hungry as a tramp who had been walking the railroad ties from early morning; and hoping ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... poor devil who, while receiving a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year, spent a couple of thousand, and utilized his wits in defending his meagre salary from his creditors. On perceiving Chupin, he made a wrathful gesture, and his first words were: "I haven't ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... the Government schooner arrived from Port Jackson, and King sent ten ringleaders of the mutiny to Sydney for trial, pardoning ten others. The vessel was despatched in a hurry, and King sent a very meagre letter to Grose, leaving a lieutenant of the corps in charge of the guard sent with the mutineers to ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... the drone of a bee, which went on, sometimes rising and sometimes getting lower, like a strange throbbing sob; and then once more it ceased. The audience hesitated a moment, being not quite certain whether the music was really finished or not. Then when they saw Margaritis rise from the piano, some meagre well-bred applause was heard, and an immense sigh of relief. The people streamed into the other rooms, and the conversation ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... half a century, pleasantly,—never called it heroism. It was done. He had time now to stretch his nerves of body and soul with a great sigh of relief,—to see that Duty was, after all, a lean, meagre-faced angel, that Christ sends first, but never meant should be nearest and best. Faith, love, and so, happiness, these were words of more pregnant meaning in the gospel the Helper left us. So McKinstry stood straight up, for the first time ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... though while the Ferrier influence had ignored him, the Darcy influence had not troubled itself to do much for him. That he had claims could not be denied. So this very meagre bone had been flung him. But if he had refused it, he would have ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... characters' Cibber terms him, and old Aston sums him up thus: 'Mr. Sanford, although not usually deem'd an Actor of the first Rank, yet the Characters allotted him were such, that none besides, then, or since, ever topp'd; for his Figure, which was diminutive and mean, (being Round-shoulder'd, Meagre-fac'd, Spindle-shank'd, Splay-footed, with a sour Countenance and long lean Arms) render'd him a proper Person to discharge Jago, Foresight and Ma'lignij, in the Villain.—This Person acted strongly with his Face,—and (as King ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... contrasted with previous excessive heat—such air must, nevertheless, be rarefied to the full extent indicated by the mercurial thermometer, and give us, therefore, our supply of vital oxygen in a very diluted form, and of a meagre, unsupporting, and unsatisfying consistence.... The sine qua non, therefore, for healthy and robust life in tropical countries, is air cold and dry—cold to the thermometer and dry to the hygrometer; or, in other words, dense, and containing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... itself with the production of chronicles. Other Annales Monastici have been edited in five volumes (Rolls Series, vol. v. is the index) by Dr. Luard. They are of special importance for the reign of Henry III. In vol. i. the meagre annals of the Glamorganshire abbey of Margam only extend to 1232. The Annals of Tewkesbury are useful from 1200 to 1263, and specially for the history of the Clares, the patrons of that house. The Annals of Burton-upon-Trent illustrate the years 1211 to 1261 with somewhat intermittent ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... to think of any one being contented with such a meagre share of the good things of life, when she was unsatisfied in spite of the rich store showered upon her. She could not understand it, and fell asleep wishing every one could be comfortable,—it was so annoying to see them grubbing in kitchens, teaching in bleak school-houses ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... drawn up by the Noble Lords, did not, it must be confessed, surmount this difficulty very skilfully. The assertion of the Prince's consistency was confined to two meagre sentences, in the first of which His Royal Highness was made to say:—"With respect to the proposed limitation of the authority to be entrusted to me, I retain my former opinion:"—and in the other, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... womanhood with but a limited education; indeed, a very meagre one, such only as she could obtain from an irregular attendance at the village school, in summer when the farm work was lightest, and in winter, a day now and then when the bleak weather and the rough, ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... Southern Railway not far south of Manassas. His grandfather, John Marshall, the first of the family of whom there appears to be any record, was an emigrant from Wales. He left four sons, the eldest of whom was Thomas Marshall, the father of the Chief Justice. Thomas Marshall, though a man of meagre early education, possessed great natural gifts, and rendered honorable and useful public service both as a member of the Virginia Legislature, and as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, in which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... was not in the least like any of the trim State buildings that now decorate every Victorian township and mark every mining or agricultural centre that can scrape together two or three meagre classes; it was the result of a purely local enthusiasm, and was erected by public subscription shortly after Mr. Joel Ham, B.A., arrived in the district and let it be understood that he did not intend to go away again. Having discovered that ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... to have had a little weekly journal sent to him by the post; which came at rare intervals on an ass's back to Ruscino, the ass and his rider, with a meal sack half filled by the meagre correspondence of the district, making the rounds of that part of the province with an irregularity which seemed as natural to the sufferers by it as to the postman himself. "He cannot be everywhere at once," they said of him ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... the office with a nervous teeter and a loud rattle of starched cottons. That morning she was clad in blue gingham trimmed profusely with white lace, and her face looked infinitesimal and meagre in the midst of her puffs of ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... lay south from Wei. After passing the small State of Ts'ao [5], he approached the borders of Sung, occupying the present prefecture of Kwei-teh, and had some intentions of entering it, when an incident occurred, which it is not easy to understand from the meagre style in which it is related, but which gave occasion to a remarkable saying. Confucius was practising ceremonies with his disciples, we are told, under the shade of a large tree. Hwan T'ui, an ill-minded officer of Sung, heard of it, and sent a band of men to pull down the tree, and kill ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... laborer Valois married the sub-lieutenant Lamotte, who lived in a little garrison city of the province, and sought to increase his meagre salary by many ingenious devices. He not merely gave instruction in fencing and riding, but he was also a very skilful card-player—so skilful, that fortune almost always ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... stairs!"—"Go on, sir."—"Fearfully alarmed at the noise, I drew my curtain—." "Proceed."—"And saw a faint glimmering light enter my chamber."—"Of a blue colour, was it not?" interrogated the doctor.—"Of a pale blue! and this pale blue light was followed by a tall, meagre, stern figure, who appeared as an old man of seventy years of age, arrayed in a long light coloured rug gown, bound with a leathern girdle: his beard thick and grisly; his hair scant and straight; his face of a dark sable hue; upon his head ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... Meanwhile Mr. Huxley and myself walked about unheeded by almost anyone. The women kept themselves in the bush at a little distance, making a great noise, but avoided showing themselves. Occasionally we caught a glimpse of these sable damsels, but only one female came near us—a meagre old woman who darted past with an axe in her hand, and sprang up into one of the huts like a harlequin, showing at the same time more of her long shrivelled shanks than was strictly decorous. Besides the usual ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... Paris—happy at last! You shall have diamonds. Jean-Marie, take it out of the boot, with religious care, and bring it piece by piece into the dining-room. We shall have plate at table! Darling, hasten and prepare this turtle; it will be a whet—it will be an addition to our meagre ordinary. I myself will proceed to the cellar. We shall have a bottle of that little Beaujolais you like, and finish with the Hermitage; there are still three bottles left. Worthy wine for ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an astounding figure in headlong flight. Its goal appeared to be the bunk house fifty yards distant; but its course was devious, laid clearly with a view to securing such incidental brief shelter as would be afforded by the corral wall, by a meagre clump of buck-brush, by a wagon, by a stack of hay. Good time was made, however. The fugitive vanished into the bunk house and the door of that structure was slammed to. But now the small puzzle I had ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... for the present, let us enquire what we mean by giving many names to the same thing, e.g. white, good, tall, to man; out of which tyros old and young derive such a feast of amusement. Their meagre minds refuse to predicate anything of anything; they say that good is good, and man is man; and that to affirm one of the other would be making the many one and the one many. Let us place them in a class with our previous opponents, and interrogate both of them at once. ...
— Sophist • Plato
... subordinate spirits, to whom were assigned peculiar employments. The chief of these were the Fairies, concerning whom the reader will find a long dissertation, in Volume Second. The Brownie formed a class of beings, distinct in habit and disposition from the freakish and mischievous elves. He was meagre, shaggy, and wild in his appearance. Thus, Cleland, in his satire against the Highlanders, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... trite; but it contains in a single page such a profusion of historical suggestion; it is so vigorous, so characteristic of Macaulay in all his undoubted resources as in all his mannerism and limitations; it is so essentially true, and yet so thoroughly obvious; it is so grand in form, and yet so meagre in philosophic logic, that it may be worth while to analyse it in detail; and for that purpose it must be set forth, even though it convey to most readers little more ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... of Canada was indeed deplorable. The St. Lawrence was watched by British ships; the harvest was meagre; a barrel of flour cost two hundred francs; most of the cattle and many of the horses had been killed for food. The people lived chiefly on a pittance of salt cod or on rations furnished by the King; all prices were inordinate; the officers from France were starving ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... cloudless sky, hot, sultry, the warmest day of the year. Not a breath of air stirred the leaves, and in the tree branches above us birds sang gleefully. Before daybreak we, who had been permitted to sleep for a few hours, were aroused by the sentries, and, in the gray dawn, partook of a meagre breakfast. A fresh supply of ammunition was brought up and distributed among the men, and, before sunrise, we were in line, stripped for a hot day's ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... and after a meagre breakfast which finished his resources, he went weakly to the address the dramatist had given him. Mr. Holt had left behind him apologies for unavoidable absence. Would Mr. Stretton call again at three? He wandered desolately home, and; waited, and when the time drew near set out ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... they may afford some trifling advantages to local traffic, and they may even in time become the channels of a more extended commerce. Yet I have never been thoroughly satisfied either of the necessity or expediency of projects promising such meagre results to the great body of our people. But with regard to the transcendent merits of the gigantic enterprise contemplated in this bill I never entertained the shadow ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... articles, I have only been able to suggest rather than put forward ideas, for my own knowledge of these correspondences is very incomplete. As far as I know the subject has been untouched hitherto, and this must be my excuse for the meagre nature of the information given. I hope later on to treat of the relation of sound and colour to form and to show how these correspondences will enable us to understand the language which the gods speak to us through flowers, trees, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... communications of Walter's were beyond her comprehension; and often she looked at him as if she doubted his sanity. From her meagre weekly allowance she saved a few doits, thinking to gladden Walter's heart with some ginger cakes, which he had always enjoyed. It was no use: Walter's soul had outgrown ginger cakes. This ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... from the comparison of pottery and pipes. On the whole the Hochelagan facts throw much light both forward on the history of the Iroquois and backwards on that of the Huron stock. Interpreted as above, they afford a meagre but connected story through a period hitherto lost in darkness, and perhaps a ray by which further links may still be discovered through continued ...
— Hochelagans and Mohawks • W. D. Lighthall
... Stranger still, these modern historians excel their predecessors as much in learning and depth of research as in dramatic power, artistic arrangement and construction, and beauty and picturesqueness of style. Compare the meagre array of references in the foot-notes of Watson's "History of Philip the Second" with the multitude of authorities cited by Mr. Prescott. It may be doubted, whether any printed book, however rare or little known, which could throw the least glimmer of light upon his subject, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... beyond this, nature must look after things. His view had much real wisdom. She was a quick and voracious reader, bad at remembering what she read; and though she had soon devoured all the books in Winton's meagre library, including Byron, Whyte-Melville, and Humboldt's "Cosmos," they had not left too much on her mind. The attempts of her little governess to impart religion were somewhat arid of result, and the interest of the vicar, Gyp, with her instinctive spice ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Luther in his own persevering study of Holy Writ. In this also he was encouraged by Staupitz, who must, however, have been amazed at his indefatigable industry and zeal. For the interpretation of the Bible the means at his command were meagre in the extreme. He himself explored in all cases to their very centre the truths of Christian salvation and the highest questions of moral and religious life. A single passage of importance would occupy ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... until the time of Dean Monk, is meagre. Dean Tarrant (1764-1791) collected the fragments of stained glass and had them all inserted in the windows of the apse. He also repaved the church, but most unfortunately without carefully preserving ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... as fishes that swim up And stare upon an element not theirs Through a thin skin of shrewish water, then Turn on a languid fin, and dip down, down, Into unplumbed, vast, oozy deeps of dream. His stomach was his master, and proclaimed it; And never were such meagre puppets made The slaves of such a tyrant, as his thoughts Of that obese epitome of ills. Trussed up he sat, the mockery of himself; And when upon the wan green of his eye I marked the gathering lustre of a tear, Thought I myself must weep, until I caught A grey, smug ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... of variety, existence turned a smiling face toward him. He had passed his examinations, most unexpectedly to himself, with a respectable percentage to spare. There was a time when he would have been ashamed of this meagre result. He was now, just a little, but the feeling was somewhat submerged in his gratitude at having "squeaked ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... with a force that was passionate. There was violence in the grip of his hands. His light eyes were ablaze. His whole meagre body quivered as though galvanized by some vital, electric current more ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... undisturbed horizontal character of the strata. Like the Silurian formations described elsewhere, they remain to this day nearly as flat and unaltered as they were originally laid down. Judged