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More "Petty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that all was over except the passing. Below was a black chasm; it would be but the work of a moment to slip from the harness, then all the pain and toil would be over. It was a rare situation, a rare temptation—a chance to quit small things for great—to pass from the petty exploration of a planet to the contemplation of vaster worlds beyond. But there was all eternity for the last and, at its longest, the present would be but short. I felt better for ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Wars, though petty, were numerous and cruel. The vanquished suffered death or slavery. Piracy, flourishing upon the unprotected seas, ranked as an honorable occupation. It was no insult to inquire of a seafaring stranger whether he was pirate ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... had not much leisure to think. The discomforts and petty miseries incidental on cheap travelling had the very welcome effect of making her forget, for the time being, the soul-rendering crisis through ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... human wishes strikes the more from his reckoning illusive hopes in the Future. Thus out of our threefold existence two parts are annihilated,—the what has been, the what shall be. We fold our arms, stand upon the petty and steep cragstone, which alone looms out of the Measureless Sea, and say to ourselves, looking neither backward nor beyond, "Let us bear what is;" and so for the moment the eye can lighten and ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was unfit to survive into the new age. Unable to adapt himself, he would see the Mansion's stable become a noisome garage, while he performed humble and gradually dwindling service to ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... of our grandfathers. They did indeed "walk in brave aguise." The pains these good, serious gentlemen took with their garments, the long minute lists they sent to European tailors, their loudly expressed discontent over petty disappointments as to the fashion and color of their attire, their evident satisfaction at becoming and rich clothing, all point to their wonderful love of ostentation and their vanity—a vanity which fairly shines with smirking radiance ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... of petty wars caused by trifles. In Egypt the clans Sa'ad and Haram and in Syria the Kays and Yaman (which remain to the present day) were as pugnacious as Highland Caterans. The tale bears some likeness ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... for you to enter into the feelings of a man who has been brought up as presumptive heir to a rent-roll of 12,000. You cannot imagine how the mind of a gentleman shrinks from the petty details, the meanness, the vulgarities of trade. You are aware, I presume, that all avenues of ambition except the Church, the Army, and the Legislature, are closed to our class? You cannot imagine—pardon my repeating it— ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... you are, have proved yourself to be a formidable enemy; you have courage, resolution, and apparently all the other qualities that go to the making of a successful leader; therefore I think it a thousand pities that you should be wasted, uselessly expended, in the mere gratification of a petty revenge which will benefit nobody anything; on the contrary, I am convinced that we should gain immensely by making you one of ourselves— Nay, do not interrupt me, please; hear me to the end before you attempt to reply. In ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... don't give you any news of Paris,—you know all that. You know that Ballanche wants to be an Academician, and accepts Salvandy and Dupaty as competitors,—you know the little check of January,—the miserable petty intrigues of court and newspaper and vestry;—in a word, you know how men are wanting in noble and generous sentiments, and how they make the most of their own ignoble ends and interests, to which their words and actions yet ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... pier-way, whence he walks off howling, and muttering threats of "taking the law." In vain;—there is not a magistrate within ten miles; and custom, Lynch-law, and the coast-guard lieutenant, settle all matters in Aberalva town, and do so easily enough; for the petty crimes which fill our gaols are all unknown among those honest Vikings' sons; and any man who covets his neighbour's goods, instead of stealing them has only to go and borrow them, on condition, of course, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... distressed that I was sorry for her. I heard afterward that she had begged her mother not to take the Browning book, saying that she did not believe the ladies would like it; and Mrs. Jameson had replied that she felt it to be her duty to teach them to like it, and divert their minds from the petty gossip which she had always heard was the distinguishing ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... another and the beasts indiscriminately. Over the tops of the blue-hooded carts the tall camels raised their scornful heads, and surveyed the commotion with aloof disdain. In all the world there is nothing so arrogant and haughty as a camel, and they regarded from their supercilious height the petty quarreling of man. In fifteen minutes, however, the snarl cleared itself up, and it was the camels who first managed to slither by, after which each vehicle unwound itself from ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... mountain heights of science, from the contemplation of the unchangeable and ineffable glories, into the foul fields and farmyards of earthly practical life, and become a drudge among political chicanery, and the petty ambitions, and sins, and falsehoods of the earthly herd.... And the price which he offers me—me, the stainless—me, the virgin—me, the un-tamed,—is-his hand! Pallas Athene! dost thou ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the white man is telling the black to abide upon the plantation raising cotton and corn, and further than this nothing will be required of him. He can cheat a white man or a black, steal in a petty way anything that comes handy, live in marriage or out of it to please himself, kill another negro if he likes, and lastly shoot every wild thing that can be eaten, if only he raises the cotton and the corn. But the white sportsmen of the South have never willingly granted the shooting ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... dressing-gown, was seated before a small, round table. The window opened to the floor, and I could see him in this frame like a full-length portrait. There was a bowl of coffee upon the table, in which he dipped his roll as he read his journal. I beg your pardon, ladies, for entering into these petty details, but the habit ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... complimented her upon such continued youthfulness. She had by no means forgotten the two greatest among the many losses and sorrows of her life, but the first sharp pain of them was long since over with. The lover from whom she had parted for the sake of a petty misunderstanding had married afterward and died early; but he had left a son of whom Miss Prince was very proud and fond; and she had given him the place in her heart which should have belonged to her own niece. When she thought of the other trial, she believed herself, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... of the navy, was bawling its raucous rags and mechano-nasal songs, and in the pauses between records, one could just hear the low hum of the distant dynamos. A little group in blue dungarees held a conversation in a corner; a petty officer, blue cap tilted back on his head, was at work on a letter; the cook, whose genial art was customarily under an interdict while the vessel was running submerged, was reading an ancient paper ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... marriage. Marriage would be entered upon lightly, as a thing easily done and readily undone, a state of things not very far in advance of promiscuity. Between married persons little wounds would fester, trifling sores would be angered into ulcers: any petty strife might lead to a fresh contract, made in haste and repented of with speed: then fond, vain regrets for the former partnership. Affinity would be a loose bond of friendship between families; and after divorce it would turn to enmity. The fair ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... there is not, as there is in Sarawak, any one large, powerful tribe, whose presence might have been a source of trouble, or even of danger to the young Government, but the aborigines are split up into a number of petty tribes, speaking very distinct dialects and, generally, at enmity amongst themselves, so that a general coalition of the bad elements ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... Thus the vigilant Vintner, notwithstanding all his little Arts of base Brewings, abridging his Bottles, and connecting his Guests together, does not always reap the Fruits of his own Care and Industry. Few People being aware of the underhand Understandings and Petty-Partnerships these Sons of Benecarlo and Cyder have topp'd upon them; and the many other private Inconveniences that they, in the course of their Business, are subjected to. Now, to let my Readers into this great Arcanum or Secret, ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson
... two wings added; and thus medical treatment can be given in it to the seamen, the convicts on your Majesty's galleys, the carpenters and calkers, and some sixty-six slaves of the crown. It was said that your Majesty has also carpenters ashore, besides petty court officers, and the Lascars and Moros who serve in mooring the vessels and for all the extra labor that is needed ashore; and hitherto they have had no hospital, and it was necessary to take them to Manila for treatment. [Marginal ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Various
... absolutely reeking of the human creature that uttered it—the word that Turguenieff's people are constantly uttering—is another. Moreover, in the dearth of commanding traits and stirring events, there is a continual temptation to magnify those which are petty and insignificant. Instead of a telescope to sweep the heavens, we are furnished with a microscope to detect infusoria. We want a description of a mountain; and, instead of receiving an outline, naked and severe, perhaps, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... country, and quick promotion for those who came out of the struggle with their lives. Instead, we have an expedition against some brigands' fastness, which is deserted when we arrive, or a troop to quell a petty riot which has fizzled out when we get there, and that ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... suggestion of the Duke of Shoreditch, to take the offender to the Curfew Tower. Accordingly they crossed the lower ward, and passing beneath an archway near the semicircular range of habitations allotted to the petty canons, traversed the space before the west end of Saint George's Chapel, and descending a short flight of stone steps at the left, and threading a narrow passage, presently arrived at the arched entrance in the Curfew, whose hoary walls shone ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... already made passing mention of Baynard's Castle, the grim fortress near Blackfriars Bridge, immediately below St. Paul's, where for several centuries after the Conquest, Norman barons held their state, and behind its stone ramparts maintained their petty sovereignty. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... were willing to work without preying on others. And the Inspector gives parting salute to the deported individuals by saying, "Many of them could well be spared in any community, for the rush had brought in toughs, gamblers, lewd women and criminals of almost every type, from the petty thief to the murderer." ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... party of good bohemians. The French do not bring their misery with them to the table. To dine is to enjoy oneself to the utmost; in fact the French people cover their disappointment, sadness, annoyances, great or petty troubles, under a masque of "blague," and have such an innate dislike of sympathy or ridicule that they avoid it by turning ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... perception of the brain-defect so general in women when they are taught few of life's graces and none of its serious concerns,—their paltry prepossessions, their vulgar sequaciousness, their invincible ignorance, their absorption in a petty self. And especially is this phase of thought to be expected in a boy whose heart blindly nourishes the seeds of poetical passion. It was Godwin's sincere belief that he held girls, as girls, in abhorrence. This meant that he dreaded their personal criticism, and that the ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Child in the Orchard The Source The Mountain Chapel First known when lost The Word These things that Poets said Home Aspens An Old Song There was a Time Ambition No one cares less than I Roads This is no case of petty Right or Wrong The Chalk-Pit Health Beauty Snow The New Year The Brook The Other House and Man The Gypsy Man and Dog A Private Out ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... hungry days, the vague oppressive dread of this law which is always acting the spy on them, always dogging their steps, always emptying their pockets. The poor can understand criminal law, and its justice and its necessity easily enough, and respect its severities; but they cannot understand the petty tyrannies of civil law; and it wears their lives out, and breaks their spirits. When it does not break their spirits it curdles their blood and they become socialists, nihilists, internationalists, anything that ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... and amusement. Seymour Hicks was not ill-favoured, and was always well dressed, and he was very civil, but what he really owed his social advancement to was his indomitable will. That quality governs all things, and though the will of Seymour Hicks was directed to what many may deem a petty or a contracted purpose, life is always interesting when you have a purpose and live in its fulfilment. It appeared from what he told Endymion that matters at the office had altered a good deal since he left it. The retirement of St. Barbe ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... in petty tribes, where all are equal except the women, who are slaves; where property is common, and where, consequently, there is no property at all; where one may recognize the Utopia of philosophers, and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... grave, earnest-looking man. "Would that His Majesty himself could stand on these walls and see with his own eyes, as you do, this splendid patrimony of the crown of France. He would not dream of bartering it away in exchange for petty ends and corners of Germany and Flanders, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of driving the Afghans from Mahmood Khan's fort, commanding the direct road between the cantonments and the Balla Hissar, and of occupying it with a British force, was so far advanced that the time for the attempt was fixed, and the storming party actually warned, when some petty objection intervened and the enterprise was ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... petty kings of small districts in the South of India are now known by the titles of Polygars; and the hereditary female chiefs are stiled Rana. It is prostituting the dignity of king to give that denomination ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... when special and lucrative jobs were found for him. He was a man of personal ambition, not only to the marrow of his bones, but more fundamentally—to the last drop of his blood; but even in his ambitions he was petty and did not rely on himself, but was building his career on the chance favour flung him by his superiors. For the sake of obtaining some foreign decoration, or for the sake of having his name mentioned ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... family, and his home was their resort and resting-place. Uncles and aunts always found a welcome there; cousins wintered and summered with us. Thus hospitality was an element in our education. It elicited our faculties of doing and suffering. It smothered the love and habit of minor comforts and petty physical indulgences that belong to a higher state of civilization and generate selfishness, and it made regard for others, and small sacrifices for them, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... absolute ruler of Austria, set aside the conflicting claims, and parcelled out the states among petty rulers all looking to him for political guidance. Italy was "only a geographical expression," he remarked with satisfaction. Cadets of the Austrian house held Tuscany and Modena, and Marie Louise, the ex-empress, was installed at Parma. Pius VII took up the papal domain in ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... other fashionable hawkers at fancy fairs to pick his Grace's pockets. We are somewhat curious to know what a Wellington bandana would realise, especially were it the produce of some pretty lady P.'s petty larceny. "Charity," it is said, "covereth a multitude of sins." What must it do with an umbrella? We fear that Lady P. will some day figure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... splendor of courts, the pomp and circumstance of war, in tourneys, and in pageantry. Full of the love of adventure, he would travel across half of Europe to see a gallant feat of arms, a coronation, a royal marriage. Strength and courage and loyalty were the virtues he loved; cowardice and petty greed he hated. Cruelty and injustice could not dim for him the brilliance of the careers of those brigand lords who ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... down to the ground, and there and in neighboring trees we romped and played all afternoon. And then came trouble. She was my sister, but that did not prevent her from treating me abominably, for she had inherited all the viciousness of the Chatterer. She turned upon me suddenly, in a petty rage, and scratched me, tore my hair, and sank her sharp little teeth deep into my forearm. I lost my temper. I did not injure her, but it was undoubtedly the soundest spanking she had ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... alternately white and aflame with unreasoning anger. "Prescott, you had it in for me. That was why you reported me this morning. That was why you put me in line for demerits and punishment tour walking. You are bound to use your little, petty authority to humble and humiliate me. I shall call you out ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... cheated out of their birthright. They desired to be in public life, and be "somebody," but they are not, and so their life grows tame and tasteless to them. They are disappointed. The men solace themselves with a petty justice's commission, or a town office of some kind, and the women—some of them—talk about "woman's rights," and make themselves notorious and ridiculous at public meetings. I think women have rights which they do not at present enjoy, but I have very ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... vengeance, called vendetta, still exists in the villages; where the people having no social amusements, nothing to read, nor any other resource than cards during the winter nights, are apt to quarrel over trifles; which, fanned by their local petty jealousies, assisted often by the generous nature of their wine, ripen ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... younger brethren. The king, instead of restraining this imperious spirit in his son, as he might, perhaps, have done by a considerate and kind, and, at the same time, decisive exercise of authority, teased and tormented him by sarcasms and petty vexations. Among other instances of this, he gave him the nickname of Short Boots, because he was of inferior stature. As Robert was, however, at this time of full age, he was stung to the quick at having such a stigma attached to him by his father, and ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... had accompanied us all day, and pointed out to us the best place to cross the river. Some of them also assisted us in carrying our things across, while one or two attempted petty thefts. I caught one with two straps belonging to a saddle, and a pair of Mr. Kennedy's spurs in his basket, which I took from him and sent him away. Many of these natives were painted all over ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... in expression. The Colonel's face is lined with weather, with age, with eating and drinking, and with the cumulative effects of many petty vexations, but not with thought: he is still fresh, and he has by no means full expectations of pleasure and novelty. Cuthbertson has the lines of sedentary London brain work, with its chronic fatigue ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... known in Europe from the seventh century, at which period they migrated from the Carpathians to the Danube, were in the twelfth century divided into petty states. ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... the side of honour, justice or humanity, on the side of the will of the centuries or the human race, nor even on the side of prudence and self-interest, that allows you to avoid it. Is it not better and more worthy of yourselves than all the subtleties, plottings and petty bargainings of diplomacy? ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... objectionable and tasteless externalities of the liberal movement—with which he was unfairly preoccupied even at the time of Die Epigonen, a score of years later—to the greater and enduring core of the aspirations of the modern age. The petty things were too near to his eye and obscured the greater things which were further removed. He thought he upheld a higher principle of morality by applying the principles of von Stein to a new situation; but be failed to see the new, larger ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... amusing to listen to the petty jealousies and the little grumblings of those not satisfied with their lot at table. One lady stated as an excuse for having her meals in her cabin that her neighbour, a bagman—or "drummer," as Americans would call him—made a noise with his mouth while eating; and another ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of amusement in his big eyes, "and that is the care they take of those useless feet of theirs. Lulu's even taken to doing hers up every night in oil or cream. It's their particular vanity. Now, take that, for instance. Men never have those petty vanities. I ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... the lack of definite utterances in the party platforms. Since each side was loath to press forward to the solution of any real problem facing the nation, the campaign was confined, for the most part, to petty or even corrupt partisanship. The career of General Garfield was carefully overhauled for evidences of scandal. Arthur's failings as a public officer were duly paraded. General Hancock was ridiculed as "a good man weighing two hundred and forty pounds." Some attempt was ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... flour, meal, in fact, every thing edible, became legitimate plunder for the negroes when the rations furnished them were scanty. I believe that in nine cases out of ten the petty thefts which the negroes committed were designed to supply personal wants, rather than for any other purpose. What the negro stole was usually an article of food, and it was nearly always stolen from ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... this may be "funny," but it is not dramatic. It reminds one of the most forced passages of Artemas Ward's generally fresh and unforced humor. But perhaps the worst instance in all Robertson's play of this pitiful sacrifice of situation and character to a petty "joke" is found in Caste. Sam Gerridge, a gas-fitter and plumber, desiring to marry Polly, the daughter of Eccles, a drunken old brute, tells him so, casually mentioning that to prove his affection he will do anything he can in "the way of spirituous liquor or tobacco." This ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... an answer to your last, which, on reflection, pleases me as little as it probably has pleased yourself. I will not wait for your rejoinder; but proceed to tell you, that I had just then been greeted with an epistle of * *'s, full of his petty grievances, and this at the moment when (from circumstances it is not necessary to enter upon) I was bearing up against recollections to which his imaginary sufferings are as a scratch to a cancer. These things combined, put me out of humour with ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... A.S.C. officer on board ready to start for rail-head with twenty-four hours' supplies. Beyond the maze of "points" is moored the strangest of all rolling-stock, the grey-coated armoured-train, within whose iron walls are domesticated two amphibious petty officers darning their socks. ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... tamed by two words. "Hapless existence!" he exclaimed; then pausing, seemed to muse, and after a while continued, "'tis but too true; comedian or tragedian, all for me is an affair of acting and costume; so it has been hitherto, and such it is likely to continue. How fatiguing and how petty it is to pose—always to pose, in profile for this party, in full face for that, according to their notions! To guess at the imaginings of drivelers, and seem to be what they think one ought to be. To study how to place them between hope and fear—dazzle ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Heaven! when I gaze on thee, and think when and how we are next to meet, I could even wish myself one of thine own degraded nation; my hand conversant with ingots and shekels, instead of spear and shield; my head bent down before each petty noble, and my look only terrible to the shivering and bankrupt debtor—this could I wish, Rebecca, to be near to thee in life, and to escape the fearful share I must have ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... larger, and kept alive in the leading cities by the continual presence of foreign emissaries. With us it would be far more like Satan's kingdom, inasmuch as our states are more numerous, relatively more petty, and, from the increased powers of modern knowledge and modern invention, capable of ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... man inspired, and beside himself. One of the comedians calls him a rhopoperperethras—a loud declaimer about petty matters; from rhopos, small wares, and perperos, a loud talker; and another scoffs at him for the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... passage was considered to have been made under the circumstances, and several vessels that had left before and at the same time were sheltering in Elsinore roads, while others had put into Norwegian ports. Mr Hobkirk was much gratified by his captain's performances, and would not listen to the petty gossip that had been sent by some busybodies about him drinking and being absent from the vessel while at the loading port. He deemed it necessary, however, to mention the matter to the captain, who on his arrival at the Tyne was asked to spend an evening with the owner and discuss things ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... Journal of a Naturalist:"—"The yellow and brown-tailed moths," he observes, "the death-watch, our snails, and many other insects, have all been the subjects of man's fears, but the dread excited in England by the appearance, noises, or increase of insects, are petty apprehensions compared with the horror that the presence of this Acherontia occasions to some of the more fanciful and superstitious natives of northern Europe, maintainers of the wildest conceptions. A letter is now before me from a correspondent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... a still wider view of this question. If I quote the right hon. gentleman the Member for West Birmingham, let me assure the House that I do not do so for the purpose of making any petty charge of inconsistency, but because the words which I am going to read are wise and true words, and stand the test of time. When the right hon. gentleman spoke at Manchester in 1897, not in the distant days ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... our author's seems to have been taken upon memory, and is not very exact. Schovten's seamen, or rather the petty officer who commanded his long boat, insulted the natives grossly before they offered any injury to his people; and then, notwithstanding they fired upon them with small arms, the islanders obliged ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... chance for a concession which may win concessions in its turn. The Victorians are imminently dissatisfied and would seem to have a right to be so. Federation is on all accounts to be desired, but it has yet to be fought for, and will only be gained with difficulty. Wise men long for it, but the petty jealousies of rival states will hold it back from its birth-time as long as delay is possible. How infinitesimally small these jealousies are nothing short of a residence in the land can teach anybody. Wisdom will have its way in the long run, ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... and pillaged their houses, loudly praying for a new and just assessment of the land; while, throughout the country, the farmers have hailed with acclamations the resumption of the sovereign power by the Mikado, and the abolition of the petty nobility who exalted themselves upon the misery of their dependants. Warming themselves in the sunshine of the court at Yedo, the Hatamotos waxed fat and held high revel, and little cared they who groaned or who starved. Money must be found, and ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... we were pleased with our new servant, Uncle Joe and his family were not, and they commenced a series of petty persecutions that annoyed him greatly, and kindled into a flame all the fiery particles of his ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Petty and Pettit are variant forms of Fr. petit, small. In Prowse and Prout we have the nominative and objective (Chapter I) of an Old French adjective now represented by preux and prude, generally thought to be related ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all, and in all," is quoted as evidence of the Divine wishes. "So overwhelming," continues the bishop, "is the flood by which all petty distinctions of nation, caste, privilege, rank, climate, position in civilization are effaced, and one grand distinction substituted." And yet, at another part of the Circular, we are told that the distinctions in civil society are acknowledged by the Gospel, when ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... you much to pay two thousand crowns, And bear the name and port of gentlemen?— Cut both the villains' throats;—for die you shall. The lives of those which we have lost in fight Be counterpois'd with such a petty sum! ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... conceived a large contempt for Aunty Rosa as he saw how easy it was to deceive her. "She says I'm a little liar when I don't tell lies, and now I do, she does n't know," thought Black Sheep. Aunty Rosa had credited him in the past with petty cunning and stratagem that had never entered into his head. By the light of the sordid knowledge that she had revealed to him he paid her back full tale. In a household where the most innocent of his motives, his natural yearning ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... with warning close behind? The pictures in his mind were gorgeously coloured. It was Richard Vance who somehow streaked them through with black. A thing of darkness, born of this man's unassertive presence, flitted ever across the scenery, marring its grandeur with something evil, petty, dreadful. He held a horrible thought alive. His mind was thinking ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... intention to stop there, for which cause I kept Strap ignorant of my success, and continued my career until I was reduced to five guineas, which I would have hazarded also, had I not been ashamed to fall from a bet of two hundred pounds to such a petty sum. ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... I hoped to triumph over my hereditary handicap and to build for myself a reputation which should rise above the petty disabilities of caste and place my name upon a level with those of Haeckel, Weismann, Wallace, Focke and the other great students who have helped to advance our knowledge ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... truth of immortality. Let a man live now in the light of the knowledge that he is to live forever. How it will deepen and strengthen the meaning of his existence, lift him above petty cares and ambitions, and make the things that are worth while precious to his heart! Let him really set his affections on the spiritual side of life, let him endure afflictions patiently because he knows ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... devotion than the young type-setter's. I admit her to the intimacy of my study, I make room for her among my books, I set her in the sun on my window-ledge, I visit her assiduously at her home, in the country. The object of our relations is not to create a means of escape from the petty worries of life, pin-pricks whereof I have my share like other men, a very large share, indeed; I propose to submit to the Spider a host of questions whereto, at times, she ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... expression; sure of seeing all the little precious every-day peculiarities of the man or woman peep out, one after another, quite unawares. The long maundering stories about nothing, the wearisome recitals of petty grievances, the local anecdotes unrelieved by the faintest suspicion of anything like general interest, which I have been condemned to hear, as a consequence of thawing the ice off the features of formal sitters ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... goodwill or judgment of their employers, whose minds were divided between keeping down the wages and the rates, and who had little of real principle or knowledge to guide them. It was possible to have recourse to the magistrates at the Petty Sessions, who could give an order which would override the vestry; but it was apt to be only the boldest, and often the least deserving, who could make out the best apparent cases for themselves, that ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... burghers, whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and industry of both Flanders ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... but, as the trimmers of his day would have told him, doubled his influence. Pitt resigned his place as Prime Minister of England, rather than break faith with the Catholics of Ireland. Should I not resign a petty ballot rather than break faith with the slave? But I was specially glad to find a distinct recognition of the principle upon which we have acted, applied to a different point, in the life of that Patriarch ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Weil, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, on the 21st December 1571. His parents, Henry Kepler and Catherine Guldenmann, were both of noble family, but had been reduced to indigence by their own bad conduct. Henry Kepler had been long in the service of the Duke of Wirtemberg as a petty officer, and in that capacity had wasted his fortune. Upon setting out for the army, he left his wife in a state of pregnancy; and, at the end of seven months, she gave premature birth to John Kepler, who was, from this cause, a sickly child during the first years of his life. Being obliged ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... by the exasperated troops and fanatical population. It was known that the number of Englishmen there was not large, two or three hundred at most; but there was a much larger number of the lower class of Europeans—port labourers, fishermen, petty shopkeepers, and others—who had preferred taking their chance to the certainty of losing all their little possessions, ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... class, and of the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-seer, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... that he joined the regiment a certain Corporal Warne and he had conceived an antipathy to one another, which Rake had to control as he might, and which the Corporal was not above indulging in every petty piece of tyranny that his rank allowed him to exercise. On active service Rake was, by instinct, too good a soldier not to manage to keep the curb on himself tolerably well though he was always regarded ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... a hard word for an American young man to have suggested in relation to his wife. If we may believe the French romancer, a Frenchman would simply have smiled in amusement on detecting this petty feminine ruse of his beloved. But American men are in the habit of expecting the truth from respectable women as a matter of course; and the want of it in the smallest degree strikes them as shocking. Only an Englishman or an American can understand ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... woman-kissed, my life that seemed to me as bright, every second of it, as bright ducats rushing in a pleasant plenteous stream from one hand to another, was after all intended to be no more than a kind of ironic commentary on, and petty contrast to, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... head. Major Widdicombe was a big man, but the town was fairly swarming with men bigger than he. There were shoals of magnates, but giants in their own communities were petty nuisances here pleading with room-clerks for cots and with head waiters for bread. The lobby was a thicket of prominent men set about like trees. Several of them had the Congressional look. Later history would record them as the historic ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... outsider. Should the man by any chance die, their situation would be such that their only safety would lie in flight. To the law they were already fugitives and consequently to be suspected of anything from petty larceny to murder. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... degree, sturdy beggars, taverners who plunder the families of careless men of their property, and the country of its barley for the bread of the poor. All these are thieves of the first water," said he; "and the rest are petty thieves, for the most part, and keep at the upper end of the street; they consist of highway robbers, tailors, weavers, millers, measurers of wet and dry, and the like." In the midst of this discourse, I heard a prodigious tumult at the lower end of the street, where there ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... idled and drank itself away during that period of inaction. Hundreds of men had drifted away to other places in search of work. Almost as many more had taken to the road to swell the ever-increasing number of professional tramps, and, in time, to develop into petty thieves and criminals. But those who remained had a desperate struggle with poverty. Philip grew sick at heart as he went among the people and saw the complete helplessness, the utter estrangement of sympathy and community ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... where we see a section of the polished life of the time—men and women making and receiving compliments, discoursing on affairs with easy lightness, flitting backwards and forwards with a thousand petty hurries, and among them one singular figure, hoarse, rough, sombre, moving with a chilling reality in the midst of frolicking shadows. But the shadows were all in all to one another. Not a point of conduct, not a subtlety of social motive, escaped ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... habits, that a speck of dirt will stain, are very suitable to trail over green swards, but not fit to bring into the houses of the poor, for fear they should be spoiled. "Oh," he cried, "I have no patience with such rules, such petty observances. I have often asked myself why the Bishop chose to put me here, where I am entirely out of sympathy, where I am useless, where there is nothing for me to do really, except to try to keep my temper. I have spoken of this matter to no one before, but, since ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... man's wife labours under no such naive folly. She may envy her husband, true enough, certain of his more soothing prerogatives and sentimentalities. She may envy him his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... scatter and fly in all directions like startled game. It is useless; they are a race of cowards. They are a mongrel set after all. Yet here must be our starting point. We must compel the folks here to tackle to the business—a petty village cannot take the initiative without some ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... something stronger than words, and surer than the acquiescence of others. This was to be the lesson of the years between 1794 and 1815, administered to us not only by the preponderant navy of Great Britain, but by the petty piratical fleets of ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... boatmen. They are a fine body of men. I have heard them maligned. Certainly they have petty rivalries and jealousies, but this is not their fault. They fish all the seasons around and have been there for years. Boatmen at Long Key and other Florida resorts—at Tampico, Aransas Pass—are not in the same class with the Avalon men. They want to please and to excel, and to number you among ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... with the devil? He would try to hope that the scheme might not fail, but what each one had to consider was the question, "Shall it fail through my cowardice, my greed, my supineness, my prudential cautiousness, my petty prejudices, ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... members of Congress here to join in that pledge. The American people returned to office a President of one party and a Congress of another. Surely, they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore. No, they call on us instead to be repairers of the breach, and to move on ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... to wrest valuable possessions from it. The successors of Charles V. were unable to breast the storm of progress successfully, and the imperial authority was completely shattered. The power of the petty rulers of small states increased and overshadowed that ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... General Johnston's headquarters, the One Hundred and Fourth Ohio being ordered to remain near the station till more complete arrangements were made. Our object had been to have force enough to guard the arms and stores against petty pillage or destruction, but not enough to provoke a collision with the larger organizations of the Confederates. Johnston had declined the hospitality of citizens of Greensborough, partly from a motive of delicacy, as I suspect, fearing ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... these markets, or trader's yards, all the time. People who lived in the city of Richmond would send their slaves here for punishment. When any one wanted a slave whipped he would send a note to that effect with the servant to the trader. Any petty offense on the part of a slave was sufficient to subject the offender to this brutal treatment. Owners who affected culture and refinement preferred to send a servant to the yard for punishment to inflicting ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... himself with my purchases. I gave him six francs to hand over to his servant, but he hinted that he was not too proud to keep them himself. I was disgusted at this petty greed, and at his meanness in depriving his maid of the six francs after having made a good profit in what he had sold me; but I wanted to stand well with him, and I was not sorry to find so simple a way of throwing dust into his eyes. So while I resolved ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "Although the petty rule of my life has been never to trouble myself about what the world calls 'politics'—(a fine word, by the by, much easier expressed than understood)—yet, I must own, I am always happy when I see a nation enjoying itself, and melancholy when I observe any large body of ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... and considered the iron mouth cut straight like a slit across the face, the hard, insignificant countenance and the small, cold, grey eyes. He realised the intensity of the petty anger based, for the most part, on jealousy because he was now independent and could not be ordered about and bullied like the rest of the little boys, and knew that behind it there was not affection, but dislike. Summing up all this in his quick ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... those days by an unsophisticated race, existing in all the simplicity of nature; that is to say, they lived by hunting and fishing, and recreated themselves occasionally with a little tomahawking and scalping. Each stream that flows down from the hills into the Hudson, had its petty sachem, who ruled over a hand's-breadth of forest on either side, and had his seat of government at its mouth. The chieftain who ruled at the Roost, was not merely a great warrior, but a medicine-man, or prophet, or conjurer, for they all mean the same thing, in Indian parlance. ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... little-minded men, cruel, and desirous of exacting the uttermost farthing in the way of revenge, forgetting that you owe everything to me. I do not wish to exculpate myself, mind you. Looking at the case from your point of view, and in your own petty way, I can almost sympathize with you. But as for accepting your terms—do you know me so little as to think that I could do so? Have you not learnt that I may break, but shall never bend? And, if I chose now to face the matter out, I should beat you, even now when you hold all the cards in your ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... discussion of the London traffic problem as we practise it in our clubs is essentially the sage turning over and over again of such fragmentary schemes, headshakings over the vacant sites about Aldwych and the Strand, brilliant petty suggestions and—dispersal. Meanwhile the experts intrigue; one partial plan after another gets itself accepted, this and that ancient landmark perish, builders grow rich, and architects infamous, and some Tower Bridge horror, some vulgarity of the Automobile Club type, some Buckingham Palace atrocity, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... at Canton." Apparently the Chinese authorities acted on the assumption that so long as there remained even one offending European the mass of his countrymen ought to be hindered in their avocations, and consequently petty restrictions and provocations continued to be enforced. Then Captain Elliot, seeing that the situation was hopeless and that there was no sign of improvement, took the bold, or at least the pronounced, step of ordering all British subjects to leave Canton or to stay at their ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... nature, the system was a complex one. It gave rise to countless misunderstandings between the various grades of its involved hierarchy. The opportunities and plausible pretexts for misunderstandings, quarrels and war were many. A petty quarrel in Burgundy, in Champagne, in the Berry in France, involved not only the duke and count of these territories but almost every vassal or feudal lord in the province. The same might be said of the German nobles in Suabia, ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... Mrs. Hazleton. Even the finest and the strongest and the stoutest minds are more frequently affected unconsciously by external things than any one is aware of. The sweet influences or the irritating effects of fine or bad weather, of beautiful or tame scenery, of small cares and petty disappointments, of pleasant associations or unpleasant memories, nay of a thousand accidental circumstances, and even fancies themselves, will affect considerations totally distinct and apart, as the blue or yellow panes of a stained ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... talking of "soch things:" she holds it petty treason to speak of it, as they are both in office about the Court; though she confessed it would be ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... he was. I could make none of the men understand me. Most of them were Finns—big broad-shouldered, ruddy, light-haired, bearded fellows; very good-natured and merry, notwithstanding the harsh treatment they often received. Big as they were, they were knocked about like so many boys by the petty officers, and I began to feel rather uncomfortable lest I should come in for share of the same treatment, of which I had had enough from the hands of old Growl. I determined, however, to grin and bear it, and do, as well as I could, ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... instance in Cos alone 800 talents (195,000 pounds) which the Jews had deposited there were carried of by Mithradates. The northern portion of Asia Minor and most of the islands belonging to it were in the king's power; except some petty Paphlagonian dynasts, there was hardly a district which still adhered to Rome; the whole Aegean Sea was commanded by his fleets. The south- west alone, the city-leagues of Caria and Lycia and the city of Rhodes, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... sincere, upright Western girl; and Blue Bonnet had found all the sweet fine qualities that abounded in Annabel's nature. There are moments, living as intimately as boarding-school girls live, when the mask that hides selfishness, hypocrisy and petty jealousy, slips away, revealing the true nature. To Blue Bonnet's somewhat critical eye, Annabel had measured up under all circumstances; and Annabel had found Blue Bonnet as fair and loyal, as honest and just, as was possible in this world where human ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... Well, that's interesting, too. Aren't you rather astonished, Miss Vance, to see what a petty thing Beaton is making of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... noun "corporal," meaning a petty officer, is not derived from corpus: it comes from the French caporal, of which ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... is a punishment for petty thefts and delinquincies. Trial by red water is generally applied to crimes of greater magnitude. After the usual ceremonial of calling a palaver, the operation is performed by heating a piece of iron in the fire, the hand of the accused is dipped into a viscous preparation, and the iron ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... promised domestic arrangements for the day, they had taken it for granted that she must have met with me at some distance from home—and that either the extreme beauty of the day had beguiled her of all petty household recollections, or (as a conjecture more in harmony with past experiences) that my impatience and solicitations had persuaded her to lay aside her own plans for the moment at the risk of some little domestic inconvenience. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... have said, executioners were wanting. There were barely twenty men at hand in the courtyard, all belonging to the petty tradesfolk of Avignon—a barber, a shoemaker, a cobbler, a mason, and an upholsterer—all insufficiently armed at random, the one with a sabre, the other with a bayonet, a third with an iron bar, and a fourth ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... alike are pained at the effacement of Plataeae and Thespiae. Is it not then reasonable that out of agreement should spring concord rather than discord? It is never the part, I take it, of wise men to raise the standard of war for the sake of petty differences; but where there is nothing but unanimity they must be marvellous folk who refuse the bond of peace. But I go further. It were just and right on our parts even to refuse to bear arms against each other; since, as the story runs, the first strangers to whom our forefather ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... animals killed in the chase; cultivates the little patch of maize, pumpkins, and pulse, which furnishes a great part of their provisions. Their time for repose and recreation is at sunset, when, the labors of the day being ended, they gather together to amuse themselves with petty games, or hold gossiping convocations on the tops ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... [Petty robberies.] Small robberies occur very frequently, but they are committed—as an acquaintance, a man who had spent some time in the country, informed me one evening when I was telling him my troubles—only upon the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... New Englanders understand this language. The strangers wanted food. Some of them sought hospitality at the doors of the stately mansions, which then stood in the vicinity of Hanover Street and the North Square. Others were applicants at the humble wooden tenements, where dwelt the petty shop-keepers and mechanics. Pray Heaven, that no family in Boston turned one of these poor exiles from their door! It would be a reproach upon New England—a crime worthy of heavy retribution—if the aged women and children, ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... armies work together as a single United Service, and how to make the people who were not warriors work with the warriors for the welfare of the whole United Empire. Of course he had a wonderful head and a wonderful heart. But his crowning glory as an Empire-maker is that he could rise above all the petty strife of party politicians and give himself wholly to the Empire in the same spirit of self-sacrifice as warriors show upon the field ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... because we knew that General French was moving towards us on that side from Bloemfontein, with the object of getting the Boers on the inside of two forces, and so giving them no chance of escape. We had only a few men wounded, one petty officer of the Scouts killed, and a negro driver killed, which was simply marvellous when one considers the terrible amount of ammunition used during the day. That night all the correspondents had to sleep, or try to sleep, with the transport. It ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... their very bookkeepers and office-boys will be bribed, and all the secrets of their business passed on to their enemies. They will find that the railroads do not treat them squarely; cars will be slow in coming, and all kinds of petty annoyances will be practised. You know what the rebate is, and you can imagine the part which that plays. In these and a hundred other ways, the path of the independent steel manufacturer is made difficult. And now, Mr. Montague, this is a project to extend a railroad ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... heterogeneous materials, which have in a longer or a shorter space successively crumbled to decay. At a time when the kings of Egypt had never ventured beyond their borders, unless it were for a foray in Ethiopia, and when in Asia no monarch had held dominion over more than a few petty tribes, and a few hundred miles of territory, he conceived the magnificent notion of binding into one the manifold nations inhabiting the vast tract which lies between the Zagros mountain-range and the Mediterranean. Lord by inheritance (as we may presume) of Eliun and Chaldaea or Babylonia, he ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... that system prevails from the Supreme Court of the State down to the petty Police Magistrates, before whom ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... opened the case. He was young and zealous. Recently elected to the office, this was his first batch of cases, and he was anxious to make as good a record as possible. He had no doubt of the prisoner's guilt. There had been a great deal of petty thieving in the county, and several gentlemen had suggested to him the necessity for greater severity in punishing it. The jury were all white men. The prosecuting attorney ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... had filled his spare hours with work, happy, exuberant, overflowing with a quaint vitality. A description of the desert in spate, thumb-nail sketches from a station-agent's window, queer little flavorous stories of crime and adventure and petty intrigue in the town; all done with a deftness and brevity that was saved from being too abrupt only by broad touches of color and light. And he had had a letter. He told Miss ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... expect an old man such as I to follow all the changes of your petty laws, and to remember under which form of government he happens to be living at the moment!" he had boldly said to a great personage from St. Petersburg, and the observation was duly reported in the capital. It was, moreover, said in Warsaw that the law had actually ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... would take the recipe at its word, and dine on the surrounding structure; and in spite of the cottage economy, he was nearly as hungry after dinner as before it, and people began to say that he had never recovered his looks since his illness. These daily petty acts of self-denial and self-restraint had begun to tame his spirit and open his eyes in a manner that neither precept nor example had ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the matters of the grape jug and the book of poems. For a whole week the Old Lady fought her pride and bitterness. Sometimes, in the hours of sleepless night, when all human resentments and rancours seemed petty and contemptible, she thought she had conquered it. But in the daytime, with the picture of her father looking down at her from the wall, and the rustle of her unfashionable dresses, worn because of Andrew Cameron's double dealing, in her ears, it got ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... disguise That wraps his breast, and tells him that he lies. He comes: the languid sufferer lifts his head And smiles a welcome from his weary bed; He speaks: what music like the tones that tell, "Past is the hour of danger,—all is well!" How can he feel the petty stings of grief Whose cheering presence always brings relief? What ugly dreams can trouble his repose Who yields ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... as usual in such cases, had fallen upon the bravest and most forward. It was to be feared, that if they were suffered to exhaust their zeal and efforts in an object so secondary as the capture of this petty fort, their numbers would melt away by degrees, and they would lose all the advantages arising out of the present unprepared state of the government. Moved by these arguments, it was agreed that the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of savings before the old bachelor's eyes; Pons had declined happiness accompanied by so many pimples. From that time forth the Dido of the ante-chamber, who fain had called her master and mistress "cousin," wreaked her spite in petty ways upon the poor musician. She heard him on the stairs, and cried audibly, "Oh! here comes the sponger!" She stinted him of wine when she waited at dinner in the footman's absence; she filled the water-glass to the brim, to give him the difficult task of lifting it without ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the spot where they had been exposed and brought up. And there was an overflowing population of Albans and of Latins. The shepherds too had come into that design, and all these readily inspired hopes, that Alba and Lavinium would be but petty places in comparison with the city which they intended to build. But ambition of the sovereignty, the bane of their grandfather, interrupted these designs, and thence arose a shameful quarrel from a beginning sufficiently ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... being a sovereign, and with his son Tippoo Sahib. Our longest and most severe contests were with the Mahrattas, a warlike tribe of Hindus in Western India, who came first into prominence in the seventeenth century under Sivajee, a petty chieftain, and gradually advanced under various leaders till they became for a time the paramount power. Their hordes of horsemen scoured the country in all directions, north and south, east and west, demanding the chauth, the fourth part of the revenue, ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... than mine?" said Barto, and he roared the 'viva' like a melodious bull. Yet Wilfrid saw that he had been recognized. In the hour of triumph Barto Rizzo had no lust for petty vengeance. The magnanimous devil plumped his gorge contentedly on victory. His ardour blazed from his swarthy crimson features like a blown fire, when scouts came running down with word that all about the Porta Camosina, Madonna del Carmine, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... been disturbed," Bending said carefully, "but I don't think anything is missing, except the petty ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... on the part of Ravenscroft ended a petty controversy, which gives him his only title to be named in the life of an ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... have heard, with a smile, of the insignificant wars and uprisings in those little tropic republics. They make but a faint clamour against the din of great nations' battles; but down there, under all the ridiculous uniforms and petty diplomacy and senseless countermarching and intrigue, are to be found statesmen and patriots. Don Rafael Valdevia was one. His great ambition was to raise Esperando into peace and honest prosperity and the respect of the serious nations. ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... carefully guarded himself from his own eager desire to accept it Barter's every action with the cards offered confirmation of the belief that he had taken possession of the lost notes. He was certainly a petty rascal, and there was obviously nothing but opportunity needed to make him bloom into a rascal on a larger scale. So the temptation to drop the cards upon the table, to look his companion in the face, and to ask simply, 'How about that eight thousand pounds?' grew more and more upon him, ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... resolve is made and followed; so that instead of the thorn to goad and wound, there springs up in the pathway of the Reconciled the olive or the myrtle. How sweet is the sight of human goodness, struggling to surmount the petty passions which discolor its beauty, and bending to the benign suggestions of that pure and gentle principle, peace with man! Doubtless there are many severe strivings with natural pride, before these ends can be reached; but the new ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... the lack of funds, because the Government—loved by the Powers on account of its weakness—has to part with all its funds to the military chieftains who fight each other and plunder the country, as in Europe—for China must be compared with Europe, not with any one of the petty States into ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... gendarmes, and their object is more to preserve the peace in places where different races meet, animated with fanatical hatred of each other. But during the whole time of our sojourn in Montenegro, we never witnessed a single case of men arrested for petty offences, or for breaking the peace by common brawling or drunkenness. The only cases that we did see were connected with the vendetta, which still flourishes. In the course of our travels in the land we have sufficiently ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... over other strips of turf. And the world, that one looks out upon through prison bars, that is so gloriously arched in the arm of a flying buttress, or that lies prone at your feet from the dizzy heights of the rock clefts, is not the world in which you, daily, do your petty stretch of toil, in which you laugh and ache, sorrow, sigh, and go down ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... But if the petty annoyances that beset our friend in the fore part of that day may be styled harassing, those with which he was overwhelmed towards evening may be called exasperating. First of all he broke the top ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... not quite know what to make of Kitty, but hoped to break her in by and by, and meanwhile she was very gentle, and Kitty loved her, although she never could be got to see that so many restrictions and so many little petty rules were not good, but extremely bad, ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... honours, even his disappointments, concur with natural graces to make him seem too distinguished (a fitter word fails me) for this world. Omnia vanitas! he seems to say, yet with a profound resignation, which makes the things we are most of us so fondly occupied with look petty enough. Omnia vanitas! Is that indeed the proper comment on our lives, coming, as it does in this case, from one who might have made his own all that life has to bestow? Yet he was never to be seen at court, and has lived here almost as an exile. Was our ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... he is neither strong enough nor clever enough for the job. He has made a wretched little whirlpool in the mighty River of Becoming, interrupting—as he imagines, in his own interest—its even flow: and within that whirlpool are numerous petty complexes and counter-currents, amongst which his will and attention fly to and fro in a continual state of unrest. The man who makes a success of his life, in any department, is he who has chosen one from amongst these claims and interests, and devoted to it his energetic powers of heart and will; ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... heart, what a long chapter we have been betrayed into! We had quite forgotten all such petty restrictions as chapters, we solemnly declare. So here goes, to give the goblin a fair start in a new one. A clear stage and no favour for the goblins, ladies and gentlemen, if ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... expressed desire was to be an artist out and out, to live like an artist, not to be troubled with the hindrances and petty restrictions of an ordinary woman's life, which she was tempted to despise, to which, if she yielded at all in her mother's house, it was with scarcely concealed reluctance and aversion. Very likely she had only the most one-sided conception of the life she would ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... be included all petty Criminals and Bridewell Birds, all which should be transported at the Expence of the County to which they belong, as also should all Convicts and Felons; and in Virginia should there be appointed proper Persons to take Care of them, ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... from petty thievery to bank defaulting. Some of the possibilities are horse and automobile stealing, burglary, hold-ups, train and street-car robbery, embezzlement, fraud, kidnapping, safe-cracking, shop and bank robbery. ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... learn that the district between Hobaboe Creek and 'Stricken Heuvel' contained, in 1829, eight sugar and five coffee and plantain estates, and now there remain but three in sugar and four partially cultivated with plantains by petty settlers: while the roads, with one or two exceptions, are in a state of utter abandonment. Here, as on the opposite bank of the river, hordes of squatters have located themselves, who avoid all communication with Europeans, and have seemingly given themselves up altogether to the ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... large illicit importation into the country for a decade after 1825. It is hardly possible, however, considering the activity in the trade, that slaves were not largely imported. Indeed, when we note how the laws were continually broken in other respects, absence of evidence of petty smuggling becomes presumptive evidence that collusive or tacit understanding of officers and citizens allowed the trade to some extent.[147] Finally, it must be noted that during all this time scarcely a man suffered for participating in the trade, beyond ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... crowded during the dinner-hour. Barbers and their assistants, cabmen, scene-shifters, if there was an afternoon performance at the theatre, servants out of situation and servants escaped from their service for an hour, petty shopkeepers, the many who grow weary of the scant livelihood that work brings them, came there. Eleven o'clock! In another hour the bar and the room upstairs would be crowded. At present the room was empty, and Journeyman had taken advantage of the quiet time to do a bit ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... man who usually danced with some one else. And there were other girls with a Spanish strain in them—girls with a drop of blood that might have been traced back a hundred years to Madrid or Seville or Barcelona. Small wonder if such girls felt like shrieking too, sometimes. Not over petty victories, and with joy; but when their hearts broke because the bells of memory called to them from away in the barred windows of Spain, or in walled gardens, or with the shepherd ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... despotism was the warlike attitude of other similar despotic lords, who always sought to advance their own interests by the force of arms. Feudalism in form of government was the antithesis of imperialism, yet in effect something the same. It substituted a horde of petty despots for one and it developed a petty local tyranny in the place of a ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... brought into collision with broadcloth.