by mere vertical depth, they present but a meagre representative of the massive Devonian greywacke and limestone of Germany, or of the Old Red Sandstone of Britain. Yet vast though the area is over which they form the surface rock, it is probably only a small portion of their total extent; for they ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... impervious gloom Opposed itself to Cynthia's silver ray, And shaded all beneath. But now the sun With orient beams had chased the dewy night From earth and heaven; all nature stood disclosed: When, looking on the neighbouring woods, we saw The ghastly visage of a man unknown, 30 An uncouth feature, meagre, pale, and wild; Affliction's foul and terrible dismay Sat in his looks, his face, impaired and worn With marks of famine, speaking sore distress; His locks were tangled, and his shaggy beard Matted with filth; in all things else a Greek. He first advanced in haste; but, when he saw Trojans and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Janet assuaged; Eda's was the love content to pour out, that demands little. She was capable of immolation. Janet was by no means ungrateful for the warmth of such affection, though in moments conscious of a certain perplexity and sadness because she was able to give such a meagre return for the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... for the earth-born worm, So deep engraven on the meagre platen Of human frailty, so debased in hue, That he who dares peruse it needs but blush For his own nature. The poor shrivell'd wretch, For whose lean carcass yawns this hideous pit, Had naught that he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... On the following day, when a detachment of the Cardinal's troops came to take charge of the prisoners and escort them to the capital, they were so exhausted with fatigue, loss of blood, and want of food, that before they could move, it was necessary to supply them with bread and water. This meagre refreshment taken, they were stripped to their shirts, manacled in couples, and marched off to Naples. Although informed of it by their captors, many of them had refused to credit the downfal of the city. "This illusion was soon dispelled by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... are many devils that walk this world, Devils so meagre and devils so stout, Devils that go with their tails uncurl'd, Devils with horns and devils without. Serious devils, laughing devils, Devils black and devils white, Devils uncouth, and devils polite. Devils ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... melancholy picture to see this bowed-down old man; his thin, pale face shaded by a worn-out, three-cornered hat, his dirty uniform strewn with snuff; and his meagre legs encased in high-topped, unpolished boots; his only companion a greyhound, old and joyless as his master. Neither the bust of Voltaire, with its beaming, intelligent face, nor those of his friends, Lord-Marshal ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... handsome bribe to tell even the meagre facts he knows. Marie Berard's case is one of the reigning sensations. Her lips are ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the row of unswathed mummies that follow. Here, in each coffin over which we bend, there is a face which stares at us—or else closes its eyes in order that it may not see us; and meagre shoulders and lean arms, and hands with overgrown nails that protrude from miserable rags. And each royal mummy that our lantern lights reserves for us a fresh surprise and the shudder of a different fear—they resemble ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... rather lost than gained in the esteem of his professional brethren by the attempt to make his commentaries an exception to the rule—and the volumes may be counted on the fingers which are at once entertaining and trustworthy compends of legal lore. To the meagre collection of attractive introductions to this subject an addition has recently been made by BENJAMIN VAUGHAN ABBOTT in a couple of brochures, respectively called The Travelling Law School and Famous Trials, which are published in one volume by D. Lothrop & Co. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Shakespeare, in which he lived and carried on his business, still stands on Henley Street, in Stratford, much the same as it was four hundred and fifty years ago. It is a paltry hovel of two low stories, half timbered, with meagre windows, and must have been a squalid abode even in its prime. It is built flush with the sidewalk, having neither vestibule nor entry, and the rough broken pavement of the kitchen is sunken a step lower than the street. A huge open fireplace of unhewn gray stones yawns rudely in the wall ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... cut of Wade's jib was unclerical. He did not stoop, like a new minister. He was not pallid, meagre, and clad in unwholesome black, like the same. His bronzed face was frank and bold and unfamiliar with speculations on Original Sin or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... success in nut-growing, brought about by our activities, when we compare nut-growing in our field with pecan-growing in the South, and with walnut, almond, and perhaps filbert-growing, on the Pacific Coast, our results are meagre indeed. Of course commercial production, the building of a new industry of food supply for the people, is our ultimate goal. Why are our results in this direction, after fourteen years of effort, so small? Is it because we have devoted ourselves ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean, 931 Hateful divorce of love,'—thus chides she Death,— 'Grim-grinning ghost, earth's worm, what dost thou mean To stifle beauty and to steal his breath, Who when he liv'd, his breath and beauty set Gloss on the rose, smell to the ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... given for this statement, I admit, is meagre, but it is as accurate as many of the figures by means of ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... what were we to do? The longboat, fine boat though she was, when stocked with even a meagre supply of provisions and water, would not accommodate more than twenty-five men, and I gravely doubted whether she would live ten minutes in such a sea as was then running, with half that number in her. Still, with the exception of such a ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... had cleared the farm, and while the soil was new it gave good crops; but as the rich surface, or "black muck," as it is called, became exhausted by continual cropping, nothing but a poor, meagre soil remained. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... another individual, who I told him was God's Son; that he came out of heaven; that he had not been bad, and was not to go in the pit; but that he allowed himself to be killed; and when he died, God shut up the pit; so the people were spared. This seemed to myself too strange, vague, meagre, to convey any definite idea to the boy's mind; but how effectual does the Lord make our poorest efforts when HE wills to work! After a few moments' deep thought, Jack astonished me by an objection that proved he saw the grand doctrine of a substitute for sinners, which I was ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... impresses upon these simple-minded, out-of-the-world people a due sense of my importance as the guest of his master, the Ameer of Seistan, and they skirmish around in the liveliest manner to provide what creature comforts their meagre resources are equal to. The best they can provide in the way of eatables is bread and eggs, and muscal, but they make full amends for the absence of variety by bestowing upon us a superabundance of what they have, and no slaves of Oriental despot ever displayed more eager haste to anticipate ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... observed, that under the name of Targa Popolo, no mention is made of the Touaricks of Ghat. Indeed, all the notices of the Renegade Tourist on this part of Africa, are extremely meagre and unsatisfactory. As to his divisions of The Sahara into so many deserts, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, &c., this is all arbitrary and most unnatural. The story about the abundance of manna gathered in the districts of Aheer, seems to have been invented to please the Christian doctors of Rome; at ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... neglect. The framers of such a bill must be content to inherit the honours of that Athenian lawgiver whose edicts were said to be written not in ink but in blood. But suppose it past; suppose one of these men, as I have seen them,—meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your Lordships are perhaps about to value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame;—suppose this man surrounded by the children for whom he is unable to procure bread at the hazard of his existence, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... two very affectionate letters. What was this, then, that hung and hovered? It was in the very air of the house and the garden and the place. Grace had left her mark upon everything and every one, even upon the meagre person of Mitch the dog. Especially upon Mitch, a miserable creeping fox-terrier with no spirits and a tendency to tremble all over when you called him. He had attached himself to Maggie, which was strange, because animals were not, as a rule, interested in her. Mitch followed her about, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... forget you when we reach the Landing, Rob!' were, the meagre words that rose to my lips, but the tone of voice supplied what the words might lack. And I did not forget him or the others; and Robillard said afterward, 'By Gar, dat de best day's work I ever done, by Gar, de time I run down dat hell river after ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... devil who, while receiving a salary of fifteen hundred francs a year, spent a couple of thousand, and utilized his wits in defending his meagre salary from his creditors. On perceiving Chupin, he made a wrathful gesture, and his first words were: ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Doubtless there is much more of it available; but a considerable of it consists of steep mountain-sides, of deserts, and the beds and overflow of the rivers. With your permission, Mr. Commander, I will retreat from this prominent position, after doing the best I could with a meagre subject;" and the doctor bowed to the audience, while ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... unsatisfactory to the philanthropist than our meagre and inadequate system of education,—a system which aims to cram the memory with acquired knowledge, which does not develop original thought, and which does not elevate the moral nature. Such a system will never elevate society, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... might be this lovely apparition. Of such patrician beauty, such elegance of form and bearing, such witchery of simple attire, and such un-Italian yet Latin type, in this antique Creole, modernly Italianized quarter—who and what, so early in the day, down here among the shops, where so meagre a remnant of the old high life clung on in these balconied upper stories—who, what, ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... was far from satisfied with the very meagre information he had received, and directly he got a favourable opportunity, he besieged Mrs. Mittens, the old housekeeper, with questions concerning the new relation who was coming to make her home with them, and of the Uncle Frank whose name he had never heard before. Eddie did not ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the Imagination of the Thing had so entirely possess'd his Mind, that all that could be said of him, had no Influence upon him, to make him doubt of the Matter; and he dreamt of nothing but Spectres and Devils: The very Habit of his Mind was got into his Face, that he was so pale, and meagre and dejected, that you would say he was rather a Sprite than a Man: And in short, he was not far from being stark mad, and would have been so, had it not ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... of the report on hardiness, the returns on these varieties are too meagre to enable one to arrive at a corroborated conclusion. In hardiness, the Hobson stands first with a rating of 95%. Zimmerman and Carr are tied at 60%; Yankee rates 50%. Reliable seems to be little planted but also seems to rate well in ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... said, she had fallen from high communion with the probabilities. She had taken more satisfaction in Isabel's accession of fortune than if the money had been left to herself; it had seemed to her to offer just the proper setting for her sister's slightly meagre, but scarce the less eminent figure. Isabel had developed less, however, than Lily had thought likely—development, to Lily's understanding, being somehow mysteriously connected with morning-calls and ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... appreciated. That he decided rightly there can be no doubt, but very few officers holding commands in India at that time would have accepted such responsibility. His knowledge as to what had happened at Meerut and Delhi was based on one or two meagre telegrams, and the information Montgomery gave him as to the treacherous intentions of the sepoys at Mian Mir had been obtained by means of a spy, who, it was quite possible, might have ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Burgundy, and not a day's journey from the town where now we sit a-sipping of old Medoc, there lived a cure. I say he lived; but barely. The parish was small, the parishioners greedy; and never gave their cure a doit more than he could compel. The nearer they brought him to a disembodied spirit by meagre diet, the holier should be his prayers in their behalf. I know not if this was their creed, but ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... customer, by producing some substitute, which, when rejected by Wayland, as not being what he had asked for, they maintained possessed, in a superior degree, the self-same qualities. In general they all displayed some curiosity concerning the purpose for which he wanted it. One old, meagre chemist, to whom the artist put the usual question, in terms which Tressilian neither understood nor could recollect, answered frankly, there was none of that drug in London, unless Yoglan the Jew chanced to have some of ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... reclamation hardly less important than irrigation itself. A third step in the reclamation of desert lands is arid farming—that is, the adapting to the soils of crops that require a minimum amount of moisture, and the utilization, to the fullest possible extent, of the meagre amount of rainfall in the region. Experiments conducted in this direction in Utah ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... otherwise. Mother, kneeling on the carpet beside him, like the faithful, ruffed, and farthingaled wife on a fifteenth-century tomb. Behind them, again, at some little distance, we and our visitor. With the best will in the world to do so, I can get but a meagre view of the latter. The room is altogether rather dark, it being one of our manners and customs not to throw much light on prayers, and he has chosen the darkest corner of it. I only vaguely see ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Kinglake's external life, his literary and political career, his speeches, and the more fugitive productions of his pen, were recoverable from public sources; but his personal and private side, as it showed itself to the few close intimates who still survive, must have remained to myself and others meagre, superficial, disappointing, without Madame Novikoff's ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... reached us through the newspapers was meagre and contradictory; many people discredited it; but a letter from my mother left us no room for doubt. The sickness was in the city. The hospitals were filling up, and hundreds of the citizens were flying from the stricken ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... these meagre expressions of the general approbation, and would not have had them different. From this time, within the narrow bounds that brought them all necessarily together in some sort, Hicks abolished himself as nearly as possible. He chose often to join the second mate at meals, which ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... being now over, the strangers requested to be shown to their place of repose. The old people would gladly have talked with them a little longer, and have expressed the wonder which they felt, and their delight at finding the poor and meagre supper prove so much better and more abundant than they hoped. But the elder traveller had inspired them with such reverence, that they dared not ask him any questions. And when Philemon drew Quicksilver aside, ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... we should dine in the waiting-room while Autolycus and the chuprassis went on with the luggage to acquaint the dak-bungalow people of our arrival, I upbraided him for not making proper arrangements, and reviled the meagre repast, and was altogether very unpleasant. When we reached our destination we found Autolycus prancing distractedly. "This," he said to Boggley, "is what comes of making no bundabust." Some other people were already occupying the bungalow, and we could only get the back rooms, small, ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... my story of the Commonstable. Young fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the boys to impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork, holding it, beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... just those qualities which endear English biographical literature to us, that we were inclined to believe that the fault was inherent in Americans and American life, that our days and works lacked picturesqueness and color and left no salient points for the chronicler to seize. We now see that the meagre harvests of former biographers were due to their hasty and superficial generalizations. For at least three of the volumes in this series—the life of James Fenimore Cooper and the two now before us—may be favorably compared with the best ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field—that, of course, they are many in number,—or, that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... looking at the sky, he remembered again how fate in the person of an unknown woman had by chance caressed him, he remembered his summer dreams and fancies, and his life struck him as extraordinarily meagre, poverty-stricken, and ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... four hundred miles, to the Rocky Mountains. This desert, broken by precipitous ravines, canons, and gorges, at the bottom of which gurgles some insignificant stream, its banks clothed with stunted and meagre vegetation, produces nothing but cacti with ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... appeared, poor lad, that he 'had talent,' and 'wanted to write'; and, an obdurate family having insisted that his calligraphy should take the form of double entry, Alice had intervened to win him six months' respite, during which he was to travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck me first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval 'ordeal.' Then I was touched by her having sent him to me. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... on the fifth floor of a building in New York City he toiled at his experiments day and night, with little food, and that of the simplest kind. Indeed so meagre was his fare, mainly crackers and tea, that he bought provisions at night in order to keep his friends from finding out ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... at nine in the morning we were at anchor in the bay just mentioned, situated westward of the mouth of the Rio Capaya. We found there neither village nor farm, but merely two or three huts, inhabited by Mestizo fishermen. Their livid hue, and the meagre condition of their children, sufficed to remind us that this spot is one of the most unhealthy of the whole coast. The sea has so little depth along these shores, that even with the smallest barks it is impossible ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... however, saw them standing their little empty shoes in front of the meagre fire, he bowed his head on his hands, and the tears trickled through his fingers. But the mother smiled softly to herself, as she kissed each of the children and tucked them into ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... not fall within the contentions of party usually cut a meagre figure on the page of the historian, and the railway policy of this decade is one of those questions. It was settled without much careful deliberation or foresight, and may be said in the main to have shaped itself. At the time when Mr. Gladstone presided over the department ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of the telescope and the microscope is not questioned, but the thought of the planchette evokes ridicule. The practical success of wireless telegraphy depends on the use of an adequate medium for the transmission of electricity. The most meagre training suffices to prevent the declaration that if wireless messages cannot be sent without apparatus they cannot be ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... toward its bloody goal. To a civilian, unaccustomed to scenes of war, the tranquillity of these men would have seemed very wonderful. Many of the soldiers were still munching the hard bread and raw pork of their meagre breakfasts, or drinking the cold coffee with which they had filled their canteens the day previous. Many more were chatting in an undertone, grumbling over their sore feet and other discomfits, chaffing each other, and laughing. The general bearing, however, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... fire and winked at him as though it were aware of the absurdity of anything so trivial being held in such high esteem. More of the "calico," which really was an inexpensive but tasteful chintz, hung against the wall and served to hide from prying eyes the child's meagre wardrobe, and a bow of it was perkily tied to ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... was more renaissance than architecture and more bay-window than both; but the number was the number of his sister's house; and, as the street and the avenue corroborated the numbered information, he mounted the doorstep, rang, and leisurely examined four stiff box-trees flanking the ornate portal—meagre vegetation compared to what he had been accustomed to ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... one of the boys bewailed the meagre celebration, "never mind, shipmate. There's a good time coming when we can whoop 'er up for Old Glory as much as we please. Then we'll make up for to-day. We can't expect to do much ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... an immense number of proverbs are associated with corn, many of which are very varied. Thus, of those who contrive to get a good return for their meagre work or money, it ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... not to be interpreted too literally. He has made a business success in raising small fruits, and his literary output has been by no means meagre. I might also mention that in youth he was something of a champion at swinging the scythe, and few could mow as much in the course of a day. But certainly labor is no fetich of his, and he has a real genius for loafing. In another man his leisurely rambling with its pauses to rest on rock or ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... a small point, with a small orifice. The first use of the blowpipe that we have recorded is that of a Swedish mining officer, who used it in the year 1738 for chemical purposes, but we have the most meagre accounts of his operations. In 1758 another Swedish mining officer, by the name of Cronstedt, published his "Use of the Blowpipe in Chemistry and Mineralogy," translated into English, in 1770, by Van Engestroem. Bergman extended its use, and after him Ghan and the venerable ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... is," said he, "is freely yours. Yet as I was only a few weeks in London my budget may be very meagre. But if you will ask, I will gladly tell ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... extent this is the case, it must be the business of this paper to attempt to show. But first it is desirable to give, as usual, a brief sketch of De Quincey's life. It need only be a brief one, for the external events of that life were few and meagre; nor can they be said to be, even after the researches of Mr. Page and Professor Masson, very accurately or exhaustively known. Before those researches "all was mist and myth" about De Quincey. I remember as a boy, a year or two after his death, hearing a piece of scandal about his domestic relations, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... we have almost always outshone them: and till they have excelled Newton, and come near to Shakspeare, pre-eminence in genius must remain with us. I think they are most entitled to triumph over the Italians; as, with the most meagre and inharmonious of all languages, the French have made more of that poverty in tragedy and eloquence, than the Italians have done with the language the most capable of both. But I did not mean to send you a dissertation. I hope it will not be long before you remove to Hampton.—Yet why should ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... worked out by force of logic and analogy an extensive system of private law from the meagre fabric of the Twelve Tables, so under the lead of American lawyers American judges have applied the processes familiar in the development of unwritten law to the development of our written ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... ordinary intelligence to say that I sought with unwearying assiduity to figure my way into the stern father's good-will; that never did dullard apply himself to mathematics more patiently than I; that never did faithfulness achieve such meagre reward. Then I engaged a private tutor. His instructions met ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... The rider was dressed in the plainest attire of a quiet citizen, though the material of his clothes and the few ornaments that were visible about his person indicated their owner to be one who was no meagre possessor of the riches of this world. Both rider and horse were as still as though they had been carved in marble instead of being living objects, save the quick, nervous motion, now and then, of the full-blooded animal's ears, ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of gratified achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition and welcome from a portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed genuinely anxious to include her in the rather meagre group that ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... common-sense with which life was regarded, the simplicity of its faith and the patience with which trials were borne. The lessons he learned in it had more practical influence in his life than all the books he read. Nor were his opportunities for the study of character so meagre as the limit of one family would imply. As often happens in New England households, individualities were very marked, and from his stern uncle and his placid aunt down to the sweet and nimble-witted Alice, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... immensity. Yet the present church is but the nave of a temple designed with transepts and choir. The length was to have been 800 feet, the width of the transepts 625, the dome 183 feet in diameter. A building so colossal in extent, and so monotonously meagre in conception, could not ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... of elaborate preparation. Beyond the fact that a "Push" was to be inaugurated upon an entirely new and experimental form of advance, nothing was disclosed even to the men. The utter importance of maintaining absolute secrecy of this meagre information was earnestly reiterated. The slightest inkling of the impending intentions escaping to Fritz would have cast upon the troops engaged a disaster perhaps unequalled in the ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... heard of Stuffer, but he played his meagre hand with a winning bluff. The boundary line between detectivism and ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... one so bound by such a vow, And women were as phantoms. O, my brother, Why wilt thou shame me to confess to thee How far I faltered from my quest and vow? For after I had lain so many nights A bedmate of the snail and eft and snake, In grass and burdock, I was changed to wan And meagre, and the vision had not come; And then I chanced upon a goodly town With one great dwelling in the middle of it; Thither I made, and there was I disarmed By maidens each as fair as any flower: But when they led me into hall, behold, The Princess of that castle ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... wedding-day, and little Marie Ethier, whom he had played with when a child, was to have been his wife. All night long, as he tossed about in his cell, he had been thinking of her and of his two old aunts who had taken him to their meagre home when his parents died, and had watched over and cared for him with the love of a mother. They had believed in him—although, alas! his guilt was so glaringly apparent—even when the whole world had forsaken him. So, because of all these things, his ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... such poor cattle as were left in their desolate fields. He and Margot and Reine Allix, between them, fed many mouths that would otherwise have been closed in death by famine, and denied themselves all except the barest and most meagre subsistence, that they might give ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... performances before them, to suggest plans for the improvement of the poetic art. Their essays are curious, as the beginnings of that great critical literature, which in England, in spite of much infelicity, has only been second to the poetry which it judged. But in themselves they are crude, meagre, and helpless; interesting mainly, as showing how much craving there was for poetry, and how little good poetry to satisfy it, and what inconceivable doggrel could be recommended by reasonable men, as fit to be admired and imitated. There is fire and eloquence in ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the soldiers, and the mob along the high road disappeared amid the darkness of the trees. The expanse, the beams, the piles of planks alone grew pale under the fading light, assuming a muddy tint that vaguely suggested the bed of a dried-up torrent. The sawyers' trestles, rearing their meagre framework in a corner, seemed to form gallows, or the uprights of a guillotine. And there was no living soul there excepting three gipsies who showed their frightened faces at the door of their van—an old man and woman, and a big girl with woolly ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... her cold gray eyes. She had never admired any man so much as she had admired this brilliant young painter. Many men had paid her compliments; as the rich Mr. Granger's sole daughter and heiress, she had been gratified with no meagre share of mankind's worship; but no words ever spoken had sounded so sweet in her ears as those few civil speeches that Mr. Austin had found time to address to her during his visits to the Rue de Morny. And after having taken so much pleasure in his ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... heath, and through the deep sand. They stopped at length before the house of mourning, which was crowded with strangers, some inside, some on the outside. Vehicle after vehicle stood together; the horses and oxen were turned out amidst the meagre grass; large sand-hills, like those at home by the German Ocean, were to be seen behind the farm, and stretched far away in wide long ranges. How had they come there, twelve miles inland, and nearly as high and as large as those near the shore? The wind had lifted ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... the Colonel is launched in English society of an intellectual order, and mighty dull he finds it. During two hours of desultory conversation and rather meagre refreshments, the only bright spot is his meeting with Charles Honeyman, his dead wife's brother, whom he was mighty glad to see. Except for this meeting there was little to entertain the Colonel, and as soon as possible ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... ears like the noise of a windmill in the country at night. Nevertheless, I was able to see that the manuscript offered every evidence of indubitable authenticity. The two drawings of the Purification of the Virgin and the Coronationof Proserpine were meagre in design and vulgar in violence of colouring. Considerably damaged in 1824, as attested by the catalogue of Sir Thomas, they had obtained during the interval a new aspect of freshness. But this miracle did not surprise me at all. And, besides, what did I care about the ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... however, it appears that the information concerning Ceylon collected by the Macedonian explorers of India, was both meagre and erroneous. ONESICRITUS, as he is quoted by Strabo and Pliny, propagated exaggerated statements as to the dimensions of the island[1] and the number of herbivorous cetacea[2] found in its seas; the elephants he described as far surpassing those of continental ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... imploring appeals for further money, embarked upon lecturing campaigns, wrote aviation articles for the Press, and canvassed possible supporters in the effort to raise funds for his next enterprise. Two years passed, but the fruits of the propaganda were meagre. It was at this juncture, when everything appeared to be impossible, that Count Zeppelin discovered his greatest friend. The German Emperor, with an eye ever fixed upon new developments, had followed Zeppelin's uphill struggle, and at last, in 1902, came to ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... design. The propriety of inserting their names at all was for a time considered doubtful. It is believed, however, that they could not, in strict justice, have been entirely omitted. But let not the meagre sketch of their views I have given, satisfy us. We want a full development of their principles from their own pens—such a development as, I hope, will not long be withheld from a world which is famishing for the want of it. But now ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... difficult—was to continue down the