[467] This brings us to the subject of the covers called "housses" by French upholsterers, and which may come under the head of small decorations, or rather, of petty disfigurements. The things which went by the horrid name of "antimacassars" have, however, given way to "chair-backs," and crochet has been displaced by linen veils worked in crewels. This is a step in the right direction. No well-regulated eye could do otherwise than suffer ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... "These petty devices are innocent enough," said Mdlle. de Cardoville, "and I confess that I do not scruple to have recourse to them." Then, leaning towards the door-sash, she added: "Gracious! how sad and dark are these streets. What wind! what snow! In which ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... tragedy in every death-bed;" there may be no distinction of great or little, high or low. But it is an affectation to confound what shall be with what is. We cannot dissociate ordinary incidents from the petty wants out of which they ordinarily spring, nor common language from the common-place thoughts which it usually expresses. The action in tragedy must be relative to the situation; and if the situation be one which we are unable to separate from ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... an angel. The primal burden of our race-existence, Mankind's perpetual perpetuation, Weighs on weak womanhood; we bear the race And all its natural ills, yet still our fellows, Who proudly call themselves our lords and masters, Do heap upon us petty wrongs, and load Us down with their oppressions. I cannot tell What rich reward my suffering may bring, But bide the piercing, like this patient cloth, In hope ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... any danger if our boys go below to the stateroom?" she asked the petty officer, who was holding the rope connected with the tackle ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... shall the State grant a share in the formulation and execution of its laws? Once, in communities very enlightened, in their own peculiar way, women, children, slaves, mechanics, petty traders, and hired servants were deemed quite unfit to be entrusted with such responsibilities. [Footnote: ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... foul—so that she could undo her magic on the spot. And there he sat on the woodbox, his cap between his hands, a pitiful sight. Maren had judged him aright, there was nothing manly about him, he fought with words instead of fists. The men of the Sand farm were a poor breed, petty and grasping. This one was already bald, the muscles of his neck stood sharply out, and his mouth was like a tightly shut purse. It was no enviable position to be his wife; the miser was already uppermost in him! Already he was shivering with ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... earth. It will not be opened in London. He can make up another packet to resemble precisely the one of which he robbed Dorward. Oh! it is a difficult game, I know, but it is worth playing. Remember, Louise, that we are not petty conspirators. It is your country's very existence that is threatened. It is for her sake ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... squire of the old times, having no inclination for London seasons, never wishing to keep up a second house, quite content with his position as quire of Bragton, but with considerable pride about him as to that position. He had always liked to have his house full, and had hated petty oeconomies. He had for many years hunted the county at his own expense, the amusement at first not having been so expensive as it afterwards became. When he began the work, it had been considered sufficient to hunt twice a week. Now the Rufford and Ufford hounds ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... execration of his fellow-men. And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their dismal business with an almost malignant persistency. Longwindedness, pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible desire to magnify one's own wretched little achievements, to pose as the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them to the whole world in every dull detail, regardless of the right of other men ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... appears to me very happily adjusted: had it been greater there would not have been a sufficient number of lawful retailers to put a stop to clandestine sellers; and if it was lower, every petty dealer in this commodity might, by pretending to keep an alehouse, continue the practice of affording an harbour to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... draught without a particle of embellishment to redeem it. In the class there was a boy who was a very eagle, and he always read his lucubrations aloud. Oh! with what unction he read out his pretty creations! (He is now settled in a manufacturing town, and has become the most prosaic of petty bailiffs.) One day the subject given out was: "A Shipwreck." To me the words had a lyrical sound! But, nevertheless, I handed in my paper with only the title and my name inscribed upon it. No, I could not make up my mind to elaborate the subjects given to us by the "Great Ape"; ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... wet to the skin, and even on a scorching day in August that is anything but a pleasant sensation. Then, too, the way was rough, and the briers and brambles along the path scratched their hands and tore at their clothing. Ordinarily all these petty annoyances would have tended toward making them irritable and cross, but on this day all such trifles passed over their heads unnoticed. For had they not between them done a marvelous thing? To save ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... Celtic inhabitants of England. It is unlikely that they were, as was formerly supposed, all killed or driven to the mountain districts of Wales. More probably they were gradually lost among the dominating Germans with whom they merged into one people. The Saxon and Angle chieftains established petty kingdoms, of which there were seven or eight at the time when Gregory the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... dangers that were sure to beset him. Nor had he thought to search for any. Long before the judge had concluded his recital of conditions in the county Hollis had decided to meet the issue squarely. He had been able to see beyond the petty, personal side of the question; had even ignored it to get at the big, pithy principle of equal rights. The Law must come. If he could assist in bringing it he would be accomplishing something real and tangible ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... hand, while I rifled their coffers, and took forth their effects; but one thing is imputed to me, which I cannot die without denying—it is asserted that I stole an extinguisher; the contemptible character of this petty theft is a stain upon my reputation, that I cannot suffer to disgrace my memory." So would I now address you for all the graver offences of my book; I stand forth guilty—miserably, palpably guilty—they are mine every one of them; and I ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... laughter as Harold related his experience at the railway-station. The Connollys had rested for several days under the ban of the most rigid boycott, and had become used to small discomforts. They faced the situation bravely, and turned all such petty troubles into jest; but the American was sorely disquieted to learn that there was only one servant in the house—an old man who for many years had blacked boots and cleaned knives for the family, and who had refused to crouch to heel under the ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... it is a fact that his mouth rested exactly over one of the rings of holes; and his position seemed very satisfactory, for some reason, for he hung there motionless so long that I began to fear he was dead. All these petty pilferers may possibly have regarded the treasure as nature's own provision, like the flowers, but one visitor to his neighbor's magazine certainly knew better. This was the brilliant cousin of the sapsucker, the red-headed ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... religious is willing, not only to absolve, but even to baptize or marry the Indian, unless he gives up his slaves; for these generally are, or were, stolen from other countries, or taken in unjustifiable petty warfare, or made slaves for very small debts—of which the majority admit no other payment than their enslavement—others by usury and barter according to their custom, and by other methods, even more unjust than these. It is necessary for his Majesty to ordain some method ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... to the persuasive arguments of a life-insurance agent; he "allowed" that he was willing to bet on almost any kind of game, but declined to take a hand in one where he had to die to win. It is painful to think of the infinity of petty economies, of all the grievous deprivations, the positive hardships, undergone in so many millions of families, day by day, and year by year, to secure these policies of insurance; but, as Plato said, "the good is difficult." There is no heroism where there is no self-sacrifice. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... here," says he, "Saviol Prokofitch, you must pay the peasants what's fairly owing to them! Every day they come to me with some complaint!" Your uncle slapped the provost on the shoulder, and says he: "It's not worth while, your Worship, for you and me to waste our breath over such petty details! I have to do with numbers of peasants in the course of the year; you can understand, if I pay them a paltry farthing short, every man of them, it mounts up to thousands, and a capital thing too for me!" Think of that, sir! And the way they treat one another too, sir! They ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... years pass. When Will Shakespeare is six, he hears that he is to go to school. But not to nod over a hornbook at the petty school—not John Shakespeare's son! Little Will Shakespeare is entered at King's New College, ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... reigning heads of European families are married, and their sons are too young for Elizabeth and Amelia. I cannot marry my grown-up daughters to boys; nor can I bring a set of insignificant sons-in-law to hang about the court. My husband the emperor would never consent to bestow his daughters upon petty princes, who, instead of bringing influence with them, would derive their reflected consequence from an alliance with us. If we cannot find them husbands worthy of their station, my daughters must remain single, or ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... inoffensive islanders will nigh pass belief. These things are seldom proclaimed at home; they happen at the very ends of the earth; they are done in a corner, and there are none to reveal them. But there is, nevertheless, many a petty trader that has navigated the Pacific whose course from island to island might be traced by a series of cold-blooded robberies, kidnappings, and murders, the iniquity of which might be considered almost sufficient to sink her guilty timbers to the ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... be over here. No girl has ever had her own way all her life more than you! Believe me, you have no idea what it would mean to be tied to a rope of convention that would tighten like a noose at any struggle on your part. As the wife of a man like di Valdo, you would be bound by endless petty formalities. Another thing—which your aunt has made me realize—as an American, you would have to excel the Italians in dignity in order to be thought to equal them. Things perfectly pardonable for them would finish you. ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... Clear Eyes The Child in the Orchard The Source The Mountain Chapel First known when lost The Word These things that Poets said Home Aspens An Old Song There was a Time Ambition No one cares less than I Roads This is no case of petty Right or Wrong The Chalk-Pit Health Beauty Snow The New Year The Brook The Other House and Man The Gypsy Man and Dog A Private ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... people must have strangely altered, then, in five years. Our New York population has hitherto had very little of the assassin-like character. Tar and feathers are the blackguards', and have been the petty tyrants' weapons, from time immemorial, in this country; but ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... and in every direction and expression of man's activity. It is the inexhaustible fountain of that lofty energy which communicates itself to every channel that carries inspiration to life and to art. Religion is the influence that redeems the mere shallow, surface presentation,—the petty trick to capture popularity, and holds art true to its real purpose. The glory of the mediaeval art of Italy owed its greatness to religion. Cimabue and Giotto were directly inspired by that spring of a diviner life given to Italy and later to the world of that "sweet ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... yoke of the conquerors, adopting, in some degree, the manners and habits of the Arabians. On the destruction of the caliphat of Cordova, in the year 1031, the dismemberment of the Moslem territories into petty Independent kingdoms, often at variance with each other, afforded the Christians a favorable opportunity of reconquering their country. One after another the Moorish states fell before them. The Moors were driven farther and farther to the south, and by the middle of the thirteenth century ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... enough just now to catch a four-footed live deer. No sooner does a man die, but you would think he had swallowed the lead of his coffin. Come along! Lord! how helpless it is! Why, he shall no more kick at his petty devouring, no, no more than if he were a dead king! [Exit with ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... nothing could be named but he had been planning just that for years, and should by-and-by get leisure for it, and there really was not enough left to call out the energies of any one else. Not from any petty egotism, but simply from inordinate activity, he stood ready to take all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... intermediate class, called boat-steerers. One of them came in Captain Terry's boat, but we thought he was cockswain of the boat, and a cockswain is only a sailor. In the whaler, the boat-steerers are between the officers and crew, a sort of petty officers; keep by themselves in the waist, sleep amidships, and eat by themselves, either at a separate table, or at the cabin table, after the captain and mates are done. Of all this hierarchy we were entirely ignorant, so the poor ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... to the great questions on which the welfare of a nation rests, if only his own private interests be advanced. All politicians are not so small and contemptible; many are honest, as far as they can see, but can see only petty details, and not broad effects. Mere politicians,—observe, I qualify what I say,—mere politicians resemble statesmen, intellectually, as pedants resemble scholars of large culture, comprehensive intellects, and varied knowledge; they will ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... terminated, could never have arisen if Cuba had not afforded a market for slaves. As long as this market shall remain open there can be no hope for the civilization of benighted Africa. Whilst the demand for slaves continues in Cuba wars will be waged among the petty and barbarous chiefs in Africa for the purpose of seizing subjects to supply this trade. In such a condition of affairs it is impossible that the light of civilization and religion can ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... gulf doth draw What's near with it: it is a massy wheel Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortised and adjoined; which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... securing of an alliance with the Flemish burghers, whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and industry of both ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... prosecution of his ambitious designs, the influence of the monarchy had been extended over eastern and central France—from Flanders, on the north, to the volcanic mountains of Auvergne, on the south. Meanwhile the oppressed subjects of the petty tyrants, whether within or around his domains, had learned to look for redress to the sovereign lord who prided himself upon his ability and readiness to succor the defenceless. His grandson, the more illustrious Philip Augustus (1180-1223), by marriage, inheritance, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... minimal importance: it treats artificial problems in a grammatical spirit, seldom giving any proof of experience or imagination. What painters say about painting and poets about poetry is better than lay opinion; it may reveal, of course, some petty jealousy or some partial incapacity, because a special gift often carries with it complementary defects in apprehension; yet what is positive in such judgments is founded on knowledge and avoids the romancing into which litterateurs and sentimentalists will gladly wander. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... who had learned in his oligarchical profession the way to command,—"but, sir, you shall, or if you mutiny you leave our body, and then will the hangman have no petty chance of your own. Come, come! ingrate as you are, what would you be without me? How many times have I already saved that long carcass of thine from the rope, and now would you have the baseness ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sun are to the frailest tendril, no answer came to my mute appeal. My little weaknesses and childish errors were never met with that enduring forbearance which is the distinctive outgrowth of a loving maternity. My trifling joys were rarely smiled upon, my petty sorrows never shared nor soothed by that unsympathetic guardian of my youth, and so I grew up by myself in a strange sort of isolation, alienated in heart and spirit from those with whom of necessity I ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... cast Kilmer into the role of hack journalist: he would have claimed no other title. Yet he adorned Grub Street (that most fascinating of all thorny ways) with gestures and music of his own. Out of his glowing and busy brain he drew matter that was never dull, never bitter or petty or slovenly. In the fervent attack and counter-attack, shock and counter-shock of his strenuous days he never forgot his secret loyalty to fine craftsmanship. He kept half a dozen brightly coloured balls spinning in air at all times—verses, essays, reviews, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... of a National School! Consider the horror of it! I expect her brother must be a very low sort of person. If she can read and write it is as much as we need hope for. That is the worst of living in one of those petty villages, ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... while, the job was finished. The petty officer in charge of the work pushed in the switch, and the pump started, sucking dry with a harsh racket. The natives twittered in surprise. Then the water came, and the pump settled down ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... is a scandal. People should be given a chance to forget. I dare say it would have been better for her if she had been turned into a scullion or something of that kind. Of course he's trying to make money in every sort of petty way, but in such a business there'll never be enough for anybody ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... elsewhere? or is this A preparation in the wond'rous depth Of thy sage counsel made, for some good end, Entirely from our reach of thought cut off? So are the' Italian cities all o'erthrong'd With tyrants, and a great Marcellus made Of every petty ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... she felt, lest its display should afterward bring humiliating regret. She told him as clearly as she could the reason why she could not become his wife, and to his unspiritual judgment it seemed a petty cause. He was accustomed to seeing a type of religion that could exist in harmony with the world, and he did not see why the fact that Winifred was a Christian and had become uncommonly interested in that sort of thing should hinder her being the best ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... intellectual pursuit. They have come to know the strength of numbers, solidly phalanxed and driving onward with singleness of purpose. These purposes may be various and many, but one and all, ever discovering new mutual interests and objects, obeying a law which is beyond them, these petty aggregations draw closer together, forming greater aggregations and congeries of aggregations. And these, in turn, vaguely merging each into each, present glimmering adumbrations of the coming human solidarity which shall ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... in Australia, where his father was clerk of petty sessions, he was seized at the age of fourteen with an intense longing to go to sea. It is possible that he inherited this passion through his mother, for her father, Charles Beilby, who was private secretary to the Duke of Cumberland, invested ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... Gray's Inn, they asked me if I could find employment for him. He was a bright, clever-looking youth, and I took him as a clerk. He came to me in May, 1827, and left in November, 1828; and I have now an account-book which he used to keep of petty disbursements in the office, in which he charged himself with the modest salary first of thirteen shillings and sixpence, and afterwards of fifteen shillings, a week. Several incidents took place in the office of which he must have been a keen observer, as ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of that island, who were divided into a great number of petty nations, under a very coarse and disorderly frame of government, did not find it easy to plan any effectual measures for their defence. In order, however, to gain time in this exigency, they sent ambassadors to Caesar with terms of submission. Caesar could not colorably reject their ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... was to her not one of the gay people around her could suspect, for she was obliged to fawn and smile as if she were in thorough sympathy with the scene, and to attend to her duties as hostess and to all the petty details required by so-called etiquette, in order to preserve the prestige which she had acquired ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Gian Giacomo de' Medici had hitherto acted with a single-hearted view to his own interests. At the age of thirty he had raised himself from nothing to a principality, which, though petty, might compare with many of some name in Italy—with Carpi, for example, or Mirandola, or Camerino. Nor did he mean to remain quiet in the prime of life. He regarded Como Lake as the mere basis for more arduous undertakings. Therefore, when the whirligig of events ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... avail them little: during the Terror their stipends were unpaid, and the churches were for the most part closed. After a partial respite in 1795-6, the coup d'etat of Fructidor (1797) again ushered in two years of petty persecutions; but in the early summer of 1799 constitutionals were once more allowed to observe the Christian Sunday, and at the time of Bonaparte's return from Egypt their services were more frequented than those of the Theophilanthropists on the decadis. It was evident, then, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Insignificant as these words may appear, I still regard them as entitled to be recorded—nay, I would even write them as town-motto on the gate of Goettingen, for the young birds pipe as the old ones sing, and the expression accurately indicates the narrow, petty academic pride so characteristic of the "highly learned" Georgia Augusta.