river as far as its junction with the Tres Barras, from which place I would strike across the virgin forest as far as the Madeira River. I had not the faintest idea how I could realize either plan with the ridiculously meagre resources at my disposal. I had money enough, but unfortunately that was one of the few spots on earth where money was of little use. Again I trusted in Providence to come to our help. Both plans involved thousands of kilometres of navigation ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the gratification of hearing, at the Protestant chapel, the Te Deum for the grand victory, in presence of the King and Queen of the Low Countries—or Holland, and of the Dowager Princess of Orange, and the young warrior her grandson. This prince looked so ill, so meagre, so weak, from his half-cured wounds, that to appear on this occasion seemed another, and perhaps not less dangerous effort of heroism, added to those which had so recently distinguished him in the field. What enthusiasm would such an exertion, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... from international science is incalculable.... Our debts are manifest in all directions.... When we draw up our scientific balance-sheet in account with the rest of the world, the credit side is meagre. In this respect we have to speak chiefly of our passive advantages, and our modesty forbids us to refer ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... method of eating the material in front of them. Detached by their mandibles, fragment by fragment, the material is digested. It passes from end to end through the body of the pioneer, yields during its passage its meagre nutritive principles, and accumulates behind it, obstructing the passage, by which the larva will never return. The work of extreme division, effected partly by the mandibles and partly by the stomach, makes the digested material ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... Shyness's soon shatter'd Chinese Wall. But in her dim fantastic temple bower The little Chinese puppet sits and sighs, A dream of far-off wonders in her eyes— And in her hand a golden tulip flower. For her the tender firstling tendrils grew;— Rich crop or meagre, what is that to you? Instead of it we get an after crop They kick the tree for, dust and stalk and stem,— As hemp to silk beside ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... every way considerably the better for our bath. Our next business was to go to breakfast, but our bread was by this time so completely destroyed as to be quite uneatable. We therefore threw it overboard, and made a meagre and unpalatable meal off more raw salt beef, washed down ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... broken French at her. Some day she will poison the soup or the vin rouge; but I hope that will not be until after mother and I shall have left her. She has two daughters, who, except that one is decidedly pretty, are meagre imitations of herself. ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... female, on seeing the house in such a crowded state, started, paused, and glanced with some terror at the persons assembled. Her dress was not altered since her last visit; but her countenance, though more meagre and emaciated, expressed but little of the unsettled energy which then flashed from her eyes, and distorted her features by the depth of that mysterious excitement by which she had been agitated. Her countenance was still muffled as before, the awful protuberance rose from her shoulders, and the ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... bravely on, heartening each other with jests under conditions in which it is extremely likely men would merely cavil and sulk and fill the air with their complainings; dressing themselves daintily through personal effort in spite of meagre purses; throwing themselves with a splendid joyousness into their few precious days of freedom; banding themselves together often and often to wring occasional hours of gaiety from the months of toil; keeping brave eyes to the front and brave hearts to the task, while they wait steadfastly ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... Cheer, the Sullen Month will die, And a young Moon requite us by and by: Look how the Old one, meagre, bent, and wan With age and Fast, is fainting ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... leave Aspinwall. However, our fears proved groundless; at all events, no such attempt was made, and we reached New York in safety in November, 1861. A day or two in New York sufficed to replenish a most meagre wardrobe, and I then started West to join my new regiment, stopping a day and a night at the home of my parents in Ohio, where I had not been since I journeyed from Texas for the Pacific coast. The headquarters of my regiment were at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... ruin. Beware, Macduff, the fallen stars! Venus aggrieved will fly to Mars; There's mischief brewing. What mountain of a fair is that, Whose jewels, lace, and Spanish hat, Proclaim her high degree, With a tall, meagre-looking man, Who bears her reticule and fan? That was Maria D-, Now the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... these matters at the time, not a rumor of them having reached me as yet in my meagre reading, I knew that it must be so. It fired me with a keen desire to read—not the old orthodox emasculated histories of the schools but those other books and pamphlets to which I fancied he must have access. Eagerly I inquired of ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... wretchedest creature present. She was about to smite on both cheeks him she loved, as well as the woman she despised and had been foiled by. Still she had the consolation that Rose, seeing the vulgar mother, might turn from Evan: a poor distant hope, meagre and shapeless like herself. Her most anxious thoughts concerned the means of getting money to lockup Harry's tongue. She could bear to meet the Countess's wrath, but not Evan's offended ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... breakfast. In no meal has luxury advanced more upon the model of the ancients than in this: the dinners (cn) of the Romans were even more luxurious, and a thousand times more costly, than our own; but their breakfasts were scandalously meagre; and, with many men, breakfast was no professed meal at all. Galen tells us that a little bread, and at most a little seasoning of oil, honey, or dried fruits, was the utmost breakfast which men generally allowed themselves: some indeed drank wine after it, but this ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... step too far plunged her into twenty feet of water, and the next moment she was spinning round and round in the current. She had learned to swim a few strokes in the creek on her father's farm, and her meagre skill now stood her in good stead, for she was able to keep afloat until the current threw her against a gravel bar that jutted into the river. She dragged herself ashore, very wet, and of a sudden, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... worth while to make an effort to give him the place he has honestly earned, before the inevitable reaction sets in, and unmerited laudations have brought about an unmerited neglect. His life was arduous. His meagre physical means and his fervent spirit were pathetically ill-mated. It was impossible to survey his career without a sympathy which trembled from admiration to pity. Certain, in spite of all precaution, to die young, and in the face of that stern fact genially and unconquerably ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... drown it. The story of Dickens's boyhood, as told by himself, is not more pathetic—nor is its outcome more beautiful—than what we know of our guest's experiences—his orphanage, his few years' meagre schooling, his work as a boy in all sorts of shifting occupations, the attempt to make a learned blacksmith of him, his final apprenticeship to iron-moulding, at which he worked on the East Side from his eighteenth to his twenty-first year. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... opened his eyes sharply and beheld the meagre figure of Mrs. Silk. In one hand she held a medicine-bottle and a glass and in ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... children of eating clay. This habit is not confined to the Otomacs on the Oronoco, nor to Indians altogether; for negroes and whites have the same propensity—Mr. Hauxwell found it impossible to restrain his own children. Bates ascribes the morbid craving to the meagre diet. This may be true to some extent, but it is certainly strange that the extraordinary desire to swallow earth (chiefly unctuous clays) is found only in the tropics, where vegetation is so rank ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... and frequently fatal. I was unwilling to lose my head just then. So I lay still. If this were the Huron, he was probably merely reconnoitring, as I had reason to believe he had done several times before. His game interested me, for he seemed to work unnecessarily hard for meagre returns, and Indians are seldom spendthrifts of endeavor. I could accomplish nothing by capturing him, for I should learn nothing. There was ostensible peace between the Huron nation and myself. I would let him work out ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... most girls in the same rank of life,—she had not been taught to fritter away such capacities for culture as Providence gave her in the sterile nothingnesses which are called feminine accomplishments. She did not paint figures out of drawing in meagre water-colours; she had not devoted years of her life to the inflicting on polite audiences the boredom of Italian bravuras, which they could hear better sung by a third-rate professional singer in a metropolitan music-hall. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you are alluding to the labours of missionaries in foreign lands?" I observed. "But I have heard it said, that in spite of all the money expended, their preaching produces but meagre results. In India, for instance, the Company will not admit them. In Africa, the climate destroys them. The fanatical Turks and other Mohammedan nations will not listen to their message; and it would be but time lost and energies wasted were they ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... being thus inseparable: and what rendered us more conspicuous, my cousin was very tall, myself extremely short, so that we exhibited a very whimsical contrast. This meagre figure, small, sallow countenance, heavy air, and supine gait, excited the ridicule of the children, who, in the gibberish of the country, nicknamed him 'Barna Bredanna'; and we no sooner got out of doors than our ears were assailed with a repetition of "Barna Bredanna." ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... record of American art up to the period of ultra-modernism, it will be found that these men are the true originals among American painters. We shall find outside of them and a very few others, so much of sameness, a certain academic convention which, however pronounced or meagre the personalities are, leave those personalities in the category of "safe" painters. They do not disturb by an excessively intimate point of view toward art or toward nature. They come up to gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... vigour immediately following each foreign conquest (such as the Mongol conquest in the Thirteenth Century and the Manchu in the Seventeenth) not only has there never been any absolutism properly so-called in China, but that apart from the most meagre and inefficient tax-collecting and some rough-and-ready policing in and around the cities there has never been any true governing at all save what the people did for themselves or what they demanded of the officials as a protection against one another. Any ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... comprising the last of their provisions. The animal heat, produced by their great and continued exertions in travelling, had thus far prevented them, from suffering much from the cold, or perceiving its actual intensity. But they had been at rest scarcely long enough to finish their meagre repast, when they were driven from their seats by the chill of the invading element, and were eagerly demanding, as a lesser annoyance, again to be led forward on their journey. The snow by this time had accumulated to the depth of a foot and a half, and still came swiftly sifting ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... before the door. Heidi ran to it and began splashing and rubbing, till she quite glistened with cleanliness. The grandfather meanwhile went inside the hut, calling to Peter to follow him and bring in his wallet. Peter obeyed with astonishment, and laid down the little bag which held his meagre dinner. ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... came, therefore, his utterance was a culmination of the two preceding centuries. An entire side of the richly endowed human nature to which we owe the high qualities of New England,—a nature which is often so easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,—this side, long suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... the justest celebrity, have assured us, that endless and dreadful evils are the portion of all who are engaged in the manufacture of tobacco; that the workmen are in general meagre, jaundiced, emaciated, asthmatic, subject to colic, diarrheas, to vertigo, violent headach, and muscular twitchings, to narcotism, and to various diseases of the breast and lungs.[48] They have also declared that some of these evils have ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... high comb. She was the only one without spectacles or eyeglasses. Henry looked older and feebler than any of the company. His scant hair hung in thin and long white locks, and his tall, slender figure had gained a still more meagre effect from his dress, while his shoulders were bowed in a marked stoop; his gait was rigid and jerky. He assisted himself with a gold-headed cane, and sat in his chair ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... and in the haste with which the afflicted crew had abandoned their ship no one had bothered about extinguishing them. By means of the meagre illumination afforded by them, the two airmen were able to take a fairly comprehensive survey ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... to the meagre and narrow hearts of men such enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal sympathy? Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on one condition—that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood forth as the representative of men, he identified himself ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... to do with Fashion as with the changing clouds. I have given considerable attention to this fact. It is worthy of the deepest thoughtfulness. Oh, it is a solemn fact that we descend into our children, in our weakness or strength, in our meanness or majesty, as we have lived. And what a lean, meagre, moonshine inheritance does a fashionable mother convey to her offspring! I confess that to me there is something grand in being the mother of a noble son or daughter, of a strong and virtuous family of children. If there is a just human ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... lodged in the same apartments in which Saxe had lived, when, at the height of power and glory, he visited Prussia. Frederic, indeed, stooped for a time even to use the language of adulation. He pressed to his lips the meagre hand of the little grinning skeleton, whom he regarded as the dispenser of immortal renown. He would add, he said, to the titles which he owed to his ancestors and his sword, another title, derived from ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... great mass of the people in Europe—men and women—were ignorant to the last degree, possessing little if any sense of delicacy or refinement, and were utterly uncouth. For the most part, they lived in miserable hovels, were clothed in a most meagre and scanty way, and were little better than those beasts of burden which are compelled to do their master's bidding. Among these people, rights depended quite largely upon physical strength, and women were generally misused. To the lord of the manor it was a matter of little importance ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Asenath had Manassah and Ephraim. Thus giving the Patriarchs just seven legitimate descendants in the first generation. If it had not been for polygamy and concubinage, the great harvest so recklessly promised would have been meagre indeed. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... time Thress had been subsisting on the meagre diet permitted to a man in his condition, but his stomach rebelled even at that. He had heard of the Dewey fasting cure and its boasted efficacy against all human ills, and, though he had little faith, death ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... life, in which sport had filled up so large a place and work so little, and in which he had developed so little power of initiative and such meagre self-dependence, and he envied the solemn-faced boy at his side, handling his team and wagon with the skill ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... lads trudged down the track toward the hut. Carefully they picked their way between groups of genuine refugees rearranging their meagre possessions in the coaches. ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... to recall the Melbourne of 1840, as it looked in that year, the year of my arrival. In the first place I must protest against the meagre view given some years ago in the "Illustrated London News", from a sketch by Mossman, an early colonist of my acquaintance, and copied into the lively and pleasant volume of my esteemed friend, Miss Isabella Bird (now Mrs. Bishop). It may be ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... possible to find some more bread and oil on the other side of it, but finally shaking her head she sat looking thoughtfully into her lap; only for a few minutes however, for the door opened and the slim form of her sister Klea appeared, the sister whose meagre rations she had dreamily eaten up, and Klea had been sitting up half the night sewing for her, and then had gone out before sunrise to fetch water from the Well of the Sun for the morning sacrifice ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he did thirty years ago, and expects the world never to forget it either. The more of a weakling he is, and the more incapable of repeating his former triumph, the more he thinks of it; and the more he thinks of it the more it satisfies his meagre soul, and prevents him essaying another brave venture in the world. His petty achievement ruins him. The memory of it never leaves him, but swells to a huge balloon that lifts him off his feet and carries ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... amongst the little leaders of party in that preposterous capital, watch their little tricks, the rapacity with which they clutch the meanest spoils and wonder how political profligacy grows fat upon diet so meagre and uninviting. He will come away with a conviction, already indorsed by the more respectable portion of the American community, that their government is the most corrupt under the sun; but he will not, with them, lay the flattering notion ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... upon this meagre regimen, but beyond all other evils a true Spaniard of the poorer sort dreads obesity. During the darkest night of the season he will get up at an absurd hour and stab his best friend in the back ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... experience of this master of exact literature was reduced to a minimum; but this minimum sufficed for him, precisely because of the philosophical insight which he possessed to so high a degree. To this meagre number of positive faculties furnished by observation, he applied an analysis so intuitive that he discovered, behind the small facts amassed by him in no unusual quantity, the profound forces, the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... systematic use of the Old Testament by the Puritans, as if it were "the rule of life" to Christians, I saw to be a glaring mistake, intensely opposed to the Pauline doctrine. This discovery, moreover, soon became important to me, as furnishing a ready evasion of objections against the meagre or puerile views of the Pentateuch; for without very minute inquiry how far I must go to make the defence adequate, I gave a general reply, that the New Testament confessed the imperfections of the older dispensation. I still presumed the Old to have been perfect for its own objects ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... called "eeklar." It fell in the heart of the hot weather, and, after the wedding, Slane was going up to the Hills with the Bride. None the less, Slane's grievance was that the affair would he only a hired-carriage wedding, and he felt that the "eeklar" of that was meagre. Miss M'Kenna did not care so much. The Sergeant's wife was helping her to make her wedding-dress, and she was very busy. Slane was, just then, the only moderately contented man in barracks. All the rest were more or ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... L. is one of that unfortunate class who have hitherto gained a meagre support from the stolen hire of a few slaves, and who, after entire emancipation, will be stripped of every thing. This is the class upon whom emancipation will fall most heavily; it will at once cast many out of a situation of ease, into the humiliating dilemma of laboring ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... nothing but his own regret at his necessarily meagre hospitality, for which he tried to make amends ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... chance made us acquainted with a highly extraordinary individual, a tall, bony, meagre figure, in a tattered Andalusian hat, ragged capote, and still more ragged pantaloons, and seemingly between forty and fifty years of age. The only appellation to which he answered was Manuel. His occupation, at the ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... her time in the midst of stupid English people who mumble broken French at her. Some day she will poison the soup or the vin rouge; but I hope that will not be until after mother and I shall have left her. She has two daughters, who, except that one is decidedly pretty, are meagre imitations ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... principal points of distinction being, that animals of the horse kind have long flowing manes, full tails, and warty callosities on both hind and fore limbs; while asses, on the contrary, have short, meagre, and upright manes, tails slender and furnished only with long hairs at the extremity, and their hind limbs wanting the callosities. These, however, are found on the fore-legs as ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... and the dishonour was aggravated by personal enmity to the bridegroom Edward had preferred. [The Croyland Historian, who, as far as his brief and meagre record extends, is the best authority for the time of Edward IV., very decidedly states the Burgundian alliance to be the original cause of Warwick's displeasure, rather than the king's marriage with Elizabeth: "Upon which (the marriage of Margaret with Charolois) Richard Nevile, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all her rays dispense, And shine abroad in perfect excellence; Else we may dread some greater curse at hand, To scourge a thoughtless and ungrateful land: Now war is weary, and retir'd to rest; The meagre famine, and the spotted pest, Deputed in her stead, may blast the day, And sweep the relics of the sword away. When peaceful Numa fill'd the Roman throne, Jove in the fulness of his glory shone; Wise Solomon, a stranger ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... solitary column, last relic of the great temple of Hera. I sometimes follow it as far as certain wells that are sunk, Arab-fashion, into the sand, and dedicated to Saint Anne. Goats and cows recline here after their meagre repast of scorched grasses, and the shepherds in charge have voices so soft, and manners so gentle, as to call up suggestions of the Golden Age. These pastoral folk are the primitives of Cotrone. From father to son, for untold ages before Theocritus ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... hours of darkness, his condition sufficiently betokened that many of them had been spent beneath the open sky. Besmeared with mire; his saturated clothes clinging with a damp embrace about his limbs; his beard unshaven, his face unwashed, his meagre cheeks worn into deep hollows,—a more miserable wretch could hardly be, than this man who now cowered down upon the widow's hearth, and watched the struggling ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... Merryon lay on his veranda, smoking his pipe in stark endurance while the dreadful hours crept by. Sometimes he held a letter from his wife hard clenched in one powerful hand. She wrote to him frequently—short, airy epistles, wholly inconsequent, often provocatively meagre. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... enthusiasm. Above you and around you rises the old convent and the great tower; there, in the far corner, perhaps a friar plays with a little cat, here a pigeon flutters under the arches about the little ruined space of grass, the meagre grass of the south, where now and then the shadow of a white cloud passes over the city, whither who knows. For a moment in that silent place you wonder why you have come, you feel half inclined to go back into the church, when shyly the friar comes towards ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... a very long face. It is difficult to trace the workings of such a man's mind, or to calculate the meagre chances on which he is too often driven to base his hopes of success. He feared that he could not show his face in Kimberley, unless as the representative of the whole old Stick-in-the-Mud. And with that object he had declared ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... suffered none but silent and submissive slaves to surround him. The Duchess showed herself docile to Courtin's advice, and passed in profound obscurity the many long years which, remained to her of existence. Saint-Simon and Dangeau say nothing more about her, save to enregister the meagre favours which the Court measured out with an avaricious hand, and that woman, to whom was owing the signature of the Treaty of Nimeguen, was reduced in 1689 to solicit a pension of 20,000 livres, which was considerably diminished when the disasters soon afterwards ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... with the threat of getting out guardianship papers and of confining him in the state asylum for the insane—which was reasonable for a man who had, a quarter of a century before, speculated away all but ten meagre acres of a California principality, and who had displayed no better business acumen ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... more especially the man who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr. Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his grandnephew, the last surviving human being, I ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... she was many years without succeeding in obtaining mastery over herself. At last God touched her. Her sin had never been accompanied by forgetfulness; she used often to leave the King to go and pray in her cabinet; nothing could ever make her evade any fast day or meagre day; her austerity in fasting continued amidst all her dissipation. She gave alms, was esteemed by good people, never gave way to doubt of impiety; but she was imperious, haughty and overbearing, full of mockery, and of all the qualities by which beauty with the power it bestows is naturally ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... household in Overcombe Mill was great in the extreme. John came thither daily for more than a week; but no further particulars reached England till the end of that time, and then only the meagre intelligence that there had been a gale immediately after the battle, and that many of the prizes had been lost. Anne said little to all these things, and preserved a superstratum of calmness on her countenance; but some inner voice seemed to whisper to ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... etc., until they be preferred, and then others in their places for ever."(1044) Within the last few years the City Chamberlain's accounts—touching "the lands of Mr. John Carpenter, sometyme commen clarke of this cittie"—have been brought to light, and serve to supplement in a small way Stow's meagre but valuable statement. The rental or amount with which the Chamberlain charged himself for the year 1565 or 1566 is there set down as L41 0s. 4d., and the discharge—embracing a quit rent due to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, and expenses incurred in overseeing, clothing and ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... gentleman. Such are all the interiors where Salassatore is written over the door; they bleed and they shave indifferently, and doing either, talk of the last take of thunny, the opera that has been or is to be, and the meagre skimmings of their permitted newspaper, which begins probably with the advertisement of a church ceremony, and ends always with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... be sitting amongst the first row of the spectators, close to the statue of Dionysus[72] and loaded with perfumes. Crates,[73] again, have you done hounding him with your rage and your hisses? True, 'twas but meagre fare that his sterile Muse could offer you; a few ingenious fancies formed the sole ingredients, but nevertheless he knew how to stand firm and to recover from his falls. 'Tis such examples that frighten our poet; in addition, he would ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... obtained the permission he had so eagerly sought. There had been no handkerchiefs to work upon, for two or three days, and the dinners had been rather meagre. Perhaps these were reasons for the old gentleman's giving his assent; but, whether they were or no, he told Oliver he might go, and placed him under the joint guardianship of Charley Bates, and his friend ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... known Venner. Indeed, there had been few secrets between them since the day when they had come down from Oxford together. From time to time, during his wanderings, Venner had written to his old chum a fairly complete account of his adventures. During the last three years the letters had been meagre and far between; and at their meeting a few days ago, Gurdon had noticed a reticence in the manner of his old chum that he had not ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... But I see many ways in which I may be helpful, and I know that she needs and wants the secretarial work which I have given her. Usually she holds her head high and one isn't even allowed to guess. But one does guess. Her meagre ration of life is plain beyond ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... known to send their brothers and sisters out into the world penniless, and sell from over their mothers' heads the homes in which they had hoped to die, obliging them to subsist or starve, as they might, upon their meagre "thirds." Whether justice to mother or children was done or not, depended entirely upon this one boy. And this was the brightest side of primogeniture. In cases of entailed property, very often the entail specified that it was to go to the heir male for all time. A father ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... have no relish for biographies that round the meagre skeleton of authentic facts with a plump padding of what might have been, this sentence of Paulin Paris is quite refreshing in its stern limitation to positive knowledge. And certainly no contemporary authority has yet been found ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... my sad experience in such matters, I am not at all surprised at the meagre number of replies to your ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... the friendliest welcome. A stranger would have thought her pretty, but by no means impressive. She was short, anything but meagre, fair-haired, brisk of movement, idly vivacious in look and tone. The mourning she wore imposed no restraint upon her humour, which at present ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... so many brilliant reputations which had been built up in the Lower Chamber that the general prophecy, mistaken as it was, was not at all a thing to be surprised at; Mr Punch's cartoon of Lord John Russell's entry into the House of Peers is not forgotten. The meagre little figure in robes and coronet is shown slinking by Lord Brougham similarly attired, and the latter addresses the arrival, saying, "You'll find it very cold up ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... they walked for an appetite, they doubtless lived en pension - were contracted for - otherwise their poverty would have made it a rash action. They were stooping, blear-eyed, dull old men, slip-shod and shabby, in long-skirted short-waisted coats and meagre trousers, and yet with a ghost of gentility hovering in their company. They spoke little to each other, and looked as if they might have been politically discontented if they had had vitality enough. Once, we overheard ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... small and low, the foliage of the olive thin and pale, the leaves of the fig broad and few, and the soil appearing everywhere at their roots, as well as between the rows of vines, the vegetation, when viewed from a little distance, has a meagre and ragged appearance. The whiteness of the hills, which the eye can hardly bear to rest upon at noon, the intense blue of the sea, the peculiar forms of the foliage, and the deficiency of shade and verdure, made me almost fancy myself ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... lightly outlined her own doings since she had met the young man in the Tsar's capital, and this recital brought the topic round to London, where it stayed till the final piece of steak was eaten. Theodore Racksole noticed that Mr Dimmock gave very meagre information about his own movements, either past or future. He regarded the youth as a typical hanger-on of Courts, and wondered how he had obtained his post of companion to Prince Aribert of Posen, and who Prince Aribert of Posen might be. The millionaire ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... Sometimes they had a few coppers over and above the daily expenses, sometimes they fell below that sum and had to make up the deficit on the morrow. On the occasions when they were in debt to the proprietor, they were forced to forego the small outlay required for food, and neither could afford a meagre bowl of millet. Pulling a rickshaw on an empty stomach is not conducive to health. Kwong, being an older man, found the strain very difficult, and Liu, being but a fledgling and weak and undeveloped at that, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... beginnings of the library of Worcester Cathedral. We cannot but think that a collection of books was formed slowly and steadily here, as in other foundations of the same kind, although actual records are scanty and meagre. In over forty of the manuscripts now at Worcester are inscriptions on fly-leaves stating where they were procured: sometimes the price is given. The dates of these inscriptions run from about 1283 to 1462, or later.