[51] The fresh morning air blew over the highroad, the birds sang cheerily, and, little by little, with the breeze and the birds, my mind also became fresh and cheerful. Such refreshment was sorely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to me? Have I no bays to crown it? No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? All wasted? Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, And thou hast hands. Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures. Leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage, Thy rope of sands, Which petty thoughts have made—and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw, And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. Away! Take heed— I will abroad. Call in thy death's-head there. Tie up thy fears. He that forbears ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... float, Benjy would instruct him in the doings of deceased Browns. How his grandfather, in the early days of the great war, when there was much distress and crime in the Vale, and the magistrates had been threatened by the mob, had ridden in with a big stick in his hand, and held the petty sessions by himself. How his great-uncle, the rector, had encountered and laid the last ghost, who had frightened the old women, male and female, of the parish out of their senses, and who turned out to be the blacksmith's apprentice disguised ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... is seldom captious, and honesty seldom suspicious; a man capable of comprehending the whole extent of a question, disdains to divert his attention by trifling observations; and he that is above the practice of little arts, or the motions of petty malice, does not easily imagine them incident ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... appreciate, and never can forget their illustrious countryman. The lines of Tasso, "Un uom della Liguria avra ardimento," etc., and the following stanza, Tu spiegherai Colombo a urn nuovo polo, etc. are in the mouth of everyone.[117] The Hall of the Petty Council is neat, but it is the recollection of the history of this once famous Republic that renders the examination of this Palace so interesting. But now Genoa's glory is gone; she has been basely betrayed into the hands of a Government ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... like the dogs wuz atter him," then they point straight back. He was made to be eaten, and he knows it. So it is with the whole tribe of deer, and even with the horse, pampered and cared for and unacquainted with danger; his ears are a weathercock registering the drift of all his petty hopes and fears. I see the left ear go forward and prepare for a desperate shy at that wheelbarrow. He knows a wheelbarrow familiarly—there is one in his stall all day—but I am taking him a road he does not ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... think that, tired and half starved, our poor fellows will be marching to their death, leaving their enemies very little work to do beside cutting down the stragglers. Ah, depend upon it, all these little petty generals think they have a great victory within their hands without any cost to themselves, and that none of our poor fellows will ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... were all assembled to partake of some refreshments, it was delightful to find that there were not enough chairs for half the party. We borrowed each other's knives and forks too, and etiquette, that petty tyrant of ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... pledge of amnesty, were either handed over to the executioner or sent to linger for life, loaded with fetters, in some of the prison ambas. For the next three years Theodore's rule was acknowledged throughout the land. A few petty rebels had risen here and there, but with the exception of Tadla Gwalu, who could not be driven from the fastness of his amba in the south of Godjam, all the others were but of little importance, and did not disturb the ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... American colonies of England did not think of union as of a peace scheme; they had been compelled into it by war, by the necessity of self-defense. It is only such an overpowering motive which has force enough to blot out petty rivalries and minor antagonisms. If union between States belonging to the same race and not divided either by history or by serious conflicting interests could be effected only under the pressure of a common peril, we must infer "a minori ad majus" that such a powerful incentive ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... delay, to tell you how political quarrels might be otherwise settled. But grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them: and that, while questions of a few acres, and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or saving of kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge if it will ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the wife had yielded in the beginning not only to her husband's bad temper but also to the antagonism of her mother-in-law, which was, of course, annoying in many petty ways, she might have gained her husband's friendship, and it is possible that she might, moreover, have gained the friendship of ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... dismayed at the prospect. I prayed for cloud and storm, and darkness. Human heart! when blinded by its own petty passions, unreasoning and unreasonable; my petition was opposed to the unalterable laws of nature—it could not ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... self-assertion must, of themselves, expire. "Stand firm in the Lord." In recollection and faith surround yourselves with Jesus Christ. The more you do so the more you will find that so to be in Him is to "be of one mind in Him." In that PRESENCE self is put to shame indeed. Pique, and petty jealousies, and miserable heart-burnings, and "just pride," die of inanition there, and heart meets heart ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... He adored his wife, who thought poorly of his intellect, but highly of his heart. In domestic difficulties Wimp was helpless. He could not even tell whether the servant's "character" was forged or genuine. Probably he could not level himself to such petty problems. He was like the senior wrangler who has forgotten how to do quadratics, and has to solve equations of the second degree ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... Dorothy Fair's room, had her mind not been fixed upon its one end, which was above all such petty details of existence, might well have looked about her. No such dainty maiden bower was there in the whole village as this. Madelon's own chamber, carpetless and freezing cold, with its sparse furniture and scanty sweep of white curtains ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ordinances passed by the town meeting; a town clerk, who keeps a record of the proceedings of the town meeting, and a record of births, deaths, marriages, etc.; a treasurer, assessors and collectors of taxes, constables, and various other petty officers. Several offices are frequently given to the ...
— Government and Administration of the United States • Westel W. Willoughby and William F. Willoughby
... sma' matter to be entered in the records of the Burgh court as a petty law-breaker. And if I continued to feed the dog I would be ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... weary time of his stay came up, and in succession the series of injuries and petty annoyances to which he had been subjected by his cousin passed before him, strengthening ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... possibly leading him to his old weakness of resorting to liquor, but Doctor Hissong made his canvass upon a high plane, appealing to the voters from a standpoint of the duties and responsibilities involving this honor, and ignoring the petty thrusts of his opponent. ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... law had two qualities in an out-of-the-way place that have pretty well died out now. These qualities were laxity and severity—the disposition to go to extremes; and in this case some idea of the way in which the work of petty sessions was carried on will be grasped when it is told that after the examination the chairman of the bench of magistrates, an old landholder of the neighbourhood, shook hands with the squire, and then ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... summer the O'Valley Leather Company discovered that Mary Faithful made quite as efficient a manager as Steve O'Valley himself. Nor did she neglect any of a multitude of petty details—such as the amount of ice needed for the water cooler, the judicious issue of office supplies; the innovation of a rest-room for girls metamorphosed out of a hitherto dingy storeroom; the eradication of friction between two ancient bookkeepers who had come to regard the universe as ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... have overthrown? And if we turn our eyes towards our own country, how many of these instruments of Napoleon do we not see, who, after having fatigued him with their servile complaisance, have come to offer to a new power the tribute of their petty machiavelism? Now, as then, is it not upon the basis of vanity and corruption that the whole edifice of their paltry science rests, and is it not from the traditions of the imperial government that the counsels of their wisdom ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... delinquent, as the children of the gentleman to whom we allude are honest enough to acknowledge their four-footed playmate's failings to papa, who willingly compensates any damage the pastrycook may sustain from the petty depredations ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... the army, Perron reigned over it in the plenitude of sovereignty. "He maintained all the state and dignity of an oriental despot, contracting alliances with the more potent Rajahs and overawing by his military superiority, the petty chiefs. At Dehli, and within the circuit of the imperial dominions, his authority was paramount to that of the Emperor. His attention was chiefly directed to the prompt realization of revenue. Pargannahs were generally farmed; a few were allotted as jaidad to chiefs on ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... the King of Scots of the robberies and evil doings of Andrew Barton; and that it became not one prince to lay a breach of a league to another prince, in doing justice upon a pirate or thief".[60] These personal irritations and petty troubles might have proved harmless, and, had no European complications intervened, it is possible that there might have "from Fate's dark book a leaf been torn", the leaf which tells of Flodden Field. But, in 1511, ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... value to the Indians. They used it simply to make ornaments, and when it was not taken from them by force, they were cheerfully willing to exchange it for beads, trinkets, hawks' bells, and any other petty trifles. Comagre was the father of a numerous family of stalwart sons. The oldest, observing the Spaniards brawling and fighting—"brabbling," Peter Martyr calls it—about the division of gold, with an astonishing degree of intrepidity knocked over the scales at last and dashed the stuff ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Jew, who seems to have been a model husband (Orientally speaking), would find no pity with a coffee-house audience because he had been guilty of marrying a Moslemah. The union was null and void therefore the deliberate murder was neither high nor petty treason. But, The Nights, though their object is to adorn a tale, never deliberately attempt to point a moral and this is one ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... keyhole view of humanity. Spiritually, Mr. Kipling may be said to have seen thousands of miles and thousands of places through keyholes. In him, wide wanderings have produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thing as the hoard in a miser's garret. Many of his poems are simply miser's shrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened. He cannot even praise the flag of his country without a shrill note ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... trowel, and talked about the great and enlightened public, and about the highest function of the drama, and about the duty of the artist to elevate, and about the solemn responsibility of theatrical managers, and about the absence of petty jealousies in the world of the stage. Everybody had vociferously applauded, while reporters turned rapidly the pages of their note-books. "Ass!" Edward Henry had said to himself with much force and sincerity—meaning ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... bears off the treasures deposited there, scattering dismay and ruin amidst a hundred families, the essence of his crime is that he makes the narrow principle of his selfish desire paramount over the broad principle of the public welfare, setting the petty good of his individual enrichment above the weighty good represented by that respect for the right of property which is a condition essential to the life of the community. The principle on which he acts, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... foundation-stones upon all this worldly dirt, and its dome in the clear serene of the world of Spirit. He who can mount to a clear conception of Nirvana will find his thought far away above the common joys and sorrows of petty men. As to one who ascends to the top of Chimborazo or the Himalayan crags, and sees men on the earth's surface crawling to and fro like ants, so equally small do bigots and sectarians appear to him. The mountain climber has under his feet ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... crafty than ambitious, more depraved than naturally wicked," says M. Malouet: "resentment towards the court had hurried him into intrigue; he wanted to become formidable to the queen. His personal aim was vengeance rather than ambition, that of his petty council was to effect an upheaval in order to set the prince at the head of affairs as lieutenant-general ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... red man calls the Hot Moon, that a little fleet, consisting of three small bateaux, fitted out at Montreal, and conveying a body of pale-faced warriors, under the command of one whose hair was white and whose face was seamed with scars, entered the mouth of the Oswego[A]. This petty armament was joined at the beginning of the following season of sleep by a great number of canoes that contained the traders, artizans, and labourers, with their families, together with such tools ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... tell it you now. The King of Spain, whose good fortune it is to bear sway over these provinces, has no right to govern them otherwise than the petty princes who formerly possessed them ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... right and correct them. Political corruption and "graft," they said, were rampant everywhere, destroying the country and blighting every enterprise and industry. A Young Turk told me that many manufactories would be started were it not that the rapacity of the horde of petty officials was such that all must get a share of the spoils before a license could be granted, and that paying this toll would amount to much more than the cost of the factory. From the sultan down ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... first. The stricken father was there, dragged from his dead by the petty concerns of this world which cannot bide for grief. He was as a sleep-walker. He had come into another universe. The hacienda sala, where his child lay mid tapers, where mumbled prayers arose, or this adobe, where ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... told Arthur the reason of his voyaging. He had been wed to the Princess Enora, daughter of a petty king of Britain, but on his wedding night a strong impulse had come upon him to leave all and make his penitence within some lonely wood, where he could be at peace from the world. Rising from beside his sleeping wife, he stole away, and ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... him to reflect upon his present condition. All was lost! He was unfitted for the conduct of a small business, for the petty transactions and details which might suffice for one of meager wants. He would renounce the idea of that marriage which was his only salvation, and his creditors, as soon as they heard the news that this hope had vanished would fall upon him. He would find himself expelled from the house of his ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... instinctively to take the part of his weak and wronged spirit. She had early been taught to pity rather than to condemn those whom evil is destroying. In all his depravity he did not repel her, for, though proud, he had no petty, shallow vanity; and the evident fact that he ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... watchful girl observed the life of a student—its scholarly tastes, its high ideals, its scorn of worldliness and paltry aims or petty indulgences, and forever its ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... make moral experiments like you. What we feel is, that we ought all to endeavour as much as possible to introduce a more serious tone into society. We want to get rid of the selfishness, and the littlenesses, and the petty ambitions and envyings, and the scandals that go on. Don't we, Louisa, dear? And you can't think how grateful I am to Lord Fondleton for having given me the pleasure of your acquaintance. I hope I may often see you; I am sure you would do us all so much good. You will always find me at ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... my only sibling. But there was no other way, I had to put the advancement of our people over the life of anyone, even my own sister, as you must do now, putting the advancement of our people over petty differences." ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... was indeed the home of revelry. The pent-up, struggling spirits of those who had dwelt therein for months in solitude arose in the wild stampede for freedom. All petty differences between Lady Deppingham and Drusilla Browne, and they were quite common now, were forgotten in the whirlwind of relief that came with the strangers from the yacht. Mrs. Browne's good-looking eager husband revelled in the prospect of this delirious night—this almost Arabian ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... share in it, and learn to enjoy it, would be both lowering and hurtful, and you can hardly be long here without being drawn into its vortex. By GOSSIP I don't mean scandal or malignant misrepresentations, or reports of petty strifes, intrigues, and jealousies, such as are common in all cliques and communities, but nuhou, mere tattle, the perpetual talking about people, and the picking to tatters of every item of personal detail, whether gathered from ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... which his genius sprang, like a newly created species, to give a salutary shock to Gallic tastes, and lend a sturdy country vigor to the new literature, we reverence his faithfulness, his incorruptible humanity, his contempt for petty courts and faded manners, his passion for Nature, and his love of God. All these characteristics are so broadly printed upon his pages that the obsoleteness of the narrative does ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... command, and the busy seamen addressed themselves for orders to him alone. In this manner an hour was consumed, when Cecilia and Katherine appearing in succession attired in a suitable manner for their departure, and the baggage of the whole party having been already entrusted to a petty officer and a party of his men, Griffith gave forth the customary order to put the whole in motion. The shrill, piercing whistle of the boatswain once more rang among the galleries and ceilings of the abbey, and was followed by the deep, hoarse ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter or that, with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of interest, pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a curiosity almost laughable to me who stood onlooker and who understood. Concerning his own rages, I am convinced that they are not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the main they are the habits of a pose or attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellow-men. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... quite real as far as it goes, but it does not go very deep, so that it does not long outlive the removal of the object of regard, either through death or any other cause. Nor will Indian affection bear much strain. Petty complications in family life, trivial misunderstandings between friends of long standing, or amongst Christians some little hitch with the authorities of a mission, will sometimes result in life-long separations or bitter animosity between those who, for the time ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... along with his eight sons, formed the last relic in our province of that race of petty feudal tyrants by which France had been overrun and harassed for so many centuries. Civilization, already advancing rapidly towards the great convulsion of the Revolution, was gradually stamping ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... act; but the entrance of a party of the military into the lower portion of the tavern, induced those who had been making free with the strong liquors below, to make a rush up-stairs to their companions with the hope of escaping detection of the petty larceny, if they got into trouble on account of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... of war, mankind, wearied with slaughter, will take a few moments' repose, and then their venomous hatred will be displayed in petty and private bickerings. Some, indeed, will every now and then raise piles of wood and fagot, and burn those alive who disagree with them in religion; others will attempt the solution of inexplicable riddles; and those born for darkness will dare to ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Gregory Fifteenth of blessed memory, that was obtained improperly, through the efforts of the religious who are in this province who are born in these regions. In it his Holiness ordained that all the elections among the said religious, from that of provincial to that of the most petty official, should be shared between the religious of these regions and those who have come from Espana at your Majesty's cost. The execution of this decree was impossible, because the number of the said religious who were born in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... a groan. What a mocker of our petty human dignity is this dyspepsia, bringing low the haughtiest of us, less than love itself a respecter of persons. This was a different Derek from the man who had stalked stiffly from the room two hours before. His pride had been ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... turned in any direction and made to answer any purpose he might see fit. No one religion is any worse than all the rest. They are all founded on ignorance, superstition and selfishness. To believe in any of these petty religions is to cast insults upon the real Creator of the universe, for a god created by the Apeman must naturally be a very inferior being. Each devout worshiper can point out the errors and absurdities of every ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... his own quarter, and to the mountains and rivers of his own domain. The victim offered by the Emperor on a blazing pile of wood was an ox of one colour, always a young animal; a feudal noble would use any fatted ox; and a petty official a sheep or a pig. When sacrificing to the spirits of the land and of grain, the Son of Heaven used a bull, a ram, and a boar; the feudal nobles only a ram and a boar; and the common people, scallions and eggs in spring, wheat and fish in summer, millet ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... perhaps, a thousand pounds sterling. Now, if we allow only half this sum to be the value, it is, notwithstanding, considerable. Every inn I entered was well supplied with silver spoons, of various sizes, and with silver four pronged forks; even those petty eating-houses in Paris, which were frequented by ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... inexperience of all that lies off the parade-ground; inexperience as of a child, yet fierceness of a man and vehemence of a Frenchman! It is long that secret communings in mess-room and guard-room, sour looks, thousandfold petty vexations between commander and commanded, measure every where the weary military day. Ask Captain Dampmartin; an authentic, ingenious literary officer of horse; who loves the Reign of Liberty, after a sort; yet has had his heart grieved to the quick many times, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... point. A prayer about ill-temper might tend to make me cross, when the effort to join my spirit with the temptation-tried souls of all ages in a solemn prayer for the Church Universal would lift me out of the petty sphere of personal vexations, better than going into my grievances even piously. I speak merely ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... Carnehan of the eyebrows, wiping the froth from his moustache. "Let me talk now, Dan. We have been all over India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler-fitters, engine-drivers, petty contractors, and all that, and we have decided that India isn't big enough for such ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... but expressed his quiet contempt for the systematic petty insults which his jailer was now heaping on him daily. His physician had demanded that he take exercise in the open air. Miles always walked with him and never permitted an occasion of this kind to pass without directing at his helpless prisoner personal ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... committees to the other members of the congregation, and from them again to their friends and acquaintances; so that I had, in the end, a pretty formidable array of enemies. The consequence of this affair was, that I soon found myself compelled, from the petty persecutions and annoyances of all sorts, to which I was subsequently exposed, to leave the congregation altogether. However, to compensate for all these troubles and vexations, I had the good fortune, about ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... brings its petty dust Our soon-choked souls to fill, And we forget because we must And not ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... England," interrupted Beaumanoir, "permit and enjoin each judge to execute justice within his own jurisdiction. The most petty baron may arrest, try, and condemn a witch found within his own domain. And shall that power be denied to the Grand Master of the Temple within a preceptory of his Order?—No!—we will judge and condemn. The witch shall be taken out of the land, and the wickedness ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... intensified, if only by an experience of the enormity of the Passport nuisance. It has cost me precious hours already, not to speak of dollars, and is certain to cost many more of each. I have nearly concluded to given up Germany on account of it, while Italy fairly swarms with petty sovereignties and with Yankee Consuls, the former afraid of their own black shadows, the latter intent on their beloved two dollars each from every American traveler. Such is the report I have of them, and I presume ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... can see out of it is for both Philip and Charles to withdraw, and allow the Spanish to elect a Spaniard for their king; or, if they could not agree to that, which I don't suppose they could do, choose some foreign prince belonging to a petty state which stands altogether aloof from European affairs, and seat him on the throne. If, again, they would not accept him, England and France should mutually agree not to interfere in the affair, and let the Spaniards indulge ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... received (June 13) a like annuity in reward for his own and his wife's services. On the 8th of June he was appointed Comptroller of the Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells and also of the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London. A month before this appointment, and probably in anticipation of it, he took (May 10, 1374) a lease for life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of Aldgate, and here he lived ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... open grave. There, man and chickens are dumb. Somehow, those who write and talk about the future never impress me so much with how much they know, as with how little. How absolutely nothing they can tell. How echoless is the Awful Silence into which they toss their petty pebbles of theories and hopes and speculations. It seems to me that if it were not for that sensitive disc, the Conscience, which conveys to us the 'still small voice,' from a country far beyond the reach of our petty theories, the Silence that envelops this planet would be intolerable. ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... strifes and vexations, your whims and complaints, (You were not saints yourselves, if the children of saints!) All your petty self-seekings and rivalries done, Round the dear Alma Mater your ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... such vain, unkind little children as the one mentioned above. It is actually unfair to the young children in the home to set the wrong example by being discourteous to the servants. They will only have to fight, later, to conquer the petty snobbishness that stands between them and their entrance ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... only thing that might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong, but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but God for us all—then indeed we might despair. But who can ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... myself transferred on board the United States corvette Pocahuntas, of twenty guns, and one hundred and fifty men, including officers, marines, and petty officers. I found that she was bound to the North Seas; to look after the interests of the United States fisheries. She was strongly built and strengthened, so as to contend with the bad weather she might expect to meet, and the loose ice she was also likely to encounter. I shall describe ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... it likely that he wished to treat them ill? A few days later Garibaldi wrote a letter in which he promised Cavour (in effect) plenary absolution if he would proclaim a dictatorship. He would then be the first to obey. There was no petty spite or envy in Garibaldi; his wild thrusts had been prompted by "a general honest thought, and common good to all." He was ready to give ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... squirrel may be known by its smaller size. He is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields. He is most abundant in old bark-peelings, and low, dilapidated hemlocks, from which he makes excursions to the fields and orchards, spinning along the tops of the fences, which afford, not only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... that would be a logical move—if they know we are here. They haven't too many of those hounds, and they don't risk them on petty jobs. I'd hoped we'd covered our trail well. But we had to risk that attack on the camp.... I needed the map case!" Again Thorvald might have been talking to himself. "Time ... and the right maps—" he brought his fist down on the raft, making the platform ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... had been directed against the mercantile interest, and excited much general discontent. The Netherlands wished the staple of the English cloth manufacture to be removed from Emden—the petty, sovereign of which place was the humble servant of Spain—to Amsterdam or Delft. The desire was certainly, natural, and the Dutch merchants sent a committee to confer with Leicester. He was much impressed with their views, and with the sagacity of their chairman, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... consisting of three small bateaux, fitted out at Montreal, and conveying a body of pale-faced warriors, under the command of one whose hair was white and whose face was seamed with scars, entered the mouth of the Oswego[A]. This petty armament was joined at the beginning of the following season of sleep by a great number of canoes that contained the traders, artizans, and labourers, with their families, together with such tools and utensils as had been deemed necessary for the commencement of a new settlement, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... shipped, but there was something in their knowledge that the skipper's word was law, that there was no arguing about orders, which must have given a certain polish to their work. Warington, of course, was no petty tyrant, lording it over young brothers, and swaggering in the undisputed character of his sway. Like the rest he is a humourist, and when a gale was not blowing or the yacht was not contesting a race, he was as full of merriment and good spirits as the rest. His ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... other boys, it was O'Brien who came in for most of the abuse. There was no explaining it, except on the ground that his was a stronger and more dominant spirit than those of the other boys, and that he stood up more for his rights, resenting the petty injustices that were meted out to all the boys by the men. Whenever O'Brien came near the men in search of a dry place to sleep, or merely moved about, he was kicked and cuffed away. In return, he cursed them for their selfish brutishness, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... weight of conscription fell upon the poorest classes of the Jewish population, the so-called burgher estate, [1] consisting of petty artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not afford to enrol in the mercantile guilds, though there are cases on record where poor Jews begged from door to door to collect a sufficient sum of money for a guild certificate in order to save their children from military service. The ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... need to mention particularly contests many years past, and presented to us in print? Words and papers now in print, as also the many petty divisions and names amongst us, sufficiently make this manifest. Wherefore light against light in this last place, or where it is thus repeated, cannot, I think, be more fitly applied than to that now under our consideration; that is to say, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the social valuation of the English servant; for, in the truest sense, England is the paradise of household servants. Liberal housekeeping, in fact, as extending itself to the meanest servants, and the disdain of petty parsimonies, are peculiar to England. And in this respect the families of English merchants, as a class, far outrun the scale of expenditure prevalent, not only amongst the corresponding bodies of continental nations, but even amongst the poorer sections of our own nobility—though ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... those that do not sufficiently balance their length with the magnitude of the idea. Some of Martial's are burdened with this fault; sometimes they accumulate too many commonplace compliments or are too petty in enumeration. For example, in this epigram to what point are so ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... but with the mind of a child is incapable of conforming his or her behavior to the standards of society and will be incapable of giving proper parental care to children. So a considerable percentage of our petty criminals, vagrants, prostitutes, and dependent are found to be feeble-minded. They are unstable, ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... CLEMENTS. Cattle Lifting. Delarey gives us a Field Day. Burnt to Death. The Infection of Spring again. Death of Lieutenant Stanley. His Burial. Promoted to Full Corporal. Petty Annoyances—The Nigger. A Wet Night. The Great Egg Trick. Our Friend "Nobby." "The Roughs" leave us for Pretoria. The breaking up of the Composite Squadron. Life on a Kopje. Death and Burial of Captain Hodge. Camp Life at Krugersdorp. Lady Snipers at Work. Treatment of the Sick. ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... an officer in her Majesty's Royal Artillery—is quite without some petty cash. How ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... one appellate court of last resort[Footnote: See Chap. XIX.] and several courts for the trial of original causes. Local justices of the peace are commonly given jurisdiction over prosecutions for petty misdemeanors, and civil cases involving small amounts (seldom over $50 or $100), which do not affect title to land. Then come County Courts (often styled Courts of Common Pleas or District Courts), having cognizance ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... for children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation; the majority of children are trafficked within Chad for involuntary domestic servitude, forced cattle herding, forced begging, forced labor in petty commerce or the fishing industry, or for commercial sexual exploitation; to a lesser extent, Chadian children are also trafficked to Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Nigeria for cattle herding; children may also be trafficked from Cameroon and the Central African Republic to Chad's ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... incredible that such monstrous efforts could have been put forth with the sole object of inflicting punishment and despair upon a poor wretch, because of some error he might have committed—one of those grave human errors which yet are so petty in face of the universe; an error which perhaps had not issued from either his heart or his brain, and had stirred not one blade of grass on ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... even in its most loyal forms. The social work in common of a man and woman united by true affection, full of tenderness and devotion for one another, mutually encouraging each other to perseverance and to action, will easily triumph over petty jealousies and all other instinctive reactions of the phylogenetic exclusiveness of natural love. The sentiments of love will thus become ever more ideal, and will no longer provide egoism with the soil of idleness and comfort on which it grows like ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... their great powers lie dormant, while they employ their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects; but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except on a great object. Consequently, wherever power of any kind or degree has been exerted, the marks and evidence of it are stamped upon its results: it is impossible that ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... them, that is. I am wearied to death with the perpetual annoyances and vexations, and petty calls upon my time—life is not worth having at such a rate! I'll have done ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... Florentine convoys were never safe from attack on the highroads that neighbored the Aretine dominion, and if any brawl broke out between Florence and one of her neighbors, a brawl never provoked by Florence, too magnanimous for such petty dealings, but always inaugurated by the cupidity or the treachery of her enemies, the Aretines were sure to be found taking part in it, either openly or secretly, to the disadvantage and detriment ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Many petty frauds of this kind have been brought to light; amongst other cases, that of a magistrate, not a hundred miles from the county town, who forged seventeen wolf certificates, and succeeded in getting the money for them; and, most likely, emboldened by his success, would have continued ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... is life itself. It is this very 'interruption' that we live for. What does God care about the wretched books you intend to write, the petty occupations you think you discharge so gracefully? He means to teach you a great high truth, worth knowing; and, thank Heaven, He will, however much you shrink and writhe. Do not pick and choose among events: try and interpret ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... that wrecked and ruined several lives. Certain prominent persons have decided to punish him. He is to have his life made miserable, he is to have his fortune taken away from him, he is to be subjected to petty annoyances and hard blows alike, driven from this, his home town, forced to realize that a man cannot do what ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... makes me sick," continued Ellis, disregarding this hint, "is to have people assume that newspaper men are a lot of semi-crooks and shysters. What does the petty grafting that a few reporters do—and, mind you, there's mighty little of it done—amount to, compared with the rottenness of a paper run by my church-going ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... embarrassment as the father of three little daughters. Much evil, it is to be feared, had already been sown; and his temperament, his affliction, and his circumstances alike nurtured the evil yet to come. He was then living in Petty France, Westminster, having been obliged, either by the necessities of his health or of the public service, to give up his apartments in Whitehall. The house stood till 1877, a forlorn tenement in these latter years; far different, probably, when the neighbourhood was fashionable and the back windows ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... moralize—which he didn't—upon the discovery, he would have laid it all at the door of his lucky star; and would have been wrong. We who have never stooped to petty larceny know that the oars had been placed there at the direction of his evil genius bent upon facilitating his descent into the avernus of crime. Let us, then, pity the poor young man ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... sensuality that you have painted makes the affirmative probable.'—'And my defence of the articles? I will publish it immediately; with a preface stating the whole transaction.'—'You will be to blame.'—'Why so?'—You may be better employed.'—'What! than in exposing vice?'—'The employment is petty; and what is worse, it is inefficient. The frequent consequence of attacking the errors of individuals is the increase of those errors. Such attacks are apt to deprave both the assailant and the assailed. They begin in anger, continue in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... affection, Maurice de Gramont, must be remarkably strong, if you weigh it against your petty, selfish interests,—your professional engagements. But, do as you please,—I ask nothing, expect nothing from you,—not even the protection of your presence, though I have no longer a son who is able to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... good taste enough not to be jealous of my so-called right, and ... otherwise what can I lose? No, Fritz, I am not jealous. [Short pause, it is getting darker.] I had to get accustomed to it; that's true. This secrecy, the petty lies and the false gravity irritated me a little bit too much at first, but I made an effort so that I could still retain a feeling of comradeship. I overcame it daily, because—well because I never really took you ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... the nature of small minds to disparage great ones; and in general Quita would have dismissed the matter with a light retort. But in her present mood, the man's petty personalities jarred more than usual. "I think we won't discuss Captain Desmond," she said without looking round. "To pick holes in a man of that quality only seems to accentuate one's ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... he: 'my uncontrolled tide Turns not, but swells the higher by this let. Small lights are soon blown out, huge fires abide, And with the wind in greater fury fret: The petty streams that pay a daily debt To their salt sovereign, with their fresh falls' haste Add to his flow, but ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... with childish levity and prattle which had no meaning. She found their thoughts narrow, their wishes low, and their merriment often artificial. Their pleasures, poor as they were, could not be preserved pure, but were embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation. They were always jealous of the beauty of each other, of a quality to which solicitude can add nothing, and from which detraction can take nothing away. Many were in love with triflers like themselves, and many fancied that ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... great and petty treasurers; scribes of grain, wine, cattle, woolen stuffs; chief masons, ditch-diggers, naval and land engineers, healers of various diseases, officers over regiments of laborers, police scribes, judges, inspectors of prisons, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... vain, and fond of excelling, was a woman of kind feelings, and entirely superior to the petty jealousies that annoyed Mrs. Ballman, and soured her towards all who succeeded in rivalling her in matters of taste and fashion. Of what was passing in the mind of the lady who had been so troubled at her reception of ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... paroxysm gradually subsided, the sobs became less convulsive and then ceased; by an odd but not quite unnatural conjunction, the captain's soothing current of talk died away at the same time and by proportional steps, and the pair remained sunk in silence. The lagoon broke at their feet in petty wavelets, and with a sound as delicate as a whisper; stars of all degrees looked down on their own images in that vast mirror; and the more angry colour of the Farallone's riding lamp burned in the middle distance. For long they continued ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whose French count, Louis de Nevers, had gained nothing in their affections through the humiliation of Cassel, which confirmed his rule. The hated count showed his hostility to Edward, as well as his spite against his own subjects, by various petty acts which interfered with the commerce and industry of both ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... had not been of roses. He had captured two hundred towns and fought in sixty battles on his way. He himself had strewed thorns for others as well. His wars spread suffering throughout France. His skirmishings, petty but many, add up to an appalling total of harm. Henry as a model of renounced ambition is a failure. Read what his Catholic enemies in Bearn said of him, in an address and appeal to the Catholics of France; as now first translated ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... to his wont, the butler informed him that Mr. Gall, the village constable, was below and wanted to see him after breakfast. He received the news in silence and sat down to eat his breakfast and read the morning paper. Gall had probably come about some petty summons, or to ask what he should do about the small boys who threw stones at the rooks and broke the church windows. After finishing his meal and his paper in the leisurely manner peculiar to country gentlemen who have nothing ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... are the gentlemen's lavatories, and smoking saloon and bar. The dining saloon is aft on the lower deck, with ladies' room forward. In the two saloons and ladies' rooms sofa berths can be arranged to accommodate 252 passengers. The crew and petty officers are accommodated in the forward part of the ship. As the profile shows, the vessel is divided by transverse bulkheads into seven watertight compartments, and there are double bottoms. She has six ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble-mindedness and his ascetic tendencies save him from the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity—these are splendid excellencies, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... (in writing to me) as "plain-looking," and as having "entrapped the handsomest man in England into marrying her." Both assertions were gratuitously made, and both were false. Jealous dislike (which, in such a woman as Mrs. Catherick, would express itself in petty malice rather than not express itself at all) appeared to me to be the only assignable cause for the peculiar insolence of her reference to Mrs. Fairlie, under circumstances which did not necessitate ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... island, who were divided into a great number of petty nations, under a very coarse and disorderly frame of government, did not find it easy to plan any effectual measures for their defence. In order, however, to gain time in this exigency, they sent ambassadors to Caesar with terms of submission. Caesar could ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Sarudine came back. He sat down next to Volochine and asked questions about St. Petersburg, and also about the latter's factory, so as to let the others know what a very wealthy and important person his visitor was. The handsome face of this sturdy animal now wore an expression of petty vanity and self-importance. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... up at the stars that studded the infinity of space. About him were dark, silent forms, rigid in the sleep of death. Those were solemn hours, hours when he looked death in the face, and then backward over the years he had lived. Useless years they seemed to him now, years filled with petty ambitions that had to do solely with self. All the spiritual ideals of life, the things that give lasting joy and happiness because they are of the spirit and not of the flesh, he had scoffingly cast aside and rejected. He had narrowed life down to self and the things ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... of Mrs. Tommy Kidder had determined this petty course. This sprightly young person, being herself a real social force, shared little of the awe in which Mrs. Teunis Van Dam was held by most of her townsfolk and by all newcomers, and Cora, with her own ideas of the part which she, as the governor's wife, should play, had taken Mrs. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... virtuousness or viciousness of the agent; if the principle that governs the act and the effort put forth to conform to the principle be recognized as the true standard by which we are to judge, then two consequences will follow with respect to the conduct of life. The first is that the seemingly petty occasions of life are to be treated as grand occasions in so far as a moral principle is involved. For instance, a petty falsehood spoken for the purpose of securing business advantage or of avoiding business ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... His business was plain before him, and it was business into which he could put his heart. Although he was not an insensitive man, he was a man of generous nature. He pushed away with an almost careless energy those small annoyances, those little injuries of life, which more petty people make much of and cannot easily forgive. The querulous man who was ready, out of his bodily weakness and his mis-directed love, to make little of his friendship, even to thrust away his proffered help, he disregarded as man, regarded as so much nearly ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... supreme sacrifice." ("Amen," screamed a voice.) "In your dark lives," he cried, "who is the King of Glory? Sacrifice. Lift up your heads, then, ye gates of prejudice and hate, and let the King of Glory come in. Forget yourselves and your petty wants, and behold your starving people. The wail of black millions sweeps the air—east and west they cry, Help! Help! Are you dumb? Are you blind? Do you dance and laugh, and hear and see not? The cry of death is in ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... sent for this girl and her mother to keep his house and he is very fond of the girl, and declares that he will leave her all his money, and that she shall marry well. Now, sir, if she was to marry me, a petty officer only, it would not be considered that she married well; so you see, sir, there's ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... management the fortunes of his family,—a point which he accomplished, to a certain extent. His dawning character shewed him to be shrewd and wary, but possessing no extended views, and disposed to rest his hopes of elevation and distinction upon petty intrigues, rather than to look upon probity and exertion as the true basis of greatness. His great talent consisted in the management of his designs, "in which," remarks one who knew him well, "it was hard to find him out ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... midst took place early in September and happened on a Wednesday, the day of the Drumbo Petty Sessions. Our list of malefactors that week was a particularly short one and I was able to leave the court house in good time to see Lalage off at the railway station. I was in fact, in very good time and arrived half an hour before the train was advertised to leave. Canon Beresford ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... in the petty affairs attendant upon such a campaign. When his three old partners went away to their work at four o'clock in the afternoon, a wire had come from far out north that a man who was competent to run the line was starting for ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... once been filled by Egypt and Babylon. But the opportunity was lost; the murder of Joab and the unwarlike character of Solomon effectually checked all dreams of conquest, and Israel fell back into two petty states. ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... the writer, as well as of the reader, is solely confined to a court, a capital, a regular army, and the districts which happen to be the occasional scene of military operations. But a state of freedom and barbarism, the season of civil commotions, or the situation of petty republics, [87] raises almost every member of the community into action, and consequently into notice. The irregular divisions, and the restless motions, of the people of Germany, dazzle our imagination, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... aristocratic regiment without any of the members being able to vote against their admission. The two daughters would surely marry, when they had reached a suitable age with officers of the Hussars whose names bore the magic "von" of petty nobility, haughty and charming gentlemen about whom the daughter of Misia Petrona waxed ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... their stage furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the grand stories of the mythology; so in England the mystery-players haunted the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, tap-rooms, or in the farm-house kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage the entire drama of the Christian Faith. We allow ourselves to think of Shakespeare or of Raphael or of Phidias as having accomplished their work by the power of their own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... terrible, Isabel, than the English life in a foreign town. It is so narrow, so petty—I had almost said so degraded. I should not have taken your pretty ward into my house here suppose you had prayed me to do it. Nothing could possibly be worse for a young girl; she could not escape its influence. No, I should never have taken ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one? Confess that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... executioners. They spared my life because they thought it not worth the taking, and left me the wrecked and crooked thing you see. Yet I have served Milan since her fall—I, the traitor,—served her by a thousand petty treacheries and inventions. It was I who sent Henry Plantagenet the news of Barbarossa's plans. I have the favor of the Emperor, and hidden things are freely discussed before me. They know I am Milanese and despise me, but they believe ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... really too great to be possessed by petty weaknesses. If I ever did excel you, which is most unlikely, I know you would be glad both for me and for yourself. No, it is not that; I am ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... like the human skin, the most sensitive and irritable part of their corporate constitution. The slightest infringement of it by a neighbouring Power is instantly resented; to break through it violently is to be inflicting a wound which may draw blood; and even interference with any petty State that may lie between the frontiers of two great governments is regarded ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... bloodshed of war, mankind, wearied with slaughter, will take a few moments' repose, and then their venomous hatred will be displayed in petty and private bickerings. Some, indeed, will every now and then raise piles of wood and fagot, and burn those alive who disagree with them in religion; others will attempt the solution of inexplicable riddles; and those born ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... that these officers lived in complete harmony for three years was proof enough that they were well and wisely chosen, and Scott was equally happy in his selection of warrant officers, petty officers and men, who brought with them the sense of naval discipline that is very necessary for such conditions as exist in Polar service. The Discovery, it must be remembered, was not in Government employment, and so had ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... fixed upon was of no use to them, being part of the sandy Beach upon the shore of the Bay, and not near to any of their Habitations. It being too late in the day to do anything more, a party with a petty officer was left to guard the Tent, while we with another party took a Walk into the woods, and with us most of the natives. We had but just crossed the River when Mr. Banks shott three Ducks at one shott, which surprised them so much ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... the Sikhs are loyal, Canada answers—"for their own sake." If British protection were withdrawn from India to-morrow, a thousand petty chiefs would fly at one another's throats. The idea that expropriation is behind exclusion could be entertained only by an Oriental mind. Expropriation is possible under Canadian law only for treason. Imperial unity is no ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... Greek art, classical; Christian art is romantic, bringing into art entirely new sentiments of a knightly and a religious sort—love, loyalty and honor, grief and repentance—and understanding how by careful treatment to ennoble even the petty and contingent. The sublime belongs to symbolic art; the Roman satire is the dissolution of the classical, and humor the dissolution of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... plight now was comparable to that of the strollers of old, hunted by beadles from towns and villages, and classed as gypsies, vagabonds and professed itinerants by the constables. He was no better served than the mummers, clowns, jugglers, and petty chapmen who, wandering abroad, were deemed rogues and sturdy beggars. Yet no king's censor could have found aught "unchaste, seditious or unmete" in Barnes' plays; no cause for frays or quarrels, arising from pieces given in the old inn-yards; no immoral matter, "whatsoever any light and fantastical ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... father, was a local claim-agent on a small railroad. He spent his life pitting his wits against the petty greed of honest farmers and God-fearing, railroad-hating citizens. If a granger let his fence fall down and a rickety cow disputed the right of way with a locomotive's cow-catcher, the granger naturally put in a claim for the destruction of a prize-winning ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... to such treatment as this in the whole compass of ancient art. Whoever the master, his hills, wherever he has attempted them, have not the slightest trace of association or connection; they are separate, conflicting, confused, petty and paltry heaps of earth; there is no marking of distances or divisions in their body; they may have holes in them, but no valleys,—protuberances and excrescences, but no parts; and in consequence are invariably diminutive and contemptible in ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... unable to move and handle the enormous eggs, the Countess, whose sweet character was a stranger to vindictiveness or petty resentment, had written to the members of the ornithological committee, revealing the marvellous fortune which had crowned her efforts in the search for evidence to sustain her theory concerning the ux, and inviting these gentlemen to aid ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... period the Czar and his advisers were temporizing and attempting to obtain peace by means of petty concessions. A greater degree of religious liberty was granted, and a new representative body, the Imperial Duma, was provided for. This body was not to be a parliament in any real sense, but a debating society. It could discuss proposed legislation, but it ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... their love for each other, there was the wider passion for their kind, which gave back to them an enlarged and deepened reflection of their personal feeling. In such an air it had seemed that no petty egotism could hamper their growth, no misintelligence obscure their love; yet all the while this pure happiness had been unfolding against a sordid background of falsehood and intrigue from which his soul turned ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... forced by law to keep a self-respect they had already lost, and have the insufficiency of things he could not eat. For he had as yet no knowledge of political economy. He evidently did not view his case in any petty, or in any party, spirit; he did not seem to look on himself as just a half-starved child that should have cried its eyes out till it was fed at least as well as the dogs that passed him; he seemed to look on himself as that impersonal, imperial ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... rather weak ruler, was greatly concerned by the news that Rezin, king of Syria and Pekah, king of northern Israel, had formed an alliance against him and were marching on Jerusalem. In his extremity this monarch of a petty state turned toward the mighty ruler of Assyria, the greatest military power in the world, and asked his help against the combination. Isaiah, statesman as well as prophet, saw that this was a wrong move. Assyria was aspiring ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... on the Past; and the more impressively it enforces the lesson of the vanity of human wishes strikes the more from his reckoning illusive hopes in the Future. Thus out of our threefold existence two parts are annihilated,—the what has been, the what shall be. We fold our arms, stand upon the petty and steep cragstone, which alone looms out of the Measureless Sea, and say to ourselves, looking neither backward nor beyond, "Let us bear what is;" and so for the moment the eye can lighten and the lip ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... past weeks a number of petty thefts had been committed. Day-scholars who left small sums of money in their jacket pockets would find, on returning to the cloakrooms, that these had been pilfered. For a time, the losses were borne in silence, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... good to know my parents were now free from petty anxieties, that no unsettled bills hung over my father's head like threatening clouds, and that my mother could, if she would, take more time; to herself. Indeed she was forced to be less busy with hard work, for Aunt Hildy worked with power and reigned supreme here, and I helped her ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... the very last, and bravely came up to the bar when called upon. It required nerves, courage, and virtue, of no common cast, to do this, in defiance of all the authorities, as vindictive and virulent a gang of petty tyrants as ever disgraced the robes of office. In this manner the election proceeded from day to day, without any chance ever having been given by me to enable the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... farmers, Sam Coxen had been wont to look with large scorn on such petty interests as gardening; but a county show down at the Settlement had converted him, and now his cabbage patch was the chief object of his solicitude. He had proud dreams of prizes to be won at the next show—now not three ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... representatives of the United States, charged with the duty of protecting not only its honor, but its interests, in arranging terms of peace, to content themselves with little Porto Rico, away off a third of the way to Spain, plus the petty reef of Guam, in the middle of the Pacific, as indemnity for an unprovoked war that had cost and was to ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... check American slavery and prevent a renewal of the slave trade by American planters, she has even determined to employ the slaves of Africa in the production of cotton: that is to say, the slavery of America is to be opposed by arraying against it the slavery of Africa—the petty chiefs there being required to force their slaves to the cotton patches, that the masters here may find a diminishing market for the products of ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... subject to the Ecuadorian government, which is represented by three or four petty alcaldes; but the Jesuit missionaries, who have established a bishopric and three curacies, generally control affairs—spiritual, political, and commercial. The Indians of each village annually elect one of their number governor, who serves without salary, and whose only show of authority ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... of several hundred persons. Immediately on his coming in sight, the guards of the king of Bantam rose up, and handled their weapons, not from fear of the king of Jackatra offering any violence, but because there were a number of other petty kings present, who were mortal enemies to the king of Jackatra. On coming near the innermost rank of the Bantam guards, and seeing that he had to pass through among a number of these inimical petty kings, and being afraid of the cowardly stab so usual among this people, he appeared much alarmed, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... consent to it, and that without its consent the marriage could not be concluded. The Princess in question was the issue of double illegitimacy; by her father descended from a pope, by her mother from a natural daughter of Charles Quint. She was daughter of a petty Duke of Parma, and of a mother, entirely Austrian, sister of the Dowager Empress and of the Dowager Queen of Spain (whose acts had excited such disapproval that she was sent from her exile at Toledo to Bayonne), sister too of the Queen of Portugal, who had induced the King, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... wretches that crawl on the earth were shared, we may be sure, by her Grace's waiting-maid. Of humanity there was as little as there was of religion. It was the age of the criminal law which hanged men for petty thefts, of life-long imprisonment for debt, of the stocks and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors, of the unreformed prison system, of the press-gang, of unrestrained tyranny and savagery ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... "respectable elements"—that is, those citizens who were of the upper class. There were two other clubs—the Blaine and the Tilden—which were similarly representative of the "rank and file" and, rather, of the petty officers who managed the rank and file and voted it and told it what to think and what not to think, in exchange taking care of the needy sick, of the aged, of those out of work and so on. Martin Hastings—the leading Republican citizen of Remsen City, though for ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... all these sufferings continued in their petty details each day, and that when night came we had not even a bed on which to stretch our weary limbs, some idea may be formed of the privations we endured on this campaign. The Emperor never uttered ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... does not always follow my advice, is sound at heart and a respectable member of the family of nations to be in the least disturbed in my sense of international good will. If I had been irritated I should have contributed to the petty backbiting by the mischievous uninformed which ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... think so!" broke in the explosive Wheatcroft. "The Major has been with us for thirty years now. I'd suspect myself of petty larceny ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... brown eyes answered hers, but he was puzzled. Had he probed her aright? It was one of those intimate moments that come to nervously organized people, when the petty detail of acquaintanceship and fact is needless, when each one stands nearly confessed to the other. And ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... art is no longer serious, and the intercourse of men is not straightforward. The Englishman will always be emotional in spite of the rigid reserve which he imposes upon himself; he is an enthusiast, and he does truly love earnestness, veracity, and healthy vigour. Take him away from a corrupt and petty society and give him free scope, and he at once lets fall the film of shams from off him like a cast garment, and comes out as a reality. Shut the same Englishman up in an artificial, frivolous, unreal society, and he at once becomes afraid of himself; he fears to exhibit enthusiasm ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the majority applauded, and the vote was carried in behalf of humanity. But the king and his coterie were very angry, and assailed the duke in the most violent terms of condemnation. The king, in a petty spirit of revenge, issued a decree, recalling the ordinance that all the princes of the blood royal were to sit in the Chamber of Peers, and declaring that none in future were to appear there but by special authority of the king, ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... was never anybody who felt so strange in her home. It is not a month since I left my sisters, and I hardly remember that I know them. They all, and even papa, appear to be thinking about such petty things. They complain that I tell them nothing. What have I to tell? My Prince! my own Leboo, if I might lie in the stall with you, then I should feel thoroughly happy! That is, if I could fall asleep. Evelina declares we are not eight miles from Dayton. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... standing in a respectful attitude with his hands at his side in a state of rest; enters a room with his shoes down at heel, or without socks; omits to rise at the approach of his master, mistress, or their friends, and commits numerous other petty breaches of decorum which would ensure his instant dismissal from the house of a Chinese gentleman. We ourselves take a pride in making our servants treat us with the same degree of outward respect they would ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... she forgot Thomas, forgot the petty annoyance of cooking and summer heat and dogs and physical discomfort, in the overwhelming prayer that the coming child, about whose advent Gerald, at first annoyed, had later been so generously ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... know which it was that amazed me most, the almost childish petulance and ungovernable temper of the girl which made her cry out in spite of her surroundings and the circumstances, or the petty rapacity of the man who could stoop to such a low level as to rob her ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... concerted battery of curiosity at Taou Yuen's shimmering figure in the drawing-room screened against the sun. Mrs. Wibird, Sidsall thought—a woman of fat and faded prettiness, with wine red splotches beneath her eyes, and a voice that went on and on in the relating of various petty emotional disturbances—must have resembled Olive as a girl. It was probable, then, that Olive would look like her mother when in turn she was middle-aged. Mrs. Clifford, unseasonably huddled in her perpetual shawl, more than ever suggested a haggard ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... transient and insignificant we are, and how vast and everlasting the world is, which was aeons before we were, and will be other aeons after we are gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone. Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and is the sure antidote to all our petty ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... may be termed, perhaps, the happiest of the first century of a settlement. The great cares of life are so engrossing and serious, that small vexations are overlooked, and the petty grievances that would make us seriously uncomfortable in a more regular state of society, are taken as matters of course, or laughed at as the regular and expected incidents of the day. Good-will abounds; neighbour comes cheerfully to the aid of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Alfred, "I leave those complaints to the insane ones: with me the gigantic wrong drives out the petty worries. I cannot feel my stings for my ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... else, the possibilities in the case. And what he saw distressed him greatly. Captain Sam Hunniwell was his life-long friend. Maud had been his pet since her babyhood; she and he had had many confidential chats together, over troubles at school, over petty disagreements with her father, over all sorts of minor troubles and joys. Captain Sam had mentioned to him, more than once, the probability of his daughter's falling in love and marrying some time or other, but they ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Alexander tried, and not in vain, to gain him as a friend. When he continued his progress eastwards across the Acesines, Porus was an active ally. Alexander moved along close under the hills. After crossing the Hydraotes (Ravi) he once more came into contact with hostile tribes, and the work of storming petty towns began again. Then the Hyphasis (Beas) was reached, and here the Macedonian army refused to go any farther. It was a bitter mortification to Alexander, before whose imagination new vistas had just opened out eastwards, where there beckoned the unknown world of the Ganges ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Countess, with a long, weary sigh. "I do, so! Nor out of men's hearts, belike. Well, Avena, to come down to such petty matter as I count I shall be suffered to have, prithee, bring me some violet silk of this shade for broidery, and another yard or twain of red samitelle for the backing. It were not in thy writ of matters allowable, I reckon, that the pedlars ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... partners who seemed to harbor a petty grudge against Brophy finally explained the whole plan to Jimmy. Everything was to be done to carry the impression to the public through the newspapers, who were usually well represented at the training quarters, ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... wood horses, patronized with such glee by the miniature men and women attending and enjoying wakes and fairs, only worked half time. The physical-force majority in the House, and their aiders and abettors, were they to see this, would perhaps laugh at the petty details, but their doing so would not in the least detract from their truth, or render questionable for a moment the deductions I make from them,—that poverty is so wide spread and bitter that the ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... economic, such as the remarkable rise in prices during the last decade. This has seriously enhanced the cost of living in India and has specially affected the very classes amongst whom disaffection is most widespread. The clerk, the teacher, the petty Government official, whose exiguous salaries have remained the same, find themselves to-day relatively, and in many cases actually, worse off than the artisan or even the labourer, whose wages have in many cases risen in proportion to the increased cost of living. Plague, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... and conscience—even conscience—is sometimes soothed into silence, while the sufferer sleeps. But nowhere, perhaps, is its influence more happily felt than in the heart oppressed by the harassing accumulation of petty ills; like a troop of locusts, making up by their number and their stings what they want ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Bright's letter both an able and a manly one, and though I cannot go his lengths, I respect and sympathise with the spirit in which it originated. I think he should draw a distinction between petty meddlings of our own, or interferences for selfish purposes, and an operation like this which really is in support of the public law of Europe. I agree with him in some of the retrospective part ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... here," said Dalny, as the horses slowed down to a walk. "We shall come soon, however, to a more interesting part of the street. Crime lurks here, also; not the more desperate crimes though. The Strada di Mara, in one part, is the resort of thieves who wish to dispose of their petty plunder by turning it into cash. And, as strange merchandise is dealt in here, the shops offer a variety of wares. We will presently look into one ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... did not know how to write in the first ages, or because their records had been lost in wars and by the sloth and ignorance that followed them. Perhaps men did not think that the records of their own times were worth preserving when they reflected how base and corrupt, how petty and perverse such deeds would appear to those who should come after them. For whatever reason, Milton said that it had come about that some of the stories that seemed to be the oldest were in his day regarded as fables; ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... financier, stimulated by the drug. "We've been wasting our time, all these years, with our petty monopolies of beef and coal and transportation and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... not the solitary examples of this recognition of the emptiness and evil of power. Everyone who gains a position of power he has striven for, every general, every minister, every millionaire, every petty official who has gained the place he has coveted for ten years, every rich peasant who has laid by some hundred rubles, passes through this ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... blood in their veins, they must seek some other meeting-place where they can pitch their never-abiding tents, and sit at their humble feasts to recount to each other, amid appreciative laughter, the tricks and devices and pitiful petty schemes for the gaining of daily bread that make up for them the game and comedy of life. Tell me not that Ishmael does not enjoy the wilderness. The Lord made him for it, and he would not be ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... actually inheritable, and that one is transmitted relatively seldom. But among psychic characters one finds that practically all are inheritable. For example, stupidity, credulity, avarice, pecksniffery, lack of imagination, hatred of beauty, meanness, poltroonry, petty brutality, smallness of soul.... I here present, of course, the Puritan complex; there flashes up the image of the "good man," that libel on God and the devil. Consider him well. If you had to choose a sire for a first-rate son, would you choose a consumptive Jew with the fires of eternity ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... mucus, nothing in them at all. It appeared in the afternoon and disappeared again about 1/2 hour after." And then on January 3: "Last night Scott told us what the plans were for the South Pole. Scott, Oates, Bowers, Petty Officer Evans and I are to go to the Pole. Teddie Evans is to return from here to-morrow with Crean and Lashly. Scott finished his week's cooking to-night and I begin ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... believe so firmly in him that I shall make him true!—Yes, the lowest, the most senseless superstitions, I venerate them, I exalt—I glory in them! The ugliest, the most deformed, the most unreal of our gods, I adore them, and I bow down before their impossibility. [She kneels] Oh, I stifle in their petty narrow world, sad as a forest without birds! Air! Air! Singing! The sound ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... must seek a refuge elsewhere. All Europe was open to them. As a Guise the archbishop would have been welcome wherever Spain had power. With Spain, Italy, and Austria open to him, why should he thus bring danger and misfortune upon the petty dukedom of Sedan? The same may be said of Soissons; however reluctant Bouillon might be to part with so dear a friend, Soissons himself should have insisted upon going and taking up his abode elsewhere. Could he still have brought a large ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... which, he was now evidently loth to leave his guest ere he had learnt the nature of his errand to these parts. An "o'er-sea pilgrim," as they were generally styled, was too choice an arrival for a petty hostel—especially in those times, when newspapers and posts were not circulating daily and hourly through the land—to let slip an opportunity of inquiring about the king of Scotland, as Robert Bruce was then called, or about his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... and devoid of desire at the hour when he stood near the corpse of his daughter, joined with the silent smoke of the censer, which rose like light mist in the air. How petty he appeared at that juncture, crushed, as it were, by some giant hand—not a demi-god in any sense, or a Titan, but rather an insect, pushing into some narrow cranny to hide from a bird of prey. Kranitski had seen Darvid then, for, on hearing of ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... fine harbour, where ships arrive daily from different quarters of the world. I frequented also the society of the learned Indians, and took delight to hear them discourse; but withal I took care to make my court regularly to the king, and conversed with the governors and petty kings, his tributaries, that were about him. They asked me a thousand questions about my country; and being willing to inform myself as to their laws and customs, I asked them every thing which I thought worth knowing. There belongs ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... changed with prohibition. Killings are now comparatively rare, arrests have diminished to less than a third of the former average, whether for grave or petty offenses, and the receiving jail, which was formerly packed like a pigpen every Saturday night, now stands almost empty, while the city jail, which used continually to house from 120 to 150 offenders, has diminished its average population ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... have it!" Caesar broke out. "Nothing but blood will do any good here, and petty aggravations will only stir their bile and increase their insolence. Is the painter of whom you speak an Alexandrian?—I pine for the open air, but the wind blows the rain ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... themselves with the narrow things of home put a pipe into their mouths and became philosophers. Poets and dramatists smoked until all ignoble ideas were driven from them, and into their place rushed such high thoughts as the world had not known before. Petty jealousies no longer had hold of statesmen, who smoked, and agreed to work together for the public weal. Soldiers and sailors felt, when engaged with a foreign foe, that they were fighting for their pipes. The whole country was stirred by ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... save my life and my throne, of which I vow to you an equal share. With the help of your Northmen and the legions I command and who cling to me, we can defeat Constantine and rule the world together. This petty fray is nothing. What matters it if some lives have been lost in a palace tumult? The world lies in your grasp; take it, Olaf, and, ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... America, and before the volunteers of Ireland. We shall live to hear the Hampstead Protestant pronouncing such extravagant panegyrics upon holy water, and paying such fulsome compliments to the thumbs and offals of departed saints, that parties will change sentiments, and Lord Henry Petty and Sam Whitbread take a spell at No Popery. The wisdom of Mr. Fox was alike employed in teaching his country justice when Ireland was weak, and dignity when Ireland was strong. We are fast pacing round the same miserable circle of ruin ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... near—how very near, had Death, in his hovering, stooped towards their home! How strange, while treading thus precariously the film which covers the abyss into which all must some day drop, and which may crack under the feet of any one at any hour,—how strange to be engrossed with petty jealousies, with selfish cares, and to be unmindful of the great interests of existence, the exercises of mutual love and trust! Thank God! it was not too late. Margaret lived to be cherished, to be consoled for her private griefs, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... already having troubles enough, he thought, what with the petty annoyances, his grave suspicions of Fred Badger's loyalty, and now this prospect of foul play being attempted by those evil-disposed men from the city, only bent on reaping a harvest of money from the outcome of the game. There ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... of virtues, if destitute of this living, reigning, and triumphant love, was to Blessed Francis but as a petty heap of stones. He was never weary of inculcating love of God as the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... half-planning something of the sort, anyway! And—perhaps, just now," she added sweetly, "it would be a little wiser that way. You see, I understand you, Martie, and I know we seem awfully small and petty here, but—since we ARE in Monroe, why, isn't it better not to give any one a chance to talk? Well, about the picnic! Ida and May always bring cake; I'll take the fried chicken; and Mrs. Ellis makes a ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... were often those we would expect from a slave with a low brow. Even of Shakespeare, it is said in the morning he polished his sonnets, while at midnight he poached game from a neighboring estate. Our era bestows unstinted admiration upon the essays of Lord Bacon. How noble his aphorisms! How petty his envy and avarice! What scholarship was his, and what cunning also! With what splendor of argument does he plead for the advancement of learning and liberty! With what meanness does he take bribes from the rich against the poor! His mind seems like a palace of marble with splendid galleries and ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... genitive of Mensa." Insignificant as these words may appear, I still regard them as entitled to be recorded—nay, I would even write them as town-motto on the gate of Goettingen, for the young birds pipe as the old ones sing, and the expression accurately indicates the narrow, petty academic pride so characteristic of the "highly learned" Georgia Augusta.[51] The fresh morning air blew over the highroad, the birds sang cheerily, and, little by little, with the breeze and the birds, my mind also became fresh and cheerful. Such refreshment was sorely ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... Sunday school with her head turned by hearing some foolish talk about her dress. Alas! how often it is that Sunday scholars, on leaving the school, instead of giving one thought to the divine truths they have been hearing, allow their attention to be absorbed with the petty frivolities in which their ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... ago I had a need for an attorney to perform for me a petty service. Just at that critical moment I met a friend who was a lawyer. I employed him forthwith. At a later time I needed a lawyer again, recalled my former experience, and called up the same attorney. This employing ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Port Macquarrie in Australia, where his father was clerk of petty sessions, he was seized at the age of fourteen with an intense longing to go to sea. It is possible that he inherited this passion through his mother, for her father, Charles Beilby, who was private secretary to the Duke of Cumberland, invested a legacy ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... less well-known name, and if I retained the two months' beard that had grown upon me, the risks of any annoyance from the spiteful creditor to whom I have already alluded became very small indeed. From that to a definite course of rational worldly action was plain sailing. It was all amazingly petty, no doubt, but what was there remaining for me ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... and in all her strength, surrounded by the handsome favourites whom she never trusted, and the wise old statesmen whom she never dismissed, uniting in herself the most contradictory qualities of both her parents,—the coquetry, the caprice, the petty malice of Anne,—the haughty and resolute spirit of Henry. We have no hesitation in saying that a great artist might produce a portrait of this remarkable woman at least as striking as that in the novel of Kenilworth, without employing a single ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... accumulated in our souls. And now after Ivan Ivanitch had gone away I had a strong impulse to go to my wife. I wanted to go downstairs and tell her that her behaviour at tea had been an insult to me, that she was cruel, petty, and that her plebeian mind had never risen to a comprehension of what I was saying and of what I was doing. I walked about the rooms a long time thinking of what I would say to her and trying to guess what ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... his toe-nails. She sang him to sleep with "Drolien" and the heart-shattering lament for Gerald. She prayed all night outside his door when he had a brief fever. When trouble was coming, she said the "snake's bells" told her, talking loudly; and petty incidents confirmed her so far that, after she found the child's room ablaze from one of Rawling's cigarettes, they did not argue, and grew to share half-way ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... quite authoritatively settled, even by St. Paul, so perhaps she was right. Mankind does not like to admit it, but it is, at the least, a question whether we can oppose our little wills against the forces of a universal law, or derange the details of an unvarying plan to suit the petty wants and hopes of individual mortality. Jess was a clever woman, but it would take a wiser head than hers to know where or when to draw that red line across the writings of ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... but that it will be my duty to do so before long," cried the officer, shaking his head like a petty tyrant, who ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... the authour of Clarissa, with a strong yet delicate pencil. I lament much that I have not preserved it; I only remember that he expressed a high opinion of his talents and virtues; but observed, that 'his perpetual study was to ward off petty inconveniences, and procure petty pleasures; that his love of continual superiority was such, that he took care to be always surrounded by women[1093], who listened to him implicitly, and did not venture to controvert his opinions; and that his desire of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... nation. In forty years it was marching behind that beau chevalier Owen Roe O'Neill to battle and victory. O'Neill, a general famous through Europe, the one man who might have measured equal swords with Cromwell, was removed by poison, and then came the massacres. In eleven years, Sir William Petty assures us, 616,000 out of a total population of 1,466,000 perished by the sword or by starvation. For the remainder the policy of root and branch extermination was abandoned in favour of a policy of State-aided migration and ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... advantage of Emily in that she was always sweet-spoken and, on the surface, sweet-tempered. Emily, hurt and galled in a score of petty ways, so subtle that they were beyond a man's courser comprehension, astonished her husband by her fierce outbursts of anger that seemed to him for the most part without reason or excuse. He tried his best to preserve the peace between his wife ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... powdered cheeks and painted eyebrows. It was a strange, restless populace, the majority here to-day, disappearing to-morrow—cowboys, half-breeds, trackmen, graders, desperadoes, gamblers, saloon-keepers, merchants, generally Jewish, petty officials, and a riff-raff no one could account for, mere floating debris. The town was an eddy catching odd bits of driftwood such as only the frontier ever knew. Queer characters were everywhere, wrecks of dissipation, derelicts of the ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... they are inclined to an idle course of life, and prefer petty commerce to agriculture; hence the prohibition not to ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
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