[1] "In 1464," writes the Rev. J. K. ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... people who paraded the streets of Rome impatient for their country to enter the War, and threatening with death the Minister Giolitti who had hitherto succeeded in keeping them out of it. The grandiose bargain which the Government had made was unknown to them; but surely Mr. Trevelyan is paying meagre tribute to their idealism and liberal thought when he implies they would have been elated by a knowledge of the details of the Treaty. Ought not, rather, a people imbued with the afore-mentioned ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... as claim to be the pink of the mode. The Castle is a fine old pile, with various courts and towers, and the entrance is magnificent. It wants, however, the splendid feature of a keep. The inside fitting up is an attempt at Gothic, but the taste is meagre and poor, and done over with too much gilding. It was done half a century ago, when this kind of taste was ill-understood. I found here the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... in the early morning to breathe the scent of honeysuckle, and sweetbriar, and lemon thyme, and all the dear, old-world treasures to be found in the gardens of well-conducted farmhouses. She had a craving for flowers in these hot summer days; not the meagre sixpennyworth which adorned the saffron parlour, but a wealth of blossom, bought without consideration of cost. And one day, with the unexpectedness of a fairy ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Tillemont and Dupin are very full and very learned. But a truly immortal history of the church, exhaustive yet artistic, brilliant as well as learned, is yet to be written. The ancient historians, like Eusebius and Socrates and Zosimus, are very meagre. The genius and spirit of the early church can only be drawn from the lives ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... they observed, and then told us that thirty of their own number had died of smallpox, having been bewitched by the people of Tette, who envied them because, during the first year, none of their party had died. Six of their young men, becoming tired of cutting firewood for a meagre pittance, proposed to go and dance for gain before some of the neighbouring chiefs. "Don't go," said the others, "we don't know the people of this country;" but the young men set out and visited an independent half-caste chief, a few miles ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... English country gentleman in many cases gives the neighborhood and the stranger a certain degree of freedom in the use of the broad expanse of ground in which they and their forefathers have loved to sequester their residences. The figure kept on, showing more and more distinctly the tall, meagre, not unvenerable features of a gentleman in the decline of life, apparently in ill-health; with a dark face, that might once have been full of energy, but now seemed enfeebled by time, passion, and perhaps ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Geographical Society are some of the more recent works published in Lisbon on the topography of that country, but they are generally very meagre and unsatisfactory. In a periodical published in Lisbon in numbers, on the plan of the Penny Magazine, there is a good deal of information, with engravings, regarding many places of interest in Portugal. I think it is called The Album, but I am sorry I have not ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... gone by, and nothing more can be done concerning the poet's life except through careful study and through patient research. All students must regret that their labours have such comparatively meagre results. Though sharing in this regret, I have been able, besides adding minor details, to find at last a definite link of association between the Park Hall and the Wilmcote Ardens; and I have located a John Shakespeare in St. Clement's Danes, Strand, London, who is probably the poet's cousin. ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... of any kind, by way of breakfast. In no meal has luxury advanced more upon the model of the ancients than in this: the dinners (cn) of the Romans were even more luxurious, and a thousand times more costly, than our own; but their breakfasts were scandalously meagre; and, with many men, breakfast was no professed meal at all. Galen tells us that a little bread, and at most a little seasoning of oil, honey, or dried fruits, was the utmost breakfast which men generally allowed themselves: some indeed drank wine after it, but this ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Lazarus from the dead! That, as Bunyan justly says, would be to make a new Bible, to improve the finished salvation. No, if they will not hear Moses and the prophets, our Lord and his apostles, they must all likewise perish. This is a very meagre outline of this solemn treatise; it is full of striking illustrations, eminently calculated to arouse the thoughtless, and to convey solid instruction to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... heroic work. Balzac appears not to have been extravagant; he had neither wife nor children (unlike many of his comrades, he had no illegitimate offspring), and when he admits us to a glimpse of his domestic economy, we usually find it to be of a very meagre pattern. He writes to his sister in 1827 that he has not the means either to pay the postage of letters or to use omnibuses, and that he goes out as little as possible, so as not to wear out his clothes. In 1829, however, we find him in correspondence with a duchess, Mme. d'Abrantes, the widow ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... This is certainly a conspicuous defect in North Wales, considered as a region of fine scenery. The few lakes I have since become acquainted with, as that near Bala, near Beddkelert, and beyond Machynleth, are not attractive either in their forms or in their accompaniments; the Bala Lake being meagre and insipid, the others as it were unfinished, and unaccompanied with ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... already tried to make clear, were really based on scientific observations of a kind, and the attempt at true inferences from these observations. But whether or not the Egyptian physician desired anatomical knowledge, the results of his inquiries were certainly most meagre. The essentials of his system had to do with a series of vessels, alleged to be twenty-two or twenty-four in number, which penetrated the head and were distributed in pairs to the various members of the body, and which were vaguely thought of as carriers of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... some use; that might be seen to," said Brandon, doubtfully. "Our data are meagre enough. Your mother is dead, I suppose, and she is the only person besides yourself who knew of the crime ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... remove distempers, much more frequently to prevent them, or to chase them away in their beginnings. It is not nutritive in any great degree. But if not food, it greatly alleviates the want of it. It invigorates the stomach for the digestion of poor, meagre diet, not easily alliable to the human constitution. Wine the poor cannot touch. Beer, as applied to many occasions, (as among seamen and fishermen, for instance,) will by no means do the business. Let me add, what wits inspired with champagne and claret will turn ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Too meagre a force to embrace the opportunity, there was nothing to do but to return to Panama. There it was agreed that Pizarro, with De Candia, should go over to Spain, taking with him Peruvians and treasures, tell what he had seen, and secure the royal countenance and support ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... circumstance, he continued his flight and the doctor was then enabled to escape. After a toilsome travel of twenty-one days, during which time he subsisted altogether on wild gooseberries, young nettles, a raw terrapin and two young birds, he arrived safely at Fort McIntosh—meagre, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... awful catastrophe recorded in earlier pages of this volume. Probably the Ameer, had he desired, would not have dared to concede such demands on any terms, no matter how full of advantage. But the terms which Lord Lytton was instructed to tender as an equivalent were strangely meagre. The Ameer was to receive a money gift, and a precarious stipend regarding which the new Viceroy was to 'deem it inconvenient to commit his government to any permanent pecuniary obligation.' The desiderated recognition of Abdoolah Jan as Shere Ali's successor was promised with the ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... Neela Deo, most exalted King of all elephants, came a runner at the end of his last strength. Stripped naked, but for his meagre loincloth, the oils of his body ran thick down all his limbs and his splitting veins shed blood from his nostrils and from his mouth. In the market-place he fell and with his last breaths coughed out a ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... at a length for which we must apologise to our readers; and yet this is but a meagre sketch of the contents of a book which deals with a very large proportion of the subjects that occupy the thoughts and move the feelings of religious men. We will attempt to sum up in a few words the leading ideas of the author. Addressing a mixed ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... and was given in Paris in 1872. But after the years of war and bloodshed, its sweetness was out of place, and so it was forgotten, until it was revived again in Germany. Though the text is meagre, the opera had great success on the stages of Berlin, Leipsic, Vienna and Dresden, and so its Publisher, Paul Choudens in Paris was right, when he remarked years ago to a German critic: "l'Allemagne un jour comprendra les beautes ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... rolling their eyes in appraisement of such meagre female beauty as is on display in Christendom, bring to their judgments a capacity but slightly greater than that a cow would bring to the estimation of epistemologies. They are so unfitted for the business that they are even unable to agree upon its elements. Let one such man succumb to the plaster ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... from garrets for old folks' concerts and other like occasions, but generally they do not correspond with each other, or with the performances. The result is committed to accident. The actors wear what their meagre wardrobes of the antique furnish. The wider the divergence from present fashions the better. Chance may bring together the styles of a dozen successive periods, and render the whole without coherence. In such an exhibition our interest is felt simply in the grotesque. It shows us ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... their natural complexion. He instances this paragraph from Cibber: "The first thing that enters into the head of a young actor is that of being a heroe: In this ambition I was soon snubb'd by the insufficiency of my voice; to which might be added an uniform'd meagre person (tho' then not ill-made) with ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... a gentleman named Villiers Wyckliffe, accompanied by Dr. Moloney, called at the police-station and reported himself as being the victim of a terrible assault by which he will be marked for life. It appears from particulars to hand, which are very meagre, that two men named Morris and Winter have followed him for some months in order to be revenged for some fancied wrong. They decoyed him into a house and committed the assault complained of. We ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... about which I was doubtful. As we encamped early, and I was desirous of recruiting the horses, I employed myself in taking an observation for latitude, whilst the black boy went out to look for an opossum. He succeeded in bringing in a fine large one, which formed a welcome addition to our meagre fare. The nights ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... grown hard of flesh and tense of muscle, with his scant rations and meagre covering in the cold nights, with his long marches and fruitless risks and futile fightings, when he is shot down, has little consolation, save in the fact that the thing he and his comrades and the regiment and the army ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... well-known bark of a pack of Esquimau dogs. In another moment they dashed into the midst of a snow village, and were immediately surrounded by the excited natives. For some time no information could be gleaned from their interpreter, who was too excited to make use of his meagre amount of English. They observed, however, that the natives, although much excited, did not seem to be so much surprised at the appearance of white men amongst them as those were whom they had first met ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... been, once upon a time, an engineer and built dams that broke and bridges that fell down and wharves that floated away in the spring floods. He had been a manufacturer and failed, had been a contractor and failed, and now lived a meagre life as a sort of surveyor or land ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... attentively at her, as she put that singular question to me. It was then nearly one o'clock. All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight was a colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue. There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and self-controlled, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... had broached me upon a spit all larded like a rabbit, for I was so dry and meagre that otherwise of my flesh they would have made but very bad meat, and in this manner began to roast me alive. As they were thus roasting me, I recommended myself unto the divine grace, having in my mind the good ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... and moping Pensiveness; With Meagre, discontented Looks they sit, And watch the wasting of the ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... Copiapo, but with a coarse scanty vegetation near the Cordilleras along watercourses and on the slopes where moisture from the melting snows above percolates through the sand. In the valleys of the Copiapo and Huasco rivers a meagre vegetation is to be found near their channels, apart from what is produced by irrigation, but the surface of the plateau and the dry river channels below the sierras are completely barren. Continuing southward into the province of Coquimbo a gradual change in the arid conditions may ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... listen to a stupid lecture on geography and history; but in the present instance it was not so. The information communicated in regard to England and Scotland was so familiar to them that it was robbed of its interest; but the school-books contained only very meagre allusions to Holland and Belgium. Many of them had read Mr. Motley's eloquent descriptions of the bravery and devotion to principle of the Dutch people in their civil wars and in their terrible conflict with the Spaniards, and they ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... and blue eyes and gold lashes— Made in the mold of the Saviour, they say! Drink deep of my bosom, my starved, meagre bosom, That—keeps ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... come. His little strength was completely worn out in efforts to disentangle himself. Once a day a door opened, and Herr Hippe placed a crust of bread and a cup of water within his reach. On this meagre fare he had subsisted. It was a hard life; but, bad as it was, it was better than the horrible death that menaced him. His brain reeled with terror at the prospect of it. Then, where was Zonla? Why did she not come to his rescue? But she was, perhaps, dead. The darkness, too, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Mr. GLADSTONE, signing them, "A Literary Constituent," "A Wavering Anabaptist," and so forth, but, extraordinary to relate, I have received no answer, and no notice has been taken of my disinterested presents. The reviews were of the most meagre and scornful description. Messrs. SAUL, SAMUEL, Moss & Co. have just written to me, begging me to remove the "remainder" of my book, and charging L23 15s. 6d. for warehouse expenses. Yet, when I read Geoffrey's Cousin, I fail to see that it falls, in any way, beneath the general run ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... of last year terrified the imaginations of those who had lived through it. "Gentlemen" having again predominated in reinforcements sent from England, the crops planted and gathered in Smith's absence had been meagre, while rats brought over in one of the vessels had wrought havoc with stored grain. Like an angel of mercy was the apparition of Pocahontas, at the head of a "wild train" of Indians laden with corn and game, approaching the fort. "Ever once in four or five days during the time ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... than trout, and a novice almost always overestimates them. But the guides were not deceived. "This one will weigh four pounds and three-quarters, and this one four pounds, but that one not more than three pounds; he is meagre, M'sieu', BUT he is meagre." When we went ashore and tried the spring balance (which every angler ought to carry with him, as an aid to his conscience), the guides guess usually proved to be within an ounce or two of the fact. Any one of the senses ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... into his bunk he rested while George prepared the meagre meal of brown beans, fried salt pork, and sour-dough bread. The excellence of this last, due to the whaler's years of practice, did much to mitigate the unpleasantness of the milkless, ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... Rice is rather meagre in nutriment; it contains but little phosphorous matter, with less carbon than other cereals, and is best and most generally employed as a diet in ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... day, when my wife and I were laughing and arguing over some little domestic detail of our meagre establishment—so soon are great griefs forgotten in an overwhelming joy, of a sudden I saw her face change, and asked what was ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... foreigners who are led into their dressing-rooms while sumptuous and significant vestments are being donned; but I must confess to feeling it for them, and if my impressions of the S. Croce sacristy are meagre and confused it is because of a certain delicacy that I experienced in intruding upon their rites. For on both occasions when I visited the sacristy there were several priests either robing or disrobing. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... circumstances which gave pleasure or profit to them; and turned his youth into a long period of mental weakness and suffering, from which he recovered, indeed, by a system of moral and intellectual cold water, meagre diet, and excessive exercise, but only to remain for the rest of his days in a condition of character absolutely analogous to the bodily condition of those self-martyring invalids, who keep the gout down by taking exhausting walks, eating next ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of household goods and chattels, the property of Simonds and White, was a very meagre one indeed. The more common and necessary articles of furniture such as bedsteads, tables, benches, etc., were probably manufactured on the premises by means of the carpenter's axe, adze, hammer and saw. In addition they had a ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... but very bright blue eyes; they were fixed now earnestly on his niece. He took a glance round the little parlor where they sat. He was an old Australian, accustomed to bush life, but even he noticed how threadbare was the carpet, how poor and meagre the window curtains. Charlotte herself, too, how thin and worn she was! Could those pale and hollow cheeks ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... a dreary little procession that wound in the drizzle from Kenmuir to the little Dale Church. At the head stalked James Moore, and close behind David in his meagre coat. While last of all, as if to guide the stragglers in the weary road, come ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... of the sound views which Spencer set forth with great detail in his essay on "Physical Education." The instruction given in schools and colleges on the care of the body and the laws of health is still very meagre; and in certain subjects of the utmost importance no instruction whatever is given, as, for example, in the normal methods of reproduction in plants and animals, in eugenics, and in the ruinous consequences of disregarding sexual purity and honour. In one respect ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... and meagre; free speech was impossible over a lodging-house telephone set in the public hall. Amy, who knew little of Cope's immediate surroundings at the moment, went on in accents of protest and of grievance, and Cope went on replying in a half-hushed ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... you when we reach the Landing, Rob!' were, the meagre words that rose to my lips, but the tone of voice supplied what the words might lack. And I did not forget him or the others; and Robillard said afterward, 'By Gar, dat de best day's work I ever done, by Gar, de time ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... children, fresh from romping in the bracing prairie air, were favored with a ravenous appetite, she had little. Tom understood all this; for, constituted like her, he, too, felt the deprivations of the table, although in a less degree, and much did he worry about her meagre diet. ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... the union of those who have loved here will in the next world amount to perfect identity, that they will look back on the expressions of affection here as mere meagre strugglings after and approximation to the union which then will be ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... Shall draw me to disown them, or forsake The meagre wandering herd that lows for help— And needs me for its guide, to seek my pasture Among the well-fed beeves that graze at will. Because our race has no great memories, I will so live, it shall remember me For deeds of such divine beneficence As rivers have, that teach, men what ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small, ill- shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and gripe and tear and rend. When they spring upon their human prey they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body till the back is broken. They possess ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... My life's the destined mark. The poison'd shaft has drank my spirits deep.— Is't come to this? Conspire with rebels! Ha! I've served you, madam, with the utmost peril, And ever gloried in th' illustrious danger, Where famine faced me with her meagre mien, And pestilence and death brought up her train. I've fought your battles, in despite of nature, Where seasons sicken'd, and the clime was fate. My power to parley, or to fight, I had From you; the time and circumstance did call ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... employments. The chief of these were the Fairies, concerning whom the reader will find a long dissertation, in Volume Second. The Brownie formed a class of beings, distinct in habit and disposition from the freakish and mischievous elves. He was meagre, shaggy, and wild in his appearance. Thus, Cleland, in his satire against ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... 11-xxiii.3 is indeed repeated verbatim in 2Chronicles xxxiv. 19-32, but the incomparably more important section connected with it (xxiii. 4-10), giving a detailed account of Josiah's vigorous reformation, is omitted, and its place taken by the meagre remark that the king removed all abominations out of Israel (xxxiv. 33); in compensation his passover feast is described all the more fully (chap. xxxv.). In recording also the finding and publication of the Law, Chronicles fails to realise that this document begins now ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... proceeding was repeated at intervals of a day or two, and finally led to the conclusion that the farmer was living from hand to mouth certainly, and in all probability on charity. Besides, the "new hands" felt a growing indisposition, owing to the meagre supplies on the table, to allow themselves any latitude in the matter of eating. So they resolved to try the good old plan of days gone by, and send out a foraging party. The plans were discussed at length, and ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... ten minutes after this brief conversation, and within a quarter of an hour of the time at which the train was due at Rugby, when the carriage, which had rocked a good deal from the first, began to oscillate very violently. One meagre little elderly traveller turned rather pale, and looked nervously at his fellow-passengers; but the young man who had spoken to Henry Dunbar, and a bald-headed commercial-looking gentleman opposite to him, went on reading their newspapers as coolly as if the rocking of the carriage had been ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Edmee's private apartments, and filled the post of companion in the drawing-room. Perhaps she had received orders from her mistress not to leave us. Certain it is that she took her place by the side of the invalid's chair in such a way as to present to my disappointed gaze her own long, meagre back, instead of Edmee's beautiful face. Then she took some work out of her pocket, and quietly began to knit. Meanwhile the birds continued to warble, the chevalier to cough, Edmee to sleep or to pretend to sleep, while I remained at the other end of the room with ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... from his meagre supply of contraband, ate two large cloves, and went formally to call on her. He remained an hour, and by exercise of the most finished diplomacy, he succeeded in building up the situation exactly as he had planned it. The note ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... been printed, giving a list of employments suitable for women, but meagre in practical suggestions how to secure them. It was thought that the war would bring about a brisk demand for female labor, as great armies cannot be collected without causing a corresponding drain from many occupations into which women would thus find admission. But the melancholy facts already ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... to the sergeant, who happened to belong to the same part of the country as himself. But the sergeant, after shrugging his meagre shoulders once, paid no further attention to the deep murmuring voice at his back. It was indeed strange that Gaspar Ruiz should desert. His people were in too humble a station to feel much the disadvantages of any form of government. There was no reason why Gaspar Ruiz should wish to uphold ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Thayer felt a passing dislike of the gorgeousness and glare and frivolity of the dinner. He was the last man to assert that good art can only associate itself with homely origins, that prosperity is a deadly foe to its growth. Nevertheless, he was fully conscious that Arlt in his meagre surroundings was much nearer to his own ideals than were the immaculate guests of the evening. Thayer loved luxury; but it must not be ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... were themselves idealists of a sort, entangled in the vehicles of perception, and talking about sensations and ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these had been the elements of human nature, or even of nature at large: and only the most meagre of verbal systems, and the most artificial, can be constructed out of such materials. Moreover, they spoke much of pleasure and happiness, and hardly at all of misery and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Since the coming of the new editor, Tillman's one daily had contrived to worry along without the assistance of a patent inside, for he was an ambitious young fellow with a knack for writing snappy editorials, and he made the most of the meagre ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... say that the incident, as in the case of Hawthorne's Tales, is so meagre and the language so exquisite, that the telling seems to be quite inadequate and inferior to the reading of the story. In such cases, variety may be afforded by reading, but generally speaking, it is more effective ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... proposed to her that she should come to the yacht, and indeed leave Brookfield to go on board. But Mrs. Chump was in that frame of mind when, shamefully wounded by others, we find our comfort in wilfully wounding ourselves. "No," she said (betraying a meagre mollification at every offer), "I'll not stop. I won't go to the yacht—unless I think better of ut. But I won't stop. Ye've hurrt me, and I'll say good-bye. I hope ye'll none of ye be widows. It's a crool thing. And when ye've got no children of your own, and feel, all your inside risin' to another ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Singhalese species. It is more than probable therefore, considering the period at which M. BOSC wrote, that he obtained his information from travellers to the further east, and has connected with the habitat universally ascribed to them from old KNOX'S work (Part 1. chap. vi.) a meagre description, more properly belonging to the land leech of Batavia or Japan. In all likelihood, therefore, there may be a H. Boscii, distinct from the H. Ceylanica. That which is found in Ceylon ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... had never known the meaning of fear his dread became tenfold appalling. He must see her—and perhaps for the last time in his life. This interview might well terminate once and for all every thought of earthly happiness, and fling him back upon the meagre solace of a wilderness, which now, without ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Lady Crawley sits. She is the second Lady Crawley, and mother of the young ladies. She was an ironmonger's daughter, and her marriage was thought a great match. She looks as if she had been handsome once, and her eyes are always weeping for the loss of her beauty. She is pale and meagre and high-shouldered, and has not a word to say for herself, evidently. Her stepson Mr. Crawley, was likewise in the room. He was in full dress, as pompous as an undertaker. He is pale, thin, ugly, silent; he has thin legs, no chest, hay-coloured ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... so that on both girls and boys a desire to provide for their own wants in an honest way shall be officially inculcated. There is a Government Reformatory School, and industrial and family schools for both girls and boys are scattered over the islands. The supply of literature in the vernacular is meagre, and few of the natives have any intelligent ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... at the magnificence as well as the evident antiquity of the ruins, and spent many days of actual pleasure wandering among them. They had read of similar remains having been found in Europe; but these were rendered vague in outline by distance, and meagre in description by their utter impossibility to comprehend the actual appearance of things, the like of which they had never seen. These were more tangible. They saw and felt them; ascended and descended ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... provisions began to fail, and they eked out their meagre supply by butchering the horses taken at Port Royal. At length they came within sight of Fayal, when a new terror seized the minds of the two Jesuits. Might not the Englishmen fear that their prisoners would denounce them to the fervent Catholics of that island as pirates and sacrilegious ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... diction, Dr Johnson has said, with meagre commendation, that it has "some sentiments which leave a strong impression," and "others of excellence, universally acknowledged." This, even when the admiration of the scene betwixt Dorax and Sebastian has been sanctioned by that ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... nothing but the heaviest storms will stop them. They will be small and difficult to hit, and very difficult to damage, and their range of operations will be very large.' Colonel Capper acted on this belief, and during his time at the factory did what he could with meagre funds to encourage aviation. The policy which, in the spring of 1908, he recommended to the War Office was to buy any practicable machines that offered themselves in the market, and at the same time not to relax effort at the factory. The attempts of Lieutenant Dunne ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... subtracting one jot or tittle from a grateful appreciation of their hardships and bloodshed; neither do they dare to question the wisdom of the statesmen who directed that the war should be fought mainly by the army. Their sole intention is to point out that, if a meagre naval force could produce so great an effect against a country mainly agricultural, a very powerful naval force, blockading effectively the principal ports of a manufacturing country, would have an effect so great that ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... square stuccoed building, plain and without decoration either interior or exterior. This was used as a nunnery until about three years ago, and the wall decorations in the room used by the nuns as a chapel are still quite fresh. This room is ugly and meagre, and without attractiveness. It has a fine garden at the back, stretching out parallel to that of its neighbour, and the two together embrace an area of close upon four acres, which will make a fine playground for the projected school. These gardens are at present neglected tangles of evergreen ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the bulk of inland commerce was still being drawn by horses along the country roads. Yet Gourlay was the only carrier in the town. The wonder is diminished when we remember that it had been a decaying burgh for thirty years, and that its trade, at the best of times, was of meagre volume. Even so, it was astonishing that he should be the only carrier. If you asked the natives how he did it, "Ou," they said, "he makes the one hand wash the other, doan't ye know?"—meaning thereby that he ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... beginning of the War, that every German waiter was an emissary of the KAISER, only awaiting "The Day" when he should return to take a full revenge for meagre gratuities, still subsists in certain minds. Mr. BROOKES was manifestly disappointed when Dr. MACNAMARA assured him that the aeronaut captured in the recent raid was not, as he supposed, one of these returned Ganymedes, but was making his first ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 • Various
... the people is as simple as their houses, and as inexpensive. A Japanese family it has been calculated can live on about L10 a year. A little fish, rice, and vegetables, with incessant tea, is the national dietary. The people living on this meagre fare are, on the whole, a strong and sturdy race, but it is questionable if the national physique would not be vastly improved were the national diet also. I have touched on this matter elsewhere, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... considerable attention to this fact. It is worthy of the deepest thoughtfulness. Oh, it is a solemn fact that we descend into our children, in our weakness or strength, in our meanness or majesty, as we have lived. And what a lean, meagre, moonshine inheritance does a fashionable mother convey to her offspring! I confess that to me there is something grand in being the mother of a noble son or daughter, of a strong and virtuous family of children. If there is a just human ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... object of the enterprise, and but little versed in science, or curious about matters not immediately bearing upon their interest, and as they were written often in moments of fatigue or hurry, amid the inconveniences of wild encampments, they were often meagre in their details, furnishing hints to provoke rather than narratives to satisfy inquiry. I have, therefore, availed myself occasionally of collateral lights supplied by the published journals of other travellers ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... per cent. of the people were just making ends meet. Another 40 per cent. were always dogged by poverty. Millet was the food of 10 per cent. of the farmers; millet, salted vegetables and bean soup were the meagre diet of 5 per cent; the staple food of the remainder was barley and rice. There are few temples in Iwate compared with the rest of Japan. "Education is more backward than in other prefectures," someone said. "The farmers ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... party will continue to be a factor in Canadian politics is for the future to decide. The net result of the general election of 1921 was the almost complete disappearance of the Coalition party and the meagre election of the out and out Liberals under the Hon. William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had been a minister in Sir Wilfrid's cabinet some ten years previously. The number of Progressives elected did not come up to the general expectation, but they represent a considerable number, in fact ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... work—the Lord's work!" repeated Fleetword,—"then go forth; why didst thou not confirm me that before? and I would have hastened, not retarded thee; for, of a verity, my outward man warreth with the inward, and these supporters of the flesh," pointing with his forefinger to the thin and meagre limbs that scarcely merited the compliment, "grow weary ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... displeasure against foolish men, That live an atheist life; involves the heaven In tempests; quits his grasp upon the winds, And gives them all their fury; bids a plague Kindle a fiery boil upon the shin, And putrefy the breath of blooming health. He calls for famine, and the meagre fiend Blows mildew from between his shrivelled lips, And taints the golden ear. He springs his mines, And desolates ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... thinking to encrease the Joys of Life, Marries a Beautiful young Buxom Wife; But soon he finds himself grow cloy'd and weak, Nor can he give her half those Joys she'd take, He now Consumptive, Pale and Meagre grows, While she complaining to her Parents goes; Says she can't Love him, such a one as he. And now desires she may live sep'rately. The poor fond Parents to him trudge in haste, And reprimand him soundly for what's past. He knows no Cause—Nor thinks he is to blame, They ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... made the round of the company to collect their offerings. The crowd melted like magic, leaving him solitary, hat in hand, and with only a few sous in it for his pains. With a resigned air, the man pocketed his meagre takings, then, pushing the accordion up on his back where it was held in place by a strap, he walked, bent, staggering, towards the gate. He passed through ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... investigated thoroughly the whole subject of those blockade runners, and I believe the prospect of success is worth a giant effort for the recovery of some of that money from the sea. There must be untold quantities of it lying there, inviting even a meagre attempt to get it. The boats can be chartered cheaply; and I have learned that the necessary divers can be secured on an equitable division of the spoils. There are many details of the organization of the enterprise which I ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... spasmodically dull. Prince ARTHUR could not lift it out of the rut, nor GRANDOLPH either. Only Mr. G. shone with effulgent light through gloom of evening. Principal result of manoeuvre, beyond giving fillip to majority, is that a day will be filched from meagre holidays, and House must needs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... at every great festival; and while his heart warmed at your brilliant success, he absolutely dreaded your coming home. 'Poor fellow,' he would say, 'what a change for him, to leave the splendor and magnificence of his Prince's board for our meagre fare and altered fortunes! And then,' he added, 'as for me—God forgive me!—I can go now; but how should I bear to part with him if he comes back to me.' And now," said the count, when he had concluded a detailed history ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... because she is willing to bear them. No, her point of view will be the opposite of this. "How much," she will ask, "can I do for my mother? Is there nothing in which I can relieve her from her toils? The utmost I can render her is but a meagre compensation for her countless sacrifices for ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... whole, however, during these pre-accession years, only glimpses of Prince William's character and doings are obtainable, but, though meagre, they are sufficient to suggest that in his case, too, if we extend the saying to cover the entire period of youth, the child was father to the man. The chief, almost the only, reliable authorities for the inner history of the time are the memoirs and notes left by ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... demands a word or two of explanation; as the reader will else find it difficult to understand upon what principle of translation three 'thick set' German volumes can have shrunk into two English ones of somewhat meagre proportions. ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... Gilbert Hawkesby's niece, was a young woman of some little importance in the world. The patrons of the circulating libraries knew her as Ena Dunkeld, and shook their heads over her. The gentlemen who add to the meagre salaries they earn in Government offices by writing reviews knew her under both her names, for no literary secrets are hid from them. They praised her novels publicly, and in private yawned over her morality. Many people, her aunt Lady Hawkesby ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... marking of red dirt on them. Helen merely knew that her father had more than once climbed up here, though she had laughed at him for seeking gold upon the exalted heights. To know anything beyond this meagre and unsatisfying data, they must await ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... Greeks hailed the sea, we are told, with a mighty shout. But to them Thalassa was merely a way-mark, a sign that they were nearing home. To Kettle it was more, far more, although he could not define the relationship. He had dwelt upon the sea the greater part of his days; he had got his meagre living from her; and although at all times she had been infinitely hard and cruel to him, and he had cursed her day in and day out with all a seaman's point and fluency, she had wrapped herself into his being in a ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... to the whole. In rendering German music Italians often fail through want of discipline, or through imperfect sympathy with a style they will not take the pains to master. Nor, when the curtain lifted and the play began, was the vocalisation found in all parts satisfactory. The Contessa had a meagre mezza voce. Susanna, though she did not sing false, hovered on the verge of discords, owing to the weakness of an organ which had to be strained in order to make any effect on that enormous stage. On the other hand, the part of Almaviva was played ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... sir."—"Fearfully alarmed at the noise, I drew my curtain—." "Proceed."—"And saw a faint glimmering light enter my chamber."—"Of a blue colour, was it not?" interrogated the doctor.—"Of a pale blue! and this pale blue light was followed by a tall, meagre, stern figure, who appeared as an old man of seventy years of age, arrayed in a long light coloured rug gown, bound with a leathern girdle: his beard thick and grisly; his hair scant and straight; his face of a dark sable hue; upon his head a large fur ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... and what little he did accomplish, a vexation; while the confinement of the counting-room, with its prosaic duties, would be the worst form of slavery for the musician, his work inferior, his capacity limited, his situation intolerable but for the meagre ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... richer, but they were poorer. There began to be talk of Debs, the leader of a great labor machine. The A. R. U. had fought one greedy corporation with success, and intimidated another. Sometime in June this Debs and his lieutenant, Howard, came to Chicago. The newspapers had little paragraphs of meagre information about the A. R. U. convention. One day there was a meeting in which a committee of the Pullman strikers set forth their case. At the close of that meeting the great boycott had been declared. "Mere bluff," ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... thought of Bosinney. Since the dinner at Swithin's he had made enquiries, the result of which had been meagre, but encouraging: "One of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever is offended at this juxtaposition, and whoever can deem no revolution important which is not boisterous and material, has not yet risen to the broad and lofty viewpoint of the history of mankind. Even in our meagre histories of culture, which, for the most part, resemble a collection of variant readings accompanied by a running commentary the classical text of which has perished, many a little book of which the noisy rabble took scant notice in its ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dined, and were preparing to sally forth on a walk up Broadway, when I saw a meagre, care-worn, bilious-looking sort of a person enter the house, and proceed towards the bar, evidently with an inquiry concerning some of the inmates. The bar-tender pointed at once to me, when the stranger approached, and with a species of confidence that seemed to ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... from satisfied with the very meagre information he had received, and directly he got a favourable opportunity, he besieged Mrs. Mittens, the old housekeeper, with questions concerning the new relation who was coming to make her home with them, and of the Uncle Frank whose name he had never ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... heared, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of chains; at first it seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees; immediately afterward a spectre appeared, in the form of an old man, extremely meagre and ghastly, with a long beard and dishevelled hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands.... By this means the house was at last deserted, being judged by everybody to be absolutely uninhabitable; so that ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... somewhere beyond the mountains; and that he sometimes crossed, searching for stray cattle. That is the history of my sketch, and since I am indebted to you for its recovery, I regret for your sake that it is so meagre." ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Sister Scudder is a crispy little body, in spectacles. Her features are extremely sharp, and her countenance continually wears a wise expression. As for her knowledge of scripture, it is truly wonderful, and a decided improvement when contrasted with the meagre set-out of her table. Tea time having arrived, Lady Swiggs is invited down to a cup by a pert Irish servant, who accosts her with an independence she by no means approves. Entering the room with an air of stateliness she deems necessary to the position she desires to maintain, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... polished to the highest degree. I was astonished to see this magnificent fellow rapidly divest himself of all his clothing—turban, tunic, knickerbockers, putties—there would have been nothing left, except that a Hindu wears beneath his uniform the meagre garments which suffice for everyday life, so that when he had got rid of everything which appertained to him as a policeman he was still fit to go into Indian society. The ordinary garments of an ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... lady was for a time tearful in her forebodings that Harry would be starved, for in those days it was a matter of national opinion that our neighbours across the Channel fed on the most meagre of diet; but she was not in the habit of disputing her husband's will, and when the letter of acceptance had been sent off, she busied herself in preparing Harry's ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... poverty still hanging about her. His worries exasperated her, and the slightest attempt to control her proceedings resulted in a charge of "grumbling." Why couldn't he be nice— as he used to be? And Coombes was such a harmless little man, too, nourished mentally on Self-Help, and with a meagre ambition of self-denial and competition, that was to end in a "sufficiency." Then Jennie came in as a female Mephistopheles, a gabbling chronicle of "fellers," and was always wanting his wife to ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... section is a meagre reminiscence of Plato's discussion in Repub. viii. The interest in politics and government had died out with the loss of ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... a couple of coarse articles of clothing, and uttered a grunt. His next grasp brought up a brilliant article of apparel. He raised it to examine it at the window. The garment shone even in the meagre light. It was a waistcoat of flowered silk, sown with seed-pearls. The ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... at in this volume. I have, therefore, taken in hand a short sketch-history of mine, published some six months ago, have cut out some of it and have revised the rest, and blended it with the material of the following chapters, of which it forms nearly one-third. The result is something not quite so meagre in quantity or staccato in style, though even now less full than I should have liked to make it, had it been other than the work of an unknown writer telling the story of a small archipelago which is at once the most distant and well-nigh the youngest of English states. I have done my ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... the world under the weight of a cruel indignity, and she had been so gracefully, modestly thankful for the rest she found there. She had joined that simple circle over the way; she had mingled in its plain, provincial talk; she had shared its meagre and savorless pleasures. She had set herself a task, and she had rigidly performed it. She had conformed to the angular conditions of New England life, and she had had the tact and pluck to carry it off as if she liked them. Acton felt a more downright need than he had ever felt before to tell ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
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